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.

Seeing the first images of extrasolar planets around a star is a stunning moment. I found out about this earlier in the week, and have had to keep quiet (along with all the other journalists) until the embargo passed, but feast your eyes on this.

Credit : Keck Observatory

The speckle pattern is what’s left of the star’s light – most of it has been blocked to allow us to see the three, faint dots which are believed to be planets. The arrows show the direction of motion, which brings me to my main point. Imagine this : in a decade or so, someone is going to take another snapshot of the same system. We’ll actually be able to watch planets circle their parent star. It’s a mindblowing thought – as fundamental, if you’ll forgive the late night hyperbole, as Galileo’s observations of Jupiter’s moons.

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.

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.