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'WORLD of SPACE and ASTRONOMY'

Weird, Wild & Breaking News Stories in Space and Astronomy from around the World 24/7 delivered free every week with regular updates as they happen.

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Here’s a selection of Astronomy/Space related stories you may find interesting. Be sure to sign up for your own copy of Astro Space News. I absolutely do not disclose your address to anyone! There is no cost and no obligation for this service. Anyone can subscribe by completing the opt in form just over there on the right … see it, do it now! We work 24/7/365 to report the most relevant ‘Astro-Space’ news back to you … virtually as it breaks. Bookmark this page and check back regularly.

For The Media

If you are interested, an interview with astronomer, writer, educator and public lecturer representing Australasian Science Magazine and Editor of Astro Space News, Dave Reneke(Astro-Dave) can be arranged by contacting Dave by Phone/Fax(02) 65 85 2260 Mobile: 0400 636 363 or email Dave for an instant reply to davereneke@gmail.com. David is well experienced talking to the media and presents information in an easy to understand, up to date and informative manner. Interviews can be on any subject, tailored to your requirements.

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LETTERS TO DAVE

Your letters are welcome on any subject covered by the scope of this newsletter or any aspect of astronomy/space in general. All letters requesting help or advice will be answered personally by me.

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Please contact me again: 2 weeks ago I received an email from an elderly chap who used to live in the same town as I do now and spoke of past history here and some of the people he came across. I accidentally lost that email and a few others so  if that man reads this please contact me again. Also, if you sent me a message in the past fortnight and have not got a reply please do the same… especially if it was to my Gmail address: davidreneke@gmail.com. Thanks and apologies

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G’day Dave

The comet that flew over SA in 2008 ? It was visible for several days was wondering what it was called and if and when it may re appear . it totally amazed me and made me realize how small we are in the total scheme of things it just disappeared into who knows were …….awesome.

Pirate

G’Day Pirate

Good to hear from you and thanks for the question. Looking back I think…pretty sure though… that it was Comet MacNaught. Amazing sight in 2007-2008…best was in Jan/Feb 2008. Tail long and curved and pointing up. It’s just coming back again this month but this time very faint and difficult to find…just a smallish blur in small scopes. Hope that helps.

Dave

Hello Dave.

Knowing that black holes exert a tremendous gravitational field capable of preventing the emission of light, I am puzzled that in spite of this they are nevertheless capable of transmitted energy in the form of X-Rays and visible streams of particles. How are the latter able to escape the gravitational pull? I would also like to know what happens to all the matter pulled into a black hole. Does it end up as a particle of infinite density (a singularity ) or does it actually disappear into nothingness.

Regards, Peter A.

Hi Peter

Good to hear from you. An interesting question you've posed! When you see energy jets emitted from a 'black hole' that isn't technically the right way for it to be written, and it's misleading to a novice. These radiation jets are expelled BUT they originate at the event horizon, the lip of the black hole. This is where the terrible tidal forces destroy matter, speed it up and superheat it BEFORE it is channeled into the black hole well. The light we see and the emission jets all come from this area. The common interpretation is that all matter taken into the black hole becomes part of the 'singularity' – a point of infinite density and the smallest area possible for matter to be crammed into by the immense gravity.

Dave

Dave: I may be able to help with this letter: (from a past newsletter enquiry)

I have been looking over the net to see if there were any reported sighting of space craft re-entry, meteorites etc. on Thursday 24/06/2010. At 5.00pm AEST, (Maryborough QLD) I noticed a strip of white light to the west – approximately where the evening star is currently rising. I thought this odd, because my initial thought was it was the new moon. As these thoughts ticked over, I noticed the light moving / extending / something – it was not the moon. As I watched, and called my partner over to witness, I noticed it was moving toward Earth at a steady pace and I could easily detect 2 tails (V shape) of growing reddish light. As it got to the tree line level – it stopped descending, moved slightly left and hovered. It then moved slightly left again, very slowly and I gradually lost sight of it behind the tree line.… Any idea? Your thoughts are appreciated -

Dave: This is almost certainly a contrail of a high flying jet ( see attached pic) We have had many similar sightings reported to us over time and it fits all the following criteria. Seen in the west at about sunset when the plane would still be illuminated by the setting Sun. Seen west of Marybourough … the main north south flight path passes over Hervey Bay which is about 40kms to east of Maryborough and the position described would put it in the right place in the sky. The V shape described fits a contrail as seen in the pic. The movement left and right is a very commonly reported optical illusion caused as an artifact of looking at a small bright object in a featureless dark or darkening sky for an extended period of time as you would know from your astronomical observations.
Cheers, Ray Johnston FRAS

Hon Secretary. Hervey Bay Astronomical Society Inc QLD
Web: www.hbastro.org

Dave

l had an on-air phone call 10 minutes after our segment. She said that that chat was the best
interview she had ever heard!! Well done.

Cheers, Jeff Burzacott
Radio 5AA Adelaide

‘Nova’ posted something on you’re my Face book Wall and wrote:

"hey david I have a telescope and it a Mead LX D55 but its so big and scary that I cannot use it its my son in laws and he just left it here when he left the house I have asked him if he wants it but he says no so I guess or rather hope I have inherited it ha i will get hold of instructions on how to use it cause he used to hook it up to his laptop and take the most amazing photos if I do that I will send you some pics ok"

Rick Shaffer commented on my face Book page:

David: Quite some years ago, I worked with a fellow who was chief engineer at the DSN/NASA/CSIRO tracking station at Tidbinbilla, ACT. His name was Neil McVicker. (Probably still is!) He retired to "the mid north coast of NSW", but I'll be damned if I can remember exactly where. He had an 11-cm Newtonian reflector telescope he and I designed for his retirement at the time. We acquired the various optical parts while he was here in the States (LA-area). 

Thanks Rick. I'm posting this here in the hope someone might know of his whereabouts. I'd like to contact him.

Dave

           What are meteor showers?

An increase in the number of meteors at a particular time of year is called a meteor shower. Comets shed the debris that becomes most meteor showers. As comets orbit the Sun, they shed an icy, dusty debris stream along the comet's orbit. If Earth travels through this stream, we will see a meteor shower. Depending on where Earth and the stream meet, meteors appear to fall from a particular place in the sky, maybe within the neighbourhood of a constellation.

Meteor showers are named by the constellation from which meteors appear to fall, a spot in the sky astronomers call the radiant. For instance, the radiant for the Leonid meteor shower is located in the constellation Leo. The Perseid meteor shower is so named because meteors appear to fall from a point in the constellation Perseus.

AND WIN A  COPY OF THE FABULOUS $25 '2010 ASTRONOMY YEARBOOK'                    

Last week's question: " Who said, "Beam me up Scotty?"

Answer: No one actually said those exact words. Kirk did say a few times, "Beam us up Mr. Scott." We have a couple of right answers (below) Congratulations to the winners.

" Beam me up Scotty" that's like 'Play it again Sam" from Casablanca. As I understand it, those words were never used in the TV series, though I believe it was used in an audio tape of an episode by William Shatner as Capt James T Kirk. Ray Johnston

According to Wikipedia, the command 'Beam me up, Scotty' was never uttered by anyone in Star Trek. However, Jim Kirk once said "Beam me up, Mr. Scott".  Jim Fitzgerald  

Try your hand at this week's  teaser: 

What was the first thing NASA told Neil Armstrong and Buzz a Aldrin to do, once they set foot on the Moon… the very first thing! What was it.? First correct answer chosen from a draw gets our fabulous '2010 Astronomy Yearbook' worth $25 posted to you.

Email in your answers to davereneke@gmail.com          Also at my FaceBook fans Page' . www.facebook.com/AstroDave

THIS WEEK'S TOP STORIES

Lost in space: Obama’s NASA program

The idiocy of the Obama administration continues to amaze us, even after eighteen months of leftist policies. After becoming president, Obama sent federal spending into the stratosphere, increasing the burden on future generations of Americans. However, one of the few agencies that he has grounded is involved in one of our most vital national missions, space exploration. Sadly, the president has reduced spending for NASA, while boosting spending for almost everything else in the federal government.

The result is that facilities like Michoud in New Orleans East are in danger of closing, resulting in the loss of thousands of high paying jobs. Instead of reaching for the stars, the president wants NASA to become more focused on earthbound challenges like the politically charged issue of global warming. This is a ludicrous departure for the once proud agency, which is now led by staunch Obama supporter Charles Bolden. In a recent speech delivered in Egypt to mark the one-year anniversary of Obama’s Cairo address, Bolden said that NASA is not just interested in space exploration, but is also “an Earth improvement agency.” With this mission, there is no need for astronauts, only geologists.

As chief NASA administrator, Bolden has canceled the Constellation program and eliminated plans to return to the moon. In making this controversial move, Bolden also canceled the production of new rockets and spaceships that were involved in the Constellation program.

The leader of NASA should be focused on expanding our space mission and returning the agency to its glory days. Instead, he is assisting the state department in promoting diplomacy in the Islamic world. Incredibly, during his Middle East trip, Bolden appeared on the Al Jazeera television network and claimed that expanding international relations was among his top goals. He said that the president told him his foremost mission was to “find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.”

When did it become the NASA administrator’s top job to “reach out” to the Muslim world and make them “feel good?” In the past, NASA administrators were busy managing their agencies, but not Mr. Bolden. He is our ambassador to the Muslim world, speaking for President Obama. In the interview, Bolden sounded more like a politician or a diplomat than a NASA administrator. The whole episode paints another disturbing picture of an administration with a curious and frightening agenda. Bolden should be focused on how this country will explore space in a time of tight budgets and an international recession. Instead, Bolden, under the direction of Obama, is playing politics in the Middle East.

This initiative will not advance space travel because none of these Muslim nations has a legitimate space program and none has ever sent men or women into space. This is just another example of the president currying favor with the Muslim world at the expense of a vital national security interest, in this case, our space program.Bolden claims that the United States needs international help to travel beyond low-Earth orbit. He said we “can’t do it” alone anymore. So the United States, the country that designed the fabulously successful Apollo program and won the space race in the 1960’s is now unable to leave low orbit without the assistance of the Muslim world? It is a sad commentary on the condition of NASA and the plight of the United States of America.

Jeff Crouere is the Host of “Ringside Politics,” which airs at 7:30 p.m. Fri. and 10:00 p.m. Sun. on WLAE-TV 32, a PBS station, and 7 till 11 a.m. weekdays on WGSO 990 AM in New Orleans and the Northshore. He is the Political Analyst for WGNO-TV ABC26 and a Columnist for selected publications.

The Daily Caller
 

Is This Australia's Best  UFO sighting? – Westall 1966

Does the eyewitness account of school children hold the same weight as adults? At Westall High School in Victoria, about 11am on April 6th 1966 a group of students and some teachers witnessed an object descend behind some trees then ascend into the sky again. All these years later as many as 200 people claim to have seen the object, making it Australia’s most observed UFO sighting. It is the subject of a TV documentary that has been 5 years in the making

Pic: Reproduced from 'Woman Day' magazine 7 June 2010.

Westall 66: A Suburban UFO Mystery:

You may think that tales of UFOs are a load of wallaby droppings, but give this new doco, Westall 66: A Suburban UFO Mystery, ten minutes of your time, and you will be scratching your head, stroking your jaw and going 'hmmm'. It's one thing to see some crazed X-Files fan emerge from their Arizona-based trailer and gibber on about being 'probed', but it's another thing entirely to hear the level-headed tones of Melburnian Aussies describing in detail what most people on the planet agree can not exist.

 Artistic representation of what the kids and teachers saw

Flying saucers. Landing in a school yard. In the middle of Melbourne. It is of course, unbelievable. Yet, there's an entire schoolyard of witnesses, including children (now grown up) and adults – None of whom come across as wacky in the slightest. It's a hard one to decipher. Could ALL these people be making it up? Could ALL of them have some weird attention-seeking problem? It hardly seems likely. If not – well, then, we are not alone.

Still, you can judge for yourself. The documentary, Westall 66: A Surburban UFO Mystery, aired on the SCI FI Channel Australia on June the 4th in its world premiere. It's a personal investigation by a local film-maker, without the hype that usually comes with the subject matter. Food for thought, it makes compelling viewing. Very much worth checking out.

Here's the abbreviated story:

It's based on the events of 6 April 1966, where, in the Melbourne suburb of Westall, 200 students, staff and local residents watched as a strange object hovered overhead for several minutes, landed briefly, then lifted off and vanished. Witnesses described it as low flying, silver-grey and shiny, shaped like a ‘cup turned upside down on a saucer’ and accompanied by five light aircraft.

A mass of excited students surged out of school and ran after the object. Many reported seeing a circle of flattened grass on the ground where it had landed. One said she touched it as it took off. Others observed men in uniforms cordoning off the ‘landing site’ and removing soil samples by the truckload. Some say they saw uniformed men torch the area a few hours later.

The incident was reported on the news on television that night and in the local newspapers. That day at Westall High School, the headmaster called a special assembly. He told students and staff that they had not seen a flying saucer – in fact, they hadn’t seen anything at all. And they were not to talk about it to anybody.

Afraid of being ridiculed or punished, many witnesses kept the secret of that day. Some are still angry about being told to lie. Others say the incident has affected their lives and continues to haunt them today.

Pic: Artistic representation of what the kids and teachers saw

Forty four years on, teacher Shane Ryan is stirring up the past. Motivated by a deep sense of injustice at how the students were treated, he’s tracking down former students and staff and searching for the authorities that presided over the day. For those interested I'll now follow this along with another story from the website: www.onlymelbourne.com.au/ Credit: www.scifitv.com.au

Academic throws light on 40-year-old UFO mystery

Just what did flash out of the sky and into the lives of hundreds that April day?  A Canberra academic is investigating one of Australia's most compelling UFO mysteries, a sighting by hundreds of people in the Melbourne suburb of Westall on April 6, 1966. More than 200 students and staff from two schools watched as the object landed in a nearby paddock, lifted off and vanished.

Shane Ryan, an English lecturer at the University of Canberra, is interviewing dozens of witnesses for a book he hopes to publish on the 40th anniversary of the sighting. Mr Ryan, 38, was alerted to the events in the 1980s by a housemate who was there. Unlike most UFO sightings, the Westall object had a large number of credible witnesses. It was viewed in daylight and attracted a forceful response from police and the RAAF. "It had these rather interesting elements which indicated to me that, unlike some other so-called UFO stories, there was some substance to this," he told The Sunday Age. "I knew the 40th anniversary was coming up next year, so I thought it was timely to do some research on it."

Mr Ryan has interviewed about 30 witnesses, mostly former staff and students from the Westall secondary and primary schools. He has tried obtaining police and RAAF reports, but so far with little luck. The story was covered then by Channel Nine, The Age and local newspapers. On the UFO, everyone seems to agree, Mr Ryan says. It was a low-flying, silver/grey shining object, either of classical flying saucer shape or close to it, "a cup turned upside down on a saucer".

The students were familiar with light aircraft because the schools were close to Moorabbin Airport. Although the UFO was of similar size, "everyone said straight away that they knew it was not a plane", Mr Ryan said, nor a weather balloon. The object was in view for up to 20 minutes, and many saw it descend. Most agree it landed behind pine trees at the Grange Reserve. Dozens of students ran across what was then an open paddock to the reserve to investigate, but the object had lifted off and vanished.

Pic: School magazine "Clayton Calendar" about the Westall UFO encounter.

Other details are sketchier. The UFO appears to have left a circle of scorched grass; others say several circles were left in paddocks bordering Grange Reserve. Many witnesses, not all, report seeing aircraft, up to five, trailing the UFO. Some say it made no sound, others say it did. Many reported that police/air force/military personnel inspected the site; some (not all) say the authorities burnt the site.

The Dandenong Journal, for which the story was front-page news two weeks in a row, reported that "students and staff have been instructed to 'talk to no-one' about the incident". Nevertheless, one teacher, Andrew Greenwood, gave the paper a detailed account. "It was silvery-grey and seemed to thicken at times," he said. "The thickening was similar to when a disc is turned a little to show the underside." One of the closest witnesses was a boy whose family leased land at Grange Reserve for horses. Shaun Matthews (not a student at Westall) was on holidays and spending time on the land. "I saw the thing come across the horizon and drop down behind the pine trees," he told The Sunday Age . "I couldn't tell you what it was. It certainly wasn't a light aircraft or anything of the like … "I saw the thing drop down behind the pine trees and saw it leave again. I couldn't tell you how long it was there for, it was such a long time ago."

Mr Matthews, 51 and now living in Greenvale, said the object "went up and off very very rapidly". "I went over and there was a circle in the clearing. It looked like it had been cooked or boiled, not burnt as I remember," he said. "A heap of kids from Westall primary and high school came charging through to see what had happened — 'look at this, look at that, we saw it as well', that sort of thing. It was a bit of a talking point for a couple of days." Mr Matthews said the object, about the size of "two family cars", passed him at a distance of about "four football fields". "It was silvery, but it had a sort-of purple hue to it, very bright, but not bright enough that you couldn't look at it," he said. "I saw that it dropped down behind the trees, and I thought, 'hello, hang on'. A minute or so later, it went straight up, just gone."

He said police and other officials interviewed his mother. But he cannot remember them burning the landing site, as others have alleged. And he did not see any light aircraft trailing the object, as others did. "The way this thing moved there is no way it could have been a weather balloon or a light aircraft," he said. "A helicopter? No way — no noise, wrong shape, and it didn't move like it. It came out of the distance, stopped, and then just dropped. "It didn't just sort of cruise and then slightly descend at an angle. It just stopped, dropped, and then went straight up."

The Victorian UFO Research Society investigated the incident. VUFORS secretary Tony Cook said Westall remained one of Australia's major unexplained UFO cases. The top one was the case of Frederick Valentich, a 20-year-old Melbourne pilot whose light plane disappeared while flying over Bass Strait in 1978. In the last minutes of radio communication, Valentich reported seeing a UFO hovering above his plane. He and his craft were never recovered. "It's pretty well documented," Mr Cook said. "That's probably the most important one because it involves the disappearance of a person."

Mr Cook said the society's stance on UFOs was that, "there are people out there seeing unusual things in the sky at times and they can't be explained. But it's a very big leap to go from unexplained things in the sky to extraterrestrials." Most witnesses, including Mr Matthews, say the UFO was not an aircraft or helicopter. But Westall is only six kilometres from Moorabbin Airport, and the object was roughly headed in that direction, travelling north to south. "It sounds to me like some sort of experimental craft, very much Earth-based," Steve Roberts, of Australian Skeptics, said. "It is an interesting event with lots of witnesses and what we now call a crop circle. 

"Accounts are confused. Some have the object landing and taking off again, others say 'a paddock over which the object seemed to hover'." As well, "if there was a whole swag of officials investigating it, there must be an official report in RAAF archives somewhere". But Mr Ryan said that no one at the RAAF knew of the incident. But given the history of the case — the way students and staff were told to keep quiet from the start — that was not surprising, he said.

"As I got a little bit older, I got a little more interested in the social and historical aspects of the story, how something like this could have happened and how it reflected society at the time, and how authorities responded to it," he said. "There's been a layer of secrecy that was very, very prominent in this story from the beginning."

Media attention

"The Dandenong Journal" covered the encounter in detail and ran two front page stories. The first was on 14 April and the next was on 21 April. "The Age" ran a very small article about the Westall incident on Thursday, 7 April 1966, page 6…….

"OBJECT PERHAPS BALLOON – An unidentified flying object seen over the Clayton-Moorabbin area yesterday morning might have been a weather balloon. Hundreds of children and a number of teachers at Westall School, Clayton, watched the object during morning break. They said a number of small aeroplanes circled around it. However, a check later showed that no commercial, private or RAAF pilots had reported anything unusual in the area."  

I like the words "perhaps" and "might have" … how would that sort of testimony stand up in a court case. What a bloody joke!

The Weather Bureau released a balloon at Laverton at 8:30 a.m., and the westerly wind blowing at the time could have moved it into the area where the sighting was reported". Witnesses and researchers were surprised when "The Sun News-Pictorial" (a tabloid) ran no story, yet "The Age" (a broadsheet) did.

"The Sun" and "The Herald" newspapers, whilst not mentioning the Westall incident, both published cartoons in the following day's editions that made light of the flying saucer phenomena. GTV Channel 9 television also ran a news report about the encounter. A student, Joy Tighe, described the event for the reporter. However, a copy of this tape is not available. Channel 9 reports that it was removed from their archive and not returned. (Wikipedia) Thanks to ABC 702 for excerpts used in this story. They sat down with Jaimie Leonarder, a long-time UFO investigator and asked him his opinion on the Westall 1966 Victorian sighting. Listen here;

* COMMENTARY FROM WORLD RENOWNED UFO EXPERT,BILL CHALKER, AUTHOR OF "THE OZ FILES – THE AUSTRALIAN UFO STORY" (1996) AND "HAIR OF THE ALIEN – DNA AND OTHER FORENSIC EVIDENCE FOR ALIEN ABDUCTIONS" (2005).

"Watching WESTALL '66 you will be entertained, intrigued and struck by the realisation that something quite extraordinary took place in Westall on April 6, 1966. I hope it gets you enthralled with the possibilities it reveals. Hoax or hysteria – I don't think so. Experimental aircraft – maybe, but the totality of what occurred there seems to argue for the more extraordinarly possibility – that something that wasn't ours intruded into our world. I know I'm not alone wanting to know what happened. WESTALL '66 – a suburban UFO mystery – is a powerful evocation of the mystery." Bill Chalkers The Oz FIles

Don't miss it. There is a DVD release. Details on http://www.westall66ufo.com.au/

Did Apple Get Their Inspiration for the iPad from 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Does all this look just a little familiar…?

Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi classic movie – most people have seen it and isn't this another case of yesterday's science fiction fast becoming today's science fact. "When Floyd tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth.

One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers … Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. … the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.

"Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.)

The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites. It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg." 

Daily Galaxy

MORE ASTRO SPACE NEWS

Long odds of finding ET, say researchers

The odds of successfully eavesdropping on the daily radio traffic of extraterrestrial life forms have been calculated by a pair of UK scientists to be astronomically small. The calculation is presented in a paper accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology .

Duncan Forgan, from the University of Edinburgh and Professor Bob Nichol from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, used a computer modelling technique, called Monte Carlo Realisation, to simulate the growth and evolution of intelligent life in our galaxy.

They combined this with previous research showing the next-generation Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope will be able to pick up radio traffic from ET up to distances of 300 light years from Earth. They calculated that the probability of picking up such transmissions as being extremely low – 1 in 10 million, to be precise. Forgan and Nichol assume that ET will only "leak" radio signals for about 100 years of its civilisation.

They say humans have been leaking signals from TV and military radar for that length of time, but are now becoming "radio quiet" as signals move to lower power. Australian radio astronomer Dr Ray Norris of the Australia Telescope National Facility in Sydney is not so sure with Forgan and Nichol's conclusions. While TV signals have been becoming quieter, military radar have been increasing in power, says the previous chair of the SETI Post-Detection Committee, which plans humankind's response to first contact. "Missile defence warning systems actually need higher power," he says.

Also, Norris does not think it's legitimate to assume that ET will be radio loud for just 100 years just because humans have. He thinks we have no idea what kind of technology ET will be using and what signals they might be making and for how long. But SETI researcher Dr Ian Morrison of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology in Sydney welcomes the new research. "It's a good attempt to put some numbers showing the difficulties of using the eavesdropping approach to SETI," says Morrison.

He says the authors' assumptions about how long ET will be radio loud for may not be defensible, but ultimately this is a minor issue, given the low levels of probability of making contact. Beacons Morrison emphasises Forgan and Nichol's calculations relate to eavesdropping on relatively low-powered daily radio traffic. The probability of picking up such undirected signals is so low because there are so few stars close enough for us to pick these signals up, he says.

Morrison says SETI would have a much better chance of detecting ET if it scanned all the stars in the galaxy for powerful signals – or "beacons" – sent out to deliberately contact other life forms. "We're talking about many orders of magnitude increase in the chances of finding something," he says. He says the highest chance of a transmission would come from the centre of the galaxy, where most stars are, and a deliberately created beacon could be powerful enough to reach Earth from the far side of the galaxy. "I think this paper helps explain why concentrating on beacons is preferable to concentrating on the eavesdropping approach," says Morrison.

ABC Science Online

Protecting our view to the world's night skies 

A New Zealand delegation will travel to Brazil next week to try to convince the United Nations to protect the world's night skies.

 The group hopes to convince the Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to create the world's first starlight reserve, starting with the night skies above the South Island's McKenzie country.

The Lake Tekapo Starlight Reserve Working Party says few places remain in the world where people can enjoy the stars pollution free. "It is the responsibility of countries like New Zealand who can still enjoy their night skies to protect them from pollution," says spokeswoman Margaret Austin.

"Fifty percent of the world's people no longer see the stars, those places that do have got a responsibility to preserve them," she says. "We are losing our opportunity to observe our night sky."

Mount John Observatory above Lake Tekapo is the heart of research astronomy in New Zealand and is increasingly attracting tourists who enjoy its clear view into the stars. "Standing up here you really feel like you're on top of the world. Mount John Observatory is one of the most accessible and with 70% cloud free nights and almost no light pollution it makes it an ideal candidate for world heritage status," says Margaret Munro from Earth and Sky.

She says the spot is popular because there are a limited number of spots like it around the world. "Some people are reduced to tears, they find it such a spiritual thing to see the stars."

TVNZ

Do astronomers have the right to keep their findings secret?

The Kepler mission is a NASA program designed to find other possible Earth-like planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. The team involved have painstakingly scoured a patch of space for the tiniest signs of small planets (sometimes called Goldilocks planets–not too close, and not too far from a star).

The Kepler team came to an agreement with NASA to delay the complete release of their findings by six months, due to launch delays and other various problems that left the team with less time to analyze their findings than expected.

Given the project’s high risk of false positives, the team wants a little more time to whittle down their work before giving the world access to it. The team is releasing a list of 350 possible planets, but keeping their best 400 secret for a few months for further analysis.

That decision has sparked a bit of controversy in the astronomy community. Some have no problem with it; many of the Kepler team’s astronomers have “dedicated their careers to the project,” and, says astronomer B. Scott Gaudi, “Who am I to say this? I didn’t put 10 years of my life into this.”

But the movement towards total technological transparency has its proponents, and they have serious issues with the Kepler team keeping their findings, at least in part, secret. Said Phillip Sharp, a biologist at M.I.T. The time has past when a bunch of elite true-meaning experts could go into the next room and make conclusions. They have to be transparent. That’s a change in the culture.

They’re both valid points: Surely the team that did all the work (and make no mistake, this was tedious and difficult work) deserves to have some time alone with their findings. But it’s also true that this is a NASA project, and surely a governmental agency has a responsibility towards transparency whenever possible. What do you all think?

SmartPlanet

Faith Vilas To Lead Suborbital Observatory Project

The Planetary Science Institute is pleased to announce that Dr. Faith Vilas is joining the institute to lead the Atsa Suborbital Observatory Project, pushing the boundaries of human-tended observing into outer space. Dr. Vilas is female and very highly respected and talented.

The Atsa project will use crewed suborbital commercial spacecraft with a specially designed telescope to provide low-cost space-based observations above the contaminating atmosphere of the Earth, while avoiding some operational constraints of satellite telescope systems.

Dr. Vilas has been developing the Atsa Suborbital Observatory with collaborator Dr. Luke Sollitt from the Physics Department of The Citadel. "At the PSI, we have an organizational framework within which we can bring Atsa fully to life," Vilas said.

Dr. Vilas has a long and distinguished career as a prominent planetary astronomer, providing new insights into our understanding of the composition and history of the asteroid belt, constraining heating in the early solar system, and expanding evidence for water throughout the asteroid belt.

As a woman scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center, she designed a telescope system for the space shuttle to detect and characterize orbital debris at low-Earth orbit through geosynchronous orbit. At NASA Headquarters, Dr. Vilas was the program scientist for the Discovery Program, NASA's solar system exploration mission workhorse. She has been a U.S. representative to the Japanese Hayabusa mission science team, whose spacecraft recently returned to Earth potentially carrying the first samples collected from an asteroid. Presently, she is a science team member on NASA's MESSENGER mission to the planet Mercury.

For her accomplishments, Dr. Vilas was honored by the designation of Minor Planet 3507 Vilas by the International Astronomical Union, and she has received numerous awards for her work at NASA. Since 2005, Dr. Vilas has been director of the MMT Observatory, a joint venture of the University of Arizona and Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Vilas will be retiring from her position with the MMT Observatory at the end of December 2010, at which time she will begin her activities at PSI.

"My greatest pleasure over the past five years has been the opportunity to work with the first rate staff of the MMT Observatory. They are highly skilled and dedicated to supporting the astronomical community," Dr. Vilas said. "I look forward to continuing to use this wonderful facility as an observer in the future." Dr. Vilas earned a bachelor's degree in astronomy from Wellesley College (1973), a master's in earth and planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1975), and her doctorate in planetary sciences from the University of Arizona (1984). As a graduate student in 1984, Vilas was part of the team that discovered Neptune's rings.

She also designed the coronograph used to obtain the first image of a circumstellar disk around another star, Beta Pictoris, with her graduate thesis advisor Bradford A. Smith. In addition to being an accomplished planetary astronomer, Dr. Vilas is also a life-long pilot and has had a parallel career as a volunteer licensed paramedic in the state of Texas. While working at NASA's Johnson Space Center, she also co-founded an animal rescue shelter in the southeast Houston area and served on its board of directors.

Dr. Mark V. Sykes, CEO and director of the Planetary Science Institute, looks forward to Dr. Vilas and her work on the Atsa Suborbital Observatory becoming affiliated with PSI. "We are very honored to have Dr. Vilas on board. She will be expanding our activities in new and exciting directions with human space flight that will greatly advance our knowledge of near-Earth asteroids, comets and other parts of the solar system and universe." he said. "We look forward to making future announcements about the Atsa Suborbital Observatory under the leadership of Dr. Vilas. Design studies are under way and we will be putting up a website on the project after Dr. Vilas completes her work at the MMT Observatory," Sykes said.

Space Daily

Down the Lunar Rabbit-hole

A whole new world came to life for Alice when she followed the White Rabbit down the hole. There was a grinning cat, a Hookah-smoking caterpillar, a Mad Hatter, and much more. It makes you wonder… what's waiting down the rabbit-hole on the Moon?

Pic: This pit in the Moon's Marius Hills is big enough to fit the White House completely inside. Credit: NASA/ LROC/ ASU

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is beaming back images of caverns hundreds of feet deep — beckoning scientists to follow.
"They could be entrances to a geologic wonderland," says Mark Robinson of Arizona State University, principal investigator for the LRO camera. "We believe the giant holes are skylights that formed when the ceilings of underground lava tubes collapsed."

Japan's Kaguya spacecraft first photographed the enormous caverns last year. Now the powerful Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC, the same camera that photographed Apollo landers and astronauts' tracks in the moondust) is giving us enticing high-resolution images of the caverns' entrances and their surroundings. Back in the 1960s, before humans set foot on the Moon, researchers proposed the existence of a network of tunnels, relics of molten lava rivers, beneath the lunar surface.

They based their theory on early orbital photographs that revealed hundreds of long, narrow channels called rilles winding across the vast lunar plains, or maria. Scientists believed these rilles to be surface evidence of below-ground tunnels through which lava flowed billions of years ago. "It's exciting that we've now confirmed this idea," says Robinson. "The Kaguya and LROC photos prove that these caverns are skylights to lava tubes, so we know such tunnels can exist intact at least in small segments after several billion years."

Lava tubes are formed when the upper layer of lava flowing from a volcano starts to cool while the lava underneath continues to flow in tubular channels. The hardened lava above insulates the molten lava below, allowing it to retain its liquid warmth and continue flowing. Lava tubes are found on Earth and can vary from a simple tube to a complex labyrinth that extends for miles. If the tunnels leading off the skylights have stood the test of time and are still open, they could someday provide human visitors protection from incoming meteoroids and other perils. 

"The tunnels offer a perfect radiation shield and a very benign thermal environment," says Robinson. "Once you get down to 2 meters under the surface of the Moon, the temperature remains fairly constant, probably around -30 to -40 degrees C." That may sound cold, but it would be welcome news to explorers seeking to escape the temperature extremes of the lunar surface. At the Moon's equator, mid-day temperatures soar to 100 deg C and plunge to a frigid -150 deg C at night.

Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute agrees that lunar lava tubes and chambers hold potential advantages to future explorers but says, "Hold off on booking your next vacation at the Lunar Carlsbad Hilton. Many tunnels may have filled up with their own solidified lava." However, like Alice's Queen of Hearts, who "believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast," Spudis is keeping an open mind.

"We just can't tell, with our remote instruments, what the skylights lead to. To find out for sure, we'd need to go to the Moon and do some spelunking. I've had my share of surprises in caving. Several years ago I was helping map a lava flow in Hawaii. We had a nice set of vents, sort of like these skylights. It turned out that there was a whole new cave system that was not evident from aerial photos."
As for something similar under the lunar skylights? "Who knows?" says Spudis. "The Moon continually surprises me."
This could be a white rabbit worth following.

'Plan 9 from Outer Space' coming in 3-D: Brilliant or bonkers?

Some say the 3-D movie fad has gone too far. I can’t bring myself to agree, as long as there are projects like this to be had: 1959′s Plan 9 from Outer Space, cult auteur Ed Wood’s infamous “worst movie ever,” is being converted to a full-color 3-D version.

It might even screen in theatres.Why is this great news? Because if ever a movie deserved to be doused in 3-D cheese, it’s Plan 9.

Just imagine that wooden acting and those cheap-o effects in three vivid dimensions and a rainbow of colors. Plan 9‘s unintentional hilarity can only improve by being taken further over the top.

The more ridiculously grandiose the format, the better. Or have I lost my mind? Am I the only person who would totally buy tickets for Plan 9 in 3-D? is this the worst dsci-fi movie of all time? Some say Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes BUT I say, check lout a few of the early Japanese attempts at sci-fi…yeah, you know what I mean!

Popwatch

Robbie Williams waves goodbye to his £7.5m mansion …and the little green men

When Robbie Williams splashed out £8.1million last year on a seven-bedroom country mansion, the purchase was said to have been inspired by his fascination for extraterrestrial life. But now the former Take That star is selling it at a £600,000 loss after apparently failing to spot any little green men.

Compton Bassett House, which has its own helicopter hangar, is one of Wiltshire’s grandest privately owned properties. But when Williams bought it, it was claimed that what really attracted him to the area was the reported presence of ley lines.

Sci-fi enthusiasts claim these are ‘mystical energy routes’ that guide UFOs – a phenomenon in which Williams is deeply interested. The county is also known for its mysterious crop circles, which some devotees believe are caused by aliens. Yet the singer has now put the mansion on the market for £7.5million and plans to live full-time in Los Angeles – where he and his girlfriend, American model and actress Ayda Field, have another home. 

Danny Adams, landlord of the White Horse Inn in the village of Compton Bassett, said: ‘He bought the house to be near the crop circle goings-on, thinking that to be spiritual stuff, but he’s probably realised it’s just a load of blokes stamping round the fields at night.
'To be honest, he didn’t play much of a part in village life. He never came to the pub but we would see him walking his dogs from time to time.’

The 36-year-old singer and songwriter, who was born in Stoke-on-Trent, would occasionally have a fried breakfast at the Divine Cafe in the nearby village of Cherhill.  But locals said he had not been seen there or at Compton Bassett House for weeks. The mansion has eight bathrooms, a library, a luxury leisure complex, two staff flats, a pavilion, a tennis court and 70 acres of surrounding parkland.

Built in the 18th century, it has been extensively restored and boasts a swimming pool in the basement, decorated with Greek-style Doric pillars. But now it appears that the lure of Ms Field has proved overwhelming.  Last year Williams stunned her by proposing on a live radio programme in Sydney, Australia. However, his publicist said later that it had been a joke and Williams himself wrote on his blog that they were not engaged. Williams’s impending departure has done little to disturb the equilibrium of Compton Bassett’s 250 residents.

Mail Online

Unraveling the mystery - All stars are born the same way

Astronomers have obtained the first image of a dusty disc closely encircling a massive baby star, providing direct evidence that massive stars form in the same way as their smaller brethren. This discovery, made thanks to a combination of ESO’s telescopes, is described in an article in this week’s issue of Nature.

“Our observations show a disc surrounding an embryonic young, massive star, which is now fully formed,” says Stefan Kraus, who led the study. “One can say that the baby is about to hatch!”

Pic: Astronomers have obtained the first clear look at a dusty disk closely encircling a massive baby star. This artist's concept shows what such a massive disk might look like. Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser

The team of astronomers looked at an object known by the cryptic name of IRAS 13481-6124. About twenty times the mass of our Sun and five times its radius, the young central star, which is still surrounded by its pre-natal cocoon, is located in the constellation of Centaurus, about 10,000 light-years away. From archival images obtained by the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope as well as from observations done with the APEX 12-meter submillimeter telescope, astronomers discovered the presence of a jet.“Such jets are commonly observed around young low-mass stars and generally indicate the presence of a disc,” says Kraus.

Circumstellar discs are an essential ingredient in the formation process of low-mass stars such as our Sun. However, it is not known whether such discs are also present during the formation of stars more massive than about ten solar masses, where the strong light emitted might prevent mass falling onto the star. For instance, it has been proposed that massive stars might form when smaller stars merge.

In order to discover and understand the properties of this disc, astronomers employed ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). By combining light from three of the VLTI’s 1.8-meter Auxiliary Telescopes with the AMBER instrument, this facility allows astronomers to see details equivalent to those a telescope with a mirror of 85 meters in diameter would see. The resulting resolution is about 2.4 milliarcseconds, which is equivalent to picking out the head of a screw on the International Space Station, or more than ten times the resolution possible with current visible-light telescopes in space.

With this unique capability, complemented by observations done with another of ESO’s telescopes, the 3.58-meter New Technology Telescope at La Silla, Kraus and colleagues were able to detect a disc around IRAS 13481-6124. “This is the first time we could image the inner regions of the disc around a massive young star”, says Kraus. “Our observations show that formation works the same for all stars, regardless of mass.”

The astronomers conclude that the system is about 60,000 years old, and that the star has reached its final mass. Because of the intense light of the star — 30,000 times more luminous than our Sun — the disc will soon start to evaporate. The flared disc extends to about 130 times the Earth-Sun distance — or 130 astronomical units (AU) — and has a mass similar to that of the star, roughly twenty times the Sun. In addition, the inner parts of the disc are shown to be devoid of dust.

“Further observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), currently being constructed in Chile, could provide much information on these inner parts, and allow us to better understand how baby massive stars became heavy,” concludes Kraus.

Laser astronomy aiding in eye examinations

A laser that helps astronomers examine new planets has been adapted to help doctors examine cells in the eye. The breakthrough is enabled by new miniature mirrors at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Lasers have been used for surgery and 2D imaging for years, but a new animation is the first 3D view inside a living eye clear enough to see individual cells — thanks to laser astronomy.

During an eye exam, your doctor flips a series of lenses between you and the wall chart. A device called a MEMS does the same thing for the largest telescopes in the world.

In a 1992 experiment, Lawrence Livermore Lab shot into space a tremendous laser beam visible for miles. As the beam bounced off a layer in the atmosphere, its reflection was distorted by turbulent air. That distortion was corrected by a special mirror that mimics the corrective lenses your optometrist uses, reshaping itself a thousand times a second.

Today, what's called Adaptive Optics is used to correct what a telescope sees — a laser guide star to make super clear pictures. And now, it's gone from discovering planets deep in space, to discovering disease deep inside the eye. "The advances with this integrated circuit, application of these micromachined mirrors has enabled this technology to span these fields," says principal investigator Scot Olivier, "where we go from the largest structures in the universe to some of the smallest structures in the human body!"

With this new mirror-on-a-chip, the space version was shrunk to a tabletop by the lab's interdisciplinary team of Steve Jones, Diana Chen and Scot Olivier. With it, clinics at UC Davis and Indiana University are now beaming lasers into patients' eyes to track the effect of new therapies. The eyeball is the atmosphere, and the cells in the retina are the stars in your eye.

ABC

British fighter jets chasing UFO?

A mystery cameraman has filmed two British fighter jets pursuing what looked like a UFO, according to media reports. The dramatic 30-second video clip, which is believed to have been taken from a West Midlands service station car park in Britain, had drawn millions of hits on the Internet.

 "This is one of the best videos I've seen. It could be a new drone – that might explain the military jets," the Sun quoted expert Nick Pope, who probed UFO sightings for the Ministry of Defence.

"But you don't normally test-fly secret projects in daylight. Alternatively, this could be the real thing – a UFO in our airspace and military aircraft scrambled to intercept, probably due to it being tracked on radar," he added. The British defence ministry refused to comment on the alleged sighting, but confirmed it would scramble jets to meet an air threat. A police official from West Midlands, however, said: "We are not aware of any reports of unidentified aircraft."

UFO disrupts air traffic in east China

An unidentified flying object disrupted air traffic over Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, late Wednesday, the municipal government said last Thursday.  Xiaoshan Airport was closed after the UFO was detected at around 9 p.m. and some flights were rerouted to airports in Ningbo and Wuxi cities, said an airport spokesman.The airport had resumed operations and more details would be revealed after an investigation, he said.

(Agencies)

World's weirdest building? – UFO House

The UFO House in Taiwan, China (Photo Source: bbs.huanqiu.com)

Fuel tank for final space shuttle delivered

The external fuel tank for the final scheduled space shuttle launch has arrived at the Kennedy Space Center after a five-day, 900-mile barge ride from Louisiana to the Cape. Built by Lockheed Martin at the Michoud factory in New Orleans, External Tank 138 reached the unloading dock near the Complex 39 press site Tuesday.

The bullet-shaped tank, shipped within the nestling cradle of a transport trailer, was towed off the covered barge and onto Florida soil Wednesday at 9:20 a.m. EDT. A short trip ensued to drive the tank across the street to the massive Vehicle Assembly Building where the tank will be hoisted into a checkout cell for inspections and final processing.

The foam-covered tanks form the structural core of the space shuttle vehicle for launch and hold the half-million gallons of supercold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen consumed by the orbiter's three main engines during the eight-and-a-half-minute trek to space.

They stand 15 stories tall, or 154 feet in length, almost 28 feet in diameter, and weigh about 1.7 million pounds when loaded with propellant. This particular tank is slated for use by shuttle Endeavour for its targeted February 26 liftoff to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer particle physics experiment and a platform of spare parts to the International Space Station. Stacking of the twin solid rocket boosters for the mission begins next week inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. 

The motor segments will be put together atop the mobile launching platform in High Bay 1. Mating of the tank to the boosters is expected to happen September 1. Endeavour is undergoing pre-flight activities at its hangar adjacent from the assembly building. Current plans call for the orbiter's delivery to the Vehicle Assembly Building on January 5 for attachment to the tank and boosters. The fully stacked shuttle vehicle then rolls to pad 39A on January 18.

The six-man astronaut crew includes commander Mark Kelly, pilot Greg H. Johnson and mission specialists Greg Chamitoff, Mike Fincke, Roberto Vittori and Drew Feustel. Photos by Justin Ray and Stephen Clark.

Spaceflight Now

Record-breaking x-ray blast briefly blinds space observatory

A blast of the brightest X-rays ever detected from beyond our Milky Way galaxy’s neighborhood temporarily blinded the X-ray eye on NASA’s Swift space observatory earlier this summer, astronomers now report. The X-rays traveled through space for 5 billion years before slamming into and overwhelming Swift’s X-ray Telescope on 21 June.

The blindingly bright blast came from a gamma-ray burst, a violent eruption of energy from the explosion of a massive star morphing into a new black hole. “This gamma-ray burst is by far the brightest light source ever seen in X-ray wavelengths at cosmological distances,” said David Burrows, senior scientist and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and the lead scientist for Swift’s X-ray Telescope (XRT).

Although the Swift satellite was designed specifically to study gamma-ray bursts, the instrument was not designed to handle an X-ray blast this bright. “The intensity of these X-rays was unexpected and unprecedented” said Neil Gehrels, Swift’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He said the burst, named GRB 100621A, is the brightest X-ray source that Swift has detected since the observatory began X-ray observation in early 2005. “Just when we were beginning to think that we had seen everything that gamma-ray bursts could throw at us, this burst came along to challenge our assumptions about how powerful their X-ray emissions can be,” Gehrels said.

“The burst was so bright when it first erupted that our data-analysis software shut down,” said Phil Evans, a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom who wrote parts of Swift’s X-ray-analysis software. “So many photons were bombarding the detector each second that it just couldn’t count them quickly enough. It was like trying to use a rain gauge and a bucket to measure the flow rate of a tsunami.”

The software soon resumed capturing the evolution of the burst over time, and Evans recovered the data that Swift had detected during the software’s brief shutdown. The scientists then were able to measure the blast’s X-ray brightness at 143,000 X-ray photons per second during its fleeting period of greatest brightness, which is more that 140 times brighter than the brightest continuous X-ray source in the sky — a neutron star that is more than 500,000 times closer to Earth than the gamma-ray burst, and that sends a ‘mere’ 10,000 photons per second streaming toward Swift’s telescopes.

Gamma-ray bursts typically begin with a bright flash of high-energy gamma-rays and X-rays, then fade away like a fireworks display, sometimes leaving behind a disappearing afterglow in less-energetic wavelengths, including optical and ultraviolet. Surprisingly, although the energy from this burst was the brightest ever in X-rays, it was merely ordinary in optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.

The Swift scientists were able to estimate the overall brightness of GRB 100621A by sampling the photons at some distance from its overexposed center — a standard correction technique. Scientists who study the Sun use a similar approach to observe the Sun’s corona by blocking out its much-brighter center. “With this burst, we had to sample the photons twice as far from the center as we ever had to go before,” Burrows said. “The correction factor for the X-rays from GRB 100621A was 168 times larger than for a typical gamma-ray burst and 5 times larger than for the brightest burst we previously had seen. We never thought we’d see anything this bright.”

Automated analysis of the Swift XRT data is performed at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, which has been studying X-rays from outer space for the past half century. Evans was the first to see the processed data from the burst’s initial blast. “When I first saw the strange data from this burst, I knew that I had discovered something extraordinary,” he said. “It was an indescribable feeling when I realized, at that moment, that I was the only person in the whole universe who knew that this extraordinary event had occurred. Now, after our analysis of the data, we know that this burst is one for the record books.”

Penn State Univ.

Robonaut getting ready for ISS mission

Nasa's Robonaut 2 will be the first human-like robot to go to space, and teams from Johnson Space Center have been putting "R2" through a battery of tests to make sure this futuristic robot is ready for its first mission. R2 will become a permanent resident of the International Space Station, and will launch on space shuttle Discovery as part of the STS-133 mission, currently planned for November 1, 2010. The 136 kg (300-pound) R2 consists of a head and a torso with two arms and two hands. R2 Once aboard the station, engineers will monitor how the robot operates in weightlessness. R2 is undergoing extensive testing in preparation for its flight, including vibration, vacuum and radiation testing.

Watch the video for more information on how R2 operates. While R2 has been in the works for awhile, it also is part of Project M — a project with the very ambitious goal of putting a humanoid robot on the moon in 1,000 days. This project was only initiated in the fall of 2009, and was started by a group of JSC engineers who more or less took matters into their own hands in order to get the Moon. Read a great post from the project manager, Matt Ondler about the history and philosophy of Project M

Did an ancient supernova trigger the Solar System's birth?

One star dies, another is born. The remains of the old are gathered up, at least in some small measure, to become part of the new. That is the astronomical circle of life, the reason that stars have evolved through the eons, each generation incorporating new elements synthesized in the stars that came before. Unlike the earliest stars of hydrogen and helium, stars nowadays contain heavier elements passed down to them by their predecessors, such as carbon, iron and oxygen.

Aside from producing many of the elements that make up our planet and our bodies, the stellar cycle of birth and death appears to have spurred the formation of our solar system some 4.5 billion years ago. According to a new model outlined in a study in the July 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, a shock wave from an exploding massive star several light-years away probably triggered the collapse of the molecular cloud that would become our sun and planets.

Employing a bit of astrophysical forensics, researchers have located fingerprints of short-lived radioisotopes, long since decayed to more stable daughter elements, in primitive meteorites. For those radioisotopes to have been incorporated into primordial solar system bodies they must have been delivered, freshly synthesized, from some nearby cataclysm, whether a stellar explosion known as a supernova or an ailing star throwing off layers of material in less dramatic fashion.

Some researchers have hypothesized that the short-lived isotopes may have arrived in a shock wave strong enough to collapse the presolar cloud, thereby kick-starting the formation of the solar system and injecting newly synthesized material in one fell swoop.

But previous models had failed to deliver enough material to the nascent solar system to account for the observed prevalence of short-lived radioisotopes, says study co-author Alan Boss, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Boss has been on the case for years, trying to solve the mystery of the solar system's formation. "Call it 'Crime Scene Solar System,'" he says. "It's a CSI show."

For years, Boss says, his models had relied on one kind of relatively thick shock front, based on the shell of material ejected in a planetary nebula. In the new study Boss and his Carnegie Institution colleague Sandra Keiser tweaked the modeled thickness and density of the shock wave. Varying the parameters of the shock front boosted the efficiency of the injection mechanism, to the point that the shock wave could indeed push enough material into the collapsing cloud to match observed radioisotopic levels. "Whammo, suddenly the injection efficiency went up quite a bit," Boss says, adding that the key was the incorporation of "more svelte, streamlined, slimmed-down shock fronts."

The svelte shock front in Boss's model better resembles a supernova spurred by the collapse of a massive star's core than it does an alternative proposed explanation, an expanding shell of material ejected from an aging type of star called an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star. "There really is a good reason for thinking that a supernova did it," Boss says. Based on encounter probabilities alone, the supernova mechanism appears more likely than a push from an AGB star, says Gary Huss, a cosmochemist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "A much wider variety of massive stars appear to be viable sources than AGB stars, most of which do not produce enough iron 60," one of the short-lived radioisotopes present in the early solar system, Huss says.

He notes that the new paper reinforces a number of previous studies pointing to a massive supernova as the source of short-lived elements in the early solar system. "I am comfortable with this conclusion, but the case is by no means closed," Huss says. "It will take many more studies like the one in this paper, many more observations of stars, star formation and stellar explosions, and many more models of stellar nucleosynthesis to close this case for good." Of course, there is no reason that some mechanism could not have delivered the radioisotopes shortly after the presolar cloud began to collapse for a totally unrelated reason."It's mostly economy of hypotheses" to link both actions to a common source, Boss says. "It's nice to do both things at once, and it does seem to work." 

As with detectives working more conventional cold cases, Boss continues to apply better technology to the task.  He is now moving from two- to three-dimensional modeling, a process that requires far more computing power but that provides better clues to solving the mystery of the solar system's formation once and for all. "Mother Nature did it," Boss says. "We know who the perp is, but we want to know how she did it."

Scientific American

Rosetta discovers haunting beauty in deep space

The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft has beamed back close-up photographs of asteroid Lutetia, an ancient, cratered relic from the dawn of the solar system. Scientists are abuzz about the stunning images, which reveal a worldlet of haunting, alien beauty.

"I've never seen anything like it," says Claudia Alexander, project scientist for the U.S. Rosetta Project. "It looked as though it could have been fractured off of a mother asteroid – it was all angles and flat planes, ancient impacts overlaid by newer ones, covered by dust of some kind."

Pic: A possible landslide and boulders on asteroid Lutetia. Credit ESA. 

She is particularly intrigued by a giant dent in the asteroid's side. "My first guess would be that it's the remnant of a giant collision that occurred sometime in the distant past," says Alexander. "The edges look shallow rather than sharp and deep as might be the case with a fresh crater. I'm sure there will be much more analysis of that feature in the weeks to come.

And then there's the perplexing appearance that boulders rolled down Lutetian slopes at some point. "If that is indeed what we're seeing, the question becomes 'what could have caused the rolling? Perhaps the asteroid spun-up, spun-down, or experienced some orbital irregularity. It's not clear right now that the asteroid is subject to the forces that could cause these things. This is another issue for further study." Right now we have more questions than answers," Alexander continues. "We can only speculate at this point about what we're seeing in the pictures."

Asteroid Lutetia has been a target of interest among astronomers for many years. It is one of the largest asteroids in the solar system and has a strange spectrum of reflected light that doesn't look quite like any other asteroid. When the opportunity presented itself for Rosetta to pay a visit en route to its prime target, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, mission planners couldn't pass it up.
Now that Alexander has seen the images, she can't help but wonder what it would be like to have a walk around.

"Astronauts would have a hard time walking on Lutetia — the gravity is likely to be much less than that of the moon," she says. "Also, the surface regolith looks very powdery, so astronauts might find themselves sinking in maybe a half-inch or so as they walked." NASA's MIRO (Microwave Instrument for the Rosetta Orbiter) instrument will help determine whether the surface layers are powdery or rocky. As scientists analyze data from Rosetta's other instruments, they'll be able to determine Lutetia's mass and density, thus revealing more about the asteroid's composition and helping solve the riddle of its origin.

Is Lutetia a 130-km fragment from a planet that broke apart billions of years ago? Or is it one of the original planetary building blocks astronomers call "planetesimals" that has remained the same because no planet sucked it in during the solar system's formative years? As scientists begin to answer these questions with the Rosetta data, they'll gain new insights into the origin and history of asteroids, and also learn more about the evolution of the solar system itself. An asteroid's contents can reveal something about the conditions and makeup of the solar nebula where the asteroid formed.

"Rosetta took measurements with 17 different instruments," says Rita Schulz, ESA Project Scientist for the Rosetta Mission. "When all the data are analyzed, Lutetia will be one of the best known asteroids out there." "These spectacular images," she says, "are just the beginning."

Space Daily

World class space education comes to Adelaide

The University of South Australia has joined forces with the International Space University (ISU), Strasbourg, France, to bring world class space education to the southern hemisphere with a new five-week intensive program set to launch in January 2011.

The annual live-in education program – the Southern Hemisphere Summer Space Program (SHSSP) – will target space professionals, graduates and senior undergraduates and in its first three years, will be taught in SA by academics from both institutions. It will be based at UniSA’s Mawson Lakes campus.

Announcing the new program, ISU President and Vice Chancellor, Professor Michael Simpson said the outreach into the southern hemisphere builds on the success of the ISU Space Studies Program (formerly Summer Session Program) which was held in Adelaide and supported by UniSA in 2004.

“Since that successful venture, ISU and UniSA have continued to discuss the notion of bringing a high value space education program to Australia at a time when students in the southern hemisphere have their summer break,” Prof Simpson said. “We believe this new partnership will meet the tests of creativity, quality and student focus that both of our institutions demand for their academic offerings and help to increase expertise in space and space technologies and business.”

UniSA Pro Vice Chancellor and Vice President for the Division of IT, Engineering and the Environment and recently appointed member of the Space Industry Innovation Council, Professor Andrew Parfitt says he is delighted to build so fruitfully on the relationship with ISU. “This new interdisciplinary program can only strengthen our leadership in space research and related technologies,” Prof Parfitt said. “A key focus for UniSA will be to encourage participants in the summer space program to build on their studies by undertaking our new Graduate Certificate in Space Studies, in that way growing national space industry expertise here and the wider region.”

The program will be accredited as one half of the academic content of UniSA’s new Graduate Certificate in Space Studies and has been designed so that students from across Australia and the region can gain academic credit in a range of other space-related undergraduate and post-graduate studies. ISU President Professor Michael Simpson says the summer space program curriculum has been designed to meet the training and education needs of emerging space nations. “We have designed the program with a particular emphasis on space applications and services,” he said. “At the same time it will encompass ISU’s education philosophy that space activities and education are intrinsically, international, intercultural and interdisciplinary.”

The announcement of the new program was made simultaneously by ISU President, Professor Michael Simpson, at ISU's Central Campus in Strasbourg and ISU alumnus and faculty member, Michael Davis, (deputising for UniSA's Pro Vice Chancellor, Professor Andrew Parfitt) at the Australian Space Development Conference in Adelaide. The inaugural program will run from January 5 to February 4 2011. The ISU plan from 2014 is to conduct the program in other southern hemisphere countries as well as Australia. More information about the program is available www.unisa.edu.au/itee/spaceprogram.

ISU

A puzzling collapse of Earth's upper atmosphere

NASA-funded researchers are monitoring a big event in our planet's atmosphere. High above Earth's surface where the atmosphere meets space, a rarefied layer of gas called "the thermosphere" recently collapsed and now is rebounding again.

"This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years," says John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab, lead author of a paper announcing the finding in the June 19th issue of the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). "It's a Space Age record."
The collapse happened during the deep solar minimum of 2008-2009—a fact which comes as little surprise to researchers.

The thermosphere always cools and contracts when solar activity is low. In this case, however, the magnitude of the collapse was two to three times greater than low solar activity could explain.

"Something is going on that we do not understand," says Emmert.
The thermosphere ranges in altitude from 90 km to 600+ km. It is a realm of meteors, auroras and satellites, which skim through the thermosphere as they circle Earth. It is also where solar radiation makes first contact with our planet. The thermosphere intercepts extreme ultraviolet (EUV) photons from the sun before they can reach the ground.

When solar activity is high, solar EUV warms the thermosphere, causing it to puff up like a marshmallow held over a camp fire. (This heating can raise temperatures as high as 1400 K—hence the name thermosphere.) When solar activity is low, the opposite happens.
Lately, solar activity has been very low. In 2008 and 2009, the sun plunged into a century-class solar minimum. Sunspots were scarce, solar flares almost non-existent, and solar EUV radiation was at a low ebb. Researchers immediately turned their attention to the thermosphere to see what would happen.

Emmert uses a clever technique: Because satellites feel aerodynamic drag when they move through the thermosphere, it is possible to monitor conditions there by watching satellites decay. He analyzed the decay rates of more than 5000 satellites ranging in altitude between 200 and 600 km and ranging in time between 1967 and 2010. This provided a unique space-time sampling of thermospheric density, temperature, and pressure covering almost the entire Space Age. In this way he discovered that the thermospheric collapse of 2008-2009 was not only bigger than any previous collapse, but also bigger than the sun alone could explain.

Physorg

DID YOU KNOW?

* A bolt of lightning contains enough energy to toast 160,000 pieces of bread. Unfortunately the bolt only takes 1/10,000 of a second – so turning the bread over might prove difficult.

*  If 10 kilograms of matter spontaneously turned into energy there would be enough energy to power a 100 Watt light bulb for 300 million years – a harrowing thought for all weight watchers.

Image Of The Week

Dying Star or Beautiful Bird?

Hubble image of IRAS 19475+3119. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA.

What a gorgeous new Hubble image! At first glance this object looks like a beautiful, giant, translucent bird. But it is actually star shedding its outer atmosphere. The cloud around this bright star is called IRAS 19475+3119. It lies in the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan) about 15, 000 light-years from Earth in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy.

As stars similar to the Sun age they swell into red giant stars and when this phase ends they start to shed their atmospheres into space. The surroundings become rich in dust and the star is still relatively cool. At this point the cloud shines by reflecting the brilliant light of the central star and the warm dust gives off lots of infrared radiation. It was this infrared radiation that was detected by the IRAS satellite in 1983 and brought the object to the attention of astronomers. Jets from the star may create strange hollow lobes, and in the case of IRAS 19475+3119 two such features appear at different angles. These curious objects are rare and short-lived.

As the star continues to shed material the hotter core is gradually revealed. The intense ultraviolet radiation causes the surrounding gas to glow brilliantly and a planetary nebula is born. The objects that come before planetary nebulae, such as IRAS 19475+3119, are known as preplanetary nebulae, or protoplanetary nebulae. They have nothing to do with planets — the name planetary nebula arose as they looked rather like the outer planets Uranus and Neptune when seen through small telescopes.

This image was created from images taken using the High Resolution Channel of the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The red light was captured through a filter letting through yellow and red light (F606W) and the blue was recorded through a standard blue filter (F435W). The green layer of the image was created by combining the blue and red images. The total exposure times were 24 s and 245 s for red and blue respectively. The field of view is about twenty arcseconds across.

Universe Today

Northern Galactic – Southern Galactic

Members Images

Northern Galactic and Southern Galactic International was established to commemorate the United Nations International Year of Astronomy in 2009 and was officially launched in November 2008. In partnership Northern Galactic and Southern Galactic International aims to gather together research and discoveries in the areas of optical and radio astronomy, astrophotography, planetary studies, and space atmospheric sciences as a service to the interested public. Our service is available to all astronomers and scientists throughout the world. Northern Galactic also makes available for its Members its own Research Grade 406mm/16" RCOS Carbon Truss Telescope for a Low Annual Subscription Fee.

IN THE SKY THIS MONTH JULY 2010

HIGHLIGHTS THIS MONTH 

* July 11 – Total Solar Eclipse. The path of totality will only be visible in the southern Pacific Ocean, Easter Island, and parts of southern Chile and Argentina. A partial eclipse will be visible in many parts of southern South America. 

* July 26 – Full Moon

* July 28, 29 – Southern Delta Aquarids Meteor Shower. The Delta Aquarids can produce about 20 meteors per hour at their peak. The shower usually peaks on July 28 & 29, but some meteors can also be seen from July 18 – August 18. The radiant point for this shower will be in the constellation Aquarius. Best viewing is usually to the east after midnight.

Dave Reneke

UFO remains a mystery
Xinhua
Some media have speculated the UFO might be a private aircraft, based on the increasing number of privately-owned aircraft in Zhejiang province. …

ET, phone Brussels: EU calls for opening UFO data
The Associated Press
A European Union lawmaker urged member governments Tuesday to open their secret files on UFOs, saying people need to know about close encounters of the …

Aviation experts cool on private plane theory in east China UFO probe
Xinhua
An investigation team, comprising police and aviation officials, are still trying to identify the UFO that was located over Zhejiang Province. …

EU Lawmaker Calls For Disclosure Of UFO Files
RedOrbit
An Italian member of the European Parliament has called on European Union governments to open their secret UFO files, saying the public needs to be made …

Source in China cites 'military connection' for UFO sighting
Tucson Citizen
The Internet was buzzing today with the news that a UFO caused flights to be diverted and delayed in China. Control tower officers detected the unidentified …

July 8, 1947: Roswell Incident Launches UFO Controversy
Wired News
Although quickly discounted as erroneous, the announcement lays the groundwork for one of the most enduring UFO stories of all time. …

FEATURE STORY

Is Time Disappearing from the Universe?

Remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. This radical theory may explain a cosmological mystery that has baffled scientists for years.

Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving the galaxies apart, and started to call this unidentified force "dark energy".

The idea that time itself could cease to be in billions of years – and everything will grind to a halt – has been proposed by Professor José Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, and University of Salamanca, Spain. The corollary to this radical end to time itself is an alternative explanation for "dark energy" – the mysterious antigravitational force that has been suggested to explain a cosmic phenomenon that has baffled scientists.

However, to this day no one actually knows what dark energy is, or where it comes from. Professor Senovilla, and colleagues have proposed a mind-bending alternative. They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards. Senovilla proposes that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down. At an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. However, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years. The change would be infinitesimally slow from a human perspective, but in terms of the vast perspective of cosmology, the study of ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago, it could easily be measured

The team's proposal, published in the journal Physical Review D, dismisses dark energy as fiction. Instead, Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock with a run-down battery.

“We do not say that the expansion of the universe itself is an illusion," he explains. "What we say it may be an illusion is the acceleration of this expansion – that is, the possibility that the expansion is, and has been, increasing its rate."

If time gradually slows "but we naively kept using our equations to derive the changes of the expansion with respect of 'a standard flow of time', then the simple models that we have constructed in our paper show that an "effective accelerated rate of the expansion" takes place."

Currently, astronomers are able to discern the expansion speed of the universe using the so-called "red shift" technique. This technique relies on the understanding that stars moving away appear redder in color than ones moving towards us. Scientists look for supernovae of certain types that provide a sort of benchmark. However, the accuracy of these measurements depends on time remaining invariable throughout the universe. If time is slowing down, according to this new theory, our solitary time dimension is slowly turning into a new space dimension. Therefore the far-distant, ancient stars seen by cosmologists would from our perspective, look as though they were accelerating.

"Our calculations show that we would think that the expansion of the universe is accelerating," says Prof Senovilla. The theory bases it’s idea on one particular variant of superstring theory, in which our universe is confined to the surface of a membrane, or brane, floating in a higher-dimensional space, known as the "bulk". In billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether.

"Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever," Senovilla told New Scientist magazine. "Our planet will be long gone by then."

Though radical and in many way unprecedented, these ideas are not without support. Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, say the concept has merit. "We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang, and if time can emerge, it can also disappear – that's just the reverse effect."

Daily Galaxy

HISTORY KEYS

     Halley's Comet and End of the World Predictions

Numerous myths, legends, fallacies and stunts, even scientific errors have predicted the end of the world. One such event occurred exactly 100 years ago. Comets have for centuries been looked on as portents of doom. One in particular, Halley’s Comet, to the people of medieval England at least, seemed to justify that reputation on its appearance in 1066.

When the earth passed through the tail of Halley’s Comet in May 1910, many people in the Western world held their breath due to the predictions of one notable scientist. The comet named for Edmond Halley visits Earth’s neighborhood every 75 year or so. Halley was the first astronomer to plot the comet’s course and so predict its future behaviour. He calculated its regular but very elliptical orbit of the sun, and the resulting passes it would make close to earth’s orbit.

The first appearance of the comet that could test the accuracy of Halley’s calculations came in 1758, 16 years after his death. Two orbits later it was 1910. Due to the earth’s position relative to the sun at the time Halley’s Comet approached, its proximity to Earth was one of the closest. By this time telescopes had become within the reach of many people and cameras were available that could clearly capture the image of the comet as it streaked through the sky.

There was great anticipation, excitement and a considerable amount of apprehension as Halley’s Comet approached. On 20 April the comet reached perihelion, passed around the sun and started to make its way back towards the depths of the solar system. There was real concern that the pass by Earth would be too close for comfort. In 1910 Halley's Comet Came Close to Earth. In mid-May 1910 Halley’s Comet was at its closest point to Earth. It was a spectacular sight in the sky. The comet’s course meant that Earth would pass through its tail of cosmic dust, a tail that stretched nearly 40 million kilometers and which some proclaimed would poison all the world’s life out of existence.

The basis for the fear that gripped much of American and other western societies was the announcement in February 1910 by the Yerkes Observatory in Chicago that the chemical compound cyanogen had been detected in the comet’s tail. French astronomer, Camille Flammarion was reported by the New York Times as saying that this gas “would impregnate that atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet.” Flammarion was well known and had popularised astronomy with his writings, but he had a vivid imagination and was seen to be somewhat eccentric.

In fact the gases and other matter in the tail of Halley’s Comet are dispersed to an almost unimaginable degree, and this was known in 1910. Scientists and astronomers sought to reassure the public that there was no danger. Well known American astronomer Percival Lowell described the contents of the tail as “so rarefied as to be thinner than any vacuum.” The press however was onto a great story – the impending end of the world. The more sensational newspapers of the day exploited Flammarion’s statement for all it was worth. Other newspapers duly conveyed the public reaction to the revelations.

The New York Times reported that “terror occasioned by the near approach of Halley’s comet has seized hold of a large part of the population of Chicago.” In Georgia people “were preparing safe rooms and covering even keyholes with paper,” according to the Atlanta Constitution. On 19 May 1910 the earth came through the tail of Halley’s Comet unscathed. The Chicago Tribune proclaimed ‘We’re Still Here’.

While Halley’s Comet brought fear and trepidation to some in 1910, the vast majority of Earth’s inhabitants, those without access to scientific proclamations and the media, were oblivious to all the fuss. They watched the show then carried on with life as normal. Halley’s comet duly returned in 1986. Earth was in such a position that the pass was not nearly as close nor as spectacular as 76 years earlier. But this time there were spacecraft to go out and collect samples so that scientists could ascertain beyond any doubt just what really was in the comet’s tail. When next it passes in July 2061, the world will know for sure what to expect, and what not to expect.  Suite 101

Getting started In Astronomy: Observing the Moon

The Moon is our closest celestial object. Observing it makes a great project that can tune up anyone's observing skill set. The Moon is up there almost every night to observe and yet the comment most heard at any star-night is" That's the first time I've ever seen the moon in a telescope". That comment also holds true for those looking through binoculars for the first time. With the moon available for so many nights of viewing it is a sure anchor for anyone looking to improve their astronomical observing skills.

The Terminator
While most people get a thrill from viewing a full moon, astronomers and lunar buffs take a whole different approach to observing the moon, they look for the lunar terminator: The lunar terminator is the moving boundary between the part of the moon that is lit by the sun during its phase and that part remaining in darkness. 

As light strikes the moon at a low angle during the phases before and after the full moon phase, shadow areas are created that give a sense of depth to the lunar surface.Suddenly, craters and rials stand out in striking detail and the observer has a sense of depth of these details. Moon Approaching First Quarter Phase the waxing moon in the west, at sunset, offers easy early evening observations especially for children:

 Each night, as the phase moves from new, through first quarter and on to full, the terminator crosses a new area of the lunar surface.
As this happens the previously crossed areas are bathed in more light and will offer less detail. For many astronomers there is the added thrill of observing the earliest crescent moon after new moon.

Moon at Full Phase

As the moon approaches full phase there are opportunities for lunar photography: Because of its brightness the full moon can be photographed with just about any digital or film camera without the need for a tracking mount to drive the camera.
Use a tripod to steady the camera for the shots. 

With a digital SLR camera, bracket the shots so that they vary in exposure time. Check each shot on the LCD screen to determine the quality of exposure.For digital non-SLR cameras experiment with pre-set programs for low light situations where the flash can be turned off.

Moon Approaching Last Quarter Phase

The waning moon offers opportunities as well: The march of the lunar terminator is now lit from the other side of the lunar disc.
After Last Quarter phase viewing becomes problematic because the lunar disk becomes less detailed as the imminent rising of the sun washes out any contrast in the night sky.

Moon Observing Kit

To begin lunar observing only a minimal kit is required:Medium power binoculars (7×50, 8×40, etc. …) will show a great deal of detail.
A chair to sit in while observing. A moon chart for observers who want to identify details. A tripod and binocular bracket are very useful. For those with telescopes, change eyepieces often to see details at different magnifications. Everyone has seen the moon and takes it for granted but there is a wealth of observing possibilities that begin.

John Kulczycki

Story Opportunities from Australasian Science, July 2010

The True Believers
Are we pre-programmed to believe in weird and wonderful things that lack any significant scientific basis, and are some of us more likely to believe than others?

Climate Change or Natural Variability? 
Meteorological records since the 1950s reveal a decrease in rainfall that is consistent with anthropogenic climate change, but a different picture emerges when looking at records since 1900.

Microbe Genes Could Curb Livestock Burps
The DNA sequence of a microbe that produces methane in ruminants provides a target for vaccines and other drugs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from livestock.

The Biggest Losers 
New evidence tightens the noose on humans as the decisive factor in the extinction of the last of the megafauna in Australia and North America.

It’s a Wiggly, Wiggly Universe
A map of the Universe as it existed six billion years ago is close to completion, and may provide new insights into the physics of dark energy.

A?Matter of Taste
Newborn babies will smile when they first taste sucrose and wrinkle their noses at the bitter taste of quinine. What is the adaptive significance of such innate responses to taste?

The Young Visionaries
Early-career scientists are using goggles that mimic common eye diseases to teach primary school children about their vision research and the importance of eye care.

Evidence for Indigenous Australian Agriculture
The assumption that indigenous Australians did not develop agriculture is highly contestable, with a body of evidence revealing that they developed food production systems and in some cases lived in large villages.

The Hazards of Synthesis
Synthesis of knowledge from different disciplines is underused in research and has hazards for practitioners.

Please cite AUSTRALASIAN SCIENCE MAGAZINE as the source of these stories.

CONTACT:  Guy Nolch (Editor/Publisher) on 03 9500 0015

BOOK REVIEW

The Eerie Silence

The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence by Paul Davies

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010
hardcover, 256 pp., illus. US$27

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the modern-day Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), one that must be marked by mixed emotions. There is a justified degree of pride among those involved in SETI with what they have accomplished to date, particularly given the challenges in funding they have faced in funding those efforts.

However, during those 50 years SETI efforts have failed to find any evidence of other civilizations in the universe. Does that mean that we are indeed alone, or that we’re not searching in the right way, or that we’ve simply haven’t searched for long enough? Those are the questions Paul Davies tackles in The Eerie Silence.

“In my opinion,” Davies writes, “the way forward is to stop viewing alien motives and activities through human eyes.” Davies, who runs the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, has been involved in SETI projects “for most of my career”, he writes, but is not interested in providing a hagiographic review of SETI in his book.

Instead, he states that he wants to “take a penetrating look at the aims and assumptions of the entire enterprise”, and he does just that in the book, examining why there have been no signals detected—the “eerie silence” from the book’s title—since Frank Drake first trained a radio telescope on the nearby stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani in 1960.

The radiotelescope searches that have dominated “traditional” SETI since its inception, he argues, is unlikely to succeed, thanks to an “inbuilt bias towards anthropocentrism”; that is, a belief among researchers that alien civilizations, if they exist, would be like us, at least to the extent of transmitting at radio frequencies.

“In my opinion,” Davies writes, “the way forward is to stop viewing alien motives and activities through human eyes.” That means less of an emphasis on traditional SETI in favor of alternative means of detecting evidence of intelligent life, if not a message from them. Davies suggests searching for evidence a wide range of markers that an extraterrestrial civilization, particularly one far more advanced from the Earth, would leave behind, such as Dyson spheres.

However, that assumes that intelligence life does exist beyond Earth, something Davies examines, as well as whether they would be interested in communicating with anyone. He argues that biological intelligence is a “transitory” phenomenon that would inevitably give way to machine intelligence that may choose to simply retreat into its own cyberspace, uninterested in the physical universe at all, let alone communicating with any other intelligence out there.

At the end of this slender, eminently readable volume, Davies tackles the question at the root of SETI: are we alone? As a scientist, he concludes that we are probably the only intelligent life in the observable universe, given all the challenges (discussed in the book) for the evolution of such life. As a philosopher, that conclusion makes him uneasy: “I wonder what all that stuff out there is for,” he writes.

But as a human being, he says he still has a “wide-eyed schoolboy fascination” about alien life and intelligence that has survived scientific skepticism. “I can think of no more thrilling a discovery than coming across clear evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence,” he concludes. That discovery has yet to come, and as The Eerie Silence notes may never come, particularly using traditional search techniques, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth some degree of effort to try and answer one of the most fundamental questions of our existence.

 Jeff Foust

Events

Call for Papers

10th Australian Space Science Conference

27th to 30th September 2010

It is our pleasure to invite you to submit an abstract for the 10th Australian Space Science Conference (ASSC), to be held in Brisbane at the University of Queensland. This will be the fourth ASSC jointly sponsored and organized by the National Committee for Space Science (NCSS) and the National Space Society of Australia (NSSA). This year the Australian Space research Institute (ASRI) is also helping. The ASSC is intended to be the primary annual meeting for Australian research relating to space science. It welcomes space scientists, engineers, educators, and workers in Industry and Government.

This year's ASSC will run in conjunction with the NCSS's workshop on implementing Australia's first Decadal Plan for Space Science, which will shortly be published. This one-day workshop will discuss the Plan and Government's responses, better link the scientific community and associated stakeholders in Government and industry, and start implementing the Plan's recommendations. This year, there will also be a dedicated session to showcase ASRI research, as well as others on space technology and engineering more generally, plus a dedicated session for Australian government units with interests and expertise in space.

 Complete details of all registration rates and details of accommodation will be available in early July. There are now less than 3 weeks remaining for abstract submission, as the deadline of July 11 approaches! The proceedings for peer-reviewed papers from the 2009 conference are now available to view at URL: http://www.nssa.com.au/9assc/downloads/9assc-proceedings-lores.pdf Please make the conference known to your colleagues. We hope that you will attend. You may email asscconference@nssa.com.au for more information. Wayne Short, Co-Chair, National Space Society of Australia Iver Cairns, Co-Chair, National Committee for Space Science, University of Sydney

PULSE@Parkes