Courtesy the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan
Yesterday I returned home from the AAS meeting. It was a long flight day, and I logged some airport time waiting for flights. So I decided to try out the ever-present T-Mobile wireless hotspots to see if I could check on the progress of the Huygens data from Titan and the Cassini-Huygens mission via their websites. I’m sure everybody’s seen the images by now. We’re in a great age of planetary exploration when we can tune in to the latest pics from Mars and Saturn every day, if we so wish it! I can pretty well guess how excited the scientists were to find out that their probe had settled down to the surface of Titan and had returned a treasure trove of 90 minutes worth of data before falling silent.
And what a collection! I’d always pictured Titan as this place with hydrocarbon-sludge oceans and maybe a frozen surface. So, the pictures were not a total surprise in that regard. But it was still exciting to see actual rocks and a surface. A friend of mine called this morning and said that it reminded him of Venus, only many hundreds of degrees colder!
If you browse around the Cassini-Huygens web site, you’ll find more pictures, plus a neat page of “sounds” from Titan. It will be interesting to see what else they post in the next few days that will shed more insight into a world that once was hidden and veiled—and still holds surprises for us all.
Today’s the last day of the AAS meeting, and things are winding down. Yesterday was a busy one—I gave a poster presentation about using arts, poetry, literature, music, and science to teach astronomy in planetarium shows, and spent about 6 hours standing there talking with astronomers interested in how we do what we do. (If you want to read the paper, you can find it at Adventures in the Dome Trade on our Loch Ness Productions web site (it’s a PDF file)). Lots of good interactions and I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of colleagues from my days in the research world and several planetarians who stopped by!
Courtesy Hubblesite.org
One of the stories released at this meeting is about this lovely star birth region in one of the Milky Way Galaxy’s neighboring galaxies—the Small Magellanic Cloud. The view is so sharp that you can see this small population of infant stars perhaps only a few million years old, from a distance of 210,000 light-years! If you want to read more about it, click on the link above.
There was also a flurry of news about the recently launched SWIFT mission, which is out there observing gamma ray bursts, those mysterious pinpoint brightenings in gamma rays that are second only to the Big Bang in total energy output. They last a few milliseconds and likely are signals from the birth of another black hole in the distant reaches of the cosmos. For more information you can browse over to the Swift web page.
If you want to see more astronomy stories from this meeting, click on over to this page o’ links.
