Someday, Mars will stop surprising me.

Today is not that day.

The image below was taken by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been taking devastatingly high-res pictures of the Red Planet for many years. While passing over the edge of the Tharsis Shield — a huge uplifted region of Mars home to its four gigantic volcanoes –it saw this bizarre fieldof craters:

[Click to hephaestenate.]

First, you may think these are mounds and not craters, but that’s an illusion. Our brain uses illumination to gauge up and down in pictures like these, and assumes the sunlight is coming from above. However, these really are craters, but the illumination is coming from below — north is roughly toward the top of the picture and the crater field is at a northern latitude of about 50°. Flip the picture over if it helps (I’ll be honest, even doing that makes it hard for me to see these as other than mounds; confounded brain!). You can see more examples of this illusion here, here, and here.

But that’s not the weirdest thing about these craters. What’s really odd is they aren’t circular! Impacts are generally round unless 1) the impact is at a very shallow angle, b) the terrain suddenly goes from one kind of material to another, creating a discontinuity, or γ) something happened after the crater was formed to distort it.

A shallow-angle impact is almost certainly not the case here, since there are so many craters spread out over the region that an incoming object would’ve had to break up into a gazillion pieces, all of which came in at that angle. Not impossible, but it seems unlikely.

The changing terrain idea doesn’t work, since again the craters are spread out over the area. You might see one crater with a sudden break in its rim or change in shape, but dozens? Spread out in all directions? Nope.

That leaves after effects, and in this case we have two more clues. (more…)

Well, what can I say about this devastating and jaw-dropping picture of our nearest spiral neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy?

[Click to massive chainedmaidenate. Do it!]

Well, I could start with HOLY HALEAKALA!

This image is a collection of 11 separate observations of Andromeda taken by NASA’s GALEX satellite. Launched in 2003, GALEX (which stands for Galaxy Evolution Explorer) scans the sky in ultraviolet light, specifically targeting galaxies. Hot stars produce UV light, and so does the gas it illuminates, so by looking in the ultraviolet astronomers can learn about how galaxies are constructed. In the decade since its launch, GALEX has been phenomenally successful, cataloging hundreds of millions of galaxies, some as far as ten billion light years away!

This image of Andromeda is simply stunning. It’s comprised of two colors: what you see here as blue is higher-energy ultraviolet light, and red is lower energy (closer to the kind of light we see). Right away you can see that objects emitting the higher-energy UV are confined to the spiral arms, and lower-energy emitters are spread out across the galaxy. That’s exactly what I would expect: massive stars, the kind that really blast out UV, don’t live very long. They’re born, live out their short lives, and die (as supernovae) pretty much near the spot where they formed, which is in spiral arms. Lower mass stars live long enough to gradually move away from their nurseries, populating the rest of the galaxy.

Also, star formation at the very center of the galaxy probably occurred long ago and shut down, so we don’t see many or any massive stars there.

One thing I didn’t know is that the arms of Andromeda are more like rings! The galaxy is at such a narrow angle that it’s hard to tell, but if you trace the blue emission, the pattern does look more like a ring than a spiral. This jibes with earlier images in infrared taken by Spitzer Space Telescope (which I’ve inset here) and a huge and incredibly beautiful newer one taken with ESA’s Herschel far-infrared telescope (and OMFSM you want to click that link).

From what I’ve read, it’s not clear why the spiral arms appear to be more ring-like. Which I love. Why? Because Andromeda is the nearest big spiral galaxy in the sky, a mere 2.5 or so million light years away. It’s easily visible to the naked eye from a dark site, and I’ve seen it myself countless times using my own eyes, binoculars, and telescopes ranging from small ones up to Hubble. Yet there it is, in all its huge and obvious splendor and beauty, still able to surprise me. That rocks.

And a note about GALEX: NASA recently handed off its operations to Caltech, a very unusual move. The satellite was put into standby mode in February, and I was worried it would be shut down permanently. However, Caltech signed a three-year agreement with NASA — while NASA still owns the satellite, Caltech will now be in control of GALEX’s science mission, managing and operating it. At the end of the agreement it can be renegotiated if GALEX is still in good operating condition. This is an interesting idea, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I love that GALEX gets to continue operations, but handing off science missions to private groups makes me a little uneasy. In this particular case I think it’s fine — Caltech is a research institute after all — but the precedent may have unforeseen consequences. We’ll see.

Still and all, it’s good to see new life breathed into an important and wonderful instrument like GALEX. I certainly hope it will continue to produce cutting-edge science for years to come… as well as amazingly beautiful images like this one.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

I do a roughly monthly segment with astronomer Seth Shostak on Big Picture Science, a radio show/podcast done by The SETI Institute. This month, Seth and I talked about the American Airlines dustup when they were planning to run an interview with reality-impaired antivaxxer Meryl Dorey. This story is a great victory for reality, and I’ve already written about the back story.

Never forget: this antivax issue is more than important: it is literally life and death. Because of lowering vaccine rates, pertussis outbreaks are so prevalent health officials in the state of Washington have declared it to be an epidemic. The governor has had to dip into emergency funds to the tune of $90,000 to finance an information campaign to get the word out.

But the money is secondary to the idea that babies and people with immune deficiencies are at risk of dying from a disease that is essentially totally preventable if everyone got their vaccinations and boosters.

I cannot state that any more simply. The antivax crowd says vaccines cause autism, vaccines cause neurological problems, vaccines hurt your immune system. None of that is true. The real danger is when people believe the antivax propaganda. Infants too young to be vaccinated themselves rely on herd immunity — if enough people are vaccinated the disease has no place to live. And when we as a community don’t vaccinate, people get sick, and some people — including those infants, usually just a few weeks old — die.

Talk to your board-certified doctor, and if they say it’s OK, get vaccinated. You may save more than one life doing so.

A little while back, I was at Utah State University to give a public talk about the threat from asteroid impacts and what we can do to stop them (PLUG ALERT: if you want me to come talk at your venue, my agent would love to hear from you).

While I was there I was interviewed by Utah Public Radio, and that interview is online.

I was also chatted up by the local TV station, KSL. I think it went OK, and they put it online as well:

[You may have to refresh this page to get the video to load.]

While I rather wish I had stated succinctly that even the basis of the "Mayan 2012 doomsday" nonsense is itself a gross misinterpretation of Mayan history, culture, and calendar, I think I was pretty clear. I have to walk a fine line sometimes: debunking crap doomsday scenarios like 2012 while also warning of real dangers like asteroid impacts… while neither over- or understating that danger. It’s a delicate balance.

A balance, I’ll note, which is apparently completely lost on some of the commenters on the KSL website who are saying I’m totally wrong and that the doomsday is coming in December [Note: I checked just before posting this, and most of the really over-the-top comments have been deleted, and I thank the forum moderators for that]. The sheer blind eye some have toward reality is stunning.

I know some people have deep beliefs they hold true, and are willing to deny what’s right in front of their face if they have to. I also know it’s the Internet out there, where people don’t read past the first line or watch a video past the first few seconds. Still, the denial and — to be blunt — dickery is breathtaking. One person actually said they hoped the Universe kills me so they don’t have to listen to my "drivel" [that was one of the comments deleted, BTW].

Of course this isn’t the first time I’ve had someone wish me dead, or that I’d shut up. Duh. But what I find fascinating is the irony. One complaint I hear about critical thinking is that it takes away hope, takes away beauty, and replaces them with despair and the ugly nature of reality. And yet here we see people shredding their critical thinking to hold fast to a doomsday scenario that is as ugly as it is hopeless.

If they actually applied a bit of skepticism, they’d see the 2012 doomsday garbage for what it is. But they cleave unto it as fervently as a drowning man to a life preserver.

I don’t think I have anything particularly profound to add to this; I’m just shining a light on it for you to see. Be aware of this, and always remember people’s ability to be paradoxical and completely embrace a nonsensical danger while denying the real one.

… or, B’ak’tun The Future.

There’s some buzz going around the web right now because some Mayan archaeologists found wall writings in the Xultun ruins in Guatemala dealing with the Mayan calendar. The writing clearly shows the Mayan calendar extending well past 2012.

As you can imagine, this is being played up as (yet more) evidence the world won’t end come December.

Well, duh.

But the thing is, we already knew that. I mean, of course we know there’s nothing to any of the Mayan Apocalypse nonsense doomcriers are advocating. That’s all crap. But in this case, as far as I can tell, what they found doesn’t change much in this regard. It’s a fascinating archaeological find and gives insight on how the Mayans worked out their math and astronomy when it came to calendars — there are notes painted on the wall clearly describing the patterns of Venus and Mars in the sky, which is very cool — but I don’t think it changes the 12/21/12 nonsense at all.

Mostly because we already knew their calendars went past December 21 of this year! For one thing, the cycle that ends this year, the b’ak’tun, is a repeating cycle. The ancient Mayans had lots of cycles to their calendar, just as we do. We have cycles of days, weeks, months, years, decades… The Mayans used different units, but it boils down to the same idea. They had cycles roughly equivalent to a month, a year, and so on.

The b’ak’tun is a unit roughly 394 years long. When one b’ak’tun ended, another one started, just like any other cycle. So when the b’ak’tun we’re in now ends, on or about December of this year, why then, the next one starts up.

Think of it this way: what happens on December 31 of every year? You throw away the old calendar and hang up a new one. Tadaaa!

Worse, there’s no evidence that the Mayans even thought the end of this b’ak’tun was the time of any kind of renewal, doomsday, or anything. All of that nonsense can be traced back to a series of New Agey books and speculations that built on one another like a pyramid built upside down. At some point, it’ll fall over. Stuart Robbins at Exposing Pseudoastronomy has a great series of articles all about this.

By the way, there are longer Mayan calendar cycles, too, like the pictun, which is 20 b’ak’tuns. The pictun we’re in now ends in the 4772! So clearly the Mayans didn’t think the world was ending in 2012.

There’s also one cycle that lasts for 63 million years! If you believe in the Mayan Apocalypse, I guess they knew about the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, too.

If I sound a little exasperated, well, I am. I have never been a fan of nonsense, but nonsense doomsday conspiracy theories really make me angry. Whether the doomsday mongers believe in what they say or not, they are scaring people over stuff that’s provably wrong! If evil exists, that kind of thing falls under the definition in my book.

If there’s any good to come of any of this, it’s a renewed interest in the real Mayan culture, calendars, and how the ancient peoples of our planet used astronomy to reckon time. And, as usual, reality is far more interesting, engaging, and plain old cool than any nonsense we can make up about it.

Well, wow. This is an honor: reddit.com put up a quote of mine on their science section:

Right there in the middle is a quotation from me: "Teach a man to reason, and he’ll think for a lifetime." That was from my speech The Goals of Skepticism (commonly referred to as my Don’t Be A Dick speech), which I gave at TAM a couple of years ago.

There it is, highlighted. I’m really happy to see that. I liked the phrase when I came up with it, and it’s popped up here and there (like on a mug, and in a Symphony of Science).

The only thing that bugs me about the phrase is the use of the masculine gender. I struggled to make the phrase more neutral, but since it’s based on an existing aphorism — "Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime" — I couldn’t phrase it that way without removing it too much from the original, and thus losing the hook. Oh well.

Anyway, I still like the sentiment. We tend to spend a lot of time arguing specific examples of bad thinking — antivax, global warming denial, and so on — but not as much on having the tools necessary to prevent ourselves from having our thinking go astray. Happily, there are places on the web you can go, like Tim Farley’s Skeptools site, the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast (which commonly uses examples of bad thinking to make a bigger picture of how to think), and of course Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit from his masterpiece book, The Demon Haunted World.

Heck, stop reading this and go buy that book right now if you haven’t already. It is the basic tome that will have you thinking for a lifetime.

Tip o’ the fishing pole to Starstuff_3 on Twitter.

Right now, the future of US human space exploration is a little unsettled. NASA is still talking about building a new rocket system to replace the Shuttle, but it’s unclear how long it will take and how much it will cost. Space X is a private company that has already launched rockets into orbit, and is working to make their vehicles rated to carry humans (there are strict rules about that, which I’ll get to in a sec). They’re planning an uncrewed launch of the Falcon 9 rocket with a Dragon space capsule to the space station for May 19, which is a massive step in their plans to be the go-to company for launches.

Other companies are working on this as well. Jeff Bezos — billionaire creator of Amazon.com — has Blue Origin, a secretive group that is looking to launch sub-orbital and eventually orbital vehicles. Sierra Nevada is working on the Dream Chaser, another orbital vehicle (and they’re pretty far along with it, too). Orbital Sciences plans two test launches this year, including a pass of the space station as well.

And now ATK steps up. I’ve heard about their Liberty rocket, but I haven’t been sure where they stand with it. Well, now we know: ATK has announced it will be ready to put humans into orbit by 2015, potentially ahead of Space X.

[Note: image above is artwork; the rocket is not yet built. Click to liftoffenate. Credit: ATK.]

ATK — a company with a complicated history of mergers and name changes, but with solid rocket experience — has the wherewithal to come through on this claim. The tech they use for Liberty is based on the now-canceled NASA Ares rocket as well as the European Ariane V vehicle. They’ve built rockets before (part of the company’s legacy is Morton Thiokol, which built the solid rocket boosters for the Shuttle) so this isn’t out of the blue.

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