'Roid Rage

Asteroids that is. And they're not actually angry. They're just being discovered from 1980-2010. It's cool to see that many objects in orbit over time, who doesn't like a little Kepler's Law in action?



From YouTuber's szyzyg's description:

The final colour of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system.
Earth Crossers are Red
Earth Approachers (Perihelion less than 1.3AU) are Yellow
All Others are Green

Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You'll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.

At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that's tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.

Currently we have observed over half a million minor planets, and the discovery rates snow no sign that we're running out of undiscovered objects.

[via Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Some Reminders

-Like all (science) graduate students, I am woefully behind everything happening in the world of entertainment. So even though it's probably not news to anyone normal, I was surprised to find out recently that there is a Facebook movie coming out soon. I can't think of anything other than this:

Facebook/off

And as usual I can remember the wild early days of Facebook where that "Too close for missiles, I'm switching to guns" tag-line comes from. Back before they started changing everything and letting in all the riff-raff who didn't go to Elite East-Coast Colleges.

I'd also like to point out, as I usually do in these circumstances, that the guy who founded facebook dated my ex-girlfriend's suitemate when we were freshmen at our Elite East-Coast Colleges. The only thing I remember about him was that he made an incorrect, but still lame, joke about trigonometry while playing frisbee in the common room. He said tangent when he should have used sine...or nothing. Also, that that girl dumped him shortly before he created that website and became a billionaire.

-I found out a few days ago that the expression "kid gloves" deals with gloves made from the skin of young goats -- not the kind of kids who are young humans. Please adjust your speech accordingly.

-I am sure that I have learned many other delayed or otherwise interesting things recently, but I've been busy doing astronomy stuff, and more importantly, programming, so that I can reduce images without having to think about each step of the process manually. For some reason, scientific (or even basic) programming is not yet part of any physics curriculum, though it seems like the primary thing many of us spend out time on. I've had to learn how to use various things, but never formally, and almost always in the context of "figure out how to do this for your job." It seems as though somewhere around your 3rd or 4th year of undergrad, professors start assuming that you know how to use most command-line programs, or write code in fortran or C, despite there never being any (even suggested) instruction on these things. Plus, many intro comp-sci classes tend to cover topics that are mainly useless to science majors. I wish my college had had some kind of "Unix-study abroad" style immersion program where that was the only way they let you communicate. (Hey, at least we'd get to travel...) I've gradually gotten proficient, but it's a lot more painful when you don't know how to phrase your (surely) stupid questions to get an answer out of the internet. Fluent or not, at least the end result is pretty:

What YOU Need To Know About Space Combat

Cool post by an aerospace engineer about the kind of stuff we all know we spend more time contemplating than we ought to, Gizmodo considers The Physics of Space Battles:

First, let me point out something that Ender's Game got right and something it got wrong. What it got right is the essentially three-dimensional nature of space combat, and how that would be fundamentally different from land, sea, and air combat. In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, the Buggers are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics – not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets' orbits. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we'll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window. At any given point in time, there are only so many routes from here to Mars that will leave our imperialist forces enough fuel and energy to put down the colonists' revolt. So, it would actually make sense to build space defense platforms in certain orbits, to point high-power radar-reflection surveillance satellites at certain empty reaches of space, or even to mine parts of the void. It also means that strategy is not as hopeless when we finally get to the Bugger homeworld: the enemy ships will be concentrated into certain orbits, leaving some avenues of attack guarded and some open. (Of course, once our ships maneuver towards those unguarded orbits, they will be easily observed – and potentially countered.)

Dark Matter Matters

As a card carrying astro-related blog owner I am contractually obligated to comment on yesterday's kinda-sorta-it-might-be-dark-matter-semi-quasi-announcement by the CDMS II group.

There had been rumors about this thing for over a week that CDMS had some kind of watershed announcement. That they had discovered dark matter (what other important announcements can DM detection projects make?), that they were publishing in Nature today, that a torrent of papers was about to hit the arxiv with analysis of this last night, that they had all learned the true meaning of Christmas and were going to be nothing but kind and generous from now on.

Yesterday, with the hype reaching a fever pitch, they held a seminar on their findings, broadcast online. Unified in the concerted effort to drive everyone crazy in anticipation they began the lecture with about 10 minutes of freshman-astronomy-level rationales for the existence of cold dark matter, before moving on to another 10 minutes of descriptions of things that were important to them but not to us, like the arrangement of the detectors and the way the data was collected. Then she threw in a joke about a spherical cow, and stalled for another 5 minutes. Finally, she got to a slide that said "Results" or something at the top, and the video completely froze. Of all the panicked, oh-my-god-just-tell-us-already, freakouts I can imagine something causing, this was way up there. When I regained consciousness and the video started working again she was on a slide that said "Conclusions," and before I could make out any of the bullet points, the camera quickly panned away and she started taking questions. It was awesome.

Anyhow, in the aftermath of that humbling experience, what actually transpired during those missing minutes has come to light. CDMS detected TWO events. But because of the way they pull events out the noise of other stuff hitting the detector that could appear as a false signal, they'd expect to find about 0.8 events in the time the experiment ran. There is a 23% chance that what they saw was just random noise. I read someone describe this as the least helpful possible result and I have to agree. It isn't enough to be a conclusive discovery, and it isn't enough to say that dark matter definitely ISN'T being seen in this kind of detector either. So unfortunately, not enough for solid results, and not much to come up with a decent parameter space constraint either. It could certainly turn out they did find it, but that will have to wait for later confirmation. Just a lot of build up, a suggestion that we might be on the verge of learning something really interesting, a clue, and then the realization that nothing has been settled and you'll have to keep waiting for answers. Kind of like an episode of Lost.

Links:
Best popular article about this I've seen: Scientific American
Cosmic Variance Liveblog of Yesterday's SLAC seminar.
Basically alright article with a non-sequitur about supersymmetry: NYTimes

Actual CDMS Paper

Season's Greetings from a Telescope!

Merry Christmas, from Hubble:

This year, say it in stars! Send your friends and relatives best wishes for the season with our printable holiday cards. Messages of joy and peace are illuminated by the natural splendor of the universe.

Worst Article Ever

I like Slate, but this lady seriously has nothing to offer. Unless you count her frequent attempts to be the worst parent ever. Without ever really meaning to, I've stumbled across her various articles about freaking out because her sons wanted to see Star Wars (she was afraid they might like it), freaking out when her son went unsupervised in the woods of suburban Connecticut for 45 min, and discouraging her son from being curious about how magic tricks work.

Still this is a new low: "My boys love astronomy. I couldn't care less." And that's just the title.

Basically she spends the whole article complaining about how boring space is to her and bemoaning the fact that her boys are always all interested in science, instead of..well, she never really says what. Except maybe some ponderous New York Times article about the 10th year of some couple's marriage -- everyone knows how normal kids really eat that stuff up.

I have never willingly studied a single page of astronomy. My knowledge of the planets begins and ends with My Very Elderly Mother Just Sat Upon Nine Pillows. [...] And yet my boys are in love. They ask for library books about outer space. They had a DVD of the moon landing. They go to the local planetarium. They recite facts about planetary gasses and burned-up stars and black holes and something else called a white hole. "Mom, did you know?" they ask before launching into a minilecture. I never do. Nor, if I'm honest, do I care to find out. The other day, Eli interrupted himself in the middle of a shooting star explanation and said, sagely, "Mom, sometimes you don't really listen to me."

This leaves me with a guilty question: What do you do when your children's interests don't match your own? Do you do your utmost to cultivate genuine enthusiasm and expertise? Do you fake it? Or do you keep the faith with your own passions, figuring you're teaching a lesson about assertion of selfhood and independence?

I am tempted to stray down the last path—is that the one for the lazy, self-involved parent, or is it the proudly resolute one?

Um, lazy and self-involved. Next question?

What kind of quandary is this? These are elementary schoolers. Is she aware of the range of stupid crap they could be into? And she's second-guessing the one that's actually educational? Sure, they're just kids and no one is saying that they're going to do whatever they're interested in now, but having your mother casually dismiss your nascent curiosity in the natural world is not helpful.

And then there's this garbage:

Maybe he'll be a rebel astronomer, and someday reform NASA, or call for an end to manned space missions so that the money can be used to fix Social Security? A mother can dream.

There are so many things wrong with that statement that I don't even know where to begin. First of all, NASA's budget is insignificant compared to Social Security (or practically anything else the government spends money on). It was $18.7 Billion in 2008, while SS was $696 Billion*. Studies show that Americans overestimate NASA to be one of the largest federal agencies, believing that it receives a quarter of the budget, when in reality it gets less than 1%. Plus a large fraction of astronomers do not favor manned space exploration, other than the role it plays in maintaining space-based telescopes, which are tremendously important.

Eliminating NASA, and all other publicly-funded science for that matter, and spending that money on other stuff would increase funding for social programs by ~2%, does anyone think this would make a huge a difference? This is one of those non sequitur "let's solve our problems on Earth first" (before ever doing science, apparently) statements that stupid people make without considering where their iPods and laptops come from.

Oh, and she cites Gregg Easterbrook. So all in all, not good.

*This chart is pretty good for showing federal expenditures visually.

Galileo Galileo!

It is well known among astronomers that Brian May, the guitarist from Queen has a PhD in astrophysics. The interesting part is that he was a graduate student at the time Queen took off, nearly finished with his dissertation, only to return a few years ago and complete his degree. He had published in Nature, and MNRAS on topics of interplanetary dust, but the lure of worldwide rock & roll fame overtook him, as it does many a prospective astronomer.

Sure, they may spend 30 years touring the world, earning millions of dollars and adoring fans, but they always come back for the radial velocities of dust clouds. That's where the real action is. (Fewer groupies though...)

NPR's Day to Day - Queen's Brian May Rocks an Astrophysics Rhapsody

CMB Beach Ball Liberated!

In August 2006 I made a solemn vow:

This is the cosmic microwave background presented in the best known way of conveying scientific information: printed on a beach ball. Talk about an inflationary universe!

...A few years ago WMAP secretly distributed them to cosmologists. Needless to say, the early universe printed on a inflatable ball is something that I have decided I must have. For some reason, despite not being for sale, the ball seems to have its own web site...I pledge now to the internet, ultimate keeper of pledges made to no one in particular, that I will acquire this ball. I am not sure how yet, but I swear to do whatever it takes--breaking into someone's office, posing as an elementary school, sending threatening letters to beach ball manufacturers. whatever.

I am now free to disclose that I have triumphed over the forces allied against me-- the beach ball website that mysteriously refuses to sell it, the people who said I would never amount to anything, the journals that keep rejecting my groundbreaking work on the anisotropy of CMB beach ball distribution, everyone. I have, indeed, obtained the ball:


I can't go into the specifics of where it came from, but let's just say that a certain physics department who could never appreciate it as much as I do had a habit of carelessly leaving it in a usually unlocked room full of other neglected items, which I thoughtfully did them the favor of not stealing. And that I have waited until now to announce to the world because the institution that department belongs to, due to some bureaucratic stuff, took until a year after I had finished to send me my master's degree. Having gotten it in the mail a couple of months ago, I am now free, statute-of-limitations-wise, to reveal the success of Operation CMB Ball Freedom. It is hanging from the ceiling of my apartment, daily inspiring me to contemplate the mysteries of the cosmos. Mission accomplished.

Now a beach ball of the Neutrino Background pattern, that would be something...

Martian Sunset

From NASA's Image of the Day, an artistic shot of the sun going down on Mars. In addition to being really beautiful, it certainly raises some important questions, such as: there's an alternative to the reviled (by me) Astronomy Picture of the Day?

NASA - Sunset on Mars

Stranger Maps of Space (and other things)

Strange Maps recently put up some interesting astronomically themed maps. The one above is "A Better Sky." Well, not actually better, but at least more current. Someone took a constellation map and replaced the star groupings by fable, with star grouping by recent world leaders. Does this make more sense? My verdict: sort of. It doesn't involve pretending that Aries somehow resembles a ram...or anything else. Plus people like Einstein, Darwin and Roosevelt get stars named after them. On the other hand, Mussolini has his own star too, in the "Tyrants" constellation (with Hitler, Robespierre and other fun friends!). At least the sunspots would run on time. Wait a second, there is a Quebec star? Nein!

Next up, the "Unnamed Methane sea on Titan."

Hmm. This is pretty much what it sounds like. There may be a bunch of liquid methane on Saturn's moon, and, basically, um, scientifically speaking, there is a "sea" of it. And it doesn't have a name. May I propose dubbing it the Sea of William Carlos Williams? He got left off the constellation map somehow...

In actuality though, we don't know whether there is liquid methane there, this map was just made by looking at "dark spots" on some radar maps of the surface. Nonetheless, Titan is pretty fascinating. When you crash into it, it looks like this:



...to a probe. (The video is Huygens' decent in 2005, time-compressed from four hours.)

I have to say though, as cool as these maps are, they have nothing on Area Codes in which Ludacris Claims to have Hoes:

“In this song, Ludacris brags about the area codes where he knows women, whom he refers to as ‘hoes’,” says Ms Gray, who plotted out all the area codes mentioned in this song on a map of the United States. She arrived at some interesting conclusions as to the locations of this rapper’s preferred female companionship:

• “Ludacris heavily favors the East Coast to the West, save for Seattle, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Las Vegas.”
• “Ludacris travels frequently along the Boswash corridor.”
• “There is a ‘ho belt‘ phenomenon nearly synonymous with the ‘Bible Belt’.”
• “Ludacris has hoes in the entire state of Maryland.”
• “Ludacris has a disproportionate ho-zone in rural Nebraska. He might favor white women as much as he does black women, or perhaps, girls who farm.”
• “Ludacris’s ideal ‘ho-highway’ would be I-95.”
• “Ludacris has hoes in the Midway and Wake Islands. Only scientists are allowed to inhabit the Midway Islands, and only military personnel may inhabit the Wake Islands. Draw your own conclusion.”

Yup.

Equal nox

Tomorrow is that vaguely astronomical holiday, where bearded men get out their sextants and declare with authority that it is now seasonally acceptable to mix lemonade with ice tea. It is cold and rainy here, so I may wait a few weeks to do that, but I will not have to wait another minute to balance my egg.

As the myth goes, of course, at the precise moment of equinoxity it is possible, albeit briefly, to balance an egg on its end, an otherwise impossible task. How this idea began is truly baffling. As is the thought that anyone who has pondered the mechanics of this idea for more than 30 seconds would continue to believe in it. (For more background, Snopes wins the quality name contest with "Infernal Egguinox"). I suspect that the only reason this notion continues to exist in the popular imagination is that equinoxes are the only day in the year anyone ever actually tries balancing eggs. Anyway, whatever the link between eggs and 12 hours of daylight is, I have long heard that one can balance an egg on any day of the year. But, the world has breathlessly wondered, how?

Well, at long last, Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy demonstrates:

Flat Earth? Teach the controversy!

I've been seeing ads for Flat Earth vegetable chips recently. I doubt that they're actually a snack food espousing the Flat Earth Hypothesis and I am having trouble figuring out how they settled on this name. It does give me an opening however to mention that of all the crackpots out there, Flat Earthers (they even have a Society, BTW -- check out the wiki article for a good laugh) are among the most pathetic science deniers in the spectrum of science denial. Even if it is inexcusable, you can still understand why people disbelieve evolution. It is an amalgamation of several fairly complex processes that happen over millions of years and can't be easily observed in macroscopic creatures over short time-scales. And they are told that "believing" in it makes them irreligious, so the blinders go on anyway. Some people don't buy relativity either, being another hard-to-demonstrate-to-people-who-don't-like-physics type theory which is also really contrary to our everyday experience. And again, though these people are ignorant, you can sort of understand why they exist. But there are few essential facts about the world easier to explain to people than the Earth not being flat. You can just look at it. You have to be so paranoid to think there is an elaborate conspiracy to doctor photos showing Earth's sphericity that you are hardly worth trying to reason with in the first place. And contrary to popular belief, people have known the planet was round for thousands of years, as opposed to evolution and relativity which are 150 and 100 years old, respectively. I don't have any more profound stuff to say about this, railing against a hilariously quacky theory doesn't really serve any purpose. The wiki page is pretty good on its own, the explanations for phenomena like eclipses and tides are so much more convoluted and unlikely than the notion that the planet is a ball.

The Flat Earth Society also maintains that the Earth is accelerating upward at a rate of 9.8 m/s², thereby simulating gravity. This upward momentum is caused by the "Universal Accelerator", a vague term used by the Society to describe a force that originated at the Big Bang and caused the Earth to speed upwards. Gravity cannot exist on a flat Earth since the disc shape would eventually collapse on itself. However in a few Flat Earth models, other planetary bodies such as the moon and the sun are alleged to have gravitational pulls, causing the gravitational force on an object to decrease as it increases in altitude. This also allows spacecraft to "orbit".

Anyhow, for bargain basement pseudoscience, you can't go bagainier than these people. What else is there? The existence of the moon?

Stephen Colbert's Fallback: Astrophysics

Mere moments after calling attention to Zosia's criminal record I have occasion to conveniently post exactly the same thing as her. What a coincidence...

Of course, a bit featuring Stephen Colbert and Neil deGrasse Tyson wouldn't have gone very long unnoticed. Especially one in which he states the unvarnished truth about astrophysics: it's a safety career.

Breakfast of ions

Atheist Sees Image of Big Bang in Piece of Toast

"I was just about to spread the butter when I noticed a fairly typical small hole in the bread surrounded by a burnt black ring. however the direction and splatter patterns of the crumbs as well as the changing shades emanating outwards from this black hole were very clearly similar to the chaotic-dynamic non-linear patterns that one would expect following the big bang". "It's the beginning of the world" he added excitedly.

Ever since news of the discovery made national headlines, local hoteliers have been overwhelmed by an influx of atheists from all over the country who have flocked to Huddlesfield to catch a glimpse of the scientific relic. "I have always been an Atheist and to see my life choices validated on a piece of toast is truly astounding" said one guest at the Huddlesfield arms hotel.

What a coincidence, I could have sworn I saw the early large-scale structure of the universe in some latte foam yesterday!

Supersupernova

I don't care that this is neither timely nor newsworthy, I just saw this simulation on The Universe and I had to post something about it. This computation group at UChicago seems to have come up with these beautiful videos of Type Ia supernovae exposions. The spike originating from the center is the dramatic ignition of carbon, and the entirety of the simulation comprises only 3 seconds in real time.

You can see a better quality video and a decent article related to it here.

ASC / Alliances Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes

Update: It has recently come to my attention that the illustrious Zosia was part of the team responsible for stealing the very video shown above and posting it on YouTube. From the comments,

he got this video from ME, and i stole it from rocky, who stole it from don lamb...please, i'd like some credit for the multiple levels of stealing i'm responsible for.

Credit awarded.

With all that larceny experience, it's no wonder she's so good at stealing from my blog.

Mercury: Not Actually Made of Mercury

Except in the sense that people call dirt "Earth" sometimes. I suppose if you were on Venus you would call the soil "Venus." Anyway, this is all just an excuse for me to show some gratuitous Mercury shots. The MESSENGER Mission just got to Mercury and photographed it's barren, hostile, sunburnt surface in great detail. This is the first mission to the (now) littlist planet since the Mariner 10 mission in the seventies. I spent a lot of time pouring over glossy picture books about the planets when I was younger and I think I got the impression that Mercury was yellowish, even though I knew that it wasn't. Futurama got that idea too. And, amazingly, the NASA art staff got it too!

So for Mercury-huggers this mission is a bonanza. Surface composition, magnetic field, the core (which is liquid now apparently), and these "dazzling" photos, which are probably just doctored pictures of the moon.

The photo below was taken near the closest approach and shows a section of Mercury 500km across where smallest craters are only 1km or so. Seriously though, this is just the moon.

[Official Messenger Site, Photo 1, Photo 2, and the Planetary Society has an excellent article]

In Which I Brag About a Christmas Present

It may be 3 weeks after x-mas, but bragging about astronomically-themed gifts is still in season. There is nothing quite like a 150-year-old engraving to help you enjoy antiquated notions of clusters, nebulae, and comets. Thanks girlfriend!

Update: I forgot the best panel. Here it is, I think it speaks for itself.

APOY 2007

And for your astronomically-themed seasonal viewing enjoyment, more pictures of things in space!

Bad Astronomy puts up their "runner up" of the best astro pictures of 2007, and it still beats the hell out of APOD's APOY. Changing the last initial of your name still won't make you cool, APOD. Of course, they just did that to make it stand for "year," but I still consider it suspect. For instance, they pick one shot which is just the International Space Station orbiting the Earth. Well, I for one, would prefer that NASA spend more of its budget on research grants, rather than on pointless manned missions that do nothing to increase our understanding of the universe, but hey, that's just me. Seeing something like that just reminds me of how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has shifted its focus away from real science. Oh yeah, APOD is hosted on a NASA URL. How convenient. (Even during holiday season, no mercy for APOD!) And how they managed to ignore the Carina Nebula altogether astonishes me. Morons.

On the other hand, BA is dead on. They've got Cassini's Saturn pic, the shot of Earth that I believe ought to replace the worn out 'Blue Marble.' And I absolutely love this photo on BA's list, its flickr page gives the background:

I came upon this juxtaposition one early evening in early May, 2007. The crane was stationed on East 32nd St. in Manhattan. I took this shot looking east from 2nd Ave. This is not a Photoshop trick folks -- just a lucky shot.

Well, it was a lucky shot, of course -- but it also took some positioning and some daring on my part to stand in the middle of 2nd Ave. as cars barreled down on me. To get this shot I had to stand exactly at the right spot (and I do mean spot), steady my nerves (and hands) and take the shot before the cars could reached me. Those rush-hour NYC drivers DID NOT seem to be willing to slow down for me.

It's amazing how quickly the moon moves across the sky. Normally this is mostly imperceptible... until you try to align it with something (such as the crane) only to realize 20 seconds later, when you are ready to take your shot, that it has already moved. I took about 8 shots and had to reposition myself 3 times.

As of 5/30/07 the crane was still there. The moon, however, has since moved.

Peace on Mars

It is probably too late for anyone to take advantage of this, but for anyone with belated card obligations, it might be worth it to check out Hubble's gallery of holiday cards formatted to be printed out for free, featuring astronomical images. Thanks government! Finally, something I can use...

Link - HubbleSite Holiday Cards

Roundup

• Bad Astronomy cooked up a wicked awesome top ten list of astro pictures from 2007. The image above is supercluster CL0024+1652, superimposed with the distribution of dark matter inferred through gravitational lensing.
  
• An Austrailan ad company stole physicist Scott Aaronson's writing about quantum mechanics to make a conversation between models in their Ricoh commercial seem more realistic (of course!). When Australians plagiarize me, I think 'large cash settlement.' Dr. Aaronson thinks 'medium cash settlement donated to an Australia science education group.' Evidently, suing people in other countries is time-consuming. He is "gratified that this sordid southern-hemisphere tale of sex, plagiarism, quantum mechanics, and printers could be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, without the need for a courtroom battle, and that schoolkids in Torres Strait Island might even learn some physics as a result." So Australia steals our intellectual property and is rewarded with several thousand dollars? Lame. Better education is only going make the next generation of Australians better at ripping us off.
• Al Gore won some kind of prize recently. His acceptance speech is online here. Somehow, despite not being a cosmologist, he managed to invoke Frost's "Fire and Ice." I don't know how to deal with hearing that poem in a non cosmological situation, but considering that Earth has ice ages too, I guess it works.
  
  You know those stories based around alternate historical timelines? Like where the South wins the Civil War or the Nazis develop the atom bomb? Seeing Gore do non-presidential stuff always gives me the feeling I'm living in the "bad" timeline.