Chris Lintott’s Universe

The picture shows space shuttles Atlantis and Endeavour sitting on launch pads in Florida, waiting for Atlantis’ mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. We were going to be there for the Sky at Night, but as you’ll have heard, a major failure with Hubble’s control system means that the flight is to be delayed until next year. We filmed an excellent preview of the mission with Martin Barstow last weekend, so I’m chalking this one up to the Sky at Night curse.

Trying to be positive, it’s obvious that we would have been in serious trouble had the faliure happened after this, the final repair mission. Right now, though, I feel like a sulky child who has had his toys taken away from him.

Meanwhile, we’re scrambling to make the best use of our tickets to the US, and to fill the large hole in forthcoming programmes that this will leave. An unexpected bright comet, or a supernova, would go down very well round about now, please.

It may surprise you to know that the disparate, motley, collection of individuals that make up the professional astronomical community are as subject to the swings and roundabouts of fashion as anyone else, but nevertheless it’s true. Fashions can change the way we think about our research (can that pet project be pitched as vital for cosmology, or as contributing to ‘astrobiology’?), and infect the language that we use to talk about ideas.

There comes a time, however, when it is necessary to draw a line in the sand and defend it against all who dare to try to cross. In this spirit, I’m declaring war on all those – scientists, press officers and journalists – who use the word ‘dark’ to describe a new discovery.

First, we had ‘dark matter’. Astronomers discovered that pretty much wherever they looked, from galaxies to galaxy clusters, the stuff we can see can’t possibly be all there is. In order to hold objects together, we need stuff which has gravity – and thus can help keep galaxies in one piece – but doesn’t shine. In other words, we need matter which is dark, and we can chatter happily about ‘dark matter’ without raising my blood pressure.

Second, along came ‘dark energy’. Observations of distant supernovae revealed that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, not slowing down under the influence of gravity as it should do. While the cause remains unknown, most researchers believe we are seeing the effects of a fifth fundamental force (to add to the traditional four : the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity). Such a force must be associated with energy, so I’ll concede the second word. But why, oh why, oh why (etc) do we have to call it ‘dark’ energy? Is gravity ‘dark’? What would it mean to have a light or dark weak nuclear force? It’s arrant nonsense, it’s confusing (as it encourages lumping in with dark matter, almost certainly a completely separate problem) and it makes my blood boil.

Nonetheless, probably because I didn’t have a blog at the time, ‘dark energy’ has become a standard term. This should strengthen our arms for the fight ahead, though, because looming into view is the monstrosity that is the ‘dark flow’. The result is interesting, although I haven’t had time to read the papers and am still somewhat sceptical. Taken at face value, a new analysis seems to suggest that hundreds of galaxy clusters are being carried along at roughly 2 million miles an hour, pulled by matter beyond our observable Universe.

As I said, interesting enough. But the press release and the papers, although mercifully not the titles of the papers, call this a ‘dark flow’. What does that even mean? How would a ‘light flow’ appear? Surely here we can all agree that using the word ‘dark’ doesn’t help us understand what’s going on – it’s just confusing.

Something must be done. I’m not sure what, so let’s just call it the dark campaign for now. Whatever it is, it starts here.

Catchup post from DotAstronomy

One of the most interesting talks on day one of the was by Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society, about armchair space exploration.

The development of this field has been incredible, with rapid release of ‘raw’ data now the rule rather than the exception. Emily made the excellent point that in learning to use their digital cameras and how to share the results people are already learning the skills they need to make use of that data. Similarly, software like powerpoint can be used to produce simple animations – Emily’s example was Encledus passing behind Dione as seen from the Cassini orbiter. This is useful scientific data because it helps refine the moons’ orbits, but it also looks pretty good.

The example that made my jaw drop, though, is this one. Ted Stryk is a biologist an english professor who in his spare time reprocessed the data from Voyager 2′s flyby of Uranus, which took place back in 1986. One of the joys of exploring the outer planets – as more recent missions like Cassini have reminded us – is the way that the moons change from being dots in an image to being worlds in their own right. Uranus was no exception – here’s Ariel as it appeared on January 1st 1986.

The sad thing is that this is essentially the only view Voyager had – the part of Ariel that is in the dark would have to wait for the next mission, which even now, twenty years later, has yet to hit the drawing board let along the launch pad. Except that, thanks for Ted, we don’t have to wait. He reprocessed the data, and suddenly the dark side of Ariel appeared, lit by Uranus-shine just as you sometimes see our Moon lit by Earthshine.

What a stunning project. Go and see the other moons.

<b>Update</b>:Emily emailed to point out I’d posted the wrong before image. It’s correct now.

Here’s my talk from yesterday :

Live streaming video by Ustream

This is both brilliant, and completely mad. It’s coffee time on day 2 of the dot astronomy conference, and almost everyone here is clustered in front of a poster explaining the philosophy of the WETI institute, which has the following mission statement :

The mission of the WETI Institute is to understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of intelligent life in the universe. The WETI Institute has chosen an entirely novel approach to achieve that goal. Instead of actively searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, the idea is to simply WAIT – until the others find us.

Enjoy.

(The poster is here in pdf format – it’s a 1Mb download.

Not the latest Dr Who episode, but the result of playing with Ed Gomez’s Impact Calculator which he’s talking about at the dotastronomy conference.

Here’s the result of a medium sized impact on the centre of London. Go and make your own.

I’m in Cardiff, for the dot astronomy conference organised by Rob Simpson of the Orbiting Frog blog. It should be an interesting few days, and I’ll try and keep you up to date here. I’ve just given the first talk – about Galaxy Zoo and our plans for the future – and you can watch all of the talks live on ustream via the feed here.

(Embedded stream deleted now the talk is over)

All the videos will end up on youtube at the conference’s channel which is here.

The New Scientist that dropped through my door yesterday includes what looks like an interesting story, about a strange anomaly affecting spacecraft that have flown past the Earth, a standard technique for hopping about the solar system. Each of them has had what the report’s author, Marcus Chown, calls ‘an inexplicable velocity change’. The effect is small – the Galileo probe, for example, gained 3.9 millimetres per second extra – but according to discoverer John Anderson (formerly of JPL) appears to be real.

I remember seeing his paper when it was first released, and I wasn’t smart enough to do any more than be intrigued. Marcus must be wishing that New Scientist had delayed publication by a week or so, though, because earlier this week a new explanation emerged. In a paper covered by the excellent arXiv blog, the effect disappears when the relativistic effects of the spin of the Earth and the satellite are taken into account.

This isn’t Marcus’ fault – magazine deadlines are what they are. But it will be interesting to see how New Scientist covers this development. They get a lot of flack from academics who think they cherry pick only the weird stories, so let’s see if this more prosaic explanation finds a home in next week’s magazine.

There’s excellent LHC coverage everywhere. Andy has a quick round up for example, and I highly recommend HastheLHCdestroyedtheEarth.com as the best response to the lack of catastrophe. Stuart, meanwhile, has found humour in the online logbooks of one of the experiments…
I was recently interviewed by a researcher trying to figure out what influences people to become scientists, and was slightly flummoxed by the discovery that it was hard to come up with a coherent story. What I do remember is a series of specific incidents which made an impression – and one of those was particle physics’ greatest acheivements of the 1990s.

I was still at school when the final confirmation of the existence of the top quark was announced. I’d just got to the stage where I was reading enough popular science to understand what a quark was, but it’s not as if I’d been waiting for the top quark to make an appearance. Yet it made a huge impression.

I heard about it, you see, on the car radio while being driven to school and it was the first item on the news. It was the first moment I realised that physics was not only still progressing, but could still make discoveries that could capture the attention of the world.

That’s why the flood of stories about the LHC will be important, because all over the world that same realisation has appeared in the minds of people who are reading newspapers on the way to work (no mention in this morning’s Chicago Tribune, though – I’m travelling again) or listening to the radio or talking to people down in the pub.

I’m slightly out of touch over here, but it’s interesting that most of the coverage – from the BBC’s radio 4 extravaganza to the headlines in the papers – have led on astronomical themes (recreating the conditions of the Universe, mainly). Another reminder of the public interest in my subject – even if we don’t mind lending it to the particle physicists for a while. Actually, could we have some dark matter candidates in return?

This weekend is proving to be one of the more bizarre I’ve had for a while. I’m writing this from a barn on a pumpkin farm about two hours’ drive south of Chicago. I’m here for the Chicago Astronomical Society’s Astrofest and I’ll be talking later about Galaxy Zoo (of course).

I can’t resist sharing this video with you, though. The Adler Planetarium run a high altitude balloon programme using students and interns (and a weather balloon six-foot across) to launch instruments more than twice as high as your average Boeing 767 reaches. For reasons best known to themselves, one of these flights carried a marshmallow bird called a peep along with it.

You can watch the flight of the Peep below :