Category Archives: astronomy

astronomy

Pirated Ideas

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Avast ye hearties! In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, I thought I’d talk about some ideas pirated from popular culture about science, particularly astronomy.

The first one is that scientists, and particularly astronomers, don’t have a sense of humor or know how to have fun. My guess is that anybody who says this has never been to an astronomy meeting. You would be amazed at the fun time we have, particularly at the opening sessions where the refreshments loosen a few tongues. I think the most fun an astronomer can have is in combining science and socializing. In that vein, check out Bad Astronomer’s tale of a supernova discovery.

In the humor department, while it may be a bit intricate, go look up the thinking behind the two new solar system bodies Eris and Dysnomia. You can read more about THAT here.

Another stupid idea about science that I’m going to pirate from popular culture is that science is hard. Well. Yeah. So it is. But then again, so is raising a family. And learning a new job and balancing a budget. And running a country wisely and keeping peace among nations, and respecting each other’s intrinsic qualities in a diverse country. But aren’t we all supposed to work at those things, too? And what tools do those things take, if not a knowledge of logical, critical thinking and an understanding of how the world (and the cosmos) works?

Maybe there are relative levels of hardness among these tasks, but they all involve using the brain to solve problems. Which is, of course, what science is about. Everytime I think of the stupidity of the Barbie Doll makers making this doll say things like “Math is hard” I have to wonder just how much market research these folks did. Or maybe their market research was flawed because they thought math was hard.

My final rant about stupid ideas that I’m pirating from popular culture has to do with astronomers being total geeks. This sort of goes with the material above about having fun at astronomy meetings. Quite a few years back I was invited to give a talk at an amateur astronomy meeting in Florida. I went down and spent a few days with this enthusiastic group of observers and found out what a wide spread of jobs they held. There were several doctors, a couple of lawyers, some teachers, planetarium folk, bankers, truck drivers, and writers (to name a few of the professions present). Not one of them seemed geeky, but more like enthusiastic. Some of the dinnertime conversations got quite technical, but not any more so than if you had a bunch of NASCAR enthusiasts sitting around talking about the characteristics of their favorite race cars. And heavens, NOBODY would think of calling NASCAR folk geek, now would they? But, it’s all technology and science behind it.

One of the kids attending the meeting asked me how hard it would be to become an astronomer. I told her that she already was one because I’d watched her work on a mirror for her telescope, and she’d been out observing with her folks each night. She persisted in wanting to know about school. And I told her about the math and science requirements, waiting for her to wrinkle up her nose. She didn’t, which told me that she hadn’t subscribed to this society’s silly ideas about geeks and math and science. So, maybe someday I’ll go back to that star party and she’ll be there, PhD papers fresh in her hand, and giving a talk about whatever her research object was in college. I hope some kids pirate some good ideas from her, and all the others of us who go around showing the world that science and astronomy aren’t geeky… but a darned lot of fun, even if they do require us to use our brains!

Yarrr! Embrace the cosmos smartly! Ye have nothing to lose but yer fear of science!

astronomy news

The Moon Falls to Earth

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I’ve been out on a weeklong medical leave due to surgery and of course in my downtime a slew of cool astronomy events transpired. Most of you have read about Eris and Dysnomia now (the two latest solar system bodies to be named), so I won’t go into that, other than to say I think the naming is very, very clever.

What caught my eye in a pile of emailed press releases was a story about a rock found in Antarctica. You can see a large-size image of it here.

It’s a lunar meteorite, meaning it’s a rock from the Moon that fell to Earth, specifically in Antarctica. A group of researchers from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, found it on December 11, 2005 on an icefield in the Transantarctic Mountains. They subsequently did some mineralogical testing on it to confirm its origin and announced their find last week.

Here’s a bit of info about the rock from the press release:

Scientists involved in classification of Antarctic finds at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History said the mineralogy and texture of the meteorite are unusual. The new specimen is a very coarse-grained gabbro, similar in bulk composition to the basaltic lavas that fill the lunar maria, but its very large crystals suggest slow cooling deep within the Moon’s crust. In addition, the plagioclase feldspar has been completely converted to glass, or maskelynite, by extreme shock (presumably impact events). The new specimen most closely resembles another Antarctic meteorite, Asuka 881757, one of the oldest known lunar basalt samples.

Like the other lunar meteorites, MIL 05035 is a piece of the Moon that can be studied in detail in the laboratory, providing new specimens from a part of the lunar surface not sampled by the US Apollo program. Many researchers believe that Apollo visited some of the most unusual and geochemically anomalous regions of the Moon, and lunar meteorites, knocked off the surface of the Moon by random impacts, give us samples that are more representative of the Moon as a whole. The highly-shocked nature of MIL 05035 suggests an old age and may provide new constraints on the early intense bombardment of the Earth-Moon system, improving our understanding of the history of the Earth’s nearest neighbor and aiding NASA’s efforts toward a return to the Moon.

Following the existing protocols of the U.S. Antarctic meteorite program, scientists from around the world will be invited to request samples of the new specimen for their own detailed research. Details concerning initial characterization of the specimen and sample availability are available through the Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter, available on the Web at (http://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/curator/antmet/amn/amn.htm) and mailed to researchers worldwide.

Discovery of this meteorite occurred during the fourth full field season
of a cooperative effort by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to enhance recovery of rare meteorite types in Antarctica, in the hopes new martian samples would be found.

So, how do rocks from the Moon get to Earth? As you might have figured out from the press release segment, bombardments and collisions knock rocks off of one body and send then careening through space. Eventually, if orbits match, those rocks stray into Earth’s orbit and come to rest on our planet. Rocks from Mars have also made the trip, taking a little longer than rocks from the Moon. No matter where they come from, however, meteorites give us fascinating glimpses into their parent bodies and into their histories.

This rock appears to be evidence from early in the Moon’s formative period, when molten lavas were cooling deep beneath the surface. How this particular rock got blasted loose and sent on its way to Earth is a story waiting to be told. I suspect it will involve a massive impact and tremendous outbursts of rock from the Moon.