First it’s rogue black holes on the loose, now it’s giant gas clouds speeding toward the Milky Way. Astronomers have identified a big glob of hydrogen that’s zooming towards us at more than 150 miles per second – and will hit our galaxy 20 million to 40 million years from now.

Scientists have known about the cloud since 1963, when astronomer Gail Smith identified it before dropping out of research. At the time, no one knew whether the cloud was headed for us, away from us, or something in between.

New observations from the Green Bank radiotelescope – the big dish in the West Virginia mountains that’s surrounded by a zone of cellphone silence, so as not to interfere with the telescope – have pinned down the cloud’s trajectory.

“I’ve been going around calling it the most interesting hydrogen cloud in the known universe,” says Jay Lockman, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory who is also known for his banjo-playing skills. Lockman and his colleagues looked at the cloud nearly 40,000 times with the Green Bank telescope and put together a detailed three-dimensional picture of it.

Right now Smith’s Cloud is about 40,000 light-years from Earth. But when it gets here, it is likely to slam into one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way – fortunately a couple of arms over from the one in which the sun, and you, reside. The collision will probably trigger a burst of star formation – lighting up the local sky in true celestial fireworks.

Lockman said that he was able to reach Gail Smith by telephone just within the past week, to let her know that her discovery of decades ago was literally about to come home. For pictures of where exactly it will hit, check out the NRAO's press release here.

Posted by Alex Witze at 08:06 PM | Permalink

Astronomers have gotten pretty worked up lately about what they see as a serious criticism of the way they do business – a paper published last spring by Simon White, director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. The paper is called ‘Fundamentalist physics: Why dark energy is bad for astronomy’ and as soon as White started circulating it among the physics and astronomy community, sparks started to fly. (Nature article here, subscription required)

I have to say that I’ve had a hard time getting worked up about the White paper. Basically he’s saying that certain work practices that are common in high-energy physics are threatening the very foundation of astronomy today. These are practices such as creating massive collaborations of coauthors to work on projects, like those needed at detectors at particle accelerators. According to White, astronomy is in danger of moving in the same direction – building giant facilities for doing astronomical research that will consume the creativity of individual scientists. There’s a lot more to his argument than that, but I’d refer you to his paper for the gorey details.

Anyway, last night came a much-ballyhooed ‘debate’ between White and cosmologist Rocky Kolb of the University of Chicago who has written in response to the White work. In my opinion, the debate ended up being a lot of griping about the nature of large collaborations and large facilities, and a lot of worrying about whether young astronomers are being driven away from the field because they don’t want to be the 300th coauthor on a massive paper.

Are you an astronomer? How are important are such working conditions to you? Or do you think creativity will win the day no matter what you’re working on – that there is plenty of good science to be done even under the framework of a massive, faceless machine?

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:47 PM | Permalink

Here’s the closest ‘look’ yet at dark matter in a massive galaxy cluster. Dark matter is that stuff that astronomers cannot see but know must exist, because without its gravitational glue to hold galaxies together, they would fly apart into pieces. Naturally, spotting dark matter is a hard thing to do, because it’s, well…invisible.

A team led by Meghan Gray, of the University of Nottingham, and Catherine Heymans, of the University of British Columbia, used gravitational lensing – the same trick described below – to measure how dark matter in space distorts the light from a massive cluster of galaxies known as Abell 901/902. This is a big thing: more than 2.6 billion light-years away, it measures a whopping 16 million light-years across and is composed of more than a thousand galaxies.

The concentrations of pink stuff shows where the dark matter lies. For more images see the main Hubble press release site here.

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:28 PM | Permalink

Those intrigued by the question posed in this post,

- What rock group had its members' names included in a reference in the Astrophysical Journal, unbeknownst to the editor?

Continue reading "AAS: Rock'n'Roll'n'ApJ" »

Posted by Oliver Morton at 05:10 PM | Permalink

Some talks have titles you just can’t pass up. So it was with “How astronomers die,” a presentation by historian Thomas Hockey of the University of Northern Iowa. Hockey exercised tact in not including perhaps the most famous astronomical death of recent decades, when a young researcher named Marc Aaronson was crushed in 1987 by a rotating observatory dome on Kitt Peak in Arizona. Such modern tragedies aside, Hockey clearly relished the gorey details of astronomers biting the dust in eras long past.

Most astronomers, he told his clearly relieved audience, die natural deaths. But others have gone down in flames in the annals of history – literally. Giordano Bruno, after all, was burned at the stake in 1600, though his crime was heresy, not astronomy. The philosopher Boethius, whose writings covered astronomical topics, was executed by having a cord tightened around his forehead so tightly that his eyes “cracked in their sockets,” says Hockey, and then was bludgeoned to death. And the 4th-century mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria (right) suffered a gruesome death at the hands of Christian mob, who pulled her from her chariot and skinned her alive with oyster shells, as some accounts have it.

War has claimed a fair number of promising astronomers -- from Archimedes who expired via a Roman sword, to British astronomer William Gascoigne, who died at the battle of Marston Moor in Yorkshire in 1644. Travel has also been “quite a grim reaper,” Hockey noted – taking out astronomers in car crashes, shipwrecks, and even a freak blimp accident. Finally, John James Waterston may have actually given his life for his work – while attempting to precisely measure solar radiant energy, he suffered heatstroke that later brought him regular fits of dizziness and may have contributed to his falling, and drowning, in an Edinburgh canal in 1883.

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:07 PM | Permalink

Sometimes a picture can be more profound than it looks. This unassuming black-and-white image shows something never seen before – a double ‘Einstein ring’ created by a chance cosmic alignment.

Look closely – you should see not only a bright, nearly circular ring, but also fainter, interrupted arcs of light outside it. That second concentric ring is what makes it a double Einstein ring.

The regular Einstein rings are pretty cool in themselves. They’re optical illusions of a sort, created when light from a distant object (like a galaxy) gets bent by the gravity of a second object that lies along the line of sight between us and the first object. Tommaso Treu, of the University of California Santa Barbara, likens it to holding up a wine glass and looking at a candle through its stem; the distortions in the glass smear out the candle flame into arc-like shapes.

There are only about 50 regular Einstein rings known to date, and Treu and his colleagues were recently hunting for more. And that’s when they stumbled across the double ring. The geometry is complicated: first there’s us; then, 3 billion light-years away, the ‘lens’ which is some object like a massive galaxy; then, 6 billion light-years away, another galaxy whose light has been smeared by the lens to create the inner, bright ring; and finally, 11 billion light-years away, the galaxy whose light has been similarly smeared into the outer, fainter arcs.

It’s a rare alignment, but Treu thinks there may be more out there. Future space missions could potentially spot as many as 50 of the double rings, he says. And with that, astronomers might be able to use the rings to start answering questions about how matter and energy is distributed throughout the universe.

Posted by Alex Witze at 04:40 PM | Permalink

It’s almost as startling as 60-year-old women giving birth. Astronomers think they have spotted two stars that are well into middle age and shockingly may still be forming planets around themselves.

Most of the time, planets are born soon after their parent star is. Think of our sun, which in its infancy 4.5 billion years ago also saw planets forming right away, condensing out of the cocoon of dust and gas that swirled around it. You don’t see any newborn planets popping into existence in our solar system today.

But that may be exactly what’s happening at two puzzling stars, says Carl Melis, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Despite being well advanced in age, both appear to be surrounded by a dust disk that could be forming planets now. It could, in fact, be a second wave of planetary formation for these stars; the first coming soon after they were born, possibly hundreds of millions of years ago, and the second happening now.

The two stars are odd. One, called BP Piscium in the constellation Pisces (right), was thought to be a young star because of the dusty disk that surrounds it. But studies of its chemical composition and other factors revealed that it is in fact quite old – maybe not to menopause yet, but definitely pushing the limit. The second star, called TYC 4144 392 2 in the constellation Ursa Major, has a dust disk and itself orbits a separate star, which does not have such a disk.

So how did these two old stars end up with dust disks around them? Melis thinks they may have, in the recent past, each swallowed another companion object – something a bit too small to be called a proper star – and, in the digestive process, belched out a giant wave of dust. That dust settled into orbit around the star.

Sara Seager, an expert on extrasolar planets at MIT, says Melis’ idea is plausible. There’s no getting around the fact that these two stars have dust disks, she says. The question now is, how exactly did they get there, and are planets in fact actually forming within them?

Posted by Alex Witze at 08:42 PM | Permalink

Stop the presses: Hundreds of rogue black holes are on the loose in the Milky Way!

It’s a good thing that black holes are only dangerous if you’re within about 100 kilometres of them. And the Milky Way is a big enough place that we needn’t worry, says Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University.

Her research team discovered the errant black holes – each of which is 100 to 1,000 times the mass of our sun -- by studying clumps of ancient stars known as globular clusters. These are rough environments, in which black holes are constantly sinking toward the center of the cluster, occasionally meeting in a violet merger that throws one or the other of them out of the cluster at speeds up to 9 million miles per hour. Holley-Bockelmann’s computer simulations show that scientists haven’t spotted nearly as many black holes getting kicked out of globular clusters as one might expect. And so, she says, there must be extra black holes lurking there, invisibly -- some of the biggest rogues ever spotted in our galaxy.

Posted by Alex Witze at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'll be sad to miss the public lecture tomorrow night by Andy Fraknoi, as there is a previously scheduled press event at the same time. But for you science/pop culture buffs out there, see if you can answer some of the questions Fraknoi poses in his abstract:

- In what popular movie does Daryl Hannah play an astronomer? (Answer.)
- What Japanese car company is named after a well-known star cluster? (Answer.)
- What science fiction story, written by an astronomer under a pseudonym, features a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stellar evolution? (Answer.)
- Can you recite the most famous neutrino poem, and name the poet? (Answer.)

And here's really geeky one I haven't a clue about - if you know, comment below please!
- What rock group had its members' names included in a reference in the Astrophysical Journal, unbeknownst to the editor?

Posted by Alex Witze at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Young stars floating together in isolated gangs, nowhere near adults and asking for trouble. It sounds like the perfect setup for a teen slasher flick, but it’s really a cosmic mystery just discovered 12 million light-years from Earth.

Diulia de Mello, of the Catholic University of America and the Goddard Space Flight Center, and colleagues spotted the stragglers near a smashup of three galaxies (including the well-known pair M81 and M82, right). De Mello calls them “blue blobs”. They are “weird,” she adds – “in regions they are not supposed to be.” That’s because they appear relatively far away from the galaxies, where gas and dust – ingredients generally needed to make stars -- are sparse.

It turns out that the blobs are actually clusters of young stars, born as the galaxies collided with each other over the past 200 million years. The cosmic disruption led to spots locally richer in gas, which then condensed under its own gravity to form newborn stars.

Eventually, the young hoodlums could grow up to throw their own trash into space – by exploding at the ends of their lives and spewing their chemical elements back into intergalactic space. It seems they may never be up to any good.

More details and images are available here.

Posted by Alex Witze at 11:03 PM | Permalink

Shuttle schedules willing, astronauts will be going back to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope this summer. The next and final servicing mission to the telescope (right) is slated for early August, and top NASA brass were out at the astronomy meeting today to tout it.

It’s a far cry from a couple of years ago, when in the wake of the disintegration of the shuttle Columbia NASA’s chief at the time, Sean O’Keefe, cited safety reasons in canceling the final trip to Hubble. That decision prompted an outcry from astronomers and others (Nature story, subscription required) and NASA eventually reversed its decision – after first looking into options to send robots instead of astronauts, and then getting a new administrator in the form of Mike Griffin.

Now the trip is hostage only to delays in shuttle launches; right now, the shuttle is backed up on delivering the European Columbus science module to the international space station, a trip that was supposed to go in December but now looks more likely for February. If other launches continue to slip, an August date for the Hubble mission doesn’t look likely.

No matter – astronomers don’t seem to mind waiting. The next servicing mission will bring two new scientific instruments up to Hubble, plus fix two other ones already up there.

Continue reading "AAS: Return to Hubble" »

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:19 PM | Permalink

Join Alexandra Witze at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas from 8-11 January. She'll be sending diary reports back here as astronomers gear up for the International Year of Astronomy in 2009.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 10:08 AM | Permalink

Astronomers make startling discoveries in our own back yard.

Astronomers are beginning to realize that we don't know our cosmic neighbourhood very well after all. Some of the galaxies next door to our very own Milky Way are speeding past us so fast that they threaten to rewrite the textbooks, whereas others are so teeny that they may deserve the entirely new name of 'hobbit' galaxies.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Ever wondered how basketball stars manage to sink a jump shot just-so? John Fontanella, an instructor at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, has the explanation for you.

By comparing videotapes of himself with, er, a slightly more accomplished basketball player, Fontanella calculated that the best players attempt to minimize the speed of the ball when it reaches the basket. That makes intuitive sense, he says - players want a 'soft' shot that sinks right into the basket. But when you hear it described in the context of gravity vs. drag vs. lift vs. buoyance -- well, it's enough to think Shaquille O'Neal might learn enough to improve his free throw percentage.

Posted by Alex Witze at 01:54 AM | Permalink

Few scientific presentations really make one hungry (or thirsty), but today's demonstration of the 'hot chocolate effect' did just that.

Tap a spoon on the inside bottom of a mug of hot chocolate, and you'll hear a rising pitch that keeps rising as you keep tapping. It's a fascinating physics experiment that can be done apres-ski. But don't limit yourself to just hot chocolate, says Bradley Carroll of Weber State University in Utah. It works for other beverages, including instant coffee and even cold beer.

It all has to do with tiny bubbles in the liquid. They slow down the speed of sound, so the pitch you hear is lower at first. As the bubbles rise to the surface and break, the speed of sound in the liquid rises, so the pitch rises in tone.

Try it out for yourself. Don't take my word for it.

Posted by Alex Witze at 01:48 AM | Permalink

You can say this for intelligent design: It has really inspired the science teachers of America. Today's session on the teaching of intelligent design - the notion that an intelligent 'creator' shaped biological organisms - was jam-packed. In fact, it was so overcrowded that the organizers moved it from a small lecture hall to a section of the giant ballroom.

If science educators such as these get out there and teach kids, one can only think that science will soon triumph over the pseudoscientific arguments of intelligent design.

Posted by Alex Witze at 01:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Colliding galaxies in the early Universe produced dance of superbright objects.

Astronomers have found a new record-breaker: a triplet of quasars.

Read about it here.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a new way to reach kids via astronomy: a planetarium in Second Life.

Anthony Crider, an astronomy professor at Elon University in North Carolina, has had his students creating astronomy adventures in the virtual world of Second Life. He set up a planetarium there, and watched 30 to 40 people - their avatars, at least - wait in line for planetarium shows. He has his students test out their class telescope in virtual life before they fumble with it in real life. And he's working with NASA Ames and others to try to create a 'SciLands' area for scientifically interested people to congregate in in Second Life.

Finding like-minded people in the virtual world can be a challenge, though. Crider says he was inspired to purchase his own land and set up a new planetarium after his old location got some new neighbors: a casino, and a shop specializing in lesbian vampire pornography.

Now, though, he sees people coming into Second Life to debate the planetary status of Pluto, or to watch launches of spacecraft on NASA-TV. It's a weird world out there, but there are plenty of astronomy buffs wherever you go.

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:03 AM | Permalink

This is fun, if a bit specialized. As seen at a poster here at the AAS meeting: the Slackerpedia Galactica.

It's Wikipedia for astronomy, as you always wished it could be. So far, my favorite entry is the one describing quasars as "vicious little dots".

The entry for Pluto needs a bit of expansion, but shows promise.

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:00 AM | Permalink

Wes Traub, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, reminded the AAS audience today of how an Earth-centric view can help us understand other worlds. Somehow I missed this back in September when it came out - but he and colleagues have done a nifty piece of work looking at Earth's evolution as seen from space. In other words, how has Earth's atmosphere changed composition through time? More specifically, how would aliens looking at Earth interpret life on our planet depending on when they spotted us?

Posted by Alex Witze at 04:58 AM | Permalink

The easiest way to guarantee a headline on CNN is to say you've found life on Mars. Or, to be more specific, that NASA once found it but didn't really know it.

At the meeting here today, Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University described his theory that the Viking landers may have detected signs of microbial Martian life in 1976. The key: hydrogen peroxide, which in addition to bleaching your hair may have formed the basis for alien life forms, he argues.

The problem is that no one has ever been able to agree on what the Viking landers found. One of the key scientists for one of the key instruments has long insisted that it found evidence of life. Few others believe him. So Schultze-Makuch can speculate all day long about life forms based on hydrogen peroxide -- but until someone demonstrates that these kinds of critters really can exist, it'll be awfully tough to prove.

You can read more about the Viking experiments here.

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:33 AM | Permalink

Gleaned from astronaut Kathryn Thornton, who flew aboard the space shuttle four times:

If the Earth were the size of a basketball, spacecraft in orbit wouldn't be more than a quarter to a half inch off its surface.

Thornton's point: humans aren't exploring any more. They're stuck repeating experiments in an environment they already know. Most astronauts, of course, are strongly in favor of President Bush's plan to send astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars. Many scientists are not, which makes her presence at a AAS meeting particularly intriguing.

Posted by Alex Witze at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The American Astronomical Society meeting starts here today at the Washington state convention center. They're handing out perhaps the most useful goodies I've ever gotten: a sturdy umbrella. This being Seattle, it is of course raining.

The meeting is joint with the American Association of Physics Teachers, so the usual crowd of typical astronomers is mingling with a younger, more diverse group of educators. As a bonus, the Seattle wedding show is also going on this weekend in the center. So the place is positively buzzing -- I've yet to see any astronomers slinking over to pick up a killer wedding dress, though.

Posted by Alex Witze at 07:18 PM | Permalink

Join Alex Witze at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle from 5-10 January. She'll be blogging about the planets and stars here!

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:03 PM | Permalink