Our Universe Address

A day late, but not a dollar short, here's a quick post about our neck of the Universal woods.

Make sure you click the picture and zoom to actual size!The Universe is so incredibly amazing.

(And we'll be back on schedule next week with a fun astronomical musing on Monday!)

No wordy post this week

Well, due to finals last week and the fact that it's Spring Break now, I will not have a blog post this week.  See y'all next week!

A little bit of Space Pr0n for you

Exploding white dwarf star, called a Type 1A Supernova, first observed by astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1572. Image courtesy of Chandra X-Ray Observatory

So beautiful, isn't it?

In 1572, astronomer Tycho Brahe noticed a new, very bright star had appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia, and this is what we see of it today. In fact, it was not a new star, but the explosion of a star which had originally been too faint to see with the naked eye. And now, thanks to the wonders of technology, we get to use it as a desktop background. Yay science!

Science Education and Public Outreach - A super hot topic right now!

I had the privilege of being part of a discussion, via Twitter, with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye when they were in the White House for a science fair last month.  They were answering questions that people were tweeting at them, live.  The cool thing about that was that I could see what people were asking them because they used a hashtag (#WHchat, in this case).

Of course, my "being part of" this discussion was really just me butting my nose in with my two cents, but whatever.

Anyway, one of the questions asked of the two venerable science communicators eventually got me thinking.

Though I answered this question right away, I later stepped back to think about it for a while longer.

I have said for some time that if you get kids excited about science, they'll get interested, thus we'll increase the population of scientists.  Pretty much common sense, really.  I've also said lately that I want whatever career I wind up with to have some sort of current or potential outreach component, because I really like getting people excited about science.

Lo and behold, I get a Facebook event notification from the UC Davis Astronomy Club for a meeting about holding an astronomy summer camp.  Upon reading this, I found myself not excited at all, but filled with dread.  And then I was quite confused - didn't I want to get people excited about science?  Don't I love talking about astronomy?  Can't I handle kids pretty well?

Yes, yes, and yes.  So what's the problem, Desiree'??

Here it is:  outreach to kids does not involve the stuff I find coolest about astronomy because it's just too complicated for a child's mind to wrap itself around.  I love being very descriptive, oftentimes using rather large words (not jargon, just your average, honest $0.50-word), and that it is just not conducive to most kid outreach.  Maybe you can make an argument that it is, in fact, but I've made up my mind, so don't confuse me with the facts.

(Plus, dealing with kids en masse is extraordinarily difficult, to put it mildly.  I've paid my dues with teaching Sunday School, doing tons of babysitting, being a teacher's aide in a 5th grade class, and volunteering in toddler care at a day camp, in another life.)

So this is what made me revisit the Twitter conversation, and also made me start thinking a little harder about how I want to try to steer my career.  Up to this point, I hadn't really separated kid-outreach from adult-outreach in my head.  Upon doing so, however, I realized my science communication and writing class (the major impetus behind two things: 1) Rekindling my love for writing as well as science outreach, and 2) Starting this blog.) has not focused at all on writing for, or communicating science to, children.

To accomplish my goals of communicating science and increasing the number of scientists, I've decided that I want to get my generation excited about science, so they can get their kids interested.  Too often, those in educatingish roles tend to forget that parents are there to *gasp* parent.  My parents had a huge impact on my interests today - my love of space came from seeing the space shuttle launch when I was about 3 or 4; I was completely hooked from then on out, resolving to be an astronaut.  I had subscriptions to Omni magazine, 3-2-1 Contact, and loved the movie Space Camp.  They also took me to planetarium shows and science museums, my favorite of which is still The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

I held on to this dream for a long time, and though I did abandon it, I eventually returned to my first love: space.  These lovely parents of mine are also largely responsible for my writing style:  they are both wonderful writers who would accept nothing less than great writing from me, even though I loudly protested (boy, was I stubborn!).  Between them, they still proofread all of my major papers, cover letters, résumés, and presentations for me.  (<3 you guys!)

One of the assignments for my science communication class (which also has a blog!) was to start a blog, and I tell you, when I found this out I was elated!  I had once briefly considered starting a food blog, but nothing came of it; the idea of a science blog, however, had me really excited!  Writing Ms. Disarray is marrying my loves of musing and talking about astronomy with my knack for writing, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

Thus, my mission, and the mission of this blog, is to get my compadres excited about science so that they can excite their kids about it in turn.  Big-words and kids-en-masse problems solved, plus it's really fun and relaxing.

So, my dear reader, what would you like me to blog about?  Is there anything astronomical or cosmological about which you've been super curious?  Drop me a line and let me know!  Feel free to hit me up on Twitter, or if you are social-network-impaired, send me an email. :)

Evolution of the Moon

At this point, we're pretty sure that our Moon, which is an unusually large one in our Solar System, was formed when a Mars-sized body crashed into the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, during the formation of the Solar System. NASA has made this amazing video to show how our lovely companion went from the ball of magma 4.5 billion years ago to the "finished" product we see in the sky today. Make sure to full-screen and watch in HD!

Darwin : Biology :: Galileo : Astronomy

Evolution is so incredibly beautiful!  Soak yourself in this video, the Millennium Simulation of dark matter in the relatively local Universe:



From the website of the creators: "The movie shows a journey through the simulated universe. On the way, we visit a rich cluster of galaxies and fly around it. During the...movie, we travel a distance for which light would need more than 2.4 billion years."  The teensy points of light you see are galaxies.

Now get this:  I used to be a young-earth creationist.  From about age 16 to 23, I believed that the Earth and the Universe are only thousands of years old, not billions, and were created in 6 days, as told in Genesis, the first book of the Bible.

In my defense, I somehow didn't learn about evolution in school - it's like my science classes just glazed right over it, or maybe just my mind did.  So when I attended a conference given by a well-known young-earth-creationist-group-who-happens-to-have-a-museum-but-will-not-be-named, I was ripe for the picking when they said, "Well, does the Bible say that the Earth is millions of years old?  No, thus it's only thousands of years old."  At 16, I was very suggestible, and likely trying to impress a boy, so of course I believed them.

They had all manner of evidence for why they were right and science was wrong, including that carbon-14 dating is flawed, because there was allegedly something live that was dated to be some exorbitant number of years old; and there are, also allegedly, trees growing up through layers of rock, which means that there must have been some sort of cataclysmic flood, just like the Bible says in the story of Noah's ark.

As a sophomore in college, I heard the most convincing argument out of them (in fact it was one of the last I heard): they wanted to reconcile the fact that we see objects (stars, galaxies) that are billions of light years away, with their belief that the entire Universe is only thousands of years old.  To do this on a cosmological front, they say that Earth is situated at the center of a white hole, which they say is the opposite of a black hole in that instead of the attracting force you feel to the center of a black hole, you feel a repulsive force from the center of a white hole.  Due to the expansion of space and the dilation of time, they explain, it has been billions of years to us but was only thousands of years if you are looking from outside the white hole.

My goodness, but that's convoluted.  And so wrong!  I'm reminded of Ptolemy and his epicycles, a last-ditch effort to reconcile the wandering motion of planets on the sky, with the Church's beliefs that the planets must move only in circles because circles are perfect.  (This problem was solved by Kepler about 1500 years later, when he said that the Earth and the planets orbit the Sun in ellipses.)

So, I'm sure you can see why evolution is something at which I marvel:  it's still pretty new to me, and just so beautiful.  Learning this, really digesting this, has allowed me to open my mind to just how unfathomably enormous our Universe is.  With a young Universe, there just cannot physically exist the extent of the space we see around us.  Physics has given me the intuition to attempt to fathom these literally astronomical distances - I honestly cannot find a word that describes just how big space is, because it's infinite.  Seeing that we, you and I, are finite, I find it highly unlikely that it is physically possible for us to grasp the infinite.

---

*** A Note Aside ***
I think I want to include a little note every so often about why I feel the way I do about something I post, or a little addendum.  For today's, I want to say that I have family and dear friends who are young-earth creationists.  I have not written this post to harm them, but I do have a message for them:

Dear ones, I love you deeply, but I no longer believe the way you do.  Please, let's try not to let this get in the way of our relationships!  I am still me, because this and YOU are part of what made me.  I've just grown.  If you are interested in how scary this is for me to say these things to you, please read this, and then come back here to see the comment I thought most interesting:

The blogger's response to a commenter: "This is the most common of all the topics I get in the letters people send me; they speak either of their well-founded fear that their family will abandon them, or the heartbreaking reality that their family has done so.
Of all the destructive and hurtful things that religion can do, this, in my mind, is the most reprehensible, and the most incomprehensible. To think that a system of superstitions can override so primal and powerful a human instinct as familial love, devotion, and protection still leaves me in horrified awe every time I witness it.
Nothing destroys religion’s credibility so thoroughly as this; nothing cancels out religion’s 'benefits' so completely as this."

Heavy words, friends, heavy words.

Sorry for the language...

But it just fits SO perfectly with my Stargazing post!

Stargazing

I love looking up in the sky on a clear night (partly cloudy nights with lots of moon are nice too, but that's another blog post entirely) and just knowing that each of those pinpoints of light is billions of miles away.  As you gaze into the star-studded blackness, photons from those exact stars are entering your eyes, and they've been traveling for anywhere from tens to millions of years, to get there.  Each photon, each piece of light that hits your eye and sends a signal to your brain, started its journey by leaping boldly from the surface of its star and diving into the void of space.  Because that little packet of light actually completed its arduous journey through the Universe to your eyeball, you know that it never got absorbed along the way - it just headed straight for you.

Now here's a brain-bender:  because the light took so many years to reach you, i.e. you see the star as it was when its photons left it, you are literally looking back in time.  Keep that in the back of your head awhile, because we'll come back to it soon.

Our photon's journey didn't just begin when it "leapt from the surface of the star" - no no no, that wasn't nearly the beginning at all.  Let's say it was born in the core, where hydrogen with its one proton is being fused into helium with its two protons and two neutrons, thus releasing energy in the form of photons.  Gradually, each photon fights its way out of the dense, busy interior of the star, bouncing from one atom to the next, messing with orbits of electrons in the process.  It could take as long as years for a photon from the core to reach the surface, being absorbed and ejected all along the way. As it makes its way to the star's exterior, the going gets a little easier, until finally it is in empty space, and the rest of its voyage to your eyeball is spent in harmonious peace, gliding along through the void, past other stars, its journey watched and guided by the surrounding infinitely-extending curtain of lights.

And when you see light from another galaxy?  Wow, that's seriously cool, because even though it looks like a teeny point or perhaps a faint smear on the sky, that light is from all of the stars in that galaxy!  And thinking about how long ago those photons were liberated from their stars really makes one wonder what those stars and galaxies look like now:  are they even still there?  Perhaps they aren't, but the light from their demise has not yet reached us.  Only time will tell.