Chris Lintott’s Universe

…for those who haven’t heard, Hubble today lost the use of one of its most important instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys. There seems to be little hope of more than minimal repair, and at present there is no plan to extend what is already an extremely complicated shuttle repair mission to fix ACS.

On a more prosaic note, there must be a lot of frustrated astronomers around the world. The deadline for proposals for the next round of HST observations - a deadline which causes stress and huge amounts of work in equal measure - was last Friday.

I’m so looking forward to the next couple of months of working on Sky at Night. We spent the weekend putting the finishing touches to our Mars special, to go out next weekend. This is 40 minutes long on BBC2, and a full hour on BBC4 and well worth it! It contains all of the interviews from my California trip last year, and a long chat with the creator of Spirit and Opportunity, Steve Squyres.

Mon 5th Feb - 00:05 (late Sunday night) on BBC2
Mon 5th Feb - 19:00 Extended edition on BBC4

We also spent a lot of time writing the script for the 50th anniversary show, to be broadcast in April. Those of who who watch probably realise we don’t often have a script, but this is going to be something rather special…I can’t (and won’t) say too much now, but I’m sure you’ll be surprised. Watch this space for more in the meantime.

Via the Annals of Improbable Research (everyone’s favourite journal), and the Guardian comes news about a interesting project to establish what ‘understanding’ a theory means. Can you claim to understand an area of science where the maths is beyond you?

Full details are here.

Researching a column on Gravity probe B for the magazine, I came across the following quotation which I suspect I’ll be using in lectures from now on.

Ptolomy invented a Universe and it lasted two thousand years. Newton invented a Universe and it lasted two hundred years. Now Dr Einstein has invented a new Universe, and noone knows how long this one will last.

- George Bernard Shaw, 1930

A short announcement to say that, contrary to advertising, Brian, Patrick and I will not be appearing at Astrofest this year. We hope to arrange some public appearances shortly, however.

Update : We have managed to reach an agreement with the organisers. There will be a short presentation, a chance to ask questions and a book signing.
New comment filtering software is up and running, so I’m going to relax the restrictions and see what happens.

Just a quick plug for the RAS meeting tomorrow afternoon. The open meeting is, well, open to all and the program tomorrow should be excellent. Talks are at a general level (usually!) - the program is here and includes galaxies, planet-hunting, manned spaceflight and Titan. It starts at 16:00 and is well worth a couple of hours of your time.

Althought I was clouded out last night, I’ve been enjoying the many pictures which arrived in my inbox overnight. Here are some sent to BBC News, and very lovely they are too.

Or at least, they are until we click through to picture 5, where we’re told that

Comet McNaught is passing close to the Sun, whose gravity pulls material off, giving it a big and visible ‘debris field’

which happens to be complete rubbish (as well as annoying english teachers around the world by only mustering ‘big’ and ‘visible’ as adjectives). It is the warming of the comet as it approaches the Sun that leads to the expulsion of material, which is then driven away from the Sun by the solar wind. Nothing to do with gravity at all. But I didn’t need to tell you that, did I?

UpdateBBC site now corrected.

One of the biggest problems in filming the Sky at Night is deciding what to put in and when. Normally, we film in the week before transmission and in the past have even managed to insert news breaking early on the Sunday morning.

This time, we filmed early because of Christmas and were caught out. I was in two minds whether to mention Comet McNaught, but as it was so low ignored it. Instead, it’s putting on quite a show. Here’s the advice for tonight from Pete Lawrence.

Get to a location with a flat WSW horizon and look out just after sunset. 16.15-17.30 is best (17.30 is the setting time). If you can see Venus, the comet is just over an outstretched hand’s width at arms’ length, to the right of it (and slightly down).

The comet is very bright, and easy to see in twilight skies. Bincoulars after sunset should show it easily.

I know it’s the 2nd, but it seems like a good time to have a look around and try and predict what might happen in the next year (which will all be wrong).

From a local perspective, it’s going to be a busy year for the Sky at Night. On April 24th 1957 the first program was broadcast and it (and Patrick) have been going strong ever since. Most of our effort at the minute is going into the April program (frustratingly, on April 2nd rather than April 1st) which is going to be very…different (but not too different). Despite big plans, this blog will continue to limp from late update to late update, and increased Bang! activity will ensure that most posts are plugs.

In the rest of the solar system, I’m looking forward to a further flood of images from Mars, particularly from the Hi-RISE camera on MRO, and I predict that both Spirit and Opportunity will be going strong at the end of the year. Opportunity might well be stuck in the bottom of Victoria Crater, but there’s plenty down there to keep everyone busy for a while. There is much more data arriving than can be analysed at the minute – perhaps Mars scientists developed a hoarding mentality during the long gap between Viking in the 1970s and more recent missions. Phoenix should be launched to join the fleet toward the end of the year too.

Cassini at Saturn will continue to produce incredible results; all but one of the close flybys is of Titan, where I expect at least one press release to announce the discovery of lakes (again). There’s also a close flyby of Iapetus to look forward to in September.

So much for planetary science. The results from Gravity Probe B – which was supposed to test the theory of relativity to an unprecedented accuracy – are expected in April. This could be the biggest story for years, but given the lack of any gossip about the results I predict that Einstein will pass yet another test. Speaking of fundamental physics, the Large Hadron Collider will finally begin operation, although it will not become the most powerful accelerator until well into 2007.

It should take a few years for enough ‘events’ to accumulate at the LHC in order for discoveries to be made, so I predict that by the end of 2007 we’ll still have no idea what the mysterious dark matter might be. I don’t expect much progress towards understanding ‘dark energy’ either, and solving these two problems are going to be top of the wish list for Christmas next year.

I think we may have got one of the other things on the list though. I suspect COROT, which was launched just the other day will have discovered at least one rocky planet in an Earth-like orbit. It’s going to stare at individual patches of sky for five months at a time, and I have a hunch that Earths might end up being rather common, so I expect one in the first bunch of stars. As I said before, though, the data analysis is the hard part.

Some time soon, though, Spanish scientists should have an amazing present in the form of the world’s largest single telescope, the Gran Telescopio Canarias, which (according to its webpage) was due for first light in 2006 (but hasn’t got there yet). Here’s to many discoveries for it and everyone else in 2007…and lots of things we don’t expect.

You may have noticed the lack of comments recently. I’m afraid I’ve been absolutely swamped with comment spam - if anyone knows of a good wordpress plugin, please let me know via email. Thanks…