a friend just pointed me in the direction of a very funny feature on the blog, improbable research: research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK. this feature is the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists or LFHCfS... since every good anything has a proper acronymn!
i was happy to see recent PhD and former Queen rockstar, brian may, inducted into the club.
if only i'd known about this club last week at the AAS meeting... i'd have several new candidates to nominate! i'll work at collecting the necessary nomination photos!
when i first looked at the full size version of the above above, i saw two large crazy sky-scraping buildings with a legendary cloud system above them! but then my perspective swapped to the outside looking in...
today APOD shares with us this dizzying image of hurricane ivan from the international space station. this hurricane was largest atlantic hurricane of 2004... the 10th most powerful ever recorded on planet earth!
globular clusters are collections of thousands of stars, gravitationally bound together. a popular cluster visible with the naked eye is the pleiades cluster. the stars in a cluster orbit around the center of the cluster, just as the planets in our solar system orbit around the sun. it takes the stars a lot longer to move one time around their system though.... about 100,000 years! during our short human lives, it is very difficult to detect the motion of individual stars around a cluster!
a different method for studying the stars in a globular cluster, is to look at how the light levels of individual stars change... which occur for some stars on much shorter timescales. that brings me to the fascinating time-lapse movie of the globular cluster, M3 (NGC 5272), shown below.
the movie above was created from 4 images taken within the same night! most of the stars remain the same brightness and color, but many stars change their brightness level drastically and become more blue over over this very short time period! these variable stars are called RR Lyrae stars (named after the first one identified - the RR star in the constellation Lyra).
these stars are different than our sun and the other stars in the image because they get larger and smaller over the course of a couple days. they inflate and deflate like a balloon, over and over, because of the specific nuclear reactions happening in their cores. changing the size of a star changes its surface area and temperature, and therefore how much light it produces and how bright it appears to our eyes. the RR Lyrae appears brightest when it is smallest in size and hottest is temperature.
M33 is a popular spiral galaxy that lives relatively close to our milky way... somewhere around 3 million light years away. comet 8P/Tuttle is roughly 40 million kilometers (or 2 light-minutes) away. M33 looks blue due to the many regions where young stars are forming in the spiral arms. the comet looks green/teal due to its chemical composition.
on a clear night you might be able to see the comet from northern latitudes with your eye (although i havent had any luck from austin). binoculars or a small telescope should give a good view. while youre at it, try to find the still-bright comet holmes!
next week austin hosts the 211th american astronomical society meeting. i'm super excited... and a bit anxious. in addition to the typical socializing, shenanigans, science, and sight seeing, i'll be giving a talk describing my dissertation research, trying to get some insightful research ideas, and schmoozing with people hiring post-docs!
you have to say that word out loud... quadrantids.
if youre up late tonight in the northern hemisphere, look to the northeast... try to find the big dipper and then watch for bright meteors shooting across the sky! the quadrantids meteor showers have been observed and recorded since 1825
if you stay up late enough.... or wake up early enough tomorrow morning, look up at the incredibly bright planet venus, and the sliver moon nearby. enjoy!
its cold right now in the northern hemisphere (even in austin), but the earth is closer to the sun today than it has been for the last year! this position is called perihelion. the earth's orbit around the sun is very nearly circular, but not quite. the image below shows circular orbits as dotted lines for mercury, earth, and mars... and the actual, elliptical orbits as solid lines.
you can see that the earth is very close to having a circular orbit (e = 0.0), but its slight eccentricity (e > 0) means that there is a point during our year where we are closest to the sun - today! happy perihelion!
intuitively, one might think that we would be closest to the sun during the hottest part of the year. but remember that the seasons are opposite for the northern and southern hemispheres. the reason for earth's seasons is because of the tilt of earth's spin axis relative the plane through which we move around the sun.
the effect of the changing distance between the earth and the sun, in combination with the earths spin axis, reveals itself by the analemma - the figure 8 pattern that the sun makes across the sky. the image above results from combining images taken at local noon on various days throughout a single year (see a movie here).
the point when the sun is highest in the analemma (and abve the horizon) is the summer solstice, and the lowest point represents the winter solstice. the rising and lowering of the sun's position in our sky is caused by the earth's tilted axis. the width of the analemma and the fact that the top loop is smaller than the bottom loop are due to the ellipticity of our orbit around the sun... the earth moves more quickly through space when we are closer to the sun in our orbit.
each planet has a different shape to its analemma because each planet in our solar system has a unique combination of axis tilt and eccentricity of orbit. to explore the analemmas from other planets, i send you off to analemma.com which has some very interesting, and slightly disorienting, videos!
if youre running around outside tonight at your local midnight, making noise and welcoming the new year... look up! find the orion constellation, focus on the bright orange mars, and reflect on the earth's recent trip around the sun.
the three stars of orions belt point down toward the bright star sirius.
the the left of the star betelgeuse, in orion, is the bright planet, mars.
enjoy! i hope the new year brings happiness for you all!
the COSMOS series doesnt have the super high-tech animations that are shown in the universe series on the history channel, because it was created in the 80's. but its information is still up to date, and i like the amount that it left to be filled in by my imagination.... and the passion and wonder portrayed in this series is unrivaled in anything i've seen since.
the moon is passing quite close to many objects this month as it travels thru the sky. tomorrow night (thursday dec. 27), the moon sits next to the bright star regulus and hangs above the planet saturn. saturn rises around 11 pm in the east and then moves up and across the sky throughout the night. enjoy!
did you notice the full moon tonight with the bright planet mars right next to it? for some lucky people around the world, the moon passed right in front of the orange-y planet, but not all of us could see this occult.
today's feature image comes from my very own older sister, Lara.
another nice shot from APOD today: an almost full moon as it passed near mars in our sky last month.
i've played this game almost exclusively in the midwest part of the US. i didnt realize how popular it has become in the cincinnati, ohio area. apparently this game is developing cultish participation levels! watching this tribute video yesterday brought tears to my sisters eyes!!
tonight mars is at its closest point to us for the next 8 years.... at about 88 million km (55 million miles) away! this is pretty close, but still 32 million km (20 million miles) farther away than in august 2003 (you may recall the "mars will look as big as the moon" hoax emails that started around that time).
my favorite shot by APOD, was taken in march when the moon passed just in front of saturn, barely blocking some of the rings and the side of the planet! a grazing lunar occultation!
to create the above image, pete lawrence of digital-astronomy, took one shot every 90 seconds during the occultation.... the moon is moving pretty quickly! then he adjusted each image so the light from saturn and the moon would contrast each other nicely instead of the bright moon dominating the entire image. then he added the frames together for this wonderful composite image!
i wonder about the distinctly human quirk of consciousness. on earth, humans are the only creatures (as far as we can tell) who have developed the ability to recognize consciousness and contemplate existence. (i think we would live very different lives on this planet had we been competing with another intelligent species all along, in addition to ourselves and each other.) many animals share our five senses and even though the details vary greatly, only humans have developed the capacity to reflect on consciousness, invent written languages, and think deeply about things that are not directly related to our daily survival.
what about life on other planets (which surely exists)? does biological evolution always create consciousness after some period of time? maybe other life forms have seven senses or breathe primarily nitrogen, but if they've developed intelligence as we've come to know it, surely they have thought about science and psychology. my presumption is that the fundamental laws of physics we've discovered would be the same for these life forms. even if no creatures in the universe fully understand the fundamental laws, as we certainly don't, the laws should be equivalent. gravity would behave in the same, inescapable, familiar way that the force between the life form and its planet would decrease by the square of the distance between the life form on the surface and the center of the planet. this seems reasonable to me... but what about consciousness? is it always the same?
just as animals on earth have no concept of cognitive awareness, is there an equivalent level of something that we humans have not evolved to be able to feel/think/recognize/attain/comprehend? i try to think of emotions that could exist that humans have not experienced, but my list of possibilities (empathy, love, fear, depression, anger, etc...) seems as comprehensive as i can contemplate! will our human creation of potentially conscious robots give us more insight to the possibilities?
i mean, i'm not really looking to further complicate my humanoid life with even more concepts that i don't understand... but its fun for this feeling, loving, learning, creating, evolving, intelligent, bipedal, earth-bound, carbon-based, biological, talking collection of atoms to contemplate such circumstances!
these thoughts developed today as i watched the following video from the march 2007 TED talk by the 1969 Nobel Prize winner in physics, murray gell-mann. his talk is titled: beauty and truth in physics.
if youre still looking for holiday cards to give out with your presents, here are some of my favorites. the clever folks at hubblesite have created some wonderfully inspired hubble holiday cards.
what about life on other planets (which surely exists)? does biological evolution always create consciousness after some period of time? maybe other life forms have seven senses or breathe primarily nitrogen, but if they've developed intelligence as we've come to know it, surely they have thought about science and psychology. my presumption is that the fundamental laws of physics we've discovered would be the same for these life forms. even if no creatures in the universe fully understand the fundamental laws, as we certainly don't, the laws should be equivalent. gravity would behave in the same, inescapable, familiar way that the force between the life form and its planet would decrease by the square of the distance between the life form on the surface and the center of the planet. this seems reasonable to me... but what about consciousness? is it always the same?
