Space Report

Wired News reports that scientists and astronomers have formed the Dark Skies Awareness group, which as part of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy is going to lobby for people to turn out the lights. The group reports that a fifth of the world’s population cannot see the Milky Way because of light pollution.

Light pollution is a serious problem for astronomers. At the Palomar observatory in California, city lights are now directly observable through a gap in the mountains. According to Dave Kornriech with Cornell University, “Many observers have given up looking at objects in the southwestern sky, because the light pollution is so bad in that direction.” He adds that if the current trend of growth with the neighboring city of San Diego continues, “in the next ten years or so, Palomar will be useless for deep-sky astronomy.” The Mount Wilson observatory outside Pasadena has already been decommissioned due to the encroachment of urban light pollution. Although many other observatories in remote locations are unaffected at this point, one wonders, how long will it be before they too are rendered useless?

Whenever I talk about this to someone, inevitably the first thing they say is, “Turn out the streetlights? That’s stupid! People will die in traffic accidents!” (Or something along those lines.) Fortunately, no one is asking cities to turn their streetlights off. However, properly shading streetlights so that the light points down instead of up would both improve streetlight efficiency, and reduce the amount of ambient glow in the sky. Most street lights pour as much light uselessly into the sky as they point down onto the street.

Buildings - both residential and office - are also culprits. Leaving the lights on at night inside an office is not just a waste of money, it is contributing to light pollution. At home, many people install bright lights which shine all night, from dusk until dawn. Does the front of your house really need to be lit up with daylight intensity, 24 hours per day? Homeowners concerned about safety and prowlers can remedy this problem simply by installing lights on a motion detector.

Last year, over 400 cities across the world celebrated Earth Hour by turning out the lights for one hour. Google’s page went to a black background (cute!) and the lights which illuminate the San Francisco Bay Bridge were turned off. (Not the ones that mark the bridge’s edges, or the ones that light up the bridge deck for drivers - just the decorative lights.)

Turning off unnecessary lighting, and using more efficient lighting that puts the light where it needs to go, is a perfect example of a win-win-win solution. The first “win” is the money saved by using electricity more judiciously. The second “win” is in the overall impact on climate change, by using fewer resources to achieve the same results. The third “win” is for astronomers, migrating birds, and anyone who has ever looked up at the sky.

A darker sky is a better sky, for everyone.

Bad news for all who have put stock in the tales and theories revolving around Alien abduction: Steven Hawking, while commenting upon the 50th anniversary of NASA, called such stories the product of “weirdos.” Even I will admit to feeling a tad heartbroken at such a remark coming from the revered physicist, thinking at first that he was dismissing the very thought of alien life itself. Not that I have piled all of my chips in said claims, but there have been times in my life when I desperately wanted them to be true.

I grew up in space, not literally of course but in grand works of fiction, both literary and cinematic, that regaled the swashbuckling tales of futuristic heroes and heroines. Now, I also had enough legitimate astronomy texts and an elementary grasp on the physics of space travel to know that tales such as those would likely never happen within my life-time, if ever at all. But I had always hoped that at some point, I’d be able to witness some sort of ‘First Contact,’ no matter how small it was. Hell, I’d probably have settled for a belligerent attack on our planet if I had gotten too old and desperate.

Then in recent months, all sorts of reports of water on Mars and CO2 on Distant Planets got me excited: Maybe the breakthrough I had always dreamed of is right around the corner. However, if Stephen Hawking is not a subscriber, I do not know if I can be. Bummer.

But wait!

While he did say such disparaging things regarding supposed alien abductions, when asked if he thought we were alone in this massive universe, he responded with a resounding “probably not,” and proceeded to give us three scenarios in which he saw the greatest possibilities. One was boring (there is nothing out there), one was exciting (basically alien invasion) and one was middle of the road (most likely primitive life, nothing too far advanced). And which one did he prefer? Why, the last one of course, though that is not the most riveting scenario for my sci-fi riddled mind. And yes, I realize he is just one man and he offered up nothing more than an opinion but it is nice to have an endorsement of such possibilities from someone so respectable for it is the belief in such possibilities that will propel us into the great unknown.

In 2005, the Huygens probe landed on Saturn’s moon, Titan. It snapped pictures for an hour before its power ran out. Wired News is reporting that one of the images has been announced as proof that methane exists in liquid form on the moon.

Astronomers have cause to believe that there might be a full environmental cycle of liquids on Titan, similar to what we have on Earth. Except where Earth’s cycle involves water, Titan’s cycle would involve methane. Methane would evaporate from the surface, form into methane clouds, fall back to land as methane rain, and gather in methane lakes. Titan has observable clouds and lakes, so the question is whether methane mingles between the two.

If so, Titan may be supporting life at the microscopic level. On earth, microbes that live off methane do quite well for themselves. (In fact, we may soon start farming them to help curb our greenhouse gases.) Titan’s atmosphere is similar to that of the early Earth’s, and if microbes lived here, they could easily have a foothold on Titan as well.

The evidence for liquid methane on Titan is… let’s just say “shaky.” Spots and splotches appeared on many of the Huygens probe’s pictures, and most of them were ruled out as “electronic imprints created by cosmic rays.” However, one of the spots were deemed too large to have been caused by cosmic rays. The spots appeared out of nowhere, and vanished shortly thereafter.

Titan’s average surface temperature is 94 K (-290 degrees F), so the theory is that the heat from the Huygens probe may have vaporized some methane, which then gathered on its lens as dew. This is an interesting first (first alien dewdrop), but it’s hardly evidence that methane usually falls from the sky.

Astronomers pored over the Huygens probe’s pictures with interest, but found no evidence for methane rain. The photos show “high, wispy clouds” and a lot of dust in the air. Presumably if rain was common, dust would be cleaned from the air. However, the Huygens probe only took pictures for an hour, and only in one location on Titan. One can’t discount the evidence of Arizona, where it’s often dusty and rains infrequently.

In the field of cosmology, some chunks of gas and dust are fascinating enough to be named. One in particular has been of interest to scientists since its discovery in 1986. It is an unusual comet called Machholz 1.

Unusual is Relative

Our solar system has its fair share of comets. Until recently, all of them have been classified into two categories. The majority of the comets observed in our solar system have a chemical composition that favors water ice. The estimated average H2O content of the first class of comets is 10^13 of ice. The second class of comets are distinguished by the notable presence of carbon molecule depletions, giving them the title “Carbon-Chain Depletion Comets”. Why the difference? The current consensus is that comets develop different chemical composition based on where they typically reside. Class 1 comets are believed to have formed in the vicinity of our system’s gas giants and subsequently traveled to the Oort Cloud where many of them remain. Class 2 comets have often been traced to the icy Kuiper Belt, specifically the much colder, farther out regions where their lack of exposure to the sun alters the rate of chemical depletion.

But Machholz 1 is a chemical oddity. While it bears many of the same carbon compounds as Class 2 comets, such as C2, C3 and cyanogen, they appear in much lower levels than those found in Carbon-Chain Depletion Comets. Recent observation has indicated that Machholz 1 isn’t alone in this. A rare few identified comets share this unusual characteristic.

The Big Deal About Depletion

Scientists are interested in comets primarily for their age. It is believed that most comets formed in a primordial stage of the universe when systems like our own were just coming into existence. Their exposure to extremes in temperature and radiation make comets into valuable time capsules, hinting at conditions in our galaxy long before Earth was even a protoplanetary disk. In fact, it’s highly likely that a significant portion of the water on our planet came from early comet collisions.

The low levels of carbon compounds in this new class of comet suggest a number of possibilities. Objects like Machholz 1 may be extremely old, from extremely far away, or both. In the first case, an older Class 2 comet would see a greater amount of depletion, indicating that Machholz 1 is one of the earliest objects in our solar system. Studying it would open up new avenues of thought concerning what our solar system was like in its nebular period. The other possibility is that the pending “Class 3″ comets come from an alien solar system where the overall chemical content is different from ours.

Continued Opportunity for Study

Machholz 1 may be an interloper from another system or a long-lost cousin of closer comets, but these days it makes its home in an orbit around our sun. It is projected to come into view again in 2012. While this and other comets like it haven’t been extensively studied over the past two decades, new data from its last appearance in 2007 has piqued the scientific community’s interest in these objects of unknown origin. In three years’ time, Machholz 1 is likely to get a lot more attention than it’s used to.

I have to admit that last night when I went to bed I worried whether I would wake up this morning in a black hole. That’s because, in case you hadn’t heard, an experiment to recreate the Big Bang was being conducted in Switzerland.

Check out this article for an in-depth explanation of how this thing works. The Large Hadron Collider is supposed to help scientists understand why things have mass and what the universe is made of. Of course, those aren’t the only reasons for the LHC to exist, scientists want to recreate the conditions right before the Big Bang supposedly happened. The hope to learn something from this experiment, which basically is sending particles into space and smashing them against each other really hard and really fast, creating black holes in space.

No worries, say the scientists. The black holes will evaporate before anyone even has a chance to notice. The LHC will notice, however, and will record these findings.

But not everyone sees this as a big leap for mankind. Some people fear that the LHC will have catastrophic consequences and that it should be stopped, despite the scientific community’s assurance that we’ll be fine. This has definitely sparked the public’s interest in science and space. This isn’t the first time a technological advance has made people freak out (remember Gallileo?), and no doubt it won’t be the last.

And hey, if the thing does make a black hole that sucks us into oblivion, at least we could say we went out with a bang!