Bad Astronomy » Piece of mind

An ear to the ocean

Phil Plait — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:06:29 +0000

The Terra satellite is designed to study our planet from space, examining the environment over large scales and in high resolution. While passing over south Africa it took this seemingly normal — if still very beautiful — image:

I rotated it, so north is to the left. You can see land to the left, the southernmost tip of Africa, called Cape Agulhas. To the top is the Indian ocean, with the Atlantic to the right. A weather system is forming there, and all looks as it should… until your gaze settles all the way to the right (south). Wait… what’s the blue swirly thing?

Holy otology! Is that a giant ear?

Nope. It’s an eddy, a vortex, in the ocean, probably spun off the ocean current that flows around the southern cape of Africa. These eddies can dredge up material from deeper waters, including nutrients. Phytoplankton in the water feeds of those nutrients, and bang! Plankton bloom.

The plankton flows along with the water, coloring it blue, making it stand out eerily against the water. As I pointed out ...

The staring eye of a crescent moon

Phil Plait — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:39:56 +0000

Sometimes, the images from the Cassini Saturn probe are so cool it’s tempting just to post them and say, "Look at THAT!"

See what I mean? [Click to gigantesenate.]

But of course, I can’t just leave it at that. This image, taken on January 4, 2012, is a bit different than most. Sure, we see Saturn’s magnificent rings, nearly edge on from this perspective. And we’ve seen this icy moon Enceladus many, many times (see Related Posts below for tons more pictures). Look at the bottom of the moon: see those fuzzy streaks? Those are geysers of water spewing from cracks in the moon’s south pole! Cassini has been studying them intently ever since they were discovered; they are proof that liquid water exists under the surface of Enceladus, though it’s still being argued over whether it’s in pockets, like lakes, or the whole moon has an ocean of water under the surface.

Despite all that, I keep getting drawn to the crescent shape itself. We can never see that from Earth. Saturn is much farther out from the Sun than we are, and geometry demands that from ...

OK, a couple of more things about a Moon base

Phil Plait — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:00:13 +0000

I love the idea of returning to the Moon, and the idea of going back there to stay I love even more. Having said that, I want to stress it must be done the right way. This has been back in the news lately because Newt Gingrich made a speech about it before his doomed Florida Republican presidential primary run.

What bugs me is that we’re talking about it in context of what Gingrich said; I’d rather we were talking about this on its own merits. There are reasons to go to the Moon, and reasons not to do it Newt’s way… all of which I went over in an interview on CBC radio’s Day 6 show with Brent Bambury that aired Saturday. The interview is archived on their site, and you can listen to it there. I was unusually lucid, IMO, and I think the points made were valid.

I was also interviewed on The Alonya Show, a TV news/opinion program on Russia TV:

[UPDATE: I also did an interview with Globo TV in Brazil that's online as well. The show is in Portugese, but I'm in English with subtitles.]

I want to add to ...

A case study of the tactics of climate change denial, in which I am the target

Phil Plait — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:00:35 +0000

Over the years I have pointed out the fallacious arguments of climate change deniers when they attack legitimate climatologists like James Hansen and Michael Mann. This is, of course, like kicking at a bee hive, and whenever I do the comments section of my posts fill with lots of angry buzzing.

But now, for what I think is the first time, I find myself the target of an attack. And I have to admit, I welcome it: it’s a textbook case of denialist sleight of hand, of distraction, distortion, error, and misdirection.

Stick around for all of this. It’ll be… interesting.

Our story so far

OK, first, here’s the scoop: a few days ago, I wrote a blog post taking apart two intellectually bankrupt climate change denial articles, one in the Wall Street Journal, and the other in the UK’s Daily Mail. Both were claiming that global warming appears to have stopped in the past few years, a claim which is trivially easy to show wrong. In fact, I linked to two articles doing just that: one at Skeptical Science, and another I myself wrote. Finding actual scientists destroying that claim is not hard at all; those ...

What caused the Little Ice Age?

Phil Plait — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:00:31 +0000

Over the course of several hundred years – most notably in the 17th and 18th centuries — winter temperatures in western Europe were much lower than normal. Glaciers came much farther south than they had before, and a famous painting shows people ice skating on the Thames river — which hasn’t been frozen since. The period is known as the Little Ice Age, and its cause has always been something of a mystery.

However, new research by scientists at the University of Colorado-Boulder (yay team!) may have pegged it: the LIA appears to have started abruptly in the late 13th century, between the years 1275 and 1300. Radiocarbon dating of plants from Baffin Island (north of the Hudson Bay in Canada) and sediment samples from a lake in Iceland indicate that there was a rapid onset of severe cooling at that time. It’s been thought that the cooling started around then, but it’s been hard to pin down until now.

More importantly, this narrows down the cause of the LIA: four tropical volcanoes erupted violently in that period. The ash would have darkened the atmosphere, letting slightly ...

Q&BA: Getting kids into science

Phil Plait — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:24:55 +0000

A few years ago, I started doing a weekly video question-and-answer session I called "Q & BA". It was a series of short videos that were a lot of fun to make. Unfortunately, the overhead got to be too high — it took all day to edit them! — and I had to stop.

But now, Google+ has changed that: Hangouts On Air is a feature that allows me to go on camera and broadcast a live video chat session to an unlimited audience. I take questions via Twitter and G+, and it’s a lot of fun. It lasts about an hour, and I put the whole session on YouTube. But some of the answers stand alone, and it’s easy to extract them out, package ‘em up, and post ‘em by themselves.

So I’m very pleased to announce I’m starting the series again! The first Q&BA is a great question: "What’s the best way to get kids into science and skepticism?" — what better way to get the series going again? Enjoy.

I’ll be posting more of these, maybe even one per day as time allows. If ...

While temperatures rise, denialists reach lower

Phil Plait — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:20:22 +0000

Over the weekend, two amazingly bad articles were published about climate change. Both were loaded with mistakes, misinterpretations, and outright misinformation, and are simply so factually wrong that they almost read like parodies.

Just so we’re clear here.

The first was in the Wall Street Journal. The article, called No Need to Panic About Global Warming, is a textbook example of misleading prose. It’s laden to bursting with factual errors, but the one that stood out to me most was this whopper: "Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now."

What the what?

That statement, to put it bluntly, is dead wrong. It relies on blatantly misinterpreting long term trends, instead wearing blinders and only looking at year-to-year variations in temperature. The Skeptical Science website destroyed this argument in November 2011, in fact. The OpEd also ignores the fact that nine of the ten hottest years on record all occurred since the year 2000.

The WSJ OpEd makes a lot of hay from having 16 scientists sign it, but of those only 4 are actually climate scientists. ...

The Gingrich Who Stole The News Cycle

Phil Plait — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:38:39 +0000

Because I was on the road Wednesday night, I missed the first few hours of reaction to Newt Gingrich’s speech in Florida, when he said he wants to have a permanent station on the Moon "by the end of my second term". It wasn’t until Thursday morning that I opened up my web browser and saw that every blog, every news site, everyone, was talking about it. I must have had dozens of tweets and emails telling me about it and asking my opinion.

So I found a video of the speech and watched it. The only reason I didn’t laugh out loud at the nonsense unfolding from Mr. Gingrich’s mouth was that I already had seen the reaction online.

In Discover Magazine’s Crux blog I wrote a dissection of his speech and why he’s so vastly and profoundly wrong: The Newt-onian Mechanics of Building a Permanent Moon Base. You’ll get all the details there of why I think Gingrich’s plan is the worst possible way to go about trying to go to the Moon: in a hurry, with the wrong source of funding, and maybe ...

Five shots against global warming denialism

Phil Plait — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:41:58 +0000

It’s a truism that whenever I write about the solid fact that the Earth is warming up, that post will get comments that make it clear that denialists — and please read that link before commenting on my use of the word — are like religious zealots, writing the same tired long-debunked arguments that are usually debunked in the very post they’re commenting on.

Still, we press on. The noise machine only wins if they can outshout reality, so it’s important to keep writing about it. Here are five news items about climate change that might help mitigate the nonsense.

1) Last week, I posted the results from studies showing 2011 was the 9th hottest year on record. Forbes online has more information on this. They take a different tack on it, but get the same results I do: the Earth is warming up, and humans are why.

2) Some very welcome news: the National Center for Science Education — who for years have been at the forefront of battling creationists getting their "curriculum" into schools — is adding climate change to their syllabus. ...

Independent researchers find no evidence for arsenic life in Mono Lake

Phil Plait — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:04:32 +0000

Late in 2010, scientists participating in a NASA news conference dropped a bombshell: they had found evidence that bacteria in California’s Mono Lake were metabolizing arsenic and using it in their life processes.

This was huge news, since arsenic is toxic for carbon based life. If some forms of life evolved a way to process it, this would open up a whole new field of biochemistry!

However, almost immediately, the work came under attack. Biochemists accused the original team of not performing the research carefully (to put it delicately). Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, was particularly critical. She decided, in fact, to try to verify the original work, and set out to do so openly, writing up her progress on her blog.

And now, according to an article on Scientific American, she can confidently provide a "clear refutation" of the arsenic uptake in the organisms:

Their most striking claim was that arsenic had been incorporated into the backbone of DNA, and what we can say is that there is no arsenic in the DNA at all.

That’s a pretty clear statement! The ...

Superb time lapse: “My Soul”

Phil Plait — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:00:32 +0000

This is a wonderful, wonderful time lapse video made by Minnesota photographer Mark Ellis put to the music of Peter Mayer.

You absolutely must make sure it’s in HD and make it full screen.

I am a lifelong appreciator of music, both listening to it and making it. As much as I love hearing an artist’s creation, there is an amazing synergy that occurs when we get a visual to go with it. Perhaps that’s why I love movie soundtracks so much; two different senses combined add up synergistically to more than their arithmetic sum. This video and the music exemplify that beautifully.

I am very impressed with the photographic work in this, and that’s not even including the incredibly cold conditions under which a lot of it was made! And as an astronomer I have to add a couple of notes. Pay attention at 4:00; the lyrics to the song say, "… counting galaxies like snowflakes…", and Mark artfully puts in a view of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. I particularly like the shots where foreground trees are in focus while the sky is out ...

The Helix screams in infrared

Phil Plait — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:45:12 +0000

About 700 light years away sits the expanding death cry of a star: the Helix Nebula, a four-light-year wide gas cloud blasted out when a star that was once like the Sun gave up its life.

A new image of it in colors just outside what the human eye can see shows just how much it does look like a screaming star:

[Click to ennebulenate, or download the huge 6600 x 600 pixel 35 Mb version.]

This image is in the near-infrared, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), a 4.1 meter telescope in Chile. Equipped with a whopping 67 megapixel camera it can take pictures of large areas of the sky. The Helix nebula fits that bill: it’s close enough to us that it’s nearly the size of the full Moon in the sky.

This image is pretty nifty. It accentuates cooler gas than what we see in visible light. What’s colored red in the picture is actually infrared light coming from molecular hydrogen, and shows the sharp ring-like edge of the nebula. What you’re seeing here is not so much a ring as it is the ...

SOPA and PIPA

Phil Plait — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:00:49 +0000

By the time you read this, you have already heard or discovered that Mozilla, reddit, Wikipedia, and many others sites are going dark today to raise awareness about Congress’s highly regressive internet blocking legislation. The House’s version, SOPA, is making headlines, but the Senate version, PIPA, is pretty much the same.

I am not blacked out for two reasons. Since I am hosted on Discover’s site, I cannot take the whole thing down, and it would not be appropriate for me to ask. But also, simply blacking out raises awareness but doesn’t give information. I’m all about making sure people get good info, so below is a list of links where you’ll find why so many people hate this legislation so much.

- Google (!)

- reddit (they also have this page with many links to help you take action)

- Adam Savage at Popular Mechanics

- Forbes (though it’s clearly not correct to say SOPA is dead, and I no longer trust Obama will do as he says after signing the NDAA)

- Mashable

- Wil Wheaton

And I’ll note: I ...

What happened to Phobos-Grunt?

Phil Plait — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:05:13 +0000

On Sunday, January 15th, 2012, the Russian spacecraft Phobos-Grunt fell to Earth after a failed attempt to get it to Mars. It burned up in our atmosphere some time around 18:00 UTC, though the exact time isn’t clear.

During its final orbit, I did a live video chat on Google+ with my friend, science journalist Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society, and we talked about the probe. The entire discussion is now on YouTube:

It’s an hour and a half long, as we were following the news and rumors of the probe in real time. The big question the whole time was: where and when did the probe fall?

It’s a good question. Moving at 8 km/sec (5 miles/sec) as it came in, it covered a lot of territory — as you can see in the map above showing the final track of the spacecraft. And since the final moments apparently happened over the Pacific ocean and southern South America — places where there aren’t many observers — it’s not at all clear just where, or even when, the spacecraft came ...

Time lapse: The Aurora

Phil Plait — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:00:26 +0000

OK, fine. I’m too much of a sap to leave y’all at the end of the year with a floaty shark balloon. So instead, I’ll leave you with some astonishing beauty: Terje Sorgjerd’s time lapse animation "The Aurora":

Wow. Make sure it’s set to HD and make it full screen!

As devastating and haunting as the northern lights are, my eye kept being drawn to the stars themselves. I recognized some constellations, but their movement across the sky was just so odd: instead of heading up or down, many were going sideways, parallel with the horizon. I hadn’t read the video notes yet, so when I saw that, my first thought was, "Holy cow, how far north was he?!"

Turns out, really, really far. The video was shot at Kirkenes and Pas National Park in northern Norway — yes, northern Norway, around 70° north latitude. As an example, down here at more temperate latitudes, Vega gets pretty high in the sky, almost directly overhead. But that far north it doesn’t; in fact, that far north Vega never sets! It’s a circumpolar star, like Polaris itself. You can ...

Stop antivaxxers. Now.

Phil Plait — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:00:26 +0000

There are times when reality is so obvious, so clear, so rock-solid 100% amazingly in-your-face incontrovertible, that it is beyond belief that anyone could deny it.

And yet, antivaccination groups exist.

Let me be very, very clear: they are wrong. Vaccines save lives. Vaccines save millions of lives. And not just directly, like they did by wiping out smallpox, a scourge that killed hundreds of millions of people. But also, through herd immunity, vaccines save infants too young to be vaccinated, the elderly with weak immune systems, and people whose immune systems are compromised due to chemotherapy, genetic issues, or because they are taking immunosuppressants for other illnesses (like arthritis).

Vaccines don’t cause autism. Vaccines don’t contain dangerous levels of mercury. Vaccines don’t contain fetal tissue. Each of these – and many, many more — is misinformation spread by antivaxxers, statements that are easily proven wrong (like, in order, here, here, and here). But many antivaxxers continue to use them.

What does that say about their willingness to tell the truth?

Yesterday, in Australia, one of the most vocal antivaxxers alive, Meryl ...

The scale of Saturn, redux

Phil Plait — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:00:21 +0000

A few days ago, I posted an incredible picture of Saturn taken from Cassini, showing the partially-lit planet and two of its moons. I used this picture to point out the massive scale of Saturn and its moons, something it’s easy to forget when you’re scanning all the amazing images.

BA Bloggee Matt Andrews liked the post, but thought it needed more. He took the picture from Cassini and added a map of the United States to it. I thought it was pretty cool, and so just in case you were having a hard time grasping just how frigging huge Saturn is, this ought to blow you away:

Ye. GADS. Astonishing, isn’t it? That scale looks about right to me. I know how big the US is; I’ve driven across it several times, and it’s a heckuva trip. To see it dwarfed like this is simply incredible.

So when I post these pictures and talk about how mind-boggingly ginormous these objects are, even the familiar ones, keep this in mind: I’m not kidding. Space is big.

A public letter to the US Government upon the passing of NDAA

Phil Plait — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:00:25 +0000

The United States House of Representatives and the Senate both passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This Act lays out the budget and expenditures of the US Department of Defense, but also has provisions for its authority. Since it defines the DoD budget, a version of it passes every year, but this year, the NDAA includes provisions that codify the ability of the President to basically snatch people off the streets inside our own country, and hold them indefinitely in detention without trial or hearing, and torture them. While some are saying that this ability already exists for the President, it is being codified into law by this Act.

Lest you think I am being reactionary, there is a vast outcry against these provisions, which includes the voices of the Defense Secretary, the Director of National Intelligence, the Directors of the FBI and CIA (!!), and the White House Advisor for Counterterrorism — all of whom spoke out that these indefinite detention provisions are bad for the country. The ACLU, which is all about defending civil rights, is strongly opposed to this. Even President ...

The $37.6 Million Dollar Fine HE Doesn’t Want You To Know About

Phil Plait — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 14:00:56 +0000

If schadenfreude made a noise, then you’d be hearing it pretty loudly from me right now: Kevin Trudeau — a convicted credit card fraud, and a man who made tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars by telling people he could cure their cancer using, get this, coral calcium — has lost his appeal to the federal court, and must pay $37.6 million dollars in fines.

Trudeau, who shilled this false cancer cure as a diet supplement, was ordered by a federal judge in 2008 to stop making and airing infomercials about it. I wrote about this at the time, but I kept seeing those evil infomercials on TV. I wondered about this, but now I understand: Trudeau was trying to sidestep the order by selling books about this false cure, not the supplements directly. And, he kept buying up those ad spots while appealing the order. But on November 29th of this year, the appeals court said "nope".

As the court papers say:

The protections, unfortunately, were too weak: Trudeau aired infomercials in violation of the order at least 32,000 times. He should not now be surprised that he ...

Colbert on Tyson

Phil Plait — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:14:43 +0000

Neil deGrasse Tyson may be the most recognizable astronomer on Earth these days, in part due to his frequent appearances on The Colbert Report. Earlier this year In 2010, Colbert sat down with Neil at the Kimberley Academy in Montclair, New Jersey and chatted with him about life, the Universe, and everything. Colbert did this out of his TV character — well, mostly — and even though it’s over an hour, it’s well worth your time. The original video is on the Hayden Planetarium site, but it’s also all over the place, including YouTube. I’ve embedded it here for your enjoyment, too.

Neil and I agree on a wide variety of topics, and he’s doing a great job inspiring people to look beyond their own immediate surroundings.

Related posts:

- Our Future in Space – panel at TAM 9
- In which I disagree with cartoon Neil Tyson
- SMBC on the brain
- Neil Tyson and I talk time travel

Christopher Hitchens, 1949 – 2011

Phil Plait — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:21:24 +0000

Christopher Hitchens has died.

You’ve probably heard; the web is lighting up with obituaries and stories about him. I didn’t know him personally — having only met him on two occasions, both times at skeptic conferences — and I didn’t come into his writings until relatively recently, so nothing I can say here would add substantively to what already exists. Instead, many people have written eloquent thoughts upon his death, so you should read those:

At Noisy Astronomer, Nicole Gugliucci recounts watching Hitchens in a debate with a theist, a situation that occurred often.

Steve Novella of course sums things up with his usual insight and sharp aim.

Kevin Murphy simply put up an interesting video of Hitchens acerbically and artfully dissecting, and then rewriting, the Ten Commandments.

And, as usual, it’s impossible to beat the amazing ability of The Onion to distill away impurities and make me smile ruefully with one simple headline.

… though of course, Zach Weiner manages to do so pretty well in both a web comic as well as a short tribute and imploration for us to do more.

One guy fooling around with the Moon

Phil Plait — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:00:52 +0000

There’s a series of pictures going around the web right now showing the rising Moon in the background, and people whimsically doing things to it in the foreground. It’s hard to explain, so here is a picture literally worth 28 words:

I love this series of photos, and I’ve seen people plug it on Twitter, Google+, and I’ve gotten an email or two about it as well. The thing is, the photographer who took these pictures isn’t getting any attribution in the copies I’ve seen (like, for example, on

Congressional funding disaster

Phil Plait — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:00:33 +0000

I recently posted a lengthy analysis of the fiscal year 2012 budget Congress and the President approved for NASA. I didn’t mention it then because it was off-topic, but in the press release for the funding bill, they list bullet points of "Important Policy Items". I took a screen grab of the last item listed, and the note below it:

Perhaps I’m the only one who sees irony in a bullet point saying Congress won’t appropriate $322M for an NOAA climate change service, while then immediately below it noting how the natural disasters that have befallen this country have required " historic levels of relief and recovery assistance", necessitating $2.3 billion in relief funds. Hmmm.

[Note: While it can be hard to pin any one natural disaster like a hurricane, heat wave, or snow storm on climate change, as we warm up we will see more things like those. I want my tax dollars to go to more scientific investigation by NOAA and other agencies. But then, I'm not funded in any way by the oil industry, and ...

How not to market science to girls

Phil Plait — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:05:03 +0000

Teaching kids about science is one of the best things we can do. Children are naturally inquisitive and curious; and the methods of science, if taught correctly, can be used to engender a lifelong love of these traits.

So I’m happy when science is encouraged for kids. Still, there are times when I see examples of science education that make me cringe, and shake my head, wondering "What were they thinking?"

Enter WILD! Science. This is an apparently successful Australian company that sells science kits for kids. That’s great, and some of the kits look pretty good.

The problem is, they split some of the kits into ones for boys, and ones for girls. And that split is exactly what you think.

For example, for boys: Hyperlauncher, Joke Soap, Perils of the Deep, Weird Slime Lab.

For girls: Mystic Crystals, Beauty Spa Lab, Luxury Soap Lab, Perfect Perfume Lab.

Oh: I’ll add that the boys’ kits are marketed in blue; the girls’ in pink.

Um. Yeah.

Now, I am not a sociologist or a psychologist who studies gender roles and the differences between the sexes. It strikes me ...

“Alternative” cancer clinic threatens to sue high school blogger

Phil Plait — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:57:59 +0000

Everyone has been touched by cancer in one way or another. If you haven’t had it yourself, the odds are extremely high you know someone who has, and who has died from it. I’ve lost loved ones to cancer, and it’s awful; it can take years filled with tests, hope, lack of hope, expensive therapy… and in the end the odds are what they are. It all makes for desperate times for those involved, with an emotional distress level that is beyond my ability to describe.

There are people out there who claim they can cure cancer, or have therapies that can mediate it. Some of these people are simply con artists, ready to swoop in as soon as they smell blood in the water, vermin that they are. Others are honest but wrong, thinking they have stumbled on some therapy that no one else has found. However, time and again, when these alternative methods are tested rigorously using controlled, properly done studies, they are shown not to work. In general this does not stop people from making the claims, however.

In Houston, Texas, is a man named Stanislaw Burzynski. He claims he has a method for treating cancer. He calls it ...