Happy birthday, Universe!

Kinda. It’s not really the Universe’s birthday, but now we do know to high accuracy just how old it is.

How?

NASA’s WMAP is the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (which is a mouthful, and why we just call it WMAP). It was designed to map the Universe with exquisite precision, detecting microwaves coming from the most distant source there is: the cooling fireball of the Big Bang itself.

New results just released from WMAP have nailed down lots of cool stuff — literally — about the Universe.

I am about to explain the early Universe to you. I’ll be brief, but if you want to skip to the results, then go ahead.

Here’s the quick version: the Big Bang was hot. The Universe itself expanded outward from a single point — actually, it’s space itself that expands, not the objects in it — and like any expanding gas it cooled. After about a microsecond, it had cooled enough for protons and neutrons to form. Three minutes later (yes, just three minutes) it had cooled enough for protons and neutrons to stick together. Hydrogen, helium, and just a dash of lithium were created, and these would be the only elements for some time (hundreds of millions of years, in fact). The Universe was a thick soup of matter and energy.

It kept expanding and cooling. At this point, it was opaque to light. A photon couldn’t travel an inch without smacking into an electron and then getting sent off in some other random direction. However, after a few hundred thousand years, an amazing thing happened: neutral hydrogen could form. Before this point, the Universe was still too hot; as soon as an electron bonded with a proton, some ultraviolet photon would come along and whack it off. But at that golden moment the cosmos had cooled off enough that a lasting atomic relationship was in the offing. Neutral hydrogen was born. At that moment — astronomers call it recombination, which is a misnomer, since it was the first time electrons and protons could combine — the Universe became transparent; without all those pesky electrons floating around, photons found themselves free to travel long distances.

It’s those photons WMAP sees. After 13.7 billion years, the expansion of the Universe has cooled the light, stretched its wavelength from ultraviolet to microwave. Another way to think about it is that the temperature associated with each photon went from thousands of Kelvins down to just a few, less than 3, in fact. That’s -270 Celsius, and -454 Fahrenheit.

Brrrr.

That light emitted just after recombination tells us a vast amount about the Universe at that time. By carefully mapping the exact wavelength of the light and the direction from where it came, we can tell the density and temperature of the matter at that time. Incredibly we can also tell how much dark energy there was, and even the geometry of the Universe: whether it is flat, open, or closed.

All this, from the dying glow of the Big Bang itself.

WMAP Results

A lot of this information was determined a while back, just a couple of years after WMAP launched. But now they have released the Five Year Data, a comprehensive analysis of what all that data means. Here’s a quick rundown:

1) The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn’t look a day over 6000 years. They’re wrong.

2) The image above shows the temperature difference between different parts of the sky. Red is hotter, blue is cooler. However, the difference is incredibly small: the entire temperature range from cold to hot is only 0.0002 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is 2.725 Kelvin, so you’re seeing temperatures from 2.7248 to 2.7252 Kelvins.

3) The age of the Universe when recombination occurred was 375,938 years, +/- about 3100 years. Wow.

4) The Universe is flat.

5) The energy budget of the Universe is the total amount of energy and matter in the whole cosmos added up. Together with some other observations, WMAP has been able to determine just how much of that budget is occupied by dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. What they got was: the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe.

We occupy a razor thin slice of reality.

There are other important things that have come from the WMAP data, and if you’re interested, you can read all about them on the WMAP site and in the professional journal papers.

But if you only want to peruse the results I’ve highlighted here, that’s fine too. But remember this, and remember it well: you are living in a unique time. For the first time in all of human history, we can look up at the sky, and when it looks back down on us it reveals its secrets. We are the very first humans to be able to do this… and we have the entire future of the Universe ahead of us.

Via Digg I heard that the makers of Rolling Rock beer want to, um, Moonvertise.

That is, use a laser to paint an ad on the Moon.

OK.

So I checked out the Rolling Rock moonvertising website. Then I waited several minutes for their incredibly bad and slow-loading Flash page to come up on my browser.

Strike One.

Then, obnoxious music and sound effects blared out my speaker, and it wasn’t obvious at first how to turn them down or off.

Strike Two.

Then, their Flash animation started eating up all my CPU.

Strike Three.

YEEEEERRRRRRR OUT!

OK, I still hung out to figure out what the heck this was about. The idea, according to the site, is that they will use a big laser to shine their logo on the full Moon. Let’s be clear up front: this is a joke. It took me about three seconds (after the ten minute loading to finish) to figure that out.

<Pedant mode ON>

Realistically, it’s not possible to do what they want to do. The Moon is a quarter million miles away, and lasers spread. Even tightly focused beams will spread out hugely by that distance. That means the power gets spread out, so the laser is pretty dim by the time it gets to the Moon.

Then, the light has to be reflected back to the Earth. The Moon is really not terribly reflective; its average albedo is about 12%, which means it reflects only 12% of the light that hits it. So you lose 7/8 of the light you send there anyway.

Of course, a laser powerful enough to overcome all this would probably have military applications, since it would have enough power to slice an incoming missile in half. Calling Chris Knight and Mitch Taylor! I imagine the FAA might be a little concerned about planes in the area, too. Any birds that happen to fly too close might be fried… hmmmm, does crow go with beer?

And, duh of duhs, they say they are doing this during the full Moon, when the surface of the Moon is lit up by the Sun! The best time to do this would be around first quarter, when the Moon is half dark, and up during the early evening. That way the surface is dark and provides contrast, and more people will be around to see it.

<Pedant mode OFF>

So this is a clever idea as far as satirical advertising goes, and not meant to be taken seriously… which hasn’t stopped people, of course.

But, if it gets people to go outside and look at the full Moon, well, that’s still pretty cool. We’ll see.

Or not.

A while back I wrote about the movie "I Am Legend", saying it was really good right up until the last five minutes, which were a putrescent pile of gentle steaming waste matter.

Turns out an alternate ending was filmed. While it’s not perfect, it’s about a bazillion times better than what was released in the theater. It’s out on YouTube Gametrailers. Warning: may be a little intense for the kiddies.

I like this one better for many reasons. The ending that was released was way too mystical for no reason; it was added on as a feel-good Hollywood ending that ruined the entire movie. This one isn’t quite as grim as I would have liked, but it’s not a fairy tale ending. Also, the zombies’ intelligence was already established in the movie, so this isn’t too much of a deviation from that direction.

I think the movie-going public can handle ambiguous endings, scary endings, even depressing endings. This cut would have been a (baby) step in the right direction.

NASA is stuffy. NASA has no use. NASA is a waste of money. NASA doesn’t speak to me.

NASA is old media.

Sound familiar? It might. I’ve heard it a few times. In fact, I know lots of people who feel this way, or at least I’ve seen these sorts of things said on bulletin boards and other venues.

A lot of folks don’t connect with NASA. And while that can be stated simply, it opens up a huge mess of problems for NASA. The space agency is run by people who are my age and older, people who were inspired by Apollo. The thing is, to people under the age of about 35, Apollo is ancient history. Some NASA administrators can’t grasp that fact.

When I was still doing contract work for NASA, I was knocking on doors trying to get them to modernize their public outreach. I was trying to tell them that they were disconnecting with youth. Specifically, I wanted them to sexy up the Moon missions. I wanted a rover that could be controlled by a console at a theme park. I wanted games online based on the Moon, school projects where kids designed their own colony.

I was met with a pretty cold silence — A few years ago I arranged a meeting with people at NASA HQ to discuss NASA lunar outreach effort, and when I arrived, literally one person showed up. One NASA top banana, when asked about the lackadaisical support for a return to the Moon, said that when we go back to the Moon, people will naturally be interested. Build it, he said, and they will come.

I LOL’ed. My first reaction to that was: what generation does this guy live in?

Not Gen Y, that’s for sure. But NASA does have some younger folks working for them, 20-30-somethings who are keyed in, who use Twitter, and Facebook, and (shudder) MySpace. These younger NASAians know what their age group responds to, far better than their bosses do.

A quartet of them put together a PPT presentation about how NASA can join the rest of us in the 21st Century, and they called it Gen Y Perspectives. I think everyone at NASA should read it, and moreover, they should take it to heart.

When I was a kid, NASA stood for adventure, exploration, cutting edge science, pushing back frontiers. It stood for people walking on the surface of another world.

It’s hard for a lot of people my age and older to understand this, but NASA doesn’t mean the same thing to kids these days.

And it should. They’re NASA.

W00t! Great news from the Lone Star State: two seats on the State School Board were being challenged by creationists, and both creationists lost (free registration may be required to read that story).

Yeehaw!

As they say down there.

So the two incumbents, one a moderate Republican and the other a Democrat, retain their seats. Texans, you may breathe a momentary sigh of relief.

But only momentary. Feel that itch, that icy cold twitch right between your shoulder blades? That’s from the stare of creationists, who still have you in their crosshairs. Never forget that the forces of antiscience, of antireality, never rest. They may be stinging in their defeat, but you can bet your last head of cattle that the creationists will regroup and do what they can to undermine science.

But for now, rejoice. Congratulations to those of you who fought to keep the medievalists at bay. Good work.

Tip o’ the ten gallon hat top BABloggee Christian Burnham for the news.

I can’t seem to go a week without seeing my friend Dan Durda popping up on TV or someplace. He’s an astronomer, currently on loan to NASA, and he specializes in asteroids. For quite some time he has looked for a class of asteroids called Vulcanoids, a group of rocks that orbit the Sun inside Mercury’s orbit. It’s not known if these things even exist, but if they do they’ll be very interesting. That close to the Sun, all the lighter molecules like water will have burned off, leaving any Vulcanoid rich in metals.

Dan is interviewed (along with other astronomers) in this short clip on MSNBC’s website (I had some trouble embedding this, so if it doesn’t work, try the direct link).

On a related note, my e-friend Bill Arnett runs the Nine Eight Planets website, and he has a short but cool writeup on the mythical inter-Mercurial planet Vulcan. I think historical stories about wild goose chases like that are really fun to read about.