Blogs / Bad Astronomy

According to Career Cast, astronomers are 20th on a list of best jobs to have!

I was rather surprised to see the income listed as over $100,000. But then, long-tenured professors may skew that upward. My own life may drag that number down a bit. It might even make it imaginary.

Still, the list is obviously flawed, since biologists rate #4. But then, I guess a soft science job would be above a hard science job; otherwise we’d have a Kelvin-Holmholtz instability as soon as the list was disturbed.

Oh, sorry: for you scientists who study squishy things, here’s what that means.

OK, just to make sure since there are so many humor-impaired people out there: that was a joke! I’m kidding. I love biologists; without them I’d have nothing to make fun of at all without it being mean.

Tip o’ the tentacle to Frank Branda.

This is cool news: on page 15 of Sunday’s Book World insert, the Washington Post gave my book a really good review! It’s online, too. You have to register at the site, but it’s free.

Here’s an excerpt:

Plait, a popular astronomer and blogger, describes each doomsday scenario with glee — for instance, how humanity could be roasted by the sun in its red-giant phase, crushed into spaghetti by the gravitational force of a black hole or blasted to smithereens by an incoming asteroid. Yet for all that, his book is strangely comforting. The sun will begin dying about 1.1 billion years from now, but it won’t explode (it isn’t big enough), nor will most stars in our neighborhood. If aliens were going to come, we would probably have seen them already. The eventual death of the universe is so many years away that it’s nearly inconceivable.

That was one of my big points: this stuff is fun to think about, but in reality the odds of anything actually happening to wipe out the Earth are really low.

Plait rolls through these explanations in the same easy way that makes his “Bad Astronomy” blog for Discover magazine so popular. Occasionally the more inquisitive reader might be disappointed by the superficial nature of some of the physics explanations… Nevertheless, the decision to avoid scary equations does render this work comprehensible and engaging for the neophyte.

… which was part of the point. I want this book to have a wide appeal, so calculus might be out! I actually considered an appendix with some math in it, but decided it wasn’t necessary for a book like this, and in fact most of the calculations I needed were already done in papers too complex to explain, or from things that are easy to find online.

Anyway, I’m pleased with the review. Almost all the reviews or notes I’m getting back are favorable, in fact, which makes me glad; I would expect some hate mail, but I literally have had none. And I’m still waiting to hear from Two Large Print Venues who were planning on doing a review of the book as well. I’d cross my fingers, but duh.

I have to wonder, sometimes, what’s running through some people’s heads.

For example, you see a picture, a famous picture, or at least one that thousands of people have seen. You see something in it no one else has noticed. It’s incredibly obvious, and in fact revolutionary. Incredibly, you realize that you’re seeing not just one amazing thing in this picture, but dozens! It’ll change mankind as we know it! You tell people, but no one believes you, no matter what you do, and no matter how obvious the picture is.

At what point do you think, hey, I wonder if just maybe I’m the one who’s wrong?

If you’re Andrew D. Basiago, the answer is "never".

Mr. Basiago is the founder and president of the Mars Anomaly Research Society, where he digs through pictures of Mars and looks for anything he doesn’t understand, which he then claims is evidence of life on the Red Planet. He evidently has met with some resistance to his claims, because he was forced to send out a press release, which Yahoo! dutifully published. In it, he’s trying to convince the National Geographic Society to publish his nonsense. Reading it is funny, if a little sad:

On December 7th, Basiago made his discovery. “I was astonished by what I found,” he said. “There, on the Red Planet, were beings in blue bodysuits and the abstract artwork of a Martian civilization. I was looking at the first evidence of life beyond Earth!”

In his letter to the National Geographic Society, the lawyer writes that careful evaluation of PIA10214 reveals “a cosmic treasure trove of pictographic evidence of life on Mars, including humanoid beings, animal species, carved statues, and built structures.”

Blue bodysuits. Right. Here’s the picture in question:

Click it to embiggen, or check out the original which has lots more detail. Do you see any Martians? Animals? Humans? Anything at all but rocks, more rocks, and yet even more rocks?

Well, there is evidence of life in that image. You can see parts of the rover in it. But I don’t think that’s what Mr. Basiago is talking about.

What I’m talking about is that this is just more pareidolia, of course, except in this case it’s mixed with a person utterly convinced that what he’s seeing is real. In general, this kind of stuff is harmless (except perhaps to the deluded individual) unless it gets publicity, or someone like Hoagland uses it to throw a monkey in the wrench at NASA, slowing real science down.

But remember the Bigfoot on Mars? Or the Martian log? This kind of stuff is beloved by the media, who don’t understand that they are in fact supporting such garbage, and wind up wasting the time of real scientists trying to do real work.

Isn’t it cool enough that we’ve had rovers traversing across the face of another planet, and they’ve been doing it for five frakking years?

For some people, I guess not. Too bad. They’re missing the actual cool stuff.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to BABloggee STUARTATK.

Astronomers using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have just released an extraordinarily cool animation. Composed of images taken between 2000 and 2007, it shows the supernova remnant Cas A literally expanding as you watch it!

See the little white dot in the center? That used to be a star, a big one. About 330 years ago^*, that star blew up in a titanic supernova explosion. Several octillion tons of material screamed outward from the star at a good fraction of the speed of light, leaving behind an ultradense neutron star, the remains of the star’s core. So, that dot in the center? It’s an object a dozen kilometers across that has about the same mass as our entire Sun. It has a density of about 100 million tons per cubic centimeter. That’s roughly the mass of every single car in the United States, crushed into a cube the size of, oh, say, a mini marshmallow.

Yeah.

The outer layers of the explodey star are what you’re seeing here in this animation. Rushing outward at thousands of kilometers per second, they are heated by the explosion itself, by the decay of radioactive materials forged in the blast, and by magnetic processes when the spinning neutron star interacts with the gas. All of these together heat the gas to millions of degrees, and it glows in X-rays. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory can see these high-energy photons, and so astronomers use it to observe Cas A (so called because it is in the constellation of Cassiopaeia, and is also a radio source, which were traditionally named after letters in the alphabet).

In fact, Chandra observes this supernova remnant quite often, so the astronomers took the images made over the past 8 years and created this animation. It shows the expansion of the debris as the gas moves outward from the point in space where the original explosion happened. It’s like watching a nuclear blast in super duper slomo.

Still images showing the expansion. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/D.Patnaude et al.

But don’t be fooled by the apparent peacefulness and calm you see here. Supernovae explosions are among the most violent events in the Universe. If one were to happen within 20 light years of the Earth, it could cause a mass extinction through the destruction of our ozone layer. Happily, no star capable of blowing up is that close. Cas A is about 10,000 light years away, so we’re in no danger from it either.

The flip side of that is that the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, and even the gold in our jewelry is created in supernovae blasts. The incredible heat and pressure of the explosion forces the gas to undergo nuclear fusion, alchemically creating the heavy elements life is based on. A supernova could wipe out life on a nearby planet, but we literally owe our existence to such supernovae. I could go into some kind of "Lion King" Circle of Life speech, but I think you get my point.

An interesting tidbit: it’s been thought for years that high-energy particles that slam into our atmosphere all the time, called cosmic rays, were accelerated to their high speeds in supernovae remnants like Cas A. Interestingly, this animation indicates the gas is expanding more slowly than it should given how much energy is released in the explosion, which in turn means that lost energy is going somewhere. Astronomers think it’s going into the production of those cosmic rays, which eat up about 35% of the explosion energy.

Animations like this are more than just cool to look at (though they are very cool to look at). They can reveal a huge amount of information about the explosions as well. One of my favorite things about astronomy — and I have a lot of favorite things — is that we can create gorgeous images and movies, and they are a wonder to see… but they also teach us stuff. And not only that, the stuff we learn is fundamental to our very existence: information on how we got to be here, how the elements in our bodies were made, and even how the Universe itself changes over time.

How amazing is that?

Well, it’s that time of year again: the weblog awards have been announced, and the science category has this very blog listed. The usual suspects are there, including Pharyngula, as well as Neurologica, run by my pal Steve Novella from Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe.

I couldn’t help but notice that Climate Audit and Watt’s Up With That are there as well, just like last year. And those of you with long memories will remember much of the ugliness that happened last year, a situation I am loathe to repeat. Also, the sentiments I expounded upon in that linked post are still true today; these awards are not set up in a way that necessarily rewards truly good blogs. Instead, the sites that garner votes are the ones with the loudest voice, the biggest audience, or that generate the most controversy.

Two years ago it was fun to have the mock battle with PZ, an affair we still chuckle over when we get together. But last year… yeah. It wasn’t fun at all. So that’s why I will mention the awards here now, and that’s it. Vote if you’d like, vote for whom you’d like, vote against whom you’d like — you can vote once per day. And check out the other blogs, too; there are quite a few worth reading.

And my thanks to Miss Cellania. She knows why. I’ll note that she’s up for Best Large Blog. Hint hint.

And how the Law category doesn’t include Bob Loblaw’s Law Blog I’ll never know.

If you live in Toronto, you may notice something the next time you take the bus: someone’s trying to teach you astronomy.

That someone is Ray Jayawardhana, who has coordinated a public outreach campaign called Cool Cosmos to get the public interested in astronomy. Along with the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics he has created a series of five posters that will go on buses, subways, and streetcars. They’re cute, simple, and feature a basic but cool fact. I like this one best:

It says, "Having a long day? It will only get longer. Tides caused by the Moon are slowing down the Earth’s spin, making each day a tiny bit longer than the one before."

How cool is that? The others are good too. This is a very clever campaign, and I think at the very least it’ll get people thinking about nifty ideas about the Universe. This is being done as a way to celebrate IYA 2009, too, and it’s an excellent endeavor.

My one complaint: they should’ve talked to the folks at Spitzer first about the name. D’oh!

I’ve been getting email and tweets about the American Astronomical Society meeting going on right now in Long Beach California, so I thought I’d make a coupla quick comments:

1) I am not there. Long story, but it just didn’t work out this year. I love going to the meetings — and I’ll be honest here — because it’s my annual chance to get together with a lot of friends, both new and old. I can’t believe I’ll miss the clubbing night this year… but anyway, I’m not there, and I’m doing any writing about it from home. I’ll preface each post title with "AAS #XX" to let you know it’s from the meeting.

2) You can participate vicariously in the press conferences by going to the Astronomy Cast live stream. Whenever there is a press conference (three times a day, usually) or some other live event, you can watch it there. They have a live chat room on that page as well, so you can actually participate!

That’s it. I’ll post what I can about the meeting, as well as the usual nonsense. But expect to hear a lot of astronomy news this week! And remember, those yellow Digg buttons at the tops of my posts work pretty well.