We Are Here: The Pale Blue Dot

This all revolves around a photograph taken by a small spacecraft a little over 20 years ago.  Carl Sagan thought for a while it’d be a good idea to have the spacecraft turn around and snap a photo of the Earth.  Fearing damage to the spacecraft the controllers were reluctant.  It was February 14, 1990 and Voyager I had completed all of its primary mission objectives.  Now was the time to have Voyager turn around and snap a photo.  If they had waited much longer the Earth would be too distant to even register.

So here we are.  We are given this photo.

The Pale Blue Dot. As taken by Voyager I some 4 billion miles from Earth. February 14, 1990.

It sure doesn’t look like much.  To us, it is everything.  Now, I could go on about this and that regarding the photo.  The thing is, it’s already been done.  In fact, so well done, that to redo or try and out do it would be folly.  Now to read what is said about the photograph is one thing but hearing the voice of Carl Sagan means a little more.  It was his idea, so his words and voice are fitting.

The original audio was from an audio-book I do believe.  Some crafty people have done things with it in videos.  This one is probably the best I’ve found.  It really is moving. (Yes, yes, I posted this video on Facebook a while back, I know.)  So have a look now.

We are here: The Pale Blue Dot

Here is the text:

Consider again, that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say;  That one is worth everything we’ve ever known.

A new type of supernova?

This one exploding star outshines an entire galaxy! The NGC 1260 core is the dimmer object.

Ok, I thought I was all on the up and up with these things and how they worked.  Ok, that is, as much as a layman can be on the up and up.  I am not an astrophysicist (yet)!

So get this: a few years ago we witnessed a strange supernova.  Actually, a little back story first.  The general idea I always had was that stars with several solar masses went supernova.  Reason being, they burned through their fuel at a greater rate.  Once the fuel at the core was gone or fusion wasn’t adequate enough to resist the inward pressure (gravity) the whole thing collapsed.  This releases a tremendous amount of energy and essentially the star explodes.  You get left with a huge amount of ‘stuff’ being blown out into space and you’re left with either a neutron star or black hole at what used to be the core of the star.

That was a super basic overview and back story.  So what is this new supernova?  It is being called a Pair-instability Supernova.  What the what?!  If the name sounds bizarre then wait until you hear about how it works.

So here is how it goes.  First, you need a supermassive star.  A star of 130-250 solar masses seems to be the “zone”.  Instinctively, one thinks “the more massive the star, the more massive the black hole it leaves behind”.  Well, not really.  At least, not in the case of this kind of star.  See, these supermassive stars have low metallicity.  I believe that means they’re almost entirely Hydrogen and Helium with very little other elements present…

…and well, I’m going to just post what Wiki says because I’m feeling lazy:

A pair instability supernova occurs when pair production, the production of free electrons and positrons in the collision between atomic nuclei and energetic gamma rays, reduces thermal pressure inside a supermassive star‘s core. This pressure drop leads to a partial collapse, then greatly accelerated burning in a runaway thermonuclear explosion which blows the star completely apart without leaving a black hole remnant behind.^[1][2] Pair instability supernovae can only happen in stars with a mass range from around 130 to 250 solar masses and low to moderate metallicity (low abundance of elements other than hydrogen and helium, a situation common in Population III stars). The recently observed objects SN 2006gy and SN 2007bi^[3] are hypothesized to have been pair instability supernovae.

So there, you have it.  The star goes kablooey and leaves nothing but the fresh scent of brute.  Ok maybe not.  Incredible though, that a star can completely obliterate itself and leave nothing behind.

With that said, the star SN 2006gy is in a galaxy some 240 million light  years away (ie the light we saw originated 240 million years ago).  There is a star nearer to us, Eta Carinae that might go supernova much in the same way.  If it does, it will likely be brilliantly bright.  Visible during the day and able to be read by at night.

Fact is stranger than fiction, once again.

More info here

And here (this site has multiple links at the bottom)

Things you probably don’t think about: Why can’t we see Venus overhead at night?

We all know the planets are out there, orbiting tirelessly around the Sun.  How do we know? Well, we can see them, and most with the naked eye!  Something you might not have thought about is why we can see all the planets overhead at night except Venus and Mercury.

Why is that?

Here is the simple answer:  Our orbit is outside of Venus and Mercury’s orbit.  Therefore when they are directly overhead it is daytime to some degree.  Have no fear, I’m a fan of using imagery.  Take a look below.

Note: light travels out in all directions obviously and this is not to scale either

So you can see there, when the Sun is overhead, the orbits of Venus and Mercury are also overhead.  Since they never travel outside of the Earth’s orbit, we never see them overhead at night.  Mars on the other hand is commonly visible at night (as is Jupiter and Saturn).  We also go around the Sun faster than Mars so we actually lap it (it goes around every 1.8 Earth years).  Neat huh?

Venus is often called the Morning or Evening Star.  That’s because we see it either before the Sun rises or after the Sun sets, depending on where all the planets are at the time.  After it rises far enough in the morning sky, the sky itself becomes too bright to be able to easily see it.  Though it is possible.  As for setting, it just dips below the horizon.

Just recently we were also able to see Mercury in the evening sky.  The window to capture that rare moment was small; just a couple of weeks I believe.  I snapped a photo which you can see in an earlier post.

So there you have it of something you probably never wondered about in the first place.

Strangelet or StrangePET?

It will steal your covers, guaranteed.

Disclaimer: I’m in the camp of firmly believing that even if a black hole were created it’d be so tiny it’d evaporate in an instant.  I do not think the LHC poses any threat to Mankind, Earth or Beyond.

Also, what IS a strangelet?  Just as the name implies, it’s very strange.  I’ll just post a link here to a site that goes into a bit more detail about what it theoretically is.  Here is the path to knowledge

Venus and Mercury sitting in a tree…

Ok, maybe not sitting IN a tree but I had to dodge trees to be able to see them both.  I went out with my D3000 and snapped a few pics with the standard lens.  I can bet a telephoto or even a cam attached to a telescope would take a great pic.  So long as the field of view allowed them both in the same photo!

So here is a smallish version:

Together, at last!

And here is the higher resolution version clickety

Large Hadron Collider

This is COOL!

I wanted to get that out of the way.  Well when they first fired this thing up over a year ago it didn’t go so well.  Something broke so they had to go back in and fix it.  This isn’t like replacing an alternator on a car.  The circumference of the collider is 27km.  On top of that it is just insanely complex.  Well they worked and worked and yesterday it went back online.  I watched some of the webcast.  It was great to see all the people there celebrating as it appeared to work as planned.

Well, what IS the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).  Ok, I’m not really smart enough to type it all up and have it work.  So I’m going to take it from the actual site itself.   Here are two explanations:

Simple: Take two beams of particles (protons or ions) and send them whizzing around a circular track at 99% the speed of light.  Merge the beams near a detector.  Watch to see what happens when these little particle smack into one another.

More detailed:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionise our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.

Two beams of subatomic particles called ‘hadrons’ – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.

There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions, but what’s for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator, as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe. For decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has served physicists well as a means of understanding the fundamental laws of Nature, but it does not tell the whole story. Only experimental data using the higher energies reached by the LHC can push knowledge forward, challenging those who seek confirmation of established knowledge, and those who dare to dream beyond the paradigm.

What I found interesting was the power at which is operates.  Right now it’s going to 7TeV or Tera-electronvolts.  Sounds insane!  Though that’s about the same kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight, from what I read.  So, I suppose you might not even feel the beam hitting your hand.  I want to clarify, that having a ‘few’ particles pass through you isn’t a big deal.  Having them pass through you in the trillions IS bad.  I understand that’s the rate at which these hadrons will be passing each other; trillions per second. Whoa!

Other cool LHC facts from their site:

At full power, trillions of protons will race around the LHC accelerator ring 11 245 times a second, travelling at 99.99% the speed of light. Two beams of protons will each travel at a maximum energy of 7 TeV (tera-electronvolt), corresponding to head-to-head collisions of 14 TeV. Altogether some 600 million collisions will take place every second.

The data recorded by each of the big experiments at the LHC will fill around 100 000 dual layer DVDs every year. To allow the thousands of scientists scattered around the globe to collaborate on the analysis over the next 15 years (the estimated lifetime of the LHC), tens of thousands of computers located around the world are being harnessed in a distributed computing network called the Grid.

Safety?  Yes it’s safe.  The bottom line is that collisions like these occur in space all of the time.  I think you have as good a chance of passing through a wall with both you and the wall in one piece as this machine creating a killer black hole.  So, don’t worry about it.  Also, if it DID create a killer black hole, well, no one will be around to care, eh?

If you made it this far, I commend you and you deserve cool linkage.  Here is your gift, a link to see some of the data coming from LHC while it is online.  This. is. cool.

Lets find out! ( I did not draw this it links to where I got it from)

Read more here if you are REALLY interested

Shuttle ‘go’ for April 5th launch

Seems there were some technical issues that threatened a delay of the launch.  Normally I’m all over the news on this stuff but I’ve slacked a bit.  I am happy though that we’ll get to see a launch in less than a week.

Here are several articles on STS-131

From NASA’s website:

Discovery will carry a multi-purpose logistics module filled with science racks for the laboratories aboard the station. The mission has three planned spacewalks, with work to include replacing an ammonia tank assembly, retrieving a Japanese experiment from the station’s exterior, and switching out a rate gyro assembly on the S0 segment of the station’s truss structure.

STS-131 will be the 33rd shuttle mission to the station.

We’re behind you Discovery!

Why many surveys of distant galaxies miss 90 percent of their targets

(PhysOrg.com) — Astronomers have long known that in many surveys of the very distant Universe, a large fraction of the total intrinsic light was not being observed. Now, thanks to an extremely deep survey using two of the four giant 8.2-metre telescopes that make up ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and a unique custom-built filter, astronomers have determined that a large fraction of galaxies whose light took 10 billion years to reach us have gone undiscovered. The survey also helped uncover some of the faintest galaxies ever found at this early stage of the Universe.

Full story here.

Though, I do have my own theory as to where they looked…

There it is! And it has my other sock!

The Scale of the Universe

This is a very clever little bit of flash put together by someone whom I have no idea who they are.   All I know is that the site was blocked at work.  I went in and nabbed the SWF file and I’m going to place it on my blog.  You still have to endure the Newgrounds logo to see the animation.

Use the keyboard to move left or right for a smoother experience.  The largest things in the Universe are mind boggling.  The really fascinating stuff is all of the tiny things that go into making the world around us.  You can see how small a neutrino is for instance; and why it passes unhindered through just about everything  (including entire planets!).

The music is very pleasant too.

NASA Gets a Quarter from Every Dollar

First thing’s first: NASA does NOT get a quarter from every dollar. A quarter would be 25% of the entire Federal Budget.  Math isn’t hard.

That does get attention though doesn’t it?  Seems there is a misconception on how much money NASA actually gets.  I’m sure that if anyone reads this they have the intellect enough to google “NASA federal budget” and find out how much NASA really gets.  The answer just might shock most people.

I’ve known for years how much money NASA gets and it’s paltry.  Bad Astronomy has inspired me to blog about it myself.  Sure he gets more readers but in the name of science, every voice must be heard!  Also, I’m going to mooch some of the content of his blog.  Why invent the wheel twice?

This article talks about the perception of NASA and what it does, among other things.  The stunning part was where respondents were asked how much money NASA got.  24% was the number.  That would be 3% more than Defense.  This was in 2007.

So how much money does NASA get?  In 2007, 0.58% of the Federal Budget.  A little more than half a penny per dollar.  That’s pretty sad, eh?  We’re talking about an organization that put men on the Moon.  They put up a telescope that was a dud and then fixed it: in space.  They’ve done most of the heavy lifting in construction of the International Space Station.  They’ve sent probes all over the Solar System to study the planets.  Two rovers are still on Mars performing science well beyond their planned mission time.

I haven’t even scratched the surface.  That’s the stuff we hear about somewhat regularly but let it go, in passing.

Given that they can do so much with so little, I would be amazed to see what they could do if given a little more.  Keep in mind that at NASA there is still wasteful spending.  It’s a government organization, duh.  Even with that, they’re able to do such amazing things.  Not bad for being so low on the totem pole.

If you ever wonder why we haven’t done more or gone further in space, then wonder no more.  Shun the non-believers, shuuuuuunnnnnnn.