Blue Collar Scientist

The final video from the Junk Bond Observatory trip is up at YouTube.

If you sent in a question, and haven’t heard it answered yet, it will be covered here. Enjoy!

This big hype up to yesterdays huge NASA announcement doesn’t appear to be justified to me. The announcement doesn’t strike me as that big a deal.

Basically, the big NASA story that we’ve been waiting breathlessly for is that astronomers have found a supernova remnant created by a star that went supernova during the US’ Civil War. This is significant because of two facts:

1. Prior to this, the most recent supernova we’ve known of in the Milky Way is over 400 years old.
2. The statistics of stellar populations tells us that there should be seeing about three supernova in the Milky Way each century - meaning we have roughly a 12 supernova deficit (well, 11 after yesterday’s announcement) since that 400 year old remnant.

The thing is, we understood already why we don’t see these things go off - even though they should all be as bright as the brightest planets at the distances within our own galaxy. Basically, the hypothesis is that lots of these supernova aren’t visible due to extinction - obscuration by the huge loads of galactic dust that get in the way of our seeing them.

So we’ve understood that supernova must be going off fairly frequently for a long time now. But we’ve also understood why we can’t easily see them. So now they find a remnant that helps confirm that (a) they are going off like we thought, and (b) we can’t easily see them for precisely the reasons that we thought.

Yeah, it’s a cool discovery. I’m fine with that. But it is cool because it shows the predictive power of the scientific method. We saw a discrepancy in the data. We made some discoveries that might explain the discrepancy. Then, at length, we confirmed that yep, that data does indeed explain the discrepancies.

But as far as the object itself, I’m completely unable to get worked up about it. Maybe it’s because it isn’t in the solar system. Maybe I’m just still a little blown up from my trip.

Whatever. If you want to learn about it, you apparently will get no opportunity from my apathy-riddled brain; instead, the Bad Astronomer has excellent coverage.

Yesterday, Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Director of the Vatican Observatory (full disclosure: the Vatican Observatory on Mt. Graham was a client of mine), was interviewed by the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. He had some things to say about the existence of extraterrestrial life that were of interest to me.

I’m currently peddling a speech about exoplanets, in which I devote about the last fourth of the talk to the possibility of extraterrestrial life, as deduced from the current state of knowledge of exoplanets, planetary formation in proplyds, and the fairly widespread existence of molecules like amino acids and sugars in space. My verdict is that the existence extraterrestrial life is so highly probable to be virtually certain.

What I’ve learned is that fundamentalist christians really, really hate the fact that I bring up the probability of extraterrestrial life and would rather me shut up about it. I’ve not really bothered to find out why, but when Dr. Funes made his comments, I decided to do a bit of research.

Dr. Funes, who I would rate not a religious extremist¹, gets to go first:

“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ’sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”

Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said.

The Bible “is not a science book,” Funes said, adding that he believes the Big Bang theory is the most “reasonable” explanation for the creation of the universe. The theory says the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of a single, super-dense point that contained all matter.

All of this sounds fairly reasonable to me, as far as it goes. I mean, if you accept the idea of an omnipotent creating god, then you can’t with any legitimacy impose any arbitrary limitations on what he might have done in the distant past. And you certainly can’t do it from the statements of some late bronze- and iron-age guys who wrote up their impressions of this supposed god in what later became a book. It is obvious they weren’t thinking in terms of the possibility that the Earth wasn’t unique.

And it was this, combined with some of the pushback I’ve been getting from the exoplanets talk, that had me wondering why the fundies had their panties in an uproar over the issue. I found some useful explanation at the notoriously untruthful site, Answers in Genesis.

They use three basic arguments to “prove” that there can be no extraterrestrial life. And mind you, they aren’t talking about extraterrestrial intelligent life, they are ruling out pond scum and even less derived kinds of life than that. Their argument denies even a pre-DNA self-replicating form of life.

Argument one boils down to: The Earth was “designed” for life, and everything else in the universe was “designed” for other reasons.

The earth is unique. God designed the earth for life (Isaiah 45:18). The other planets have an entirely different purpose than does the earth, and thus, they are designed differently.

You would expect Isaiah 45:18 to be a pretty powerful statement on the uniqueness of life on the Earth if that is the only part of the bible they can muster to support their remarkably extremist belief. But you’d be wrong:

For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited), “I am the LORD, and there is none else.

How does this relate exactly? There is nothing at all about Earth being unique, let alone about life being unique. In fact, it says that god “did not create a waste place,” which strongly implies that he’s not in the habit of slapping terrestrial planets on the great heavenly pottery wheel for the purpose of leaving them lifeless and barren. The fact of the matter is that to derive the uniqueness of life from this verse, you have to read it with a strong, blinding filter of your own arrogant presupposition in place. And what does the bible have to say about doing that?

• I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book. (Revelation 22:18-19)

• You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you. (Deuteronomy 4:2)
• Whatever I command you, you shall be careful to do; you shall not add to nor take away from it. (Deuteronomy 12:32)
• Every word of God is tested; He is a shield to those who take refuge in Him. Do not add to His words Or He will reprove you, and you will be proved a liar. (Proverbs 30:5-6)

While some of these don’t address the specific issue of imposing your own traditional beliefs on your study of scripture, the preponderance of evidence would suggest that this god doesn’t like it when people add to, or take away from, what he’s said. So it seems to me that Answers in Genesis has actually taken an anti-biblical view of the issue, which is, of course, no surprise.

The second argument is that there can’t be any extraterrestrial life because the bible doesn’t explicitly mention that it was created:

In Genesis 1 we read that God created plants on the earth on Day 3, birds to fly in the atmosphere and marine life to swim in the ocean on Day 5, and animals to inhabit the land on Day 6. Human beings were also made on Day 6 and were given dominion over the animals. But where does the Bible discuss the creation of life on the “lights in the expanse of the heavens”? There is no such description because the lights in the expanse were not designed to accommodate life…. From a biblical perspective, extraterrestrial life does not seem reasonable.

At this point you simply have to point out that plastic exists. The frozen polar caps of Earth exist. Death Valley exists. The Grand Canyon exists. Bacteria and Archaea exist. The Duck-Billed Platypus exists. Antibiotics exist. The point being that none of these things are specifically mentioned as having been created; and although you could lump some of them in with their broader classes (you might be able to smuggle the Platypus in with “animals,” for example), there are some things that have existed for a very long time that don’t fit anywhere in the Genesis description - such as the polar caps, or antibiotics.

Let’s take this a bit further. AiG’s argument is that “extraterrestrial life doesn’t exist, because Genesis doesn’t mention it.” There’s a hidden assumption in that statement, and that is that the Genesis account offers a complete, comprehensive accounting of all the things that were created. But the Genesis account itself fails to mention that it is a comprehensive account. Again, we have some dimwit, dishonest theologians bringing their own traditional beliefs into their reading of the bible and coming to wild conclusions as a result.

The third argument AiG deploys is strictly theological - that is, even more so than their vapid outgassings so far - and applies only to the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligent life. Basically, it goes like this:

1. Adam sinned. (Yes, they say Adam, not Adam and Eve.)
2. As a result, death and sin entered the world. (They cite Romans 5:12: Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned….
3. It was necessary for Jesus Christ, who was both human and god, to redeem this sin by being sacrificially killed. Killing animals couldn’t do it because they are not of the same “blood” as human beings.

Given all this - and I’ll take them at their word just for the sake of discussion, they conclude:

When we consider how the salvation plan might apply to any hypothetical extraterrestrial (but otherwise human-like) beings, we are presented with a problem. If there were Vulcans or Klingons out there, how would they be saved? They are not blood relatives of Jesus, and so Christ’s shed blood cannot pay for their sin. One might at first suppose that Christ also visited their world, lived there, and died there as well, but this is antibiblical. Christ died once for all (1 Peter 3:18; Hebrews 9:27–28, Hebrews 10:10)….

One might suppose that alien beings have never sinned, in which case they would not need to be redeemed. But then another problem emerges: they suffer the effects of sin, despite having never sinned. Adam’s sin has affected all of creation— not just mankind. Romans 8:20–22 makes it clear that the entirety of creation suffers under the bondage of corruption.

Having painted themselves into this corner, they say - hold on to your britches, this is really funny:

These kinds of issues highlight the problem of attempting to incorporate an antibiblical notion into the Christian worldview.

Hahaha! There’s two legitimate answers to this. The atheist would quite rightly say that this is a sign that your “christian worldview” is a bunch of make-believe rubbish, and maybe you should consider reality as an alternative.

The moderate religionist might point out that perhaps this is a sign that they’ve taken the “christian worldview” and pressed it a little too hard, believing it to mean something far beyond what the words were ever intended to say, and that maybe they should lay off the crack pipes for a bit.

(Moderate religionists might point this out, and they should - because whackjobs like these make them all look stupid and dishonorable - but for reasons that puzzle me, they rarely do.)

The AiG page goes on to debunk UFOs as alien spacecraft, a conclusion that I heartily endorse. Their arguments, of course, are rubbish.

Conclusion: Religionists who deny the possibility of extraterrestrial life are extremists.

1. Despite his church’s brutal views on contraception, etc - most Catholics I know freely ignore the behaviorally harmful aspects of Catholic teaching, and so I rate them more or less mainstream. In the meantime, I fully recognize the evil that the church is perpetrating against peoples in developing nations, of low income, of restricted educational opportunities, and so forth - and I condemn it. [↩]

My previous two videos about Junk Bond Observatory have inspired some Q&A, so I’ve posted part one (of two) of some answers to the questions that have been posted to the blog as comments, and/or e-mailed to me. This is a bit dry, I know, but it is what I do for a living, and I don’t know how to make it interesting unless you are really obsessed with high performance telescopes that aren’t being controlled by grad-student-ware¹. Anyway, here it is:

If you want to keep up with my future videos, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel.

The next two videos coming up will be part two of the Q&A, and a video of a short presentation I gave at a religious school.

1. This is a slightly derogatory term referring to kludged-together software, generally written in some deplorably out of date language or development environment, with many bad architectural choices made, by the graduate students tasked with writing it in return for peanuts and water from the drinking fountain down the hall. In astronomy, grad-student-ware (cf. shareware, freeware) seems to be responsible for more observatory downtime and observational overhead than any other source. [↩]

I’ve finally completed the video about data reduction at Junk Bond Observatory. In this video, we answer the question of how Junk Bond Observatory got its name, and provide a demonstration of what our images look like and how we turn them into scientific results. The demonstration by Dave is followed by a higher-resolution screen recording to show you the details, so stick with it to the end if you are interested in seeing the images up close. (And yes, I know this isn’t the best way - I’ve been learning whole new continents of my computing system doing this, and I am learning, but if I wait to post until I’ve learned everything, I’ll never get around to posting this stuff.)

In the next video, I’ll have answers to the rest of the questions that people asked after the first video was posted, and hopefully it won’t take me so long to get it posted. What can I say - I’m on a working trip. Work comes first, and even though the formal purpose for the visit was fulfilled sometime yesterday, I’ve still been quite busy taking care of loose ends and addressing things that I felt needed to be dealt with before I left.

Tomorrow will be a semi-travel day for me; I’ll be leaving JBO around noon Arizona time and heading up to Tucson, with a long stop to visit some people in between. Then Wednesday is a travel day. Blogging will continue to be light, sporadic, and possibly sub-standard until I’m home and have had a chance to sleep properly. But I’m hoping to get a few things posted from the hotel in Tucson, so stay tuned.

By way of Space Politics I learn that the upcoming 2008 Libertarian National Convention, at which the libertarian party will select a presidential candidate, was to include a presentation on the topic of “Inside NASA” by Dr. David Hoagland.

This, it turns out, was an error, and the actual talk is “Do We Still NEED NASA?” and will be given by Richard C. Hoagland. He’s going to talk about this:

Mr. Hoagland will … reveal –with official NASA imagery — startling scientific discoveries NASA, by law, has deliberately withheld from the American people for more than 40 years!

It is bad enough that every third Libertarian I meet is a credulous UFO nutjob, and now they are giving voice to this total whackjob¹.

This is a guy who believes that James Clerk Maxwell’s equations were misunderstood and can only make sense in terms of “Hyperdimensional physics,” which says that enormous energy is available at a latitude of 19.5° on the Sun and every planet in the solar system. The evidence? Olympus Mons. (Which isn’t at 19.5 °, but 18°, a degree and a half difference.) No word about all the free energy available on the Earth at this latitude as yet.

This is the guy who thinks there was an advanced extraterrestrial civilization on Mars in the past.

And that the Martians moved to Earth and became humans.

And there was a similar civilization on Europa.

And on the moon.

And on Iapetus, the moon of Saturn, which is in fact artificial, kinda like the Death Star except maybe without Darth Vader and the big planet-destroying laser beam.

And that the moon civilization built glass domes which have been retouched out of Apollo imagery.

And that the Apollo astronauts had their minds wiped to they forgot seeing these domes.

This is the guy who claims that the Galileo probe to Jupiter caused a black spot due to nuclear materials on board.

This is the guy who claims the 9-11 attacks were part of a Masonic conspiracy.

This is the guy who says the Apollo 1 astronauts were murdered by NASA.

This is the guy who claims there is a clandestine space program, using antigrav technology stolen from extraterrestrials, which causes comets to explode².

This is the guy that swore that the Space Shuttle main fuel tank could never work using conventional engineering, and something called “Torsion Physics” would have to be used to solve the problems.

This is the guy who repeatedly claims to have friends at JPL who provide him with inside information.³

This is the guy who claims to have designed the Pioneer 10 plaque that was actually designed by Carl Sagan.

And so on.

Now, if you believe anything in this lengthy list of Hoagland claims, congratulations. You are a nutjob. If you don’t believe it, you should understand why I view the libertarian party as the party of choice for cranks, lunatics, and other stout deniers of reality.

1. And yes, the taxonomy is valid - total whackjobs are far stranger than nutjobs. [↩]
2. Sounds like fun. But I’m pretty sure I’d notice if comets started exploding; you know, that’s the sort of research we do here at the observatory I’m currently visiting. [↩]
3. I have actual friends with real names at JPL who deny they provide Hoagland information, inside or otherwise. [↩]

One of the things I emphasize to my students is that a lot of the better research going on today is interdisciplinary, in which scientists from completely different fields collaborate to study a phenomenon and the scientific results are improved from the participation of folks that have different knowledge and different backgrounds.

Yesterday I spent a little time in my own cross-disciplinary scientific world. I wasn’t really contributing anything, I was soaking up the awesome coolness that is Tom Kaye.

Tom’s a sort of modern gentleman-scientist, of the sort that nearly went extinct shortly after Darwin’s time when the cost of doing scientific research began to require funding that was not available even to the very rich. I’ve known Tom by reputation for years; back in 2000, he had a telescope set up at a friend’s observatory where he made the first amateur astronomer detection of an exoplanet using the radial velocity method. He’s also the guy that got hold of Norm Oberle’s 1-meter mirror blank; I knew Norm back when I lived in Ohio, have seen the blank, and knew that someone had bought it, but never knew who until I went to dinner with Tom a few nights ago.

Tom’s neck-deep in astronomy, but he’s also a paleontologist, and he’s specifically looking at a possible connection between gamma-ray bursters, the K-T boundary extinction, and the Chicxulub impactor. To support this research, Tom has a bunch of fossils, K-T boundary samples, microscopes, and atomic composition analysis equipment.

And when I say microscopes, I mean microscopes. He’s got everything from a simple stereo microscope, to a couple of the nicest compound binocular microscopes ever made, and even two electron microscopes. We slapped a spider leg into one of the electron microscopes and took a look at it in all its hairy, spikey glory. Really cool stuff - I’ve never had a chance to play with a microscope before.

Tom was kind enough to donate a bunch of hadrosaur teeth to me for use in my educational programs, along with a sauropod stomach stone and some 35 million year old fossilized poop. And we’re going to work at the beginning of next school year on putting together some brief educational videos for use in the classroom, and maybe even set him up so that he can visit my classes through webcam to talk about his research.

It’s amazing the people you meet in my line of work.

The ESO (European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, in case you aren’t familiar) has released some interesting images, including one of the best photographs of the gegenschein that I’ve ever seen.

I know I have a lot of non-astronomer readers, so bear with me for a second while I explain. That word is pronounced gay-gen-shine (hard “g”), or gay-gun-shine, depending on where you grew up and learned it. And what the gegenschein actually is, is pretty dang cool. The solar system was formed about 4.5 billion years ago from a great disk of dust and gas. The gas was blown out into interstellar space by the sun, but the dust is not so easy to drive out of the solar system. In fact, something called the Poynting-Robertson effect¹ causes this dust to fall inward toward the sun, so the dust has to be continually replenished, and we think that happens as a result of dust distributed by comets and the rare asteroid collision. In any case, there’s dust in our neighborhood of the solar system.

The gegenschein is what we see when sunlight illuminates this dust and reflects the light back to us. Actually, the zodiacal light is exactly the same thing. The zodiacal light appears in the west after sunset or the east before sunrise, and is awesomely bright from a dark sky at the right latitude. Part of this brightening is probably the result of dust between us and the sun backscattering light in our direction.

As you follow the zodiacal light farther from the sun in the sky, it gets quite dim, and perhaps becomes invisible. If you can see it at all, the faint wisp of light is called the zodiacal band, and you can track that all the way across the sky, until the end of the night when it re-connects with the morning zodiacal light. But along the way, something strange will happen - a bit football-shaped glow² will be found right in the middle of the zodiacal band. If you do your homework, you will find that this football is exactly 180° from the sun.

This football shaped glow is the gegenschein. The brightening of the zodiacal band here is caused by all the dust in this area being seen at nearly full phase. Neither the zodiacal band nor the gegenschein are easy to see - you need a dark site with clear skies at the proper latitude and season to reliably make it out.

And it is incredibly hard to photograph, which is why this photo blew my socks off:

That may not look like a big deal to a person who doesn’t spend much time under the night sky, but to someone who does, and who has tried to photograph the gegenschein many times, this is an impressive result. You can click the picture to get a high resolution version in all its glory.

There are more pictures associated with this ESO press release, including good shoots of the green flash and the blue flash. Enjoy!

1. Drag caused by radiation pressure tangential to a celestial body’s orbital motion. You do not want to see the math, or the relativistic model, of this phenomenon. Trust me. [↩]
2. American football - I’m referring to a shape that is approximately the cross-section of a prolate spheroid. [↩]