Science Made Cool

Seeing Red

Pluto, which isn't a planet, is acting funny. Specifically, the remote dwarf planet is turning red. Marc Buie, a planetary scientist in Boulder, used Hubble Space Telescope images to study Pluto and noticed a distinct reddening of the non-planet's surface some time about the year 2000. Since Pluto wasn't kicked out of the planet club until 2006, it can't be blushing from embarassment, as some have suggested.

It's possible that some phenomenon is releasing reddish methane compounds, though exactly how that could happen on a world as cold as Pluto is unclear. Perhaps the New Horizons probe will reveal more about what's changing Pluto's color. We'll find out in five years.

Definition Trouble

Pity the poor International Astronomical Union.

In the course of kicking Pluto out of the planetary club they made an error in phrasing which turns out to exclude all other planets outside the Solar System. The definition of a planet adopted by the I.A.U. in 2006 specifies that it is a body "orbiting the Sun" -- which of course rules out bodies orbiting other stars. Trouble is, we've now found 429 planets -- or whatever we're supposed to call them -- orbiting other stars.

So now the organization has a difficult choice to make. They can keep the definition as is, thereby excluding a growing number of planets, many of which dwarf anything in the Solar System, and leaving astronomers who study extrasolar planets without a proper term for the things they're observing. Or they can re-open the planetary definition can of worms, with the highly vocal Pluto lobby enlisting schoolchildren and state legislators to lobby for their favorite iceball.

Ah, well, at least they get some public attention. How often do you have intense public debate over decisions about nomenclature made by scientific societies?

Happy 400th Birthday to the Medicean Stars!

On January 7, 1610, Galileo Galilei first reported his discovery of three new stars, as he watched the planet Jupiter through his new telescope. This was moderately big news, since telescopic astronomy was brand-new and pretty much every time you pointed a lens at the sky you found new stars.

But these new stars were even more interesting than Galileo had thought. Over the next few weeks he realized that they moved with Jupiter against the backdrop of "fixed" stars. Not only that, but they shifted around, sometimes appearing on one side of Jupiter and sometimes on another. The number varied sometimes, too, though he never saw more than four. He began to realize they weren't stars at all, but moons orbiting Jupiter.

A month after his first report, Galileo went public. In a stroke of inspired scientific sycophancy, he named his new discoveries the "Medicean Stars" after his patron Duke Cosimo II de Medici, ruler of Florence.* Non-Florentines weren't as excited about the name as Galileo was, and eventually other astronomers settled on the nomenclature invented by the German Simon Marius (a.k.a. Simon Mayr): Io, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto -- all lovers of Jupiter in mythology.

So it's only fitting that 2010 is the year a joint Russian-American manned space mission visits Jupiter so we can see for ourselves what those moons are like! Good luck to Dr. Floyd and the courageous cosmonauts! Oh, wait, that's just a movie. Looks like we'll have to wait until the 500th anniversary for a visit.

*That was in the Bad Old Days. Nowadays scientist are never influenced by ideology, funding, or politicking. It simply never happens.

Kepler Delivers

A little more than a year ago I reported on the Kepler mission -- an orbiting telescope dedicated to searching for extrasolar planets. Well, NASA's announced that Kepler has made its first hits. The satellite has so far identified five worlds circling other stars. All five are big "hot Jupiter" types, massive worlds circling close to their parent stars.

This is not a surprise to the astronomers running the project, as that kind of world is apparently the easiest to spot. Smaller worlds like Earth with longer orbital cycles take longer to identify. It will likely be several years before there are enough observations to tell if any of the stars watched by Kepler have planets like ours.

Still Not Reassured

Remember how I mildly mocked the U.N. for dealing with the possibility of asteroid Apophis striking the Earth by having some meetings about it? I take it all back. Because the Russians have announced they're going to deal with Apophis on their own. What could go wrong?

Huh?

This is one of the most bizarre philosophy-of-science ideas I've seen in a long time. It seems the ESA's Planck satellite is gathering an incredible amount of data on the cosmic background microwave radiation. A group of astronomers at Case are afraid that releasing this metric load of information will actually harm the science of cosmology.

The concern is that the Planck data is so comprehensive, and will be the state of the art for the forseeable future, so there won't be any new information to provide a reality check for any models based on the data. So, the argument goes, the ESA shouldn't release all of it at once, but rather at a slow trickle.

The trouble with this argument are that:  1) it negates the entire purpose of launching the Planck observatory in the first place, and 2) seems to contain a logical fallacy.

1:  The Planck satellite gathered an immense amount of high-quality information about cosmic background radiation; far more than previous instruments could have collected. The concerned trio of cosmologists want to release the Planck information very slowly -- which is to say, as if it was being collected by those older, less sophisticated instruments. Why bother launching Planck at all, then?

2:  The fear about theories not being testable with new data is based on a flawed assumption. If the data comes in over ten years instead of all at once, and each year some cosmologist comes up with a new theory which then gets invalidated by next year's data, then after ten years we've gone through ten revolutions in cosmology, each based on more and better data than before. The final theory (they seem to believe) would be the most robust, as it would be the product of ten iterations of test-and-revise.

Trouble is, the only reason we could tell that final theory is "better" than the first is that it fits the data better. Which means it would be the same as a theory based on the Planck data released in a huge lump. Plus it would save cosmologists the time and effort devising nine theories which aren't as useful at explaining the data.

So:  LET THE DATA FLOW LIKE A BURSTING DAM!

 

Look! Up In The Sky! It's SUPER-EARTH!

The current top story in the Astrobiology Web 'zine is on the prospects for life on massive Earthlike planets. At least one astronomer, Dimitar Sasselov, thinks the odds are good that supermassive terrestrial bodies (which the article calls "super-Earths") could give rise to living things. He speculates that Earth may actually be on the small end of the range of habitable worlds, and wonders if this might explain the lack of evidence for other civilizations in the Galaxy. Basically, we're a lucky fluke and came early.

This starts my science-fiction brain working in two directions. The first is to speculate about what kind of stories one can set in Dr. Sasselov's universe. Millions of years hence the first inhabitants of supermassive Earthlike worlds cast their eyes to the heavens -- and find evidence of an incredibly old and advanced civilization descended from humans (and our machines). In that setting, humans are the "wise old skinny buttock-headed aliens" giving cryptic and unhelpful advice to burly, venturesome "young races" from planets with high gravity and deep oceans.

The second is to consider what an uncommon view Dr. Sasselov's speculations represent. One abiding principle in science, especially in the search for intelligent life, is the principle of Mediocrity -- the idea that there isn't anything special about us or our world, and that we are average, normal, run-of-the-mill intelligent organisms. Sasselov's idea is that we're not. We're the freaky outliers. It's a hard idea to test, until we either meet intelligent beings or establish they don't exist. But it does suggest an interesting avenue of research, which I offer to any grad student looking for a topic in astrobiology. Has anyone tried to work out, from first principles, what kind of planet would be the optimum to give rise to life? And, based on that, tried to find worlds like that to see if they show signs of intelligent inhabitants? If anyone knows of any research on that I'd love to hear about it.


 

World Not Ending, Film At 11

Following a link from the redoubtable Phil Plait at Skepticblog, here's a wonderful presentation of why the 2012 nonsense is, well, nonsense. I don't mean to be piling on here, because there's nothing so pointless as telling ignorant crackpots that they are, indeed, ignorant crackpots. But there seems to be something unusually tenacious about the 2012 nonsense. Maybe it's the massive film marketing campaign, maybe it's the rebound cycle from the Y2K nonsense. My personal theory is that it's residual Christian eschatology bubbling up through post-Christian scientism and boutique-spirituality syncretism. 

Anyhow, the short version: it's bogus. But you knew that, didn't you?

 

What If . . . ?

We all know about the Chicxulub impact -- the famous "dinosaur killer" asteroid which smashed into Yucatan 65 million years ago and ended the Cretaceous era with a bang. It may have had help. Paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee, of Texas Tech University, has identified another ancient crater he calls "Shiva," near modern-day Mumbai in India. The jury isn't quite in on Shiva yet -- so far no other researcher has confirmed Dr. Chatterjee's research -- but the prospect of two simultaneous dinosaur-killer impacts sets my science fiction writing organs twitching. Stand by for some completely wild speculation.

The Futility of Debunking

The big buzz in the world of crackpotdom right now is the impending End of the World in 2012. In case you've somehow missed it, the story is that the Mayan calendar (in this case the approximately 400-year "Long Count" cycle) is due to end in 2012; obviously that means Something Big And Probably Bad will happen then. At present the leading SBAPB candidate is a close encounter or even collision with the imaginary planet "Nibiru."

Debunking this is about as easy -- and as productive -- as debunking a six-year-old's worry that there is a monster under the bed. Which is to say, it's impossible. You can show the six-year-old there is no monster under the bed as many times as you wish, but if the six-year-old wants to believe, you won't be able to convince him.

NASA scientist David Morrison has an excellent PDF article available for free at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's Web site, debunking the 2012 myth like there's no tomorrow. Among other things, he points out how much of the current furor has been deliberately ginned up by the marketing department at Columbia Pictures to promote their upcoming film 2012 (which looks to be a pretty blatant knockoff of When Worlds Collide). Dr. Morrison's article is worth reading, but I'm afraid the only people who would be convinced by it are people who don't believe in post-Christian bogus millennialist viral marketing apocalyptic bullshit anyway.

That's the problem with all debunking of paranormal nonsense: debunking is by definition an appeal to reason, to hard evidence, to logic and common sense. People who think logically and want scientific evidence before they'll believe something won't fall for crackpottery in the first place. The believers are beyond the reach of the debunker's tools.

I've been wondering if other techniques might be more effective:  should debunkers fall back on simple scorn and mockery? Or make peace with existing established religions in order to combat the brushfire waves of idiocy which otherwise rage unchecked? Suggestions?

UPDATE: Phil Plait went through all this back in 2003 at his old "Bad Astronomy" Web site. See his savagely polite debunking of the "Nibiru" nonsense. And what did he accomplish? Six years later this garbage has moved from a couple of crackpots with Web sites to a major motion picture.