Archive of Writings
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The Three R`s: Research, `Riting, & Recording
The past 10 days have been an insanely busy whirlwind of activity for me, and I’m afraid real life pulled me away from online life for a bit. Last Thursday, I gave a presentation at my home university, SIUE, on both my research and podcasting (this was an experimental combination of two talks, and will in the future go back to always being two talks). Tuesday night I gave a talk on professional-amateur astronomy collaborations that highlighted my research on the star AH Leo at the Naperville Astronomical Association outside of Chicago. Both talks went well, and I’ll be recording an online version of the pro-am collaboration talk as time allows. With these presentations behind me and a few last bits of spring break in front of me, I’m going to steal a few days for the three R’s: Research, ‘riting, and recording.
Everyday Days of an Instructor
As an instructor I find that there are good days – days when my students remind me of why I selected my profession, and there are also bad days when small collections of specific students make me really frustrated. Most days, however, are just days where all of us are just trying to get through life. The measure of a career is ticked away in these more average days. The quality of these everyday days varies from place to place, and opinions of quality vary as one person’s pleasure is someone else’s terror. To find happiness, we must each tune our location to the lifestyle that makes us happiest on so called normal days.
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to work a lot of different places. The universities I’ve haunted have ranged from the Big Ten (MSU), to the Ivy League (MIT and Harvard), to the Big 12 (UT), to the unheard of (SAO), to a small state school (SIUE). My students faces have ranged in age from the 10-year old prodigy learning college-level astrophysics to the late 50s chinese immigrant working through freshmen physics toward a dreamed of PhD. The students I have worked with have ranged from students so smart and together that they can run 1500 person programs without traumatizing their grades, to students who are just trying to figure out how to just get through their next homework set. To me, the measure of my career is counted not in the number geniuses I can help loose onto the world, but rather it is counted in the number of students for whom I can make just one idea click and who I can help find their dream that they want to make reality.
Helix hides Comets in its Core
It is easy in astronomy to lump different objects into specific groups. At the top-most level, there are stars, galaxies, planetary systems (including asteroids and comets), and dust-bunnies interstellar and intergalactic media (clouds and nebula). Looking a bit deeper, each of these categories can be nit-picked apart into more sub-categories. For instance, stars can be divided up by energy generation mechanism, or mass, or both. But, astronomy isn’t just the study of a bunch of discrete objects that can be junked into boxes any more than plant science is the study of how a bunch of leaves that can be classified by structure. Both sciences must consider the ecology around discrete objects. Trees grow in forests in symbiosis with other plants and animals, and are both harmed and helped through these synergistic relationships. Stars too exist in rich environments, and when we study stars and their evolution we are also studying the evolution of their planetary systems and of the galaxy they live within. Until recently, it was easy to see the average star as an isolated object on a solitary journey from molecular cloud to planetary nebulae – we simply weren’t able to see anything other than the star and what isn’t seen is easily ignored. Today, however, that is all changing.
As we peer at stars in more wavelengths and in greater detail, we are beginning to find evidence of planetary systems around more and more objects.* As we witness this co-formation of stars and planets it is becoming impossible to stick stars in discrete boxes – Stars and planetary systems must be studied as a whole. This was brought home to me by a newly released Spitzer Space Telescope image of Helix nebula (above right, credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/K. Su (Univ. of Ariz.)). This favorite object of amateur astronomers appears as a faint swirl of light through the eyepiece of a backyard telescope in a dark location. With Spitzer, it is resolved into concentric rings marking the location of a dead star. Around that dead star are the remnants of a cometary cloud.
Three New Species Discovered in the Milky Way
Scientists this week have discovered three previously undiscovered species: a new species of reef lobster living off the cost of the Philippines, a new source of gamma-ray radiation associated with star forming regions, and a new class neutron star+supergiant binary found the Milky Way Galaxy. Each of these three discoveries leads it’s respective discoverers to believe there are a myriad of things still waiting to found in the oceans and outer space. In our cyinical era of “been there, done that,” it seems there is nothing new to wow the mind, but these three new critters indicate our planet and our universe still have a few surprises in store for explorers.
Education: Some Assembly Required
While I was at Michigan State University, we had a change of president. The new guy in charge (at that time – it’s changed again since then) was M. Peter McPherson (and, as he would tell you, McPherson rhymes with person). He came from a business background, and under his guidance, students became consumers and professors became the provider of a specific good – an education. This idea of education being something that can be purchased pre-supposed that a student’s learning is directly correlated to the professor’s teaching. This is a model that doesn’t work real well. Learning is actually a collaborative journey, and like with any collaboration, success depends on what all members bring to the table. As a student, I saw the “student as a consumer” model as broken, but also as justification for expressing teenage indignation at any faculty member who wasted my time on stupid assignments or in teaching me things the US education system expects people to know by 8th grade. I also understood, however, that when I decided not to go to class, I was totally on my own in earning my desired A. I was a consumer, and it was their job not to waste my time. However, if I decided not to RTFM (or at least my textbook), when things blew up, it wasn’t their fault.
Today, that sense of student responsiblity in learning has diminished as consumerism has grown.
For every force there is an equal and opposite force…
One of the common questions I get is (averaged across many versions) “Why don’t all stars become black holes – don’t they all have gravity? And why don’t they start as Black Holes – didn’t they start with all that mass that made them become black holes?
Balancing stars against gravitational collapse is actually a process that is much more simple than many people think. When a star forms, the pressure and density in the center causes nuclear reactions to occur. These reactions release energy, partially in the form of photons, and the photons exert a pressure on the outer layers of the star. The light pressure pushes outward with the same force that the gravity presses inward. As long as nuclear reactions are occurring in the star’s center, the star doesn’t collapse. When stars die, their nuclear reactions stop and without the pressure from the light they collapse. If a star is similar to the Sun, it becomes a white dwarf, and the force of the electrons repelling one another supports the star. If a star is more massive, the electrons and protons in the stars atoms get crushed together and become neutrons, and the star is supported by the neutrons pushing against each other. If the star is even more massive, there is nothing left to support the star against gravitational collapse and it becomes a black hole.
So, for every force, their is an opposing force, and in black holes, well, inside the BH, we have no idea what is happening, but whatever it is, it kicks in after the material has collapsed small enough that we can get close enough to the center of mass that bad things can happen. Spaghetification anyone?
Picking a Direction (and sticking to it!)
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.
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.
Flying Metal Bits
A quick fly through the nearby universe will show you, well, a whole lot of nothing. But, embedded in the nearest bits of that nothing are 8 spectacular planets, dozens of moons, and hundreds of random bits of rock and ice that, depending on where they orbit, fall into such categories as asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, and comets. Somewhat randomly distributed around (and sometimes on) these celestial objects are little bits of flying metal.
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.
‘Cause Knowledge is Power
It 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.
Making the Technological iLeap
I 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.