Category Archives: Astronomy outreach

astronomy news, Astronomy outreach, starbirth

Astronomy’s Outpouring

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Imagine that our Milky Way Galaxy is being warped by the action of a neighboring galaxy. Or that the steady North Star Polaris (the one we’ve all been taught as our navigational guide in the sky) has a companion so small that it was only recently we could see it through the powerful eye of Hubble Space Telescope. Or that a small galaxy is slowly being gobbled up by our own galaxy? Or that astronomers can now “see” down to within a few light-years of a supermassive black hole at the heart of another galaxy? Or that, if you have a little extra duty cycle left on your home computer, you can help astronomers find interstellar dust grains?

All this, and a whole lot more is pouring out of the informational firehouse at the 207th meeting of the American Astronomical Society this week in Washington, D.C. More than 3,000 of the world’s astronomers (about a third of the astronomy community) is convening here and it is my pleasure to be attending as well. There are more papers and talks than you can shake a stick at. I am sitting here in the press room surrounded by some of the best science writers and reporters in the business — in fact, I’m parked next to Phil Plait, the bad boy behind the The Bad Astronomy web page and blog. His viewpoint on all things astronomy is always a little bit hip and ironic (okay, a LOT hip and ironic).

There are a record 11 press conferences at this meeting, and I’m going to be at all but one of them (have to leave early to go home and teach (more on THAT in another entry)).

So, if you’ve been looking at the paper or perusing CNN.com, you’ve likely seen the stories about the death spiral of material into the heart of a galaxy, and the story about the companion to Polaris. So, what else is there? I’ll be presenting a few of the cooler papers here in the next few days, and I want to start with a pretty picture.

Starbirth in the Magellanic Clouds
Starbirth in the Magellanic Clouds

This is a lovely image released by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory of glowing clouds of gas in a starbirth region in the Magellanic Clouds. Astronomers have assembled a huge mosaic of images of this region, which you can see and read about at their website (click on the link under the picture for more of the story and more pictures). Imaging and studying such regions help astronomers understand the mechanics of star formation — one of the most fascinating topics in astronomy.

Okay, I’ll be back later with more goodies. For now, it’s time to go to a press conference!

Astronomy outreach, pareidolia

Pareidolia and Space

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NGC 6559
NGC 6559

What do you see here? When I first saw this image taken by Gemini Observator’s Travis Rector, I thought to myself, “hmmm… interesting dust cloud and nebula.”

Peter Michaud, Gemini’s Public Information Officer, sent it to me along with a press release for me to edit. We chatted about the image, and he asked me if I thought it looked like a Chinese dragon. Up until that moment, I’d been thinking it looked like the snout of a bull, or some cosmic graffiti. A Chinese dragon hadn’t occurred to me.

The fact that the two of us could see such different things in it, all recognizable, is a fine example of pareidolia, the perception of a pattern or meaning in something that is actually ambiguous or random (see The Word Spy for other examples of targeted perceptions of random objects or patterns). If you’ve ever looked up at clouds in the sky and seen ships or cats or capering clowns, then you’ve been engaging in pareidolia.

Eskimo Nebula as seen by HST
Eskimo Nebula as seen by HST

A lot of space photos lend themselves to some wonderful flights of imagination. One of my favorites is the Eskimo Nebula.

Hubble Space Telescope took this image of a planetary nebula that only started to look like this about 10,000 years ago. It was a sun-like star, and in another 10,000 years it may look very different, as the wisps of its atmosphere continue to spread out through space.

That’s part of the beauty of pareidolia—it has an essentially fleeting quality. Wait long enough and the thing you thought you saw, like the ship in the clouds, goes away as the cloud dissipates. Wait long enough (in cosmic time) and the Chinese Dragon and the Eskimo will go away, too. Enjoy ’em while you can!