Wow, 100 carnivals. See the latest at One Minute Astronomer. I know, that seems like such a crazy, important number, but that’s just because we have 10 fingers, right? Semantics aside, it’s a fabulous weekly round-up of all things in the space blogosphere, so go check it out for news on spaceflight, science reporting, and exoplanets. I still consider myself a newbie to the carnival, jumping in around the 70s or so. But why are you still reading this? Go! Learn about the universe!
Entries from April 2009
What does it mean to be green?
April 28, 2009 · 2 Comments
For the past few years now, we’ve been asked to “green” everything, from our cars to our dish soap. My stance of environmentalism is that the planet will live on, in some form, no matter what we do to it. But we need to make sure that we take care of our natural resources and don’t push the environment to an extreme where our race can’t survive. There is a delicate balance, and we’re a pretty voracious consumer of resources, so some care is necessary. But I’ve been very skeptical of all the “green” claims in advertising, since I just assume that most companies are jumping on the bandwagon to improve sales. After all, the true impact of materials and manufacturing is complicated.
Science is our best weapon of defense against global warming and environmental harm. Only knowledge will help us to inform our decisions and take the right steps to minimize our impact. Those who pursue that knowledge are studying Life Cycle Assessment, as highlighted in a recent article on SciAm.com. Physicists, engineers, and ecologists, such as Greg Norris, explore every step of the manufacturing process of an item and determine all of the ways in which it releases toxins or uses natural resources. By completing a complicated LCA for products, companies can better determine what products are truly “greener” than others. Norris describes part of the lifecycle of a glass bottle, which seems hugely overblown, but the impact is indeed minimized by using recycled glass, even when taking into account all of the environmental costs of that process. It’s a really fascinating article, so do take time to read it.
I’m excited to see that scientists are thinking about environmentalism in a systematic, robust way. I’d rather pay attention to the latest Life Cycle Analysis of a product than screaming green billboards. In fact, I’d love to see, for example, LCAs of regular cleaning products side-by-side with so-called “green” cleaning products, and see how well they live up to their advertising. We need to accept the whole process of greening, as the author points out, not just jump on the latest fad.
It’ll be just fine without us, but we need to take care of ourselves! By Aaron Escobar on Flickr.
Categories: science
Tagged: earth, environment, opinion, technology
Public night and Carnivals…
April 27, 2009 · 2 Comments
So now that I have a brand-new laptop, where the battery works and the hard drive isn’t trying to take off, I have no excuse for not keeping up with my blog, even when the weather is gorgeous. That’s what wireless networks are for, right?
So, catching up on the Carnivals 97, 98, and 99 is the first thing of importance. Man, I can’t even keep track of all the cool stuff. I am still stunned by the “space hand” captured by Hubble. Astro-paredolia FTW.
Last Friday night, I participated in UVa’s Fan Mountain Public Night. This special event occurs twice a year, in which we put eyepieces on the back of our 43-inch and 31-inch telescopes and invite the public to take a look and a tour of the observatory. It’s a great event, also including talks by various members of the department, green laser sky tours, and a huge star party with the Charlottesville Astronomical Society. Find out how to get free tickets to the next Fan Mountain event! As usual, I did a few talks in the 40-inch control room, telling eager participants all about UVa’s facilities and the typical night for an astronomer. I also gave a talk to the people waiting outside in the gorgeous weather for their tours, and delivered a presentation about radio astronomy, with my slides projected onto the side of the Fan Mountain station house. I don’t think I can yet be as entertaining and informational as Ed Murphy, but I can try! Although 350 tickets were collected, but some of us estimate that there were nearly 400 people there, as tours went well past 11. Both big telescopes were showing Saturn, with its thin, nearly edge on rings, and we later pointed at the Sombrero Galaxy for an “oooh! ahh!” moment as we were cleaning up. It was a great night, and you can read more about it from another grad student’s perspective at George Privon’s blog!
Back to work for me, but more to come later…
Categories: astronomy · outreach
Tagged: carnival, Charlottesville, space
News from the Radio Spectrum
April 16, 2009 · 2 Comments
The life of a grad student gets pretty crazy from time to time, but I’m excited about returning to blogging as things cool down a bit. As mentioned in my last post, I’ve got a list of fun things that have caught by attention recently, so I hope to churn those out in time! Today, I’ll showcase the NRAO Newsletter, or the news and happenings at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory where I work.
Back in January, it was announced that the Milky Way is much bigger than previously thought, in fact, almost two times bigger! That allows our home galaxy to rival the nearby Andromeda Galaxy in size. These are based on a set of Very Long Baseline Array observations, and most of the astronomical community is not familiar with VLBI. These measurements are great for being very precise and work purely from geometrical arguments, which limits the amount of assumptions about your objects that need to be made. But they do conflict with the prevailing model based on decades of observational evidence, so it will take some time for these new measurements to be accepted by the broader community. And surely, more observations that agree would help. So do read the NRAO Newsletter version by Reid et al., linked above for more on how these observations are done. Maybe they will have to rescale the beautiful Galaxy Garden* after all!
Click to go to larger version. By Reid et al. 2009. Caption from article, “Rotation speed versus radius for the Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way. The red squares are based on HI observations of Andromeda tabulated by Carignan et al. (2006, ApJ, 641, L109). The blue filled circle is our best estimate of solar rotation speed = 254 ± 16 km/s at radius = 8.4 kpc for the Milky Way, derived from the parallax and proper motions of high mass star forming regions. The blue dot-dashed line is for a flat rotation curve, and the blue dashed line corresponds to a slightly rising rotation curve of 2.3 km/s/kpc. These lines are plotted over the range of Galactocentric radii sampled by the parallax and proper motion results. Note that these two galaxies have nearly identical rotation speeds over this range.”
For those who want to look at something more technical, check out the “Lab Notebook” report by Matt Morgan and Rick Fisher (yes, THAT Fisher of the Tully-Fisher relation!). As radio telescopes become more sophisticated, using focal plane “imaging” arrays on single dish telescopes and larger arrays for interferometry, the need for more and better receivers is growing. Read all about their progress with digital phase shifting technology for GHz-range receivers. It is important for a world-class observatory to maintain large facilities and focus on the interesting science. However, no radio observatory can be complete without a robust research and development program so they can stay on top of the next big technological advances that will change how we observe the universe.
Finally, radio astronomy gets some love for Google Sky. It kind of bothered me that you can open up showcases in the 0ptical, infrared, ultraviolet, and x-ray, but the fascinating and amazing images of the radio sky don’t get much play. I haven’t actually taken the time to play around with this yet, but you can now create KML files of the radio sky and upload them to Google Sky. Take a look at the examples in the newsletter, showcasing the Galactic Center region and Kepler’s supernova remnant.
Click to embiggen. I kind of see it…. oh THERE it is!
Radio astronomy lets you see processes that are so alien to our usual, optical way of looking at the universe. Keep up with all the good stuff by subscribing to the newsletter RSS feed!
*Thanks, Gail, for that link! Soooo pretty I want to go!
Categories: astronomy · science
Tagged: nrao, technology, telescope
I’m a 7th (and final!) year