Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I just found out I’ll be on the radio show Coast to Coast AM tonight at 22:00 or thereabouts Pacific Time (05:00 UT Friday morning). We’ll be chatting about the Hubble images I wrote about this morning, and I’m sure I’ll get a plug in for the book, too.

Update: Well, that was fast! There must be a lot of news tonight. Still, it’s always fun to be on.

A Texas judge state’s commissioner for higher education has ruled that the Institute (heh) of Creation (heh heh) Research (HAHAHAHAhahahaha) can’t award Masters of Science degrees.

I mean, duh. The judge commissioner said, basically, that religion isn’t science.

Again, duh.

But then the judge commissioner said:

Religious belief is not science… Science and religious belief are surely reconcilable, but they are not the same thing.

Perhaps some aspects of religion are reconcilable with science, but not the idea that the Earth is 6000 years old. That’s just wrong.

The money quote is here:

“What they are calling science education has as much to do with science as reality television has to do with reality,” said Paul Murray, a geophysicist from Austin.

Man, I’ll have to remember that.

And to the ICR, I say: <Nelson>HA ha!</Nelson>

Tip o’ the mortar board to BABloggee Richard Wilbourn.

Hey, another blog carnival is up today; The Skeptic’s Circle #85, hosted at Andrea’s Buzzing About. I just perused some of the entries there, and it’s good stuff! But don’t believe me. Click it. I dare you. Shake up your belief.

At the Popular Mechanics websites, Rand Simberg has written an unusually lucid and clear opinion piece on how the three Presidential candidates see NASA. Lucid and clear compared to lots of other things I’m reading, that is.

The bottom line: things don’t look so good for the human spaceflight part of the space agency. None of the candidates looks like they support the current Moon and Mars goals, and McCain looks like he’ll freeze NASA’s budget. It’s not clear if Clinton and Obama will cut spending either; neither actually says they will cut the budget as McCain did.

Let me be very clear here: NASA may need reorganizing, and it may need to rethink the humans-on-Mars idea since that is a huge expenditure with no clear goal and no real mission plan. The Moon is somewhat better defined, but only somewhat. Still, cutting NASA’s budget is stupid. Yes, I said stupid. It gets 0.7% of the national budget, which is a pittance, while we churn through 12 megabucks per hour in Iraq… but McCain wants us to stay in Irag for the next 100 years.

Stupid.

Obama said earlier this year he wanted to cut NASA’s budget and move that money to education. The Department of Education’s budget for fiscal year 2009 is about $65 billion. NASA’s FY09 budget is $18 billion, less than a third that of the DoE.

Stupid.

Even stupider, since NASA already funds education; that was what I worked on for six years at Sonoma State University. The level of internal NASA funding for education was small (just 1 or 2% of a mission’s cost) but we did some effective work. Cutting NASA for the DoE is just plain dumb, and I’m glad Obama backed off that rhetoric.

If I worked at NASA right now, I’d be updating my resume. Unless someone can grab these candidates — hopefully before they take office and it’s too late — and tell them just how important spaceflight is. They just don’t seem to get it.

After writing the previous article, I found this on the web: a post by Hell’s Handmaiden that contains a video with an interview of a Muslim "scientist". Warning: this may make your head explode.

This guy, Abd Al-Baset Sayyid (about whom I’ve written before) is spouting 100% pure unadulterated nonsense (and from this video it’s clear, as I said in the previous post, that it’s his stuff being talked about in the BBC article). It’s like listening to a little kid explaining a dream he had. The Earth emits infinite short-wave radiation? Centered on Mecca?

The zero-magnetism stuff he says at about 2:00 minutes in is jaw-dropping. Compasses don’t work on the Equator? News to me! He doesn’t understand that the needle in a compass is also a magnet, and will always align itself with the magnetic field lines? He would fail 4th grade science.

According to him, gravity’s lower in Mecca, too. Cool. We should launch rockets from there.

Wow. I’m not sure if I feel better or worse knowing that it’s not just creationists in America that spew out crap like this. It’s a little comforting knowing that it’s not an American trademark, but it’s terrifying to think that even if we could somehow get folks in the US to see things straight, there are still hundreds of millions of other people across the globe who are so woefully uneducated in the ways of reality.

Clearly, Abd Al-Baset Sayyid is a crank. But he seems to get airtime, and that’s what makes me seriously unhappy. He has the right to emit as much nonsense as he wants, but I certainly wish TV shows wouldn’t let him do it to millions of people, just because his nonsense happens to align with their beliefs.

Fundamentalism, in any flavor, really plays havoc with reality.

The conduit this time is the BBC news, which posted this confused article about Muslims (specifically, the cleric Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy) wanting Mecca’s time zone to be used as the world’s standard, replacing Greenwich.

The article is pretty weird, because it focused on the ridiculous claims by fundamentalist Muslims^* but doesn’t say much in the way of rebutting any of them. For example, one claim listed in the article is that Mecca is the center of the Earth. I guess it must get hot there, what with all that ionized iron and magma surrounding it for thousands of kilometers!

Or do they think the Earth is flat? Well, then all arguments are off… though I suppose they’d still have to prove that Mecca is near the center of the Earth’s disk. "Because I said so" isn’t even a good excuse for a parent to use to a four year old, let alone be the basis of rewriting all of Earth’s time zones.

My favorite quotation in the article is this one:

One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca’s was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.

That’s a good trick! How does a city align itself to anything? Maybe the civil borders can be north/south, but that’s arbitrary. Maybe some buildings do too, but a whole city?

And magnetic north? Perhaps the article author misquoted the geologist, or maybe it was in fact what the geologist said… but the magnetic poles of the Earth wander around over the surface of the planet. Does Mecca undergo changes in its orientation to match?

The article author then really steps in it with this closing paragraph:

But the movement is not without its critics, who say that the notion that modern science was revealed in the Koran confuses spiritual truth, which is constant, and empirical truth, which depends on the state of science at any given point in time.

That makes it sound like science is a dithering, undecided venture with no claim to reality, while Islam is rock steady. That’s pretty disingenuous. Science is a path from ignorance to knowledge which uses evidence and observation to understand the real, objective world. It changes as ideas get better, and ever-approaches truth. Denying reality when it goes against your scripture is not a good way to understand the real world. The phrasing of that article isn’t all that strong either way, but that in and of itself is a miscarriage of justice. Why not call things as they are? Why feel the need to equivocate?

I don’t feel that need at all.

Now, despite the claims of some commenters here, I don’t want to abolish religion, and of course it has a significant place in human discourse. But when it overlaps into scientific definitions, there is almost always going to be trouble. In this case, I don’t think much will come of it: literal Koranists can define their time zones any way they want, but good luck to them in convincing anyone else of it. Americans still haven’t even gone metric after a zillion years of trying, and time zones are far worse to change. Trust me: I got jet lag just having to think about debunking nonsense like this.

What happens when a smallish galaxy plows right through the center of a bigger one?

This:

Holy Haleakala. That’s Arp 148, and it’s magnificent. That elongated galaxy was probably not quite so stretchy before it hit, but the gravity of the other galaxy drew it out. In turn, its own gravity drew in stars and gas from the bigger galaxy, which then expanded as a ring as the smaller galaxy plunged on. It almost looks like a freeze-frame image of a bullet shattering a drum head.

If you like that, you’ll love this: Hubble has released 59 such images of galaxy collisions today (the US version of the release is here), celebrating Hubble’s 18th anniversary in space. It launched on April 24, 1990.

The galaxy pictures are stunning. The one on the left is Arp 256, two spiral galaxies interacting as they pass each other for the first time. Long tendrils are being drawn from both galaxies, and the blue regions indicate epic bursts of star formation (young, massive stars are blue and extremely luminous). Someday the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will look very much like this… a billion years from now, when they pass each other. I’d write more here, but golly, I have a book coming out in October with lots more details.

This one is even weirder: it’s a red elliptical galaxy and a bluish spiral interacting. The blue galaxy looks to be small to my eye; it’s getting totally disrupted by the elliptical. There’s some indications of dust getting blown every which-way in the elliptical too. This will be a very interesting system in about another 500 million years or so.

I’ll leave you with one more: NGC 6050.

Two magnificent spiral galaxies, each about the same size, slide toward one another and are just now beginning their slow dance. I can almost imagine them spinning like buzz saws into each other, tearing both to shreds (in fact, they look a whole lot like the animation of colliding galaxies used in my short astronomy video on Hulu — and yes, we’ll be posting that on internationally-accessible servers soon). The two spirals will no doubt merge completely into an elliptical… unless they’re moving too quickly. They are both part of the Hercules Cluster of galaxies, 650 million light years away (the press release says 450 million, but the 2MASS catalog says 650). Hercules has over 100 galaxies in it and is therefore pretty massive; all that mass means a lot of gravity, and that in turn means the component galaxies are screaming along at high velocity. It’s possible these two beauties will continue on their way, passing through each other, distorted, beaten, but surviving.

I wonder how that story will end; lover’s embrace or ships passing (literally) in the night? With images like these, astronomers will learn a lot more about how galaxies behave when they collide, and that will point the way to better, more detailed observations. Eventually we’ll know how the story goes, from start to finish.

Our own future is wrapped up in these images, writ large across the sky. As usual in astronomy, and in science as a whole, by looking outwards we learn more about ourselves.

Happy anniversary, Hubble.