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BBC reveals plethora of inanimate objects in space...

1/14/2019

After the wonderful discovery and imaging of Ultima Thule recently (the farthest object visited by a human space craft) I noticed that the BBC decided to describe the rock as a Snowman... In fact, a quick search online shows that many media outlets were guilty of this; namely, naming space objects after stupid things. I then tried to figure out "to what end" did they decide to do this. It's long been said that in order to make science 'more appealing' journalists need to make science more 'relatable', and who doesn't relate to snowmen (so the logic goes). Teachers are also told this and it leads to all sorts of funny syllabuses and schemes that we have to teach. I wonder if this is true, useful or helpful. I'll explain why...

Science is inherently interesting! Having discussed lesson planning with many teachers, I can safely say that scientists have a much easier job of making things interesting than other fields of study (that's not to disparage other fields of learning!). And yet, there seems to be a need among mainstream media outlets to dumb-down scientific content. It's no wonder that many people are disconnected from science if mainstream media regularly feeds us space junk in the form of inanimate objects. This, of course, is not the only factor making people disenchanted with science.

But, by comparison, media outlets make no shortage of highly convoluted technical jargon when it comes to the finance or business sections of news coverage! Dr. Ben Goldacre has been vocal about this for quite some time and wrote a great column in the Guardian for a decade demystifying science for public consumption. For example, he makes the (facetious) point that media outlets tend to sort all food items in to: "causes cancer" or "does not cause cancer"! Why do they do this?!

In short, don't get put off by media outlets dumbing things down. There are many great technical science magazines and other media formats for public consumption; some of which can be found on the links page. The internet is alive with good science content, I would highly encourage you searching it out!

So, without further ado, here are some examples of inanimate objects BBC found in space...

BBC, 2 January 2019
Nasa's New Horizons: 'Snowman' shape of distant Ultima Thule revealed

BBC, 13 December 2018

NASA's Jupiter Mission Juno Reveals Giant Polar Storms

BBC, 3 June 2018

What is Pluto's heart made of?

BBC, 11 February 2018

'Oumuamua: 'space cigar's' tumble hints at violent past

BBC, 24 September 2018

There is huge 'monolith' on Phobos, one of Mars's moons

For those of you who noticed... Monolith is a very relevant reference to the greatest science fiction film of all time: 2001 A Space Odyssey

I'm actually quite amazed that there wasn't a separate article in the BBC about the levitating spoon!

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

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Rare Repeating Energy Burst from Distant Galaxy

1/10/2019

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An artist’s conception of the centre of an active galaxy where gamma-ray bursts originate. Guys... its just a drawing... Credit: NASA

The rarest of rare: repeating Fast Radio Bursts (FRB) were detected from the same point in the sky. But will we see it repeat again? “The answer is definitely maybe” said scientists conclusively in 2017.

This year, radio telescopes in Canada have spotted something strange in a rare astronomical event known as a Fast Radio Burst (FRB). FRB’s were first detected in 2007; they are high intensity radio signals lasting only a few milliseconds that emanate from distant galaxies. And scientists know exactly what their cause is… Aliens… nah just kidding, they have no idea! Yet!

Since 2007 about 50 – 60 such events have been spotted, however, this is only the second time that a repeated signal (5 times) was detected emanating from exactly the same place, in the space of a few months. The first time this happened was in 2012 from a galaxy 2.5 billion light-years away (with a few repeat signals from that point). So this appears to not be some accident of measurement. Intriguing…

So where do these FRB’s come from? The 2012 ‘repeater’ came from a star-forming region in a dwarf galaxy (there are different types but it’s basically ‘a small galaxy’). Scientists think that this is no coincidence as it is likely that the conditions for these bursts would arise from some extreme astronomical environment.

Some have suggested that FRB’s arise in magnetars, a type of neutron star with a powerful magnetic field that are thought to arise as a result of unusually large supernova explosions; thought to be prevalent in dwarf galaxies. Others suggest that supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN) are the cause. AGN’s are high luminosity emanations of (normally) electromagnetic waves coming from the centre of galaxies. Sometimes the ejection from an AGN points towards Earth, making it look very bright (we call it a ‘blazar’). It has been suggested that streams of plasma emanating from AGN’s can interact (somehow) with pulsars (another type of neutron star, highly magnetized and rotating) to produce FRBs. Indeed, previously, a faint gamma-ray burst was observed coinciding with an FRB and may eventually help explain the origin of FRBs.

So that’s a brief journey through some high energy astrophysics terminology (!): gamma-ray bursts (most energetic explosions in the universe, from supernovae), active galactic nuclei, quasars, blazars, magnetars, pulsars, FRBs, neutron stars, etc. (more on these another time).

But no one yet knows why FRB’s are only momentary and seem not to appear again. Perhaps more time is needed to see if repeated FRB’s are more common than previously thought, or a signature of some new interesting phenomenon in astrophysics. Will it happen again… “the answer is definitely maybe”!

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The Giant Peanut in Space

1/2/2019

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Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI; sketch courtesy of James Tuttle Keane

On new years’ day, the world was witness to new images from the “most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft”. NASA’s New Horizons space explorer set out in 2006 and has only now flown past a mysterious rock named Ultima Thule and came to within 3,500km of it (although at the time of writing this article, a day later, we’re now at…. 1,665,527km!). New Horizon’s has flown past Jupiter and Pluto (more on this in a later post) and arrived somewhere in the Kuiper belt; a rock and ice ‘filled’ region believed to hold the key to understanding the origins of our solar system.

Scientists working on the New Horizon’s project have been looking for a suitable object to study in the Kuiper belt ever since the launch in 2006. Ultima Thule was discovered only in 2014 and the Hubble Space Telescope was recruited to track its trajectory. Interestingly enough, in 2017, Ultima Thule blocked three background stars (known as an ‘occultation’) on its journey tumbling through the Kuiper belt region. Data from five different telescopes gave strong indications that Ultima Thule was an odd shaped object with two uneven lobes.

The object’s strange shape has now been confirmed by data during the close fly-by and shows that Ultima Thule is bowling-pin shaped* and rotates on a similar axis as a plane’s propeller. Its size is about 35 by 15 km. The shape was mainly determined by following the object’s shadows, rotation and trajectory, in much the same way as ‘Oumuamua’s shape was found (see previous post).

Regarding its shape, there is some speculation as to whether the object is one continuous body or, in fact, a contact binary. This is where two objects have come in to contact with one another through gravitational attraction and merely touch; but eventually fuse and coalesce. Either way, this could shed light on how planets form, through the accumulation of rocky material.

Another great discovery at the far reaches of our ever-mystifying Solar System!

*when I first saw images of Ultima Thule, it looked more like peanuts in their husk than a bowling-pin (as reported by most Media agencies!), and thus, I refer to it here as the Giant Peanut in Space

********** UPDATE - 03.01.19 **********
New high resolution image of Ultima Thule:
(~33km long)

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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BBC reveals plethora of inanimate objects in space...

Rare Repeating Energy Burst from Distant Galaxy

The Giant Peanut in Space

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