A Day For Big BIG Explosions

Happy Independence Day! (and, may I add, I'm glad to be back to my blogging routine!)

As I write this, the night's first fireworks are exploding around my home. Yes, today is the day that pyromaniacs dream of all year long, when they legally get to set off explosives and display them for all to see. Cool.

Oh yeah, and it's the country's birthday. Yada yada yada.

Actually, being hyper-patriotic, this day means a great deal to me. My flags are out, and I'm thinking about those I consider to be national heroes: people like my niece who are fighting for, or have fought for, our country's national interests and safety (though, may I add, the war in Iraq has little perceivable interest for our country in either regard), and people who are exercising their right to freedom of speech and democracy, like myself, by publicly opposing our President in his attempts to tear down those rights (or the separation of church and state, or his trampling of people's right to privacy, the Geneva Convention, environmental consciousness, etc etc).

But I digress. Let's get back to the intoxicating topic of things that go BOOM in the sky.

Last Monday, June 30, was the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska Event:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/30jun_tunguska.htm?list1101046

Yes, a century ago in 1908, just after 7 AM in the Tunguska wilderness of Siberia, a massive meteor exploded several kilometers above the surface, releasing the equivalent energy of 185 Hiroshima bombs, leveling 800 square miles of forest.

Now THAT'S fireworks!

Due to the remote location and the state of science and communications of the period, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the explosion. Enough gaps, at least, to lead to the occasionally wacko interpretation as to the cause of the event, everything from mini-black holes to UFO's (see my previous blog post on one, HERE, which also talked about how one of the meteorite fragments had gone missing from storage). Personally, I'll stick with the scientific explanation.

So I hope you've taken the chance to go outside to eat a hot dog, drink some brew, and set off some sparklers, bottle rockets, fountains, and other assorted explosives to celebrate the founding of our great nation. And while you're at it, ponder how, a century ago, one particular explosion lit up the sky from Siberia strong enough to read newspapers at midnight in China and be read by sensitive barometers as far away as England.

Happy 4th of July!


Image taken from HERE.

Where The Heck Have I Been?

Geez! Where the heck have I been for the last couple weeks?

No, I haven't given up blogging. I was on a business trip, then my wife was sick, then I was sick, now we are simultaneously: a) having wood floors installed in half our house, b) stripping wallpaper and repainting our dining room, and c) repainting our master bedroom.

It's enough to drive an angry lab rat crazy! Ever tried living in a construction zone – with two small children – while sick? It ain't fun, and it's just barely begun. (My blogging pal, Maggie, at Mind Moss, can attest to this, having gone through this last year!) It's enough to make me howl at the moon.

So please stay tuned. Lots of good stuff to write about, but it may be as much as a week before I get back to my usual blogging schedule.

In the meantime, there will be a fantastic full moon on June 18th. This is a solstice moon, meaning that the moon will be full around the time of the summer solstice (on the 20th), which means that the moon will be hugging the horizon.

This makes the moon appear unnaturally large and spectacular, an optical illusion known since ancient times but nonetheless wonderful to behold. Here is a link that explains it:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/16jun_moonillusion.htm?list1101046

So, in a couple nights, go outside and enjoy the early summer night and its nice, full moon. I'll try to join you, but there's a good chance I'll be sniffing paint vapors while tip-toe-ing around the half-installed bamboo flooring.


Image taken from HERE.

African-American Scientists: Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson is arguably one of the most influential African-American Scientists alive today. He is basically an all-around astrophysicist extraordinaire, leaning more toward the public face of the field than the hard-core lab rat type.

Tyson grew up in New York City, attending public schools through graduation at the Bronx High School of Science. He went on to wrap himself in "ivy", graduating with a BA in Physics from Harvard and a PhD in Astrophysics from Columbia University, with an MA in Astronomy in the meantime from the University of Texas at Austin, and has been a visiting research scientist and lecturer at Princeton. He is currently director of the prestigious Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.

Tyson isn't the geeky, shy sort of scientist. He's "out there" livin' large. He's handsome, muscular, and trades quips with talk show hosts. He makes frequent appearances on The History Channel's "The Universe" series and hosts PBS's "Nova ScienceNow" series, discussing everything cosmological, from black holes to the formation of the universe, our solar system, and even life on other planets. He analyzes images from the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as from telescopes from all over the planet, including Palomar and the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. He's edited or written nine books, and has another on the way, as well as chapters and articles in other publications, and about a dozen scholarly articles. I won't list here all the assorted honors, guest appearances, astronomy board memberships, and society memberships.

Twice (in 2001 and 2004) Tyson was named by President Bush to be a member of commissions to study America's role in space and to explore the future of space travel. I'll try not to hold it against him. In 2006, Tyson was appointed to the NASA advisory panel by the head of NASA.

He is the recipient of nine honorable degrees, the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, and even has an asteroid named after him ("13123 Tyson").

And if all that wasn't enough, Tyson made Time Magazine's "Time 100" of 2007 (HERE), and was named "Sexiest Astrophysist Alive" by PEOPLE Magazine in 2000. Just look at that picture!

Here is Tyson's official website, which contains just about anything you would care to know about the man: http://research.amnh.org/~tyson/.


Image taken from HERE, where you can also find a short interview with Tyson.

Move Over, Sol, There's A New Kid In The Solar System

The sun is no longer the largest celestial body in our solar system.

That's right, something's bigger than the sun. Is it Saturn? Not even close. Jupiter? Keep dreamin'. The skyrocketing deficit of the United States? Almost.

No, it's a comet.

http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/faculty/jewitt/holmes.html

But not just any comet. This one is an exploding comet, named 17P/Holmes. The comet's nucleus is a mere 2.2 miles in diameter, but explosive outbursting has created a dust cloud coma an amazing 900,000 miles in diameter. It's elementary, Watson. The sun's diameter is only 870,000. As of November 9, as detected by astronomers from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, comet Holmes became the largest celestial object in our general vicinity, and the comet dust cloud is expanding. (see the bright blue-colored dust cloud compared to the sun in the picture. In the lower right inset is the planet Saturn, for comparison). In October, Holmes had an explosive outburst that created an unprecedented half-million-fold increase in brightness.



Oh, sure, 17P/Holmes will only be around for another five, six years, tops, then the dust cloud will dissipate as the comet moves away from the sun and the sun will return to being the king of the solar system. Numero uno. The burning king of fusion. And what is this comet upstart, anyhow? A big cloud of dust? A flashy upstart? Old Sol laughs in its general direction. Why, if it weren't for the sun's heat, the comet's cloud wouldn't even be there, and 17P/Holmes would be just another tiny snowball hurtling through space.

Enjoy your size while it lasts, Holmes! One day you'll be tiny again, and you will be banished to the depths of space for another 100 years!

Neo-Earth

Get this: Astronomers based at the University of Geneva have found the first Earth-like planet outside of our solar system.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070425/ap_on_sc/habitable_planet

http://www.physorg.com/news96694571.html

Image from the PhysOrg.com article: Artist's impression of the system of three planets surrounding the red dwarf Gliese 581. One of them is the first rocky planet lying in the habitable zone to have been discovered. Credit: ESO


By “Earth-like” they mean that it is relatively similar in size (it is 1.5x larger, which is relatively the same compared to all the gas giants they’ve found so far) and is of a temperature that could support water. The planet orbits a dwarf red star, called Gliese 581, and though it is closer to its star, the average temperature could range between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius. It rotates its star every 13 days, and is the third planet found in that solar system (the other two are much more massive, and most likely gas giants like Jupiter), and thus the planet is known as “581c” or simply “C”. It’s also a relatively close 20.5 light years away from us. “C” is the first out of 220 planets found so far which is of the right size, temperature, and likely composition to support Earthlings.

From the PhysOrg article: "Liquid water is critical to life as we know it," avows Xavier Delfosse, a member of the team from Grenoble University (France). "Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extra-terrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."

Nifty. Of course, there’s a lot still unknown. It COULD support water, but does it? They don’t know. And they don’t know if there is even an atmosphere of any sort. But it does fire the imagination, doesn’t it. Just think, because it is so close to its star, the red dwarf star hangs like a giant red sphere over the horizon, 20-times larger than the moon appears to us on Earth. And whether the temperature is a water-freezing 0 degrees Celcius, or a balmy-jungle 40 degrees, it would still be habitable for us humans as long as the atmosphere was right.

Anyone got a rocket ship? I wanna go.


Addendum: A good video article: http://video.physorg.com/?channel=Space&clipid=880809.