Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Tonight on Showtime, Penn & Teller take on astrology! You can take a peek at the show online here (with the bad words edited out), or you can watch the show at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time.

I happen to know that a certain Beloved Internet Personality who blogs about astronomy and Doctor Who is on the show briefly as well. Well, it’s probably a good episode anyway, so you should order Showtime and watch it, and buy the DVDs as well.

Bonus ironic pun: the episode is directed by Star Price. Siriusly.

So, if you are totally convinced that astrology actually works, despite an entire Universe of evidence stomping on your face telling you you’re wrong, then you can give P&T a piece of your mind personally, since they’ll be at TAM 7. You can yell at them then… but be prepared to have Penn enthusiastically join that Universe of evidence.

And don’t forget:

My bud Neil Tyson was on Jimmy Fallon’s TV show the other day, and they asked him a series of questions. It’s worth watching:

About some people’s total credulity when it comes to ridiculous doomsday scenarios, Neil says:

It’s a profound absence of awareness of … how nature works. They’re missing some science classes in their training in high school or in college that would empower you to understand and to judge when someone else is basically full of it.

I actually disagree with Neil here; it’s not that students missed that part of science class, it’s that it was never taught in science class to start with. It’s very, very rare that science is taught as a process, as a way of knowing. Instead, it’s taught like a compendium of facts, as dry as a dictionary, and like a dictionary only pulled out when needed. In fact, the methods of science are a way of understanding everything in the whole Universe, and so can be used all the time, whether it’s when you’re deciding to eat a sandwich or when you’re trying to figure out why gamma-ray burst beams are collimated so tightly.

Being skeptical, asking for evidence, examining that evidence, and diagnosing it compared to the whole of learning that goes on around it is the way to go. That’s how you distinguish sense from nonsense. It takes work, and sometimes hard work, but it’s worth it. The prize is understanding.

And I do agree strongly with Neil when he says,

Sceince is basically an inoculation against charlatans.

Yup. One of many, but still the best.

As you may recall, my fellow Hive Overminder Sheril Kirshenbaum is writing a book about kissing. She ran an experiment a few weeks ago about it, asking people to rate different pictures of people osculating. I posted about it, and apparently BABloggees are an affectionate lot, as she got an overwhelming response.

In fact, she got so many emails that can’t possibly respond to them all, so she has decided to use Twitter to keep people updated on recent events. If you want to stay on top of kissing, then follow her on Twitter at thekissingbook.

And if you don’t like this idea, that’s fine; just don’t give me any lip about it.

Photo from Richard Masoner’s Flickr photostream.

The Big Picture once again does the International Space Station. My favorite picture? No contest:

Oh how I love this picture.

Of course I love shots of the Moon, but this speaks volumes. Note the Earth just below the Moon; the ISS was seeing the Moon through the top of Earth’s atmosphere. As you may know, light bends when it passes from one medium to another, like from water to air, which is why a spoon in a glass looks bent. The same is true when light passes from a vacuum through air; it bends. In fact, the amount the light bends depends on the angle it intercepts the boundary; so that light coming in from one direction may get bent more than if it comes in from another.

So here comes the cool part: the Earth’s atmosphere follows the curve of the Earth, so you can picture it as a thick shell of air around us. Here’s a diagram:

The Earth’s surface is the lower arc, and the air above the upper arc. The Moon is to the left, the ISS to the right.

The red lines indicate the line-of-sight view to the Moon. When an astronaut looks at the bottom of the Moon, the angle of the air/space boundary is a bit different than it is when he or she looks at the top of the Moon. In my diagram that angle is close to being 45 degrees for the bottom line, but is more like 30 degrees for the top line. That means the light coming from the bottom of the Moon gets bent more than the top. As it happens, the light from the Moon gets bent upward as it passes through our air… so the bottom of the Moon looks like it’s getting pushed into the top.

This squashes the view of the Moon! All of the light is getting bent, but by different amounts; the upper part of the Moon is closer to being a circle but is still distorted significantly. Making it worse, the Moon was not quite full in this picture, so the "left" side looks off, too.

What a mess! But it’s an explainable mess, and one that’s not even all that hard to do. The math is really just a bit of trig and a bit of algebra. In detail it gets more complicated, because the Earth’s air gets thinner with altitude, and I didn’t account for that. And I bet there are a hundred other variables as well.

But making some quick assumptions explains the gross characteristics of this picture just fine. And to me, that adds to my amazement of such a shot. Knowing more about it doesn’t detract from its beauty and its wonder; it enhances them.

I really love that about science. It’s easy to be awed when you don’t know how something works, but when you get a glimpse into the machinery behind it, get an idea of how it really works, what you see becomes that much more beautiful.

Anyone can be passionate about physics. Anyone:

A homeless man is on trial in San Mateo County on charges that he smacked a fellow transient in the face with a skateboard as the victim was engaged in a conversation about quantum physics, authorities said today.

Man. Reminds me of grad school.

The article goes on:

The attack was witnessed by two other people

Oh, too bad! There goes the defense; the observers collapsed the wave function. Otherwise, he could’ve pleaded guilty and not guilty.

Tip o’ the Bose Einstein condensate to ntolman.

How do galaxies form?

Seems like a simple question, right? We live in a galaxy — a sprawling city of gas, dust, and over a hundred billion stars — and we see hundreds of billions of them in the sky, so you’d think we have a decent handle on how these objects came to be.

That turns out not to be the case. Their formation is more complicated than you might expect, but a new set of observations reveals an important clue in the birth process of the largest discrete objects in the Universe.

First, the cool image:

OK, so it’s not the most photogenic thing in the world. But what is it?

Deep optical images of young galaxies reveal that they are surrounded a vast cloud of hydrogen gas, many times larger than the galaxy itself. In a fit of nomenclaturial acumen, astronomers have dubbed these "blobs". The thing is, to be seen at all from this great distance, the blobs must be tremendously luminous, and there’s no clear source of energy for them. Something must be powering them, but what?

There were two competing ideas: one was that the gas is simply cooling as it falls in to the galaxy, and that gas radiates away its heat in the form of light (similar to the way a hot iron bar will radiate its heat away as infrared light). That will then power the gas on the outside, causing it to glow. The other idea was that there is some central source of power deep inside the galaxy itself, lighting up the blobs like a light bulb in a smoke-filled room.

But which is it? Ah, enter these new observations.

The image on the left is of such a young galaxy with a blob around it. This image is optical (from Japan’s Subaru telescope and Hubble) plus deep infrared (taken using the Spitzer Space Telescope). You can see the blob, falsely colored yellow, and the denser galaxy embedded in it. Look at the upper left part of the blob: see that reddish glow? What could that be?

The image on the right reveals it. That is the same picture, but added in (in blue) are observations using the Chandra X-ray Observatory. X-rays are only produced through very energetic and violent sources, such as matter swirling around a black hole, or exploding stars. That would certainly explain what’s powering the blobs’ light! But usually these events also produce a lot of optical light. Why don’t we see that?

The reddish glow in the left hand picture is the key. That indicates the galaxy is loaded with dust, made when stars are born and when the explode, too. Dust absorbs optical light, and what does get through can be highly reddened.

So now it looks like we have a complete picture of what’s going on here: as a galaxy forms from an infalling blob of gas a million light years across, a supermassive black hole coalesces in the center. Matter falls in, swirling madly around it, pouring out X-rays. Just outside this central region of the galaxy, stars are born at tremendous rates, creating lots of dust. The most massive stars explode in just a few million years, also blasting out X-rays, but also making even more dust. The dust blocks our optical view of the bright sources, but the X-rays still can leak out in quantities sufficient to heat up and light up the surrounding blobs of gas. What this means for the galaxy at large is that this huge amount of energy dumped into the blobs may slow and eventually reverse the infall, shutting off the process which forms the galaxy itself.

What we’re seeing here may be the last birth throes of a galaxy.

What I love about all this — besides the fact that we can know anything at all about what’s going on in an object a million light years across, billions of light years away, and billions of years in the past — is that we need all these observations together to figure this stuff out. The optical light alone presents us with a mystery, and the IR observations help but don’t solve the problem. But when you add the X-ray observations, they reveal the solution.

And think on this… the blobs we’re talking about here are huge, dwarfing the galaxies that are forming from them. They contain billions of times the Sun’s mass in raw gas, the building material of stars in a nascent galaxy. And these immense clouds are being lit up by not just supernovae — which are terrifying all by their lonesome, dumping out energy at rates that would turn the Earth into a crispy ember — but also by gigantic black holes smack dab in their galaxy’s hearts, which are blowing out energy in quantities to rival or exceed the supernovae themselves.

Yet all that power, the true source of energy illuminating the clouds so much we can see them from across half the Universe, is hidden from our telescopes. Or at least it was, until we learned to slip the surly bonds of Earth and loft our eyes into space, where X-rays can travel freely, unimpeded by our pesky atmosphere.

The universe is complex, and if we truly want to understand it, we will need to continue to explore it, and use the combined might of our scientific equipment to investigate it. There are hidden treasures out there, and the more we probe, the more we’ll find.

Via Built on Facts comes this slice of awesome from the Intellectual Ventures Lab site. They strap a scary big capacitor onto a U.S. quarter and zap it with 15,000 Joules, a truly terrifying amount of energy to pack into a few square centimeters. And what happens when they do?

Go watch the videos to find out. It’s pretty cool. Interestingly, in the high-speed video, you can see the affect on the coin before the materials get so hot they incandesce. That means the magnetic field is interacting with the quarter itself before it heats the air, which is not what I expected.

You can also clearly hear one of the guys telling people to look away when he trips one of the safety devices. That threw me for a moment. Why look away? Because it’s bright? And then I realized: they are creating a potential of 10,000 Volts, which means they get enough energy density to make X-rays ultraviolet light. Holy Haleakala. Anyway, watch the setup video as well.

Science!