Telling a Science Story

One of the things I do is help scientists describe their work to the public. Sometimes this means writing a press release or reading over an article someone has written for a publication. Whatever it is, my job is to find the most important parts of the story and bring them forward so that the scientist and the public (reporters, usually) can have a meaningful discussion about the work. That’s not always easy, since there are stark differences in the way scientists write up their work for their peers and the way they might tell their story to the public. You can chalk those differences up to the rigors of scientific publishing, where the methods of doing a science experiment are as an important part of the story as the results.

Every discipline in science has its jargon, its ways of communicating among the participants. For example, if you go to the doctor and have an examination of your right side above your waistline, your doctor might write up that the examination centered on the abdominal RUQ. Jargon, to be sure, but it’s a shorthand that describes exactly what was examined. Or, let’s say you go to a talk about the early universe, as given by one astronomer to a group of colleagues. You might hear the following: “We’re using long-period gamma-ray bursts as a probe of the intergalactic medium neutral fraction at z=6.3.”

Translated, that means that they’re looking for long-period gamma-ray bursts (longer than a few seconds, typically), which scientists think happen when a huge star explodes and emits a jet, or when a white dwarf star merges with either a neutron star or a black hole. The action emits a huge burst of radiation, which speeds across the universe. As it goes along, it passes through clouds of gas, clouds of gas and dust, and through clusters and possibly other galaxies. As it does, that radiation (light) is absorbed by whatever is in the way. You can see that absorption when you study the light with special instruments called spectrographs. The results tell you the chemical makeup of any clouds of cold gas, or gas and dust in the space between galaxies back in the early universe (more than about 9 billion years ago). So, in that one sentence, the scientist says a lot, but it’s buried in specialized language.

In a science paper, the typical form is to describe (briefly) a finding, and then go into details about how that finding was made (equipment, constraints, etc.), and then go into the details of the finding. Often this means that the “news” of a paper is buried IN the paper, and not up in the first few sentences, as you’d see in a newspaper story. This is perfectly normal and nothing to be worried about—unless you’re also trying to explain the “newsworthy” part of a science discovery to the public. Then you have to find the “meat” of the story, and lead with it in the first few sentences. So, a story about the gamma-ray bursters might read like this if you saw it in the paper: “Scientists at Gemini Observatory are using the 8-meter telescope to peer back about 9 billion years to study bright flashes of light called gamma-ray bursters. The light, which passes through clouds of gas and dust on its way across the universe, can tell astronomers the makeup of that gas and dust, as well as how quickly it’s moving.”

That’s my job—to identify the news in a story and help tell that story. I might do it for a press release or a newspaper article or a magazine article, or (my favorite) for a planetarium show or documentary.

So, a few weeks ago I was talking to a scientist who studies the effects of space weather on our communications systems. Spaceweather (which you can learn more about here, and here, and most especially here) is basically a catch-all term for interactions between material that has been belched out from the Sun and our planet’s magnetic field and upper atmosphere. Auroral displays (northern and southern lights) are the most obvious manifestation of space weather that we can see.

Aurora on April 1, 2007, over New Aiyansh, British Columbia. Taken by Yuichi Takasaka. Courtesy Spaceweather.com.

There’s another side to space weather, however. A strong event can knock out telecommunications systems, power grids, and GPS satellite service. This last is important because we depend on GPS timing signals for an incredible number of things in our daily lives.

So, back to the scientist. She was asked to give a presentation at last week’s Spaceweather Enterprise Forum in Washington, D.C. She came to me for advice on how to identify some strong talking points for her presentation. So, we set to work on her statement. The science is very compelling, very straightforward: spaceweather can harm GPS systems. We need to know that and construct backup systems as well as harden the systems we have. Otherwise a strong solar burst could knock out more than just communications. I asked her for some examples of what GPS effects are in our daily lives. She mentioned a few, including one I hadn’t thought about: financial transactions. Bank transfers depend on accurate timing from GPS. So, I said to her that this was a point that would grab people right in the wallet. To me it was a point that would grab the attention of bottom-liners in business as well as government. So, I suggested that she make that one of her talking points.

We quickly came up with a few more talking points, such as how we can’t predict when large solar outbursts are going to take place. We were totally surprised by one last December that partially shut down GPS systems for (as she put it) tens of minutes. That’s a long time in communications and financial circles.

We honed her statement down and off she went to the meeting. And, lo and behold, her statements got picked up by nearly every news agency in attendance. Even though she was the last speaker on the podium, she got maximum “sound bite” out of a simple truth: space weather can and does affect things on this planet. (If you’re interested in what she had to say, go here and click on the link for Anthea Coster of MIT’s Haystack Observatory. Heck, listen to all of them!)

It’s a lot of fun being a space writer and doing what I do. Sometimes it gets me in on a story before it hits the news!

The Cosmos Measured

The universe is huge. It’s bigger than we can imagine. We can model it, but unless we figure out a way to travel across huge gulfs of space, I don’t think we can ever truly get a complete feeling for how huge it is. But, we CAN measure it. And we have, using various wavelengths of light from the depths of space to do it. The multiwavelength universe tells us what’s out there, how far away it is, but also where WE are.

So, what are the measurements? Let’s start with your every day distances. From your face to the computer screen is somewhere around a third to a half of a meter (9-14 inches for those who use the English system of units). What’s the distance to the nearest park? A few hundred meters? A kilometer? Several kilometers? The distance around the world is roughly 40,000 kilometers. The distance from Earth to the Moon is 384,403 kilometers. To travel from Earth to the nearest star is a distance of 4.1 light-years. (Light travels 1,079,252,848.8 kilometers per hour, do the math!) The distance from our planet to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy is 26,000 light-years; the nearest galaxies are at least 163,000 light-years away. The most distant phenomenon ever measured lies some 13.7 BILLION light-years away. That 13.7 billion is, essentially, the limit of how far we can see. Beyond that is—what? The froth stirred up by the Big Bang.

Considering that most of us human types are no more than a couple of meters or so tall, you can see that on the scale of the universe, we’re pretty small. Our brains aren’t more than a dozen or so centimeters across, but we’ve managed to figure out distances in the cosmos.

Universcale

If you’re a person who enjoys a visual explanation of distances and scales, check out the Universcale. It’s a fascinating animation of distances and scales in the cosmos. From the tiniest bits of cosmic matter seen by the electron microscope to the scales at which our greatest telescopes offer, you can explore the size of the cosmos in all its variety.

The Solar System Plays Tricks on Us

Just when we think we understand a little bit about our neck of the cosmic woods, something comes up that whacks us upside the head (in a nice way) and spurs lots of questions.

Saturn's active north pole, courtesy the Cassini Mission.

Take the planet Saturn, for example. We’ve all grown up being taught that this planet is a gas giant—made mostly of hydrogen gas, with varying amounts of helium, ammonia, nitrogen, methane, and other gases in its atmosphere. We’ve studied that atmosphere, charting storms that churn through it, and measuring temperature and wind speed variations. Heavy atmosphere, lots of round or semi-round storms in it, fast winds, and steadily thickening layers as you go down toward the core: that’s what we pegged for Saturn.

Still, the nature of planetary science is to study planets—and keep studying them for long periods of time. Planets aren’t static places, not even the “deadest” of them. Not by any means. They change over time, develop new features on their surfaces or in their atmosphees. And, their visible appearances don’t always tell us the full story. Just look at Saturn with infrared eyes, sensitive to thermal radiation (heat), for example, and interesting features pop right into view.

There’s this bizarre, six-sided feature that encircles the North Pole of the planet near 78 degrees north latitude, for example. It was actually discovered back in the 1980s by the Voyager spacecraft missions, but this is the first time we’ve been able to position a spacecraft (Cassini) in a good orbit to get a clear image of the thing. You can read more about the specifics of the image here, but suffice to say, this is the best view we’ve had of this atmospheric phenomenon ever. The hexagon of clouds is long-lived, so we’ll have much more time to study it (at least as long as Cassini pipes images and data back). But what is it? There’s nothing been seen like it at any other planet in our solar system, and nobody expected to see anything like it in Saturn’s thick atmosphere, either. It’s naturally occurring, so now the trick is to come up with a good atmospheric model that can explain the thing. There is a similar type of atmospheric phenomenon on Earth, called the polar vortex, so perhaps using that as a model, astronomers will be able to get a handle on Saturn’s, which is four times the size of Earth.

I remember when Saturn used to be thought strange because it had rings. Now, it turns out that Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune have rings. And, in the distant past, Earth might have had one, too. What else will we learn about our solar system before we think we can say we know it all??