What's up with Jupiter!?

I'm resigned to the fact that all the really cool things happening in the sky are going to happen at hours of the night when I'm comfortably and irretrievably ensconsed in my bed.

Interesting asteroid passes, novae...they're all on the list. Now, Jupiter's on it too.

The fifth planet in our solar system is a pretty dynamic body all on a regular basis. Giant storms the size of Earth or larger, psychedelic weather patterns, multiple moons that go round and cast visible shadows across its face. But now, it's got some real wild goings-on that would almost make it worth setting the alarm for the wee hours of the morning.

First, it's south equatorial belt. Because Jupiter is little more than a giant ball of gas, the planet is nothing but weather. And because of its massive size, it gained a lot of angular momentum as it formed from infalling gas. The result is that it also spins very fast - once every nine hours - which stretches out its weather systems.

The result is its iconic cloud bands. However, lately, Jupiter has been missing its south equatorial belt. Jupiter's Great Red Spot is reportedly visible without anything of the belt near it.

It's something of a mystery. Not unknown, it's happened before. Several times, actually including one I recall back in the early '90s. Even in my primitive Tasco reflector, Jupiter's Great Red Spot was quite noticeable without the competition of the dark, expansive southern belt. In fact, Jupiter's northern equatorial belt has expanded and become even darker.

Also recently, an amateur astronomer who recorded a black cloud that mysteriously appeared in Jupiter's south temperate zone last summer also recorded a bright flash in the atmosphere that can only have come from another impact. Amazing! So far, no sign of a black cloud like last summers or, most memorably, the comet impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994, but stay tuned.

The problem? Jupiter doesn't rise until much, much too early in the morning for me. As an astronomer, understandably, I'm a bit of a night owl. "So?" you might say. "Suck it up, buttercup!"

Fair enough. Except that I have a little problem...a large two-storey strip mall to my south. So Jupiter doesn't rise high enough to clear the building before the sun rises. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

So, as the season progresses and Jupiter rises higher...so much the better. However, in the meantime, I'm going to enjoy my sleep.

Clear skies!

Is that a 'hand' you're shaking?

By now, everyone's heard of physicist Stephen Hawking's assertion that announcing ourselves to the greater galactic community might be a bad idea.And, not one to miss out on an opining opportunity, here's my two percent of a buck's worth.

Hawking's basic premise, on the surface anyway, seems reasonable. Essentially, by announcing our presence to anyone "out there," we run the risk of finding ourselves much as the Native Americans did with the arrival of the more technologically advanced, hygiene deficient Europeans. Let's bring it down to brass tacks by saying, basically, they were 'boned!'

However, it's fair to say that the aliens won't be 15th century Europeans. They may even take baths.

For one thing, it's highly unlikely they will find anything here that they can't find "out there," James Cameron and 'unobtainium' notwithstanding. Water seems remarkably plentiful in the universe and it's doubtful they would find us very palatable. Hey! If they've mastered the fine art of interstellar travel, chances are pretty good they've managed to eliminate a wide variety of the shortages that ails society today. If not, they're not going to get far looking here for the secrets of the universe here, I suspect.

It also assumes they're even going to travel the distance at all. After all, interstellar travel encompasses a host of technical challenges, not the least of which is time and ultimate speed limits! Our first "alien" visitor might simply be a Voyager-like probe. Perhaps it's already passed, or is on its way.

In fact, Fermi's Paradox - if there are aliens out there, given the age of the universe, how come we haven't met them yet - still holds a certain sway. Remember, Frank Drake's famous equation was never actually meant to be the final word on the likelihood of actually finding aliens, simply an agenda of points for a meeting on Project Ozma, one of the first Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) efforts. And, Area 51 conspiracists and the tinfoil hat crowd aside, we have yet to find any real evidence for anyone out there! The universe remains distressingly quiet.

One other thing pops to mind...that of the messenger. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Stephen Hawking. The man is brilliant! But he's not an astronomer, or a part of the SETI team. He's a theoretical physicist. While he has as much to lose by a planet razed to rubble by marauding aliens, he's as much of an authority on it as I am. So why the extra authority given to his voice on a subject out of his normal 9 - 5?

Ultimately, the point is moot. We've already announced our presence to listening...um...'ears' and continue to do so with every radar pulse, flick of a light switch and call on a cell phone. From 50 light years out in space and listening with radio ears, our little blue marble would be the loudest radio source there is in the sky. So the cat's already out of the bag.

So get your tinfoil out and hope for the best. After all, if they're not here now...

Clear - and hopefully unthreatening - skies!

Human space exploration still 'do-able!'

There seems now to be a tendency to view the current state of affairs in space exploration as a major setback. And, in many ways it is. But it's also an opportunity for a renewed and more cooperative approach to space exploration.

In 2004, when former U.S. president George Bush announced his country's plans to return to the moon, it could have been and was viewed by some as a means to divert at least some attention away from a clumsily executed and increasingly unpopular "War on Terror." However, its resultant Constellation program also marked an important step in maintaining a human (and largely American) presence in space in the wake of the retirement of the aging shuttle fleet.

A new administration brings a new set of priorities. And a return to the moon - and even beyond - is sadly not high on that list.

Human exploration isn't popular to many and they do have a point. It is inherently unsafe and inherently expensive, with robotics capable of doing many of the things human beings would be able to do and at a fraction of the cost. But robots can't do everything. They can't move autonomously. They can't make snap decisions. And they can't get themselves out of sticky situations creatively, should they arise.

Ah, but there's that price tag again. About $400 billion by some estimates to get a crew of people to Mars.

Clearly, there is a lot of room for recriminations. A lot of work already completed on the Constellation program will now go into mothballs. Or, does it need to?

Here's the thing...a lot of nations in the world are already "spacefaring" or, at the very least, have their own space agencies and are involved in space exploration technology development. Canada is most definitely one of the latter! Other nations like China, India, Japan, etc., have already shown tremendous prowess at launching satellites, material and even people of their own into space. Russia is already a major player.

So why not make space exploration more of an international effort? I know, I'm hardly coming up with anything new here. This sort of idea has been rattling around for years. But could this new change in American focus be a new opportunity to take what has been learned and "spread the cost?"

Any nation that participates in a united effort to get to space will also be the first to accrue the benefits. And any space exploration development project does lead to new technology development. So already, that is one major incentive.

And it just seems to make sense. For one thing, it's already agreed by international treaty that space, the moon and the planets do not belong to any single nation. Why should their explorations be any different?

There is so little that unites the nations of the world. However, a shared interest is certainly a good place to start. And a truly international success that lands an international crew on the moon or even Mars would benefit from shared success far more than they would from singular resentment and envy.

of course, as this article on Spacedaily.com points out, it is likely to be a difficult row to hoe as many nations continue to look on their neeighbours with suspicion and insist that they can do it on their own. However, it is worth it for nations to start putting such foolishness away. The reasons are far too many to list and none are more important than the other.


If it can be conceived of, it can be done. All it takes is a little will. And a good dash of hope.

Clear skies.

So...NOT the end of the world, then!

On Tuesday, it was announced the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, had smashed two 3.5 trillion electron volt beams of gold ions together. The combination resulted in record energies never before produced on Earth, almost instantaneously creating conditions similar to the universe in the first milliseconds after the big bang.

Almost just as quick, internet discussion groups were alive with both declarations of praise and predictions of doom.

Of course, you're probably aware of the LHC is. It's the product of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), a consortium of 20 European states that spent 10 billion Euros to build the LHC, the largest scientific instrument ever built. it is a 17-mile circumference track of superconducting magnets that direct opposing beams of charged particles into collisions of tremendous force! Imagine the kinetic energy of two baseballs colliding into each other at 100 miles per hour each. Doesn't sound like much? Well then, condense that into an atom. That's a big whack for a little atom!

Of course, for the past couple of years, a lot of talk has been heard over "will this create a black hole and destroy the Earth?" It has even spawned lawsuits in order to prevent the switch being thrown. However, in addition to courts rejecting the bid on the grounds that it was out of their jurisdiction, there were also arguments that nature does this kind of thing over our head every day. In fact, the particles that come into our atmosphere from cosmic phenomenon are even stronger and rain all manner of subatomic particle on us.

So here's the thing...the chances of such an occurrence are not zero. But they're also so remote, you might as well be worried about being trampled by a dinosaur in the next 30 seconds. Hasn't happened yet? Not surprising!

And there were those saying "What a waste of money! It could have been spent on 'real' problems here." To me, that's a spurious argument. First of all, it assumes that "throwing money" at a problem is a solution. Frequently, it's only the cause of more problems.

Secondly, it assumes that not enough money is being spent on certain problems already. However, if you listen to actual economists and people on the ground dealing with these issues rather than Bob Geldof and Bono, the real problem is not the amount of money being spent, but the fact that it isn't getting where it's going. In fact, again, a lot of it boils down to the expectation that money somehow solves everything.

Finally,it presumes to be able to predict how discoveries by CERN will actually be used. Indeed, with every experiment of this type, it opens up the possibility for new and better understanding of the fundamental laws of nature. That, in turn, can lead to advancements in technology that can and have been proven to enhance the quality of life.

So, by next year or so, we should be seeing the LHC powering up even higher to it's maximum 14 trillion electron volts. What amazing discoveries can we look forward to?

See you at the bottom of the black hole!

The Greatest Show...Everywhere!

Friends of mine may have noticed I've taken a particular interest in evolution lately.

It is no small part owed to a book I'm reading now, The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution written by Richard Dawkins. It is a fascinating book, well worth the read. I'm more than halfway through it in a surprisingly short amount of time. For something as "technical" as biological evolution, which is not any kind of expertise for me, that's a challenge.

Of course, in discussions I've got into about astronomy, I find an understanding of evolutionary processes is important not just for biology but for all sciences. The universe is certainly the biggest ongoing evolutionary process that we can imagine.

Like biological evolution, the notion of an evolving universe has not always been considered or accepted. With the growth of empiricism and the development of modern scientific processes such as experimentation and observation, the way has been opened up. Over 400 years ago, we started to develop a broader understanding of the universe and our place in it when Galileo turned that first primitive telescope toward the skies and discovered that, no Victoria, we really aren't at the center of everything.

Even so, it wasn't until the end of the 19th and very first decades of the 20th Century that we got our first real glimmers of our present cosmology - the expanding universe. We generally credit Edwin Hubble with the discovery in the 1920s of galactic redshift - the process by which a galaxy's light is "stretched out" by Doppler shift toward the red, indicating it is receding from our line of sight - but he did have predecessors including Vesto Slipher, James Keeler and William Campbell.

Our understanding of our evolving universe itself has evolved from a "steady state" in which the universe is as it always was to our current understanding that it had a beginning, is expanding and will likely continue on forever at an ever-faster pace. It's an irony that the name "big bang" came from one of its most vocal detractors, Fred Hoyle. Imagine if creationists could have had a chance to name evolution. Yikes!

Better technology and the limiting speed of light has enabled astronomers to peer into the universe's own "fossil record" from the background 3-degree Kelvin "glow" left over from the big bang to young infant galaxies imaged by Hubble's space-borne namesake to even more recent discoveries of fainter, farther and less developed galaxies.

Here is a recent fairly recent article on it. Here is a picture of one of the Hubble Deep Fields that show dozens of younger, smaller, less "evolved" galaxies.

I used to say that I "believe" in evolution, but I know now that that was a poor choice of words. Science is about evidence. Scientists look to evidence to draw conclusions and must always be open to the possibility of contradictory evidence that might render that conclusion "false." In the case of the big bang and both cosmological and biological evolution, such evidence has not surfaced.

One thing this does not do is say anything about "God." I neither acknowledge or deny "God" as a factor in existence because, quite frankly, it's a concept that lacks definition, in part, because God by definition is either "super" or at least "supra" natural, existing outside of our frame of reference that we consider "nature" by the mere supposed act of "creating" it.

We cannot view "outside" of our universe. Not that such a thing might never be possible. But it leaves us with a problem. And to try and confirm the existence of "God" by his supposed "creation" is an exercise in faulty circular logic. How can we verify the existence of "God" if we cannot see beyond our universe?

Additionally, every process of nature carries on, regardless of the presence of a guiding hand or not. The sun shines, not by continued animal (or human) sacrifice, but through nuclear processes. The rains come and go, bringing bounty or disaster, regardless of what deity is prayed to. And good things happen to bad people and vice versa.

So if God isn't an explanation for anything, is it not fair to say that God is an explanation for nothing? Some are content to throw up their hands and say "it takes faith." Others say "that's it, there is no God." I remain firmly on the fence. Sure, I may end up with a logic wedgie! But I'm content to keep my options open.

Clear skies!

Congrats New Horizons

Halfway there!

When I was a kid, whenever we had to go on long trips, one of my more annoying habits - at least as far as my parents were concerned - was to constantly ask "how far!?" If I were riding the cold depths of space in the backseat of New Horizons probe to Pluto, the answer would be a definitive "halfway there!"

New Horizons is the NASA probe to have a closer look at one of the more distant specks of light in our solar system, Pluto. Of course, when it was launched in January 2006, Pluto was still considered a "planet." Since then, it has been "demoted" in a sense. It's now a "minor planet" or "plutoid," simply one of the larger (but not the largest, that honour currently belongs to a more distant speck called "Eris") objects at the edge of our solar system.

Actually, by tremendous coincidence, NOVA on PBS recently showed The Pluto Files with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Tyson is the director of New York's Hayden Planetarium who got into a bit of trouble with school children everywhere when, after a renovation of the planetarium, the new solar system display did not include Pluto as one of the main planets.

I missed half of the original airing, however, it can be watched online at http://video.pbs.org/video/1425502261/. It was quite the lighthearted take on what was actually a bit of a contentious debate. After some thought, I have to agree to a certain degree that the reasoning is sound. Still, in my heart, Pluto will always be a planet. It's not a scientific view. But it's an honest one.

Clyde Tombaugh discovered this little body on the edge of the solar system. Tombaugh himself started off observing the planets with a home-built telescope from the family farm in Kansas. His drawings led him to the attention of Lowell Observatory, where he was hired. During his time there, he was brought on to a project to hunt for the "10th Planet."

In January of 1930, Lowell took two photographs of a section of sky in Gemini and compared them. And there, a tiny dot flipped back and forth. After a few follow-up observations, it was announced that the 10th planet was found. To this day, he continues to be deservedly honoured by his home town of Streator, Illinois. Some of his ashes are even on their way to Pluto and beyond on the New Horizons probe.

However, things changed for Pluto starting in the 1990s. Dave Jewitt and Jane Luu discovered a small object out in that same region of the solar system called 1992 QB1. Over the course of the next several years, many more have been found including a couple such as Eris that are actually larger than Pluto.

This sparked a debate...can we actually call Pluto a "planet?" After all, it does have several characteristics we attribute to our classic examples of planethood - it's big, round, orbits the sun...the usual stuff. In 2006, the decision was made by the International Astronomical Union...Pluto was no longer a planet a "dwarf" planet.

So, in the meantime, we wait for 2015 when New Horizons which is the fastest moving object ever launched by humans encounters this mysterious object. It will likely bear a striking resemblance to such objects as Neptune's moon Triton. But it's always the unexpected that makes planetary science all the more interesting.

And we're halfway there!

Why astronomy is better than sex.

Yeah, I know, I'm as surprised as you. But, after considerable thought, it turns out that astronomy really is better than sex. Don't believe me? Here's my Top 10 list:

10: It is possible to have a “22-incher!”

9: Nearby mosquitoes are extremely limited in options of where they can bite you.

8: Oo’s and Aah’s are usually sincere.

7: "It's not how big it is but how you use it" is actually a valid point...at least where telescopes are concerned.

6: Group involvement without any of that awkwardness afterward.

5: Doing it alone is okay, too.

4: “Wow, that was amazing!” is also usually sincere!

3: It can be done lying down, standing up or in a sitting position…oh wait, that works either way.

2: Much shorter recovery time afterwards.

And my Top Reason Astronomy is Better than Sex?

1: You don’t need any special pills to keep the fun going all night long!