Category Archives: astronomy

astronomy

Space Media

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Upcoming Programs to Watch

I’ve been a producer of astronomy and space science-related media for many years. As I’ve mentioned before, I was inspired to go into this type of outreach by watching Cosmos, the original series hosted by Carl Sagan. That journey actually started when I was a child, looking at the sky with my dad. It flourished all my life, watching space missions, going back to school to study astronomy, up to this day. Cosmos was an important waypoint for me. I hope that it becomes an important waypoint for many whose interest in the skies could flourish as mine did.

The Cosmos Ship of the Imagination takes us to the cosmos each week. Courtesy CosmosOnline.

The second episode of the “next generation” Cosmos, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, shows on Sunday night, on Fox, and the following day on National Geographic channel. Make time to watch it (whether you watch in “real time” or via TiVo, or other delay technology). It’s worth it for the inspiration alone, but the science will win your heart, too. It is a new and different take on the principles first aired in Cosmos in the 1980s, and I think it is a great step forward in using the media to bring the message of science to viewers.

One thing that I hope people “get” from Cosmos is a sense of just how wonderfully complex our universe is, and how we work to unravel that complexity. That is the essence of science, and it’s why science is never a dogmatic thing to be accepted on faith or dictat from above. Science asks questions until it finds answers. It takes the answers and derives ways of understanding the universe. And, if something new comes along to challenge our understanding, we start asking questions all over again. For me, that’s what makes science so much fun to cover in my writing and my documentaries.

Life in space aboard the ISS is the subject of a National Geographic Special on March 14th. Courtesy NASA.

Speaking of fun, National Geographic is airing a space special of its own on Friday  night, March 14th. It’s called Live from Space, hosted by Soledad O’Brien. It’s a space enthusiast’s dream — a two-hour event, taking viewers live into orbit on the International Space Station to talk with astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Koichi Wakata (station commander). Hosting with Ms. O’Brien from the ground is astronaut Mike Massimino, who will share what it’s like to be in space. He is familiar to most of us from the Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions and also from some very funny guest appearances on Big Bang Theory.

Live From Space gives viewers a chance to see the station up close and personal, and see how its complex systems work. Viewers are encouraged to post questions ahead of time, using Instagram and the hash tag #HelloFromEarth.  Check it all out! It’s a weekend to get your space interest nourished!

 

astronomy

The Milky Way’s Place

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At the Cosmic Table with Giants

When you go out and look up at the night sky, you see stars and planets. If you’re lucky, you might get to see the Milky Way. That’s our galaxy — and we see it from the inside. When you first start to learn about astronomy, the Milky Way probably seems like the biggest thing you can imagine. It has hundreds of billions of stars, countless planets, and at least one place where life exists (here on Earth). If you wanted to travel across the galaxy, it would take a few hundred thousand years at the speed of light, and much more time at slower speeds. We’re not traveling at Star Trek-style speeds yet.

Imagine going out beyond the Milky Way. What would you find?  Well, for one thing, you’d find other galaxies. The closest ones are the Magellanic Clouds (at about 170,000 light-years away), the Andromeda Galaxy (at a distance of 2.5 (or so) million light-years away), and beyond that, a slew of others that make up what’s called the “Local Group” of galaxies. The whole group occupies a region of space about 3 million light-years across.

A diagram showing the Council of Giants surrounding the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxies. Courtesy Marshall McCall/York University.

Beyond them are more galaxies, some large, some small. Astronomers have been studying distant but “local” galaxies, and have found some interesting things about our neighborhood. Within 20 million light-years, galaxies are organized into what they call a “Local Sheet” that stretches out about 35 million light-years.  Arranged in this sheet is a group of twelve very large galaxies that act somewhat like a circular fence around our region of space. The astronomers mapping this region of space call these galaxies the “Council of Giants”.

They’re an interesting bunch of galaxies. There are elliptical giants, and of course the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies are spirals. The spin directions of these “Council” members go around a small circle in the sky, which should  tell astronomers something about the interactions of these galaxies in the distant past.

This is an interesting 3D view of our local neighborhood that will help astronomers figure out the arrangement of matter in the larger universe. And, how those arrangements came to be. The origin and evolution of the universe (a science called cosmology) is largely focused on how the galaxies formed — and how they came to be arrayed in the giant sheets and filaments of matter that dominate the arrangement of matter in the universe. Want to know more about this interesting peek at our local galactic neighborhood?  Check out the story here, at the Royal Astronomical Society’s web page.