Tag Archives: astronomy

February 2023 in Review

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Sorry to all my faithful readers worldwide (who I could undoubtedly count with the fingers of one hand with some left over) for my lengthy posting gap. Anyway, let’s have a look at what I was thinking about in February.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Pfizer says they are not doing gain of function research on potential extinction viruses. But they totally could if they wanted to. And this at a time when the “lab leak hypothesis” is peeking out from the headlines again. I also became concerned about bird flu, then managed to convince myself that maybe it is not a huge risk at the moment, but definitely a significant risk over time.

Most hopeful story: Jimmy Carter is still alive as I write this. The vision for peace he laid out in his 2002 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech is well worth a read today. “To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honorable recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions that beget further war.”

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: It was slim pickings this month, but Jupiter affects the Sun’s orbit, just a little bit.

Jupiter and the Sun orbit each other

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This is just a random science tidbit. Two bodies with mass will always interact just a little bit, but in the case of the Earth our effect on the Sun is so small as to be negligible. In the case of Jupiter, it is not. Jupiter is so massive that it moves the Sun just a little bit, so they are actually technically orbiting each other. As for exactly what gravity is and where it came from, I can’t tell you, but I am grateful for it.

more on Oumuamua

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The media and mainstream scientific consensus seem to have dismissed the extraterrestrial object Oumuamua that passed the Earth last year as a natural object. (But according to this article, we should think of it more as our solar system passing the object. It turns out we are not the center of the universe!) Not so fast, says Avi Loeb, “one of the world’s foremost astronomers“. He says “the most rational, conservative explanation is that ‘Oumuamua was produced by an alien civilisation.”

Warning: This is a potential brain-exploding article if you choose to take it seriously and think about it too hard. He says the reason this is the first time we have seen an object of this type might be that we didn’t have the technology to look. Now we have the technology, we are actively looking, and the technology is continuing to improve quickly. He says we “we should assume that we will see another object once every three or four years” with existing technology, and possibly once a month with near-future (a few months or years from now) technology. This would imply “that there are plenty of them, a quadrillion of them, inside the Oort cloud. Inside the solar system.”

He has been talking about the likelihood of alien life for awhile:

In a 2014 paper, he described the likelihood that rocky planets with liquid water provided the chemistry to support life when the universe was as little as ten million years old. In the 13.8 billion years since that time, billions of galaxies – each home to billions of Earth-like planets – have formed. To say that life, intelligence and civilisation have emerged only once in such an expanse of time and space is, he argues, a radical view.

New Statesman

He has a new book on this subject called Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

And I can’t help saying it: The Truth is Out There, my friends. (Remember when a TV show about a simple vaccine distribution conspiracy linked to aliens was considered quaint entertainment? That ancient civilization and culture was called 1990s USA and will no doubt be the subject of many anthropological studies when the alien scientists land.)

April 2020 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • The coronavirus thing just continued to grind on and on, and I say that with all due respect to anyone reading this who has suffered serious health or financial consequences, or even lost someone they care about. After saying I was done posting coronavirus tracking and simulation tools, I continued to post them throughout the month – for example here, here, here, here, and here. After reflecting on all this, what I find most frightening and depressing is that if the U.S. government wasn’t ready for this crisis, and isn’t able to competently manage this crisis, it is not ready for the next crisis or series of crises, which could be worse. It could be any number of things, including another plague, but what I find myself fixating on is a serious food crisis. I find myself thinking back to past crises – We got through two world wars, then managed to avoid getting into a nuclear war to end all wars, then worked hard to secure the loose nuclear weapons floating around. We got past acid rain and closed the ozone hole (at least for awhile). Then I find myself thinking back to Hurricane Katrina – a major regional crisis we knew was coming for decades, and it turned out no government at any level was prepared or able to competently manage the crisis. The unthinkable became thinkable. Then the titans of American finance broke the global financial system. Now we have a much bigger crisis in terms of geography and number of people affected all over the world. The crises may keep escalating, and our competence has clearly suffered a decline. Are we going to learn anything?

Most hopeful story:

  • Well, my posts were 100% doom and gloom this month, possibly for the first time ever! Just to find something positive to be thankful for, it’s been kind of nice being home and watching my garden grow this spring.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • There’s a comet that might be bright enough to see with the naked eye from North America this month.

how did the moon form?

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This article in Science Daily says that one theory consistent with the evidence is that the moon formed when something as large as Mars slammed into the proto-Earth (which is what the Earth was called before it was called the Earth. Or to be more precise, there was nobody there to call it anything, but that is what we now call the thing that was there before the thing that we now call the Earth.) This may also be how the Earth came to have a lot of the elements that allowed life to form, which is actually the main point of the article.

the new exoplanets

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This long NASA article first gets you excited about the possibility of life on eight new planets it has just discovered, and then throws cold water (actually, make that lethal X-rays) all over your excitement. Still, the possibility of some kind of “slime” exists, which I guess is something.

Scientists are pondering the possibilities after this week’s announcement: the discovery of seven worlds orbiting a small, cool star some 40 light-years away, all of them in the ballpark of our home planet in terms of their heft (mass) and size (diameter). Three of the planets reside in the “habitable zone” around their star, TRAPPIST-1, where calculations suggest that conditions might be right for liquid water to exist on their surfaces—though follow-up observations are needed to be sure…

Recent findings suggest life would have an uphill battle on a planet close to a red dwarf, largely because such stars are extremely active in their early years—shooting off potentially lethal flares and bursts of radiation…

But so little is known about how life gets its start, and how common or rare it might be in the cosmos, that tenacious life on M-dwarf planets remains a distinct possibility.

However rare life might be, it would make all the difference to find it in just one more place besides Earth. Because if we find it in one more place, and are sure it arose independently of Earth, that would mean it is probably present in many more places. If we never find life anywhere else, we could consider the possibility of seeding other planets with some kind of life from Earth. This way, even if we don’t last forever, intelligent life would have a chance to arise again after a few billion years.

Stellarium

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Stellarium is free, open source software that simulates the night sky as it would appear from anywhere anytime (no foolin’ I promise). It’s used by professional planetariums, but you can download it to your Windows, Apple, Linux or Ubuntu machine.

Here’s one more fun thing – a simulation where you can change the mass of the Sun, Earth, or Moon and see how it affects the orbits of all three. If you make the Sun too big, the Earth gets sucked into it, but if you make it too small, the Earth just flies out into space. It just reminds us that we are lucky to be here. There’s also a similar simulation where you can make up your own planets and see how they would orbit a star and each other.