Blogs / Bad Astronomy

My friend Bug Girl (an entomologist and Skepchick) sent me a note about a cool opportunity for U.S. east coast teachers: you can participate in a Shuttle experiment involving Monarch butterflies in space!

When Atlantis launches next week, it will be carrying some Monarch caterpillars to be taken aboard the Space Station, where they will hatch and be observed. Lots of questions will be investigated: What happens when pupae burst open in space? How will the butterflies cope? Will their migrating instinct be satisfied by moving 7 km/sec across the face of the Earth?

OK, I made up that last one, but Monarch Watch is looking to get teachers and students involved in the real science of butterflies in microgravity. But HURRY! They need your email by tomorrow, Friday, November 6! So if you’re an east coast teacher, go to Bug Girl’s blog and see how you can join in on the insecty fun.

Ever since the Hubble upgrade a few months ago I’ve been waiting to see the results of it getting back to routine science observations… especially for the new Wide Field Camera 3, which promised to return gorgeous imagery.

Well, the wait’s over. The first image is out, and it’s a nice one: star formation in the spiral arm nurseries of the nearby galaxy M83:

[You know the deal: click it to embiggen, or go here to grab a delicious 15 Mb 3900x3900 pixel version.]

M83 is about 15 million light years away, making it practically a next door neighbor for the Milky Way, as well as a tempting target for telescopes. Proximity = clarity in most cases, and with M83 we have a great view of its lovely spiral arms. This new image from Hubble’s WFC3 shows unprecedented detail, too. There are star clusters everywhere, factories cranking out baby stars by the millions. There are also something like 60 supernova remnants, the expanding gaseous debris from exploded stars, five times the number previously seen in this galaxy.

The colors are interesting. This picture is not quite true color. Sure, blue is blue, green is green, and red is red, but they also added a second version of red coming from the light of warm hydrogen gas (called Hα in astronomical parlance) as well as a fifth color: cyan (turquoise) coming from the light of warm, tenuous oxygen. That light is typically emitted from gas clouds making stars as well as the gas emitted from stars when they die (in fact, my PhD thesis was based on observations of this oxygen-light glowing from a ring of gas around an exploded star). You can see that this teal-like glow pervades the entire image: oxygen is everywhere! But it’s so thin it’s more like a hard laboratory vacuum than anything you could breathe.

Also, if you look closely at the pockets of red clumpy gas, you can some that are edge-brightened, like a soap bubble. These are where stars are being born in vast numbers. Their mighty winds expand outwards, carving huge cavities in the gas. My favorite is the one in the middle left of the image, zoomed in here for your viewing awesomeness. The stars are so closely packed they blur together, and each that you can see here would dwarf the Sun in mass, size, and brightness. You can also see that the rim of the bubble is more pronounced below the star cluster, which means that the surrounding gas in the environment of the cluster is thicker there, and has piled up more as the expanding winds have snowplowed it.

And everywhere in this picture are the dark ribbons and filaments of dust, dust, dust. These are long molecules (usually with lots of carbon) which are created by new stars and dying stars. They litter galaxies like M83 as well as our own. And while they make life difficult for optical astronomers who struggle to penetrate the thick veil and see what lies beneath, the dust is interesting all by itself… and adds a certain depth and grace to images like this one.

And, on the right of the big image, is the white glow of the galaxy’s nucleus. You can see detail of the dust, stars, and gas all the way down to the very center. It’s an amazing image, and I’m sure will keep astronomers busy for a long, long time.

What a great start to the return of the Hubble! And, as always, I can’t wait to see what’s next.

STS 129, the 31st mission of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, is scheduled to launch at 14:28 Eastern time on November 16, 2009. Like all remaining flights, this will be to the space station. The primary goal is to install a couple of platforms on ISS on which they can store spare hardware for use after the shuttles retire.

The launch date depends on an Atlas V launch from a nearby air force base on the 14th, so stay tuned to NASA to see if there are any last-minute changes.

Speaking of HiRISE and Mars…

The Phoenix Mars Lander is sitting at the Martian north pole, its mission complete. Designed to study the history of water on Mars and investigate potential human habitability, it touched down in May 2008. It dug trenches and examined the surface soil of Mars for months, but the Martian winter was inexorable. Eventually, the intense cold forced engineers to shut Phoenix down (as planned), and there it still sits.

The HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took images of Phoenix last year while its mission was still active, in June 2008. Here’s that image:

Phoenix is pretty obvious! The surface there was relatively free of frost at that time. But scientists on Earth decided to get more images, this time during the winter. In July of this year they found Phoenix once again, but the picture is a little different!

First off, the green is not real; this is a false color image. So don’t go thinking they found moss bogs or anything like that. What you’re seeing is the same field as in the first picture, but this time its covered with carbon dioxide frost! Even Phoenix appears to have CO₂ over it, making it pretty difficult to see. I imagine that if they hadn’t taken the earlier picture, it would’ve been a lot harder to pick the lander out from the background.

Spring sprung on the northern hemisphere of Mars a couple of weeks ago, and in another few months scientists will try to contact Phoenix and see if they can wake it up after its lengthy hibernation. It’s a bit of a long shot — the mission wasn’t designed for it — but one thing we’ve learned about the probes we’ve sent to Mars is that they can be incredibly hardy: the two rovers are still operating years after the initial design lifetime. So maybe Phoenix will live again, and get back to work (expect other news sources to say it will rise from its ashes; a bad metaphor given that it’s covered in frost). And if it does, images like the ones above from HiRISE will help us back here on Earth interpret what it’s seeing. The more eyes we have on Mars, the better.

I am no fan of pseudoscience, as you may have guessed. Dowsing is a practice that falls squarely in that field. It’s the idea that you can detect an object — usually water, but sometimes gold, or people, or whatever — using a y-shaped branch, or copper tubes, or some other simple device. Dowsers never really have a good explanation of how their devices work, but they tend to claim 100% accuracy.

However, James Randi has tested dowsers many, many times as part of the JREF’s Million Dollar Challenge. Not to keep you in suspense, but the money still sits in the bank. In other words, time and again, the dowsers fail. When a real, double-blind, statistical test is given, dowsers fail. Every single time.

That’s all well and good, and you might think it’s just another silly idea that nonsense-believers adhere to despite evidence. If someone wants to waste their money on a dowser, well, caveat emptor.

But what if your life depended on it? What if thousands of lives depended on it?

Such is the case in Iraq, where the military there is using what is essentially dowsing techniques to try to detect bombs in cars at military checkpoints. Let’s be very clear here: they are using provably useless antiscientific nonsense to try to find terrorists who carry explosives. They may as well use tea leaves, or palm reading, or seances.

This story just got major press; a reporter in Iraq wrote about it in the New York Times. It’s impossible to overstress how bad this situation is. Iraqi Major General Jehad al-Jabiri, who is the head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives, is a whole-hearted believer in this crap. He is such a believer that the Iraqi military are abandoning proven methods such as sniffer dogs.

Instead, the Iraqi have purchased hundreds of these so-called bomb-detection wands from a company called ATSC in the UK. The cost? Millions of dollars. Millions. On technology that James Randi has come right out and called "a totally fraudulent product". Bob Carroll of the Skeptic’s Dictionary agrees with Randi.

The NYT article also has expert advice from several explosives and military authorities (including long-time friend of the JREF Air Force Lt. Col (retired) Hal Bidlack), all of whom conclude that this device does nothing. Given the product description on the company’s own web page, I agree as well. The description makes no scientific sense at all; it claims it can detect ions from a distance without ever coming in contact with them, and that includes through lead, concrete, and more.

In other words, it’s magic.

This, however, won’t stop al-Jabiri, who chalks up any successes to the detector, and any failures to the operator. In a situation like that there is little hope he can be convinced him he’s wrong, especially when he says things like "I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them. I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world."

Really? Then why, as the NYT article indicates, did that dowsing wand fail on October 25, when terrorists detonated two tons of explosives killing 155 people? Four thousand pounds of explosives apparently got right past the magic wands’ sniffer. But at least they’re fast! Again, from the article:

Checking cars with dogs, however, is a slow process, whereas the wands take only a few seconds per vehicle. “Can you imagine dogs at all 400 checkpoints in Baghdad?” General Jabiri said. “The city would be a zoo.”

I suspect a zoo would be better than a slaughterhouse.

It’s arrogance and blind faith like that which has and will get people killed. And the people we’re talking about in many cases are our fighting men and women, people who have to put their own trust in the leaders in Iraq. This is not a game, not some lark. It’s real. And in this case, antiscience kills.

[This post, with minor variations, has been cross-posted on the JREF Swift blog.]

Mars is weird. It’s small, and cold, and has a thin atmosphere that’s almost entirely carbon dioxide, and what isn’t CO₂ is nitrogen and, bizarrely, argon.

So you expect to see weird landscapes. But even so, Mars has the potential to be really, really weird. Check this out:

That slightly disturbing image (click to embiggen) is not a microscopic picture of a scientist’s colon (at least, not as far as you know). It’s actually a region near the Martian south pole. It was taken with the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the area shown is roughly 700 meters across (about 0.4 miles).

What you’re seeing are layers of the polar ice cap. The ice is mostly CO₂. Mars is so cold that a lot of the cap persists throughout the year, and is called the residual cap. Some of it does sublimate, though, which means it goes right from a solid to a gas. Underneath that layer is something more solid, perhaps water ice, that does not sublimate. As the upper layer partially goes away, it leaves these weird Swiss-cheese-like patterns, revealing the smooth layer below.

This image only shows a small portion of a much larger area where this occurs. Here’s the "context image", a zoom out if you will:

I marked the rough outline of the zoomed image in this one (it’s rotated about 90 degrees counterclockwise in the zoom). You can see that this odd terrain (aresain?) goes on for kilometers. It really does look like some sort of bacterial colony. But it’s actually the result of millennia, maybe millions of years, of constant annual atmospheric deposition and sublimation.

And just as a reminder — because I love to point this out — Mars was 250 million kilometers (150 million miles) away from Earth on August 20, 2009, when this image was obtained. Yet MRO was only 250 km above its target, yielding this fine imagery at a resolution of 25 centimeters (10 inches) per pixel. Got a ruler handy? Pick it up, hold it in your hand, and think on the fact that we have spacecraft orbiting Mars, an alien world, that can take pictures of objects on its surface about the size of that ruler.

Man. I love this stuff.

[P.S. If you like this image, the HiRISE page has wallpaper versions of it; the links are at the lower right at that link.]

Well, not literally, though that would be really amusing.

Jamie Hyneman and My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™ were on the always-hilarious Late Night with Craig Ferguson show a little while back, and the video is on YouTube (note: somewhat NSFW dialogue):

Did you hear what Adam mentioned roughly six minutes in? The JREF! Woohoo! Adam is great about donating stuff from Mythbusters to the JREF so we can auction it off to raise money, and that particular gift was pretty special. Rarefied, you might say.

And, thanks to Greg Fish, I can add this:

Yer darn tootin’.

[Get it? Tootin'! Hahahaha!]

Image from ROFLRazzi.