The Winter Solstice Conjunction of 2020

 

Tonight is the Great Conjunction with Jupiter and Saturn. It's visible just over the south-westsern horizon, and will be there for a little while longer if you want to catch it. This pic was taken by my friend Steven Glaspie. His phone camera is a bit better than mine :-)

 

 

 

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Some musing on the meaning for life

A thought:

Earth is the only world out of countless trillions spread across the universe that holds the perfect conditions for life, because the universe needed to be seen and recognized and appreciated.  The universe requires life to justify its existence and give it meaning.  Even if that life is constrained to one small speck of dust in the limitless cosmos.

Had there been no life whatsoever anywhere with consciousness and sentience to acknowledge and accept and observe the universe, would the universe exist at all?

Either the universe alone created life on Earth for its own sake, or something higher than the universe itself created life on Earth with conscious intent.  Which followed to its logical conclusion means that the universe as an entire reality is created with conscious intent.

Merely something that's been on my mind the past week or so...

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Got to see Neil deGrasse Tyson this afternoon at Elon

Dr. Tyson's badass jazz-hands

Astrophysicist, bestselling author, science education advocate, "some guy from a Fox show" (as we heard one passerby say while we waited in the standby line), advisor to multiple White Houses and general megaboffin Neil deGrasse Tyson came to my alma mater Elon University this afternoon to speak at the school's spring convocation.  This was a tough thing to get into.  Tickets sold out in less than 30 minutes when they went on sale a few weeks ago, with only a few allotted for the general public.  Not even being esteemed alumni as "Weird" Ed and myself are was any help.

But Ed was determined to see Tyson, and nothing was going to stop him.  He drove four hours to pick me up and then after some lunch on the way we got to Elon and became the third and fourth people in the standby line.  That was at half past noon.  Convocation was scheduled for 3:30.  Thirty minutes before it began they began handing out tickets for the standby people and we proceeded in to await the appearance of Dr. Tyson.

After the processional of the class of 2015 into the hall, Elon's chaplain delivered an opening prayer.  President Leo Lambert and a member of the science faculty extolled the virtues and accolades that Tyson has accumulated during his colorful career.  And then it was time for the man himself...

He spoke for at least an hour, in what he called a "stream of consciousness" speech as opposed to something really prepared.  He had multitudes of information and was nothing short of animated in presenting it.  Tyson totally took hold of the scene and captivated us with thought on objective and subjective realities, the guiding forces of exploration and scientific inquiry (I especially appreciated his remarks on the real reason why President Kennedy challenged the country to reach the Moon in less than a decade).  During his opening Tyson spoke of Aristotle and how experimentation had not been developed as a tool of investigation.  To demonstrate the point he took off his shoe and dropped it onto the stage: trust me, it was the coolest demonstration of the tenets of Newton's Principia that I've yet seen.

What I appreciated most of Tyson's lecture however had nothing really to do with science.  He made a point numerous times: that we can't be defined by the majority.  We certainly cannot be defined by political parties (which, he noted, are capricious in the extreme).  That was something which resounded especially strong with me.

I will be honest: I do not agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson on everything.  In my estimation, he is too focused on the objective means of understanding the universe around us, while showing considerable disregard and even some amount of disdain toward what he termed the "subjective": of which the spiritual is part.  Throughout my years I have come to understand... and Tyson would be the first to note that this is purely something that I cannot prove, as it lacks grounds for experimental proof... that science and faith are not counter to each other, but are instead two sides of the same coin.  Each is the pursuit of truth.  For the love of truth.  Truth for its own sake, without ourselves within its frame of reference.  More than we give them credit for, I do hold that those from the spheres of religion are, for the most part, seeking that truth... and not to draw from it any sense of power.

But I also came away from his lecture with a far deeper respect for Tyson's perspective as a scientist.  And during his lecture I came to understand something: that we may disagree on the methods, but our motives are the same.  Although, it must be said, he definitely has a classier presentation!

I enjoyed this.  I came away from this with a deeper appreciation of the human condition.  "Weird" Ed agreed.  And his four-hour drive wasn't for naught after all.  Mission accomplished!

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Newly-discovered planet has rings TWO HUNDRED TIMES BIGGER than those of Saturn

I won't apologize for the all-caps there.  I mean, we are talking about something of monstrous proportions here...

Four hundred-some light years away is the recently-discovered exoplanet J1407b.  Its parent star kept blinking in and out of view.  Astro-boffins went to work on the case, doing analysis of light patterns and spectroscopy and all kinds of stuff like that.

What they found is that J1407b, a young planet with about 40-50 Jupiter masses, boasts a massive, MASSIVE ring system.  One that is more than 200 times larger than the one Saturn has.

Here's what it might look like...

See that teeny dot?  That's meant to be J1407b.  Mind you, this is a planet already with 40 times more mass than Jupiter.  See those rings?  They're spread out over 120 million kilometers of diameter's worth of disk.

If J1407b was located where Saturn is in our solar system, not only would the ring system be very easily visible from the Earth, it would be significantly larger than the full Moon.

And yet, it's been calculated that this system of rings is made up of about the same amount of material as the Earth has.  Which is comparably small in the cosmic scheme of things.

Just when you think you can't imagine anything else, here is something confirming that, yes... there are things that we could not have imagined out there.

Mash here for more about J1407b, how it was discovered and all that jazz.

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When worlds collide? Comet C/2013 A1 may hit Mars next year

2013 is promising (or threatening, depending on the stock one puts in omens) to be an incredible year for comets in our sky.  Depending on where you live there are two and maybe even three of those cosmic iceballs that may give us quite a show.  In a few short weeks Comet PANSTARRS will become visible to the naked eye in the Northern Hemisphere: perhaps more brilliant than any in more than a decade.  Comet Lemmon, found late last year, could turn into a moderately bright beauty for our friends south of the Equator (and certain gases in its tail are giving it a green color).

The big, big show is still to come.  This fall brings Comet ISON... and it could be one massive honker of a spectacle, folks!  If you remember Comet Hyakutake in the spring of 1996 and how enormous it was (I'll never forget how it looked during spring break at Elon College), ISON could possibly eclipse that.

And now there is Comet C/2013 A1 waiting in the wings: a visitor from the far-flung reaches of the Solar System that might... emphasis on might... have repercussions for places close to home.  Namely, Mars.

Comet C/2013 A1 (credit: Carl Hergenrother)

C/2013 A1 was first spotted by Robert McNaught in Australia early last month and since then astronomers have been scrambling to figure out where it came from and where it's going (the comet, not Australia).  More observational data is needed to crunch the numbers but as things stand now, C/2013 A1 (can't we just call it "Comet McNaught" like we would have in the old days?) harbors a possibility of colliding with Mars on or around October 19th, 2014.

Hit here for more about C/2013 A1 at Discovery.com's article.

Ever see those photos of Shoemaker-Levy 9 when it smashed into Jupiter in 1994?  It wasn't one complete body: it was a big chain of teenier fragments of the parent comet after it was broken apart by Jupiter's gravity.  The smaller chunks flew into Jupiter like pearls loose from a necklace and you could see the impacts from Earth with even a medium-sized telescope.

Now envision one solid mass of rock, dirt and ice the size of three or four big-a$$ mountains smooshed together, and that mass rushing toward Mars at about 126,000 miles per hour.  Toward the planet next door.

Depending on where you live and the sky conditions, if C/2013 A1 hits Mars, it might well be visible with the unaided eye.

Assuming that it hits Mars at all.  Or that Marvin doesn't get to it with his Illudium Q36 Exploding Space Modulator first...

"Where's the 'KA-BOOM!'? There's supposed to be a C/2013 A1-shattering KA-BOOM!"

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Meteorite(s?) smashing Russia this morning

CNN and Fox News are proving they're worse than useless this morning when it comes to breaking news! The "big story" in the U.S. this hour is still that damned Carnival boat that was crippled at sea for the past week.

Meanwhile our friends in Russia are having to deal with a real-life Michael Bay movie unfolding even now...

Check out these bits of footage that are coming in from the Urals, especially the vicinity of Chelyabinsk, where a few hours ago the area was struck by a barrage of meteorites:

There are reports as of this writing that at least 500 people have been injured, mostly from glass shattering because of sonic booms as the meteorite or meteorites exploded in mid-air. However a lot of fragments hit the ground (including crashing through a zinc factory). I'm not hearing of any fatalities yet. Let's pray that there are none.

However to the best of my knowledge, the Chelyabinsk event today has produced about 500% more injuries than all the wounds caused by meteorites of the past sixty years or so combined. The one that best comes to mind right now is one lady in the Fifties who was struck on the leg by a tiny meteor fragment that crashed through the roof of her house as she lay on her sofa watching television.

Twitter is going nuts at the moment with even more footage and tons of photos that witnesses took of the meteor. This is not going to be a situation as difficult to document as the Tunguska event was.

Now hearing that authorities are considering the possibility that more strikes may be expected.

What a week this has been. First Benedict XVI announces his retirement, now this. I'm doubly-cursed to be a fanatic about both history and science (especially astronomy). What's that they say: "No rest for the wicked".

Seriously though, this is gonna be something to watch over the next few days. No doubt even more footage and pics are gonna be making their way onto the Intertubes.

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Dung beetles use Milky Way to move poop

That's odd. I've eaten lots of Milky Way bars at my girlfriend's house...

...and I didn't know the stuff was a laxative.

*rimshot* "Yes ladies and gentlemen I'll be here all week!!"

Actually I speak of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is most visible in the Southern Hemisphere and which the humble dung beetle of sub-Saharan Africa uses for stellar navigation, scientist have recently discovered.

It's like this: dung beetles roll around balls of... ummm, "Number Two". They need to do it fast and in a straight line away from the source so that other natural predators of poo won't swipe it first. During the nighttime hours the dung beetles use the Moon to guide them. But on nights when there is no lunar light, something else is required.

So these researchers conducted a series of experiments and found that in the absence of the Moon, the Milky Way (the most concentrated visible part of it anyway, the brightest part being the galactic center in the direction of Sagittarius) suffices for the dung beetle's navigational needs

Pretty cool. So not only is the dung beetle the strongest animal on the planet in terms of weight ratios, it's also the first insect found to use the stars to guide their way.

Sorta "stinks to high heaven" in a perverse sort of way, huh?

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"Who are we to You?"

Ever since I first saw this movie in February, it has lingered on the edges of my consciousness like no film before has.

And of all the wonder that is to be found in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, this is the scene that has most entranced and enchanted me.

As I wrote after watching it then, this is a movie that dares to ask God "Why?", before providing the same reply that God gave to Job.

Now that the thought occurs to me, I might even suggest watching The Tree of Life after studying the Book of Job from the Old Testament. Yeah: read everything from the beginning, on through Job losing all but his life and then to the monologues by his friends (some help they were!) and exactly before hitting the point where God comes in to answer Job, go to this scene in The Tree of Life and let that paraphrase what God says.

What God has said to Job and to every one of us who has demanded of Him, "Answer me."

The music is "Lacrimosa" by composer Zbigniew Preisner. And as soon as I find the CD of it I am absolutely putting it on my iPod.

Just felt like posting something beautiful at this late hour...

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Bad Moon Rising: British cop's call for backup leads to luna-tickling mistake

A police officer in Great Britain is weathering international ribbing after calling in for reinforcements to help with a potentially dangerous situation... that turned out to be nothing more than the light of the silvery moon!

From the story at The Inquisitr:

According to Independent Online News, the story was originally picked up by Police magazine, which brought the cop’s startling encounter with the moon to the masses. In the article, the officer in question didn’t realize his mistake until after he’d told his co-workers that he might require backup.

“While single-crewed on night duty in Worcestershire a PC called up his sergeant letting him know that he was going up into the Clent Hills to investigate a ‘suspicious bright light’ that he could see shining from the other side of the hills,” the magazine revealed. “The call was for safety reasons as he might need back-up once he found the source. Twenty minutes later the PC called his sergeant back to reassure him that everything was ok and that he had found the source of the light.”

Fortunately, the mysterious light was nothing more than the moon hanging out in the heavens. All kidding aside, at least the cop was doing his job. Had the light turned out to be some sort of threat to the fine residents of Worcestershire, the poor guy would have been a hero. Sadly, he’s just the butt of a joke.

Personally, I don't think this guy should be ridiculed at all. Astral phenomenon has a long, long history of playing tricks with light on human visual acuity. I mean, the planet Venus has been mistaken for everything from distant volcanic eruptions to flying saucers. It's not the first time that somebody has been fooled by natural lights in the sky, and it won't be the last.

This policeman wasn't wrong to call for help if he thought there was legitimate reason for it. But still, all in all... it is a rather funny story :-)

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Jack Horkheimer - AKA the "Star Hustler" - has passed away

Late last night the sad news arrived that Jack Horkheimer, known to millions as the "Star Hustler" and host of PBS's long-running Star Gazer, passed away Friday afternoon. He was 72.

There's a whole heap o' amateur astronomers and no doubt quite a few professionals as well who can say that Jack Horkheimer, with his exuberant style and enthusiastic love of astronomy, was one of the biggest reasons why they took up naked eye stargazing. Every week since 1976 we'd see Horkheimer sitting on one of Saturn's rings (gotta love cheapo chromakey done clever) as he effervescently described the heavenly spectacles for the coming week.

A very cool guy, who I am told was just as nice and energetic in real life as he was on his television shows. He will be missed.

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Witness the fiery re-entry of the HAYABUSA probe over Australia

Remember when the Mir space station came crashing and burning out of the sky nine years ago? I was watching that on TV and among friends we jokingly quoted Kirk's line from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: "My God Bones. What have I done?"

Well, this ain't the flaming destruction of a space vessel for once. This is the atmospheric re-entry of the HAYABUSA Asteroid Explorer mission, videoed from a NASA DC-8 over Australia. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched HAYABUSA in 2003. A few years later it landed on the asteroid Itokawa. Then HAYABUSA scooped up some samples and made the five-year journey back to Earth, using a high-tech ion engine to return its precious cargo.

The capsule containing the asteroid samples has been located at its calculated arrival point in western Australia (gotta love mathematics aye?). And soon the asteroid rocks and dust will be in laboratories undergoing analysis.

That is about as successful a space mission as I have ever heard of in any recent memory. Congrats to JAXA and the HAYABUSA crew on a job well done!

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Exoplanet observed orbiting star for first time

Apologies for the absence, dear readers. Of which no less than three of you have insisted today that I must return 'cuz apparently this blog has become a daily fixture in the lives of some! I shall endeavor to do better but what can I say? I'm a busy lad, with many irons in the fire. And Lord willing I'll get to begin sharing some of those sooner than later.

But first: yay for Beta Pictoris! For at least the past two and a half decades this has been a candidate star for having a planetary system. And now thanks to the European Southern Observatory's honkin'-big 8.2 meter Very Large Telescope, we've got the first observation of an extra-solar planet orbiting a star (namely, Beta Pictoris).

Click to enjoy an extra-huge aperture of astronomical goodness!

Click on the above link for better explanation about how neat this is. And thanks to Shane Thacker for finding this story.

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Saturn's weird hexagon replicated in a lab

Here's something that's intrigued me for quite a few years. Saturn - the second biggest planet in the solar system - has an odd feature and it ain't them purty rings: there's a huuuuuge hexagon-shaped cloud formation, thousands of miles to a side, surrounding its north pole. It's a persistent phenomenon that has mystified astronomers ever since it was first discovered.

So if you've been baffled about Saturn's mystery hexagon, be bebaffled no further 'cuz Ana Claudia Barbosa Aguiar and Peter Read of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom have recreated the mechanism in their lab with little more than a bucket of water and some green dye, and set it a'spinning on a variable-speed turntable. And fun was had by all!

From the article at ScienceNow...

The faster the ring rotated, the less circular the green jet stream became. Small eddies formed along its edges, which slowly became larger and stronger and forced the fluid within the ring into the shape of a polygon. By altering the rate at which the ring spun, the scientists could generate various shapes. "We could create ovals, triangles, squares, almost anything you like," says Read. The bigger the difference in the rotation between the planet and the jet steam—that is the cylinder and the ring—the fewer sides the polygon had, the team reports in this month's issue of Icarus. Barbosa Aguiar and Read suggest that Saturn’s north polar jet stream spins at a rate relative to the rest of the atmosphere that favors a six-sided figure, hence the hexagon.

I bet some entrepreneur could make a tidy sum selling this thing as a science project to middle-school students :-)

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Meet David Morris and his backyard observatory

David Morris (left) is someone I've been honored to have as a friend for many years now so I know of what I speak when I say this: David Morris is like the Chuck Norris of renaissance men! This guy does everything, including competition roller skating and (along with his wonderful wife Gretchen) being active in the Theatre Guild of Rockingham County.

David and I first met because of our mutual love for astronomy. But David, being David, took his passion to the max and pulled off what most amateur astronomers only dream of: his very own observatory! Here's an excellent write-up in today's News & Record about David and his homebrewed facility, which he has christened Smithstone Observatory.

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Prepare to have your mind blown

From the shortest possible distance (the Planck Length) to the edge of the observable universe (93 billion light years) and everything in between, this incredible Flash presentation puts it all into perspective...

Thanks to Shane Thacker for such a humbling and breathtaking find.

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The trees of Mars

Not really trees, but an optical illusion captured by NASA's HiRISE camera in orbit around the red planet. What appears to be a scattering of pine trees is actually several trails of debris near Mars's north pole, left behind as the ice cap goes on its seasonal retreat.

Mash down here for more about the "trees" of Mars!

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Newly discovered "super Earth" has water, atmosphere

Exciting news on the astronomy front: the most Earth-like planet yet outside our solar system has been discovered. The world, which thus far is known only by its official nomenclature GJ 1214b, is 40 light years away (practically in our backyard, cosmically speaking 'course). It's six times the mass of our Earth and according to analysis is literally swimming in liquid water. It orbits a red star, kinda making it "Krypton meets Waterworld". But it ain't quite the habitable sorta world that astronomers are looking for: the temperatures on this planet are around 400 degrees Fahrenheit and the air pressure is much higher than we're used to on Earth.

Maybe we should name it "Saunaworld"? :-P

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If the Earth had rings...

...it would possibly look like what Roy Prol has cooked up in this 3D animation. Prol took into account the Roche limit for Earth's mass to calculate the size and distance of the rings from the surface, and also how the rings would look from various latitudes on Earth.

Check it out!

Thanks to Shane Thacker for this thought-provoking and beautiful find.

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International Space Station transits the Moon

Bernhard Christ, an amateur astronomer from Germany, put himself in just the right spot on the Earth's surface (a testament to his mad plottin' and plannin' skillz) and using a digital astronomical camera produced this sequence - made in less than 0.4 seconds - of the International Space Station transiting across the Moon...

That's five shots of the ISS taken at equal intervals. If you're wondering where the fifth is, click on the image to drastically embiggen it and look just inside the Moon's limb toward the left side of the picture and you'll easily pick it out from the lunar landscape.

Aim here for more about Bernhard Christ's astonishing photo, and many thanks to Shane Thacker for the great find!

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2012 "end-of-world" date a miscalculation (by more than two centuries)

Somebody get Roland Emmerich on the horn: his upcoming 2012 movie is gonna be off. Like, waaaay off.

Per the reckoning of a group of scientists being reported in a Dutch journal (link goes to English translation) the popularly-held belief that the Maya calendar predicts the destruction of the world in 2012 is a miscalculation and doesn't even have anything to do with the end times whatsoever. The real end of the Maya cycle of time, according to what these researchers have found, is around 2220... and then the calendar just goes back to the beginning, even as ours ends on December 31st and goes into January 1st.

So like Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova of Babylon 5 once said: "No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There is always boom tomorrow."

(But if this kind of thing floats your boat, we've still got Sir Isaac Newton's prediction of a 2060 apocalypse looming before us :-)

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