I am very pleased to write that the Nobel Prize for physics this year has been awarded to three astronomers for their discovery of dark energy — a still-mysterious phenomenon that is causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate.

Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess are sharing the award. Back in 1998, Saul and Brian headed up two rival teams trying to observe very distant exploding stars, hoping they would yield better numbers for how fast the Universe expanded. Adam was on Brian’s team, and led the work on finding a way to try to understand the behavior of the supernovae. To everyone’s surprise, the data indicated the Universe was not just expanding, but expanding faster every day — it was accelerating.

Something must be pushing on the very fabric of space itself, causing it to expand ever-faster. We don’t now what it is, exactly, but we call it dark energy, and over the past 12 years, more and more observations have piled up showing that this stuff really is out there.

If you want background info on all this, see the Related Posts section below; there are plenty of links to articles I’ve written on this topic. The folks at Hubble also created a video describing dark energy and what it means for the Universe.

This is very exciting for lots of reasons. First, of course, it’s nice to see an astronomical topic win what is considered the top prize in science. Second, because I predicted it would years ago (not that this was all that difficult to see coming!). And third, for personal reasons, because I know all three of these men. I worked with Brian and Adam back in the day; the project Brian headed up to observe distant supernovae was part of a project using Hubble to observe supernovae in general, and I worked on a different aspect of it. Adam and I were both grad students at the time; after I got my PhD I went to work on a different Hubble project, and Adam stayed with the team, cracked the supernova code, and now has a Nobel Prize.

I suspect that was the right move for him.

Saul, too, is an acquaintance; I first met him at a talk he gave in 1999, and he was also on a panel I moderated for Discover Magazine in California a couple of years ago.

All three of these men have worked for a long, long time on this problem, essentially devoting their lives to it. It’s very, very nice to see that pay off. It’s richly deserved!

Well, it’s been a while coming, but I’m pleased to let y’all know that the third and final episode of "Bad Universe" will air on The Discovery Channel tomorrow, April 19, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern (US) time — but of course, check your local listings.

The episode is entitled "Death Stars", and is about the effects of solar flares and nearby supernovae. Like the other two, this was a lot of fun to put together, though the trip to Sandia Lab still haunts me a bit… but I won’t give that away. You’ll just have to see. I actually haven’t seen the final cut since we put it together late last year, so to be honest when I watch it tomorrow it’ll be a bit like seeing it again for the first time.

Speaking of which, my daughter will be in school when it airs, so I won’t watch it until we can see it as a family. That means I won’t be live-tweeting or anything like that.

And to answer the inevitable question: I don’t know if the network is picking it up as a series or not. I expect the ratings of the airing tomorrow may play into that, so tell a friend! Or tell a few dozen.

I hope you like it, and have at least as much fun watching it as I did making it.

Last weekend I was in NYC attending the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, aka NECSS. It was a lot of fun, as I kinda figured it would be. Skeptic conferences usually are! And of course it was a chance to catch up with a lot of old friends.

Attendees are writing their opinions of the meeting all over the place (like here, here, and here for starters). I’ll spare you the recap, which would boil down to how awesome my talk was, and cut to the chase which is to thank Michael Feldman from the New York City Skeptics, and all the folks from the New England Skeptical Society for inviting me and throwing such a fab conference.

I’d be remiss, though, if I didn’t include this little bit of funnery. Skeptical singer songwriter and BA friend George Hrab was at NECSS. On Geo’s last album, "Trebuchet", he wrote a tune called "Death from the Skies" — based on the brilliant book of the same name. He plays the funky beat, and I read statistics of getting killed by various astronomical events. We performed this song live both at Paddy Reilly’s, a bar where Geo had a gig, and to close out the ceremonies.

Here’s the recording of the latter, which is pretty laid back considering how many octillions of Joules of energy I’m talking about:

And what the heck, here we are at the somewhat more rambunctious bar the night before:

See? If you go to skeptic meetings you can experience stuff like this live. It’s way too much fun.

There are photos of NECSS popping up all over the place (search Flickr), including for example a nice set by Bruce Press. I also like this shot of Geo and me taken by Brian Engler. Apparently I had just stubbed my toe.

NECSS really is a terrific event. I hope to see you all there next year!

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?

What does a half million galaxies look like? Something like this:

Whoa. That’s a part of a huge image just released by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey Deep Field #1, a ginormous mosaic of the night sky… and by ginormous, I mean GINORMOUS. It covers a solid square degree of sky — 5 times the area of the full Moon — and tips the scale at a whopping 370 megapixels! It took 5 years and several hundred hours of observing time with the 3.6 meter telescope on top of Mauna Kea to get this massive mosaic.

The image itself may look cool and all, but the true power comes when you give in to the dark side you use the interactive zoom feature. You can surf the entire mammoth 370 million pixel image, zooming in on galaxies galore. And you won’t run out of objects to investigate any time soon: there are an estimated 500,000 galaxies in the image. Like the Hubble image I posted about yesterday, almost everything you see in the image above is a galaxy, not a star.

The images were taken to look for very distant supernovae. It was the investigation of these far-flung stellar explosions that led astronomers to determine the Universal expansion is accelerating, and to postulate the mysterious dark energy that powers this phenomenon. The CFHT is being used to map the same area of the sky over and over again, looking for the tell-tale blobs of light that mark the spots of a distant, dying suns. The more of these we see, the better we can nail down the physical characteristics of the cosmic expansion, and of the dark energy about which we know so little.

Of course, astronomers will squeeze a lot of science from this and other images… but it’s also OK to simply scan and pan through them at home, too, marveling that the Universe is so deep and so deeply beautiful.

For more deep and gorgeous images like this, see Hubble Digs Deep to See Baby Galaxies, The Milky Way Bulges with Cannibalized Corpses, Hubble Pokes at a Galactic Bulge, or just search in the Pretty Pictures category of this blog.

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.

M81 and M82 are bright nearby galaxies; you can spot them with binoculars easily in the northern sky, and they are a mere 12 million light years from us (for comparison, the Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so if you think of the Milky Way as a DVD, M81 and M82 would be about 14 meters away). These two galaxies interacted a couple of hundred million years ago, and the gravitational interaction drew out long tendrils of gas (which is very common in colliding galaxies).

Astronomers examined this bridge of material using Hubble, and found clusters of stars in it. That was totally unexpected; the gas was thought to be too thin to form stars! Amazingly, many of the stars are blue, indicating they are young (blue stars burn through their fuel much more quickly than redder stars. This means that the gas is still forming stars, even 200 million years after the collision!

In the image below, almost all the stars you see are young blue stars formed in the aftermath of that titanic collision. The reddish stars are stars in our galaxy, and the bigger objects are distant background galaxies.

Most likely, the stars formed when turbulence in the tendril caused local regions of denser gas, which could collapse to form stars. Before these observations, it wasn’t really thought it was possible to form stars in the regions between galaxies, so this is an interesting new find.