Chris Lintott’s Universe

I wrote yesterday about waiting a few years to watch the planets around HD 8799 move, and completely missed the fact that the Hubble Space Telescope has managed to do exactly this for one planet in Formaulhaut’s dust disk.

Here’s the disk :

Credit : NASA/STSci

And here are two images of the planet, superimposed, from 2004 and 2006.

Credit : NASA/STSci

I still want to see HD 8799′s whole system whizz round their parent star, but this is stunning.

Over the last year or so, the denziens of the Galaxy Zoo forum have been getting together to talk astronomy over a beer or two. This seems like a splendid idea, so if you’re free on Sunday 23rd November and in – or can get to – central London, then please join me and the indomitable Pamela Gay, host of the wildly successful Astronomy Cast.

We’ll be in Mabel’s Tavern in Bloomsbury, not a million miles from my old stomping ground of UCL between 2 and 5pm.

As we found out yesterday, dust storms ended the life of Phoenix, and today a JPL release tells us that Spirit is now suffering, producing less energy from its solar panels than it has at any point in the past five years. The forecast is better for the next few days, but the fear is that dust which has settled onto the solar panels will stay there unless a friendly gust of wind blows it off.

We always knew Phoenix was going to reach the end of its mission sooner rather than later, but Spirit and Opportunity had begun to look invincible. The mission team are clearly thinking similar thoughts, with the recent decision to send Opportunity off across the Martian plains to a distant crater. Let’s hope this is nothing more than a timely reminder that Mars is a harsh place for a spacecraft, and that Spirit hangs on for the better weather that’s on the way.

I’m in the office late, but am distracted by listening in to a Phoenix press teleconference happening right now. I hope the news isn’t as bad as I think it might be. Watch this space…

Update :

A few sols ago, they were doing the last of their significant science days; they’d been planning to turn off the heaters and keep an eye on the weather, and maybe just do a few images. The only problem was that a dust storm blew in, which threw out the calculations for how much power they would have. They failed to keep the batteries from ‘browning out’ – running out of power entirely. For the next few nights, Phoenix fell asleep and then woke up during the day and managed to say hello. However, power got less and less, and on November 5th2nd the team received their last communication.

While the team will be listening, they’re officially declaring Phoenix dead. A wonderful mission is over, just over 150 sols after touching down on the surface of Mars. Now the scientists can work on their data without distraction! They certainly have lots to keep them busy.

Wired’s epitaph contest has a lot of attention, but here are the winners. The winner’s excellent.

Update 2 :

The following tweet just appeared on Mars Phoenix’s Twitter feed :

01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3

Update 3 :

As we reported on the last episode of the Sky at Night, Peter Smith sounds very, very convinced that the soil Phoenix has been sampling is recent, rather than old. This may account for some of the differences from the Spirit and Opportunity results, but more excitingly suggests that the Martian surface is still changing.

Tonight’s Sky at Night includes a report from the Phoenix Mission Control in Tucson. We recorded it a couple of weeks ago, and while everything in there is still true, events on the surface of the red planet have moved on.

While not dead yet, having successfully communicated with an orbiting spacecraft on Thursday, in most meaningful ways Phoenix’s life as a scientific explorer is over.

Deciphering the results from Phoenix‘s five months or so on the surface will take a lot of time. The experiments it carried were among the most ambitious ever flown, and perhaps the frustrations – soil too sticky to fall swiftly into an oven, for example – were inevitable. I’m disappointed in particular that a measurement of the isotopic ratio of the ice (which would have given us clues as to when it last was liquid) proved impossible, but the scientific bounty from the mission is immense, and no amount of scientific greed should detract from the fact that Phoenix was hugely successful.

Credit and kudos should also go to the mission’s media team. In the five or so years I’ve been doing the Sky at Night, we’ve never been made more welcome by a mission than we were the three times we visited Phoenix in Tucson. One of the team who looked after us, Carla Bitter, Education and Public Outreach manager, has written about her feelings on the Phoenix blog.

As you can imagine, communicating real science in real time here on Earth about the daily happenings on Mars can have even the best minds reeling at the complexities of sharing new information quickly and authentically, sometimes before we really know what it all means. This is the time before mere information becomes knowledge. The time you’d like to stay quiet, to think and wonder about the data. The time it takes to assess, to examine, to argue, to understand, then finally to explain and share these new findings.

Here, we disagree. The joy of the Phoenix mission is that they’ve taken us along with them while they’ve thought, and wondered, examined and argued, doing their best to explain and share what they’re doing. If more missions did this, then we might begin to move away from the idea that our explorers of the solar system send back the Answers, complete with press release and Nature paper and with no further work required. I may be waiting eagerly for the flood of scientific papers to start flowing now that the team have more time on their hands, but I’ve enjoyed this period of glorious uncertainty too.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve seen a couple of days that made me think hard about all sorts of things. The first, at least, is tangentially related to the subject of this blog, and so I feel justified in writing about it. I’d been waiting to see Proof for a long time; the play comes with a heavy reputation having won the Pulizer prize and a Tony Award for its author, David Auburn. It’s even had the ultimate accolade of being made into a movie, starring Anthony Hopkins of all people.

It deals with the story of young mathematician, struggling with the death of her father – another mathematician, who had done brilliant work in his early 20s and then gone steadily, slowly crazy, looking for messages encoded into the Dewy Decimal system of cataloguing library books. The eponymous proof – of a theorem mathematicians have been wrestling with ‘for as long as there have been mathematicians’, although we never learn its identity – lies in one of the many notebooks that lie scattered around the house.

The production was good, gripping at times, and we, the audience, were drawn into the world of the characters. Yet I came away disappointed and even a little angry. I’d expected a play that was to mathematics what Michael Frayn’s magisterial Copernhagen was to physics; a serious attempt to engage with the ideas and mental landscape of a subject. The language of Copernhagen is filled with physics; we see Bohr and Heisenberg on stage discussing their work and – miracle of miracles – can follow along. When friends and I produced the show in Cambridge (cast : entirely arts students, crew : entirely scientists…) I would stand by the doors during the interval, and listen to our audience talk about the ideas in the play.

Proof, on the other hand, might as well have been about flower arranging. Or molecular genetics. Or stock-car racing, or anything at all for all the presence maths had. A few technical terms are dropped in – a reference to Hilbert spaces and elliptical forms suggests that the playwright had been reading press coverage of the solution to Fermat’s last theorem – but no explanation offered. Characters talked often of prime numbers – but never allowed the audience to glimpse why anyone might care.

For the play to be as good as I’d wanted it to be, I needed to believe in the character’s motivations and thoughts, yet not one of the mathematicians on stage ever gave us a glimpse of that. It was as if the show was about struggling painters, who had forgone any suggestion of belief in their art. Without that, the play felt unfinished.

Actually, it’s funny I mention painters as an analogy. The one theme that did get underlined was that mathematics is an art form, not a science. It’s something that’s been uppermost in my mind since I read a document known on the net as Lockhart’s Lament (warning – 25 page PDF).

It was written a few years ago by Paul Lockhart, a mathematician who left academic life to become a teacher. The first paragraphs capture the gist :

A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where
music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more
competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.” Educators, school systems, and the state are
put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and
decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or
composer.
Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious
black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students
become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it
would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a
thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone
composing an original piece, are considered college, and more often graduate school. .

Is maths in the same situation? Read the rest, and let me know if you agree or disagree.

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.

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?