Chris Lintott’s Universe

It’s not every day you get asked to spend £250 million, but that’s what we’ll be trying to do in a debate at Science Oxford next Wednesday. I’ll be trying to persuade the audience to back my idea of how to spend an extra quarter of a billion pounds per year on UK space exploration. Enjoying stirring as I do, I’ll be arguing that the money would be better spent on ground based astronomy.

If you’d like to come along and vote for me take part in the debate then tickets are still available via the link above.

This week’s Living Space is now online, featuring news from Jupiter with BAAJupiter section director John Rogers, and a fantastic interview with Stuart Clark. Aside from Patrick, Stuart has had the greatest influence on both my careers and it was fantastic to be able to get him on the show.

Today’s Living Space podcast is now available, featuring an extended interview with astronaut Piers Sellers. It’s worth listening if only to find out the real answer to the old question about what can be seen with the naked eye from space. The answer made me - and everyone I’ve talked to about it - go ‘Wow’.

Tomorrow’s Living Space is the first of our extended interviews, featuring twenty minutes of chat with astronaut Piers Sellers. With the crew of Atlantis struggling with a whole host of problems, what better time to hear about the problems of working in space? Harriet will also have the latest on the current shuttle mission, and you can of course still listen to the two previous episodes (which are up there now).

Thanks to all those who have emailed with comments on the podcasts. All feedback is welcome! If you haven’t gone and listened yet, why not?

At about five am this morning, two thirds of the way through my second shift on the telescope, I went outside to watch the dawn. The peak immediately behind the JCMT is called Pu’u Poliahu and I decided that would be the perfect spot to watch the Sun come up. Poliahu is the Hawai’ian snow goddess, who was constantly at war with her sister, the volcano god Pele. Pele’s home is the still active Mauna Loa, whereas Poliahu lived on the summit of Mauna Kea which is frequently snow covered. Pu’u Poliahu is therefore a sacred site, but as the place where the first astronomical site testing on the mountain was done, I suppose it might be considered sacred to astronomers too!

The sky was already bright when I stepped out of the door, with a crescent moon hanging about the summit ridge which is home to Gemini, UKIRT and several other telescopes. I walked through one of the JCMT’s neighbours down here in ’sub-mm valley’, the SMA which consists of eight small dishes, and began climbing the mountain. I could see Jupiter extremely low on the horizon, and off to the right I could see the neighbouring island of Maui sticking above the clouds.

As I climbed higher, I began to feel the effects of the altitude. Climbing even a small hill at more than 14,000 feet above sea level is not easy, and I found myself becoming short of breath. I was also being blown about a bit by an extremely strong wind cutting across the summit, gusts of which blew me from one side of the track to the other. I had my back to the West, and between concentrating on breathing and resisting the wind I didn’t turn round to look at the dawn until I reached the top.

My pictures - taken while crouching down trying to shelter the camera from the wind - don’t do the sight justice. With the crescent moon above the greatest collection of professional telescopes anywhere in the world, the colour of the dawn was a deep red, purple low on the horizon rising to a golden yellow higher up. There were still stars visible in the sky as well as the Moon, and most of the telescopes were still open, most of them pointing toward me, away from the rising Sun.

I know it may be hard to believe, but sitting up there I was thinking of all the times when doing research feels like a hard slog, a prison sentence in front of a computer which won’t cooperate. Combined with the excellent data we got last night, it’s trips like this that remind me why I’m doing any of this in the first place. All I could think about (apart from the need to avoid being literally blown away) was how incredibly, incredibly lucky I am. I think I stayed up there for about twenty minutes, not able to tear my eyes away from the colours laid out in front of me (and realising that clouds are useful for something!).

And walking back down, frozen but ecstatic, I thought about how unique this wonderful island is. On the way up to the telescope, we’d looked over and seen the glow of the vents from one of the world’s most active volcanoes. Where else in the world could you find such an amazing variety within an area not much bigger than greater London? I also think I found the perfect spot to capture almost all of Mauna Kea’s telescopes on pixels.

From left to right: Subaru, Keck, IRTF (NASA), Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, Gemini North, Uni. Hawaii, UKIRT, small Uni. Hawaii dome and in valley JCMT and CSO.

I love my job.

More from Mauna Kea shortly, but to distract you in the meantime here’s this week’s Carnival of Space. Given the weather up here at the minute, I might need the distraction.

It’s 7.20am. I started my shift when we left the astronomer’s residence at 8pm. It’ll be at least another three, probably more like four hours until I’m back in bed. And then we’ll do it all again tomorrow.

And yet getting fantastic data with Harp, the new instrument on the JCMT, can make react like this (spontaneous movement captured by the webcam). It’s not even my data as the weather’s still preventing us from doing what we came here for.

I went out and watched the dawn earlier, but I’ll save that story for when I’ve got the pictures off the digital camera.

Morning. Or evening. I’m not sure, you see. Living in three different time zones does that to you. There’s UK time, which my body is still just clinging to. Local Hawaiian time, too, and nocturnal time which means that it’s 7pm at night and time to get up.

We drove halfway up to mountain to the astronomer’s residence yesterday, spending a night here to get acclimatized before heading on up to the summit. Needless to say, last night was absolutely stunningly clear, one of the darkest skies I’ve ever seen. I was reminded of something someone in Chile said to be - ‘really good skies are grey’ with all the starlight, and last night definitely was. Seeing the Milky Way overhead stretching down into Scorpius was just stunning, especially with Jupiter high in the sky instead of hugging the horizon as it does at home.

So my hopes were high for tonight’s observing. However, I woke up this evening to find that we were sitting in the middle of a cloud. This isn’t necessarily bad news - the summit’s clear conditions rely on the inversion layer, a band of cloud which sits almost permanently around the island. So cloud here might mean that the summit is perfectly clear - but we should head on up and see. Keep an eye on us here (scroll down for the webcams).

Update 20.27 HST : Doors opening. Sky’s beautiful up here to the naked eye - Jupiter and Venus in the same sky, Crux just visible above the horizon.

Update 22:02 HST : Currently observing the molecule CS in the Antennae galaxies. The idea is that such molecules will help us understand the massive rates of star formation associated with such galactic collisions. Unfortunately we’ve got a computer problem so we’re stuck on this source for a while, and it’s setting…

Update 22:69 HST : Computer’s fixed, and we’re off to our next target, which is Sakurai’s object. Which targets we observe are determined by where they are in the sky, and also by the quality of the sky. As we’re observing in the sub-mm, nothing matters is the amount of water vapour in the air above us (which is also the reason to be so high up). That means that it’s possible to walk outside and see a perfect sky, and come back in and see terrible conditions - which is what we have tonight. So we do other people’s observations, and they’ll do ours, and in the meantime we’re working on data taken for our project on previous nights.

Update 1:23am HST : We’re still looking at Sakurai’s object, looking for hydrogen cyanide. This is usually used as a tracer of high density gas, but I’m not sure what it signifies in this object. I’ll look it up when we get a second. We’ve finished the rough analysis of our data on the Antennae, and are fairly confident we have a detection of CS, which is pleasing. Almost half way through the shift, and I’m going to take a walk outside shortly.

Update 3am HST : It’s cold and clear outside,but the weather from the sub-mm point of view is worse than ever. There must be some wet air up above us. As a result, we took the only decision we could in the circumstances and have switched to rock music to stay awake. Look out for air guitar on the webcam.

Update 4:09 HST : Finished our integration on Sakurai’s object (finally) and have moved to the variable V605 Aql. About which I know nothing, but if I get a second, I’ll find out for you. Feeling reasonably awake, and I haven’t attack the coffee yet either.

Update 4:55 HST : Found the science proposal (the things we spend hours writing to be allowed to get here in the first place) for the project we’ve been observing. It turns out that the objects we’ve been looking for are ‘born-again’ giant stars which were once quietly heading toward being white dwarfs. In about 20% of cases, for reasons that aren’t clear, the stars suddenly flare up again. This normally takes a couple of centuries, still pretty fast for astronomical objects but Sakurai’s object managed it in just a couple of months about a decade ago. Why look for HCN? If I’m reading this right, the stars throw off a shell of dusty material, and HCN should be contained there. Right, off to see the sunrise…

Update 6:06 HST : And it’s daylight out there. Subaru were still open when I went out, but there was a stream of other cars heading down the mountain as everyone else went home. The advantage of the sub-mm is that we can observe in daylight, so we’ve got almost three more hours on sky to go. We’re onto our third born again giant - tentative detections of the molecule we were looking for in both the others so far.

Update 7.32 HST : Feeling pretty tired now, but the view out the window is showing the beautiful red colour that I’ve only ever seen here and in bits of the South Devon I grew up in. And which I imagine covers lots of Mars. The Atacama desert was sandier, not quite so vividly red. In the meantime, we’re pointing (just) at our last science target, a high mass protostar. We’re looking for molecules that shouldn’t be there - the PhD student who wrote the proposal is trying to establish where molecules are still frozen onto the surface of dust grains despite heating from the central star.

Update 8:55 HST : The last science is done - the weather is the best we’ve had all night, and if this trend continues we’ll be observing the sources we came to see when we do it all again in about 11 hours time. The telescope is pointed at Mars to get an observation which will allow us to callibrate all of tonight’s data, and then we’re off down the hill. More tonight - probably picture based.

Hello from halfway up Mauna Kea, on the Big Island of Hawai’i. The blog this week will accompany me on my observing run at the JCMT, but in the meantime here’s the photo set from last time I was here (filming for Sky at Night). If you want to have a look around, the program is still available to watch online.

You should also go and read this essay over at Orbiting Frog about why we should study star formation in the first place.

…is here. The next question is ‘what are we going to do about it?’ because it appears that ‘nothing’ is no longer a viable option.