Monthly Archives: April 2009

stephen hawking

When I Met Stephen Hawking

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in Utah

Dr. Stephen Hawking, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Dr. Stephen Hawking, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

News today is that British scientist Stephen Hawking is very ill and is in the hospital. No word yet on how serious his condition is but we are hoping for the best for this man, who has accomplished so much despite so many obstacles posed by his motor neurone disease.

Some years ago Mark and I and our brother-in-law Tony had the chance to meet Dr. Hawking in Salt Lake City. He was there as part of a promotion for a film being made about his life and work, and some of the production team members invited us to come over for a special reception with Dr. Hawking and then hear him give a talk at the University of Utah arena.  It was probably one of the coolest and yet strangest experiences of our lives.

There are three things I’ve never forgotten about the visit.  The first was when we met him at the reception. He wheeled in and we all stared at each other in silent appreciation. Then, he activated his voice synthesizer and we all greeted each other.  I think most of us didn’t really know what to ask or say, but we all muddled through.  There was one moment when I felt we were all in some sort of surreal, subdued “exhibit” atmosphere, and I’ve often wondered who was more of an exhibit — us or Dr. Hawking.

The second moment was when Dr. Hawking gave his talk to a standing ovation crowd at the arena.  First they played his scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Descent.”  That brought the house down. Then, as that faded out, Dr. Hawking wheeled up onto the stage like a rock star.  The crowd went wild and from that moment on, he had them in the palm of his voice synthesizer. One of the people we were sitting with leaned over and said in wonderment, “It’s amazing to see this many people get together to hear a lecture on cosmology and astrophysics from a guy who can’t talk.”  It was amazing. And extremely gratifying.

The third moment came the next day when a small group of us accompanied Dr. Hawking out to Evans & Sutherland so that he could tour their flight simulators and planetarium installations.  The high point of that day was when they loaded him into a flight simulator, showed him how to fly it, and let him loose.  In one simulation he practiced shooting moving targets and when he hit one, he grinned like a kid in a candy shop and tapped out on his voice synthesizer, “I deaded it.”  (I’m guessing he didn’t have the word “killed” in the memory banks.)

I’ve had a lot of time to think about those three days in Salt Lake City and it has taken me a while to write about it. I had a request for a story about it at the time, and I couldn’t do it — it would have felt exploitative of a man who had no defenses against such stories.  Or maybe I didn’t feel I could do it justice. Maybe I still haven’t, but it feels like the right time to talk about it. In a strange sense, putting Stephen Hawking in a flight simulator is a completely natural thing to do, and I often have wondered if he would be the philosophical prototype of a research project where a perfectly functioning human brain is transplanted into the cyborg world of a simulator.  Clearly he will not be doing that completely — but watching him play and learn in that simulator, and watching him in subsequent experiences on a zero-gravity simulation flight, showed me that such human-machine mergings are in our future. And, more importantly, the human who does it won’t lose his or her humanity. Far from it. Stephen Hawking is a man tethered to a machine, and yet, he was having fun and that was what counted!  I hope he will be with us a while longer and continue having fun as he lives on.

astronomy, spitzer space telescope, starbirth, UKIRT

A Seething Hotbed of Star Birth

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Another Peek at the Orion Nebula

It’s getting to be the time of year when the Orion Nebula isn’t readily available in the night sky because — well, it’s just not a sky sight for the next few months.  So, those of us who love to explore the nebula have to “make do” with the latest in professional studies of this busy, busy star birth region.

The Orion Molecular Cloud as seen by UKIRT and Spitzer Space Telescope. (Click to emiggen -- and you WANT to!)
The Orion Molecular Cloud as seen by UKIRT and Spitzer Space Telescope. (Click to embiggen -- and you WANT to!)

The kind folks at the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT), the IRAM Millimeter-wave Telescope in Spain,  and the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope did a set of observations and combined them to create this stunning infrared image of the Orion Molecular Cloud. There’s a lot going on here —  star birth is NOT a serene event (just as human births aren’t exactly quiet, respectful events).

Let’s deconstruct this image. (You might want to right-click on it and open it in a new browser window to see all the details.)  First, the glowing green areas are clouds of gas and dust that are the seed material for stars. They’re usually made up of hydrogen gas and dust particles.  There are newborn stars in here — they glow in a sort of golden orange color and they’re heating up the cloud with their ultraviolet radiation. This causes the cloud to glow in a variety of wavelengths — some of them invisible to us — like infrared, which is what UKIRT, IRAM, and Spitzer are sensitive to.

So, it stands to reason that if you want to study the intricacies of star birth, you want to study the infrared light streaming from stellar nurseries.  It can cut right through most of the gas and dust in the region and give us a peek behind the clouds that often hide starbirth from us.

Newborn stars give off more than light and heat. They also emit jets during part of their infancy and childhood. Those jets shove their way out through the clouds and help sculpt the nebula.  In this image, the jets show up as tiny pink–purple arcs and dots.

A close-up of jets in the Orion Molecular Cloud (UKIRT WFCAM). (Click to embiggen.)
A close-up of jets in the Orion Molecular Cloud (UKIRT WFCAM). (Click to embiggen.)

To see the real action in this region, the astronomers took a close-up view of a jet streaming from a newborn star in one of the busier areas of star formation in this nebula.  The image was created from data acquired by the Wide Field Camera (WFCAM) at the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope.

The jet is in red, and you can see other objects — wisps, knots and filaments — that are also jets from other young stars. .

What I find cool about studying regions like the OMC is that at the same time they give us a look at star formation in the current age of the universe, they also give us a look back at the birth pangs of our own Sun and solar system some 4.5 billion years ago.  Some of the baby stars you see popping out here will someday BE like the Sun — and maybe even have their own planets.