Lookin’ fer Pulsars!

Pulsars are spinning neutron stars (Image by Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Pulsars are big, nasty, radio-noisy beasts in the cosmic zoo. They are what’s left over after a massive star (say one that is at least eight times more massive than the Sun) explodes as a supernova. Some of the star’s body (what hasn’t been blasted out to space) falls back in on itself in a seething mass of crushed neutrons. They’re superdense and they spin. As they whip around many times per second, they send out beams of radio waves that sweep across our field of view like the light from a lighthouse. We catch their beams as pulses of radio waves; hence the name “pulsar.”

A group of astronomers who study these strange stellar animals has put together a project for high school students and their teachers to participate in searching out pulsars in our galaxy. The students and educators will join astronomers on the cutting edge of science under a program to be operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and West Virginia University (WVU), and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The program, called the Pulsar Search Collaboratory, will engage West Virginia students and teachers in a massive search for new pulsars using data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT).The GBT has discovered more than 60 pulsars over the past five years, including the fastest-rotating pulsar ever found, a speedster spinning 716 times per second.

Student teams will receive parcels of data from the GBT and analyze the data to discover pulsars. To do this, they’ll learn to use analysis software and recognize radio interference from Earth-based technologies that can contaminate the data. Each portion of the data will be analyzed by multiple teams. Of the 1,500 hours of GBT observing data in the project, all taken during the summer of 2007, some 300 hours is reserved for analysis by the student teams. This reserved data set is expected to include tens of new pulsars and about 100 known pulsars. It’s highly possible that each student in the project could discover one of these cosmic beasts for themselves. Think of how THAT will look on a college application form!

…Really COOL Stuff… from Stars

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called “Home Soil,” the crew of the starship Enterprise run into a life form that, when they finally figure out a way to communicate with it, calls the humans “ugly bags of mostly water.” It’s a great line, but it’s also true: we ARE mostly water.

In fact, if you break down the elements in our bodies by how much there is of each one, you get this list:

• 65% oxygen
• 18% carbon
• 10% hydrogen
• 3% nitrogen
• 1.5% calcium
• 1.0% phosphorus
• 0.35% potassium
• 0.25% sulfur
• 0.15% sodium
• 0.05% magnesium
• A mix of copper, selenium, fluorine, chlorine, molybdenum, iodine, cobalt, manganese, and iron that comes to about 0.70%
• Another mix of lithium, strontium, aluminum, silicon, lead, vanadium, arsenic, bromine that are in very small trace amounts

So, we ARE mostly water, when you combine the oxygen and hydrogen to make H₂0. Our skin, organs, muscles, bones, and nerves basically give the water a place to hang out. Now, the interesting thing is that, aside from the hydrogen, the rest of the stuff all comes from stars. Some of those elements are cooked up inside stars like the Sun. Others come from stars that exploded as supernovae. Each of those kinds of stars spent a long time converting fuel to heat, and in their old age, they blew off clouds of material that included these elements.

The late astronomer Carl Sagan coined the phrase “We are star stuff” to explain how we came from the stars, albeit in a very long, long birth process. A bunch of stars had to live and die in order to make the “stuff” that is in our bodies, that makes up our planet, and even our Sun. It’s great stuff, this starstuff!

By Offering Prizes to Meet a Challenge

So, will the next steps on the Moon be taken in order to win a $30 million X-prize? If Google has its way, it will. They’re offering that much money to whoever gets the first privately funded robotic rover on the Moon by the year 2012. It’s a great prize, although it probably won’t cover the actual costs of the rover. It almost really doesn’t matter if it does, though. It’s the spirit of the thing that really counts. That a foundation and a company would be willing to put their money with their mouth is speaks volumes about their commitment to moving humans ahead to explore the near-Earth environment. And, to do that, some radical moves need to be taken, both in funding and incentives as well as in the actual technology to do the job. In the history of technology, sometimes really good solutions have come about because of competition and pressure to do a job well. And, as we know from the history of space travel so far, the spinoffs benefit education, medicine, and many technologies we take for granted in our daily lives.

Earth from the Moon (NASA)

The X-Prize foundation doesn’t just fund competitions for space travel, although their first big one, the Ansari Prize to prove that personal, affordable space flight is achievable. It went to Spaceship One and Mojave Aerospace Ventures, led by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen. It was a private team and they achieved a major breakthrough in space travel. If you go to the X-Prize Foundation’s web site you’ll find X-Prizes for a variety of other challenges: genomics and automotive breakthroughs, to name a couple. You can even suggest an X-Prize challenge, something breaktaking, audacious, and visionary. That’s what it takes: an idea and a chance to push it through. Sort of like going to the Moon with a lunar buggy.
There it is—let’s go!

Gazin’ at Yer Starrrrrs!!!!

Yarrr!!!!

Arrr!!! Avast ye lads and lasses, ’tis Talk Like a Pirate Day! All in good fun and silliness, because as the old chumbuckets over at Talk Like a Pirate Day say, we all know that real pirates are scurvy bilge rats and no fun at all. We’re not here to celebrate the evil ways of real pirates. We just want to be a little silly, sling around some piratey lingo and exhibit some swashbuckling pirattitude. And, so today we’re Stargazin’ like a Pirate here at Ye Olde Spacewriter’s Blogge.

In days of old, honest sailors and pirates alike used the stars for navigatin’ the briney deeps. Today, us modern travelers at sea AND on land depend on things like computers and cell phones and GPS units to do our navigatin’ for us. So we can just go out and enjoy the night sky for the sheer beauty of it all and celebrate a cosmic version of Talk Like a Pirate Day!

To get started, dress fer the weather! If it’s cold in yer part of the world, put on yer warmest piratey britches and overcoats. While yer still inside, get yerself some star charts here. They’ll come in handy when yer sailin’ the starry seas!

Aside from that, ye won’t need anything else but yer own two eyes and a safe place to stargaze from! If yer really in the piratey mood, however, take along some grog! This can be a spiritous beverage (if yer of legal age) or a hot chocolate or warm chai or whatever shivers yer piratey timbers!

Next, get yerself outside as soon as the Sun has set in old Davey Jones’s locker in the sky. (When it’s dark.) Lay down on a nice chaise longue chair, or a blanket or sleepin’ bag, anything to keep yer piratey stargazin’ hiney warm and dry. Then, ye just look up!

There, stretched above ye will be the glory o’ the cosmos. Stars, planets, our galaxy, plus a few others, clouds o’ gas and dust, and much, much more. If ye have a piratey spyglass (or binoculars or a telescope) drag it out and focus on the lovelies above ye!

That’s all there is to it. While yer at it, spice up yer language and talk like a piratey astronomer! Use such swashbuckling lingo as:

“Aye, that’s a lovely treasure chest o’ stars up there, matey!”

“Shiver me timbers, I’ve never seen such a bright planet as that one!”

“Arrr Matey, check out that Lagoon Nebula afore she sets!!!”

“Well, blow me down, matey! We’ll be sailing Carina over the horizon tonight!!

“Avast ye, the Moon is over the yardarm!”

“Look smartly, me lovelies! There went a meteor!”

‘Tis a new way to get yer starrrrry fix, and a great way to celebrate the Piratey Silliness. So, have fun and don’t forget—talk like a pirate!

Arrrrrrr!!! Check out the starrrs!!!

The first step you take to space is the one you take when you go outside and look up at the stars. A lot of questions crowd your mind. How far away are those stars? is a good one. Another one that you eventually get to is: How did they form?

Astronomy, the science that studies the stars and planets and galaxies, is a rigorous way of looking at the stars and explaining how they came to be. It applies physics, which is another science that we all learn at some point in our lives. The laws of physics describe motions, actions, and reactions. Pretty simple, really. Something happens, a law of physics describes that happening. If you can observe it, you can describe it. If it happens often enough in the same or similar ways, the laws of physics describe it. That’s the essence of science, and the application of physical laws. Clear thinking is required and it’s not hard to do once you get the hang of it.

So, the stars are out there, and over centuries of study, we’ve figured out how they work, where they came from, and what they’re going to do throughout their lives. Same with planets and galaxies and nebulae.

But, the first step is to go out there and gaze.

There’s a project going on in the first two weeks of October called the Great World Wide Star Count. It’s aimed at anybody who wants to go outside, look up at the stars, and then share what they see with others. It’s a science project, and as such things go, it’s pretty easy. You go outside, look for specific constellations and then come inside and write up what you see in a form on the World Wide Web. Visit the link to find out more. It’s time to step outside to the stars! Start practicing for the Star Count tonight!