This is only tangentially related to Doctor Who, but Christopher Eccleston, who played the Doctor for the first season of the revival, will be in a movie about… G.I. Joe. It’s difficult to overestimate the amount of suck this movie will contain, but having Eccleston in it will mitigate that somewhat. He’s a terrific actor. His appearance on "Heroes" was cool, though he was totally wasted in "The Seeker", which was awful.

Still, there’s not much chance I’ll go see it. And I had a G.I. Joe when I was a kid. Maybe if they can get Billie Piper to be in it too…

It’s been a couple of months (I’ve been busy, like I’ve said), but it’s time once again for Where Has The BA Book Been.

I have a couple of friends, fellow skeptics named David and Carol, who live in Seattle. I saw them again at TAM 5.5, and as usual I didn’t have enough time to talk to them (despite the restaurant we ate at being incredibly slow; I suspect some of the customers who were there when we were are still waiting for their food). But we did talk about Seattle, and how I got sick there the last time (they came to a talk I was supposed to give, but a norovirus had other ideas, and that’s still the one and only talk I have ever canceled). I also regaled them with a tale of the Central Market and the monkfish, and we all had a laugh.

Obviously, they remembered that story. Hence the picture:

If you live in Seattle (or Austin), you need to shop at Central Market. They don’t carry my book, but they do have the ugliest and scariest fish you can imagine.

Oh, a postscript: David took this picture of me at TAM 5.5. It’s not as bad as it looks.

So, do you own a copy of the book? Take a picture of yourself holding it in some fun location, send it to me, and I’ll post it here!

I was going to post on this, but Emily beat me to it: two space exploration shows are on tonight (Tuesday February 12). One, "Tank on the Moon", is about the Soviet lunar rover missions (the Lunakhods), and the other, "Astrospies", is about astronauts used to spy on other countries. Emily has the details. Both shows look like lots of fun, so I’ll be tuning in.

Antiscience kills. It does. Chelation, exorcisms, alternative medicine that replaces real medicine… all these (and many, many more) do real measurable damage to people.

But c’mon, folks like Sylvia Brown don’t really hurt us, right? They tell us what we want to hear, and that’s good. Right?

Right?

Wrong.

Fantasy has its place, but when it replaces reality it hurts us. We don’t seek cures, we don’t heal, we cannot make rational decisions. But specific examples of this are hard to pin down sometimes because of the vast number of cases which are spread out all over the place.

Well, not any more. Now when someone asks "What’s the harm?" you can send them right to What’s The Harm. This is a compendium of actual cases, real people who have been hurt or money that has been wasted due to magical thinking, from acupuncture to the Y2K scare. It’s a very interesting place to click around.

… until you see how children get hurt by this. Little kids, babies, injured or even killed by parents who were not able to break free of the blinders they wore due to some brand of antiscience. This is no joke, and it makes my stomach churn. People, sometimes children, die because of this.

Again, there are so many reasons to fight nonsensical thinking. But in the world, in the real world, it’s because we need to save peoples’ lives.

What’s The Harm allows you to submit cases yourself. Help them out, and let’s make this a resource for people all over the world to help save the world.

I’ve had this post in my drafts for weeks, so my thanks to Skeptico for reminding me to post it.

My sweetie Rebecca^* reminds me that today is Darwin Day! I like to pound the pulpit about evolution, but let’s face it, I’m an astronomer, not a biologist. So spend some time today perusing some biology blogs and see what folks are saying about the man who changed not just the world, but its entire history ranging back three billion years.

But don’t go squishy on me. You’ll just be feeding his ego.

^*Actually, to paraphrase Carol Marcus, Rebecca is many things, but she was never sweet.

Hot on the heels of that fabulous Spitzer image comes news that Hubble and Spitzer have teamed up to find what may be the most distant galaxy ever seen. It appears to be at a distance of 12.8 billion light years.

Yikes.

Here’s the image (click to make it more cromulent):

The big image shows the incredible galaxy cluster Abell 1689, a well-studied city of galaxies. The combined gravity of the galaxies in that cluster act as a lens, distorting and magnifying the light of galaxies on the other side, more distant galaxies that might be too faint to be seen on their own. The arcs you see are all more distant galaxies, their light strewn out by the gravity if the intervening cluster (see how they all appear to have the center of the cluster as their own center of curvature?).

Even boosted by this gravitational lens, the light of the distant galaxy named A1689-zD1 is too faint to be detected in the visible, but Hubble’s infrared camera NICMOS got a peek at it. Then the Spitzer Space Telescope was able to see it even more clearly, as can be seen by the three images on the right.

The more distant galaxies we see, the younger they are, because it takes light a long time to cross the Universe. We see this galaxy as it was when the Universe itself was only about a billion years old. Astronomers are not sure how long it took galaxies to form after the Big Bang, but every time we look farther away, we still see galaxies. Mind you, the ones we see have to be fantastically bright, so they may be skewing our view (there may be much dimmer ones, but they are as yet too faint to see). But the point is, we do see galaxies at this fantastic distance.

The distance was determined by looking at the colors of the galaxy. The Universe is expanding, and more distant galaxies recede from us more quickly. This stretches the light from distant objects out, making them redder, a cosmic variation on the more familiar Doppler shift that makes car engines make that WWEWEEEEEOOOOOORRRR sound as they pass. By knowing what kind of light a young galaxy emits, and then comparing it to the amount of light in each image, the amount of redshift can be estimated, and the distance determined. For A1689-zD1, it’s invisible in visible light, detectable at near infrared wavelengths, and stronger yet in the longer infrared colors. This indicates a tremendous redshift, and therefore a great distance.

From my rough calculation, it may be possible to nail down the redshift using STIS, a camera on board Hubble. STIS is currently dead, the victim of an electrical short. However, astronauts will attempt a repair of it in September during the Hubble servicing mission. I wonder if it’s worth trying to observe the galaxy… it’s a marginal observation; it’s possible that even if STIS can detect this faint smudge, it will only be able to give us a lower limit to the distance (in other words, the data will say that the galaxy is at least at a distance of X billion light years, but not tell us what the actual distance is). Still, it might be worth a shot.

By knowing the distance to this galaxy, and examining the way it emits light, we can put yet another data point in our models of the early Universe. We’re still trying to figure out just what the heck the cosmos was doing back then, and every time we see farther back, we nail down a little bit more about this place we live in. Observations like this one from Hubble and Spitzer propel us that much farther in our understanding.

I think one of the most amazing things we have learned in the centuries of the scientific pursuit of astronomy is that stars are born, they live out their lives, and that they die. That concept by itself is stunning: a process which takes billions of years can be understood, simply by knowing a few laws of physics and taking a look around.

And look we do. We have fantastic tools to investigate the lives of stars, and one of the best is the Spitzer Space Telescope. Don’t believe me? Then take a look at this stunner:

Spitzer took this gorgeous picture of the star forming region around the nearby star Rho Ophiuchi (just called Rho Oph for short). At 400 light years away, it’s one of the closest places where stars are actively being born, and so it provides us a front-row seat to the process.

However, the problem is that our great view to the show is blocked by a stage curtain. Star birth, like human birth, is messy. Gas and dust litter the nursery, obscuring what’s going on. Spitzer’s advantage is that it sees light in the infrared, which can penetrate the muck. The stars being born emit a lot of infrared light, so it can pierce the veil, so to speak, and reach us and our telescopes.

And what a sight! Infrared light emitted by the gas and dust themselves appears as tenuous wisps streaming across the view. The newborn stars shine brightly, and their fierce light (and strong solar winds) sculpt the gas, pushing it aside, carving sandbar-like shapes. Look at the windswept cloud just above the center of the image. That blob of material is probably a light year or more across, and its shape is due to the infant stars just below it and to the right in the picture. They are eroding it as surely as a river erodes away a spit of sand.

Spitzer can see different wavelengths, different colors of infrared as well, and this tells us different things about the nebula. For example, in the image above at the very left just below center is a red star, and you can just see that is has a fuzziness to it. In this case, the light we are seeing is coming mostly from very long infrared wavelengths (24 microns, for those keeping track at home; for comparison, a human hair is about 50 microns wide). But Spitzer can also see shorter wavelengths where the view is a little better, and it made an image of this nebula using those colors of infrared as well. Here is a side-by-side of the two images, zoomed in and centered on that fuzzy star:

On the left is the short wavelength image (in this case, 8 microns) and on the right is the 24 micron image (actually, they are composites of several wavelengths, but the longest wavelength in each is 8 and 24 microns, respectively). In the 8 micron image on the left, the nebulosity is easier to see, and reveals itself to be hourglass-shaped, pinched in the middle and flaring at the ends. Astronomers call this kind of nebula bipolar: the star is emitting gas from its poles in opposite directions. This is a dead giveaway that we’re looking at a very young star, only a few million years or so old. Rapid spin, strong magnetic fields and other forces are what focus that gas outflow, and the process itself will eventually slow the star’s spin like a parachute slows a skydiver. After a few dozen million years the flow will shut down, and the star will look a lot like the Sun.

So it’s not just looking in infrared that lets us peek into the cradle (to completely mix all metaphors), but it’s looking in different flavors of infrared that really lets us understand what’s going on. Because of telescopes like Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, and ground based behemoths like Gemini, Keck, and the VLT — and a lot of smart people, hard work, and scientific progress — we now understand a fair bit about how stars are born. It’s an ongoing process of creation, it’s incredibly beautiful, and we understand it. How cool is that?