Your Astronomy Geeking of the Day

Astronomers have found the first interstellar object in the solar system, named 1I/2017 U1 (`Oumuamua):

A few weeks ago, we reported on a small object visiting from beyond our solar system. Now astronomers have scrutinized data from this object, which has been given the name `Oumuamua, and which must have traveled through space for millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system. The conclusion is that it’s a dark, reddish, highly-elongated rocky or high-metal-content object. And, indeed, it is the first known asteroid from interstellar space. These new results were published today (November 20, 2017) in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

Some astronomers thought the object was a comet when the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawai`i first picked it up on October 19, as a faint point of light moving across the sky. Others thought it looked like a typical fast-moving small asteroid. As they tracked its motion through space, astronomers began to be able to calculate its orbit, showing beyond any doubt that this body did not originate from inside our solar system, like all other asteroids or comets ever observed.

Instead, this object was doubtless from interstellar space.

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Bottom line: Astronomers report on the first known interstellar asteroid, which swept nearest our sun in September, then sped away again. Astronomers have named this object `Oumuamua and say it is dark red and very elongated.

For some reason, the Arthur C. Clarke novel Rendezvous with Rama comes to mind.

I Like Frank

I mean of course the Pontiff.

In his latest acknowledgement of reality, he has recognizes that the Big Bang Theory is real and throws a shindig:

The Vatican has invited the world's leading scientists and cosmologists to try and understand the Big Bang.

Astrophysicists and other experts will attend the Vatican Observatory to discuss black holes, gravitational waves and space-time singularities as it honors the late Jesuit cosmologist considered one of the fathers of the idea that the universe began with a gigantic explosion.

The conference – which runs through the week – is part of an increasing admission by the church that scientific theories were real and not necessarily in contradiction with theological doctrine.

Pope Francis declared in 2014 for instance that God is not "a magician with a magic wand" and that evolution and Big Bang theory are real. 

Considering that the Vatican Observatory had a significant role in the genesis^* of the Big Bang theory, this is very apropos.

^*Pun not intended.

This Headline is Not an Honest Mistake

Uranus Takes a Pounding More Frequently Than Thought.

One hopes that the editor-in-chief is having words with the headline writer.

Seriously Neat Tech

Do you know how GPS works?

Basically, the satellites broadcast the time using very accurate clocks, and the differences in times received from various satellites in different positions allow a receiver to determine its positions.

Well, it looks like someone is on the cusp of using a natural clock to do the same thing, using pulsars: (paid subscription required)

Celestial navigation was a mainstay in the early days of aviation, and astronavigation is still used in nuclear bombers to overcome jamming. Now a European research project has shown the feasibility of employing pulsars for aircraft navigation that is independent of ground- or space-based equipment.

The PulsarPlane project is investigating the use of pulsar signals for real-time navigation and timing, to overcome the vulnerabilities of global navigation satellite systems and reduce operating costs for aviation in the second half of this century.

Begun in 2013 and funded by the European Union’s Framework 7 research program, the project is coordinated by the Dutch aerospace laboratory NLR and involves universities in the Netherlands, Finland, Portugal and Bulgaria.

Pulsars are fast-rotating neutron stars that emit stable, fast electromagnetic pulses with unique periods between 1.4 millisec and 5 sec. and unique shapes. Pulsars are visible from everywhere on Earth and across a wide band of frequencies.

This is insanely cook cool.

In Addition to Being a True Patriot, Edward Snowden Is Wicked Cool

He just showed up in robot form on Neil Degrasse Tyson's podcast to explain why we have not been contacted by aliens:

Whistle-blower Edward Snowden has some strong opinions on communications — even when those communications are coming from aliens.

The former intelligence-agency contractor turned fugitive was an unexpected guest on famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk podcast on September 18. And, inevitably, the two got to talking about extraterrestrials.

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But Tyson scored an interview with him in New York City. How? Snowden rigged a robot that he can control from Russia, and rolled right into Tyson's office at the Hayden Planetarium in New York with his face displayed on the screen.

The conversation turned to encryption and cybersecurity, but here's where an astrophysicist differs from a journalist: Tyson's line of questioning quickly turned to how encryption relates to communication with ... aliens.

Tyson asked Snowden if a highly intelligent alien civilization might be communicating with encrypted messages. And Snowden had an unsettling answer.
First, Snowden said, let's assume that most advanced societies eventually realize that they need to encrypt their communication in order to protect it. This could also be the reason why we've never heard from other civilizations — their messages may have just been melding into the background static of the universe.
Here's Snowden's full answer, from the StarTalk podcast:

So if you have an alien civilization trying to listen for other civilizations, or our civilization trying to listen for aliens, there's only one small period in the development of their society when all of their communication will be sent via the most primitive and most unprotected means.
So when we think about everything that we're hearing through our satellites or everything that they're hearing from our civilization (if there are indeed aliens out there), all of their communications are encrypted by default.
So what we are hearing, that's actually an alien television show or, you know, a phone call ... is indistinguishable to us from cosmic microwave background radiation.

So it could be possible there are alien messages constantly hitting our satellites, and we just don't recognize them because they're so heavily encrypted. (The cosmic microwave background radiation that Snowden mentions is thermal radiation throughout the universe left over from the Big Bang. It basically looks and sounds like static to us puny humans.)

(emphasis original)

This is way cooler than I will ever be.

Another Climate Change Denial Talking Point Bites the Dust………

It turns out that the evidence that we are in a period of some sort of freakishly high sunspot activity is just an artifact of how counting was modernized in 1947, which means that suggesting that it's all sunspots is a load of bunk:

A bunch of boffins has completed the first-ever revision of the world's most important sunspot data repository, along the way challenging the theory that climate change is substantially attributable to the prevalence of sunspots.

It turns out, in fact, that the pro-sunspots argument relies on a statistical artefact introduced in 1947 and not corrected until this year.

While the change officially took place in July, rendering obsolete the data that climate deniers use to “prove” that it's sunspots driving global warming rather than CO2, it came to prominence at the end of last week in a presentation to the International Astronomical Union's current general assembly in Hawaii.

The most important correction to come out of the new data, the Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations (SILSO) project says, is “a lowering by about 18% of all numbers after 1947, to remove the bias produced by a new counting method started in 1947 in Zürich”.

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As SILSO explains, the sunspot data set (which, courtesy of Galileo (the man, not the spacecraft), stretches back 400 years) was first collected into an index by Rudolph Wolf in 1849. Startlingly, SILSO says, “this series was left unchanged since its creation … without any backward verification”.

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The adoption of the new Sunspot Number doesn't change our understanding of the Maunder Minimum, the low sunspot activity period between 1645 and 1715 that coincided with the “Little Ice Age”.

However, the recalibration does overturn a previous consensus that the data set showed a 300-year upward trend in sunspot activity, culminating in a “grand maximum” in the 20th century.

As Physicsworld says, the dataset “nullifies the claim that there has been a modern grand maximum”.

In response, I expect some right wing nut-job state Attorney General to subpoena scientists private communications.

Buh Bye!

Voyager 1 is now officially in interstellar space:

By today’s standards, the spacecraft’s technology is laughable: it carries an 8-track tape recorder and computers with one-240,000th the memory of a low-end iPhone. When it left Earth 36 years ago, it was designed as a four-year mission to Saturn, and everything after that was gravy.

But Voyager 1 has become — thrillingly — the Little Spacecraft That Could. On Thursday, scientists declared that it had become the first probe to exit the solar system, a breathtaking achievement that NASA could only fantasize about back when Voyager was launched in 1977, the same year “Star Wars” was released.

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The lonely probe, which is 11.7 billion miles from Earth and hurtling away at 38,000 miles per hour, has long been on the cusp, treading a boundary between the bubble of hot, energetic particles around the solar system and the dark region beyond. There, in interstellar space, the plasma, or ionized gas, is noticeably denser.

Dr. Gurnett and his team have spent the past few months analyzing their data, trying to nail down whether what they were seeing was solar plasma or the plasma of interstellar space. Now they are certain it was the latter, and have even pinpointed a date for the crossing: Aug. 25, 2012.

Kewl!

Astronomical Headline of the Year

Tell me that this was not the product of much giggles by the editorial staff:

Uranus takes a pounding more frequently than thought

Uranus isn't just gassy, it's also tilted completely sideways, such that instead of rotating like a spinning top, it rolls around the plane of the solar system more like a giant ball. Now astronomers think they know how this happened, and it means that Uranus has been pounded really, really hard not once, but twice.

Uranus' axial tilt of 98 degrees means that it's got one pole pointed almost directly at the sun, and one pole pointed out into space. As the planet revolves around the sun, these poles slowly switch places, meaning that if you lived there, you'd get 42 years of sunlight followed by 42 years of darkness, with a short time in between where things would seem almost normal.

Needless to say, this sort of behavior is a bit strange for Uranus, although nobody's quite been able to determine how it happened. New simulations from astronomers at the Observatory of Côte d'Azur in Nice, France may have just figured it out, and the answer seems to be that Uranus has suffered from not one but two giant impacts..

H/t LD at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Decisions, Decisions

You see, there are two events happening right now that are both rare and could be described as being of astronomical importance (albeit in two completely different uses of the word "astronomical), the Venus transit, and the Scott Walker recall.

Seeing as how my son is supposed to be downtown at the Maryland Science Center right now, and he's planning to record and Youtube the event, I'll just post his video when he finishes with it.

In either case, safety first: Do not stare at the sun, or at Scott Walker without wearing appropriate eye protection.

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Moon Crash Appears a Fizzle

At least to the visible eye and amateur astronomers, there is still a possibility of good data from the mission, but that will be a few weeks down the road.