Day 2 of AAS

One of the biggest stories of this  meeting is about the International Year of Astronomy, a year-long celebraton of astronomy that is taking so many forms that it’s breathtaking in its scope. More than 135 countries are honoring the celebration, and the outreach is truly world wide.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, the 365 Days of Astronomy is one major push.

Another is the Galileoscope Project, which aims to get inexpensive but good-quality scopes in kids’ hands this year.  Another project is a TV documentary and planetarium show called 400 Years of the Telescope.

We saw some snippets from it on Monday night and had a chance to meet the producers.  The film will will debut before the assembled astronomers tonight and then air on PBS stations later this year.

If you’re interested in participating in the Year of Astronomy, you can find all the information you need at this link.  Check it out!

Astronomy and Medicine: Together at Last

Today’s firehose of astronomy continues unabated. There’s way more than I can talk about here, so I’m going to write about a couple of tidbits that really piqued my interest.

The first is about a supernova remnant called Cas A (an affectionate nickname for Cassiopeia A). The star that blasted this remnant out to space exploded about 330 years ago and astronomers are looking at the cloud in three dimensions to understand how it’s expanding and what kinds of elements are scattered throughout the cloud.

The story starts nearly ten years ago, when the Chandra X-Ray Satellite took its “First Light” image of this “ghost of a star”. That picture was astounding because it showed a lot of details in the structure of the expanding cloud that hadn’t been seen before.

Okay, fast-forward eight years and astronomers in a team led by Daniel Patnaude at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, as well as astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based optical telescopes have continued to study Cas A and are able to see changes in the cloud as it expands. Patnaude’s team made a movie that lets us see those changes. Essentially, even over eight years, the view lets astronomers learn more about the aftermath of these catastrophic stellar death agonies.

This is pretty darned cool all on its own, but it gets even better! Harvard CFA astronomer Alyssa Goodman, who heads the Astronomical Medicine project has worked with a series of collaborators, including to make a 3D model of the Cas A supernova remnant using the same kinds of software tools that medical researchers use to recreate 3D views of people’s brains in CAT scans. You can see their movie here. Also, check out some other cool visualizations from the same project here.

While these are stunning visuals, both the data movie from Patnaude and the 3D model from Delaney are, more importantly, rich resources for science.  The two teams are trying to get a much more complete understanding of how this famous supernova explosion and its remnant work.  Read more here about the science that Patnaude and his team are doing to figure out what’s happening with Cas A.

The Aldebaran Puzzle

The second story that piqued my interest today was from my friend and c0-author Jack Brandt. He’s been digging through the astronomical archives looking at Edmund Halley’s studies of stellar proper motion (the motion of stars through space).  It appears that Halley in fact discovered proper motion by comparing stellar positions taken by ancient astronomers (such as Ptolemy and Hipparchus) and comparing to stellar positions that he measured hundreds and hundreds of years later. This is all fine and good, but for some reason the proper motion for the star Aldebaran is off. Or rather, the basic measurement is off.

And, therein lies a mystery — which Jack is trying to solve.  It may be that Halley relied on some erroneous measurements published in Ptolemy’s Almagest, but the evidence for that is difficult to find. So, Jack is continuing his research this summer in England, hoping to look at Halley’s papers first-hand.

Why is this fascinating?  Because Aldebaran should be an easy measurement — a slam dunk, in astronomical terms. Except for this little anomaly in measurements.  I am piqued by this story because not all astronomy research is on what’s new and hot. Sometimes it involves looking at older measurements and trying to puzzle something out so that we can refine our current measurements.  And, there are more and more stories of astronomers looking to older measurements and observations to help them understand modern findings. Which tells me (as if it was ever in doubt) that astronomy is a living, breathing science with a useful past and a fascinating future.