Small Problems for Astronomers

By: | December 6, 2010

Big problems for astronomers: the just-launched zillion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope couldn’t be focused; a Mars probe got to Mars and then lost contact with the earth; the 300-foot Green Bank radio telescope collapsed one night into lacy rubble. Smaller problems are below.

An amateur astronomer, after observing on his back porch one night, locked his 14.5 inch Starmaster Dobsonian at the horizontal position, put a towel over the eyepiece, and called it a night. The next morning, the wind first blew the towel off, then blew the telescope out of gear so it bobbed up into a vertical position and looked at the sky. As the morning passed, the sun hit the mirror, the mirror focused the sunlight, the eyepiece caught fire, the telescope exploded into flame, the whole back porch caught fire. The amateur wasn’t entirely dismayed: he was insured and besides, it was only the 14.5 inch Starmaster that exploded, not the 20-inch.

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The Truth Is Out There: The Planet X Files

By: | December 3, 2010

Did you know there’s a tenth planet—well, ninth, if you don’t count Pluto—that’s on a collision course with Earth, and the government has built a telescope in Antarctica to monitor its movements, only they don’t want the public to know about this impending doomsday because they don’t want to cause a worldwide panic? It’s true! But you don’t have to take my word for it. Just Google “South Pole Telescope collision planet Earth” and you’ll find all the evidence you need.

Okay, maybe not you, since you’ve presumably come to this site with a greater fondness for physics theories than for conspiracy theories. But a lot of people. And they’re not afraid to make their opinions known to the people they will most need to convince, if the truth is ever to see the light of day: scientists.

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Bad Things Happen

By: | December 2, 2010


This thing is just simmering soup, circulating oceans, the granules on the sun’s surface, and the driver of the continental plates; it’s just convection.  That is, heat rises and cold falls, updrafts and downdrafts, up in the middle and down at the sides:  a cell of convection.  This convective cell is called a supercell and it’s rare but is the worst kind of thunderstorm; the other kinds are single cell and multicells, and they’re bad enough.  Supercells not only have a super-strong updraft, the updraft is rotating.  They can stay formed-up like this for hours and they’re miles across; they’re over-sized, steady-state tornadoes.  They’re mean and ugly and cause havoc.   As it happens, this one didn’t.  It sat in Glasgow, Montana – supercells are most common in the Great Plains – for a while, looking like your worst fear, and then moved on.  I’ll bet it blew out that bushy little tree to the right though.  The photographer has a lot of these pictures and if you’re complacent about nothing bad ever happening to you, you’ll want to look at them.

Photo credit:  used with the kind permission of Sean Heavey

All I want for Christmas . . .

By: | December 1, 2010

Would I lie to you, honey? (Notice the pyrex says 66 degrees and the Taylor says 62. Hmmmm.)

Each year my mother asks for my Christmas list. No, I’m not eight. I’m more than two decades older than that. Yet she still asks. And I still send one. (I also cc Santa just to be on the safe side.)

This year, I’m inclined to ask for a kitchen thermometer. It’s not that I don’t have a thermometer. I do. In fact, I have three of them — two dial thermometers and a digital thermometer with a removable probe on a cable (pictured above). But I don’t trust them. One was too cheap (“You get what you pay for,” says the voice in my head). One got wet (and now may or may not be accurate). And the other rapidly flashes between Celsius and Fahrenheit. I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to do that. And none of them agree. What I’m after is the Cadillac of thermometers: ThermoWorks New Splash-Proof Super-Fast Thermapen. The drawback is the shock-inducing cost. Are you sitting down? The Thermapen is $96. Most other kitchen thermometers are in the $15-$20 range. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose, Stardust, & Entropy

By: | November 30, 2010

Abstruse Goose added a mysterious little tag that says something like, “Now, how many pop culture references can you find?”  None for me, not one, geezer that I apparently am.  But I did get the astronomy/physics references.

The stardust one:  maybe you already know this but most every element — the lithium in our batteries, gold in our rings, carbon in our own selves — was made in the last drastic moments of those supernoved stars I was telling you about, and then flung out into space to be made into more stars and their planets and whatever the planets come up with in the way of life.   So literally, actually stardust.

The worldline in space/time:  make a graph, time on one axis, space or location on the other,  put a little particle down in the bottom left corner, and set it loose.   As it moves from location to location through space, it inevitably moves forward in time, and the little line connecting its locations and times is called its worldline.  The universe has a worldline, and so do we.  That word is a piece of physics poetry.

The increasing entropy/thermodynamic equilibrium one:  that’s the heat death of the universe.  I already told you about that too. So in simple gratitude, you ought to at least explain the pop references to me.

http://abstrusegoose.com/317

Palm Revelations

By: | November 29, 2010

Last week, I had my palm read for the first time.

I was spending the day with scientists who study the microscopic bugs living on our skin. (It’s actually not as creepy or smelly as you might think.) One of the researchers, a young and energetic dermatologist, was giving me the grand tour of the lab when I happened to mention that my sister had eczema — an itchy red rash — when we were growing up. Then, right in the middle of a long, sterile corridor, the doctor suddenly stopped and demanded my hand.
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Biological Astronomy

By: | November 26, 2010

I haven’t had anything to do with biology since I wrote an article years ago about sleeping pills.  I found out that the drugs used by 60-gazillion insomniacs to put themselves to sleep are not the chemicals the brain uses to put us to sleep naturally.  Can’t neuroscientists just find those brain chemicals and sell them to us?  I called and asked; the answer is not that neuroscientists can’t find the chemicals, but that they find way, way too many.  Not only that, but each chemical seems also to affect some different and important part of the body: the immune system, the body’s clock, digestion, blood pressure.  I was indignant:  all those causes for just one effect, and each cause having other effects?  What ever happened to the principle of parsimony?  I gave up on biology and ever since, have stuck closely to astronomy:  the laws of the universe are parsimonious. Continue reading →