How to Use Hubble Space Telescope

Schoolin’ Scalia

This past week the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ruling that allows the government to nose farther into the private backgrounds of people who want to work for NASA. Mind you, this isn’t the nosing that people with security clearances need to endure. That’s an entirely different set of investigations for people with a Need to Know certain things.

No, this one applies just to scientists and other technical folk who work at NASA, specifically JPL. I don’t have the legal background to comment on ALL the merits of the case and this entry is not about those merits, although it does seem troubling that you must give up privacy rights to be a scientist (according to a read of the decision, which you can see here, if you wish: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-530.pdf). I did study law for a couple of semesters when I was in grad school, and part of that was an examination of such issues as right to privacy (particularly as it pertains to media), so I do know that privacy is not precisely enshrined in the Constitution of the United States, as such. So, there’s a little ambiguity there. And, the exploitation of that hole in our rights could result in some chilling practices.

What caught my eye in the decision is on page 31, wherein Justice Scalia (writing notes concurring in judgment) notes “Respondents do not even attempt to argue that the claim at issue in this case passes that test, perhaps recognizing the farcical nature of a contention that a right deeply rooted in our history and tradition bars the Government from ensuring that the Hubble Telescope is not used by recovering drug addicts.”

And this gave me pause for thought. The first thing that entered my mind is what’s the issue with a recovering drug addict? If they’re recovering, that means they’re not using drugs anymore. And if they’re not using drugs and are a good scientist, the drugs are in the past and the brilliant science part is NOW.  Does the Justice (in his mean-spirited-looking way) mean to imply that people lose their right to a job or privacy or a chance because they’re recovering from a drug dependency?  If so, and using the logic implied in the Justice’s sarcastic flippancy, can we please also see the drug dependency backgrounds of ALL federal employees, including the Justices and their clerks?  I mean, fair’s fair. If this is what the Justice is hinting at, then we wouldn’t want a recovering drug addict (including alcoholics) to be writing legal opinions or affecting the monetary policy of this country, for example.  And, by drugs and drug addicts to which the Justice infers, then I would infer we should include alcohol and other addictive substances and activities, since, by implication, those are also bad, right?

And, this brings up other questions, like what drugs is Mr. Justice Scalia thinking of? I mean, what if you ARE a recovering alcoholic? Or used to be addicted to sleeping pills? Or uppers?  Are those socially more acceptable to the Justice than some drug like meth that a person may be recovering from? How long before the Justice decides that the government needs to know who you sleep with before you can be allowed to work at JPL? Or what religion you belong to? Or who you associate with socially? Shades of McCarthyism here, and apparently Mr. Justice Scalia doesn’t recognize the camel’s nose sneaking inside the tent.

The other big question that popped into my mind is this: since when did ignorant sarcasm become a staple in Supreme Court decisions? Mr. Justice Scalia employs it  in an effort to get a point across, and fails because he uses an example he clearly hasn’t researched. Which looks somewhat unprofessional in someone who was touted by his appointing president as a “fine legal mind”.

It’s pretty clear that the Justice doesn’t know how HST gets used or what the process is for using it. Given his “fine legal mind,” I’m quite surprised that neither he nor his clerks bothered to look up the process (or heck, call STScI in Baltimore, and ask what the process is for getting to use HST) before throwing out a sarcastic comment in an otherwise staid-looking opinion. I’m no fan of Justice Scalia, but even if I was, I’d be raising my eyebrows at an opinion comment that is so clearly ignorant. You’d think “fine legal minds” would be sticklers for accuracy, particularly in cases where people’s rights and dignity are at stake. But, I’m guessing that he used sarcasm because he didn’t have anything else to fall back on (like knowledge).  I don’t know about you, but if the Supreme Court justices in this country are going to rule on things like this, it behooves them to at least find out what’s involved in science before commenting scathingly about it. Otherwise, to use a word that Mr. Justice Scalia loves to use, the SC Justices show an absurdly low level of knowledge of professions outside of their own.

So, Mr. Justice Scalia, since you’re clearly not in the know about how science gets done (particularly with HST)  this one’s for you. May you and your low-level clerks get it right the next time before you spout off using ignorant sarcasm in a judgment.

How Astronomers Get to Use HST

If you’re an astronomer with an idea about a cosmic object to study, first of all, you’re probably part of a big team of astronomers.  You’ve probably studied for years to get to the point where you can even think about putting in a proposal. Or, you may be a graduate student who has spent more hours in front of a computer analyzing data than you care to think about, and using that experience to move up to the next step in research (usually with permission and guidance from your much older advisor).  You’re not usually a drug abuser because you wouldn’t have gotten to where you are if you were.  You’re also not a lone wolf strolling up to the control center and ‘jacking the scope when nobody’s looking.

No, you are a professional researcher and you have to put in a proposal, outlining the scientific justification for using the Hubble Space Telescope. Generally, you are writing it up with the members of your team. You have to be precise and persuasive about just why — scientifically — you should have your object looked at with HST.

That proposal goes through a LOT of review before it gets sent to a time allocation committee that reviews the merits of the work and decides whether or not to allow use of the telescope.

Once a proposal is accepted for time on HST, it goes into a pipeline of activity that includes dozens of people who work on scheduling the time and getting the observation programmed into the telescope’s computer systems. (I’m paraphrasing here — there’s a lot of technical work that has to be done to get a winning proposal into the pipeline, more details than I have room to go into here — but you can find out by simply asking somebody at STScI or one of the science teams about it — it’s not a secret, so far as I know.)   No ONE person gets to run the telescope. It is done as part of a team of scientists who then rely on a team of controllers and technical staff to get the observation done for them. Just like any other NASA mission, like most other science projects.  It’s just NOT like a Supreme Court justice (who should be dealing in facts as they relate to law) imagines.

How do I know this? Back when I was in graduate school, one of my jobs was to work on team requests to use the telescope.  At no point did anybody’s personal life come into play. It just wasn’t relevant to the SCIENCE being done.  If anybody was a recovering drug addict — an irrelevant personal problem and we didn’t ask a scientist wanting time “Hey did you used to use drugs?” as a prerequisite to be answered before we could talk science — we didn’t know it.   Nor did we care who they were sleeping with. Or what church they went to.  In a team situation, we were focused on the science to be done. That’s what we were paid to do –  not sniff into people’s personal lives.  I also know about how it works because (with co-author Jack Brandt) I wrote a book about HST science and how it gets done. That means I asked questions about how it gets done — something Mr. Justice Scalia (or his minions) could also have done.

So, if you’re had the same idea Mr. Justice Scalia did and think that anybody can just walk up and use the HST, I hope I’ve shown you that it doesn’t work that way.  Teams of human beings work together to program HST and bring back the amazing data and images each day.  I’m glad it works this way: I just wish Mr. Justice Scalia had bothered to ask before employing the witlessness of sarcasm in his concurring opinion.  It leaves me questioning his “fine legal mind” even more. If he doesn’t bother to get THIS right, what else isn’t he getting right?  And I’d ask that question of anybody of any political persuasion who showed so little regard for getting the facts straight about how science works. Double that for anybody in a science job who did NO research and made witless comments based on what they “thought” it might be. Science has no place for such ignorance. I used to think law didn’t either… but now I wonder.

OMG, My Life is Ruined! My Astrological Sign is Wrong!

Astrology is Bunk

Oh wow.  Can we get a life for all those folks who are COMPLETELY up in arms because they just NOW found out something that astronomers and all other sensible people have known for centuries: that astrological signs do not line up with the constellations they purportedly represent. This story hit the news a few days ago, and you would think that the world was ending judging by the panicked reactions of those whose lives are measured by little boxes of BS that appear as “astrological advice” in newspapers and magazines.

Folks, astrology is bunk.  I said it up there.  And I’ll say it again. Astrology is bunk.  It doesn’t work. It is a parlor game, a shell game, a way for people who otherwise don’t have any visible means of support to take your money and pretend to tell your future, etc.  It has NO basis in science, in reality, and shouldn’t have any meaning for you other than as fascinating historical oddity dating back to the time when people were superstitious, ignorant of reality, and willing to believe anything… not like now, right?

oh…. wait…

Logic cleanup in aisle three, please!

If you want to know why astrology doesn’t work, let’s start with the fact that, yes, the astrological signs (made up by ancient shamans who had very little understanding of physical processes but who, even in prehistory, had found a way to make mystical BS pay) don’t line up with the constellations they’re supposedly named for.  That’s explained by an entirely measurable and predictable process called precession, which you can read about here (and the first paragraph explains it pretty well, along with the moving graphic).

Then, let’s move on to the often-ignored FACT that a planet moving through the solar system has NO effect on you at your birth or at any time during your life. Its gravity isn’t strong enough to do anything to you (and I have to wonder just how a planet’s gravitational pull would affect your ability to make love or money or win the lottery, but I digress).  A distant planet has NO mysterious powers to predict who you will marry, what your life’s work will be, how much money you’ll win in a game of chance, or any of the other stuff that astrologers claim it can do.  Ask an astrologer how they actually physically measure the powers of the planets in astrology. Then, laugh at the answer, because it won’t make any sense.

Fact is folks, astrology had a useful lifetime of a few centuries many centuries ago when folks didn’t understand the sky and believed in magical beings and fluffy unicorns and other things that we now know don’t exist now.  Astrologers’ study of the sky helped them create star charts, which are the only remaining link between the old outmoded magical beliefs and today’s modern scientific study of the universe called astronomy.

Astrology is a fantasy.  And fantasies have their place. But, in a useful, modern life, the fantasy of astrology should be just no more than a make-believe game. If you use it to predict your love life, your next raise, the stock market, or anything else, you’re living in a fantasy world of your own choosing, not reality.

If you want to know more about why astrology is not a serious science, please read the excellent article at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s website called Horoscopes Versus Telesscopes: A Focus on Astrology.

The Astronomy Fire Hose: Distant Galaxy Edition

Peering Into the Gravitational House of Mirrors

What is it about galaxies that SO evoke our sense of space and distance?  Is it because they’re so big and magnificent? That they stretch across immense regions of space? The idea that these cosmic cities are thronged with stars? If you look at an image of a galaxy like the Milky Way, you see stars and regions where stars are born and die, and you see (if it has one) the central core with a black hole at its heart.

But, how did galaxies get started?  How were they born?  And what is their lifestyle like?  These are questions that astronomers are still working to answer. Understanding the origin and evolution of galaxies benefits from looking at galaxies in all stages of their lives.  And, so, astronomers look through billions of years of cosmic history to study some of the earliest galaxies.

This illustrates how gravitational lensing by foreground galaxies will influence the appearance of far more distant background galaxies. This means that as many as 20 percent of the most distant galaxies currently detected will appear brighter because their light is being amplified by the effects of foreground intense gravitational fields. The plane at far left contains background high-redshift galaxies. The middle plane contains foreground galaxies; their gravity amplifies the brightness of the background galaxies. The right plane shows how the field would look from Earth with the effects of gravitational lensing added. Distant galaxies that might otherwise be invisible appear due to lensing effects.

There’s a little bit of a problem looking back that far. We have to peer through what amounts to a cosmic “house of mirrors” to see the youngest galactic objects in the universe. Everything we see in this house of mirrors is distorted by a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. This occurs when light from a distant object is distorted by a massive object that is in the foreground.

Astronomers have started to apply this concept in a new way to determine the number of very distant galaxies and to measure the amount of something called “dark matter” in the universe.

So, how does gravitational lensing work?

Albert Einstein showed that gravity will cause light to bend. The effect is normally extremely small, but when light passes close to a very massive object such as a massive galaxy, a galaxy cluster, or a supermassive black hole, the bending of the light rays becomes more easily noticeable.

When light from a very distant object passes a galaxy much closer to us, it can detour around the foreground object. Typically, the light bends around the object in one of two, or four different routes. This magnifies the light from the more distant galaxy directly behind it. What you get is a sort of “natural telescope”, called a gravitational lens. It provides a larger and brighter — though also distorted — view of the distant galaxy.

A very massive object — or collection of objects — distorts the view of faint objects beyond it so much that the distant images are smeared into multiple arc-shaped images around the foreground object. This effect is a lot like looking through a glass soft drink bottle at a light on a balcony and noticing how it is distorted as it passes through the bottle.

This is a very cool idea and I remember back in graduate school first learning about lensing, and we all thought it was almost too weird. At that time, all we could really see were the brightest, most obvious lensed objects.  Now, we can see many of these distortions. And, as we move toward fainter and more distant objects, many of the more recently observed ones pushing the limits of the Hubble Space Telescope.  Even fainter ones will need something with more observing power.  If all goes well, those next generation objects to be observed will be more effectively handled by a new space telescope on the drawing boards — the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

First Light and Lensing

When you look back to when the universe was young, you are seeing extremely early objects (also known as “first light” objects) that are very far away. The older and farther away the object, the more foreground universe there is to look through, which means the greater the chance that there will be something heavy in the foreground to distort the background image.  Dr. Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University, is doing research suggests that gravitational lensing is likely to dominate the observed properties of very early galaxies, those that are at most 650-480 million years old The halos of foreground galaxies when the universe was in its heydays of star formation (when it was about 3-6 billion years old) will gravitationally distort most of these very early objects.  This leads to an effect called “gravitational lensing bias” where we are seeing many things whose light is stretched by lensing.  He reported on that work today at the AAS meeting, by way of pointing out just how useful future telescopes, especially the JWST, will be in extending our view out to the early universe and dealing with this house of mirrors effect.

JWST will have to take this bias into account. Scientists like Windhorst and his colleagues will need to design new ways of handling the data from those observations to really help them understand just what it is those early, distant gravitationally lensed galaxies are doing… and how they evolve to become the galaxies we see today.