From Discoverychannel.ca, in various stages from just completed, to underway, to on the drawing board:
1. Large Hadron collider at CERN

2. Next-stop, cold fusion?: The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)

3. The finished International Space Station, circa 2011

4. A 3,000-foot-tall “Solar tower” in the Australian outback

5. The largest-scale climate-change simulator on Earth

6. James Webb Space Telescope

7. The Svalbard “Doomsday” Seed Vault

8. Space elevator

9. The ANTARES underwater neutrino detecting array
My own research is feeling small and insignificant, even though I deal with galaxies hundreds of thousands of light years across hosting black holes of billions of solar masses, outshining stars by billions of times, billions of light years away.

Oh, wait.  My research feels big and impressive again!

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, popular events, science

Between having a leaky water heater replaced yesterday, costing me a lot of sleep and money, and running a two-hour “Writing Science Fiction” session for middle school kids attending our Wyoming Astrocamp, it’s been pretty busy for being summertime without travel.  As usual when this happens, I still get in some surfing time and friends forward links of interest.  I think I’ll start posting these under the heading of “Starlinks” the way Jay Lake does his “link salad” posts.  I’ll make some comments, but usually won’t do an extended response.

So what’s been going on in the world and heavens above?

Science

Cracked lists five superpowers you can have in this lifetime.  Either great minds think alike, or it’s a ripoff of my list of ten superpowers you can have now.  Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

A solar system is discovered with “a trio of super-Earths.”  Krypton?  Nah…

Nucleobases confirmed from space.

We have the summer solstice coming up next week, and a full moon tomorrow, which will make for an exceptionally good optical moon illusion Wednesday evening at dusk.
A thoughtful Atlantic article with the provocative title asking “Is Google making us stupid?” discussing how the internet is changing our reading habits, turning people into shallow skimmers, and changing the way we think.

An idea to build an evolution museum across from the Creationist museum.  I’m of a mixed opinion about the wisdom of this.  Isn’t every Natural History museum already an “evolution museum?”

Stephen Hawking speaks out against Britain cutting science budgets.  Also, for what it’s worth, it’s revealed that Hawking has turned down a knighthood because he “doesn’t like titles.”

Science Fiction

Should the Hulk be the villian in the upcoming Avengers movie?

Entertainment Weekly writer defends himself after calling Blade Runner and Jurrasic Park “Sci-fi misfires.”

An 1881 science fiction novel rediscovered that anticipates space travel, space suits, and more.
Some image lists of Old School Toys and Bad Movies.  Some nostalgia there.  I’m miffed that the second list starts with Barbarella, however, which is marvelous for what it is and has perfect 1960s charm.  Several science fiction movies on the list, some of which (e.g., Ed Wood’s Robot Monster with its “Billion Bubble Machine”) are much better choices than Barbarella.  I’m a little offended that Soylent Green is on the list at all though.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, personal, popular events, science, science fiction

It’s here. There’s a nice video slideshow of the Hubble images of the post-starburst quasars. Check it out.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, general, personal, science

It seems like about once a week or so that I suddenly spot a bunch of interesting things on the web, and don’t have the time to give each the individual attention they deserve. Pointing them out here is as much for me as for you, so I can come back and find them when I do have the time to give them deeper thought.

Okay, the first one is a week old, and I skipped the actual talk to visit my family. Sean Carroll at the American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis last week spoke of time before the Big Bang and multiple universes. He’s probably smarter than me, and has some small chance of being right. Worth looking at in any event, as speculative as it is.

GLAST launched, and so we have a new gamma-ray observatory in space.

A disgustingly correct article explaining how morning people do better in school. I had a really high college GPA as a night owl, which makes me an official super genius when corrected for this awful bias. Damn you morning people, damn you! What is this daylight savings time crock of shit!? Embrace the night, baby, and let your inner vampire do its thing. Astronomers do not love the sun. What is wrong with this world?

An amusing summary of string theory, cartoon form.

Dwarf planets like Pluto now called plutoids. OK, whatever. I’m not hung up on semantics except when everyone else is and it annoys me.

The sun is not getting back with the sunspot program. The solar sunspot cycle is not particularly well understood, and it does have an effect on the Earth. We continue to alter our atmosphere, and such things as the sunspot cycle may mask it in such a way as to cloud the minds of the simple, who unfortunately do vote and exercise influence on public policy. More to come soon on this, from me or others. Well, here’s one for now: I’m a freaking idiot grasping at anything to support my political bias, even if it makes no sense. The premise of this article is that the sunspot deficit could foil warming predictions, by a guy who has a career championing global warming deniers. Everyone knows the sun isn’t understood perfectly and is a potential wildcard, but only an idiot is thinking they know it’s going to throw a spanner in the works at this time, as it hasn’t shown much variation in many decades. What we have control over and what’s been changing with increasing temperatures is the atmosphere, particularly CO2. I’ve about had it with the intellectually bereft and politically biased types who pretend to have a clue and deserve only derision.

Apocalyptic cow farts and hope for the future through genetic manipulation. That’s a sacred cow in my book.

io9 tells us that crappy movies nuke our brains. Duh. What? I thought movies like Jumper were supposed to inspire kids to go into science! Now, I thought the movie was okay, but a science-inspiring tour de force, not so much. There does seem to be a practical difference between thoughtful movies and popcorn movies. I usually prefer the former, but sometimes the latter. My ex-wife preferred the latter, but appreciated a thoughtful movie when I picked one out.

A unicorn deer in Italy. Mutations can be cool. Very cool, as shown by a 20-year-old bacteria experiment, as E. Coli learns to eat citrates.

Smart people less likely to believe in God. This is news?

Sleep Apnea linked to memory loss. Good thing I use a C-Pap, or I’d be more absent minded than ever I guess. Hey, Einstein was pretty bad, too, and I hear he wasn’t a total idiot.

Finally, Freeman Dyson reviews a couple of books on the cost of global warming. I agree with a lot of the substantial points in the specifics, but the final summary leaves me cold. In the past, I’ve admired Dyson, but I’ve come to think he’s a detriment on the issue of thought and belief, blithely proclaiming things like “secular religion” which is perhaps not inappropriately descriptive, but is oxymoronic and definitely intellectually misleading. He could do better. Shame on you, you shill Dyson. Did winning that big financial Templeton prize make you more likely to publicly lie in your terminology in your public statements? I think it did, and am disappointed in you. What Dyson calls a “secular religion” is a failure of our educational system to teach people to think critically about topics in general, and in the absence of revelation and dogma should be curable and not be labeled religion.  Sean Carroll, who I started this post with way above, has refused to accept Templeton Foundation money, by the way.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, science, science fiction

In order to secure high-quality guest instructors for anything with a substantial time commitment, you need to book way in advance. I’ve learned this the hard way by getting turned down by very interested people because their schedule starts to fill up a year in advance, or more, depending on the season. I should have already gotten someone for Launch Pad for next year, but I haven’t. I’m going to try to remedy that situation very soon, before this year’s workshop, and I’d like a little help.

The goal of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers is to increase the quality and quantity of astronomy/physics reaching the public by using writers already reaching large audiences. We educate them in a week-long crash course in astronomy, and our NASA funding let’s us pay for everything. The idea behind having a guest instructor, who we pay a $2000 stipend, is to bring in some expertise we don’t already have locally and to make the workshop more appealing to a broader range of writers who may not have heard of Mike Brotherton or thought of Wyoming as an astronomical mecca. Jerry Oltion has been our guest instructor so far, and he’s done a terrific job. My vision is to have a different guest instructor in different years to help appeal to different writers.

To that end, I’m soliciting some input in the poll below. Pick up to three names from the list that you think would be the most appealing to writers. While I originally envisioned this workshop for science fiction writers, I’m very open to writers of all types for whom a better understanding of astronomy would enhance their work, and editors are welcome to apply as well. Many of the people listed have expressed some level of interest in being a guest instructor in a future year, schedule permitting. They all bring strong expertise in astronomy and/or in communicating astronomical science to the public. If you have a strong preference for someone I haven’t listed, please leave a name in the comments.

Thanks!

 Loading …

Again, vote for up to three. Be encouraged to suggest other names in the comments.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, personal, popular events, science, science fiction

Okay, I thought this idea was dumb before I read the article. There’s an interesting discussion to be had about extremely hot temperatures, which I didn’t appreciate until I read it.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, science

I had a post over the weekend where I claimed that life on a planet around a type M star (see classifications here) would be like living in a red light district. Not the sex part, just the red light part. M stars are cool as stars go, around 3000 Kelvin or a bit less, and put out most of their energy in the near-infrared, invisible to humans. What visible light is emitted is heavily skewed toward long wavelengths — red light. Simple physics, right?

Well, James Nicoll reminded me of something I had conveniently forgotten. Your typical old-fashioned light bulb operates at about 3000 Kelvin and emits a spectrum an awful lot like an M star. They look white, don’t they?

Well, yeah. That’s true. But I have also looked at M stars through telescopes and those suckers sure look red.

I’m calling this the “light bulb paradox.” Why doesn’t light from a light bulb look red? Should it? When doesn’t a spectrum correspond to the color of an object?

I’m not completely certain, but I think I’ve got some insight and an explanation, although it’s a little outside my expertise.

First, some reference material.  Spectra of M stars, which, except for the very coolest M8 star do put out some blue light and do resemble the spectrum of an incandescent light bulb.   For good measure, let’s also have the efficiency of the human eye as a function of color, the spectra of the sky and sunset (and light bulbs, tungsten and “full-spectrum”).  Finally, a nice discussion of the perception of color.

OK, that’s a lot of stuff to get through.  The key to understanding the paradox lies in the perception of color.  The eye has different cells that respond to different colors (red, green, and blue, with some overlap equivalent to the bandpasses of filters we use in astronomy).  When all three are sufficiently stimulated, the color is regarded as “white.”  Light bulbs are intense enough that all three are sufficiently stimulated and they look white, even though the spectral shape of the tungsten filament is very similar to that of an M star in a telescope or a sunset, both of which definitely  appear as shades of red.  The red-detecting cone cells in these fainter light sources send a much stronger signal than those from the red and green cone cells.

So the key to the paradox is the intensity of the light.  Saturating all the varieties of color-detecting cone cells results in white.

So what of our hypothetical planet orbiting an M star?  It’s going to depend on the particulars of how bright and large the star appears in the sky.  Let’s take an Earth-sized planet with Earth-type temperatures, ballpark.   Let’s take a typical M star with half the temperature and half the radius of the sun.  That will make the star emit only about 1/32 as much energy as the sun (see discussion in wiki blackbody article).  This will mean that the planet has to be much closer than the distance from the Earth to the Sun (an astronomical unit).  Because the radiation follows the inverse square law, it’ll have to be about 1/6 (square root of 1/32) of an AU orbital radius, and the star will look about three times bigger across than the Sun in the sky (it’s about half the size, but six times closer).  Now, that’s not the only large effect, however, even though it does affect how intense the light will be as it will be spread out over an area ten times larger.  Another large effect is that the spectrum is peaked in the near-infrared, and the ratio of visible light put out by the M star to that of the sun is very small (governed by Planck’s Law, again see the wiki blackbody article).  Based on some plots, I’m estimating another factor of five or so, largest in the blue.

This means that the M star’s visible light surface brightness will be approximately 50 times fainter than the sun, with a larger factor at shorter wavelengths.

The discussion here suggests that the Sun at sunset is seen through 6-10 magnitudes of visual extinction at yellow colors, which corresponds to factors of a few hundred to a few thousand, order of magnitude, compared to the Sun at noon.  I can look at the sun at sunset and it looks pretty dang red.  If we let it get ten times brighter, that’s somewhere approaching sunset and I think the sun starts to look red before it gets all the way to sunset.

So, having said all this, I think it will come down to specific details.  This order of magnitude estimate seems to put us on the boundary between what’s going to look white and what’s going to look red.  The colors of plants and things and the quality of the sky and general lighting should be equivalent to what we see on Earth approaching sunset, but not quite there.  It should look different, but probably not quite as different as I indicated in my original post.

Let’s call living around an M star as the “almost sunset” district.

Apparently, James, I will do other people’s homework when they disagree with me!  You’re on your own for the moment with the Jovian moons.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, general, personal, science, science fiction

I received my preliminary schedule for Worldcon this coming August:

Panel Name (this may be a working title) Day Time

Not as much to do as I’d hoped, but there will still be signings and readings to be added. I always feel like the astronomer at science fiction conventions, and the science fiction writer at astronomy meetings. I’d be happy to do more writing related panels at cons, but I guess I shouldn’t complain. Worldcons are so big that some fine writers get on very little programming at all, and my niche as a scientist-writer gives me a lot more options.

I’m perfect, or nearly so, for the panels I’m on. While I’m not an atmospheric scientist, I am up on global warming issues and have a few bones to pick with the politically biased on that topic.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, personal, popular events, science, science fiction

NOTE: I’m keeping the below post as originally written. It will be superseded by a post to come as the issue is more complicated than I appreciated.

A friend of mine has a story coming out and wanted to doublecheck some issues of colors on a planet orbiting an M-star. My friend supplied me with a technical source:

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kiang_01/ and the press release is at http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20070411/.

The thing is, these are terrible! I mean, technically they seem correct and very detailed, based on a paper in Astrobiology last year, but I have a PhD in astronomy and understand the science but I can’t tell what they’re claiming in any specifics. The pictures would be great if they actually specified what sort of planet/star they were talking about.

Well, let’s consider the case of an M-star at any rate, and I’ll give you my take. Stellar classifications depend on the mass and age of a star. The temperature/mass sequence is OBAFGKM (”Oh be a fine girl, kiss me!” is the mnemonic). An M-star is a very low mass star, a few tenths solar, that is much cooler. How cool? Maybe a couple of thousand degrees Kelvin, about 1/3 of the surface temperature of the Sun. A star this cool puts out most of its light in the near-infrared part of the spectrum, and almost no blue or ultraviolet light whatsoever. It doesn’t look white like the Sun. It looks red. This makes a big difference in what things would look like on the surface of a planet in the water zone of an M-star, vegetation or not.

Fred Pohl wrote an interesting novel called JEM I remember reading in my college days. It takes place on a planet orbiting Barnard’s Star, an M-star and things are red, red, red!

The atmosphere will scatter shorter wavelength light preferentially, like on Earth, but a late enough type M-star won’t have much. Compared to the star (which will look big compared to the Sun, if you’re in the water zone where temperatures will be higher), the sky will be more orange/yellow.

The planets can be of all sorts, including like those here on Earth, which do a lot of absorption at red wavelengths. They wouldn’t, I don’t believe, look very green. I suggest they’d look black.

This is a very complicated multidisciplinary problem to simulate, as we not only need to know about the spectrum of the local sun, the atmosphere and what it absorbs, how bright the light is and how dilated the eye, but also to incorporate the response of the eye. The eye sensitivity is peaked at green wavelengths. This is why green lasers, which usually have the same power as red lasers, look so much brighter.

I submit that the color pallet is going to be red, orange, maybe yellow, and black. Something that looks blue under a white light is going to look black under the red light of an M-star. For an experiment, get some red/orange party lights (easier to find at Halloween) and then go look at different colored items under that light. Try different light levels, too, as the eye is less sensitive to color at low light levels.

Under an M-star, the spectrum is limited. It’s like living in a red light district, literally.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, personal, science, science fiction

Given the post a few days ago about returning to the moon, and my desire to see a lunar observatory, this link seems apropos.  It’s Phil Plait discussing Peter Chen’s idea for building things out of raw lunar materials, especially telescopes.

I think I’ll come back to this whole topic of a lunar base next week after doing more research about the pros and cons and weigh in myself in a more serious way.  If NASA cuts my funding to pay for it, I might be too biased, but until then I think I can be open minded.

Originally published at Mike Brotherton: SF Writer. You can comment here or there.

Tags: education, science, science fiction