Yesterday, I was in a live video chat session with several other scientists and science journalists. I wrote up the details of it yesterday, and it went pretty well! We had a lot of fun talking about the new GRAIL Moon mission, the fiery future return of Phobos-Grunt, 2012, and of course President Obama’s purported teleportation trip to Mars many years ago.

Wait, what?

Well, if you wanna know more, now you can: the video’s online.

The plan is to do these every week on Thursdays, and have a rotating cast of characters over time. I hope you like it. And I strongly suggest people join up over at Google+. I really like it there, and post quite a few things you won’t see here or on Twitter.

It’s been a couple of days since the foofooraw involving Betelegeuse, 2012, and media laziness took place. As you may recall, a site in Australia made some dubious connections between 2012 and the red supergiant star Betelgeuse exploding, which you may imagine I took a fairly dim view on. As bad as that was, it got worse when The Huffington Post weighed in, adding their own nonsense to the story, misattributing parts of the story and making even more faulty connections to 2012.

The story went viral rapidly. Other media venues quickly picked up on it, furthering the nonsense without doing any independent investigation of it. Happily, not everyone got it wrong; I’ll note that the first venue that apparently got it right was Fox News, who linked to an earlier article I wrote about Betelgeuse.

I was also contacted by Jesse Emspak from International Business Times, who asked me specific questions about it and wrote a very well-written and factually accurate article about all this, doing something that made my heart sing: not just presenting the real science we could get out of a Betelgeuse supernova, but making that the focus of the article! As it should be. Kudos to him and IBT.

Stories like 2012 and nearby supernovae are sexy, easy to sell, and get eyeballs on a webpage. It’s the devil’s bargain to write about them even on a skeptical astronomy blog; it can reinforce bad science in people’s minds, or it might put a spotlight on something that could otherwise wither and die on its own (which is why I didn’t write about this story until HuffPo posted it). It’s also amazing to me how some media — some actual, mainstream news sources — didn’t do any real fact-checking before putting up links to HuffPo. It once again reinforces what I learned long ago: keep a very skeptical frame of mind when reading or listening to the news. If they can mess up something as simple as this, then what else are they getting wrong?

I swear, I need to trust my instincts. As soon as I saw the article on the news.com.au site desperately trying to link Betelgeuse going supernova with the nonsense about the Mayans and 2012, my gut reaction was to write about it.

But no, I figured a minute later, this story would blow over. So to speak.

I should’ve known: instead of going away, it gets picked up by that bastion of antiscience, The Huffington Post.

Grrrr.

The actual science in the original article is pretty good; they talked with scientist Brad Carter who discusses the scenario of Betelgeuse going supernova. The whole story is pretty interesting — I wrote about it in detail the last time there was nonsense about Betelgeuse blowing up — but in a nutshell Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star in Orion with about 20 times the mass of the Sun, and it’s very near the end of its life. When stars this massive die, they explode as supernovae. The distance to Betelgeuse is unclear (it has a very puffy outer atmosphere which makes distance determination somewhat dicey) but it’s something like a bit more than 600 light years, way way too far away to hurt us.

It’s the question of when that the two articles go off the rails. Betelgeuse may explode tomorrow night, or it may not go kerblooie until the year 100,000 A.D. We don’t know. But given that huge range, the odds of it blowing up next year are pretty slim. And clearly, the original article was really trying to tie in the 2012 date to this, even when it has nothing to do with anything. The tie-in was a rickety link to scuttlebutt on the web about it, but that’s about it.

What’s worse, the HuffPo article attributes the date to Dr. Carter himself, but in the original article he never says anything about it; the connection is all made by the article author. Given how popular HuffPo is, I imagine a lot of people will now think an actual scientist is saying Betelgeuse will blow up in 2012.

OK then, tell you what: I’m an actual scientist, and I would give the odds of Betelgeuse going supernova in 2012 at all — let alone close to December, the supposed doomsdate — as many thousands to one against. It’s not impossible, it’s just really really really really really really really unlikely.

Really.
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Are there three giant spaceships on their way to Earth, dooming us to extinction when they arrive in — gasp! — December 2012?

Duh. No.

But you might think otherwise reading an article about this on The Examiner’s website. It documents the three spaceships, shows images, and even has quotes from a SETI astrophysicist!

SETI Astrophysicist Craig Kasnov (not to be confused with Craig Kasnoff ) has announced the approach to the Earth of 3 very large, very fast moving objects. The length of the "flying saucers" is in the range of tens of kilometers. Landing, according to calculations of scientists, should be in mid-December 2012. Date coincides with the end of the Mayan calendar.

There are some teeny, tiny, problems with this story, though. Like, the "spaceships" are actually image defects and aren’t real, there’s no way to figure out how big they from the picture, and the "astrophysicist" quoted in the article doesn’t even exist.

But gee, other than that…

1) The spaceship that wasn’t

It’s been a while since I’ve done a good ol’ smackdown debunking, so let’s take these one at a time. First things first: the spaceships. Shown here, as you can see, the article refers to a picture of a big blue wormy-thingy floating in space. What could it be? Well, because I don’t trust articles online talking about giant spaceships invading us (or anything anyone says about doomsday in 2012), I went to the original pictures themselves.

NASA has an image archive viewer called SkyView, which I used to use all the time when I worked on Hubble data. It has access to dozens of surveys of the sky taken using various telescopes, including the Second Digitized Sky Survey the UFO article mentions. Amazingly, the article gives coordinates for the "spaceships", so I took a look for myself. (more…)

I love geeks. I love clever people. I love sciencey stuff.

So this fills my heart with squishiness: a skirt with rows of lights that illuminate when facing north:

Make those LEDs red and every astronomer could use it. Not to mention campers, hikers, and let’s face it, nerds like all of us. I would dance all night with someone wearing this.

Want one? She’s selling kits so you can make one yourself!

Of course, in 2012^* when the poles flip the skirt will light up when facing south. Oh! I know! You could wear it backwards. Problem solved.

Tip o’ the compass needle to that bon vivant, Josh A. Cagan.

The cool website Information is Beautiful presents, um, well, information in a beautiful way. They recently posted a good guide to the sense and nonsense of the 2012 phenom, pretty much showing that the major claims of the doomcriers are baloney.

I haven’t checked every factoid of the graphic, but the part pictured above is cool: I independently came to this same conclusion a few months ago using some planetarium software to plot the position of the Sun and the Galactic center (and presented this at TAM 7, in fact). There are people out there trying to spin, fold, and mutilate astronomy to fit their pre-manufactured conclusions about 2012, but — as usual when it comes to doomsday scenarios — the actual facts show that these scaremongers’ claims are as vacuous as space itself.

I did an interview with reporter Maria Sciullo of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a few days ago, and her article is now online. I’m glad she talked to Anthony Aveni; I’m reading his book The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012 and it’s a great review of the Mayans, their astronomy, and their complete lack of predicting a doomsday in 2012.

I’m sure I’ll get some doomcriers in the comments. If you really think the Mayan calendar says the world will end in 2012, then I strongly urge you to read Aveni’s book. He’s an actual Mayan scholar, he knows his stuff, and he’s not out to either scare you or reassure you: he’s out to tell the truth.