Astronomy and Space Piques Their Interest

Children doing an astronomy exercise in Venezuela. (Courtesy UNAWE.org)

I’ve been asked to give talks next year at a several places (including some cruise ships) and I’m using those experiences to help people celebrate the International Year of Astronomy. In addition, I’m creating some podcasts for the IYA’s ongoing 365 Days of Astronomy activity, which should be very cool.

One of the venues where I’m speaking asked me to come up with a program for kids, basically to answer their questions about space and astronomy. Those are always a lot of fun because it’s amazing what questions children will ask. Generally I make a little opening statement, show some really cool pix (and/or animations) from the latest space and astronomy news stories, and then open the floor to questions.

The International Year of Astronomy begins January 1, 2009. Planning for its events has been going on for several years.

So, I pretty much know what sorts of questions I’ll get, and I can prepare for those. I went online and did a search on “questions from kids about astronomy” and found some really, really helpful sites. So, for those of you who teach astronomy and/or give talks to the young’uns about those subjects — or, if you ARE a young’un and want to see what other young’uns are asking, here are a few of the ones I ran across. (NOTE: these comprise a very tiny sampling of what’s out there, so I encourage you to Google for yourself, too.)

• The University LowBrow Astronomers of Ann Arbor, Michigan, has a nice reprint of a 1998 article by Mark Deprest called Questions by Students and Teachers.
• The folks at Cool Cosmos have the ever-popular Ask an Astronomer for Kids page, chock full of all kinds of great info.
• NASA’s Starchild learning center online is a great source for questions and answers!
• My friend Phil Plait (also known as The Bad Astronomer) has a great set of Youtube videos where he answers questions from kids. Check ‘em out.
• And then there’s Curious about Astronomy, the outreach effort from Cornell University.
• Want to test your knowledge in astronomy (and other sciences)?  Check out the Explorit online science center.
• Finally (for this round of links, anyway) there’s the Homework Help page at Amazing Space, the outreach effort at Space Telescope Science Institute.

Chances are I’ll be poking around some more as I prepare my talks for IYA, and who knows what other great sites I’ll run across as I do!

…and Today’s Reality

Future Mars explorer

It’s always thought-provoking to read about plans to explore the Moon and Mars and build O’Neill Colonies at LaGrangian points in space and so on. These were once the stuff of science fiction — and in many ways they still are. But, the reality of lunar exploration, for example, is that it’s on the drawing boards and may actually happen in the next decade or so.  Mars exploration? Robotic probes, sure. But, setting foot on Mars ourselves and tossing a few rocks into the bag before we start building colonies?  That will take a little longer.

It’s not for lack of interest to do it. Not at all. There are many of us who would love to do it and we’re raising new generations of explorers to want to do it as well.

No matter who does it, these future exploration initiatives are really dependent on the physical, cultural and political will to do it and the proper amounts of infrastructure and money and people to do the work. We’re just now learning to live long-term in space and build structures (ISS).  The way to Mars will be paved with a lot of complex, interlocking structures supplied by an international cooperative effort, and such an effort will take time to build and maintain as well.

O'Neill Colonies: a NASA Vision

I remember a long time ago hearing a conversation between a self-styled “expert” on space exploration and a radio talk show host. The “expert” was pontificating about how well the free market could be used to boost space exploration. His thesis:  do some spectroscopy on Near-Earth asteroids and point out how they are chock full of stuff like gold and other precious metals and minerals, and maybe even some water, and by golly, Big Bidness will come flocking out to near-Earth space.

He just figured that companies would see that billions of dollars worth of wealth floating around out there in space and they’d rush right out to build the spacecraft to get there and grab the goodies.

As you might imagine, this guy had NO experience with such businesses, and his view of the pragmatism and altruism of big business when it comes to huge space-based ventures was naïve, to say the least. I’m quite certain that he was a firm believer in the idea of free markets to solve big problems.

Well.

In case anybody has been too buried in work or whatever to notice, the free market system has been taking quite a beating these days. Its boosters (always an optimistic bunch when there’s money to be made) are somewhat less than enthusiastic now that they’re seeing the downside of at least one law of free market physics–that is, what goes up can (and usually does) come back down, especially when there’s been some manipulation of complex investment vehicles and bad loans and excessive executive compensation and dicey credit arrangements and trade imbalances and so forth. And right now, we’re seeing all this come back to bite some Armani-suited posteriors. As it should. When the foxes are left to guard the henhouse, eventually folks with money to invest aren’t going to feel too confident about egg futures.

Asteroid 433 Eros

With markets being a bit shaken up now for Earth-based businesses, even the knowledge that asteroid 433 Eros (for example) is a walloping Mother Lode of shiny riches isn’t going to spur a big company like, oh say LockMart, to bootstrap a robotic pick and shovel to go out there and mine the ever-lovin’ bejeebers out of that asteroid.

It’s not that LockMart couldn’t do it (provided it could persuade its stockholders to fund such a thing), but the infrastructure to even begin building the thing isn’t ready.

Reality has a funny way of bringing us back to pay attention to what’s important. I’m not suggesting that our current market turmoil will get better if we just start funding missions to the Moon or the asteroids or Mars or whatever. All that stuff will happen, and when it does, the infrastructure building process will bring in new jobs, require more education and technology investment — all the things we need to keep a healthy economy going. But, it’s going to take some doing, and while we’re digging our way out of the current financial morass, it’s going to be important to keep our eyes on the prize of ongoing space exploration.

The Little Galaxy that Could

Galaxies make stars. That’s what they’ve done since, well, since just about forever–in the cosmic scheme of things. Colliding galaxies pump out stars in huge batches. The action of smashing together two galaxies usually compresses their clouds of gas together and when you compress enough hydrogen gas together, you get stars. In colliding galaxies you get massive starburst regions like the one in NGC 1569, seen here through several observations made by Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys.

The core of the starburst galaxy NGC 1569. This region contains three giant star clusters grouped inside a huge central cavity hollowed out by winds from the formation of massive stars. Those stars are long gone, having exploded as supernovae. The outbursts from those explosions hurled a river of gas and dust that is sculpting the 3,700 light-year-long outflow structure at the lower right (in red). (Click to embiggen.)

Now, astronomers have long puzzled over a small, isolated nearby galaxy (about 11 million light-years away) because it is ablaze with starburst activity. There are millions of newly formed stellar babies here, and this galaxy is continuing to pump out newborns a hundred times faster than the starbirth regions in the Milky Way Galaxy. So, given the intense rate of starbirth, you’d think you’d there’d be a collision involved here.

But, no, this galaxy seems to be all by itself.

Or so astronomers thought.

When they reanalyzed the observational data, they found that it really lies about one and a half times farther away from us than they thought. And that makes a huge difference. It puts this galaxy in the middle of a group of ten other massive galaxies. Interactions between this group that may be the culprit in compressing the gases in NGC 1569 and pumping up its prodigious starbirth engines. That interaction also makes this one of the most active galaxies in our local neighborhood.

ZOMG, They’re Reviewing the Trailer!!

Star Trek lives again! Courtesy Paramount and www.startrekmovie.com

Okay, I’m a Trekkie.  I admit it proudly.

I’ve been one so long that I remember passionate discussions in college about whether Trekkies were better than Trekkers, or whether Trek-ites were the truly serious of the Trek fans… nerds… geeks experts. We  sopped up Star Trek along with our physics and astronomy classes, and I know more than one scientist who got interested in pursuing a career in science as a result of watching Star Trek.

Honestly, yes we did argue about degrees of Trek fandom and who was most serious and who were merely pretenders to the Trekiverse Throne.  And, we had those “get a life” moments when knowing the proper derivation of a Klingon name was more important than, say, differential equations. And, I must confess, I was a member of an impromptu group of skiers who banded together as the Klingon Ski Team when I was in grad school. Our motto was  “Ski with honor, there is NO honor in falling!”   We took our Trek seriously…

Well, I’m glad to see that there are still Trekkies/Trekkers/Trekites out there and that the Trek phenomenon trundles along. We have the TV reruns, the movies, the books, the cartoons, the comix to keep us happy.

But now, in case you’ve been stranded with your Intrepid-class starship inside an inversion nebula and haven’t been on subspace radio due to verteron particle emission interference, here’s some news: there’s a new Trek movie coming out. And, since it’s not coming out til next May, the producers have released a trailer, which you can see at the StarTrekmovie.com (the official movie site) and StarTrek.com.

Okay, that’s all fine and good, but wow, there are reactions all over the place to the trailer!  Just the trailer, mind you.  It has ignited heated discussions on various blogs (and many of them NOT normally Trek-related) and science discussion boards that remind me so much of those early days of Trekhood, when we’d quibble about such things as how hard to pronounce the “g” in “Klingon.” I mean, this trailer has spurred arguments over technical issues, casting, costumes, technology use, canon vs. non-canon fact, and it goes on and on.  It’s all great publicity for the movie, but what really impresses me is the intensity of the discussions (and you can find them all over — just Google “Star Trek movie”).

What does this tell me? There are a lot of Trek folk out there, sure. But, despite early calls for the demise of the Trekiverse by critics and naysayers who pit one Trek series against another, it tells me that folks out there do very much care about Star Trek and the messages it has always told through its stories. I can’t wait to see what they’ve done with Trek this time… nor can bazillions of my Trekking compatriots!

Blending Art and Science

Cosmological visualization... what does it say to you? (Courtesy NASA/STScI)

I’ve written before about space art and astronomy visualization, but there’s always a new artist or a new way of looking at the universe popping up.  There are whole clans of people who work on finding ways to take astronomy data and turn it into eye-smacking artwork and images.  In turn, we can all look at their work and understand a little bit better how the cosmos looks and behaves.

Take the cosmological visualization I’ve posted here. It’s actually quite a nice piece of artwork and I’d have no problem with hanging a print of it in my office. But, like all art, you have to ask: “what does it mean?”  To an artist, it may represent a balance of light and dark, a gradation of colors, a counterpoint of smooth and active textures and regions of heaviness and lightness, all blended into one painting.

But, look at it with scientific curiousity and it becomes a visualization of the process of cosmic creation.  It depicts, from right to left, the emergence of large-scale structure in our cosmos in the epochs after the Big Bang, which took place just off the right side of this image (and some 13.7 billion years ago in real time).

After the Big Bang, the universe began a headlong expansion effort that continues today.  Free electrons and protons began forming atomic hydrogen, the first — and most abundant — element in the cosmos. Those atoms could absorb light, which they did, turning the cosmos into a murky place. This period is called,  appropriately enough, the Cosmic Dark Ages. The golden area depicts that murky time. It may look bland, but there was action going on there as atoms of hydrogen crowded together to make the first stars.

About 900 million years later, the universe began lighting up as those first stars and the massive quasars began generating ultraviolet light, which turned hydrogen atoms back to protons and electrons. In the process the universe began to light up again. This was the Epoch of Reionization. At first it occurred in isolated bubbles, but as time went by, they spread out and connected, and eventually the universe was freed of its murky dark ages. Light could travel freely as the galaxies and stars continued forming and expanding.

So, this picture (created by the Goddard Science Visualization Studio) is really an artful depiction of the Cosmic Dawn, using real science data to draw imagery of a time we could never see or experience for ourselves (in real time).  Isn’t it amazing?