Chris Lintott’s Universe

This week’s Carnival of Space is now live, over at the Martian Chronicles blog. The Carnival is the best way to find new writers about everything astronomy and space online, so make sure you click through and find something.

Personally, I enjoyed the update on the Chariot lunar rover – which took part in the inauguration parade in Washington this week – provided by Potentia Tenebras Repellendi.

It pains me to say this, but New Scientist has just handed the creationists an enormous gift, something we’re going to be arguing over for years. It’s one they’re already making use of, as this report in the Dallas Morning News about recent Texas Board of Education meetings shows (Hat tip: Phil)

New Scientist Cover art

It must have seemed like a good idea. The cover above will certainly sell copies of the magazine, I imagine. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do a steady trade from back issue orders of this for years and years, although whether the people who want to read ‘Darwin was wrong’ are interested in the rest of New Scientist‘s content is another matter.

Let me rewind. This week’s edition of New Scientist leads with a story by writer Graham Lawton. You can read the full article here. The idea is uncontroversial enough; that the image of a branching ‘tree of life’ was (a) central to Darwin’s view of the world (so critical that ‘Without it the theory of evolution would never have happened.’) and (b) Wrong, because hybridization and the swapping of genetic material between species quickly turns a nice, linear tree into a tangled bush.

I’ve just finished Janet Browne’s magnificent biography of Darwin which provides a more nuanced view. If you want a more forthright, shorter explanation of why the first point might be rubbish try the Evolution Blog. For an explanation of why point 2 isn’t controversial see Sandwalk.

Even if the article had been 100% true, the problem is this: By splashing the ‘news’ that Darwin was wrong, New Scientist plays up to the idea that evolution can be attacked by attacking Darwin. Of course he was wrong, about many things; he was writing a century or so before DNA was even discovered, for goodness’ sake. As PZ Myers says, It’s a symptom of creationist influence that journals would think that hyping a story that “150 year old theory gets revised!” is newsworthy.

I’m sure New Scientist’s intentions were either unconscious or innocent – perhaps they thought the headline would appear to their scientifically literate audience already sick of Darwin commemoration in this, the 200th year since his birth. But nonetheless that Dallas Morning News story gives us a taste of what we’re in for :

Rep. Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands … said there have been “significant challenges” to evolution theory. She cited a recent news article in which a European scientist disputed Darwin’s “tree of life” showing common ancestors for all living things.

It’s too late. The genie is out of the lamp, and all of us who deal with questions about creationism are going to have to get used to hearing about ‘The New Scientist article that said…’. Nonetheless, a contrite apology – as public as possible – by the magazine in next Thursday’s issue is now required.

I’ve always been in awe of the work done by Pamela and Fraser over at Astronomy Cast. It was a honour to be invited on as a guest a few months ago, and even more of an honour to be invited back.

You can listen to Pamela and I discussing the trials and tribulations of modern cosmology here. Enjoy..

Astronomy’s appeal is inextricably linked to the visual richness of the subject, but it’s not just images from professional observatories that take our breath away. Astrophotography with amateur telescopes is thriving like never before, as more and more people experiment with digital cameras, webcams and all the rest. We know from the Sky at Night just how good the quality of many of these images is – every programme is scattered with contributions from all over the world, but it’s about time those who enrich our view of the sky got a little more attention.

BBC Sky at Night magazine in combination with the Royal Observatory Greenwich are proud to announce the launch of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. It’s open to anyone – anywhere in the world – capable of taking a picture of the sky and will be judged by an expert panel, and myself. The shortlisted photographs will be professionally printed and displayed in an exhibition at the Royal Observatory itself – an honour for any astronomer.

We hope this annual competition will grow to become as important an event as the Wildlife photographer of the year, but that can only happen if you submit your images.

To enter (or to view the competition!), go to the official website here. I’m looking forward to sorting through the results in August.

The new results from astronomers using two telescopes on Hawaii – NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility and the giant Keck telescope – which reveal the presence of methane in the atmosphere of Mars are enormously exciting. As far as we know, methane signals the presence of one of two things – either life or, more likely I would say, substantial geological activity on the surface. The volatile molecule will break down in the atmosphere, so for it to exist in detectable quantities it must be being replenished by one means or the other.

The press release makes no mention of the results from ESA’s Mars Express which also found methane in Mars’ atmosphere, announced a few years ago. The results of the Mars Express team were published in Science, the same journal that will carry the new results.

From what I can gather, the new results are an important confirmation of the Mars Express data, and move our understanding of what’s going on a step further forward. But not to mention that an ESA spacecraft had got there first is certainly uncharitable, and verges on the misleading (and why didn’t journalists check the story by googling ‘methane +mars’, for example?).

There used to be an old and hoary joke doing the rounds about how many times water had been discovered on Mars. Let’s not do the same with methane, potentially the most exciting discovery on the red planet for quite some time.

P.S. As ever Emily at the Planetary Society has all the details, including what exactly is new (seasonal variation) and how this fits with other work.

I’m up in Tromso, northern Norway, filming the Northern Lights with the Sky at Night team. We need to dash out to make the most of the fleeting hours of twilight here in the Arctic circle, so I’ll write more later, but for now enjoy this picture from last night’s display. It was taken by Pete Lawrence or me (we were sharing a camera, but Pete did all the hard work) and is featured on Space Weather today.

Aurora from Tromso

The UK is currently engaged in an effort to subvert the celebrations for the International Year of Astronomy. While we’re clearly in favour of IYA as a whole, it appears that far too much credit is being given to that notorious Italian, Galileo. Sure, he discovered the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, not that he knew what the latter were, but he wasn’t the first to map the Moon. That, it seems, was an englishman called Thomas Harriot.

You’ll be hearing a lot more of Harriot, but in the meantime I present my modest contribution to this rebellion : a 365 days of astronomy podcast staring everyone’s favourite astronomical historian, Allan Chapman.

(And if you haven’t already subscribed to 365 days of astronomy then you really should do. It’s the only way to include a daily dose of astronomical content in your carefully balanced diet.

Remember Phoenix’s discovery of snow on Mars?. In the last public talk of the AAS conference yesterday, Principal Investigator Peter Smith updated those of us who normally think about galaxies rather than planets on Phoenix’s mission and the analysis that’s underway. There wasn’t too much new to say, but he did let slip that late in the mission they did detect falling ice not only high in the atmosphere, but actually reaching the ground.

So not only does it snow high up on Mars, but at least at the northerly latitude of Phoenix it hits the ground too. An amazing thought, isn’t it?

An American Astronomical Society tradition is the party held on the Wednesday evening. I’m sorry to let you down by not bringing you all the gossip- what happens at the AAS party stays at the AAS party – but it’s reassuring to see that the lecture hall is busy this morning for the first talk of the day, so let me talk about that instead.

It’s been given by Steve Ritz, one of the team behind Fermi, NASA’s new gamma-ray space telescope which was launched in June last year. Fermi was known, before its launch, as GLAST – the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope. Gamma-rays mark the most energetic end of the electromagnetic spectrum, and so Fermi sees some of the most dramatic events and most energetic objects anywhere in the Universe.

The gamma-ray sky looks very different from that our eyes can see; the lecturer pointed out that Fermi operates in the only region of the spectrum where the Moon is brighter than the Sun, for example! Satellites have looked at the sky at these short wavelengths before; the most famous was the Compton gamma-ray observatory, and it’s with these previous results that Ritz began his talk. For starters, there’s an obvious background glow – the source of which is unknown – in front of which we see emission from our galaxy (the long stripe across the all-sky map seen below). There are some individual sources, too; nearly 300 of them, but the identity of half of these is unknown.

EGRET all-sky gamma ray map

Fermi is a much more sophisticated spacecraft than Compton was, and even after only six months there are plenty of new results for astronomers to chew over. It carries two instruments; the Large Area Telescope can view more than 20% of the sky at once, while the Gamma-ray burst monitor scans the whole sky for dramatic sudden changes. Instead of pointing the spacecraft at specific objects, Fermi normally scans across the sky repeatedly, and in total each pixel on the sky has already been viewed for 2 million seconds. As this process continues, the team will see fainter and fainter objects or watch the brighter ones change.

Faint means faint, here, too. Ritz mentioned that one of the goals of the mission is to monitor pulsars – the spinning remnants of massive stars which shine out boldly in the radio. By contrast, Fermi might be lucky to receive ten individual photons of light a day, and yet they’ve managed to draw conclusions from their observations. One of the most remarkable first results is a pulsar (CTA1) that only shines in gamma-rays – not in any other part of the spectrum. This strange behaviour is most likely a result of our particular viewing angle, but much more work needs to be done.

Perhaps the most dramatic feature of the gamma-ray sky is the presence of gamma-ray bursts, ‘the biggest bangs since the Big one’. Fermi is on course to detect roughly 250 of these each and every year, and the selection it’s already found include the burst with the highest apparent energy ever seen. These events remain mysterious, despite the sterling work in discovery provided by the Swift satellite over the last few years, and Fermi’s ability to look in many different wavelengths at once will be very important here.

There’s plenty in the data set for those of us that study galaxies, too. Fermi sees the most active black holes in the nearby Universe, lurking in the centre of active galactic nuclei (AGN). These objects can and do change extremely rapidly, flaring and sputtering as (presumably) the fuel drops into the black hole, and there will be much discussion of variations in brightness seen in the data, particularly in the 20 or so bright galaxies that Fermi will be concentrating on.

The talk was clearly an early and whirlwind tool through a huge host of topics. Ritz closed by reminding astronomers that they are invited to apply to use the observatory for their own projects, and I suspect keeping up with Fermi’s progress will be essential for years to come. As the lecture’s final slide said – ‘join the fun’!

I think I made the lot of the sub-mm astronomer, working extremely hard just to identify blobs, sound pretty thankless earlier today. Strangely, I managed to do so without even complaining that the worst thing about using these short-wavelength radio waves is that most of them are absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere so unless you’re high up, you might as well not bother.

One solution is to go as high as you can; I’m in favour of this because it means I get to go to Hawaii or Spain, but an international collaboration of astronomers has a much better idea.

BLAST hangs from balloon.

The BLAST collaboration have been flying their satellite underneath a balloon, getting high above most of that pesky atmospheric water. I’ve just come from a talk which detailed their results on a set of galaxies, but Wednesday night offers a chance for you to ride along with the BLAST team. BBC4′s Storyville thread will be featuring an excellent documentary about the project at 10pm GMT.

I was lucky enough to see a preview disk, and it’s brilliant, one of the best scientific documentaries I’ve seen for a long while. Watch it (there’s a list of opportunities here for those of you not in the UK) and feel even more amazed at the lengths sub-mm astronomers are driven to.

Update : Watch the trailer!

Hat tip : Andrew Jaffe for reminding me to post about Blast! the movie.