I’ll write more when I get to the UK tomorrow night, and I hope to see you Sunday at Mabel’s Tavern in London.

Last Thursday I flew from St Louis to London where I spent a couple days recovering from jetlag somewhere that I (almost) speak the language, and then yesterday I flew on to Munich where I am now working with other International Year of Astronomy folks to build the Portal to the Universe.

While getting to London was more of an adventure then intended (my luggage was lost again), the too few hours I got to spend in the UK were wonderful. On Saturday I took a train out to the east side of England (Audley End) to meet some of the wonderful folks behind Galaxy Zoo, including Steven Bamford, whose journal articles on galaxy morphologies and galaxies in cluster environments I’ve been gleaning inspiration from for over a year. Sunday was another day of happy meetings involving trains and train stations. I was able to finally meet Astronomy Blog writer Stuart Lowe for the first time, as well as seeing Chris Lintott. The three of us met at St Pancreas / King’s Cross train station - I love public transit, and luckily so do they. We met, drank coffee, and then found some lunch as we discussed new media, astronomy, and just how different British English and American English really are.

For instance “pants.” After my luggage was lost (yes, again) I was promised by British Airways that I would get all my things, but probably 24 hours after I actually needed them. This led to me shopping. There is an amazingly cheap store called Primark that offered me almost everything I needed. Almost. As this store caters primarily to teenage girls (judging from the swarm of skinny 14 year olds that were flirting with mirrors), I was very lucky to find anything that fit (for better or worse, I am not shaped like a teenager). My luck ran out just shy of finding a pair of what I would call pants and what a Brit would call trousers. This probably wouldn’t have been a problem accept that “pants” in British English means underware, whereas the type of pants I referred to would have made up the publicly viewable lower half of Ms. Clinton’s ubiquitous pants suits. (I really need to find out what Brit’s call pants suits). Thus, my struggle to fund “pants” led folks to believe I was on a quest to find panties. You can see where this might lead…

But I survived and I think I’m going to try and start writing down all the random new words I keep encountering.

But London and the trains and train stations that allowed me to meet cool people are temporarily behind me (although I’ll be back and will meet any of you up for it at Mabel’s Tavern on Sunday November 23 from 2-5pm. With me will be Galaxy Zoo’s Chris Lintott). Instead of confusing British vocab words I’m now dealing with even more confusing German. It has been a good day and my two years of High School German have sufficed to allow me to kinda-sorta interact with shops and restaurants. Everyone at ESO / ESA (they share a building) speaks English at some level, so once I’m to work I’m fine, and I’ve been enjoying the adventure outside of that safe science center. It is good to know that knowledge sometimes sticks (and I actually looked up my old german teacher in Westford and emailed him a note of thanks).

I’ll put up pictures tomorrow (I forgot my camera today).

Working at ESO is fun. Space exploration is in the air and the walls are lined with pictures of space and of the ground-based and space-based instrumentation that allows us to explore the universe’s most distant corners. The group of people working on IYA are under the guidance of Lars Lindberg Christensen and Pedro Russo. Between them and their staff, well - this is where all the IYA magic is happening. I’m not sure how many of the international cornerstones are coming out of the offices here, but I know Mariana Barrosa, Lars Holm Nielsen, and Rachel Shida are all playing roles along with staffs of graphical artists and programmers too numerous to list but all deserving respect for the cool and global projects they are making a reality. Lars Holm Nielsen is one of the main programmers making Portal to the Universe, the IYA international website, and many other websites function, and he’s been patiant with me working on Portal to the Universe as I stumble jetlagged through our python and java code. (Thank God the coffee at ESO/ESA is free!) Hopefully in the next couple weeks we’re going to have something really great to show you.

For now though, I find that I sadly need to get some sleep. And just in case you haven’t heard me say it before, Go Register Your Organization, Your Astronomy Business / Department / Facility, Your Astronomy Blog / Podcast / Vodcast / Image of the Day Feed for Portal to the Universe! Go do it today!

Pictures coming …

And just a reminder - GO REGISTER FOR PORTAL TO THE UNIVERSE pretty pretty please. Please?

I hope I’ll see you in London!

I’m going to try and get back to blogging more, but I can’t make any promises of success until Dec 1 or so. And here is why!

365 Days of Astronomy: This is a new podcast being brought online just for IYA2009! Our goal is to bring you (and every other person on the planet) a new roughly 8 minute piece of astronomy all 365 Days of 2009. Our shows will be made by volunteers from throughout the astronomy community - students, scientists, artists, authors, and everyone else. We’ll address a variety of topics ranging from astronomy theories to astronomy discoveries to astronomy in art. We even have a really cool theme song composed and performed by George Hrab. Want to learn more? Listen to this preview episode by me and Michael. Want to help make this possible? We are looking for $25/day individual sponsorships as well as major corporate donations to fund this project. While the shows are getting created by community volunteers, we are planning to hirer mass communications students at SIUE to centrally produce all episodes. Can you help?

Portal to the Universe has a whole website dedicated to it, so go read that And when you’re done, go register you web feed, your organization, and any nifty astronomy widgets you have!

Second Astronomy is a project to build a dynamic astronomy venue in Second Life that features IYA content, including sidewalk astronomy displays, planetarium shows, and even a theatre for streamed content. If you have space on your personal Second Life land and are interested in hosting a kiosk or sidewalk astronomy display, drop us an email and we’ll work on hooking you up with your own little piece of IYA.

IYA is something we’re working on, but we are building it for you and with lots of places you can get involved. What are your idea? What do you want to do to make IYA yours? We’re listening! email us at newmedia@astronomy2009.us

The International Year of Astronomy 2009, The Universe: Yours to Discover!

This triggered several Astronomy Cast listeners to write and basically say “Huh?” We addressed this a little bit in today’s questions show (real show to follow tomorrow or Wednesday - we had problems with a corrupt audio file over the weekend and got behind). I wasn’t able to give as thoughtful a response in the show as I might have liked however, so I’m going to try and write something here.

So, first, I’d like to say there are two ways to look at this: 1) In reality, 2) in make-believe land.

Make-believe land is oh so much more fun. So, lets imagine that somehow we are able to grow a very large blackhole in isolation. Then, using imaginary technology (we are in fantasy land, afterall), we throw a star at the supermassive blackhole (SMBH) so that it’s goes on a straight, uninterrupted path toward the SMBH. So straight, so perfect, infact, that if we could watch we’d see it hit on a line connecting the star’s center of mass with the SMBH’s center of mass. Now, the SMBH will simply slurp up this perfectly thrown star. Burp. No more star and no accretion disk. Now, If you, using your super duper, impossible, imaginary technology could throw a star with dead on aim over and over every second across all the epochs of time, you could pretty much build a SMBH as big as you wanted.

Here is where I stress this pretty much can not happen.

Let’s look at the reason’s briefly. First of all, the only way to easily get a SMBH all by itself is to have three galaxies merge together and one of the SMBH’s in the merging system gets ejected via three body interactions. (Pretty much any three body interaction between objects of similar masses leads to one of the masses getting spit out. This works for stars and black holes). So now I have an isolated SMBH hurtling itself through the intergalactic medium, passing rapidly through the space between galaxies. Yes, I can get a SMBH all by itself, but now I kind of have it hurtling through space.

So let’s image it lands in a nice friendly crowd of stars. As it hurtles in  through the stellar populations, stars will fall in from all sides, spiraling in and forming a disk. At the same time, any dust and gas that may be around will also get sucked in. Eventually, a thick disk of material from this thick pocket of stuff will form a nice hot disk that give off so much light and wind that anything new trying to fall in will simply get blown away before it can get so close that it can’t escape.

And it’s not like there is a lot of stuff to eat in this imaginary star cluster we have flung our imaginary SMBH into.

The reality of the universe is in many ways far more interesting then our imaginary scenerio and galaxies self-regulate the size of supermassive black holes through complex feedback mechanisms. In the rather cool paper mentioned above, astronomers Priyamvada Natarajan and Ezequiel Treister describe how a combination of winds and star formation regulate the size to which SMBHs can grow. They estimate the upper limit is roughly 10^10 Solar masses (10,000,000,000 Solar Masses).

Here’s how it works:

First of all, most galaxies just don’t have enough stuff around them to ever grow that big, and as the universe expands and carries non-gravitationally bound systems farther and farther apart, the potential for truly giant SMBH’s dimishes.

Second, while it is possible to grow what they term Ultra-Massive Black Holes, SMBH’s approximately the size of the 10^10 Solar Mass upper limit, it is hard to grow them bigger. These objects when they do exist, are in the hearts of cD galaxies sitting in the centers of large galaxy clusters. In these systems, the gas the SMBH can consum eventually gets pushed away when the luminosity of the accreting material reaches a certain threshold. Once the gas is pushed away, it really has no reason to fall back to the center and get eaten later unless something disturbs its orbit, and if that does happen, it will get pushed away again as soon as the accrestion luminosity again gets above a certain level.

In addition to clearing out dust and gas that isn’t currently trying to flow in, but happens to be local, this accretion luminosity can also actually stop material that is in the process of falling in already (stuff that hasn’t gotten to the event horizon yet). It’s all about how the kinetic energy of the infalling material is changed.

Finally, the growth of the SMBH into an UMBH also means that any outflow from the black hole will be bigger and badder. In general, the material flowing away from SMBH’s flows out, cools, and some of it condenses into stars or flows back in as accretion. Once the outflow get’s big enough, it becomes a superwind and no recycling of material takes place - bye  bye gas.

So, in our reality, black holes have an upper limit that comes basically from the fact that things spiral in and the material spiralling in does destructive things: Blasting Light, Blasting Wind. Blame angular momentum and if you want to build a bigger blackhole, get good at aiming stars.

Tonight, when John McCain said we should send soldiers into the classroom, he scared me on many levels.

Teaching requires preparation. I have a doctorate degree in astronomy, and preparing for class is still hard,  takes time, and requires me to continually learn new techniques to improve the craft while at the same time requiring I keep up with the newest in what has been discovered in the universe. Teaching is hard. It’s hard because you bleed for your students, and what they go through as they struggle to make their dreams reality. Teaching is hard. It’s hard because your knowledge in many ways determines what your students are able to do in the next step. As teachers, we may be the limiting factor in our students’ futures.

I get a lot of amazingly bright students in the classroom who’ve come from high schools where their teacher was trying to teach too many classes all at once without the proper education to teach any of them. These wonderful students have the potential to run anywhere: Caltech or MIT  might have been possible  for some of my engineers. They’re creative, they’re driven, they’re all the things a teacher dreams of having. But they’re small-town kids,  from small-town schools, where it might have been one teacher teaching all the subjects. That teacher is probably doing the best he or she can without the tools he or she may need. An English teacher was never meant to teach physics. And I, as a astronomy/physics teacher, shouldn’t teach literature. To allow our students to be the best they can be we have to give them the best teachers we find and train.

Training is important.

The United States military would never send a soldier into a situation they hadn’t at least tried to train him for.  People aren’t thrown out of planes without learning proper technique, and they certainly aren’t asked to fly those planes.  Our soldiers are trained in how to use their guns, and in how to pack their packs.  Part of the “be all you can be” is giving them all the training our tax dollars can afford. I have to say, many of the students who I have respected the most have come out of the service. The are still working to every day be all they can be.

One of these soldiers who had come home, and who is going to college on the G.I. Bill, was one of my elementary education majors. He was  the only boy in the class of 25, and he took  all the girls teasing with a smile, although on one day when they were particularly giving him shit he brought up what life was like for him in Afghanistan.  He came home from serving in battle and decided to become a early elementary school teacher. And he’s going to be a really good one. And he’s getting a college degree make that happen.

Senator John McCain served in the military, he flew planes, he took the training, he did the time in training. I don’t understand: at what point did he forget that education matters especially for the educators?

I think there’s a lot to be said for taking people who served in the military and who have a passion for children  and training them in college via the G.I. Bill to be a next generation of schoolteachers. If this is what a soldier wants to do, let’s find a way to let them do it. And while we’re at it, let’s find ways for soldiers coming home to get any college degree for free.

Training matters.

For soldiers, for students, for all of us.

Training matters. Period.

About an hour ago I finished giving a talk to a physics major seminar course at the University of Nebraska. There were about 40 young minds,  intent and willing to listen. I was there to tell them about what got me into astronomy, what  astronomers do, and what doors are open to different careers. The thing I wanted to stress is that with physics and astronomy you can explore, you can create, you can go beyond just the numbers in the equations.  We don’t get paid  enough to do what we do if we hate it. We can only justify the long hours for low pay and the sometimes crazy travel with a passion that drives us to not be happy unless we’re doing what we do in each of us needs to find our own way.

This is what gets me to this book. Last night on the plane I hit this passage:

We’ve reached the end of pure inspiration, and are now somewhere else, something implying routine, or doing something because people expect us to do it, going somewhere in each day because we went there the day before, saying things because we have set them before, and this seems like the work of a different sort of animal, contrary  to our plan, and this is very very bad.

This section refers to how the author and his coworkers at a magazine feel about the change in how they approach their work.  I have to admit I  have felt this way too. Their project started on a laugh and a dream.  This isn’t very different from research. We get an idea, we decide to create, explore, question, try.  We laugh our way through the project descriptions, working through dinner as we define the first problems, and on that first all-nighter that we  fight through as we work our way through our first grant, it is all still fine, all still worth the lack of sleep,  the lack of life, because at first the project is bigger than any of us  and it is simply the project that must be done.  I have taken risks with my career, deciding to take time away from classic research — variable stars, galaxy evolution, things that you expect to see published in the Astrophysical Journal — deciding to take time away to instead create podcasts ( and research how they impact people), to create websites  (and see how they bring people together), to explore language and learning  (and ask if we communicate what we mean to), and to try and understand how you understand what I’m trying to tell you about the universe. I’ve taken risks to follow passions, each project bigger than me.

But then one day the projects become mundane; they become work.

I still love what I do. The people I work closest with are people whom I respect  and I trust and I suspect I’ll be working with over the decades to come. But those are just the  handful of people I work closest with. Then there’s everyone else, and the work, and the politics, and the paperwork, and the trying to hold it all together and make sure everything gets done. There are days that are simply not fun. There are days when I think about setting it all aside and just writing websites, writing books, just staying at home and creating things that don’t require any approval paperwork. Or at least  there are fractions of days. I don’t think it’s ever been so bad that I’ve considered leaving astronomy for more than an hour or two. But there are days I think about giving up on  this or that  bureaucracy that should make my life easier in the long run, but right now it just makes me miserable. I’ve had the days, it felt like the days in this  book passage, were each of us is simply  “doing something because people expect us to do that.”

These are usually the days when I’m writing not the first grant for a project but the second or third or fifth, and the thing that made the project a joy and a rush  has been forgotten as we battle over budgets and try to figure out just what piece of paper is needed this time and what format is required by this potential funder. These are usually the days when I’m waiting to hear on the grant, to hear on my fate, to find out if I get to follow that dream and answer the question.

They don’t tell you about the waiting in graduate school.  They don’t tell you how you’ll spend six months not knowing if this great idea that you got is something you’ll be funded to do, something  that will be funded before the graduate students who  you wish to work with wander off and graduate and go somewhere else. Like most of the astronomy education community, I’ve been waiting to hear on a NASA  Grant since the middle of the summer. I’m waiting to hear on  an EPO rider on another project, and God  I want to do that project.  It’s like being hungry and only having enough money to order one pizza for you and a friend, and making that call and spending that money  you both scrounged out of your pockets and out of your book bags and then waiting first one hour than two hours than three hours as the pizza never comes. Sometimes you get lucky, and suddenly the pizza arrives with extras — free garlic bread, free soft drinks. But sometimes there’s not even a call to say ’sorry.’

And in the moments while I’m waiting, I feel like I’m going through the motions. In these moments it’s hard to remember the passion  for the projects that carried us through that sleepless night when we wrote the words that might define the next three years of our lives. It’s hard to remember it as I go through the motions of grading, and posting homework, and writing the second grant for some other project, and as I work on the websites for IYA, and I work on all the random things that have to get done because it’s what’s expected.

But then I travel,  and there, in front of the classroom, in front of the lecture hall, in front of the auditorium I look out on a sea of faces -  a sea of people who don’t know if this is going to be just another boring science lecture or maybe, just this time, maybe it’ll be something exciting, something interesting, something that will make them feel alive and open their mind, open their curiosity, and carry them to another part of the universe. In that moment, as I open my power points, my keynotes, my websites, my videos, as I open the various technologies and look out  and breath in,  I remember what it felt like the first time I fell in love with astronomy. As I exhale my talks, I try to instill life into the audience, and on those days when I hit my stride, and hit my marks saying the things I want to say, I like to think a couple walk away a little bit in love with the parts of astronomy that mean the most  to me. And no matter what they go away with, there is something about watching them come alive, watching them fall into the slides and the ideas and concepts; it makes me feel alive. This is the beauty of teaching. I get to see over and over what it’s like to experience all these wonderful things our sky has to offer for the first time. I get to experience everything anew and fall in love again.

I love to travel. I can only travel when someone else pays my way and sadly it really helps when they pay me because the days I travel are the days I don’t get paid. This is one of the flaws in being a contract soft-money astronomer.

Today, in Nebraska, was a good day when I was reminded that I’m still in love with my research, with teaching, and with trying to communicate astronomy to the public. And today is a day, when I think maybe just maybe a few more people will go to bed wanting to get up the next day and learn more about citizen science, about astronomy podcasts, and about how they can get involved in the International Year of Astronomy.

As long as I have these days, I will always be an astronomer.

Um, wow.

I suddenly want to hirer the organizer, the wonferful Kevin Lee, as my publicist.

If you are in the Lincoln area (or like to drive), please come!

Please?

More to come…

The Mythbusters have given me a new reason to keep watching the water heater:

And as a reminder, here’s our Pilot Episode (related to my Husband’s Blog).

FlexMonkeyPatch “Pilot Episode,” is a program to figure out why my husband and I can’t always take hot showers. For mysterious reasons, at completely random intervals, our water heater’s pilot light fails. This usually happens in the middle of the night. Sometimes we’ll be okay for weeks, sometimes it will go out 3 times in 1 day. We’ve had the plumber out several times, and he hasn’t a clue.

Having gotten sick and tired of traipsing in PJs from the 2nd floor bathroom to the basement water heater, my overly technical husband has now setup a webcam on the water heater pilot light. If you see the light go out, can you direct twitter him @turdotherun?

Please help. Without your citizen plumbing, we may not be able to get a repairman to acknowledge we have a problem.

I would like to state for the record that the Google Sandbox does not work equally elegantly in all themes. I would also like to say that caching can drive you crazy. Nonetheless, it is highly satisfying to code things that proclaim “Goodbye, World!” or “Delete World” instead of the normal “Hello, World!” It was a sarcastic day.

Okay, whining over.

Wanna see what I did? As I create gadgets, they will appear in the Gadget’s link above. One of the two gadgets I created is one that combines a webcam and a twitter feed. It has some issues and I’m hoping that if I tell you what I did, the javascript experts in the audience may have some ideas.

First the gadget:

Now, for reason’s I can’t explain the twitter feed associated with this gadget randomly shows up. (Admittedly, I’m testing this during the debates and I think twitter might be a bit busy right now). Here is a screen capture of what it looks like when working right:

The code for this gadget does 3 things:

• Retrieves an image from the Jodrell Bank Telescope webpage to display (It is coming from a cach though - I can’t figure out how to get the image to correctly refresh every 30 seconds.)
• Get’s the latest tweet from JodrellBank and parse it so the name jodrellbank links through to the twitter page
• Has title and footer info that redirects the user to Jodrell Bank

(I selected Jodrell Bank simply because I know they have a webcam and twitter feeds. I will repeat this with other scopes as I find them).

This gadget required about 1 page of code presented here.

<UserPref name=”num_entries” display_name=”Number of Entries:” defaultvalue=”1″/>

<Content type=”html”>
<![CDATA[

<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/distance/observatory/images/webcam.jpg" width="150px"></p>

<style> #content_div { font-size: 80%;  margin: 5px;} </style>
<div id="content_div"></div>

<!---- Use Javascript to get the twitter feed and parse what I want. ---->
<!---- Refer to http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/remote-content.html#Fetch_Feed ---->
<script type="text/javascript">

// Get userprefs
var prefs = new gadgets.Prefs();
var entries = prefs.getInt("num_entries");

// Get the feed, SUMMARIES is the content. Can also get title and date, but decide not to
function getFeed() {
var params = {};
params[gadgets.io.RequestParameters.CONTENT_TYPE] = gadgets.io.ContentType.FEED;
params[gadgets.io.RequestParameters.NUM_ENTRIES] = new Number(entries);
var summaries = true;
params[gadgets.io.RequestParameters.GET_SUMMARIES] = summaries;
var url = “http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/5747502.rss”;
// response calls function below
gadgets.io.makeRequest(url, response, params);
};

function response(obj) {
// obj.data contains the feed data
var feed = obj.data;
// Initialize the variable all the html goes in
var html = “”;

// Access the data for a given entry
if (feed.Entry) {
for (var i = 0; i < feed.Entry.length; i++) {
// find the break between twitter name and tweet and grab the tweet
var Delim = feed.Entry[i].Summary.indexOf(”:”);
var Tweet = feed.Entry[i].Summary.slice(Delim+1);

// find the name of the tweater and grab it
var Twit = feed.Entry[i].Summary.split(”:”, 1);

// post the tweater’s name as a link their page and then show tweat
html += “<div>”;
html += “<a href=’http://www.twitter.com/” + Twit + “‘ target=’_blank’><b>” + Twit + “:</b></a>”;
html += Tweet;
html += “</div>”;
}
}
// This changes the content between the div open and close to contain the html variable
document.getElementById(’content_div’).innerHTML = html;
};
// this calls getFeed, which calls response
gadgets.util.registerOnLoadHandler(getFeed);
</script>
<p style=”font-family: times; font-size: 80%; font-weight: bold; text-align: center; border-top: thin solid #999999;”>Learn more about
<a href=”http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/”>Jodrell Bank</a></p>
]]>
</Content>
</Module>

Now, as I stated, the Twitter code magically does and not appear at will. This has me sad. But then, we’re talking twitter. I also can’t figure out how to make the image refresh in a sensible manner. Help?

I also have a wish list of things to do: I want to turn links into, well, links, and make sure that @person shows up as a link to that person. This is a lot of complicated string parsing. I am just learning javascript, so this is a fun little puzzle when I’m not being confused by twitter not loading.

I’m also working on a “Keeping up with Star Stryder” gadget. I’ll post it under the tab above when I’m done

I have to admit, there is a soft spot in my heart for conference proceedings. Once upon a time, when you wanted to quickly dive into a new area of astronomy you went to the university or observatory library and searched out the ASP or IAU conference proceedings on the topic of your passion, and then wandered off to read it cover-to-cover. As an undergrad, I got my introduction to pulsating variable stars that way, and in graduate school I am guilty of losing 4 cloudy nights of my life to a periodical on cataclysmic variable stars for no particularly good reason. Today, I teach at a small college that doesn’t have astronomy conference proceedings in its library, so when I want to get my fill of something new, I either have to fork over the cash, or wait on arXiv for something new and exciting to appear in a burst of related papers. One such burst is currently unfolding, and the topic is the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Back in late July there was an IAU symposium on these two nearby systems.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are a pair of nearby irregular galaxies that everyone thought were orbiting the Milky Way galaxy in a death spiral. The way it was taught, these two systems, visible to the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere, are orbiting the Milky Way. as they go they appear to be leaving behind a faint trail of material as they go, like a slug’s train across the sidewalk. According to the story, they are a binary pair, with the Small Magellanic Cloud orbiting the Large on a nearly circular orbit. It is/was believed that the two systems collided about 200 or 300 Myr ago, triggering star formation and maybe even causing the 30 Doradus (Tarantula Nebula) star forming reason to form.

This is the standard story. Heck, I’ve told this story several times on Astronomy Cast even.

The thing is, we’re not entirely convinced it is true.

Back in 2006, a team of astronomers lead by Nitya Kallivayalil published Hubble Space Telescope observations that seemed to indicate that these two galaxies are actually just passing through. According to their measurements, the galaxies are moving tangentially at 370 km/s relative to the Milky Way, which is 100 km/s faster than we thought and also fast enough that they should just keep going, moving past the Milky Way on their journey through the Local Group of galaxies (which they shouldn’t leave - they are gravitationally bound to the group.) This measurement was the final word on the matter - The authors acknowledge that more data is needed, and they even tried to get that data with Hubble’s high resolution ACS camera, but it failed, and they couldn’t do the follow up that was needed. So, while they wait for Hubble to get repaired, they did the next best thing - They reanalyzed their data looking for every possible error they could have made. It turns out that it still looks like the LMC and SMC are just sweeping by.

This has some rather serious effects on our understanding of several observations. First of all, there is a stream of material that is “connected” on the sky to the two galaxies. This material is referred to as the Magellanic Stream, and it was thought that it was made of material gravitationally torn off the systems. We refer to this as a tidal tail. The catch is, tidal tails typically don’t form with so much vigor during a pair (or in this case a trio) of galaxies’ first encounter. The location of the Magellanic Stream is also wrong, given our new understanding of the galaxies motions. And it also looks like the Small Magellanic Cloud can’t be orbiting the way we thought either.

Since 2006, astronomers have been working hard to try and solve these problems, and at IAU Symposium #256, they met at Keele University to sort out some answers.

The first big problem is the Magellanic Stream. Using some very pretty models, a paper by Besla et al shows that this string of material could have been created through interactions between the dark matter halo and regular matter halo of the Milky Way Galaxy and a former disk of gas (an extended HI disk) around the LMC. If the LMC has once had a disk of material around it and the disk hit the Milky Way at the right angle, a process called Ram Pressure Stripping could have stripped off the disk to create the Magellanic Stream.

One problem down.

The next problem is trying to figure out how the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are orbiting one another. This can be done by looking at what types of orbits could be stable. In computer models, it looks like the Small Magellanic Cloud may simply be on a highly elliptic orbit around the Large Magellanic Cloud, and that orbit maybe slowly getting smaller.

Second problem down.

And put together we have a new understanding. It now appears we are seeing these two binary galaxies as they slowly spiral together, and they just happen to be passing by us as they engage in a death match of sorts.

As was stated at the top, these results still need more followup observations. They need the Hubble to be fixed. But this will come. Soon. Sometime in the next several weeks hopefully.

In case you haven’t seen this yet, let me share the most amazing image of two Shuttle’s lined up waiting for launch. The foreground craft, Atlantis, will be going up to the Hubble Space Telescope to install new instruments, repair the old, and service several parts, including gyroscopes used to control its pointing. But that’s a story for another post.

Atlantis and Endeavour on pads 39 A and B. Credit: NASA

There is a certain intimacy to writing my blog. It’s me and the words in my head spilling out across the screen. I work in silence, no one knowing what I’m saying, until I hit the publish button. And then it all goes live at once. As I sit here talking to my computer, talking to Firefox, I feel this terrible urge to pace and rant and use my arms to talk. I’m not giving in to my desires, I’m sitting quite still at the kitchen table, speaking softly to my computer while my husband plays Wii in the living room. I’m not sure what will happen to my writing style - I’m not sure how my language will change as I speak to you rather than letting the words spill across my fingertips. I’m going to take a risk, I’m going to try and figure it out.

I’m not sure how I feel about the software, but after using computers almost every day since I was in the fifth grade, I a realized who is running up against maximum number of uses numbers. My joints only had so many tries left in them. I needed to find a new way to communicate to my software before my parts demanded replacement. This is a compromise. There are some things I can’t speak to my computer, at least not easily, like when I’m coding, when I’m drawing, when I’m creating things for the Web. But at least this is a partial solution. I want to keep working online for another 40 years. It’s a good fantasy at least.

I have to admit, mostly I like the software. Nevertheless, I have to reprogram my brain. I can think, I can speak, I can do many things faster than I can type. This software spells better than I do - I don’t have to keep going back to figure out what I’ve done that has caused little red lines under my every fifth word! It’s odd though, my internal wetware is struggling with this new device more then the software is struggling with my voice. As I speak I feel my brain pausing in ways it doesn’t do when I’m speaking in front of an audience. It’s an interesting challenge, changing how I do this thing have been doing so naturally for so many years.

I am really impressed with MacSpeech. While there are certain things I just can’t get it to do consistently, it’s not too bad except when I’m using Mail. For instance, deleting an e-mail message just doesn’t seem to work. There is something about how I say deleting, that causes it to hear “leading” most of the time. I think I’ve crashed mail 20 times today. There are other interesting errors it makes occasionally. But than there are no more errors than I make myself. I’m guessing most of you have read my posts that weren’t correctly proofread. This seems to be doing a better job than I do when I try and type. I’m going to try and work through this, and see if I can adapt. So far so good.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to try and see what its astronomy vocabulary looks like. Tomorrow I need to think, and write about something that challenges my brain. Write about something that challenges your brain, maybe? And that will definitely challenge the software.

I’ll be talking about the International Year of Astronomy and focusing on New Media projects.

If you’re in the area and you can come, I’d love to see you Wednesday at 1:40PM in Room 1400 of the Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building at MSU.

Go Spartans

So here is the paper. On a quick read, this is just another paper on what happens to gas when and star formation when an AGN gets involved. If you’ve listened to many episodes of Astronomy Cast, you might have heard me explain this before. AGN (short for Active Galactic Nuclei) are actively feeding black holes in the centers of galaxies. These giant monsters are capable of calmly devouring vast quantities of gas and dust with accretion rates (the rate they take stuff in) of anywhere from 1 to 100 Solar Masses a year. AGN can occur in all sorts of different galaxies, and once upon a time, our own Milky Way galaxy might have had one in its core. Spiral galaxies with lots of gas and dust can recover from their AGN phase to go on to billions of years of happy go lucky star formation. Elliptical galaxies aren’t so lucky.

If you look out at the sky with a reasonably large telescope and you explore the distribution of colors and shapes of galaxies, you’ll find that spirals are generally (but not always) blue, and elliptical galaxies are generally (but not always) red. Any of you who have played with Galaxy Zoo have probably seen this too, and cursed your fair share of boring red blobs. The only way to get a blue galaxy is to look at a system that contains lots of hot stars, and hot stars don’t live that long, so either you are looking at something with ongoing star formation or something that produced stars until very recently. This tells us that in general, spiral galaxies are actively forming stars, and ellipticals are not. As we look at these systems across other wavelengths, looking for gas and dust using Infrared and radio and all the colors of light in between, we also find that elliptical galaxies are poor in gas and dust and spirals are rich in those exact same things. This means ellipticals generally just don’t even have the stuff in them necessary to form stars.

The question is, how did they get that way?

The standard answer has always been that there is a burst of star formation (often triggered during the formation of the elliptical, or the merger of a spiral galaxy into an elliptical), and the gas and dust not involved in this sudden burst is driven into the super massive black hole in the center of the system (and when I say super, I mean something 10,000,000,000 solar masses or so in size!) This process causes the galaxy to first light up with star formation, then the AGN turns on, and in the end the AGN is all that is left signaling the recent event. The timescale for this process was originally thought to be determined largely by the rate of star formation, but star formation is a slow thing, with many billion years being required to eat away the gas and dust. But… with timescales that long we should see more blue(r) ellipticals. The longer something lives, the more likely we are to see it. (Think of being in a room with a variety of lights that randomly turn on and off that are on all sides of you. Those that turn on for the longest period of time are the ones that you are most likely to see, while those that flick on the smallest fraction of a second are very unlikely to be something you see well enough to learn anything about them.)

So here we were with a model and a universe that weren’t in perfect alignment.

But then came this paper, to tell us we had underestimated the effects of an AGN. In this paper, they look at a series of 24 galaxies (10 Star Forming, 10 AGN+Star Forming, and 4 AGN). What they found was about 200 Million years after the Star Forming turns on, the AGN kicks into full swing, and the Star Formation dies quickly - it dies in a fraction of the time predicted from models that use star formation to devour the dust. This indicates that the AGN is having more of an effect on the dust than previously thought.

They put forward in this paper that AGN feedback is responsible for destroying the gas that would have otherwise gone into star formation. This process was already thought to exist, but the magnitude of the role it plays hadn’t been assumed to be this big! It appears that the actively feeding AGN is able to heat and expel the gas very quickly. We knew this happened in GIANT galaxies, with GIANT AGN (think M87), the type of systems that often sport massive jets and other rather radical high energy phenomenas. What we didn’t know was that low luminosity AGN do the exact same thing. And that is just cool. (Or actually “That’s Hot”).

This paper gives us a cleaner insight into how effectively black holes can kill things. That is a very flippant remark, but to put it more scientifically - we now have new insights into how actively feeding black holes can disrupt the surrounding gas so effectively that they shut down star formation essentially instantly (on cosmic timescales at least). From alive to AGN to dead and red in a billion years flat, that may be the life of even the most mundane elliptical galaxy.

While this paper does use a lot of technical language, it explains itself well and is well referenced. If you feel like chewing through something that will hopefully change how we look at ellipticals, give it a read.

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On a completely unrelated note: There is a remarkably ugly huricane on its way to Texas. One of the worst nights of my life involved a tropical storm parked over Houston that caused flooding and tornadoes as far north as Austin (the barn I used to keep horses at flooded and several hundred horses had to be evacuated in the middle of the night with water rising faster then a human could run). Just looking at the satillite imagery is making quesy with anxiety. My heart goes out to everyone on the Gulf coast. Stay safe everyone.

Way back when I was at Michigan State University I had a website on Physics and Astronomy humor that then migrated to U-Texas, and now I share the link with you. I am contemplating resurrecting that site here, but it requires a bit more content. Anyone have any good ones from the days of email forwards?

Preface - My laptop is at the Apple Store being repaired. This means my computer with all my best toys is not available for use.

For those who have been following my twitter whining, here is the full story.
1) Yesterday I noticed starstryder was no longer googlable (is that a word), and asked for ideas
2) The wonderful Stuart Lowe noted that if I did a view source, many naughty and pharmaceutically related words appeared.
3) I realized I’d been hacked. As had my university computer (growl). Astronomy Cast was safe.
4) I restored my theme, removing all google ads and stuff, on this site and upgraded wordpress (this site is privately hosted.
5) I upgraded Astronomy Cast for good measure. This totally broke the site. Dead Dead Dead. I can’t repair it and cried via email to Fraser. I tried every trick I know - and I know many. Ugh.
6) I went into campus (where I have now been for 8 hours on a Sunday) and upgraded my work server to 10.5. This broke *everything.* Blue screen of pointer only. I reduced myself to the command line and fixed it. I then updated everything, fixed permissions, and reconfigured the server.
7) Part way though this I began to understand why Wil Wheaton’s original blog is still toast.
8 ) After getting my office and starstryder.com servers fixed, I looked into why I wasn’t in google search and learned I’d been officially banned from their index (joy). According to Google “We’ll review the site. If we find that it’s no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we’ll reconsider our indexing of the site. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request.”

At this point, I probably need to crawl under the bed and cry, however, instead I’m going to work on a programming project that I should have completed hours ago.

Worst. Tech. Week. Ever.

As for the dreamers of my generation? We’re pretty much… Well you know what word goes there.

According to NASA, the average age of someone accepted into the astronaut core is 34 (my age). It then typically takes a few months to a year to be selected for a mission (if you ever are selected), and then another half year or longer to train for a mission. My guess would be that someone hired in the current round (and NASA is currently hiring astronauts) would get their first opportunity to fly in late 2011 or so.

Except I don’t think we’ll have a manned government funded space program at that point in time. And it scares me how little people are aware of this.

Here are the facts:

• The last space shuttle launch is currently scheduled for May 2010. The Shuttle fleet needs to be retired. While the shuttles still work (mostly) they were only meant to last until 2000, and it is increasingly difficult to keep them running (NASA buys parts on eBay periodically). There are also only so many resources to go around. We can’t pay the salaries of the folks who service and run the shuttle fleet and pay people to design and create whatever comes next.
• The original plan was to use Russian capsules to launch astronauts to the International Space Station after the shuttle fleet was retired. For that to happen, Congress needs to invest in the Russian Space Agency *now* and send them money *now* to pre-order capsules that take three years to build. Due to the latest Russian actions in Georgia, Congress is justifiable reticent to invest capital in that country. While there are plans to continue the Space Shuttle to fill possible gaps… At some point the shuttle will die - some vehicle will suffer one too many technical problems, and like the old pickup you give up on, it will be sent out to rot in the back pasture (or at least at the Smithsonian). Hopefully it will fail with no one in it. Once this happens, my guess is the whole fleet will be grounded.
• The new program to build launch vehicles, Constellation, is seriously delayed. According to official NASA pages, Orion (the manned half of the Orion program) will have it’s first launch in 2014. Unofficially, it is facing all sorts of delays and cost overruns (1, 2). And if Obama is elected, he’s announced he’ll delay the mission 5 years. My guess - Constellation will launch 2019 at the earliest, and more likely 2022ish.

Getting the Constellation program going is far harder than anyone seems to have previously anticipated. This is going to be a rocket that makes the Saturn V look average. To get it to work, everything has to be rebuilt, from beneath the ground on up. Literally. The Crawler may not be able to support the Ares rockets’ weights and the Launch Pad will need to be restructured for this taller rocket. These are rebuilds not fully budgeted.

I have to admit that I’m afraid that if the cost overruns for the Constellation program become too great, it will simply be canceled. This has happened before (e.g. the X-33 and see also).

Needless to say, as I look at the facts as I can google them, I’m not going to apply for the Astronaut core (actually I wouldn’t anyways - I enjoy teaching too much). And, I’m going to encourage students interested in the astronaut core to get to know the non-NASA space cores. As we move into the future, I’m hoping that the commercial space agencies may somehow find a place in space doing science now and then.

Just as I fear NASA is about to enter a period without a manned space program, I also think that thanks to Scaled Composites (who will bring us Virgin Galactic) and Bigelow Aerospace commercial space flight is going to become what Concorde flights were in the early 1980s: expensive but possible for anyone who wins the lotto or makes a killing on the stock market.

I have very mixed emotions about how I see NASA’s role in space slowly dieing just as I see commercial manned-space on the verge of becoming something great. NASA needs astronauts as construction workers and repair artists (really, what they’re doing to the Hubble Space Telescope is art). Most science in space can be done by robotic probes, but fixing and building often needs hands. We need astronauts. I’m just not convinced we need as many as we have. As someone who once wanted to be the first Journalist in space, I still hope to someday get my ticket, but I don’t know how to advice my students any more. The best I can say is work hard, try hard, prepare for everything and learn Russian and/or Chinese. And have a plan B. NASA probably shouldn’t even be plan A. Maybe Plans A through D …

I hate giving advice that tempers dreams. I hate that NASA is breaking my heart all for lack of funding.

(If we leave Iraq, can we please send 1 months worth of war funding to NASA? Please?)

This blog is not showing up in Google on the first page of searches for my name or Star Stryder or starstryder. I have no idea what’s going on. If anyone has any ideas, can you please email me? pamela at starstryder dot com.

At Dragon*Con (which I won’t mention again until next summer) some fascinatingly misguided person suggested that ghosts are made of Dark Matter. Dark matter is the missing 22% of the stuff the universe is made of. This is stuff - it is just stuff that doesn’t interact with the electromagnetic force in a noticeable way. This means it does not obscure light (like dust), it does not give off light (like stars), it does not chemically interact, or in fact it does not do anything other than move stuff with its mass via gravity. This means that if you can see something, it is not Dark Matter. This means that if you can detect something as a cold spot (which implies something happened to the heat energy in that spot), and if you can measure something via some electromagnetic something (changes in inductance, conductance, etc of air), it cannot be dark matter.

I do not believe ghosts have been proven to exist.

That said, the folks trying to prove they exist have “results” based on stuff that requires ghosts interact via the electromagnetic force.

If dark matter was as visible as they claim ghosts are, my job would be a whole lot easier. Dark Matter can only be detected via gravity. Ghosts cannot be made of dark matter based on any of the “Observables” ghost hunters tote out.

One more point: if you try and claim ghosts use gravity to move stuff around, then they couldn’t selectively move things because they’d need HUGE amounts of mass to move a small chair, and in the process they’d probably bend walls and collapse ceilings. They could not simply push or pull on the chair because without the electromagnetic force at play, dark matter pretty much just passes straight through normal matter (like chairs).

In case you missed it, ghosts are not made out of Dark Matter.

Try again, and please stay out of astronomy next time.