Cosmic Vertigo

I'm pleased to announce the LAUNCH of my new space podcast, Cosmic Vertigo, made with co-host Alan Duffy and our amazing producer Joel Werner.

"Do you ever feel dizzy when you think about the incomprehensible scale of space? We call that feeling Cosmic Vertigo. Welcome to a head-spinning conversation between two friends who study the sky for a living."

Rest state: Alan and I cracking up (Photo: ABC/Radio National)

The three of us had a lot of fun creating this series, and I'm in awe of Joel's editing and production genius.

Dream Team: Alan Duffy, Joel Werner, and yours truly (Photo: ABC/Radio National)

The first two episodes are now LIVE with a new one released every two weeks.... so GO LISTEN and COMMENT and SUBSCRIBE wherever you get your podcasts!

dirty space news update

here are a few pieces of dirty space news that i've collected recently, all together in one happy place for your enjoyment.

from a paper simulating magnetic fields called "High Energy Neutrino Emission from Astrophysical Jets in the Galaxy."  i particularly like the last line of the abstract: "One of the main ingredients of the present work is the presence of a toroidal magnetic field that confines the jet flow and furthermore greatly affects the distribution of the high energy neutrinos." 

Caption from paper: A plot of the magnetic field magnitude roughly half way into the simulation. We can see the jet self-confinement due to magnetic forces resulting in a narrow beam.

Adrian Price-Whelan on twitter shared a graph he created for his research and wondered "maybe it's not that bad, just my inner 11 year old showing." i think we can all agree that it is that bad.  

helpfully, a fellow astronomer suggested that "if you switched x and y, it might not be quite so snigger-worthy." i'm not sure it helped... 

and finally, yet another space vehicle for our dirty space news entertainment - Blue Origin's New Shepard space vehicle completed its first developmental test flight.

there is even a viedo of the launch!

from different countries

i have returned to australia after a recent round of travel to europe.  this venture was scientifically productive, but another interesting sequence of events happened that i didnt realize until they were almost finished.  of course, these events revolved around the world cup!

throughout the course of this tournament, i watched an australia game while in australia, an england game while in england, a croatia game from croatia, and the swiss play their quarterfinal match from switzerland!   if we ignore the fact that the home teams of each of those matches lost, it was a pretty great series of experiences!

the croatians were the most outwardly enthusiastic, while the english were (predictably) the most negative.

this part of england always feels like i'm in a jane austen novel.

croatia's beauty is underrated.

geneva's cheese still makes me drool, and the sound of the french spoken there makes me swoon.

my first "raclette"

if the embedding doesnt work below, watch the raclette video here!



when they offered me an XMM pin at the astronomy conference, i thought it would be more "dirty space news!"

watching the swiss play in switzerland!

and then the big finale of the conference - an excursion to the the CMS detector of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)!!  geek heaven.

the day was so clear and dry that you could see mont blanc, the highest peak in the alps, behind the CMS building!

Add caption

 bye bye switzerland!

ps.  in the two world cup sweepstakes i entered, i ended up 13th of 247 in one and 6th of 156 in the other.  not bad!! but still no money won :(

dirty space news: aliens

i dont know who to give credit to for creating this cartoon, but i saw it in a tweet from i f*cking love science.  

it all makes sense now.

dirty space news goes live!

if you are in chicago, head over to the adler planetarium TONIGHT for Adler After Dark (get tickets here) for a very special event.  i'll be narrating a live dirty space news show inside the massive 360 degree dome!   

here's a sneak peek of the 40 ft view ;)

finally - some DSN of the female persuasion!

i have been laughing almost to the point of tears while rehearsing for the show.   it's going to be so much fun!  

but i've been enjoying the cold, windy city!  yesterday i decided to walk from where this photo was taken to that circular building perched out on the edge of the lake (adler planetarium).   it was a good idea in principle, but WOW was it COLD!  i've lost all my winter weather tolerance.   oh well, the snow is lovely.  

chicago's museum campus

ps. sorry for the late notice on this show - have been running around like crazy since moving, starting my new job and during my prep for travel.

this is our sun, our star.

this is our sun, our star.   this is what it does.



over 5 days last week, our sun spun and spewed out coronal mass ejections (no, this is not a dirty space news post!), sending waves of solar particles out into space, through our solar system.  the video was produced by NASA Goddard and shows solar flares and coronal mass ejections from Oct 23-28th.  the images were taken by NASA's solar dynamics observatory and the ESA/NASA solar and heliospheric observatory.

i particularly like how at 1:45 they show just how far out the solar particles are flung - notice the tiny little sun in the centre for scale!

dirty space news: self-eclipsing

last month at the dotAstronomy 5 conference in boston, someone pointed out to me the existence of bewbsinspace.tumblr.com.  that's right.  how had i not heard of this before?!?

for this installment of dirty space news, we explore one of the elusive female components of the universe.  do you see it?

finally - some female DSN!  (Credit: Scotty Degenhardt)

this graph was created by amateur astronomer scotty degenhardt and shows how light from jupiter's moon, Io, changes over time.  Io's orbital path around jupiter holds a puffed ring of dusty material. this graph shows Io "self-eclipsing," which happens when its atmosphere blocks light scattered from its own torus, producing the attractive curve shown above.

dirty space news: solid as a rock

this earthly spire is excitedly reaching toward the milky way galaxy in today's dirty space news entry. the rock formation, called castildetierra, is located in bardenas reales, spain.  

Photo Credit: Maria Rosa Vila

why does the milky way arc like a rainbow across the sky in this photo, you might be wondering?  the image is a collection of 14 different shots that were added together for the final effect.  the photographer would have stood in a single place and taken photos in all directions to capture images of the entire sky. then she added them together and cropped the final image in post-processing.

i think the lack of any distortion in the final combined image is impressive! or maybe the universe is just naturally attracted to that 50 meter pillar of stiff rock ;)

dirty space news: merging galaxy clusters

at a distance of 3.4 billion light years lives a very excited system known as the bullet cluster.  the image below shows the cluster - lots of galaxies speckled throughout, two clumps of hot x-ray gas shown in red, and two separate regions of blue that represent dark matter.

the bullet cluster: interacting galaxy clusters (credit: link)

the bullet cluster is actually two separate galaxy clusters, caught in the act of intergalactic intercourse - they are merging together to become one.   the separation of the two red and two blue clumps is evidence that the clusters have just slammed together.

when the clusters pass through each other the first time, the gas between the galaxies kinda slams together, heats up to very high X-ray temperatures and slows down to stay more centrally concentrated. the dark matter does not heat up due to this thermodynamic friction and instead passes through more easily without as much slowing.   so the red and blue blotches are separated.

a team in germany decided to use computer models to simulate this process and guess what they found? thats right - dirty space news!

Credit: bullet cluster simulations (pdf)

they took two clusters of galaxies and allowed them to come together, checking the effects when using clusters of different size ratios.

in the image above, you can see a map of how the hot gas spreads during the encounter.  the authors point out that "a top-down inclination of the plane of the encounter ... does not produce drastic changes in the morphology of the bow shock or of the edge of the bullet."  this has not been my own experience, but to be fair, my work is not yet published.

bad astronomer under southern skies

i saw this lovely astronomy image collage on elise andrew's twitter feed this week and thought you might like it too.

Credit: link

elise is the founder of the fantastic "i fucking love science" facebook group, and is hosting an "IFLS live" event in sydney tonight.  the event features a pretty amazing array of special guests, including the bad astronomer, phil plait, who i was lucky enough to hang out with over the weekend.

trouble makers making trouble

we spent some time enjoying the views from sydney observatory.

sydney's harbour bridge and opera house from observatory hill

the southern cross over phil plait

i think phil was searching for special southern hemishere dirty space news in the night sky above the crescent moon and very bright venus.

phil plate admiring the southern skies

you can listen to some of our visit , as it was captured in the skeptic zone podcast #251 by richard saunders.

richard saunders recording phil plait while observing with this 16'' telescope

looking forward to the event tonight and will hopefully post something here about it afterwards!   you can follow me on twitter for updates, or the #IFLSlive hashtag.

Credit: link

the einstein tower

the einstein tower is a cool piece of expressionist architecture built in germany in the 1920s.  the building was designed by erich mendelsohn and dedicated to understanding einstein's theories.

the building had to be reconstructed recently after it had been damaged in world war II and left for a while.

today the einstein tower is a working solar observatory.

dirty space news: albedo libido

today's installment of dirty space news asks the question: does albedo affect libido?   that's how i interpret this research by aomawa shields and collaborators, anyway!

the way a planet's climate behaves is caused by many factors, one of which is the the kind of light that shines from the star around which the planet orbits, and how this light reflects of the planet's ice and water.  the amount of light reflected is called "albedo" and can be thought of as measuring the "whiteness" of the planet.

this paper tests how different kinds of light from a parent star can affect different layers of the planet's atmosphere, and well, changes in the model dont appear to affect libido ;)

their models also appear to have found some creepy duck clown face thing with a looming monster.   i dont claim to understand this part of the research at all!

thanks to alex parker for the dirty tip on twitter.  

dirty space news: all over mars

it seems several news outlets have finally started to appreciate the humorous value of dirty space news, although they aren't calling it by that name.

either the spirit or opportunity rover on mars created these telling tracks on the surface of the red planet during a routine maneuver.

Credit: NASA

i call it "routine" because there are other photos where a similar pattern is made in the dusty dirt.

just think about it - there are probably penises drawn in the dirt ALL OVER MARS.   well done, NASA ;) 

UPDATE:  how could i have forgotten to remind us all about the marssack?   thanks, phil plait, for pointing out this folly.  

UPDATE: in the comments, ed davies offers some excellent information about the above images.  according to doug ellison the first image was part of a large panorama taken by the spirit rover on sols 59 to 61 (march 3 to 5, 2004).  the other images were also taken by spirit in early 2004.  

and the sad news, those tire tracks are probably not on the surface of mars anymore, as strong winds would have blown them away.   sad, really :(

dirty space news: comets

astronomers often refer to comets at "dirty snowballs."

NASA sent a space probe to investigate comet temple 1 on a mission that was called Deep Impact.

this one is called "comet cardinal."

Comet Cardinal (Credit: Nick Howes using Faulkes Telescope North)

since ancient times comets have been branded with such titles as "the Harbinger of Doom" and "the Menace of the Universe."  here are some old sketches of various comet sightings.    

1) Encke’s Comet – 1828, drawn by struve

2) Halley’s Comet – 1835, drawn by bessel

3) Biela’s Comet – 1846, drawn by struve

4) Great Comet of 1843

5) Comet of 1744, drawn by cheseaux

the comets all appear in the above sketches to have unique shapes, but they all have a few basic features: a tail, a nucleus, and a head coma.

Link

when approaching the sun, a comet changes shape as the hotness of the sun's radiation causes the frozen ice and gases to puff up and form a head coma.  interestingly, comet tails always face away from the sun no matter what direction the comet is traveling, because of the scent of perfume carried on the solar winds.