The talk that in some sense stood out this morning was deliverd by Einar Svendsen, research director at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research. While the general feeling here is one of grave concern, about the future of fragile Arctic environments, Svendsen told the surprised audience that climate change so far has been good to Norway, namely as far as fisheries are concerned. Economically important fish stocks off Norway (the world’s second-largest exporter of fish) and in the Barents Sea have fully recovered from a dramatic collapse in the late 1960s, to which overfishing and a temporary cooling of the North Atlantic seem to have equally contributed. Cod, haddock and saith populations are currently all in good shape, he reported.

But there is no guarantee that this will remain so, he cautioned. Given pronounced natural multi-decadal fluctuations, predicting the impact of rising ocean temperatures on marine ecosystems is extemely difficult. Fears are that if the North Atlantic continues to warm, cod and capelin, on which they feed, might migrate to colder waters off Siberia. And ocean acidification, an inevitable by-product of increased ocean CO2 uptake, might actually be an even bigger threat than is warming.

When asked about the environmental impact of the oil and gas recovery, Svendses said there is as yet no proof that pollution significantly affects the marine food chain or given fish stocks. But he strongly advised that no seismic surveys be conducted during the spawning season, and, in particular, that petroleum activities stay clear of the major spawning areas around the Lofoten Islands.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on January 20, 2009
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Sergei Donskoi, Russian Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology, gave an illuminating accout of Russia’s plans in terms of developing its huge Arctic mineral resources.

He said 25 new oil and gas fields have in recent years been discovered in the western part of the Russian Arctic sea shelf alone. The Russian government will outline in a so-called federal targeted programme, to be finalised by the end of the year, plans for environmentally sustainable exploitation of these deposits.

Under the new Russian licensing procedures, set up last year, oil and gas companies must have at least five years experience in the exploitation business. More restrictively, only companies 50 % of whose shares are controlled by the Russian Federation can participate in oil and gas exploitation activties. Foreign companies are only allowed to participate as sub-contractors to Russian enterprises anyway.

The federal targeted programm will describe the requirements by 2020 in terms of geological survey, technology procurement, construction, and environmental safety. In the latter respect it will address risks on ground water, soil and plant degradation, and, more generally, climate issues arising from enhanced Arctic exploitation activities. Among other things, Russia will set up new datbases of environmental hot spots in its Arctic territory, create extended new protected areas, and set up an automated monitoring system, we were told. Donskoi says a National Concil for Sustainable Mangement of the Arctic has also been proposed.

But representatives of environmental groups in the audience were not convinced that Russia has really prescribed itself a new environmental consciousness. Greenpeace and the Worldwide Fund for Nature fear that the meger last year of the Russian Ministry of Natural Resorces and the Ministry of the Environment could actually dismantle environmental impact assessment across the Russian Arctic.

Nope, counters Donskoii.The merger (“dictated by structural changes of priorities set at national level”) will reduce bureaucracy and make environmental management of the Arctic more feasible and efficient. The new Ministry of National Resources and Ecology covers environmental functions which were previously spread across eight different government agencies. Russia’s new environmental “doctrine” will now facilitate non-conflicting decisions, he says.

The Arctic hosts more than 20 % of all undiscovered hydrocarbon resources, according to frequently cited data by the US Geological Survey. This is only a rough estimate, however. In future, Russia should get increasingly involved in Arctic mineral resources asessment activities, said James A. Slutz, assistant secretary in the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy, on his last day in office (and in what otherwise was a pretty vague and disappointing presentation.)

Participants here warmly welcomed US plans to join the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, part of the US’s new Arctic strategy that was announced earlier this month by the leaving Bush administration. The view that the US does not need a ‘Treaty on Ice’ , as John Bellinger, legal adviser to forme US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, once put it, seems to be finally overcome.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on January 19, 2009
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The University of Tromsø, an ancient Norwegian city 350 kilometres inside the Arctic circle, this week hosts the 3rd ‚Arctic Frontiers’ conference. The meeting, a two-day policy conference, followed by a three-day science conference, not only celebrates the return of the Sun to this part of the world, but also the end of the International Polar Year 2007-2008, which wraps up next month.

The policy meeting opens today with representatives from Norway, the European Union, Russia, the United States, Canada and Greenland giving presentations about their governments’ respective Arctic strategies. Next up is Egil Olli Olsen, the president of the Sami Parliament, who will address the audience in Sami language. The complete policy conference is broadcast live on the internet at www.arcticfrontiers.com. I’ll be blogging from the plenary bits and pieces that I find of particular interest. Stay tuned.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on January 19, 2009
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“Do you realize that we are up to our 11th year of parties?” says Gina Brissenden, who was hemmed within a scrum of astronomers on the patio, but utterly pleased about it. Hundreds of astronomers had turned out to the Rhythm Lounge in Long Beach, and were rapidly starting to get their groove on (aided and abetted by the 'Galileo 400' drink special). What began as an impromptu afterparty in a hotel room, organized by Gina, has since turned into a biannual bacchanalia for the young, the old; for those inclined to dance, and for those who you wish weren't so inclined.
Above the dance floor, an endless short film loop was projected -- about the discovery of the period-luminosity function for Cepheid variables. I was pretty sure that it was entirely incidental, however, when the DJ played the Beastie Boys song, “Intergalactic.”
They didn't need any help on the dance floor anyway. Astronomers are an interesting bunch. Individualists, each and every one of them, but as a fellow observer remarked to me: she had never seen a pack of people devote themselves so quickly and diligently to the collective task of getting down. The dance floor was a black hole, and at one point, there were demands that astronaut John Grunsfeld occupy its singularity (that he might be more concerned about fixing the Hubble space telescope was not an issue). “I heard there were astronomers in the house,” says Kevin Marvel, AAS executive officer, revving up the crowd from the DJ booth. With just a hint of cautionary worry, he implores them: “Don't go supernova.”
Allright folks, it's been a pleasure, and it's time for me to catch a plane back to Washington, DC. And in case you were wondering what's in a 'Galileo 400', it's vodka, peach schnapps, and Sprite.

Posted by Eric Hand on January 08, 2009
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Some 70% of the stars in the galaxy are M dwarfs, and so exoplanet surveys will be targeting these relatively cool, small stars. But the habitable zone for Earth-like planets in these systems will be at least five times closer to the M dwarf than the Earth is to the sun. That keeps the planet warm, but also subjects it to the star's capricious behavior. “They flare as powerfully or even more so than the Sun,” says Lucianne Walkowicz, of the University of California at Berkeley, who gauged the effects of an M dwarf flare on planetary habitability in an AAS poster session. “People assumed that this would just sterilize the planet.”
Lucianne modeled a 4-hour flare -- a classic one that astronomers had observed carefully on a nearby M dwarf --and calculated its effects on an Earth-like planet, with an Earth-like atmosphere, orbiting at 0.16 astronomical units -- six times closer than the Earth is to the Sun. She measured the effect of the flare -- which for our Sun, can rise up to heights 50 times the diameter of the Earth -- on temperature, ozone, UV flux and water vapour.
Turns out, the flare wasn't that big of a deal. Temperatures only changed a tenth of a degree. Most of the energy of the flare went into the upper atmosphere where it broke down ozone. The fraction of the radiation that did make it through, she says, is less than you'd get on a sunny day walking around Earth.

Posted by Eric Hand on January 08, 2009
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The 10-foot-tall tub, full of 500 gallons of liquid helium, dangled underneath a high-altitude balloon over the skies of Texas for just a few hours. But the bucket came back with a big mystery.
In the 2006 flight, Alan Kogut of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and his colleagues were aiming to use the seven super-cooled antennae in the tub to hear the faint, relic radio signal of 'first light', the epoch a few hundred million years after the Big Bang when big lumbering stars ruled the roost.
But instead, they heard a really loud radio hiss. “To our surprise, we found an unexplained radio static... that fills the early universe and is currently unexplained,” says Kogut, speaking at a press briefing on Wednesday.
Astronomers, using balloons and satellites, have mapped the cosmic microwave background -- the faint, 2.7 degree Kelvin fabric created by the Big Bang itself -- at slightly shorter wavelengths, and ground based astronomers have conducted radio survey at longer wavelengths. But Kogut says his group was the first to notice something in this strange, in-between regime.
In four papers submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, they are careful to rule out the possibility that the radio background signal came from the Milky Way. It's much bigger than the total signal from all known radio galaxies, and it's way too big to have anything to do with the first light stars (they would have looked for the radio signal associated with hot gas near these first stars).
But they were reluctant to speculate what it could be. “We really don't know,” Kogut says. The balloon experiment didn't have much resolving power to pinpoint individual sources of the static, and it only looked at a few frequencies. Pressed for ideas, Kogut said that it could be radio radiation from the collapse of these huge, first stars into black holes. There would have hundreds, if not thousands, of these first stars in each proto-galaxy, he says, and their collective death rattle, so many of them across the sky, just might appear as a background signal to his relatively crude balloon instrument. “We may have accidentally backed into the epoch we were interested in.” It would be the first signal from one of the deepest, and heretofore darkest, reaches of the universe.
I was just pleased to see yet again that simple balloon experiments can have a potentially big impact. At $4 million, the experiment, called ARCADE, is another example of how cost effective balloons can be.

Posted by Eric Hand on January 08, 2009
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In just a matter of months, the Fermi gamma ray observatory since its launch has found dozens of new pulsars -- spinning, magnetized remnants of supernovae -- that emit a flashing signal in the gamma-ray part of the spectrum only. This new class of pulsar has revolutionized scientists' view of its general structure: Early in a pulsar's lifetime, it blasts a broad gamma-ray signal rather than a narrow polar one, as was previously thought. The findings, announced Tuesday at AAS, also includes a club within a club: a subclass of the gamma-ray-only pulsars that flash exceptionally quickly, an indication that they are revving up as they partially devour their dying partners in binary star systems.

The supernovae that come at the end of a star's life cast off much of a star's mass, but what's left collapses to form a neutron star, a fantastically dense object just shy of being a black hole. The spinning magnetic fields produce a narrow cone of radio waves that jet out from the poles. Some 1,800 radio pulsars have been discovered this way.

But there were only a handful that also produced gamma-rays, and these signals were also thought to emanate from the poles. Fermi has boosted the number of known gamma-ray pulsars up to 38, including 13 that lack a radio signal altogether -- an indication that the gamma rays can't be coming from the poles. The results, says mission scientist Roger Romani of Stanford University, “have put the nail in the coffin of the polar cap model.”

He is still working out the mechanisms and geometries by which the intense magnetic fields create the powerful gamma-ray signal, which is expected to arise only in the first million years or so of the pulsar's life. His models show a trumpet-like bell shape that emerges and sweeps across the pulsar's face, higher in its magnetosphere, rather than only at the poles. “It means the gamma rays are being beamed widely across the sky,” he says.

The newest phenomenon -- seven so-called 'millisecond' pulsars that flash hundreds of times faster than normal -- has led mission scientist Alice Harding, of Goddard Space Flight Center, to envision how this happens. In binary stars systems -- relatively common in the universe -- one may die first and become a pulsar. Before the second star explodes, it expands, and its excess material can be sucked into the spinning maw of the pulsar thereby speeding it up. “These guys must have strong stomachs,” Harding says. That's the scenario pictured here. After the jump, Fermi's all sky map, and the new gamma-ray pulsars.

Images: NASA / Fermi / LAT Collaboration / Dana Berry

Posted by Eric Hand on January 07, 2009
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Dr. Penny Sackett began her term as Australia's chief scientist in November 2008 -- a government position akin to the presidential science adviser in the US -- but still feels enough of an allegiance to the community from which she hails (astronomy) to come and give an invited talk at AAS on Tuesday. Towards the end of the talk, which was an overview of Australian science and its place in the world, she mentioned in passing that the government is considering establishing a national space agency. After the talk, I asked her about it, and she said that the government is expected to deliver a white paper on the subject early this year, which would be a first step towards any eventual parliamentary establishment. She said if it does happen, it would be an agency more so than a funding program.

Posted by Eric Hand on January 07, 2009
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Many AAS sessions here are emphasizing temporal astronomy -- the idea that the heavens are by no means as static as was once thought. Two new projects, LSST and Pan-STARRS, will exploit wide fields of view and scan vast swaths of the sky night after night in the hopes of catching variable stars, supernovae, pulsars, even the occasional killer asteroid.
While these projects look to the future, there is already a century's worth of information at hand, waiting to be tapped. The Harvard Plate stacks contain half a million photographic plates, dating back to 1885. That's 1.5 petabytes of data that Josh Grindlay, of Harvard Smithsonian Observatory, is eager to recover and rehabilitate in a project called DASCH. The plates, created in early, and often jungly, telescopic expeditions to both hemispheres, were brought back to the US, where 'computers' -- small armies of women -- hunched over the plates and performed the grueling task of cataloging them.
Now Grindlay wants to digitize them, and fold them into a universal coordinate system using a special software that can synchronize just about any picture of the sky to the right time or place. They have already built what he describes as the world's fastest scanner, capable of scanning one 8 x 12 inch plate a minute. All he needs is a cool $4 million, so he can hire 10 people to do the manual feeding of the scanner. “We're begging to be done,” he says.
He says he's had interest from Google and Microsoft, and he is also trying to approach foundations and invidual benefactors, but so far, no one has offered the money. C'mon millionaires, cough it up: DASCH is clearly an acronym that can disappear. Would you rather have your name on a century's worth of sky, or a yacht? Here's an image taken in 1896 with an 8-inch telescope in Arequipa, Chile, that happened to catch an alien invader in the act.
Image: DASCH

Posted by Eric Hand on January 06, 2009
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The sharpest images yet of the central 300 light-years of our galaxy, courtesy Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes. Say no more.

Image: NASA / ESA / Q.D.Wang / JPL / S.Stolovy

Posted by Eric Hand on January 06, 2009
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Kenneth Brecher, an astrophysicist at Boston University, gave a funny little talk today called 'How now brown cow dwarf'. The title of his talk, he says, is as meaningless as the term 'brown dwarf'. It's one of his many concerns with light perception at Project LITE, an umbrella for the psychophysical color experiements he runs.
'Brown dwarf' was coined in the 1970s by Jill Tarter, now director of the SETI institute, and it was a term that stuck. “It was a mistake,” says Brecher. “'Infrared dwarfs' would have been a much better name.”
The problem is that brown is a subtractive color -- made by 'desaturating' yellows and oranges with black. But since brown dwarfs are emissive bodies -- they glow -- they by definition can't be brown.
Now Brecher knows that he's not going to change astronomers from using a term that is so much a part of the vernacular. But just like many involved in the debate over what constitutes a planet, Brecher seems to be a scientist who cares very much about names and definitions. “Astronomy is riddled with historical artifacts that nobody in their right mind would use today.”
Here is Brecher holding a neon light, glowing with the color that he says we would perceive a brown dwarf emitting: yellowish-orange. Note, however, that Brecher is wearing a brown jacket.

Posted by Eric Hand on January 06, 2009
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Lots of press people in attendance, but I would venture to say that, given the economy in general and the layoffs that have gutted the media in particular, there are fewer now than in years before. There are more public affairs officers than there are reporters, and so far, I have not seen a single newspaper reporter. There aren't too many live blogging the conference, either, as far as I can tell. Victoria Jaggard appears to be blogging a bit at National Geographic. And Wired science and Discover's Phil Plait are both blogging from distance, tuning into the press conferences streamed here. Anyone else out there?

Posted by Eric Hand on January 06, 2009
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The glowing graveyard of rubble that surrounds some dying 'white dwarf' stars is providing astronomers with clues to the composition of rocky extrasolar planetary systems. By looking at the faintly glowing, shredded remnants of asteroids that surround distant white dwarfs, astronomers at the University of California at Los Angeles are finding that they have similar chemical compositions to rocky planets and asteroids closer to home – in the inner solar system. “We have a tool for measuring the bulk composition of the planets,” UCLA's Michael Jura said at a AAS press conference on Monday. “It strengthens suspicions that Earth-like planets are common.”

Geologists, Jura says, have long known that the Earth is rich in silica minerals, but poor in carbon, relative to the overall chemical composition of the sun. But whether that discrepancy holds elsewhere in the universe has been, until recently, a mystery. “Astronomers tend not to think about this,” he says. Using the Spitzer Space Telescope, Jura and others have assembled a small catalog of white dwarf stars that have rubble disks that glow brightly enough so that astronomers can tease out chemical compositions from their spectra. The latest white dwarf system, presented on Monday, brings the total up to eight.
Jura showed a spectrum with a clear bump in the prevalence of silicate minerals – and a lack of carbon. This means that the inner solar systems of extrasolar systems might not be terribly different from our own. Jura's work has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/M.Jura

Posted by Eric Hand on January 05, 2009
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Welome to Long Beach, California for the 2009 conference of the American Astronomical Society. This means, at least for me, palm trees in January. They've also shipped in a container-load of astronomers, here in Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, the site of one of the largest ports in the world. There are 2,450 registrants so far, according to AAS staff. It's a beautiful day out there, but most of us are in the basement of the conference center listenting to AAS president John Huchra greet us.

It's five days after the new year, and thus five days into the International Year of Astronomy, or IYA for short. I have yet to hear this acronym pronounced out loud, but I hope that it is said 'eee-yah', like a cross between 'hell yeah!' and 'enya'. That accurately describes my feelings about astronomy – it takes the excitment of discovering new worlds and sets it to a backdrop of ethereal lounge music.

But John Huchra just pronounced it 'eye why ay' – and this makes sense too, because the reason for the IYA is that it is the 400th birthday of Galileo's telescope: the first eye on the sky, and the instrument that led to many 'why' questions. Looking forward to hearing new why questions this week.

Posted by Eric Hand on January 05, 2009
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