Astronomy & Space – Page 3 – The Celestial Monochord

Two Hundred Planets

When I was a kid, being stuck with just the Sun’s nine planets drove me half mad. Astronomers suspected there were planets circling other stars, but the brute fact was that nobody knew. The uncertainty made my skin crawl.

Carl Sagan made matters worse by vividly fantasizing about a future in which you could thumb through an “Encyclopedia Galactica,” a catalog of known worlds and civilizations. He wondered, ominously, what our entry would say.

Well, the first “extrasolar planet” was discovered about 10 years ago, and today something like 20 new planets are announced every month. Within a few weeks, the total number of known planets will hit 200. It’s almost impossible to keep up with these announcements (especially since a few don’t pan out and are later withdrawn).

The May issue of “Sky and Telescope” reports that a planet recently found circling a pulsar has a mass of 0.0004 that of Earth’s — that is, it’s basically just an asteroid. The rate and variety of discoveries is going to do nothing but accelerate, and fast. We’ll have our own page in an “Encyclopedia Galactica” sooner that Carl thought.

Deep Impact: NASA and Performance Art

On July 4th, NASA is going to bash a large plug of copper into a comet (discovered in 1867 by Ernst Temple). Nobody’s sure exactly what will happen — which is the main reason to do it — but it should make a sizable crater in the comet and generate a plume of ejecta.

NASA seems to like to schedule landings and other such events to coincide with holidays (July 4, December 24, etc.). Not only are people at home and watching TV, but NASA’s copywriters often try to manage some sort of tie-in. The resulting headllines can be agonizing.

In 2000, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft arrived at an asteroid (basically, a large rock) named Eros. A 1999 encounter had failed, and the spacecraft had to take more than a year to swing around again, so I believe the February 14th date of the encounter was a coincidence. But it generated endless headlines about Romancing the Stone in a Valentine’s Day NEAR-Eros tryst, etc., etc. I shudder to imagine the headlines this year’s unprovoked Independence Day attack on Comet Temple might generate in the USA or abroad.

In part, NASA designs its missions as public performace art and then tries to spin the missions to appeal to headline writers — but the agency is simply an inept storyteller. NASA’s unmanned robotic missions are incredibly cheap, completely safe, visually and conceptually dazzling to the public, and hugely productive scientifically — especially when compared to the wasteful and dangerous manned space program. Nothing NASA has done in the last 30 years has inspired more interest and support than missions like Voyager, Viking, the Mars rovers, or the Hubble Space Telescope. The credit for these successes goes not to the cleverness of the PR department or the cuddliness of the astronaut corps, but to the skill and creativity of NASA engineers and scientists. Just go with what you do best.

Steve Robinson: Astronaut Banjoist

Banjo Player and Mission Specialist, Steve Robinson

Believe it or not, the next Shuttle mission will send a banjo player into space. I mean, how monochordum mundi is that?

I wonder if he’ll play us Well May the World Go (When I’m Far Away) from the launch pad. Anyway, check out NASA’s official pre-flight interview with Steve Robinson:

I still want to be a musician and an artist someday when I grow up. I play music and I play guitar in a rock and roll band, and I play banjo and mandolin and bass and a pedal steel guitar.

Remember, in space no one can hear you scream "Yowza!"

Stalked by the Northern Lights

Often, great displays of the Northern Lights (aurora borealis) do insane things. Several times, over many years, they seemed to hover directly over me, personally. They swirled wildly overhead, as if they knew where I was standing. Looking straight up, I saw:

I never understood how this could be … until one night, standing under a great display, puzzling very hard over the problem, it hit me. It felt like a Nobel-Prize-worthy discovery. ah-HA!

Imagine you’re lying on your back on the floor in somebody’s living room, looking up at a set of lace curtains. The curtains to either side of you will fall down in straight lines to your left and right. But directly above you, you’ll see a complex, maybe S-shaped curve, surrounded by lines radiating from a point above your head. If you move to another spot along the curtains, you’ll see the same thing, due to perspective.

NASA photos taken looking down from Earth orbit aboard one of the Space Shuttles confirm that this is pretty much what’s actually happening:

Aurora space shuttle

The Vatican Observatory

Father George V. Coyne, S.J.
Director of the Vatican Observatory

Pope John Paul II died a few hours ago. One of his first actions after becoming Pope in 1978 was to appoint a commission to study the matter of Galileo, with an eye toward formally setting the record straight regarding the Church’s attitude toward his condemnation 350 years before. In Vatican jargon, John Paul wanted to move toward Galileo’s “rehabillitation.” In 1984, the commission presented its findings and acknowledged that the Church had been in error when it put Galileo under house arrest for the rest of his life.

The “pardon,” as it was popularly called, was taken as high symbolism by the public, but from a point of view within the Vatican, I doubt it was much of a stretch.

John Paul II said, without much fanfare, that the Bible holds no specific scientific information and discusses natural phenomena for metaphorical purposes only. He was alright with Darwin. Long before John Paul II, the Vatican had never been as backward about to astronomy as people imagine. A Vatican observatory was built in the 1500s to help with calendar reform, and was formally established as The Vatican Observatory in 1891. Since then, it’s been among the most advanced astonomical institutions in the world. It’s staffed by a bunch of Jesuits, naturally.

Corn Stalks and the Milky Way

My momma done told me … when I was a boy … that when she was growing up on a Wisconsin farm, the corn would grow so fast in late summer you could hear it grow — it was noisy. Being a suburban kid, and a born skeptic, I didn’t believe her at first. An April Fool’s joke?

She explained that at the height of the growing season, little fibrous strands on any given stalk of corn will snap on occasion, maybe once a week or so. But when you have a whole field of many thousands of stalks of corn, the field crackles like a campfire.

So, in that Wisconsin farmhouse, late at night in the dog days of summer during the Depression, with the windows of her bedroom wide open, she used to fall asleep listening to the corn grow … crackling, crackling, all night long.

This was a lesson in statistics: very rare events happen all the time. I thought of it years later, reading how radio astronomers map our galaxy.

The vast, star-forming clouds in our Milky Way Galaxy’s spiral arms are mostly made of hydrogen atoms — simply, one electron circling one proton. They both spin on their axes like tops, usually in parallel directions. But very rarely, the electron will flip and spin in the opposite (or anti-parallel) direction from its proton. When this happens, the atom emits a light wave at a wavelength of 21 centimeters — a radio frequency.

It only happens to a given hydrogen atom every 10 million years or so, but because our galaxy contains trillions of hydrogen atoms, it happens everywhere, all the time. So radio astonomers can map the galaxy, because the Milky Way softly hums with radio noise, all night, all day, for billions of years.

Sundogs and Sweet Angles

Sundogs (and Sun)

Astronomy has always been my first love, so people sometimes ask me what causes sundogs, rings around the sun or moon, light pillars, etc. I used to say, “Uh, it’s ice crystals.” That seemed to satisfy most people. But when I read the book “Rainbows, Halos, and Glories,” I learned what it really meant — how, exactly, ice crystals cause the various spots, arcs and rings you see in the sky from time to time. Suddenly the whole sky really came alive for me all over again.

Sundogs are the colorful spots you sometimes see on either side of the sun:

Sundog Sun Sundog

* O *
______________________________________ horizon

They’re caused by ice crystals shaped like hexagonal plates — like thick-ish stop signs, miniaturized. These little hex plates fall through the air with their faces parallel to the ground. So, picture billions of tiny quarters made of ice, all falling either “heads” or “tails”, not standing on the edge.

As they fall, the sun reflects off their faces and edges, and also passes through them making prismic colors (or not), depending on the angle of the sun and the angle from which you view them. There’s one particular angle that’s really sweet — an angle at which the sunlight passes horizontally right into the edge, along the plate’s face, and with the plate rotated “just so”. At that angle, the ice crystal passes a nice rainbow through itself.

Towards a certain direction in the sky, all the crystals that happen to be in this orientation “light up” that part of the sky. The direction works out to be about 22 degrees to the left and right of the sun:

* 22deg O 22deg *
_______________________________________

It turns out that various other angles are also “sweet” for different reasons. And ice crystals can have different shapes — for example, hexagonal cylinders, like pencils — which, in turn, creates a huge variety of wild arcs and rings and spots, which you can see if you are both lucky and alert.

Visit Les Crowley’s beautiful site on Atmospheric Optics or read “Rainbows, Halos, and Glories.”

Well May the World Go

I hear an astronaut’s folk song

Of course, maybe it’s me … I can’t help but hear Pete Seeger’s “Well May the World Go (When I’m Far Away)” as at least two songs in one. Is the narrator of “Well May the World Go” about to die? Or is he an astronaut? After all, Seeger based the song on an old Scottish tune (maybe a sea chantey) called “Weel May the Keel Row,” which bids a bon voyage. Was Seeger thinking of death or space travel when he decided “The World” would somehow stay behind?

To my ears, “Well May the World Go” is a fine anthem for NASA’s manned space program. The song’s aims are like those of the program I thought I knew as a youngster – to reintroduce us to our own planet as a beautiful place, to collapse vast distances, to wish the world well. NASA still seems to want to be seen this way, and many of its employees are kids like me who never fully grew up. “Well May the World Go” still lurks somewhere in the gaps of NASA’s bureaucracy.

So why not really adopt the song as an official anthem? The trouble, from NASA’s point of view, would not just be that Pete Seeger has always been a proud resident of the blacklist and a sworn enemy of American missiles. The still bigger problem would be that the song is too apt. The manned space program has come to be haunted by Death, always there on the buffalo side of the coin. Many of us already think the risk to human lives and the measly return on investment make the manned space program a dinosaur.

The song could also be seen as reflecting the fact that the policy has turned its back on the world and its needs “when its far away.” Instead of needing a new song, the Bush administration, to make the obvious quip, should consider naming its outlandish Mars program “No Planet Left Behind.”

Chorus
Well may the world go
The world go, the world go
Well may the world go
When I’m far away

Well may the skiers turn
The swimmers churn, the lovers burn
Peace may the generals learn
When I’m far away

(Chorus)

Sweet may the fiddle sound
The banjo play, the old hoe down
Dancers swing round and round
When I’m far away

(Chorus)

Fresh may the breezes blow
Clear may the streams flow
Blue above, green below
When I’m far away

(Chorus)

— Words by Pete Seeger/Stormking Music, Inc.

Spider John: Amateur Astronomer

In his recent book, Dylan says this Minnesota bluesman inspired Bob to literally trade his electric guitar for an acoustic. But somehow, he didn’t mention Spider John is an astronomer.

You may know the great Minnesota bluesman Spider John Koerner as a character in Bob Dylan’s recent book. He’s portrayed there as, essentially, “the other guy” around Dylan’s university neighborhood who, in 1960, played the acoustic guitar and tried to sound 45 years older than he really was. Well, now John really is 45 years older than he really was, and you can still find him playing in bars near the same old Dinkytown neighborhood, sounding better than ever.

The City Pages now confirms the obvious — Koerner is an amateur astronomer. This great bearer of the folk-blues tradition is also a “StarGeezer.” Since tonight marks the premiere of a new documentary about him, “Been Here, Done That,” it’s a good day to award Spider John the coveted Monochordum Mundi, given to those who best represent the fusion of science and music we’re looking for here at The Celestial Monochord.