2015年4月30日 星期四
Across the Sun
Ellen Ochoa's Warp Drive Gizmo
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NASA Chief Statement on House Budget Bill
As I wrote this morning, Republicans on the House Committee for Science, Space, and Technology passed a nakedly partisan budget authorization bill for NASA that drastically and brutally slashes hundreds of millions of dollars from NASA's Earth Science Division, which studies how climate change is affecting our planet.
Charles Bolden, NASA administrator, issued a statement that is brief, to the point, and clearly states his feelings.
The NASA authorization bill making its way through the House of Representatives guts our Earth science program and threatens to set back generations worth of progress in better understanding our changing climate, and our ability to prepare for and respond to earthquakes, droughts, and storm events.
NASA leads the world in the exploration of and study of planets, and none is more important than the one on which we live.
In addition, the bill underfunds the critical space technologies that the nation will need to lead in space, including on our journey to Mars.
If I were him, I would've laced that with some colorful metaphors, too.
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NASA Administrator Statement on House Authorization Bill
April 30, 2015
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NASA Invests in Hundreds of U.S. Small Businesses to Enable Future Missions
April 30, 2015
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NASA Completes MESSENGER Mission with Expected Impact on Mercury's Surface
April 30, 2015
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SpaceX Targets May 6 for Pad Abort Test of New Crew Spacecraft
April 30, 2015
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Overview of MESSENGER Spacecraft's Impact Region on Mercury
NASA Authorization Act Markup
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The Planetary Society is Both For and Against Earth and Climate Science
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Farewell, Good MESSENGER
Today, sometime around 19:30 UTC (3:30 p.m. Eastern US Time), the MESSENGER spacecraft will slam into the planet Mercury at nearly kilometers per second.
That will bring to an end an astonishingly successful mission, one that was ridiculously difficult to pull off.
Getting a probe to Mercury is hard. Mercury orbits the Sun far faster than Earth does, but, ironically, dropping the probe straight down from Earth would accelerate it too much to achieve orbit. On its way to the inner solar system, MESSENGER had to pass by Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury three times to match velocities.
And now, after six and a half years on route, and four years circling the planet (totaling more than 4000 complete orbits), MESSENGER is out of fuel. The gravity of the Sun distorts its orbit, and over time it would crash one way or the other. Scientists and engineers squeezed every last drop of science they could out of the probe, but the time has come. Today it becomes a part of the planet is studied for so long.
And what a mission it had! The MErcury Surface, Space Environment, GEochemistry, and Ranging spacecraft achieved so much in its short time around the rocky world. It made the first global map of Mercury, found ice in the poles, sampled its exosphere, discovered why the planet is so dark (it’s painted black by passing comets), found volcanic deposits, and mapped the minerals on the surface.
You can read more in the Related Posts section below, and see what the Principal Investigator thought were its10 greatest highlights. The University of Michigan engineering department put up a nice little list of facts about it, too.
NASA released a fitting tribute video to the mission. Watch:
It should be noted that the European Space Agency is preparing their own Mercury mission, due to launch in early 2017. But MESSENGER was special; it was the first Mercury orbiter.
There have been so many nights I’ve gone out after sunset and spotted Mercury in the west, hanging over the horizon in the twilight glow. It’s not always easy to see, and there’s some satisfaction in spotting it before the sky is dark.
Right now, Mercury is climbing in the sky again after sunset, and tonight will be very close to the Pleiades, low to the west. Look for it with binoculars, but have a care, it’s low. By the time the sky is dark it’ll be gone.
But if you do catch Mercury, a faint spark in the gloam, take a moment and tip your hat to MESSENGER, a human sentinel that watched over the tiny, broiling, spectacular, and now less-unknown world.
Related Posts
Watermelon Planet
Mercury: How Much More Black Could It Be?
Crash Course Astronomy: Mercury
Ice to See You
MESSENGER’s Family Portrait
Spiders on Mercury
Mercury Hides a Monster Impact
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First Developmental Flight of New Shepard
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ISS Daily Summary Report – 04/29/15
April 30, 2015 at 01:03AM
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House GOP Wants to Eviscerate NASA Earth Sciences in New Budget
There’s no other way to put this, so I’ll be succinct: A passel of anti-science global warming denying GOP Representatives have put together a funding authorization bill for NASA which at best cuts over $300 million from the agency’s current Earth Science budget.
At worst? Over $500 million.
The actual amount of the cut depends on whether some caps enacted in 2011 are removed or not. If they are, then Earth Sciences gets $1.45 billion. If not, it gets $1.2 billion. The current FY 2015 budget is $1.773 billion.
Compare that to the White House request for FY ’16 of $1.947 billion for Earth Sciences. The bill will marked up (amended and rewritten) by the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee today.
This, for the space agency which has a critical role in understanding climate change and its effects on our planet.
I'll note that I have many more issues with this bill, including the inevitable funding of SLS and Orion, and some things I like, such as planetary exploration being well-funded... though that appears to be getting the money Earth Sciences is losing. You can read more about that at the Planetary Society.
But the evisceration of Earth Sciences means this bill is seriously, critically flawed. I have written about this again and again: Republicans in the House and Senate don’t want NASA studying Earth, because they think (or say) that global warming isn’t real, or isn’t a problem, or whatever talking point they’ve been told to use this week. What they say in statements is that NASA should be looking outwards, and other agencies should be studying Earth.
Sounds good, right? But then they pledge to cut that ability from other agencies, too (that particular bill passed, by the way). Pretty transparent.
If you think I’m mad, I am. And so are others; Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Maryland) has pledged to fight the bill, and I hope others Congresspeople in the House do as well. Cutting NASA Earth Sciences funding is, frankly, disgusting. Much like throwing snowballs in Congress.
So yeah, damn right I’m mad. When you vote for people who publicly and loudly spout nonsense about science, and go against the overwhelming 97% consensus among climate scientists, what do you expect?
We sowed this Congress, and this is what we reap. Potentially huge cuts to critical science, care of the GOP. Remember that in November 2016.
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2015年4月29日 星期三
New Horizons sees surface features on Pluto, begins raw image release
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NASA Awards Research Grants for Minority Serving Institutions
April 29, 2015
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New Horizons Sees Features on Pluto!
At a press conference on Wednesday astronomers working on the New Horizons space probe revealed new images that show surface features on Pluto for the first time!
The probe was just over 100 million kilometers from Pluto when the images were taken on April 12–18 (the Earth is 150 million km from the Sun, for comparison). Hubble images taken over the years have shown the diminutive world has darker and lighter patches on its surface, and these images match that.
In fact, these images are now at higher resolution than Hubble can produce! And they'll be getting better every day ...
Pluto looks lumpy in the animation, but that’s certainly an illusion; darker spots near the edge make it look like Pluto has chunks taken out of it. It’s expected that Pluto will be quite round; its gravity should compress it enough for it to be mostly spherical. I wonder if it’ll be oblate (slightly flattened) due to tides from its moon Charon. We’ll know pretty soon.
Charon can be seen in the animation as well, orbiting Pluto once every six days or so. Actually, it’s about ¼ the diameter of Pluto, and massive enough that it pulls on its parent pretty hard, hard enough that it’s more correct to say they both orbit their common barycenter, their center of mass.
I’ll note these images have been deconvolved; that means they’ve been sharpened using techniques that help bring them into better focus. The raw images look like blurs, but by combining them and using these techniques, the surface features can be detected.
The rotation axis of Pluto is labeled in the animation. Pluto’s spin is tilted compared with its orbit, so the probe is coming into the system nearly “face-on”. Interestingly, as NH Principal Investigator Alan Stern points out, there’s a bright spot on Pluto at the lower right, right at the pole. Is that some sort of ice cap? Maybe. It’s too soon to tell, but in a few months we’ll know better once New Horizons can see features better, and analyze their composition.
Pluto is tiny, just 2,370 km across—our own Moon is far larger (3,470 km). That’s why it still appears so small to New Horizons. The probe is closing in on Pluto rapidly, though, moving at about 14 km/sec. Right now, New Horizons is about 90 million kilometers from Pluto, and 4.7 billion km from Earth. It takes the radio signals from the probe nearly 4.5 hours to get here!
Closest approach occurs at noon UTC on July 14. Even in early June Pluto will only be a little over 10 pixels across, and 100 pixels four days before the encounter. Things will happen rapidly starting then. Pluto flies through the system in only a few hours, and it’ll take months to send all the data back to Earth. Bandwidth is limited when you’re that far from home.
I'll note that the raw images off the probe are being posted online, too. I suggest checking in on them every day or two, and watch them get better and better as time goes on, and New Horizons approaches Pluto.
I’m very excited about this mission. If they’re getting detail like this now, imagine what we’ll see in July!
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NASA’s New Horizons Detects Surface Features, Possible Polar Cap on Pluto
April 29, 2015
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ISS-bound Cargo Spacecraft Doomed to Atmospheric Reentry
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NASA's NuSTAR Captures Possible 'Screams' from Zombie Stars
April 29, 2015
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More than 1000 Rosetta NavCam images released!
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Good Planetary Support in A Flawed NASA Bill
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April 29, 1990, Shuttle Discovery Lands Following Hubble Deployment Mission
ISS Daily Summary Report – 04/28/15
April 29, 2015 at 01:15AM
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A Million H-Bombs Per Second Heat the Sun's Corona
The Sun’s atmosphere—its corona—is far, far hotter than its surface, and this has been a long-standing mystery, baffling astronomers for decades.
This week, astronomers announced they have found the smoking gun. Almost literally.
Here’s the scoop. The Sun is a huge ball of plasma*, gas so hot that electrons are ripped from their parent atoms. It doesn’t really have a surface, instead just sort of fading away with height.
The layer we see is called the photosphere (“sphere of light”), because that’s where the material in the Sun gets thin enough that light can easily fly out. Above this layer is the corona, what you can think of as the Sun’s atmosphere: extremely thin gas.
The thing is, while the photosphere is hot, roughly 5500° C, the corona is freaking hot, two million degrees on average. That’s weird. Inside the Sun, the temperature drops as you move out from the center, but that trend reverses, viciously, at the corona.
Why is the corona so hot?
Astronomers have tried to explain this for years, coming up with lots of mechanisms. But they’re hard to prove or disprove. Observing the corona is difficult; the plasma there is incredibly thin and faint. It’s also so hot it glows at wavelengths of light that don’t penetrate our atmosphere like far ultraviolet and X-rays, so we need space-based observatories to study it (usually; hang on for the important exception).
Also, the scale is a tad mind crushing. The Sun is over 10 times wider than Earth, 1.4 million km across, and the corona even larger. There’s not much on the large scale that seems to show why the corona should be so hot.
But there are hints. The Sun has a complex magnetic field, caused by its internal motion, which can generate huge, towering loops above the photosphere. These store unbelievable amounts of energy and when they twist up and tangle, they can snap, releasing that energy as solar flares. These are storms of ridiculous power; a single flare can explode with as much power as 10 billion one megaton H-bombs.
These aren’t the source of coronal heating—flares don’t happen very often—but what if big ones are only (so to speak) the tip of the iceberg? What if there are little ones, lots of them, too small to see?
These nanoflares, as astronomers dubbed them, could pay the solar coronal heating bill, assuming there were enough of them. But they were maddeningly elusive. Astronomers looked, but never saw any.
…until now. Using a combination of different observatories, these nanoflares have finally been spotted. Using EUNIS (the Extreme Ultraviolet Normal Incidence Spectrograph), the nanoflares have revealed themselves. Here they are:
EUNIS breaks up light into its individual colors, allowing astronomers to determine the Sun’s plasma properties, most notably the plasma temperature. The image on the left (teal) shows a small region of the Sun at 10 million degrees Celsius. The middle (pink) is about 1 million degrees, and the right (yellow) a paltry 100,000°—which is still searingly hot, far hotter than the Sun’s surface.
The teal image shows the hottest part of the corona, and you can see those finger-like tendrils above center: Those are the nanoflares, or actually many of them, all overlapping. They still happen on a scale too small to see individually, but they’re collective nature has finally been seen.
Each nanoflare sounds small, but they’re still incredible: Each explodes with the energy of a 50 megaton nuclear weapon, equivalent to the most powerful device ever detonated on Earth (the Tsar Bomba; read about that if you want to lose sleep tonight), and there may be millions of those going off each and every second on the Sun’s surface.
That’s what heats the corona. Mind you, as powerful as they are they still are dwarfed by the Sun’s normal energy output, which is 100 billion megatons per second. But that heat doesn’t couple with the corona well, which is why the discovery of these nanoflares is so important. And interestingly, the nanoflares are hotter than the corona, too. The physics is complicated, but the astronomers involved in this discovery have models that can help understand this, where the heat transferred to the corona is quickly dissipated. These models, too, are new.
While this is a critical step in understanding the corona’s heat, there’s still a problem: What causes the nanoflares? The idea of smaller scale magnetic loop tangles snapping is a good one, but there are others that may contribute as well. For example, you might expect nanoflares only where magnetic loops are prevalent (where the Sun is active), but observations also show they occur where the Sun is quiet. Clearly, more observations are needed, and more theoretical work to explain them.
This new breakthrough was made using several different observatories, including SOHO and the orbiting NuSTAR X-ray observatory (usually used to look at distant black holes, but which is also sensitive enough to see small-scale eruptions on the Sun). Interestingly, EUNIS was launched on a sounding rocket, a suborbital flight (basically, up-and-down) that lasted only 15 minutes! It’s amazing to think that in that short a time, such a long-standing mystery was finally solved.
… and a new one started. The cause of the flares may take some time to untangle (haha! Get it?) but we have a solid start now. But of course, that’s part of what makes science so much fun. We solve a mystery, and get to enjoy the satisfaction… and then roll up our sleeves and get back to work.
* Some might say it’s a mass of incandescent gas.
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2015年4月28日 星期二
Hollow Promises From Stealthy Inept Space Advocacy Organizations
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So ... What Will Dava Newman Do at NASA?
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Looking Down On Jupiter's North Pole
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NASA to Hold Media Call on Latest Images of Pluto from New Horizons Spacecraft
April 28, 2015
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Worden Beams Up
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NASA Successfully Tests Shape-Changing Wing for Next Generation Aviation
April 28, 2015
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Russian Resupply Ship Spins Out Of Control after Reaching Orbit
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Russian Resupply Ship Experiencing Difficulties; International Space Station, Crew are Fine
April 28, 2015
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NASA Technology Day on Capitol Hill to Showcase Critical Journey to Mars Tech
April 28, 2015
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Breaking: Russian Resupply Mission to the Space Station in Trouble
Note: Information about all this is still coming in, so regard anything here as tentative. I’ll add updates to the bottom of this article as I get more reliable news
Last night, at 07:09 UTC (03:09 Eastern U.S. time), a Soyuz 2-1a rocket lifted off from Kazakhstan, carrying an uncrewed Progress capsule loaded with roughly 3 tons of food and supplies for the astronauts on the International Space Station.
After separation from the third stage, however, ground controllers got data showing the telemetry was sporadic and that only two of the five communication antennas had deployed. Not long after that it became clear the capsule was spinning rapidly, tumbling once every three seconds.
The original plan was to put Progress on a quick trajectory to meet ISS after just four orbits (about six hours). That was then delayed, setting up a Thursday rendezvous. With the spacecraft tumbling, this has now been delayed again, this time indefinitely until the problems are fixed.
And there may be a time crunch: Some reports indicate the Progress is in a bad orbit. Instead of a slightly elliptical orbit taking it from 190 to 240 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, the current orbit may be dropping it as low as 124 km, where air is substantially thicker. This puts drag on the vehicle, dropping it lower, where air is thicker, dragging it more … if the capsule is indeed on an orbit with this low a perigee (closest approach to Earth), it may only have a few days before this decay causes it to burn up in the atmosphere.
Again, note that the Progress capsule is uncrewed, so no lives are in immediate danger. The astronauts on ISS have supplies for several months (SpaceX sent up a Dragon capsule with supplies just two weeks ago) and more resupply missions are scheduled (SpaceX has one planned for June 19 and another Progress launch is set for Aug. 6).
This problem comes on only the second flight of the new Soyuz 2-1a, an upgraded version of the standard workhorse Soyuz rocket (the first was in February). It’s too early at the present time to know what went wrong with the flight.
For more information, I suggest keeping an eye on Sen.com, NASA’s space station blog, and the Twitter streams of the ISS and my friend and space expert Jonathan McDowell.
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Astronaut Scott Kelly Speaks at Shuttle Enterprise Dedication Ceremony
Russian Progress 59 Experiences Problem
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ISS Daily Summary Report – 04/27/15
April 28, 2015 at 12:53AM
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Making Sense of Nonsense: a MOOC about Climate Change Denial
The Earth is warming up. The climate is changing. Human activity is responsible.
97% of actual climatologists agree on this.
But the media still give “equal time” to climate change deniers, who flood the public with misinformation. Just this week, the icky Heartland Institute* hosted a “press conference” in advance of the Pope’s expected encyclical about global warming (for the record: I support the Pope), Rep. Lamar Smith (Chair of the House Science Committee!) wrote an embarrassingly misleading OpEd in the Wall Street Journal downplaying climate change, and a Pulitzer-winning newspaper printed an OpEd so full of errors it’s hard to know if the authors were being breathtakingly dishonest or merely grossly incompetent.
What can we do?
A dozen scientists and science communicators think they have an answer: Inoculate the public. The metaphor is apt: The idea is to take the misinformation used by deniers and use it to teach the actual science of climate change, making it work for them… much like the way a vaccination inoculates against diseases by using a weakened form of the disease itself.
To do this, they have created a Massive Open Online Course (or MOOC) through the University of Queensland (Australia), called Making Sense of Climate Science Denial.
I love this idea. First, anyone can enroll. Second, it’s free. Yes, FREE. Third, because it’s online you can take the course at your own pace, watching the pre-recorded videos on your own schedule. The video lectures include interviews with people on the cutting edge of climate change research and public policy, including Michael Mann, Katherine Hayhoe, and Naomi Oreskes. They’ll arm you with the tools needed to understand climate change denial by going over the science and psychology of denial, and the facts you’ll need to understand (and argue for!) the reality of our warming planet.
And, of course, I love this idea because an educated public ensures a strong democracy.
The course is coordinated by John Cook, one of the brains behind the wonderful Skeptical Science website. He’s put together a short video explaining this:
And yes, I did enroll in the course! It starts today, April 28, 2015, so sign up and learn how to face reality. Hopefully, we can turn the politics of this around, and start taking action on a threat that faces us all.
* Yes, the same “think tank” that put up billboards comparing climate scientists to mass murderers, because that’s a great PR move if you want to make yourself look really, really slimy.
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2015年4月27日 星期一
Space Station over Lunar Terminator
Statements on Senate Confirmation of Dava Newman as NASA Deputy Administrator
April 27, 2015
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NASA Brings in Small Business for Further Development of Hypervelocity Vehicles
April 27, 2015
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NASA Awards Grants for Research, Technology Development
April 27, 2015
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Bill Nye’s Earth Day Visit with the President of the United States
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SpaceX Launch Today, Second in Less Than Two Weeks
SpaceX is scheduled to launch a Falcon 9 rocket into orbit today, carrying a Turkmenistan communications satellite. The 90-minute launch window opens at 22:14 UTC Monday night (6:14 p.m. Eastern time).
You can watch the launch live on the SpaceX LiveStream channel, NASA TV, and NASA’s Ustream channel. I will live tweet it, too.
Before you ask, there will not be an attempted landing of the first stage booster for this launch. The satellite being launched is going into a geostationary orbit, 40,000 kilometers up, and a lot of fuel is needed to get it there. There won’t be enough left to slow the first stage and land it, so it’ll drop into the Atlantic.
I think the most remarkable thing about this launch is that (if it goes off on time) the most recent Falcon 9 launch was only 13 days previous (on Tuesday, April 14). That’s an incredibly fast turnaround time for a company, and a day faster than its previous record of 14 days set last year.
For more info, I recommend this amazingly detailed America Space article. It answered many of the things I was wondering about for this launch. SpaceX also has a PDF press kit with highlights as well.
If the launch is scrubbed (weather may play a factor today) then it is scheduled for the next attempt Tuesday also at 22:14 UTC.
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NASA, Boeing ecoDemonstrator Jet Comes to Shreveport for Anti-Bug Research
April 27, 2015
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Showdown Over NASA Earth Science Budget Looms
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Unmasking the Secrets of Mercury
Bad Astronomy Video: The Bizarre Eructation of V838 Monocerotis
Something like 20,000 light years from Earth lies a bizarre object.
Dubbed V838 Monocerotis — the 838th variable star found in the constellation Monoceros, the unicorn — it’s a luminous red star, well over 20,000 times brighter than the Sun.
That’s not so unusual; lots of stars are far more luminous and redder than the Sun. It’s also centered in a cloud of material, which, again, isn’t all that odd. Lots of stars have material around them, wither left over from their formation, or expelled as they die.
What makes this star so weird is its recent activity. In 2002 it underwent an epic eruption, brightening to a million times the luminosity of the Sun. Astronomers thought it might be a nova, an outburst caused when a tiny white dwarf accumulates matter on its surface, which explodes quite literally like a thermonuclear bomb.
When this happened, in 2002, Hubble was quickly called to service, pointing at the object. What it found was not a nova, but one of the oddest stars in the galaxy. Watch:
There are lots of things that could have happened to cause this event. Red supergiants are known to undergo periodic paroxysms, for example, but such things are generally not this powerful. Plus, whatever caused it must be something rare, or else we’d see more examples of it. That’s why I lean toward the stars merging idea discussed video. It’s rare, but not impossible, and does explain what we’re seeing.
And to reiterate something I said in the video: What we’re seeing here is what’s called a light echo. The dust cloud around the star is old, probably thousands of years old. When the star suddenly brightened, it sent out a flash of light that moved outward, illuminating the pre-existing cloud from the inside out.
In the video it looks like the cloud itself is expanding (you can see motion of individual structures), but that's an illusion. Over just a few years the structure wouldn’t be seen to expand at all; we’re just seeing different structures (or different parts of the same structure, like filaments or compressed regions) as the flash of light moved through the nebula*.
It's pretty odd, but adds to the overall awesomeness of it. And it’s a good reminder, in this 25th anniversary week of the Hubble Space Telescope, that the Universe is vast and strange and beautiful, and best of all, surprising.
We could have 25 Hubbles up there for 25 times 25 years, and still only have scratched the surface of what’s out there to see.
* As opposed to objects like novae and supernovae which have been seen to physically expand over time.
Watch more of Slate’s Bad Astronomy videos with Phil Plait.
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2015年4月26日 星期日
Planetary Nebula Mz3: The Ant Nebula
Rising Rainbow
Aysun Ülger is, like me, someone who loves atmospheric optical phenomena. Halos, glories, aurorae, iridescent clouds … so much so she created a Facebook page where she collects such photos. She just started it, but there are already a few lovely examples there.
And this includes, of course, rainbows. Since I just wrote about that very cool quadruple rainbow in New York, I thought I’d follow up with an example of a fun series of photos Ülger took herself in Izmir, Turkey: a rainbow rising as the Sun set!
Those were all taken on the same day, April 6, 2015, except for the bottom one, which she included in the series to show just how high a rainbow can get. In order (top to bottom), they were taken at 3:41, 3:50, 4:24, 4:50, 5:21, and 6:11 pm. The bottom one was taken at 5:58 pm on March 28. But due to a local time change, it corresponds to 6:58 on the later date.
As I’ve written about many times, rainbows appear in the sky opposite the Sun—to see one, you have to stand with the Sun behind you. That’s because the light from the Sun bends inside the raindrop and is reflected on the drop’s backside, back toward the Sun. But not exactly: The light leaves the drop at an angle of about 138°. Only drops 42° away from the point in the sky directly opposite the Sun send that light toward you (180°–138°).
Also, the colors that make up the Sun’s white light get bent by slightly different amounts, spreading them out across the bow.
Since the arc of the rainbow is centered on the point on the sky directly opposite the Sun, a low Sun means a high rainbow, and a high Sun means a low rainbow. As Ülger waited, the Sun set, so the rainbow got higher. You can even see a double rainbow (called the secondary) and Alexander’s dark band, the darker region between the two bows.
Too bad she couldn’t get a time lapse of this! But she did point me to this one, which shows the increasing (more vertical) angle of the base of a very bright rainbow as the Sun lowers.
We get extremely bright rainbows in Colorado in the spring and summer, once afternoon rain showers clear out. They tend not to last very long, but still, next time I see one I’ll have to try getting a time lapse of it. That’ll be a fun project.
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2015年4月25日 星期六
Cluster and Starforming Region Westerlund 2
Hubble's History and Incredible Achivements
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A Crash Course in Transgender Sensitivity
On Thursday, April 23, 2015, the 14th episode of Crash Course Astronomy went live. It’s about our sister planet Venus, and I spent quite a bit of time talking about just how infernally inhospitable it is.
Just as I have with every other episode, I had a lot of fun writing and recording it. A little background: Once we finish getting the footage of me talking, it’s edited and sent around to the team for comments. I then scour the ‘net looking for good images we can use, usually from NASA, ESA, and other public organizations (they have excellent high-resolution images which are free to use). Those images (and sometimes video) are placed in the rough cut, and then it goes off to Thought Café, who does our animations.
Eventually it goes live on YouTube, posted around 3:00 p.m. Mountain Time every Thursday. We promote it, and keep an eye on the YouTube comments for anything useful (did we make a factual error, is the audio good, and so on).
For the Venus episode on April 23 I was in Utah giving a talk at Clark Planetarium. When I got back that evening I checked to make sure the video was up, linked to it for a blog post first thing Friday morning, and then went to bed.
I was out of contact for much of Friday, traveling home. When I landed, though, there was a text from my editor that there was a problem.
If you’ve watched Crash Course Astronomy, you know I like to make jokes, and sometimes I’m the butt of them. The team goes along with it, and it’s usually great. This time, though, we made a mistake without even knowing it.
In one part of the episode, I’m talking about how Venus is really pretty when you look at it from Earth, but up close, it’s an awful place. As I spoke about Venus being pretty, we put up a cute animation of Botticelli’s famous “Birth of Venus”. But then, when I say Venus up close is awful (and say, "Yikes!"), we zoom in on the drawing and it turns out Venus has my face on it.
I thought this was pretty funny, a bit of humor poking fun at me. So we okayed it.
Well, it turns out that wasn’t so OK and funny with a lot of viewers. We got some comments that the joke was transphobic, making fun of transgender people.
That’s why my editor had texted me. I called her, and she told me what had happened. As soon as she told me, I had a forehead-slapping moment. Of course this could be seen as transphobic. In retrospect it was obvious. The good news is that the team felt the same way, and had already re-edited the video to remove that part, and had re-uploaded it before I had even called.
Let me be clear: I apologize for myself and on behalf of the team to anyone offended by the joke. None of us would knowingly make a joke at the expense of a group of people, especially one already marginalized and so often mocked in society. That wasn’t at all the intent, and it didn't occur to us it could be seen that way when we put it together. I hope you forgive us, and we’ll try to do better in the future.
Unfortunately, there’s more. In the comments to the (re-uploaded) video, some people are complaining that we are under the thumb of the PC crowd, and the phrase “social justice warrior” is used derisively. Let me address those commenters now:
You’re wrong. First, it’s not up to you to decide what offends or does not offend a group of people you are not a part of. You may feel that this was not an offensive joke, and you are welcome to that opinion; certainly the joke wasn’t intended that way.
But what you don’t get to decide is what offends others, especially in a group you’re not a part of. You may think that offense is undeserved, or that they are overreacting. You have the right to think that, but you cannot dictate it to those others.
Even if there was no harm meant in the joke, people may still take offense at it, and that’s their right. In this case, I can easily see where transgender folks would be put off by it, even angered.
And here’s the important bit: Apologizing and changing it does no harm, and in fact does some good; it helps a group of people see that we can be sensitive to their needs.
There are times when I think people are too sensitive, and times I think others aren’t sensitive enough. I tend to judge these on a case by case basis. But with a group that is historically marginalized and “othered”, well, a little (extra) empathy does a soul good.
And for the other bit, people derisively calling us “social justice warriors”? They may use it as a derogatory term, thinking of SJWs as shrill and overbearing, but to me it’s a term that refers to people willing to go to bat for others who don’t have as big a soapbox. I might prefer the term “ally”, but SJW fits fine, too. This world could use a lot more social justice. I’ll be happy to fight for it when I can.
So to them I say: “Thanks!”
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2015年4月24日 星期五
Blue Tears and the Milky Way
A few gems from the latest Cassini image data release
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New Horizons One Earth Message
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LightSail Readiness Tests Prepare Team for Mission Operations
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April 25, 1990, Deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope
ISS Daily Summary Report – 04/23/15
April 24, 2015 at 01:25AM
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Crash Course Astronomy: Venus
There but for the grace of physics goes us: Venus, second rock from the Sun, could be said to be Earth’s twin… but it’s the evil one.
Find out why on this week’s episode of Crash Course Astronomy!
I love the fact that you can learn all about Venus in this week’s episode, and then go outside after sunset and see it for yourself, shining brilliantly in the west. It’ll be close and bright for the next few months, actually, so you’ll have plenty of chances to see it. And in July it’ll start to show its crescent phase even in binoculars. That’s really something, and I hope y’all go out and take a look.
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2015年4月23日 星期四
Meteor in the Milky Way
Dava Newman Confirmation - Soon?
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Can nuclear waste help humanity reach for the stars?
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ISS Daily Summary Report – 04/22/15
April 23, 2015 at 01:00AM
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Stunning Imagery from Hubble
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Celestial Fireworks
NASA Unveils Celestial Fireworks as Official Image for Hubble 25th Anniversary
April 23, 2015
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Slamming the Door Shut: Vaccines and Autism
Let’s start this off by being very clear: Vaccines don’t cause autism.
They just don’t. Perhaps I should be scientific, careful, technical, and say that no connection between vaccines and autism has ever been found. That’s technically true, because, after all, there is some incredibly small chance that eventually perhaps some connection might possibly be found. But when study after study after study show no such connection whatsoever, at some point it’s probably OK to close the door on this.
Now it’s time to slam it shut. A new study, reported in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at a group of over 95,000 children and found no connection between the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine and incidence of autism.
Specifically, they looked at children who had older siblings, looking at the rate of diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder and vaccination. The study is pretty interesting, and I suggest you read it, but the results are pretty clear, as the researchers themselves write: “MMR vaccine receipt was not associated with an increased risk of ASD at any age.”
Emphasis mine, but c’mon. That’s emphatic.
Mind you, younger siblings who have an older sibling diagnosed with ASD are themselves at a higher risk for it (likely due to genetic factors). Despite this, the researchers conclude:
These findings indicate no harmful association between MMR vaccine receipt and ASD even among children already at higher risk for ASD.
In other words, the MMR vaccine is not associated with autism.
Mind you, the entire modern anti-vax movement is based on the idea that the MMR vaccine somehow causes autism; that was the conclusion drawn by Andrew Wakefield in a paper published in the British journal the Lancet… a paper that was retracted, that had several of Wakefield’s team members asking to have their names removed from it, that established a clear conflict of interest for Wakefield who stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars replacing an MMR vaccine with his own alternative, and which prompted the BMJ to call Wakefield’s methods “fraudulent”.
Yeah, that paper.
This new study is getting some press, which is nice, but I’m seeing here and there some folks hoping this will be the last nail in the anti-vax movement. It won’t be. That’s because the anti-vaxxers are not basing their decisions on science, they’re basing them on emotion. We’ve seen this over and again; as I pointed out before, this isn’t the first study showing no link between vaccines and autism.
People simply don’t make decisions based on facts. That’s not how we’re wired. Fear is an incredibly strong motivator, and many of the anti-vax groups use it to their advantage. Look at the truly atrocious Australian Vaccination Skeptic Network, who actually and truly compare vaccination to sexual assault (and seriously, survivors of such assaults may want to have a care clicking that link; the AVSN graphic is abhorrent and brutal).
And look no further than someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who believes that vaccines cause autism, and compared this to the Holocaust. Yes, the Holocaust. He backed off that analogy when called out on it, yet few seem to remember this isn’t the first time he’s made this despicable claim. I’ve written about Kennedy before, taking him to task on his unfounded claims, and wrote a follow-up after he doubled down on it.
So yeah. The folks who beat the drums about vaccines and autism will never stop. My hope is that they will eventually be marginalized, like Moon Hoax believers.
The good news is that action is being taken. California is looking at stricter rules for parents who want to opt out of vaccinating their children, for example, and in Australia, the religious exemption is being removed.
And of course the forces of good are still at work, promoting vaccination. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has put out a lovely campaign using art to show how important vaccines are. Called The Art of Saving a Life, it features works of film, literature, music, photography, and more.
As someone who loves classical music, especially Debussy, one video in particular struck me. Called Afternoon of a Faun, it’s a powerful piece about Tanaquil LeClercq, principal dancer at the New York City ballet. Before a European tour in 1956, she declined getting a polio vaccine. She contracted polio in Copenhagen, and became paralyzed. She never danced again. Chinese pianist Lang Lang performs the pas de deux from Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun, with images of LeClercq in the background.
I would like to personally thank Mr. and Mrs. Gates for supporting this project. It is extraordinarily difficult to discuss this topic with people who lean towards being against vaccinations, and it’s all too easy to reinforce their beliefs. I think that by continually putting forth a positive message, together with presenting the facts, we can get vaccination rates in this country up to where they need to be to protect us all.
As a father myself, and with an immunocompromised family member, I know how important this is. When you get vaccinated, the life you save may be your own, and it may also be someone you know and love. But it may very well be someone you don’t know, but who is loved by others.
To those of you who vaccinate: I thank you too.
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2015年4月22日 星期三
Colorful Star Clouds in Cygnus
Rep. Rogers Hates Everything Russian - Except Russian Rocket Engines
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