Happy Birthday, Hubble

Well, it's been up there twenty years, now. And in all that time, the Hubble Telescope has been doing some incredible things. There's that Deep Field view for starters, wonderful work there. Some cracking pics of the Eagle Nebula which stayed on my desktop for a good two years. And then quite recently this rather stunning image of the Butterfly Nebula.

Breathtaking.

I know that these aren't true images, I know they've been enhanced and artificially coloured but I don't care, it's still a marvellous piece of human engineering. One can only imagine how good the James Webb telescope is going to be!

I'm... so ronery, so ronery...

Happy birthday to the XMM-Newton observatory. Gets pretty lonely up there, I'm sure. In case you were wondering, it's a big ol' telescope with X-ray capability, so it's been able to pick up some pretty pictures like the supernova below. Apparently its the oldest one recorded.

On another note, the climate change conference is underway in Copenhagen. The funniest thing I've seen from this so far is Barack Obama pledging to cut emissions by 15%, with China saying something like "is that all? We can do better than you, we're going to cut by, erm, 30%!" I look forward to the counter bid by the US. Only this time I think the Republicans might be getting in the way. Bah.

Crunch! Bang! Smash!

A Higgs Boson goes into a church, but is stopped by the priest.
"I'm sorry, you can't come in here," the priest says.
"Why not?" asks the Higgs. "Without me you can't have Mass."

...

Is that tumbleweed I see rolling across the screen?

Anyway, the Large Hadron Collider has been doing it's thing for nearly a week and so far no bits of bread have fallen into the mechanism, nor has a black hole swallowed Switzerland. Nor has a hypothetical Higgs appeared with the sole intention of wrecking the machine just to remain undiscovered, etc. etc. What has happened is that some collisions have taken place, and the folks at CERN are now starting to crunch through some data.

However exciting this may be, it could pale into insignificance compared to the massive collision that is taking place as we speak. Oh, did I mention it was on a galactic scale? It would appear that a "dark galaxy" - a barely discernible yet rather huge cloud of hydrogen (with rather a lot of matter within it to hold it together) is colliding with our own galaxy. Apparently this is not the first time it's happened; the very same dark galaxy did this around 70 million years ago. How cool is that?

"We were just talking about that..."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/oct/07/saturn-ring-nasa

So where the hell did THAT one come from? How did we not see it before? I mean, it's blimmin' massive!

Ringpiece!

A cheap joke for a rather interesting story. Wired.com has a piece about the rings of Saturn (see what I did there...), in that the 30-foot thick bands of rock and ice that girdle the planet are not entirely uniform.

In a nutshell, every fifteen years or so Saturn reaches its equinox, which results in some very different light angles, reflections and suchlike, and the latest one has allowed folks in Colorado to study the rings in some detail. In so doing, they've found some areas to be thicker than others, caused by the gravitational pull exerted by Saturn's moons. Pretty cool stuff.

From one ring to another: Ever wondered what makes gold and copper so different to the other shiny metals? Why one is yellow, another orange? As it turns out it's all to do with electrons; yes, that old chestnut again. See for yourself: these folks explain it all far better than I ever could.

Of course, ever since people began rummaging in the dirt we've always had a fascination for a bit of bling. I suppose with gold being so unusual a metal it became more than an object of fascination, it became currency. Copper, too, would once upon a time have been a prized material: copper ingots were used for trading a heck of a lot, as was lead of course. And yet, my Grandmother remembers when Aluminium was considered rare and precious: we now know it's probably the most abundant metal in the earth's crust. I reckon that's a result of all the takeaways we eat.

I thank you ladies and gentlemen, I'm here all week.

Isn't technology wonderful?

I saw this story on Reddit of all places, as you do, and was immediately fascinated: someone claims to have imaged the s- and p-electron orbitals in a single carbon atom. Then I saw the comments below the story: shurely shome mishtake seemed to be the order of the day: why are they not sp- hybrids? Anyway, the paper has only just been accepted by Physical Review B so it may be a while before we see the details. However, sp- or no sp-, it still seems incredibly exciting. We shall see.

Also, I see that the folks at the European Space Agency have basically given NASA a resounding "meh" following the latest Hubble images (see previous posts), and gone and released some of the images their own Planck telescope has started to capture.

Lest we forget, Planck is the coldest object in the sky, chilled to -273 deg C (can't do the ascii), designed to answer some of the most complicated questions posed by astronomers. One idea is that a model of the initial expansion of the universe may be accurately determined. So, from the very small to the very large; how splendid. Have a good weekend!

Busy, busy, busy

Dreadfully sorry, it's been rather a long time since my last post. I do have an excuse though, my book has been progressing very nicely and I'm about 1/3 or maybe even 2/5ths of the way through. I don't think it'll be finished by the end of the year but who knows?





Anyway, I'm not the only one who's been busy, those rather splendid people working on the Hubble telescope have been doing stuff since the big beast itself was upgraded. Look at this, for example. And taken from the same site...

All very pretty. Well, who knows, in a few years time we may even get an upgraded version of the Deep Field video. In case you haven't seen it, here it is.

Personally I think it is the most humbling, yet the most incredible and uplifting thing I've seen in a long while. Well, since this, anyway.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

How did I miss this story?

Betelgeuse appears to be shrinking quite considerably: 15% in 15 years, all without losing it's intensity. While the behaviour of red giants such as Betelgeuse is not fully understood one possible theory is that it's about to supernova.

I say about to: seeing as it's 640 light years away that means it may already have done so, some 639 years ago.

Needless to say the possibility is starting to alarm some folks; there are those who believe that the Mayan Calendar (due to end in about 2 and a half years) is inextricably linked to astronomy. Although what possible link this has to Betelgeuse going pop is anyone's guess. Damn those apocalypse nuts.

I could go on and mention the potential destruction of a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and its implications, but there would be little sense to that.

Whatever happens (or has already happened) to Betelgeuse hopefully we'll have a grand view: Herschelle is up and running and hopefully in a prime position to observe some serious boom. No, the other Herschel.

Nurse, please fetch me some sutures, I seem to have split my sides again.

Creationist Museum

I'm sorry to say this: coffee actually came out of my nose.
I heard of this about a year ago, but now even the BBC are drawing attention to these poor, misguided fools.

I always had one argument ready that I was fairly sure was watertight: if the universe was created 6000 years ago, then the furthest point in the universe must be no more than 6000 light years away from us. Yet we can measure with some degree of accuracy the distance of some stars. Here's one, the Pistol Star, identified nearly 20 years ago. It is a mere 25000 light years away. But unless Einstein et al. are horribly wrong, 25000LY is impossible because the universe can only be 6000 years old... and nothing travels faster than light... and... but...

Thank goodness god invented willow bark. My head hurts.

Actually, the name "Pistol Star" is pretty fantastic. But not as good as "Just Another Kinase". Or Sonic The Hedgehog, or Human Ether-a-go-go... Or all the other wacky genes / proteins that folks discovered 20 or so years ago. Biochemists have more fun, I reckon. Or they have too much time on their hands.