Rule 1: Be Prepared

Rule 2: Use Lots of Observatories

The big news about Alicia Soderberg and Edo Berger’s observations of a supernova just beginning its explosion is one of those great stories that illustrates the saying “Chance favors the prepared mind.” A few months ago when both authors were writing an article about their find for GeminiFocus (a magazine on which I’m associate editor), I marveled at how lucky these two were. But, they were doing more than just being in the right place at the right time. They also had the capability to reach out and grab use of several observatories to get the best multi-wavelength view of the supernova (which blew up in the galaxy NGC 2770 (which lies some 88 million light-years away from us). Of course, SWIFT saw the first x-ray emissions from the supernova, and the astronomers noticed that right away. In short order, the pair alerted the astronomy community, and soon the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico, the Gemini North and Keck 1 telescopes in Hawai’i, two telescopes at Palomar Observatory in California, and a telescope at Apache Point in New Mexico were all looking at this outburst.

The combination of observations from all this observatory “firepower” pins down the moments when the first x-rays began streaming from the star. Eventually this information will help astronomers understand the moment-by-moment events that occur when a massive star finally explodes as a supernova. It’s a look at stellar death throes that wouldn’t have been possible even a few years ago. Chance — and a lot of really good telescopes — really do favor the prepared astronomers who got this chance to look into the jaws of star death.

I was born and spent my childhood and early adult life in Boulder, Colorado. For those who haven’t been there or don’t know about Boulder, it’s home to the University of Colorado and a whole slew of science research institutions including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Space Science Institute. Ball Aerospace makes its home in Boulder, along with other space-related outfits.

Both of my degrees are from CU, and as an undergraduate, I worked at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics and hung out at the campus planetarium. In graduate school I worked for the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and continued doing a few lectures at Fiske once in a while to keep my finger in the live planetarium show end of things.

It was interesting to grow up in Boulder’s science community, once I got old enough to appreciate it. There were always lectures on campus, covering just about any topic in science you can imagine. I remember going up to CU once to hear a fellow speak about the emergence of life on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago, and it was the first time I ever heard of stromatolites. Another time a group of us went up there to see a physics lecturer and his amazing experiments. Astronomers, geologists, physicists, you name it, they were available to us, and as I grew up, I met some who were the parents of variousradiosond school classmates.

My dad often talked about the science these folks were doing. One time we found a radiosonde from a weather experiment. It had landed in our fields (we had a farm outside Boulder). He called around and found out it belonged to one of the research institutes (probably the predecessor to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Together we took it back to the lab and I remember looking around with awe at the place. Daddy also worked at Ball Aerospace briefly and used to bring home pictures of some of the spacecraft the company was working on.

Like most kids, I went through the whole “I wanna be an astronaut, I wanna be a pilot, I wanna be a … whatever…” thought process. Eventually I ended up deciding I wanted to be an astronaut and writer. Of course, I haven’t gotten to do the astronaut part, although I certainly have met plenty of them and understand what it is they do. My science writing is a direct result of growing up in a place where science research and education is an integral part of the community.

Being an astronaut or a scientist isn’t an idea outside of the realm of possibility in a place like Boulder–not then and certainly not now. It occurs to me that kids growing up in other places where science isn’t such a big part of community life might feel differently, as if science was being done “somewhere else” or was for “other” people.  I’m glad I grew up in Boulder; there are days that I miss it very much. Would I go back?  That’s a question we talk about once in a while.  I don’t know if I can go back “home” or not. But I’m sure as heck glad that I lived there in the first place.  There aren’t too many places where one small town holds so many research groups. Perhaps that’s why I think of it as the center of the cosmos, and I know that for those of us who grew up in Boulder with an interest in science, it definitely took a village to create that interest.

and It’s Out There

But, how do you find it? That’s the question that confronts astronomers who study the large-scale structure of the universe. There are two types of matter that they can study-ordinary, baryonic matter (protons, neutrons, and the subatomic particles that make up hydrogen, helium, and other elements (which themselves combine to form stars, planets, and galaxies) and then there’s dark matter, which isn’t baryonic. To get at the problem of how much dark matter there is, you have to corral all the baryonic matter. For a long time, astronomers have known that there’s a substantial mass of baryonic matter out there. The problem was to find it. You have to do a cosmic accounting of it. And, it’s not easy. You can’t just look out at the sky and easily spot the protons, neutrons, and other particles. You have to look at what it does to light.

The way to do that is to look at light from distant quasars through a spectrograph, a device that breaks up the light into its component wavelengths. As that light travels through space between the quasars and us, it gets absorbed by baryonic matter. And that leaves little dark lines (called absorption lines) in the spectrum of the quasar’s light. Those lines correspond to various elements that exist in the intergalactic medium.

Mike Shull and Charles Danforth (of the University of Colorado) used the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) to look at quasars and map the distribution of baryonic matter in the local universe (the four billion or so light-years around us). They’ve now mapped enough of that “local” intergalactic medium to be able to say they’ve found about half of the missing baryonic matter there. (Read the details here.)

Shull says they’re finding structure in this matter, which is a big deal. “We think we are seeing the strands of a web-like structure that forms the backbone of the universe,” he said. “What we are confirming in detail is that intergalactic space, which intuitively might seem to be empty, is in fact the reservoir for most of the normal, baryonic matter in the universe.”

Of course, there are many more quasars to observe, and mapping the entire universe (in all directions) will take more time and a new instrument that is scheduled to go up on HST later this year. Stay tuned!

The Future

Over the weekend I read a story about a study that concluded that women aren’t in “hard” science because they aren’t interested in it or have somehow gotten disillusioned with it. The piece raised a few red flags for me because these studies often seem to come to some conclusion based on biology or temperament that somehow gets generalized out to ALL women, and thus seems to feed into a feeling (by some) in the community that women don’t belong in science. Of course, that’s hogwash. Women (like men) belong wherever they feel they can make a contribution or an advance, science included.

Back when I was in graduate school we heard a lot of horror stories about female science students being mistreated, snubbed, or downright abused by male scientists (advisors, professors, fellow students). The worst usually involved some graduate advisor making advances at his student and if she didn’t comply, making it clear that she’d never graduate/advance. In one case, the guy actually went so far as to reserve a room for him and his student at a meeting (without her knowledge until she arrived at the hotel and was confronted with that nasty fact). Given stories like that, and so many others, I am surprised that anybody still wonders why women have a hard time getting taken seriously in science. Sure, science is a rigorous way of knowing things, and the classes can be difficult, but it’s not privileged knowledge that is preserved only for those who have certain chromosomal arrangements.

Things have improved since the days when women weren’t even allowed to go to college or vote, so I suppose that’s some consolation, but I still wonder why it is that many of these studies about women’s interests or advancement in science ALWAYS seem to come back to biology and temperament. As if certain arrangements of chromosomes and emotions are somehow wrong for science while others are “right.” Seems to me that passion and interest are the same, no matter what genes one bears. I doubt it enters anybody’s mind to question why more men don’t go into science. It would be interesting to see the results of a well-conducted survey, don’t you think?

Anyway, I thought it was interesting to read the article a week before the annual University of Massachusetts-Lowell-led Women in Science and Engineering Day, which is held every year at UMASS-Lowell. It’s a day when the organizers bring in middle-school girls from around the region to hear talks from female scientists, and participate in “hands-on” workshops in science-related careers. Sometimes the girls get to play “CSI” detective, in other workshops they learn about being a doctor or a pilot or science illustrator or museum curator or meteorologist. One year the woman who is president of iRobot, the ROOMBA folks, gave a talk, another year they had a pilot from Southwest Airlines. I’ve taught at the event a few times, leading girls through a series of writing projects where they take science press releases and turn them into stories for the media. It’s a lot of fun, very rewarding, and even their teachers get into the workshops. I always hope that a few of the girls will turn to science, once they realize that it’s not the domain of one gender or social class.

I’m not teaching it this year–too many conflicts, but I hope to do it again in the future. It’s a great thing, and I notice that a lot of universities do it. It’s kind of sobering to think that in these so-called “modern” times we still have to do stuff like this, but I guess we do.

Does it Hurt?

I got an email from a casual correspondent (not anyone I know well) a while back that has me shaking my head. While I haven’t written much about climate change here (even though I’m working on a climate change project for a museum right now), my note about preserving the Earth a few weeks back tripped a breaker in somebody’s mind and the lights went out.

So, the letter began by excoriating scientists who “believe” in global warming. Not even a “Hi, I read your entry and I have a few comments to make” opening. No, this person just plowed right in and began flinging poo. First, the writer listed a series of statements that he/she said were made by proponents of global warming that were (in the letter-writer’s opinion) false and made only to get more funding (the letter-writer’s interpretation). No, the person didn’t say WHY they were false. Apparently it was enough to just get out the world FALSE in big, black letters with lots of exclamation points after it.

The person did send me some links to “research” that he/she said disproved global warming. The first one on the list turned out to be a site that pretty said verbatim what was written in the email to me. At the bottom of the email message, the person suggested that scientists should be more “open to new ideas” and not closed-minded to people who disagree with them.

Okay, so I got the idea that this person doesn’t think that global warming is real. Fair enough — everybody’s entitled to their opinion. But, this person’s opinion wasn’t his/her own. It was basically a rehash of a website that he/she had read (and was graceless enough to point out to me as a “scientific source”). The site misquoted several scientists, actually putting words in their mouths they’d never said. Then it took them to task for what it claimed they said (rather than what they actually said).

And my letter-writer was whining about closed-mindedness on the part of scientists?

It was entertaining for about one minute. But, I have less patience these days with people who don’t use their heads or prefer to let others do their thinking for them, particularly when it comes to discussing science. Let me just say that the human mind is meant to be educated and exercised, not rented out or mismanaged by people whose degrees are in psychoceramics.