First Lines of Samuel R. Delany's "Nova"

 "'Hey, Mouse! Play us something,' one of the mechanics called from the bar.

'Didn't get signed on no ship yet?' chided the other. 'Your spinal rocket'll rust up. Come on, give us a number." 

The Mouse stopped running his finger around the rim of his glass. Wanting to say "no" he began a "yes." Then he frowned."

- Samuel R. Delany, Nova

Delany's work has always impressed me, but i've only really known his famous works: Dalghren,  Trouble on Triton, the always stunning "Aye, and Gomorrah" from Dangerous Visions. Nova is one of his earlier novels, appealing to me for having more plot than the sprawling Dalghren and for his elements of Tarot, Moby Dick, and classical mythology. Overall, it's a vibrant book - filled with color and invention with very little of the obsolescence that 50 years of scientific progress can often bring to older speculative fiction. Like many of his books I felt like I didn't catch all of the thematic references, but then again I didn't feel like I needed to because there were so many fascinating aspects to the story. My favorite parts were the univeral acceptance of the Tarot, the power structure of the galactic governments and how Von Ray - the Ahab-like obsessed captain - wanted revolution, and the different species and how they spoke and related to each other. An excellent example of New Wave scifi.

 Good summary of the book here.

New observations from Webb, new theories of the universe

 I recently read this article at LGM that summarized the implications of some of the findings from the new Webb telescope.  Long story short, some galaxies appear to have formed much earlier than the standard cosmology model predicts. Which leads to some uncomfortable questions about how accurate the standard model is, and points to how little we actually know about the universe. (Campos points out that our understanding has always been flawed; as I've always pondered, a system that essentially says "this equation explains everything except the odd fact that the majority of universe seems to be "dark matter" which we can't see, study, or explain" doesn't make sense.)

Of course, there's a lot of freaky shit that in the universe that doesn't make sense. Some of the models proposed to help explain these new observations are out there: the laws of physics evolving over time? Or John Wheeler, who thinks that observing the universe may cause it's behavior to change (i.e., his “participatory universe” in which every act of observation was in some sense a new act of creation.) 

I can't say I understand all of what this means but I do enjoy pondering what it could mean. It stretches the mind in good and interesting ways. I can't wait to see where this line of inquiry goes!

Approaching Ceres

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory just did something really cool: they plugged images from Dawn's approach to Ceres and generated a 3D video of the spacecraft's approach to the dwarf planet. It's a fascinating short movie with lots of amazing detail. You should watch it.

Science Tab Dump

Because when shit's falling apart around you, the sane man escapes into the wonder of the cosmos...

This article about the seven wonders of our solar system is a good reminder of the incredible scale of what's in our immediate vicinity. Check out some of these examples:

• Jupiter's Great Red Spot. "A storm," Bova pointed out, "larger than the entire planet Earth that has been raging across the face of the solar system's largest planet for at least four hundred years." But it's just it's great size and height that gives it its distinctive color. 
• Olympus Mons, a volcano on Mars, that is so large that it rises above the Martian atmosphere. 
• The martian canyon Valles Marineris is as long as the United States. (There's a lot of awe about these natural features in KSR's Mars trilogy.) 

Sander van den Berg has animated thousands of stunning real pictures from NASA's Cassini and Voyager satellites in this short video. Wow. The images of the moving clouds of Jupiter and Saturn are mesmerizing.

Many people credit Poe with being the first Horror and Detective writers. Now perhaps he was the first SciFi writer as well? Click through to see Eliza Strickland talk about Poe's poem Eureka, which includes “a spookily intuitive description of the Big Bang theory more than 70 years before astrophysicists came up with the idea."

Get your Sunshine shades on!

• Short video of an immense sunspot of plasma punching its way out of the Sun. 
• Longer timelapse video of  the sun during the time that the sunspot 2192 was erupting.

More and more scientists are becoming more open to the idea that we might live in a multiverse:

If  modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn't be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up either of these constants even a little would render the universe unlivable.
To account for our incredible luck, leading cosmologists like Alan Guth and Stephen Hawking envision our universe as one of countless bubbles in an eternally frothing sea. This infinite “multiverse” would contain universes with constants tuned to any and all possible values, including some outliers, like ours, that have just the right properties to support life. In this scenario, our good luck is inevitable: A peculiar, life-friendly bubble is all we could expect to observe.
Many physicists loathe the multiverse hypothesis, deeming it a cop-out of infinite proportions. But as attempts to paint our universe as an inevitable, self-contained structure falter, the multiverse camp is growing.

Comet Landing!

Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko

So 10 years ago, mankind launched a box named Rosetta into space. It traveled over 4 billion miles to sync up with the orbit of comet 67P, a hunk of rock and ice only 2.5 miles in diameter and travelling 85K MPH. The comet is believed to have formed 4.6 billion years ago with material leftover from when the solar system was coalescing. Rosetta launched a lander Philae to the surface of the comet yesterday and, after bouncing twice (harpoon failure!), the comet is safely on the surface in a gravity just .01% of the Earth.

I'm awestruck, in the true sense of the word. And best of all, the comet is singing!

For more on the mission, check out this post on Bad Astronomy.

Blue Sunsets

Mars sunsets are blue:

A 6-image mosaic taken by Curiosity on sol 587 (April 1, 2014) of the sun setting behind the tall western rim of Gale crater.

NASA / JPL / MSSS / Damia Bouic

I was reading about this phenomenon in Green Mars, where Sax, the "disinterested scientist", ponders the effects that the thickening atmosphere on Mars is having on the color of the sky. The short answer is that it all depends on Rayleigh scattering (the elastic scattering of light by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the light). Essentially, the martian atmosphere contains a lot of very small specks of rocks and minerals ("fines") which, combined with the different chemical makeup of the atmosphere, diffuse light differently. Here's another, undoubtedly better, explanation.

One of the fascinating things about KSR's Mars trilogy is how the details how the human colonization of Mars would change things. For example, finishing his research, Sax "...concluded that if the atmosphere was thickened to one bar, then the sky would probably turn milk white." p. 162 Now that would make for an interesting sight!

Random Tab Dump

Have always liked Giovanni Piranesi's (1720–1778) architectural drawings (see some here). Thought of it because the Dish quoted Frances Stonor Saunders, who "suggests that urban wrecks offer a shortcut to self-transcendence, “a steroidal sublime that enables us to enlarge the past since we cannot enlarge the present.”"

400 year old "cubist" art from Giovanni Battista Bracelli. Insane drawings for the time. I'm amazed he wasn't burned at the stake!


The rebooted Cosmos debuted last Sunday. I'm always up for a good space documentary, and this didn't disappoint. Neil deGrasse Tyson - the scientist with the Barry White voice - was excellent as always, and the sfx were impressive. Nice to see a show that's honest about our space in the universe in prime time competing with modern distractions (reality TV!). Just about the only thing I didn't really get was the "Spaceship of the Imagination" but I can deal with it. Looking forward to next week. Until then, here's an interview with Tyson about the series.

Developments in nanotechnology are making the idea of space elevators less far fetched everyday.

What is string theory? Take it away Brian Greene: "It's an attempt to unify all matter and all forces into one mathematical tapestry."

Off Balance with Awe

Cayte Bosler, while examining the benefits of awe in The Atlantic, quotes Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota:

"The experience of awe is one where you are temporarily off-kilter in terms of your understanding of the world," explains Vohs. "People mostly walk around with a sense of knowing what is going on in the world. They have hypotheses about the way people behave and what might happen; those are pretty air-tight. It is hard to get people to shake from those because that’s just how the brain works. We are always walking around trying to confirm the things we already think. When you are in a state of awe, it puts you off balance and as a consequence, we think people might be ready to learn new things and have some of their assumptions questioned."

It's one of the reason that I like space so much. The scale is so huge that it puts your mind a perspective that its hard to achieve on an everyday basis.

The Pale Blue Dot

I never get tired of this one.

The New "Cosmos"

This looks cool: Neil deGrasse Tyson's update of Carl Segan's famous Cosmos TV show. My impression is that since the show is going to be on Fox - and produced by the Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane - it will be a show more for the masses than perhaps it was before (being originally shown on PBS). deGrasse Tyson isn't always my cup of tea - he can be a bit abrasive and clown-like (at least in his StarTalk Radio show) - but he knows his science cold, and has an amazing voice one could listen to all day.

The Majesty of Saturn

Gordan Ugarkovic recently created an absolutely stunning composite image of Saturn.

You'll really be doing yourself a disservice if you don't go here and check out the incredible new high-rez shot of Saturn where you can see all of the cool details. Bad Astronomy runs down some of them:

"Cassini was high above Saturn to the north, looking “down” on the ringed world when it took these images. You can see the bizarre hexagonal north polar vortex, the six-sided jet stream flowing around Saturn. The subtle but beautiful bands mark the cloud tops of Saturn’s atmosphere. Unless I'm mistaken, the thin white line you see wrapping around the planet at mid-latitude is the remnant of a vast storm so huge it completely dwarfed our own home world of Earth. And if you look carefully (you can measure it!) you can see that Saturn is highly flattened, its equatorial diameter wider than through the poles."

Click through for lots more. Incredible stuff.

Water on Mars

Pretty amazing news from Curiosity - Mars does indeed have water! according to the report, there's a decent amount too: "[Curiosity] found water molecules bound to other minerals in Martian soil...  Researchers say that every cubic foot of Martian soil contains about two pints of liquid water. All things told, about two percent of the Martian soil is made of up water."

What's most exciting about this is it makes future expeditions to the red planet even more plausible. Money quote:

"We now know there should be abundant, easily accessible water on Mars," says Leshin. "When we send people, they could scoop up the soil anywhere on the surface, heat it just a bit, and obtain water."

Bring on the space colony!

It's, Like, Pictures? But of Space?

io9 has a great space porn collection up called "The Most Spectacular Astronomy Images of the Past Year." My favorite: "Green Energy" by Fredrik Broms.

The Sound of Interstellar Space

The JPL has officially determined that Voyager has left our galaxy and is now travelling in the empty space between stars. The video above is the synopsis of how they figured it out. If you want an isolated soundtrack of the eerie sounds of "dense, ionized gas (the "interstellar plasma" that fills the space between star systems...)", check out this i09 article. Cool stuff.

The Transit of Venus - in Ultraviolet

Last year, I posted a picture of the 2012 Transit of Venus and mentioned that it was the most dynamic picture taken of the event. I was wrong.

You're looking at the sun, filtered for three types of ultraviolet light, with the black dot of Venus crossing it. Damn! Check out the NASA website for a larger picture and a description of how the image was created. 

Meanwhile, on Mars...

The red planet used to have drinkable water!

A picture is emerging of ancient Mars in which neutral water existed at multiple locations, quite possibly raining down from the sky. Over the course of millions of years, Mars has gotten progressively drier and colder, resulting in highly concentrated pockets of acidic water.

Another interesting fact:

Though it was only designed for a 90-day mission, Opportunity is now approaching its 3,400th day of operation. It arrived on Mars over nine years ago on January 25, 2004. 

Russian Meterorite

Incredible news out of Russia this morning. A meteorite exploded or impacted the ground near Chelyabinsk, Russia (just east of the Ural mountains). The pictures and videos are a testiment to the power of these types of events. Check them out at the Bad Astronomy blog or on Talking Points Memo. A few containing the awesomely loud sound of impact as well as show just how much broken glass resulted from such a powerful sound wave.

Might As Well Be Infinity...

To expand upon this post a bit, Voyager I is almost at the edge of our galaxy. To put that in perspective, TPM writes, it's "some 11 billion miles away from the Sun, with its signal taking about 17 hours to get back to Earth." It took Voyager - a nuclear-powered spacecraft - 35 years to travel to the edge of the solar system.

It's always hard to really grasp distances like this, but Alan Lightman devotes an entire article ("Our Place in the Universe") to it in the December 2012 issue of Harper's:

"...Newton correctly concluded that the nearest stars [beyond our solar system] are about 100,000 times the distance from the Earth to the sun, about 10 trillion miles away. ... If we traveled in the fastest rocket ship ever manufactured on earth, the trip would last 100,000 years, at least a thousand human life spans." 

Pretty stunning numbers. And that's just to our nearest star, to say nothing of other galaxies. Lightman quotes a scientist studying a galaxy named UDFj-39546284 that is 100,000,000 trillion miles from earth. Damn.

Practically, this means that, since our current understanding is that speed-of-light travel is impossible, the rest of the universe is out of reach for manned space travel. Its reasons like this that make SciFi authors like Kim Stanley Robinson limit themselves to our solar system: the distances between systems are just too vast. And they're getting bigger all the time!

Words and Action

"It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall on the flow of the stream."

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, p. 461

Friday Space News

More and more potential diamonds are being found in space. The latest is "55 Cancri e," "a planet 40 light years away from Earth [that' has at least a third of its mass made up of solid diamond."

As rare as they are on earth, being the most stable form of carbon, diamond is theoretically much more common elsewhere in the universe. This notion first grabbed my attention in Clarke's 2010 when he postulated a Jupiter with a diamond core larger than the size of the earth.

Bonus space item: An incredible unraveling Helix Nebula as tweeted out by NASA.