Dr. Pamela L. Gay
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Archive for January, 2007
Jan 30th, 2007
Comments(0) Picking a Direction (and sticking to it!)
This kind of a process isn’t new. In the U.S., we’ve been producing decadal surveys for a while, with the most recent coming out in 2001 (you can read it here, NRC cover art shown above right). Until recently, for every decadal survey desire, their was a matching plan of action that often included a NASA mission with allocated funding (or at least allocated web space). The problem is, the plan of the scientific community and the plans of individual members of Congress and the White House don’t always match. Read more...
Jan 24th, 2007
Comments(3) Flying Metal Bits
Locally, COROT (vaguely rhymes with Inspector Perot), obtained first light today (image above, credit CNES 2006 - D. Ducros). This orbital observatory will dedicate it self to the search for rocky worlds around other stars. A product of the European Space Agency, COROT will study nearby stars with its 30cm telescope, looking for slight changes in brightness indicative of planetary transits. The images it takes will also be useful for asteroseismology, the study of how stars bump and wiggle in reaction to chemical and thermal processes deep beneath their surfaces. Pre-launch calculations predict that every 150 days (the time COROT will spend studying one area of the sky), COROT could discover 10-40 rocky planets and tens of gas giants. Since the first published discoveries of an extrasolar planet around a pulsar in 1992, and around a normal star in 1995, astronomers have only discovered 209 extrasolar worlds. With COROT, that number could double in as little as 1 year. Read more...
Jan 23rd, 2007
Comments(2) ‘Cause Knowledge is PowerIt is a slow science news week, and sitting here at home I’m realizing I haven’t the foggiest idea how to get my e-journal fix via SIUE without being at an SIUE IP address. I’d like to riffle through Science or Nature from my sofa. I’d like to think there is a way to do it. I’m not certain however, and after reading through the SIUE website, I’m mostly just confused. Luckily, I know that I do have access to information somehow, it just may not involve being on my sofa while I read. No matter what, I am lucky. Not everyone has access to Science. Limited access to information (and the decision to actually access that information) acts in many ways to divide our society. It takes money to get the cable and satellite news feeds. Prolonged access to online content - the type of access needed to hunt down links and read background material - takes money or the right job. Knowing how to access information takes education, which is another way of separating the haves from the have-nots. And sorting through digital, video, and audio content takes that most precious resource of all: time. It takes effort to be informed, and one must choose to know what is going on. Read more...
Jan 17th, 2007
Comments(10) Making the Technological iLeapI hate Microsoft Office. It is a hate that has been slowly boiling in the background for a long long time. I can make it do anything. I get how it works at a level at a brainstem level, such that prettily formatted documents come out of my computer with ease. I still hate it. As an undergraduate, I earned my living as “Lead Monitor” of the Erickson Hall Computer Lab and Michigan State. In this role, it was my pleasure to help anyone with any computer problem. 90% of the problems were either failure to print or failure to format. All of them were related to Microsoft breaking the minds of poor innocent ungrads (and occasional grads). The lab was a mix of Macs and PCs and platform really didn’t matter. Everyone had to use MS Office, and everyone got burnt. But there are options, and I’m going to use them. Read more...
Jan 16th, 2007
Comments(12) Getting your Blog OnI found out via both The Astronomy Blog and Cosmic Variance that this is De-Lurker Week. Translation: If you’re listening, you are encouraged to say “hi” and wave from the comments section. It’s a slow news week. It appears everything was saved up for the AAS meeting, and now the well of discoveries runs dry. Comet McNaught is the media wonder child of the moment, but from here in the way too cold mid-West, all I can say is “I see clouds.” On a separate note, I was interviewed by Aaron Price of Slackapedia Galactica, and a former colleague from Slacker Astronomy. You can find the interview here. Read more...
Jan 16th, 2007
Comments(3) AAS Epilogue: The After Hours Party
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On January 24th the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) in the UK announced Michael Bode (an Astrophysics Prof at Liverpool John Moores University) will take the lead in defining a 20 year vision statement for astronomy in Europe. Dr. Bode was put in this powerful but unenviable position by ASTRONET, a consortium of eleven European science agencies. In this job, he will herd cats (e.g. scientists) until they come up with a unified vision. Specifically, he will work to get his community to agree on what questions are most vital to answer, and how these questions can most effectively be answered. This set of questions and methods for answering will be used to shape how limit resources are allocated for science.
A quick 
Back in 2003, I attended the AAS for the first time as a member of the media. In this new role, for the first time in my life, I was one of the cool kids. I wasn’t quite sure how the transition happened, but I wasn’t going to question. One of the results of getting to run with the fast crowd was being invited to the AAS after-hours party. Now, truth be told, as much as I’ve heard the admonishment, “Be careful who you tell about the party,” I don’t know of anyone who is turned away as not cool enough. All I really know is some people are more aggressively invited than others, and that year, I was one of the people who was taped on the shoulder, handed a little card with directions, and told, “You really need to be there…”
The scientific method requires good scientific theories to build theories based on observations/experiments that make specific predictions about the outcomes of future observations/experiments. It’s okay if we don’t currently have the technology to make an observation. Theories are perfectly capable of sitting on shelves waiting to be proven right or wrong. What matters – what makes the theory science – is that the theory is eventually provable (or disprovable). 
A couple more posts on the AAS are coming, but for now I want to take a moment to answer a question asked by a reader yesterday. Paul asked “I have a question about how stars form. I’m confused about the answers I’ve read or heard about. Some people say that stars “condense” from molecular space gas. As they do, they heat up and ignite. Others say they “collapse” from gas. Still others say that the gas is “compressed” by a nearby supernova. … Can you help explain how stars are formed?” 
NOTE: more links will be added tomorrow.
Today’s round of press conference started with the story of three systems that have mutually triggered fireworks in one another’s cores. Specifically, a gravitationally bound system of three quasars has been located at a distance of roughly 10.4 billion light years (z = 2.076). This is the first such triple quasar system that has been located.