Ian O'Neill

Astroengine Live #8: Methane and Astroengineering

It’s been a big week this week. It looks like a replacement for Michael Griffin has been decided, Barack Obama is now President of the United States, NASA has shown all its cards by hinting (shouting) that life on Mars might be generating all that methane* and we could be living in one giant holodeck. Just another week in the Universe I guess…

As there was no Carnival of Space this week, I’ll probably grab a few interesting blog posts from my fellow space bloggers for good measure to throw into the mix for this week’s Astroengine Live! Wedneday at 4pm EST, 5pm MST, 6pm CST, 7pm EST and midnight GMT! If you’ve found any articles of interest, please feel free to drop me a line on astro@wprtradio.com.

Get Involved!

Have any articles or stories you want to contribute? Have an opinion on anything in the world of space? Email me on astro@wprtradio.com and I’ll be sure to give it a mention. Eventually, I hope to have telephone call-ins, but for now, email will do.

Listen to Astroengine Live using the Paranormal Radio player. Or, pick up the podcast feed to activate your favourite audio software.

Check out Paranormal Radio’s live streaming vidcast, Captain Jack will be airing my show on his website too.

*Actually, the methane thing might just be geological activity, but if this week’s headlines are anything to go by, you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s a whole alien civilization on the Red Planet! Which there probably isn’t by the way…

Peter Higgs Discovers Higgs Boson… in the Mail!

Dr Peter Higgs holds his very own Higgs boson (©Particle Zoo/Peter Higgs) — Peter Higgs holds his very own Higgs boson (©Particle Zoo/Peter Higgs)

In October, something very special happened to me. There, on the doorstep, a Higgs boson sat, waiting to be picked up and unwrapped from his packaging (and yes, I can confirm, he is a he).

Of course, he wasn’t the same Higgs boson physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) were looking for, he was a Higgs boson plushie from Julie Peason’s Particle Zoo.

Since that day, Higgsy (as I affectionately call him) has been sitting on my desk, watching me write, whilst holding down a stack of papers when I have my office window open.

Yesterday, I received some more good news via email from my friend Julie, the Particle Zookeeper. The particle physicist whom the Higgs boson is named after has also discovered his very own Higgs boson… at his home in Scotland!
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Gravitational Waves and Gravity Waves, What’s the Difference?

I’ve received this question so many times, so I thought I’d post, for reference purposes, the difference between a gravitational wave and a gravity wave. Yes, they are different creatures (although many authors would have you believe otherwise).

Gravitational waves are theoretical perturbations (ripples) in space-time. Much work is going into the discovery of gravitational waves using gravitational wave detectors like the US Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) or German-British GEO600, but so far, they have proven to be very elusive. In a previous Astroengine post, there is a new theory that perhaps gravitational wave detectors have reached a limit on their precision (i.e. the quanta of space-time, leading to the holographic universe conjecture). Gravitational waves, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, are thought to exist, but have yet to be detected. There are indirect observations of gravitational waves, from observations of the slowing period of binary stars; energy is most likely being lost through gravitational wave generation. Gravitational waves are thought to be generated also by black hole collision, pulsars and supernovae. More on Gravitational Waves…

Gravity waves are physical perturbations driven by the restoring force of gravity in a terrestrial environment. A common example of this are waves formed at an air-water boundary (i.e. the surface of the ocean). Wind creates an instability in the ocean, the restoring gravity force pulls down on the water, while the buoyancy of the water pushes it back up. A perturbation then propagates (i.e. ocean waves). Extreme examples include tsunamis and tides. Perturbations in the atmosphere can also be caused by gravity, where rising/falling air tries to regain equilibrium (after being forced over a maintain range, say), but gravity and buoyancy forces will cause it to propagate as a wave. More on Gravity Waves…

So, gravitational waves are perturbations in space-time (over universal scales). Gravity waves are perturbations in atmospheres (planetary scale). They most certainly are not the same thing.

Is the Universe a Holographic Projection?

Luke and Obi-Wan look at a 3D hologram of Leia projected by R2D2 (Star Wars)

Could our cosmos be a projection from the edge of the observable Universe?

Sounds like a silly question, but scientists are seriously taking on this idea. As it happens, a gravitational wave detector in Germany is turning up null results on the gravitational wave detection front (no surprises there), but it may have discovered something even more fundamental than a ripple in space-time. The spurious noise being detected at the GEO600 experiment has foxed physicists for some time. However, a particle physicist from the accelerator facility Fermilab has stepped in with his suspicion that the GEO600 “noise” may not be just annoying static, it might be the quantum structure of space-time itself…
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Fireball Over Sweden

Just when we thought it was getting quiet, a fireball exploded over Scandinavia last night. What’s more, there is outstanding video footage of the event over the skies of Sweden (above). There are a huge number of sightings from Sweden, Denmark and Holland which is good, there’s a better chance of finding any debris that way (in fact, if you saw something, contact the International Meteor Organization).

“The fireball occured on January 17th at 19:09 UT. It was a spectacular sight. Duration: 3 or 4 seconds, colours: yellow to green, fragmentation yes, brightness -10 or maybe brighter. I’m a meteor observer active since 1978 and I have observed almost 60 000 meteors since that time.” – Koen Miskotte, Ermelo, Netherlands.

For more, check out Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy article and SpaceWeather.com…
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Naming Pluto: A Review

Naming Pluto, the story of Venetia Phair (© Father Films)

When my copy of the “Naming Pluto” DVD arrived in the post, I was very excited. However, this wasn’t the original plan.

Only a few days earlier, the short film was being aired down the road at the Los Angeles Femme Festival in Beverly Hills and the film’s writer, producer and director Ginita Jimenez had invited me along. Alas, I couldn’t be there (really frustrating as you know how much I love premiers!), so Ginita kindly posted a copy to me.

I had little idea about the history of the naming of Pluto (and I only had a general knowledge about how and when it was discovered), so I was looking forward to being educated as well as entertained.

Fortunately, I had the night to myself to watch Naming Pluto and take notes for a future review of the short film (just posted on the Universe Today). So I dimmed the lights and started the DVD. For the next 13 minutes, I didn’t write a word…
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“Zapowiedzi Końca Świata na rok 2012 to kompletne bzdury!”

No Doomsday in 2012 Article Now Available in Polish!

Great news. My original “No Doomsday in 2012” article is available not only in Spanish and Portuguese, it’s now available in Polish!

A huge thank you goes to Dr Piotr Dybczyński from Astronomical Observatory of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań (Poland), for taking on this huge task.

I am still completely overwhelmed by how popular my writing about the 2012 hysteria has become, and it is quickly becoming clear that word is being spread throughout the non-English speaking world as well.

Check out Piotr Dybczyński’s website. He’s working his way through each of the six (so far) English versions so they can be accessed in Polish too.

No Doomsday in 2012 in Polish:

Zapowiedzi Końca Świata na rok 2012 to kompletne bzdury! (“Predictions for the End of the World are Complete Nonsense!“, Piotr’s index page for all my 2012 articles, plus my profile!)
Nie będzie “Dnia Zagłady” w roku 2012 (“No Doomsday in 2012“)

As the translations are coming in thick and fast, I have decided to build a sidebar widget for a mini-directory of all my “No Doomsday” articles so they can be quickly accessed and brought together. I’ll let you know once this is up and running on Astroengine. I also plan to add links to the translations on the original articles on the Universe Today.

Thanks also to Manuel Herman who has painstakingly kept up with my Universe Today 2012 articles (and others!), translating each into Spanish on his space news website Ciencia Kanija. Also, thank you to Roca at Eternos Aprendizes for translating my recent “2012: No Comet” article into Portuguese! More to come soon…

An Insult, on a Galactic Scale

“That’s really going to burn when those insults reach you in 2.5 million years.” – Stephen Colbert.
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Twitter Journalism: Methane on Mars, The Signature of Life?

The distribution of atmospheric methane originating from three principal regions on the Martian surface (NASA)

Today, NASA held a press conference detailing some significant discoveries from observations made of the Martian atmosphere. Using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility and Keck Telescope, scientists from the University of Hawaii and NASA were able to deduce the spectroscopic fingerprint of methane. Although scientists have known for a long time that methane exists in the Martian atmosphere, the big news is that there is lots of it, it appears to be constantly replenished and it is a huge indicator of biological processes under the surface.

Fortunately, I was able to watch the NASA TV broadcast of the press conference at 11am (PST), so I thought I’d try, for the first time, to do some live microblogging of the announcements using Twitter. So, rather than going into vast detail about today’s methane news (as the web has exploded with articles on the subject anyway), I thought I’d publish my Twitter feed during the conference…
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Astroengine Live #7: Beer, Beer and Cutting-Edge Cosmology

I'm not sure whether I should laugh or cry...

I wasn’t actually going to mention the whole space beer thing again, heaven knows I’ve been banging on about that enough! But I just stumbled across a website advertising a film that will be made called “Beer Drinkers in Space”. (Sign me up!) There’s little information about it, but it appears to be based on a 1980’s original movie of the same name. The blog has recently announced that “Beer Drinkers in Space is readying for a March shoot in Orlando, Florida. The movie, starring Christopher Atkins and James Hong, will be directed by Iake Eisenmann.” I wonder if they need a space beer science advisor? Hmmm…

Anyhow, today’s Astroengine Live will include an airing of my 10-minute-long podcast for the 365 Days of Astronomy that aired last week (about, you guessed it, “The Link Between Beer and Space Settlement”), a behind-the-scenes look at the AAS conference last week in Long Beach (about, you guessed it, drinking free space beer), and something about magnetars, colliding black holes and hot neutron stars. Oh yes, and a run-down of the Carnival of Space. It’s going to be awesome.

Show starts at 4pm PST, 5pm MST, 6pm CST, 7pm EST… and midnight GMT!

Get Involved!

Listen to Astroengine Live using the Paranormal Radio player.

Check out Paranormal Radio’s live streaming vidcast, Captain Jack will be airing my show on his website too.