Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Bob Mahoney, in his article in Space Review, understands that it’s easy to promote space to the public. But how do we get them actively engaged in it?

We can’t rely on the media to do it for us, he says, and he’s right. We can do some great stoking of fires that way, but it’s still not going to get people engaged. And the media screw it up a lot (or else I wouldn’t even have this website). As he points out:

Expecting the news media to get a particular message out is not unlike asking a beloved dog to bring a package of meat to a neighbor—some semblance of the wrappings may arrive, but don’t expect the contents to have their original weight or texture.

He also points out the fact — the cold, hard fact — that NASA TV sucks. I have complained about it for years, and I’ve tried to talk to people at NASA about it, but no one listens (at least no one who has any authority in this area). NASA TV should be NASA! Rockets! Fantastic images! Daring-do and space travel! Yet watching it is like watching fingernails grow, only more tedious.

If only there were some media-savvy person who loves being on camera, is good at making complex topics accessible, and clearly is having fun and is able to infect others with that same enthusiasm! But where are we ever to find such a person?

I have a book to finish right now, but I will think on this. I have plans to do a lot more media stuff to promote astronomy and space travel, including more videos and maybe more mainstream media. But this blog is interactive, so if you’ve got ideas, post ‘em. Let’s get some brainpower behind this, and see what we can do.

Man, do I love me some planetary nebulae. Here’s one for you:

That’s IC (for Index Catalog, a supplement to the original New General Catalog of astronomical objects) 4593, a nebula in Hercules, and it’s one of four nebulae images just released from Hubble. What you are seeing here is the death of a star like the Sun. I have written about them before (here and here, with some more general info here), so go read those to get the intro.

I studied planetary nebulae (or PNe) for years, and they fascinate me. The fantastic shapes are caused by the collision of winds emitted by the central stars as they turn into red giants and evolve into small, hot, white dwarfs. Normally, red giants don’t spin rapidly, so you might expect the winds to expand spherically (if the star spun quickly, the centripetal force would flatten out the wind into an oblate spheroid, like a basketball someone sat on). But actually a spherical PN is rare! Somehow, these stars are getting some kind of injection of angular momentum, and one (IMO) very good hypothesis is that the stars consume planets as they expand. As the star vaporizes the planets, the angular momentum from the planet’s orbital energy spins the star up. The winds flatten out, and you get those incredible shapes that remind me of squids and flowers.

But if you look at IC 4593, you’ll see two bright red knots of gas with long streamers; one is at the upper left and the other at the lower right. A cursory examination indicates many interesting things: they are on opposite sides of the star; the streamers point directly back to the star; the knots are mostly nitrogen (indicated by the red color in these images); they are moving rapidly compared to the rest of the gas (this can be seen by taking spectra); they are not at as high a temperature as the rest of the gas.

What are they?

They’re called FLIERs, for Fast Low-Ionization Emission Regions. Fast is obvious enough. Low ionization means that they are not hot, and not getting pelted by UV radiation from the star. Emission means they are glowing. They’re seen in lots of PNe.

I’ll cut to the chase and say they aren’t well-understood, at least as far as I can tell by looking at the literature. Most likely some are caused by some weird feature of the wind collision where gas is squeezed out under higher pressure, like a watermelon seed when you squeeze it between your fingers. But this idea doesn’t explain all the features of FLIERs seen in other PNe, and their origin is still a mystery.

An odd thing that crops up in the papers I’ve read is that the knots may not actually be moving all that quickly. The speed is inferred from the Doppler shift in the spectra, and some astronomers are wondering if perhaps that’s not showing the speed of the knot itself, but maybe is due to gas flowing around them, or from some other combination of effects.

Observations from Hubble and other ’scopes will keep coming in, and the models will keep getting refined. Studying these objects will turn up insights into how stars like the Sun die, which in turn will tell us how they change as they age, which has a direct impact on us. Maybe not for a while yet — maybe a billion or five years — but any knowledge on this topic is a good thing.

Plus, they’re pretty. That counts too.

I’m not much for anniversaries and such, but this one is difficult to maneuver around.

It means different things to different people, as anniversaries always do. To some it means flag-waving, jingoism, and America-love-it-or-leave-it.

To me, it will always be a reminder of just how cold and cruel our own government became, and how that government was all too-easily fed by the population’s fear.

What have we learned in six years? What progress has been made? Are we safer?

I don’t know what makes me sadder: that those people in the World Trade Center, in the Pentagon, and on Flight 93 died because of pointless dogma, pointless ideology… or that their deaths have been so ruthlessly abused by those in power in our own country to further their own mad agenda based on pointless dogma and pointless ideology.

Perhaps saddest of all is the cold, certain knowledge that I will get comments on this post saying that I am wrong; that Iraq deserved what it got, despite all the evidence we have amassed showing that our government has consistently and with malice aforethought lied to its citizens, sent its children off to die for that lie, and is now beating the drums to expand that lie into Iran.

Different people, different meanings. But somewhere in there is the truth, and of all the jabbering and slavering I will no doubt see in blogs and on TV today, of one thing I am completely certain: enough people will still want to be blind, to be led, to be safe, that they will gladly trade their freedom for empty words.

But not all words are empty. I urge you to read these:

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

"The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes."

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

Ideas inspire these words, and I hope these words inspire action.