Remarkable New Mars Panorama

For your viewing pleasure, here is a dynamic 360-degree panorama of what you would see around you if you were with the Curiosity Rover on Mars, created from NASA images by Danish photographer Hans Nyberg. Note the tall mountain, Mt. Sharp, in the background.   Note that the picture above is only a static appetizer. You have to click on the link below to get to the really wonderful, processed panorama that you can move through.

http://www.panoramas.dk/mars/curiosity-first-color-360.html

Once you are there click on the box with the four arrows inside the picture to have it go full screen on your computer. The colors have been changed a bit to show you what the scene would look like in Earth sunlight, but the level of detail is quite spectacular.  Several people I have shown this to have commented that it really gives them the sense of what it might be like to stand on the surface of the red planet as a visitor.

Searching for Intelligence Among the Stars & the Drake Equation

At the quarterly meeting of the Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute (to which I have the privilege to belong), I spent some time this week with Dr. Frank Drake, the astronomer who is the father of the science of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). Now over 80, Frank is still going strong and very much involved with the ongoing quest to find evidence that there are other intelligent species among the stars.  Today, 52 years after Frank made the first search for possible intelligent radio signals from other star systems, our technology for searching has become much more sophisticated, although funding for the searches is still sporadic.

The discovery of so many planets orbiting other stars is very encouraging to those who hope to find our counterparts out there.  The Kepler mission is showing that planets the size of Earth and planets in the habitable zones of their own stars are more common than most astronomers had dared to hope.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of encouraging Frank (and his coauthor Dava Sobel) to update a historical summary of how he came up with the "Drake Equation." Not so much an equation as a way of making estimates, this formula (which you can see behind him in the photo) is now taught in many introductory astronomy classes. It helps us summarize our best knowledge of astronomy, biology and sociology to figure out how common our type of technological civilization might be in the Galaxy.

Thanks to the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (which published the column,) you can read the story of how he came up with the equation by going to:
http://www.astrosociety.org/drake/index.html

An Interesting New Picture from Mars

Curiosity (the new Mars Rover) has been driving around a bit, testing all its instruments. Here is my favorite new image, showing some of the interesting geological (or should that be marsolog

ical?) features we encounter as we look toward Mount Sharp, the rover's target.

In this picture, taken by the camera on Curiosity's big mast, we are looking toward the base of Mt. Sharp. You can see the many layers in the rock that were probably the result of standing water in the great basin (crater) that Mt. Sharp is in the middle of. The little inset shows a dark rock that is about the same size as our rover. So the pyramid-shaped mound behind it is much bigger than our vehicle. Exploration in this region will take much skillful maneuvering when it starts.

Bear in mind that Mars today has no liquid water to speak of, so that the scenes we will see will remind us of the deserts of the Earth.  But we have excellent evidence that ancient Mars, which had a thick atmosphere, had liquid water galore -- rivers, lakes, maybe even oceans.

Star Corpses Help Us Prove Einstein Right

One of the most intriguing predictions of Einstein's theory of relativity is that, just like there are light waves and sound waves, there should also be GRAVITY WAVES. When the arrangements of massive objects in the universe changes (like two stars orbiting each other), Einstein's theory predicts that waves of gravity energy should be be given off.

But gravity waves are very, very weak and hard to detect. We have gravity wave telescopes operating, but so far they have not succeeded in catching some big gravity change that would give off enough waves to be measurable. So astronomers are turning the idea around. If we could find two massive stars in the universe that are in orbit, they should be giving off these subtle gravity waves and should be losing energy. That means the two stars will -- as their motion energy is lost -- spiral inward toward each other, something they would not normally do. The more compressed the star, the bigger the effect. Dead stars, that have fallen inward -- gotten "squozen" in death (as I like to say) are excellent subjects for testing this prediction.

Two astronomers in the mid-1970's, including one of my undergraduate advisors, Dr. Joseph Taylor, discovered two star corpses (collapsed stars) that showed exactly this kind of behavior. There were the two dead stars, called neutron stars, minding their own business in space, lost in each other's gravity embrace. Yet, they were very slowly approaching each other in orbit. And the energy they lost was exactly what Einstein predicted. Taylor and Russell Hulse won the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics for their painstaking observations of this pair. But their measurements were done with radio waves, since that was the only way to see these particular star corpses.  

(For those of you who know a little astronomy, the precise story is that most neutron stars are only observable as "pulsars" -- objects that give off regularly pulsing radio waves.  As the two pulsars orbit, they lose energy and their pulses change as they get closer to each other.)

Now, a larger team of astronomers has just announced finding a different pair of dead stars (called white dwarfs) that show the same spiraling behavior, but shining in visible light. The nameless pair of star corpses is about 3,000 lightyears away. As they orbit close around each other (taking only 13 minutes for an orbit!), we see one eclipse the other. Between April 2011 and today, the eclipses have come 6 seconds earlier, as the two dead stars lose energy and approach. This is, again, exactly what we would expect if Einstein is right, and the pair is losing energy via gravity waves.

(Just as a lightbulb loses energy as it shines away light, and you have to pay the electric company to replace it, so it seems orbiting stars slowly lose energy as gravity waves. The difference is that there is no source of new energy, and so the stars simply fall slowly toward each other.)

How nice that Einstein's ideas, now almost 100 years old, are being confirmed in some of the strangest astronomical environments we can find. He'd be proud.

"Doomsday 2012" and Cosmophobia

As students return to school this fall, the media and web hype about Doomsday 2012 (the end of the world because a planet will hit us, something will align in the sky, the Earth's rotation or axis will change, or just because the ancient Maya said so) promises to reach a final, fevered pitch. Those of us in science and science education are preparing to respond to concerns from people (especially young people) who are genuinely worried or confused.

Two new resources are now available for educators, parents, youth group leaders, to address fears that world-wide disaster is coming on Dec. 21, 2012. Perhaps you can let your favorite teacher, school counselor, scout leader and other adult working with kids know about these.

I have put together (with lots of help) a guide to accessible written and audio-visual materials on this topic (most of them freely available on the Web). You can find it in the on-line publication "Astronomy Education Review" at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/AER2012021
(click on the "Download PDF" link under the author's name for the easiest way to see the entire article).

And a video recording of a panel I had the privilege of leading on "Doomsday 2012 and Cosmophobia" at this summer's meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific has now been posted by NASA's Lunar Science Institute at:
http://lunarscience.nasa.gov/articles/cosmophobia/

"Cosmophobia" is NASA astronomer David Morrison's name for the unnecessary fear of celestial events and phenomena. When David and I were young, new discoveries in the sky were a source of awe and fascination. Now, we are observing more and more people asking, as new things are discovered, "Should I be afraid?" It's kind of sad, given that we live mostly in splendid cosmic isolation, and most things in the universe are really much too far away to hurt us.

Please help spread the word that students will still have to take exams and we all still have to pay taxes in 2013. ·  · Share

Mars Update

In this beautiful picture, you can see what the NASA publicity team is calling the "Promised Land" on Mars. The slope of Mount Sharp beckons in the distance in this color image taken by the Curiosity Rover's mast camera. The Mars light, by the way, has been adjusted on this image to show you what the scene would look like in Earth sunlight.   You can see that they have added a white bar on the mountain which is 2 km, or about 1.2 miles, wide.

The highest point on Mt. Sharp rises about 3 miles above its base. Note that in the picture, the lower parts of the mountain are darker than the rest. It is this dark region that we believe was covered with water long ago and is expected to show us the chemical and mineral traces of having been long submerged.

Also check out the image below for a bird's eye view (or more precisely, a spacecraft's eye view) of where Curiosity is now (green dot), where it is going first (Glenelg blue dot), and where it will approach Mt. Sharp (the blue dot in the center). Note that the elevation rises as you move toward the bottom right in this picture. 

Today, Curiosity fired its laser beam for the first time at a rock on Mars, with 30 pulses over 10 seconds. This vaporizes the rock, so that Curiosity can measure very precisely what it is made of. Scientists using the ChemCam instrument were delighted with the information coming into their little "mini-telescope" from the flash of the vaporized rock.  For more information, see: 

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-248

A Huge and Distant Cluster of Galaxies (and a Movie)

I want to introduce you to a short, but truly mind-boggling movie and then share a piece of news with you. 

All stars are organized into giant islands called galaxies. We live in one 

such island, called the Milky Way Galaxy, and our telescopes show many billions of other galaxies all around the sky. Like explorers on an unknown continent, we have recently been trying to map the way all these galaxies are distributed through space. Perhaps the most impressive such mapping project is called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and they just released a short film allowing you to fly through 400,000 galaxies whose positions in three-dimensional space have now been measured. Here is the movie: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08LBltePDZw 

Note that each little object on your screen is a galaxy of billions of stars (stars like the Sun)! Also note that the galaxies are not evenly distributed. Just like stars, they tend to be "social" -- they collect into groups (or galaxy clusters). 

Just today, astronomers announced the discovery of one of the largest galaxy clusters ever seen, nicknamed the Phoenix Cluster. It contains enough material (in many many galaxies) to make more than 2 million billion Suns. And it is almost 6 billion light years away, which means the light we see tonight from this huge grouping of galaxies left on its way to us before the Sun and the Earth ever existed. Wow. 


What makes the Phoenix cluster of special interest to astronomers is that, at its center, the gas falling in from all over the cluster is leading to a huge rash of newly forming stars. 740 new stars form in the middle galaxy of the cluster EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Many such galaxy cluster have a core that is "red and dead" -- with little star formation going on in the central galaxy. But this cluster has a center that's "blue and new" -- with lots of new stars being born. 

You can just stop there if (like many people) your head now hurts from the movie and the huge numbers I am throwing around. Just let the feeling of the immensity of the cosmos overtake you. (It helps a lot when you can't stand the pettiness of presidential politics these days.) Or, for more on the Phoenix Cluster see:

http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/12_releases/press_081512.html
or
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/Heavyweight-Cluster-166282866.html