The second Living Space show is now up, featuring the latest results from Cassini, a chat with the Sky at Night’s very own Pete Lawrence and best of all a preview of the shuttle mission due for take off this evening with British-born astronaut Piers Sellers. Please do come and have a listen.
This week’s Carnival of Space is up, although it’s too early in the morning for me to concentrate on any of the posts.
Venus has been hard to ignore in the evening sky these last few months, and it’s helped rekindle my love of city astronomy. It’s not that I’d ever lost the habit of looking up as soon as I step outside, it’s just that I’d begun to long for trips outside of town to see a properly dark sky. The searchlight of Venus shining in the west has been a reminder that even from the most light polluted spot you can watch the slow dance of the sky as the months go by, and that’s partly why we chose it as the star of the show for the first Living Space podcast.
I’ve been keeping up with the latest results from Venus Express, and looking forward to whatever Messenger will have provided during it’s last swing past yesterday, but it’s been a long while since I did any background reading on the Earth’s evil twin. I was therefore surprised when interviewing Fred Taylor for the podcast when he said confidently that there must have been oceans on Venus. I knew it had long been suspected that there was water, carried to the young planet’s surface by comets or contained in the gas released from volcanoes (and Venus certainly was and maybe still is a volcanic planet). But whole oceans? Where did all that water go?
The usual reason given for studying Venus (and other small, rocky balls like Mars) is that we can test our models of how atmospheres work, and then apply the results to Earth. Rather wonderfully, while reading up on the background following Fred’s interview, I found a wonderful piece of work from five years ago which applies what we already know about Earth to Venus. Researchers from NASA studied the only place on Earth where a ‘runaway greenhouse’ effect applies - a place where more energy is being absorbed from the Sun by the Earth’s surface than can be emitted. This is a runaway effect because the hotter the surface gets, the more energy it can absorb.
On Earth, there’s (currently - see the comments on this post below for the latest discussion here of our attempts to warm the planet) only one place where this happens (in the Pacific, just NE of Australia) but this must be what happened across the whole of Venus billions of years ago.
The moral of the story? The more we study all of the planets, including Earth, the more we learn about all of them. And that you should go and listen to Fred’s interview over at Living Space. It’ll be joined by a new podcast coming on Friday.
It appears to be comic week. This appeals a lot.
It hasn’t been a good week for my blood pressure. Reading stupid things written by people who know nothing is fine. Reading stupid things written or said by people in a position of authority who really should know better is just upsetting.
First up, NASA chief executive Mike Griffin.
First of all, I don’t think it’s within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.
I’m not sure where to begin with this, so I’ll let the Bad Astronomer say it for me, and move on to something more local.
Step forward the Rev Jan Ainsworth, the Church of England’s new head of education, who according to the Guardian said about intellegent design
You would get howls of protest from the scientific community, which would say there is absolutely no place for it in the curriculum. But you could do it in history of science,” she added, pointing out that religious education lessons in CofE schools include discussions of different beliefs.
This is just utterly wrong, so consider this my howl of protest. Would it be possible to include discussions of the alternatives to evolution that were considered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Yes, and such a discussion might even be a useful way of demonstrating the evidence in support of evolution. Is intellegent design such an alternative? No. It was invented 20 years ago when the US supreme court ruled that teaching ‘creation science’ breached the ban on mixing state and religion. See this and much else on the Panda’s Thumb for more details.
I’m writing to the Guardian right now.
Fed up with waiting a month for the next Sky at Night? Missing out on the huge amount of astronomy news each week? The solution can now be found at Living Space, the new collaboration between myself and Harriet Scott. We’re joined on the first program by Fred Taylor of Venus Express and Doug Ellison of Unmanned Spaceflight.
Harriet and I have been working towards this for the last year, so it’s wonderful to finally have something ready to go public. Please do go and listen (or even subscribe) and let me know what you think, either over there, over here or via email.
