Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Update (Feb 20): The Navy has apparently successfully hit the satellite with a missile.

I have been hearing lots of rumors and getting asked a lot by friends about the spy satellite USA 193 that the United States intends to blow up, so I created this 9-minute video (also embedded below). I talk about what’s going to happen, what we know, what we’re guessing, why the satellite is falling back to Earth, why they might blow it up during the eclipse tonight, and why this is different than what the Chinese did in 2007.

A lot of this is my opinion, like maybe that the real reason they’re blowing it up is to keep any secret tech out of enemies’ hands. But I am trying to base what I’m saying here on what is actually known. No (goofy) conspiracies needed.

You can get more info on the USA 193 Wikipedia page, and another great place to learn about what’s going on over your head is Jonathan’s Space Report.

So, you’re a skeptic, eh?

Think you’re hot stuff? Think you have a keen sense of humor, a critical mind, and you look dynamite in black-and-white?

Then maybe you should apply to be a calendar model over at Skepchick.

All the cool kids have done it: Randi, Shermer, Wiseman… me. Yeah, me.

If you have what it takes (basically, a complete lack of shame) then apply! Besides, who wouldn’t want to pose in the altogether for someone like this?

Today, the Florida state Board of Education voted on new science standards for teaching evolution. By a 4-3 margin, the word evolution (gasp! horror!) is now included in the biology standards for the first time ever.

Hooray!

However, there are a bunch of caveats. First, it’s great that the word has been used instead of weaselly phrases like "change over time". Creationists hate the word evolution, and love to try to water it down. While "change over time" is technically correct, it avoids mentioning the principle scientific basis of that change.

So that’s a plus. However, the word evolution is preceded by "the scientific theory of" which again is technically correct, but we all know how creationists love to dissemble over the word theory. So in effect, this is a win for them; they get to continue to lie over what the word theory means.

I’ll also note that "evolution" was included only by a 4-3 vote, which means that 43% of the board are at least creationist sympathizers (while members of the majority may also be, but were satisfied with the compromise wording). That in turn is a guarantee that this issue won’t go away. Lawsuits have been threatened, by both sides. Strap yourselves in, folks, because this will never end.

And, of course, there’s the elephant in the room: the breathtaking inanity of people trying to vote on reality.

Sigh. Well, at least Florida performed a bit of microevolution today (and even the creationists agree that happens)… but it sure would be nice to welcome them to Club Reality with a lifetime membership.

Note: Florida Citizens for Science live-blogged the debate, and will no doubt have more info on this as time goes on.

By now you’ve probably heard about the lunar eclipse tomorrow night. Lunar eclipses are great; they last a long time, so there’s no hurry, you don’t need crystal clear skies (the clearer the better, of course), and you don’t need a telescope! Just your eyes will do, though having binoculars is better. I actually prefer them over using a telescope.

The event will be visible pretty much everywhere in the US, Canada, South America, and western Africa and Europe. Orbiting Frog has a ton of info, including a nice animation of what to expect. Sky and Telescope has info as well (including a diagram with times listed for the west coast of the US, if that helps). But here’s the rundown:

The show starts for real around 01:43 Universal Time (CAREFUL HERE! That’s 1:43 a.m. on Thursday morning in England, but that’s Wednesday night for the United States. Check to see what your local offset is from Universal Time; for example, in Boulder we are UT - 7, so the eclipse starts here at 1:43 a.m. UT - 7 hours = 6:43 p.m. local time Wednesday night. But don’t trust me– do this math for yourself!).

You may read that the eclipse starts an hour or so before that, but if you look you probably won’t see anything. Earth casts a dark shadow surrounded by a much lighter one, called the umbra and penumbra, respectively. When the Moon enters the penumbra you’ll hardly notice, but when it enters the umbra at 01:43 it’ll look like a bite is taken out of it.

1 hour 20 minutes later (03:00 UT) the Moon will be totally engulfed in the Earth’s shadow. It may take on a brown or reddish appearance, depending on various factors like pollution in our atmosphere. Sometimes the Moon turns blood red, and it’s really amazing. I have found that the Moon appears to really be a globe when this happens; I assume it’s an illusion of some kind but the effect can be overwhelming.

The totality phase of the eclipse will last for about 51 minutes, and then it will start to leave the umbra, and you’ll see a bright crescent begin to form. By 05:10 UT it’ll all be over, and the Moon will look normal again.

I plan on being at The Little Astronomer’s school, since they’re hosting a party in the parking lot to see it. There are no doubt viewings all over the place, so call your local astronomy club, museum, or even news station to see what’s going on in your area.

This is the last total lunar eclipse for the US until very late in 2010, so I hope you get a chance to see it!

I just heard that astronomer Robert Jastrow died last week. I never met him, but I remember reading his book Red Giants and White Dwarfs when I was a kid; it was a pretty popular book in its day, and I’m sure it influenced me at a tender age.

Jastrow was fairly outspoken on a number of topics, and while I disagreed with him on some of them (particularly his views of science and religion), I’m glad that he was one of the few astronomers who was out there promoting astronomy to the public.

Any BABLoggees in the US northwest, near the southeast corner of Adams County? There are reports of a meteorite fall there this morning. If you saw anything, chime in!

Also, you can report it to the International Meteor Organization, which can aid in triangulating the fall and maybe finding the meteorite.

Tip o’ the Whipple shield to BABLoggee Measure for letting me know.

Gravitational lensing is all the rage these days! The fact that massive objects have gravity that bends lights was a prediction by Einstein, but it has come into its own over the past few years as a way of learning more about the Universe. We’ve used it to map dark matter, and to find planets orbiting other stars. The more lenses we find, the better we can map out the distant Universe.

And now Hubble has found new ones. 67 of them, in fact!

Gravity bends the path light takes in a similar manner in which a car has to follow a dip in the road. Gravity warps space, and a beam of light follows that warp. Galaxies have lot of mass, and therefore a lot of gravity. Imagine a distant galaxy, billions of light years away. Between us and it is another galaxy, much closer to us. The distant galaxy is sending out light in all directions. Light that happens to be aimed at us will eventually reach our telescopes.

But now imagine a beam of light that just misses us. It’s not quite aimed right at us. However, the galaxy in the middle bends the path of that beam, angling it just enough to hit us. Light from the distant galaxy that would otherwise miss us can hit us due to the lensing action of the galaxy in the middle! That makes the distant galaxy brighter to us: we’re getting more light from it.

But it also distorts the shape we see for that distant galaxy. It can be stretched out into arcs, for example, if the intervening galaxy is off to the side a bit. Like this:

Back when I worked on Hubble, one of our Early Release Observations (cool pictures taken right after a new camera is checked out) was of a cluster of galaxies — think of it as a condominium of galaxies — surrounded by four separate arcs. When I put the images together into a mosaic, I just stared at it. I had seen lenses before, in books and such, but never on data that I had personally been working on. That was very nifty.

But it gets better. If the lensing galaxy is smack dab between us and the farther object, the light can be focused into a perfect circle, called an Einstein Ring. The first image above is one of those. They’re pretty. They’re also terrifically cool.

We can learn a lot from such lensing. For one, we can see distant galaxies that might otherwise be invisible. Sure, they’re all twisted and weird, but we can still investigate them: spectra can tell us if stars are forming, for example. Also, the amount of distortion can yield the mass of the lensing galaxy (since the amount of lensing depends on the lensing galaxy’s gravity, which itself depends on the galaxy’s mass) and that can even be used to map out dark matter.

So this is pretty interesting news, and worth poking over the images. Certainly they are scientifically useful, but images of lensing events are also pretty weird. Looking at them is a reminder that the Universe is a pretty strange place.