Blogs / Bad Astronomy

… Hemant has this:

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. [PZ] Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed.

Yes, Ben Stein went there. He equates PZ with Nazis who gassed Jews by the hundreds of thousands.

Great guy, huh?

There is nothing too onerous for that foul little man to say. Nothing. And then he turns around and talks about "God’s love". What an evil hypocrite.

This news came as a surprise: my old friend Bob Naeye will be the new Editor-in-Chief of Sky and Telescope magazine!

Criminy, where to start? OK (and I hope I have all this in correct chronological order), Bob was an editor at Astronomy magazine, and when I was a fledgling writer just spreading my wings (barf gag) he edited contributions I made to Ask Astro, their Q&A section. His edits were always right on the money, always improving what I wrote. Not only that, but he was easy-going and fun to work with.

Then he moved on to Mercury magazine, the publication of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. I sent them one or two articles, and again his editing was great.

Sometime around this era (2002) he won the David Schramm award for best writing in high-energy astronomy, for his article about the Chandra X-ray Observatory titled "Superman’s Telescope". I voted for him, by the way. I worried a bit about favoritism, but although there were good entries that year, his was clearly the best.

Then he became an editor at Sky and Telescope, and was once again one of their best writers and editors. Eventually, he wanted to move on, and went to Goddard Space Flight Center to work on their public outreach there. I enthusiastically endorsed this move by NASA; and it was cool to see his byline on press releases from there (which were always, of course, top-notch).

Last I heard he was still there, so this news of his going back up to Cambridge to be the E-C of Sky and Tel is a surprise, but a great one! Sky and Tel is an honorable and venerable magazine, supporting amateur astronomy for many decades. I’ve written for them many times (and I’m still around, guys, hello?) and getting Bob back will only make them even better. Rick Fienberg, the outgoing EiC, is also an old friend and I’m glad to see he is staying on with the mag as a contributing editor.

So again, congratulations, Bob! It’s always nice to see good things happening to good people.

But of course, we know that. That puts the lie to everything Ben Stein says in his craptacular movie Expelled, too, since it’s illegal to teach religion in schools. And why doesn’t Ben ever mention Chris Comer in the movie? She really was expelled due to creationism… but maybe Stein would rather you didn’t know about her. Hmmmm.

The heroes at NCSE put out this video, which drives home the point about just how deceptive creationist promulgators can be, showing yet again that they are hypocrites, ignoring the Ninth Commandment.

The Milky Way Galaxy is relatively typical of galaxies today, if a bit on the beefy side. It has about 200 billion stars, and is 100,000 light years across.

Now imagine a galaxy with that same mass, but only 5000 light years across. That would be an incredibly densely packed galaxy, and in all honesty, pretty freaky.

But that’s exactly what astronomers using Hubble and Keck have found! Probing the early Universe, 11 billion light years away, they found nine galaxies that are as massive as galaxies today, but far more compact. The galaxies are very young, only a half to one billion years old, judging from the types of stars they contain. Not only that, they appear to be quiet: unlike our galaxy today, these distant compact galaxies are not actively forming stars. It’s as if they formed all their stars all at once right from the start, and then that was that.

This plot shows that these galaxies really are small and massive. Size is shown on the vertical scale (bigger galaxies are near the top) and mass along the horizontal (more massive galaxies to the right). A big massive galaxy would be to the upper right, and a low mass, dinky galaxy to the lower left. These oddballs are marked, and are clearly separate from other galaxies: they are massive, yet small.

That’s really weird! What could cause such galaxies to form so tightly jammed with stars? One idea is that in the early Universe there were pockets of dark matter, places where it was somewhat denser than on average. Hydrogen would have collected there, attracted by the fierce gravity, and formed the galaxies. Constrained by the dark matter pockets, the galaxies would have been very dense and formed stars furiously for a short period until all the hydrogen was used up. That would explain their small stature, dense stellar population, and lack of ongoing star formation. But it’s just a hypothesis for now.

What’s also odd is that we do not see any galaxies like these today; any galaxy of comparable mass that we see in the current Universe today is far larger, like our Milky Way. So these galaxies existed in the past — possibly in large numbers — but we don’t see them now. Where did they go?

They may get bigger with time. It’s not clear how they would do that, but perhaps the more massive stars fall to the center, flinging lighter stars outward, puffing up the galaxies over time (I describe this process a bit in a post yesterday about globular clusters). Maybe they collide and puff up — though that means they would get even more massive than we see them, and they’re already as hefty as galaxies today. Maybe they grow dark over time, and we just don’t see them any more.

Actually, I don’t like any of these answers very much. We obviously need a lot more observations of these tiny dense suckers. However, we’re pretty much at the limit now; it took Hubble’s and Keck’s incredible resolution to be able to see these things at all. We’ll have to wait for the Hubble servicing mission in September to get even deeper images, when the new Wide Field Camera goes online. I suspect that STIS, the spectrograph that I used to work on, may be able to help as well, if the astronauts can fix it too.

Either way, it’s cool to know the Universe can still throw us the odd curveball or two. The more we look, the more weirdness we find.

Fancy yourself a science writer? Do you like weather?

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (right here in Boulder!) is holding a four-day science writing workshop on June 23-27, and they’re looking for applicants. This will be fully funded (well, there are five fellowships), but you have to have the chops: they’re looking for applicants with "five years of writing, producing, or editing experience for a general-interest audience," as an example.

I normally don’t post things such as this, but NCAR is way way cool, and I support fully what they do. And, of course, we need more trained science writers, trained specifically in topics of interest and import. I know a few pro writers read my humble blog, so apply! The application deadline is May 16.