Category Archives: astrophysics

astrophysics, Commentary, funding, money, Opinion

Defunding Astronomy in the UK

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The Role of Money in Astronomy

So, all this astronomy I write about costs money to do. That isn’t a surprise to anybody, I hope. Everything in life has some cost to it, whether in money, karma, time, personal involvement, or ethical reward. While it is true that you can walk outside, look up, and do astronomy at the very basic level, to do anything beyond that requires equipment and person-hours. And those cost money.Amateur astronomy equipment can cost as little as the price of a book of star maps and a pair of 10×50 binoculars or run to many thousands of dollars or Euros or whatever units of money you use for a top-of-the-line home observatory. I always tell people to start small and let the love of astronomy guide them to whatever seems appropriate to spend.Professional astronomy is a whole different ball game. No one person “owns” a big observatory like Yerkes or Anglo-Australian or Mt. Wilson or Gemini or Hubble Space Telescope or the Very Large Array. They’re operated by consortiums of institutions based in a number of countries. It’s about the only way that the enormous costs of running state-of-the-art astrophysical research facilities can be afforded. And the costs can be … well… astronomical, running into multiple millions of dollars/Euros/etc. each year. The consortiums (and their countries) help pay the bills, and in return, each member of the consortium gets time on the instrument(s).

Recently the Gemini partnership was shaken when the United Kingdom announced it was pulling out to save money. I don’t know all the politics that led to this decision, but it took UK astronomers by surprise. The result of that pullout would have denied UK astronomers access to a major Northern Hemisphere observatory, starting nearly immediately.

It made little sense, but in times of tightening budgets, I suppose that the science and technology committee in the UK that made this decision didn’t see astronomy as being as important as other physics expenditures it wanted to make, or perhaps much less important than life sciences, for example. Nonetheless, it was a surprise to the partnership and a shock to the world’s astronomy community.

Today the Royal Astronomical Society announced that the UK is in “constructive discussions” to continue UK involvement in the Gemini Partnership. President of the RAS, Dr. Michael Rowan-Robinson commented, “The UK has invested about 35 million pounds in the capital phase of the Gemini Observatories, in which we have a 23% stake. To pull out precipitately, as seemed to be happening, would have written this off to make a saving of 4 million pounds a year, at the expense of inflicting great damage to the UK’s international reputation.”

That is a lot of money to invest, and UK astronomers had every right to feel betrayed by their government’s actions in the attempted pullout. Astronomy IS worth the money and the effort, and I suspect that UK scientists will need to make sure their collective voice is heard the next time somebody suggests “cost-saving” measures such as this one.

astrophysics, chemistry

Cosmic Mother’s Milk

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The Big Bang and Hydrogen

 

The progress of evolution from the Big Bang to the present…

 

I’ve got a project coming up in a few weeks that involves learning more about the conditions under which life might form throughout the universe. So, I’m busily studying various papers and articles so that when I get to one of the meetings involved with the project, I’ll be able to ask some intelligent questions.

There are so many factors that can play a role in the formation of life that I could spend dozens of blog entries talking about them. One of the most important sciences we can study to suss out the role elements play in the cycle of life is chemistry. Which is, of course, the study of the elements that make everything the universe, and how they work together to do so.

The typical study of chemistry starts with a student learning the chemical elements, starting with hydrogen, shown here as an atom with probable locations of its single electron. Why hydrogen? Because it was the first element created in the Big Bang, the creation event thatstarted the universe on its evolutionary journey some 13.7 billion years ago. The second element was helium, followed by lithium. All the rest of the elements depend on some sort of action that takes place inside stars, or at the end of a star’s life. And, those elements, along with hydrogen— a star’s first “food”— play a huge role in shaping how new generations of stars—and planets (and us) — are formed.

Hydrogen, however, is ubiquitous, which is a fancy word meaning that it’s everywhere. And, it was all there was in the early universe to feed the first rounds of starbirth, and thereafter nourish the formation of more stars. Those stars consumed hydrogen in their nuclear furnaces for much of their lives, but also created new elements as they went along, using their fuel to do so. When they died, they spit back into space all the elements they’ve made, along whatever hydrogen they have left. All that stuff becomes the seed material for MORE stars, and whatever planets those stars form. It’s going on today, this chain of starbirth and stardeath, using hydrogen as the formative “star food” and then churning out heavier elements at the other end of the stellar life cycle. So, like babies that survive on mother’s milk early in life, but turn to other foods later to grow and thrive, the universe continues its reliance on hydrogen for the early phases of star life, creating the heavy elements needed for later phases where more metal-enriched stars, planets… and life… are formed.

So, hydrogen is everywhere, even in you! How so? To paraphrase a life form that once spoke in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we are “bags of mostly water.” Water molecules are made of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen.

So, think about THAT the next time you’re out under the stars. You have hydrogen to thank for your existence… the mother’s milk of the cosmos.