At the end of the year, many people make lists.

Well, so did Science magazine, and they picked Swift’s observation of short gamma-ray bursts as their 4th biggest breakthrough of the year. Since I work on Swift, I feel the need to crow a little (and also to point out that the two artists whose illustrations are used for the articles are both friends of mine; Aurore is a co-worker and I’ve known Dana for many years; he does a lot of illustration work for Hubble).

I was going to write a description of what short gamma-ray bursts are, but it turns out I had to do this for my day job first! We put out a quarterly newsletter about Swift, and I wrote an article explaining what happens when a black hole tears a neutron star apart. Check it out.

One thing I didn’t mention in the article, though, is that the energies involved are scary, very very scary. A neutron star has a surface gravity that may be a billion times the Earth’s– yes, you read that right. On a neutron star, I would weigh 170 billion pounds, about as much as a small mountain 300 meters (1000 feet) high! It would take a huge amount of energy just to lift a marshmallow off the surface of a neutron star, yet the tides from a black hole can shred one, vaporizing it.

Yikes.

Before Swift (and it’s sister satellite, HETE-2) we only had theories about these events, but now we have data, and it fits the theory beautifully. So I agree with Science magazine: Swift has been one of the better things to come along in 2005.

The news that there might be a way to make transparent aluminum — foretold, kindof, in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home– has been around awhile. I was reading an article about it just now in New Scientist, and saw this quote:

“The substance itself is light-years ahead of glass,” said 1st Lt. Joseph La Monica, who heads the research.

I’m sure Lt. Monica is a smart man and a great engineer (as good as Scotty?), but he needs to read my website more.

Tip o’ the BA hat to Larry Kellogg for the link.

While surfing around the web, I found a statistic that said there were roughly 298 million people in the United States right now.

That surprised me. I thought we were hovering around 250 million. So I went to the source: the U.S. Census Bureau. On that site they have a population clock, and sure enough, we’re at 297+ million people here in the US of A^*. Wow.

According to that site, the population has a net increase of one person every 10 seconds (accounting for births, deaths, and net immigration). Given that rate, and the current number, it looks like we’ll hit the 300,000,000 mark in about 253 days, in early September (the 9th, according to my calculations). Since they use a formula to calculate the population instead of actually counting people, this is approximate, but probably close.

I’m not one for arbitrary milestones, but I have to admit that’s pretty interesting. I’ll have to check back on that clock in a few months and see how close we’re getting.

At Dec. 30 at 18:29 Greenwich time, we had 297,813,672 people. The world population was at 6,488,327,783. These are estimates based on formulae.

According to this article, China will be launching a lunar orbiter in 2007 (just a year before NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter).

Will China send men to the Moon? They’re gonna try. To give you a sense of a timeline, the U.S. sent its first probe to the Moon in July 1964, five years before landing men. That was very early in the space age, and the probe was an impactor, which is somewhat easier than an orbiter (though not terribly easy). Two years later the U.S. launched a lunar orbiter (the Soviets were somewhat ahead of the U.S. in unmanned lunar probes at that time, but their manned program — which ironically was ahead of the U.S. in the early 60s — had lagged far behind the American effort by then). Three years after that, Neil Armstrong took his small step.

Technology is better now, and the Chinese have our own experience at their disposal (well, it’s not like we’re sharing secrets, but a lot of knowledge is online). I wonder how long it will actually take them to plant their flag?

This all reminds me of the scene in Arthur C. Clarke’s book (not the movie) "2010", when the U.S./Soviet mission to Jupiter is passed by a Chinese mission that the other team had no clue about. Hmmm.

Folks–

Thanks for being patient. As far as I can tell, the move to the new server has worked, and it was only marginally painful (though I still have some behind-the-scenes work to do).

It is possible that some people may still see the blog from the old server, until their network catches up with the new location . That usually happens in a few hours, so I’m hoping it’s over. But if you post a comment, and the next day it’s gone, that may be the culprit.

And now, back to the regularly posted astronomy/critical thinking/humor ranting. Well, in a coupla hours.

Loyal readers (and if you’re new, or not loyal, you can read this too):

Big changes are afoot at Bad Astronomy. I have some plans that will improve the website and blog considerably over the next few weeks, and by improve I don’t mean "make crappy like the ‘improved’ Coke, or the way the cereal manufacturer have ‘improved’ Cocoa Puffs by making them whole grain, which removes any hint of flavor".

No, things will get better. The first step in this process is to move Bad Astronomy to a new server that gives me more disk space, more bandwidth, and more freedom in general. That move is happening in the next few minutes after I post this. Because for a while the site will exist in two places (until the domain name servers catch up), I am shutting off commenting to the blog. This is temporary; it’ll be back on by Thursday evening Pacific time if all goes well. I hope no one minds.

In the end, you shouldn’t notice any difference at all. The blog and main site will always work, but you won’t be able to post comments for a few hours.

So bear with me please! And if you see any problems, please email me.

According to this news article, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is getting ready to build a spacecraft facility near Seattle and have it open next year:

… a Texas newspaper editor who interviewed Bezos earlier this year said the billionaire talked about sending a spaceship into orbit that launches and lands vertically, like a rocket, and eventually building spaceships that can orbit the Earth - possibly leading to permanent colonies in space.

Well, that’s cool! I’m actually pleased that so many ultra-rich folks are starting this up. I think that the government space program was and is necessary to do certain things (not the least of which was to investigate how to get into space and what to do there in the first place) . I also think that technology has rolled along far enough that private industry can join in on the fun, though it is still extremely expensive: hence the people getting in are ones like Bezos, and Richard Branson.

Eventually, these guys will make it profitable. And then folks like you and me can hitch a ride to orbit.

The initial investment is huge, but the eventual payoff is much, much larger. How much do you think a kilometer-wide metal asteroid is worth? Or a solar station that can beam microwave energy down to Earth continuously?

How much is it worth to simply explore the cosmos?