Science: It’s How We Learn about the Universe
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
The last weekend of 2018 and the first day of the new year brought us some of the most amazing gifts of science in the form of images and data from the New Horizons team as their spacecraft flew past Ultima Thule (2014 MU69). I say these are gifts because what else do you call it when a group of people dedicates their careers and intellects to showing us a tiny world at the edges of the solar system? It is a wonderful thing they gave us: precision measurements, precision flight, and spot-on analysis of what their spacecraft saw and measured. And, they gave it to the world. They handed us knowledge, pure and simple, at a time when scientific knowledge is being dumped on by people who only understand ignorance and fear.
Humans owe our New Horizons team members from around the world a debt of gratitude for the wonders they showed us. Will we give it? I hope so. If you haven’t yet checked out the New Horizons website, look at it periodically. Starting in about a week, as soon as the spacecraft moves out of occultation with the Sun, more data will be streaming down. I’ve been told the highest-resolution images will be headed down within a few weeks.
AAS and Shutdowns
This week, I’m at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Washington. There are probably a couple of thousand astronomers here. Unfortunately, many of our most accomplished colleagues are forbidden to be here. They are shut out of their life’s work by a silly government shutdown over a wall our nation doesn’t need and can’t afford. It’s a waste of human talent, made all the worse by the fact that these people (and all government employees) are being forced to live without pay for their work. The effects of the shutdown on people’s jobs and lives are a lousy testament to the shortsighted stupidity of a political party that also denigrates science and knowledge.
Still, science moves on, and we are hearing about very cool things at this meeting. The empty chairs that would have been filled with our NASA colleagues are sad and waiting. And, perhaps the next meeting, we’ll have them back in their rightful places, sharing the science we as taxpayers have funded and want them to do on our behalf.
Astro News
So, what are hearing about at this meeting? Today, it was exoplanets (with the TESS mission) and also a look at activity in the Orion Nebula, a nearby star formation region. The main story is here, but the gist of it is that the stellar winds flowing off of a newborn star are actually having an effect on nearby clouds of gas and dust. The result is that new stars aren’t forming. This image shows a region nicknamed “The Dragon’s Heart.”
Astronomers ask why star birth can be stopped in its tracks. One idea is that nearby supernova explosions can “quench” star formation. Now, it appears that young stars themselves can stop the births of their siblings, too.
This finding comes from observations by the SOFIA flying observatory. (We were supposed to see this observatory here. However, the shutdown prevented this highly useful observatory from flying here.)
Galaxies and Hubble
Of course, it wouldn’t be an AAS meeting without a Hubble Space Telescope image. This year, it’s the Triangulum Galaxy and we’ll hear more about the science being done on it tomorrow. But, for now, here’s a sneak preview. This gorgeous view comprises 54 Hubble fields that cover an area of sky 19,000 light-years across.
The image shows the light of nearly 25 million individually resolved stars. It is the largest high-resolution mosaic image of Triangulum ever assembled. You can go over to the site above and explore it in high detail!
This galaxy is a smaller member of the Local Group of galaxies. Since we can see it “face on”, it gives astronomers a good look at spiral galaxy structure. Interestingly, there’s a lot of star formation going on in Triangulum. It turns out to be about 10 times more intense than in the comparable Hubble panorama of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. There’s a lot to study in this image. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more cool announcements about the mechanics of this galaxy in the years to come. For example, astronomers have a lot to dig into with the galaxy’s spirals and dust lanes. They may learn that this galaxy hasn’t interacted as intensely with its neighbors as others have done. So, stay tuned on this one!
More to Come
The meeting here goes on until Thursday night. There are more sessions on exoplanets, galaxy formation, gravitational waves and other hot topics in the cosmos. It is an exciting time to learn about astronomy!