Leon Jenkins is the President of the LA chapter of the NAACP, the organization that advocates for equal rights for black people. The work they do is fine by me, and I support their efforts. But organizations are made up of individuals, and individuals can make mistakes.

This is really one of those times. Here’s the story: Hallmark came out with a card for recent graduates, and it’s one of those deals that has a speaker in it that activates when you open it. Like all such cards it’s twee and sugary and over the top. It involves two cartoon characters with squeaky and high-pitched voices talking about how the graduate can now take over the world. It has an outer space theme to it, and what they say, well… watch/listen for yourself:

Um, yeah. It’s pretty clear to just about anyone who hears it — and doesn’t have any particular stake in the claim — that the card is saying “black holes”. The space theme is obvious enough, and black holes are a common topic. So why on Earth would someone think the card is saying “black whores”, as Mr. Jenkins and other LA NAACP members do?

In fact, there’s a good reason. What we have here is a very well-understood topic to skeptics: audio pareidolia. (more…)

When Galileo first turned his telescope to the sky, almost exactly 400 years ago, he could not possibly have known what he was starting.

Today, four centuries later, we’ve come a long, long way. To celebrate the anniversary of Galileo’s telescopic revolution, NASA’s Great Observatories — Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra — have released a jaw-dropping mosaic of the very heart of the Milky Way galaxy. Behold!

[Oh yes, you want to click to embiggen that-- what I show here is a very compressed version. Or you can go here for a massive copy. You can also get wallpaper versions here.]

This image is nothing less than a heroic effort of astronomical artistry. It’s a chunk of the sky 38 x 14 arcminutes across, or about half the size of the full Moon, and it’s aimed right into the core of our galaxy. See the bright spot just to the right of the center? Buried in there behind light years of dust and gas is the monster of the Milky Way, a black hole with four million times the mass of the Sun. But even that is dwarfed by the 400 billion solar mass heft of the entire galaxy.

There is so much going on in this image it’s hard to know where to start. But first… the Hubble images are in the near-infrared, with a wavelength a little more than twice what the eye can see (1.87 microns for those playing at home). That’s represented in the image as yellow. Spitzer contributed observations in four infrared wavelengths (3.6, 4.5, 5.8, and 8.0 microns), and those are depicted in red. Chandra sees X-rays which are normally written as units of energy, but to remain consistent with the other two images, they were at wavelengths of 0.0005, 0.00025, and 0.00016 microns, and are shown in blue.

What does all this mean? Different objects emit light at different characteristic wavelengths. Warm dust, for example, emits strongly in the infrared. Stars and warm gas emit visible and near-infrared light. Violently heated gas, affected by huge magnetic fields or shocked by colossal collisions glows in X-rays. So this image is a polychromatic view of the crowded downtown region of a bustling city: our galaxy.

You might want to look at an annotated version of this image so you can get your bearings. It’s worth it!

The huge arches of gas on the left are actually the edges of gigantic molecular clouds (dense nebulae where stars are born), lit up by the torrential blast of light from a clutch of massive stars nearby. This clot of stars, called the Arches Cluster due to the arcs it excites, can be seen as a small spot glowing blue just to the left of center in the picture. Don’t be deceived by its diminutive appearance: the Arches cluster has thousands of superstars in it, each dwarfing our Sun, and each capable of sleeting out vast amounts of radiation that lights up the gas surrounding it. Were this cluster much closer than its 25,000+ light year distance, it would blaze in our sky like a beacon. Replace the Sun in our solar system with just one of those stars, and the Earth would be fried beyond the capability of any life to survive. You might as well try living in the flame of an arc-welder.

Below and just to the left of the Arches is a clumpier, more twisted arc of gas called the Sickle. That’s a giant cavity being carved out of dense gas by the Quintuplet cluster, the pinkish glow in its center. It’s another nursery of stars like the Arches cluster, which is also blasting out light and stellar winds which eat away at the gas enveloping it. The Pistol Star resides there, perhaps one of the most massive stars in the Milky Way.

And there’s more! The blue glow on the left is from an X-ray binary called 1E1743.1-2834, what is probably a massive star being orbited by either a neutron star or a black hole. Matter is being stripped from the star and piling up outside the collapsed companion, where it gets heated up to millions of degrees and emits X-rays.

Supernovae remnants dot the image, as do stars, filaments of gas, clouds of dust, and more. This picture is an astronomer’s dream, a map of everything someone might want to visit with a starship — as long as the shields are at full strength. This image is also a map of violence, turbulence, and unrest… a typical scene, so we think, of any normal spiral galaxy like ours. And our Galaxy’s center is considered quiet by astronomers! Some are far worse.

But this is home for us. It’s a place of unimaginable fury but also astonishing beauty… and we see it now as we do because we have dared to examine the world around us, to use tools we invent to peer closer, to magnify the tiny, to extend our eyes into realms we once didn’t even know existed. And every time we do — every single time — we find more questions, more puzzles, more things to examine.

And we find art. Galileo wasn’t the first to turn his telescope to the sky, nor was he the first to record what he saw. But he was the one who made everyone see what he did, and for that, all these years later, he is owed a debt of gratitude.

Young Earth creationists can be sneaky. First, years ago, they loudly proclaimed their religious beliefs. Then when they got smacked hard in the courtrooms when they wanted to teach religion in schools, they evolved: they changed their snake oil to Intelligent Design and tried again.

And again they got whooped. ID was shown to be creationism in disguise — what some might call a bald-faced lie — so that again fundamentalists could attempt to teach religion in the classroom, despite the Constitution of the United States.

I have wondered aloud what they would do next. After all, when facts are slippery things, able to be misused as openly and ridiculously as so many creationists do, then clearly they won’t just give up. They’ll move on to the next deceptive technique.

And now I have to wonder if we’re starting to see it. Could this new tactic be: telling the truth?

Greg Fish of the blog World of Weird Things clued me in to a post on the execrable Answers In Genesis website talking about black holes. In this essay, creationist astronomer Jason Lisle discusses the topic with clarity and actual accuracy. He uses decent analogies, doesn’t let them run away from him, and makes a good case for the existence of black holes.

Wha wha whaaaa?

Of course, in the end, he says this:

Black holes provide an observable confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Such physics is the basis for several young-universe cosmologies, which allow light from the most distant galaxies to reach earth in thousands of years or less. Scientific discoveries, such as black holes, are not only interesting, but they give us a small glimpse into the thoughts of an infinite God (Psalm 19:1).

Well, he certainly drops the ball there, letting it fall down (ha! haha!) a black hole. Cosmologies which abuse basic physics to change enough to allow a young Universe tend to be wrong in their basic assumptions.

But the point here is that the article itself is pretty much factually correct, making me wonder what’s going on here. Maybe the folks at AiG are hoping that by writing an article not filled with fallacious reasoning, they’ll reap the benefits of Google links (though not from me, since I put a rel=nofollow in the above link to the site). It’s hard to say. But given the sheer amount of nonsense on their site, it’s hard to ascribe noble motives to them.

And let me add an irony: on that page is a description of dark matter. I find that humorous, because dark matter was originally proposed to solve the mystery of how individual galaxies in clusters can move so quickly but still stay bound to the cluster itself. The gravity from the visible matter in the cluster was too weak to hold on to such rapidly-moving galaxies, and therefore, if the clusters are to not fly apart over the age of the Universe, there must be invisible matter holding them together.

So dark matter was originally proposed because we know the Universe is old. Of course, now we know that dark matter has influence all over the place, and would have been found even if we hadn’t studied clusters. But the irony still tickles me.

Anyway, what do we do here? Well, if creationists want to actually describe the Universe for what it really is, then I guess we let them… as long as they do so, pardon the pun, faithfully. But as soon as they step over that broad, broad line into territory clearly denied by the evidence, then they need to be called on it.

Eternal vigilance.

Years ago, I worked with producer and director Tom Lucas on a documentary, and last year we made a series of short astronomy videos I blogged about here.

Tom’s latest endeavor is a partnership with Space.com to create short-format videos about astronomy. The Largest Black Holes in the Universe is the newest of these, and it’s pretty impressive. Make sure you hit the HD button!

The graphics are very nice. The science is good too! I’ll have to take some time (when I get some, someday) to watch the rest.