Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Well, this certainly explains a lot.

“After impact with the satellite, these diverted prayers typically plummet back into the atmosphere, where they either burn up or eventually land, unanswered, in a body of water,” the report read in part.

Tip o’ the mitre to BABloggee Mike Murray.

BABloggee Tom Epps may hold a record: he has carried his copy of the BA book to more than 65 countries! Here he is holding it while his ship, the USNS Arctic, crossed the Suez Canal:

This begs the question: once he crossed into the red Sea, did he part with it?

Scientists have used Hubble to detect methane in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star for the first time and to confirm the existence of water vapor there as well.

This is not an easy thing to do! The planet is so close to its star that they can’t be separated in an image, and the star totally overwhelms the light from the planet. However, when the planet is between the star and us (think of it as a tiny and very distant eclipse) the starlight passes through the planet’s atmosphere, which absorbs some of the light. Methane is very good at sucking down infrared light in fact, so when you look in the infrared you see the star looking a bit dimmer.

If you take a spectrum — break the light up into individual colors — you can get pretty detailed information about the starlight. In this case, the absorption by methane in the planet’s atmosphere is pretty clear.

A spectrum is like a fingerprint: it identifies the element or molecule, how much of it there is, and even in some cases its temperature. The spectrum obtained using Hubble indicates the presence of methane and water vapor.

This is an important first step in understanding exoplanetary atmospheres, especially since we don’t know all that much about these giant Jupiters that orbit close in to their parent stars. In this case, the planet, called HD 189733b, is about 63 light years away, and orbits its star in just about two days. We don’t expect there to be life on it — the tops of the clouds are at about 1700 degrees Fahrenheit — but just finding these two molecules means they must be abundant in other planetary systems.

Now here’s a dash of some slightly chillier water on these findings. First, they aren’t surprising: I’d be far more surprised if we didn’t find these molecules in the planet’s atmosphere. We’ve seen plenty of both water and methane in space; in fact I worked on spectra of a brown dwarf that showed water vapor (literally steam in this case) in its atmosphere — plus, the water vapor was previously detected using Spitzer (the telescope, not the governor). Methane is a very simple molecule, and should form anywhere there is carbon, hydrogen, and low enough temperatures so that the molecule doesn’t break apart.

To me, the import of these findings is that with equipment we already have, we can probe the atmosphere of a planet over 600 trillion kilometers away. That’s cool. That implies very strongly that with the next generation of space and ground-based telescopes being built now, we’ll soon have an even better glimpse into the air out there.

So March 20 at 05:48 UT (11:48 p.m. tonight my local time) the center of the Sun will appear to be directly over the celestial equator, and it will be the moment of the Vernal Equinox.

Got your eggs handy?

Every year I get people asking me about my egg-standing technique, which I have honed over years of practice. I decided to make a video tutorial so that you, my BABloggee, can reproduce (haha! get it? It’s an egg!) this experience for yourself.

So get cracking.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I kill me.

Update: Right after I posted this, Universe Today put up a post on it as well!

I’ve been getting a spate of emails lately with links to other sites of interest, so I thought a link dump might be in order.

First, a real science site: ReducedMass is a new science blog that the author described to me as a Gizmodo for science, and I’d agree. it’s not snarky, but it is funny and cute.

Second, a marginally sciencey page on Religious Tolerance that lists many end-of-the-world predictions that have failed to come to pass, from 30CE to 1990. They could easily double the length of the list by bringing it up to 2008. The thing about EotW predictions is, they will all be wrong… until one isn’t.

The third is, well, I think someone who is saying that NASA is lying and planets are hollow and they all have life, based on a Hindu religious text. I don’t care what your religion is, if your holy book contradicts everything we know about reality, I pick reality.

The fourth is a video from some guy who is claiming… wait for it… Columbia was shot down by aliens! What is it about reality and evidence some people find so alarming? Not that you’ll make it through the first vid, but here’s a link to Part II as well. I accept no responsibility for melted brains.

Fifth, an Indian skeptic challenged a practitioner of black magic to kill him using his powers (Randi mentioned this as well in his weekly newsletter). Needless to say, reality won yet again. That reality! You just can’t wish it away!

Sixth, Senators Sam Brownback (R-Middle Ages) and Joe Lieberman (XXOO-McCain) want the U.S. Senate to take off from such ridiculous time-wasting things as government oversight and the tanking economy to recognize "the importance the Ten Commandments have in our nation", because, I assume, we are all totally worshipping false idols. And of course no one in the Senate would steal, or lie, or covet their neighbor’s ass. I guess there are already enough asses in the Senate.

I think that’s it for now. Read those sites and enjoy or experience schadenfreude to your heart’s content.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to all the BABloggees who are obviously trying to get me to lose weight due to an upset stomach.

Go outside, look up at night, wait long enough, and zip! You’ll see a tiny bit of rock burn up in our atmosphere: a meteor.

But other objects get hit too, including the Moon. It happens more rarely; the Moon presents a smaller cross-section to get hit, and its gravity is lower so it cannot draw in material as well as Earth. But hit it does get, and if you watch long enough you’ll see one.

Amateur astronomer George Varros did just that on March 13, and better yet, he had a video camera hooked up to his telescope! He captured an impact, and has an animation on his site of it; the image above is a still from it.

These are notoriously hard to get on video, and even then they are harder to confirm; it might be something else like a flaw in the camera. But in this case, other cameras caught it, so this has been confirmed; it was the equivalent of about 100 kilograms of TNT exploding on the lunar surface. Assuming an impact speed of 30 km/sec (that’s a complete guess, but about the speed of an orbiting object near the Earth’s distance from the Sun) the object itself would have massed about a ton kilogram. If it were a rocky sphere it would have been about a meter across 10 centimeters across, roughly the size of a baseball. Not something you want hitting your house!

Varros has a page listing other impacts he’s caught as well. Very cool, and very useful! Eventually, when we go back to the Moon, the number and size of impacts on the surface will determine how we build structures on — or below — the lunar surface.