Blogs / Bad Astronomy

More Mercury awesomeness from MESSENGER:

Wow, this one is very high res (click to embiggen)!

It was taken when MESSENGER was less than 6000 km over the surface, and shows crushing detail near Mercury’s equator (the smallest things you can see are about 300 meters across, roughly as detailed as you get looking at the Moon through a big earthbound ’scope). The whole image is about 170 km across.

There are so many things to see! The huge crater at the lower right is interesting. I’m not sure what crater it is, or if it was even mapped by Mariner 10 back in ‘74; I’m still figuring out how to match up the maps. I’m guessing the crater us about 200 km across. We only see one quadrant of it here, but there’s lots of stuff to note. The rim is incredible, seen in great relief due to the low sun angle.

The floor of the crater is relatively flat, so I suspect some later event filled it in, maybe volcanic flow. Then, over time, more asteroid impacts created the peppering of tiny craters all over it. But the floor is also cracked, which doesn’t surprise me too much. Cracks like that are all over the tiny planet, possibly due to the crust shrinking as the planet’s core cools and shrinks. That right there is fairly mind-boggling.

The linear radial features — the lines coming straight out of the center all around the crater — are probably secondary events, streamers of rocks that splashed out of the crater when the impactor hit. They slam back into the surface and create littler craters.

Heh. At the top is a biggish crater, and you can just see a little crater inside it, with its rim poking out into the sunlight.

Now, I’m not geologist, I’m just a country astronomer, but if I can see this stuff at a glance, I’m guessing people like Emily are having braingasms right now. And this is just one of three high-res images they just downloaded! I’d love to be at the data center at APL right now.

Fun fun fun. And more to come!

Some important updates are at the bottom of this article.

OK folks, nothing to see here.

I talked with my buddy Seth Shostak, who is a Senior SETI astronomer, and he told me that this whole alien signal thing is a big misunderstanding on the part of the KTVU reporter.

Basically, Dan Wertheimer, a radio astronomer who is affiliated with SETI, detected a pulse from space told the reporter about a signal that had been detected from space. The source is certainly extragalactic, and is most likely some sort of natural event. It’s unclear exactly what kind of event, but there is a long list of things it could be. Aliens phoning us is pretty far down that list. But since Dan does do some SETI work, the reporter just botched things up a bit and misattributed the source. The news article reads oddly, like he took a mishmash of topics and wrote them all up into one article, so this misunderstanding doesn’t surprise me much.

The signal was detected quite some time ago, and had it been alien, believe me you would have heard from the folks at SETI!

So chalk this one up as yet another in a long line of false alarms. Sorry to burst the ET bubble.

UPDATE (18:45 Mountain time):

1) The original news article — shocker — has been pulled off the KTVU site. However, someone should tell KTVU that there exists this thing called Google, and they sometimes cache web pages. I also took a screen capture of the meat of the article and uploaded it to my Flickr page.

2) I just talked to Dan Wertheimer, the astronomer quoted in the article. He told me that the original interview was about sending signals into space (so-called "active SETI") as opposed to just listening for aliens. After the interview, he talked to the reporter about some of the astronomy he does, including looking at what are called radio transients: bursts of radio waves that are seen once and never repeat. These may come from one-off events like colliding neutron stars, exploding stars, and so on. Somehow, in the article the reporter mixed up the observation of the transient signals with detecting a signal from E.T. Worse — if that’s possible — the observations of the transients weren’t from Arecibo, and they weren’t from Wertheimer. It was another astronomer altogether, observing with the giant Parkes radio dish in Australia.

So basically, the news article is utterly wrong about everything it discussed concerning the signal. Wow.

OK folks, first of all, stop emailing me about this! Aiiieeee!

Second, the deal is that there are rumors floating around the ether that some sort of signal was picked up by the Arecibo radio telescope, and that folks from SETI (the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) are working on it.

I have left messages with some friends of mine at SETI, and if/when they call me back I’ll let you all know what I know.

Until then, feel free to speculate, but also be prepared to find out that this was all made up, exaggerated, or misinterpreted.

Or it might be real. Tee hee! We’ll know soon enough.

Wow, I lost to PZ again. You might think that this isn’t really about good science, but might just be a popularity contest.

Oh. Right.

At least he lost the Editors’ Choice.

Thanks for the votes, folks. I feel the lurv.

Oh– some other guy wrote about this too.

I love Fark. Love love love. How can you not, when it brings us this historic moment in TV?

Fark said it was broadcast exactly 30 years ago, but a search online indicates it was aired on January 21, 1978. Either way, it was momentous. Thing is, I remember watching it! I was pretty young in ‘78, but a HUGE science fiction fan (still am, baby, still am). The Saturn Awards were on TV, and I couldn’t believe it; we had gone mainstream! I (vaguely) remember that they had an animated Pete’s Dragon giving out an award; can any BABloggee confirm or deny that?

Anyway, Shatner came on, and even at the tender age of 14, I realized that we were seeing something that would be sung about for the ages.

The Shatner discusses this moment here.

And Wil, if you’re reading this, I know how you feel about WFS. But c’mon. This is history.

Obvious title, I know.

Guy sees slab of granite, guys sees Jesus, guy will sell it on eBay.

I see article, I look at picture, I see Satan, I make it obvious.

Why is it people see the subtle and miss the obvious? Satan was the first thing I saw… and the folks at Fark, where I saw this originally, agree.

What do you see?