What Will Happen?

One of the things that has always fascinated me about public understanding of science is the question that somebody asks, and then immediately apologizes for asking a dumb question. Folks, there is NO such thing as a dumb question, but there are people who think they’ll LOOK dumb by asking something they think everybody but them knows the answer to.

One of those questions is “What’ll happen to the Sun?” Well, it’s a valid one. We’ve all heard that the Sun is about halfway through its life, that it’s about 4.5 billion years old. So, that suggests that in another five and a half billion years, something will happen. But what?

To tell you the truth, that’s a question we’ve been grappling with on this project I’m writing for. The current story is that the Sun will end its days as a white dwarf. Somewhere between now and that time, however, it might go through a giant phase and then a planetary nebula phase before it approaches white dwarfdom.

It’s a nice, orderly progression that satisfies our sense of science marching onward, but is it really going to happen? Maybe yes. Maybe no.

Not exactly what you want to know, is it? Well, science is like that. Based on the best available data, we try to give answers. When the data and models change, then the answers change. It doesn’t mean the original answer was wrong. It just means the data changed what we think is going to happen. If you give somebody directions down to the nearest shopping center or gas station and they come back and tell you that the stores are not there anymore, you weren’t wrong in your directions. You just didn’t know the truth of the matter.

So, what’s the truth of the matter when it comes to talking about the ultimate demise of our star? The current storyline could be written something like this: in about five billion or so years, the Sun will stop burning hydrogen in its core and start burning helium. The outer layers will expand with the added heat that is given off in the nuclear process, and the Sun may well become some sort of giant star. It may engulf Mercury. The orbits of Venus, Earth and possibly Mars could get shifted outward a bit. Then, after some amount of time, the outer atmosphere will blow off, and maybe (maybe!) there will be a planetary nebula surrounding the slowly shrinking (but still very hot) core of what’s left of the Sun. If there’s enough mass left over, the Sun will become a white dwarf.

That all sounds pretty iffy, but that’s the way it goes. Science aims to get us enough data to understand (and explain) these things. Right now the data point toward our Sun going through this set of steps in the far distant future. It’s a great story and I’d love to be around to see it happen!

However, keep in mind that some new data and observations could come in that will change this storyline—maybe subtly, maybe in a big way. That’s the way science works, too. And that is it’s greatest strength!

Where Were YOU 15 Years Ago?

A Pillar of Creation

It seems like not too long ago we were all waiting for the first images from the newly launched Hubble Space Telescope. April 26, 1990 was a date that so many scientists and engineers had looked forward to for so long. HST was officially “started” in the late 1970s, when a group of scientists brought forward a proposal to build an orbiting observatory that would far outpace anything that had been flown. It wasn’t a new idea. The German rocket scientist Herman Oberth had written about an orbiting mirror back in the early decades of the 20th century. But, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the momentum to loft an observatory like HST really began to pick up. The Challenger disaster certainly delayed the launch of the telescope, so by the time it left the pad at Cape Canaveral, everybody in the astronomy community was ready for great things.

Of course, we all know what came after HST’s launch—the heartbreak of the discovery of spherical aberration in the optical system. That marked the beginning of many dark days for HST scientists and staffers. But, remarkably, they pulled through and the telescope has been transformed from what Barbara Mikulsky (D-Md) called a “technoturkey” to one that she and others have hailed for its many and varied discoveries.

The image posted here is one of the more than 700,000 photos taken with this incredibly productive telescope. It’s a view of another pillar of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula (M16), a starbirth nursery some 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Serpens.

Take a few moments to browse the Hubble Space Telescope outreach site and celebrate the amazing 15-year odyssey HST has taken us on across the cosmos.

She Went Where?

It has been a few days since I wrote last. I have a good excuse though, since I now find myself in New York City working on a tres cool project! The Griffith Observatory (read more about it here: the Griffith Observatory renovation project) was looking for a person to do some writing for their exhibits and I thought it sounded like an interesting challenge. One thing led to another and here I am, putting all that astronomy knowledge to work for an institution I’ve long admired. No, I haven’t moved permanently to NYC, in fact, I’ll be spending a lot of time between home (in Massachusetts) and NYC over the next few months. Through the wonders of the Internet (thank you, Al Gore), I can post from anywhere, and so I’ll resume my blog entries as I can. I have a lot of time on trains and planes…