Monthly Archives: October 2008

Planetarium, Planetarium-related, politics, politics and science

Still with the Planetarium-bashing…

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Building that Bridge to Nowhere

The McCain folks really ARE on the bridge to nowhere. As of today (Friday, October 10), the Senator and his feckless running mate continue to bash Senator Obama for asking for planetarium funding (not to mention ranting about the whole Ayers thing, which is a non-starter for a majority of voters).

Apparently fact-checking isn’t part of Senator John McCain’s skill set. Nor do his handlers seem to have grasped the truth of the matter about the planetarium funding that didn’t actually happen. As countless numbers of us have shown in OUR fact-checking since Tuesday (which Mr. McCain’s handlers could easily do if they cared to), the funding never happened.  Yes, Senator Obama asked for it, but so did other elected officials of BOTH parties.

Asking for earmark funding is part and parcel of any Senator’s job (and Mr. McCain has done quite well in the past with his spending requests for his home state, despite his much-vaunted bragging against earmarks).

The bottom line is that I don’t know what’s more despicable: bashing education and planetariums, or continuing to do so even after the facts are known (facts which can be found in the Congressional Record).  Then again, watching the campaign incite voters with overt racism is pretty despicable, too. If this is all they have to run on, their well is running dry.  We should be a nation/world of people looking FORWARD and working together to solve problems and provide good educations for all, not a mob ruled by hatred and ignorance.

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starbirth, stars

Your Astronomy Dollars At Work

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Starbirth in The Small Magellanic Cloud

NGC 346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Infrared light (red) shows cold dust; visible light (green) denotes glowing gas; and X-rays (blue) represent very warm gas. Ordinary stars appear as blue spots with white centers, while young stars enshrouded in dust appear as red spots with white centers.
NGC 346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Infrared light (red) shows cold dust; visible light (green) denotes glowing gas; and X-rays (blue) represent very warm gas. Ordinary stars appear as blue spots with white centers, while young stars enshrouded in dust appear as red spots with white centers.

Okay, after all the political excitement, let’s get back to some astronomy!

Here’s an example of something you might learn about in a planetarium. It’s a starbirth region in a neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way.  The cloud, called NGC 346, shows up  here in multiple wavelengths of light gathered by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared light), the European Southern Observatory’s New Technology Telescope (visible light), and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space telescope (x-ray).

What’s going on here? A phenomenon called “triggered star formation.”  It is just like it sounds — star formation triggered by some exterior event.  What’s the trigger?  You need massive stars that are interacting with their environment. First, they give off huge amounts of radiation, which sends shock waves out through surrounding clouds of gas and dust. Those shock waves shove together clumps of gas and dust, and this creates new stars eventually. This compressed material is the arc-shaped orange-red filament. There are new stars inside the filament, hidden by the clouds of gas and dust that are giving them birth.

The second trigger comes when massive stars die. As they get older, these giants puff out clouds of material. t’s called “mass loss” and seeds nearby space with elements that will become other stars (or maybe even planets). See the pink blob of stars at the upper left. Their formation was triggered by winds from a massive star located to the left of it. It blew up in a supernova explosion 50,000 years ago. Before that cataclysmic event, the star’s winds pushed gas and dust together into new stars. The bubble that star created when it exploded is near the large, white spot with a blue halo at the upper left (this white spot is actually a collection of three stars).

This kind of exploration is fascinating. The more astronomers learn about distant areas of starbirth, the more they can explain about how our own region of the galaxy came to be populated with stars (and planets).

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