My Second Published Science Fiction Story Now Available Free On Line

 As some regular readers know, one my recent projects is writing short science fiction stories based on good astronomy. After a long learning period, two of my stories have now been published in science fiction anthologies. The second one, which is about exploding stars and music, just had its rights returned to me, and so I am happy to put it up free on the web for everyone's enjoyment at: 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310397794_Supernova_Rhythm 

After the short story, I have put a non-technical explanation of the science behind the fiction.

The accompanying photo is a NASA composite showing the remnant of Tycho's Supernova, a star seen to explode by the great astronomer Tycho Brahe in October 1604. In this image, blue and green colors shows what the remnant would look like if you had x-ray eyes, the yellow shows what it looks like in visible light, and the green shows the heat rays (infrared) coming from the object. Blended together, all the colors show where this remarkable "left-over"of a star that blew itself to bits is still glowing brightly more than 400 years later.

By the way, if you also want to read my first published science fiction story "A Cave in Arsia Mons" (about a surprising discovery on Mars), you can do so at: 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282914928_The_Cave_in_Arsia_Mons

My Mars Science Fiction Story Now Free on the Web

As some of you know, I have begun writing science fiction stories (based on ideas from astronomy) in recent years and two of them have now been published.

The first story (“The Cave in Arsia Mons”) was published in a small-press anthology of Mars stories entitled “Building Red: Mission Mars,” and deals with a surprising discovery made in a cave on the side of one of the giant volcanoes on the red planet.

The publisher has now given me permission to put the story on-line free and it can be found at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282914928_The_Cave_in_Arsia_Mons
If you click on the blue “download” button just above and to the right of the title, you get a PDF file with the story and a bit about the actual discovery of martian caves.

My second story (“Supernova Rhythm”) is just being published in an anthology entitled “Science Fiction by Scientists,” edited by astronomer Mike Brotherton, and published by Springer. It concerns an advanced civilization out there that can play music using exploding stars:
http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319411019 or
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Fiction-Scienti…/…/3319411012

When I retire from teaching at Foothill College in June 2017, I am looking forward to spending more time writing science fiction stories like this.  For my listing of a wide range of science fiction stories with good astronomy, see: http://www.astrosociety.org/scifi 

New Evidence that We Live in a Space Bubble

Many people enjoy talking about their neighborhood, and how well they've come to know it. But do you know much about the "neighborhood" that our Sun and its planets hang out in? New evidence from an instrument launched aboard a NASA rocket has confirmed that our cosmic neighborhood really is a big bubble.

We have known for some time that our solar system sits inside a region which is emptier than the typical neighborhood in the Milky Way Galaxy. This "Local Bubble" (as it is called) is about 300 light years across, meaning light would take 300 years to cross it. Our diagram shows the bubble and some of the bright stars that are located in it. (The stars that looked brightest to our ancestors are the ones that wound up getting names. Many of the names we use today are Arabic translations of ancient Greek names.)

The Sun is actually located in a region that has a bit more loose gas and dust that the bubble. We call our slightly denser region the "local fluff." You can see the local fluff and other slightly denser regions inside the big bubble in yellow on our picture.

But what made this bigger bubble that we sit inside? Our best idea was that the violent explosions of giant stars ("supernovae") carved out this emptier region perhaps 10 or 20 million years or so ago. Some astronomers were not convinced of the exploding-stars origin of our bubble and thought that we might be fooled by some ways that our Sun's wind (the flow of atomic particles boiling off our star's surface) is interacting with the material in the fluff.

A new instrument, which looked for x-rays that come from collisions of atoms in deep space, was launched in 2012 aboard a rocket and got to spend five minutes above the Earth's atmosphere, where cosmic x-rays can be monitored. The data collected from those five minutes (!) was enough for the astronomers to confirm that the violence of exploding stars was the major contributor to the signs of the local bubble.

The exploding stars were not close enough to the Sun and the Earth to hurt life on our planet significantly -- after all, life on Earth thrived earlier than 10 million years ago and still thrives today. But it's clearer and clearer to astronomers that exploding stars have a lot to do with the geography and chemical makeup of our Galaxy. They not only made the bubble we find ourselves in, but we also know that it is the death of these stars that recycles the elements they get to make in their hot centers. This enriches the neighborhood with atoms like carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen -- the chemical building blocks of life as we know it. (Just about every atom of calcium in your bones, for example, was actually once inside a star that later exploded.)

By the way, our cosmic bubble is by no means unique. Other bubbles have been discovered near and far, blown by countless other star explosions over the 13 billion-year history of the Milky Way Galaxy.

For more technical details about this research, see the nice Science@NASA newsletter at: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/26aug_localbubble/

Cosmic Fireworks

For those of you who don't get to see fireworks today (July 4), here is an image of cosmic fireworks for your enjoyment. The glowing ring on our picture (taken with the Hubble Space Telescope) shows material ejected long ago from a star whose total explosion we saw in 1987. Recently, earlier debris from the star has been hit by the fastest moving material from the star's final explosion. The shock of collision has set knots of thicker material in the ring to glow like a necklace of sparklers.

The dramatic explosion at the end of the life of a star is called a "supernova," and this particular supernova is located in one of our closest neighbor galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 168,000 light years away. We wish it were closer, but a visible supernova is a rare event. This was actually the first supernova explosion we have been treated to since the invention of the telescope in 1609-1610. It's been given the extremely clever name Supernova 1987A (the first such explosion seen in 1987.)

The huge star whose explosion we saw in 1987 had been losing some of its mass in earlier periods of its life and was surrounded by a cloud of its own debris. Later a wind of hot particles had blown from the star as it went through a different stage of its development. That wind had made a cavity in the gas around the star.

Now the material from the star's actual explosion, which has been moving for 27 years at great speed, has reached the inner walls of this cavity and is colliding with thicker blobs of the older material. That's the glowing ring we see so clearly in the Hubble image.

If you want to see a time lapse movie made of Hubble images taken each year as the ring started lighting up, you can see it at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A#mediaviewer/File:SN1987a_debris_evolution_animation.gif

Happy fireworks day!

Talk on the Work of and Crisis at Lick Observatory Now on YouTube

As you may have heard, the Lick Observatory (on whose Council I am now proud to serve) is being threatened by budget cuts at the University of California. Recently, Dr. Alex Filippenko (who was named the best professor at Berkeley a record nine times, and is a wonderful speaker) gave a very exciting talk on: "Exploding Stars, New Planets, Black Holes, and the Crisis at Lick Observatory". The video is now available on YouTube at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEY2pzxda1w

Lick Observatory, the first mountain-top telescope facility in the world, was founded in 1888, but continues to be a vibrant research facility and an important site for student and public education. Dr. Filippenko, who chairs the Lick Observatory Council, discusses some of the most exciting research being pursued at Lick, but also explains the funding crisis, what is being done by local citizens, and how you can help.

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Today's image is a snapshot I took at Lick, showing Dr. Filippenko (left) with noted venture capitalist Jim Katzman, standing in front of the Katzman Automated Imaging Telescope. It was with the use of this telescope that astronomers discovered a number of special exploding stars in other galaxies that could be used as distance markers for the universe. That work led to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the cosmos and won the two groups involved the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. We can't let them shut this facility down, folks!