I just got back from the premier of a new planetarium show "Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity" at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. I worked on the script of this show.

My group at work has grants to do education and public outreach for various astronomical satellites. We gave seed money to director Tom Lucas to create a NOVA show for PBS about black holes. He used that money to get more money from the National Science Foundation, and he used that to make a planetarium show. Since I dabble in writing, I helped edit the script and check it for scientific accuracy.

It was great fun working on a real planetarium show, especially this one. The graphics are truly amazing. I have never seen anything so cool! A few months ago I flew to Denver to see the show as it was at that time. There was a scene which talks about the Sun, and then cuts to black holes. I said we needed to put a red supergiant in there, to segue from stars like the Sun to ones that can explode (the idea that the Sun will explode at the end of its life is a common misconception, and one I didn’t want to promulgate… hmmm, maybe I should write a page about that). So they did, and the scene totally rocks. You see the Sun, embedded in a 3D grid representing space-time (I took a couple of pictures during the show which is why they’re not high quality):

Then the scene backs off from the Sun, and an enormous red supergiant rises below it:

This was one of the most compelling scenes visually in the show. It was really tremendous. In the final scene, we fall into a black hole, which was also great. The effects are stunning.

But of course, the very bestest part came up in the credits:

That’s the first time I’ve ever had a credit like that! Woohoo!

The show premiers for the public on February 10, and we hope to have it going to other planetaria around the country and the world very soon.

So here’s the deal. I got 6 hours of sleep last night, which is twice my average over the past week. I just got in to Denver tonight, and I’m exhausted. Tomorrow I have a series of press-the-flesh activities at the Denver Museum of Natural Science; a planetarium show about black holes is premiering, and my group helped fund and write it. So what I’m saying is I can’t post anything tonight besides this note, and I may not be able to post until tomorrow night. This week has been incredible, but I may sleep for a week when I get home to make up for it.

Hoo boy!

The hotel the TAM was in had a really crappy internet connection. I paid for the first day, and had such a rotten connection I didn’t bother with the rest of the days (the room had dialup!). So I had to let this blog lie fallow for a couple of days, for which I apologize. The timing could not have been worse: the meeting has been incredible, a blog comment war was started over my last post, and I’d like it if I had fun and exciting entries for people coming here from the Bloggie award site.

I’m sitting in the Vega$ airport right now, and they have free wireless! Woohoo! The only thing in this town that is free. So I wrote an entry the other day, and now I can finally upload it. If I had more time I’d add pictures, but that will still have to wait until later. Again, my apologies. Hopefully tonight I’ll have time to post some more, but until then, here are some thoughts about something Penn Jillette said.

After lunch on the second day, Penn took questions for a few minutes. He was in typical form; loud, obnoxious, and very funny. He talked about future episodes of his Showtime program (I won’t give the name here, but the link makes it clear), as well as skepticism in general.

Penn said an interesting thing: he was asked how a famous trick he and Teller do is done. He didn’t give the actual answer, of course. But he talked about how people are almost always disappointed when they find out the secret of a trick. It’s not that revealing the magic itself is disappointing, it’s that the way the trick is done is generally "ugly". It’s not magic, not something hugely slick; it’s tape, or a misdirection, or a reach into a pocket.

People don’t want to believe a trick can be done in such a clumsy, ugly, obvious way. It’s not the knowledge itself that disappoints; knowledge, Penn said, is always good, always beautiful.

I agree with him. I watched a friend of mine do some simple tricks, and I was shocked at how simple and how ugly some of them were done. I guess my problem was that the trick was actually a lot simpler than I thought. I was expecting some incredibly deft sleight of hand, requiring hours of practice to perfect. I was not expecting a magnet! I mean, that’s cheating!

I felt silly thinking that. It’s a trick, you idiot! I told myself. It’s cheating no matter what.

It’s like watching a movie, and seeing how the special effect is done. I find that disappointing, sometimes. But in that case, it’s because when I watch the movie, I am suspending my disbelief. I don’t mean to sound formal, but when I watch a movie, I enter a contract with the movie maker: they will entertain me, and I’ll try not to ask too many questions. I’ll buy into their premise, and they won’t violate that trust.

The real world isn’t like that. There is no contract; the universe obeys a set of rules, and those rules will hold sway whether you believe in them or not. So finding out what’s happening behind the scenes can’t be a let down. There’s no violation of disbelief, because there’s no disbelief.

Sometimes people tell me that when they learn the science behind something, they feel disappointed. I think that’s silly. Knowing more is never disappointing. When you look at the stars, they may look pretty. And that’s great! But look at that star there. It’s one thousand trillion kilometers away. Or that one: it’s so young, it’s still surrounded by the gas and dust cloud from which it formed. That one there will blow up in less than ten thousand years. That one is blue because its temperature is twice that of the Sun’s. That one there has a system of planets orbiting it. This one weirdly has three times the amount of magnesium in it than current theory predicts.

When I think of those things, my heart swells with that knowledge. And not just the knowledge itself, but the fact that we can, in fact, have that knowledge. Knowing those things enriches my experience and magnifies my sense of awe and wonder, exponentially increasing my enjoyment of the stars.

How can knowing something ever be disappointing?

This meeting attracts some very big names, besides just TV stars and Nobel laureates. Perhaps the most important person to speak here today was Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU may be the most falsely defamed organization in America. These people have devoted their lived to protecting the Constitution. That’s an act that a lot of politicians appear to have forgotten.

Ms. Strossen gave an impassioned talk about how the government is trying to destroy science in this country. She focused on medical laws, including drug laws, sex (mis)education, and Oregon’s Death with Dignity act, but she (of course) talked at length about creationism. There have been some big victories lately (like Dover, Pennsylvania and California), but the fight goes on.

She quoted the ACLU’s first leader, who said: "No fight for civil liberties ever stays won." That’s so very true, which in turn calls to mind Wendell Phillips: "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom."

Between what she was saying, and what we’re seeing happening with school boards across this country, it’s easy to be discouraged. But it’s also good to know that whistleblowers are out there. In the case of Ms. Strossen, she shines a very strong light on some very shady dealings. It’s up to us not to flinch as we look at what she’s saying, to take action to protect our rights, and to protect the truth.

For the next two days, I am attending the James Randi’s The Amaz!ng Meeting in Las Vegas. I’ll be reporting about this critical thinking/skeptic conference as often as I can.

I made it to TAM4! That’s the good news. The bad news is that my internet connection here can be charitably described as flaky. We’ve also been busy here, so I haven’t been able to write until now. Even now I have to hurry, as there’s an auction to raise money and I donated a copy of my book.

I would have written earlier, but I had to have lunch with Shuttle astronaut Ed Lu, and physicist Murray Gell-Mann (who is somewhat well-known, since he won a Nobel Prize for discovering the quark). Yes, I’m gloating. I’m also sitting next to Julia Sweeney during the meeting, and have been chatting with James Randi and Michael Shermer.

Such is life. Someone’s gotta do it.

This morning was a very interesting talk by Christopher Hitchens, a contrarian in nearly every sense of the word. He gave a fascinating talk about Thomas Jefferson and religion. Next up was Michael Shermer, who read from a minibook he’s written called "The Soul of Science". He make a lot of interesting points about the idea of a human soul, how we evolved a sense of moral responsibility, and how science is revealing why we are a moral species. I agree with many of his points, and a lot of entries in this blog will reveal that (search the category listing here for Rants and Piece of Mind).

Murray Gell-Mann talked about science and politics (which is the theme of the meeting); he served on several Presidential science advisory commissions over the decades, and had lots of funny stories about presidents, and how they take, or, more commonly, ignore scientific advise.

This connection is too slow to upload images, and I have to run right now to get to the auction. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some images and more insightful comments up later. Stay tuned!

First off : Don’t forget to vote for the Bad Astronomy Blog in this year’s "Bloggies"!

Second off: if you catch this in time, I’ll be on Coast to Coast AM Wednesday night at 10:00 p.m. Pacific time to discuss the new planet discovered (see previous the blog entry).

Third off, I’m going to TAM!

Thursday morning I get on a plane for Las Vegas, to attend James Randi’s The Amaz!ng Meeting. Woohoo! Like I did for the American Astronomical Society meeting two weeks ago, I plan on blogging as often as I can from the meeting to relate events and other fun things going on (including the poker tournament I have no hope of winning, the chocolate challenge, and perhaps — perhaps — a hallway debate between me and another astronomer on whether Pluto is a planet or not (it is, but it shouldn’t be)).

Fourth off, anyway, I may not be able to write here until late Thursday. Until then, do yourself a favor: the new and improved Skepchick website now has features, news, and more. Skeptical reading fun for the whole family! And, occasionally, nudity. So maybe not for the whole family.

The ultimate goal of astronomers who look for planets orbiting other stars is to find a planet like Earth—the same mass, orbiting at the same distance from a sun-like star.

We’re not there yet. But new observations are getting us closer and closer to that goal. Today, a team of scientists has reported the discovery of the lowest mass planet yet (view a news video of the discovery, or read about it here). The planet, called OGLE-2005-BGL-390Lb, is about 5 times the mass of the Earth, orbiting a star about 25,000 light years away. That’s halfway to the center of the Galaxy! So we won’t be visiting it any time soon.

The planet is not exactly Earth-like; it’s still pretty hefty at five time Earth’s mass. Also, the parent star is only about 1/5 the Sun’s mass, making it red, dim, and cool. The planet orbits the star at three times the distance Earth orbits the Sun. So its distance, together with the cool temperature of its parent sun, means the planet is very cold, far too cold to sustain life as we know it.

The planet is way too far away to be seen directly. In fact, the way the astronomers found this planet is a little strange. They used a technique called "gravitational microlensing". Part of Einstein’s great contribution to science was the idea that gravity can bend space. Space is more than just a thing in which objects sit; Einstein’s math shows that space is itself a thing has properties, like shape. Gravity distorts the shape of space, similar to the way a heavy weight sitting on a bed warps the shape of the surface of the bed. If you take a ball and roll it on the bed, its path won’t be straight, but it will curve as it passes the depression caused by the weight.

Massive objects have gravity, and that gravity bends space. As light passes through that space, it can bend. If that’s not weird enough for you (and really, it should be), gravity can also act like a lens, amplifying light as well.

If a massive object is sitting between you and a distant light source, then the gravity of the object can make the light appear brighter. This is the method used to find the planet.

Astronomers look toward regions of the sky where there are lots of distant stars — like toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. In general, the stars give off a steady stream of light. But if a massive object happens to pass between us and one of those stars, we’ll see a jump in brightness. The amount of the brightening can tell astronomers how massive the object is.

Astronomers observe regions with lots of stars to look for microlensing events. Here is the view toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy… 10 million stars can be seen in the original image (click for higher-resolution and more info).

Astronomers have dedicated projects looking for planets using this method. Two were involved in this case: OGLE, for Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, and PLANET, for Probing Lensing Anomalies Network, RoboNET, and MOA, for Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (I love those first two names; I have a weakness for good puns).

In this case, the astronomers saw two peaks of brightness from the star. The first was big, and the second smaller. The first was from the parent star of the planet, and the second from the planet itself. From the way the distant star got brighter (how long it took, and how much brighter it got), the team was able to determine the mass of both the planet and its parent star.

This technique has been around a while, and astronomers have used it to look for planets, stars, black holes, even exotic dark matter out between the galaxies. It’s very different than the usual technique of planet hunters, which is to look for changes in a star’s spectrum as a planet orbits it. That technique works better for big, massive planets orbiting their star very close in. This lensing technique can work for any size planet, including a terrestrial one– a planet the size of the Earth. It’s very possible – even likely – that the first truly Earth-like planet will be found this way.

As a kid I always thought that the first Earth-like planet we find would be nearby, like around Alpha Centauri or some other well-known star. But in fact, it may be some distant world, orbiting an unnamed star tens of thousands of light years away.

Maybe as a kid I would have been disappointed knowing that. I’m not now! Just knowing there’s a planet like that out there is incredibly exciting. And if we know of one far away, then that makes the search for nearby ones all that much sweeter.