Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

When it comes to NASA Satellites, Hubble is the star of the show. The Mars probes have gotten plenty of interest lately, but compared to Hubble, they are a flash in the pan (Wonder where that saying comes from-photography I suspect). No doubt about it, Hubble has been fantastic, and the Space Shuttle is scheduled to do one last repair mission on it in a few months.

My favourite picture, in all Astronomy, is the Hubble Deep Field. Imagine taking the most complex telescope ever built, and pointing it at an empty patch of sky. Open the shutter, and wait for days, and days. Then close it and develop the image! It’s very similar to taking a long exposure picture with a digital camera at night. You can show the whole landscape in starlight alone, if you make the exposure long enough.

The deep field image is below. Those stars are not suns like our sun. They are GALAXIES. Each containing countless billions of suns. They are all very far away. At the edge of the visible universe.

An Image from the edge of time itself.

Astronomers and Cosmologist now think that our Universe is so big as to be incomprehensible. Let me explain, the best I can. If I get this wrong a local Astronomer will correct me. I live in Huntsville Alabama, and Marshall Space Flight Center is nearby. A friend down the street works on Chandra (More on that in a moment). So if I make a mistake, I WILL HEAR ABOUT IT! …and learn something new too!

Oh yes, how big is the Universe.

Let’s talk age first.

13,700 Million years. (Give or take a few million)

Now think hard about this for a second. Say there is a star, one trillion light years away from Earth. The light from this sun is headed toward us at the speed of light. It will take one trillion years for it to get here.

BUT THE UNIVERSE IS ONLY 13,700 MILLION YEARS OLD!!

It Ain’t here yet!

We cannot see it!

WE CANNOT SEE ANYTHING FURTHER THAN 13,700 MILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY! (Actually because space itself is expanding we can see about 45,000 million light years but this gets complicated. So ignore what I just wrote. It’s purpose was to save me having to write sheepishly back to an Astronomer and say “Well yes I did know that…)

Doesn’t mean there isn’t something far, far beyond, our “visible universe”  though.

The current thinking, is that at the time of the Big Bang, (13,700 million years ago) the Universe underwent INFLATION. This would mean an expansion, faster than the speed of light. (This does NOT violate relativity, according to Cosmologist Alex Filipenko of U.C. Berkely).

The Universe is still expanding, and according to the current theories, it will likely keep on expanding forever.  Eventually, every object will be too far from every other object, to be seen. A cold and dark end to it all. The speed of the expansion, is also INCREASING, and it may pass the speed of light as well. Again, this is not a violation of relativity.

Think of balloon with dots all over it. The dots are galaxies. The ballon is the universe. As the balloon is blown up the galaxies (dots) all start separating. The light traveling between the universe dots can only go at light speed. The balloon can inflate faster than this.

Don’t yell at me! I am just telling you what the Astronomers say!

So the Universe may be billions of times bigger than 13,700 million light years in every direction. There is good evidence that it is. Watch the Berkeley Astronomy lectures I wrote about in a previous post. They are riveting, and free. (I knew you would like that last part.)

So what Hubble saw was a glimpse of the edge of time. We cannot see much beyond it, but there is likely a whole lot there.

I was going to talk a bit about the Chandra X-Ray Telescope. It doesn’t get the attention of Hubble, but arguably it is more important. I will save that for a future post.

Later,

Dan

PS Pics from NASA, and Flash in the pan comes from the days of Muskets. (According to my close friend Alan in Wales, who knows all kinds of things like this off the top of his head!)

I am not much of a Basketball fan. Cricket and Football for me. No not that football. REAL FOOTBALL. Think Beckham!) . (Who I am watching play for England against Slovakia, as I type!)

I’m smart enough to know that March is HUGE for basketball fans. Now the rub. Two big games are on, and the CBS is broadcasting them in High Definition. As I expected, storms started to develop,  and conditions were favorable for tornadoes, hail and damaging winds.

The trick here is to give out all the necessary information immediately, but still allow those in the path of the storms to know that they are dangerous, and when they will arrive.

Viewer Mike Wilhelm took this shot of the storms behind our transmission towers in Huntsville.

Thanks to some excellent directing, and a little cooperation from Mother Nature, we showed almost the entire game, and anyone watching would have had advance warning of the storms, with the needed information to prepare for them.

The newsroom told me, that indeed the phones melted during the game. About half of the callers were asking why we were not on constantly tracking the storms, and the other half were upset about the on air map, the crawls, and the short interruptions. That tells me I hit the right balance. This has to be the only job in the World where if you tick everybody off, you did well!

Anyone who has done this job for 29 years, soon gets to have a thick skin. The complaints are usually pretty silly. People do not seem to realize that there are other areas of North Alabama than where they live. They cannot seem to understand that the folks where the storms are, want to know if they are about to be slammed by a a tornado. Actually they do realize it, they just don’t want to admit it.

My way of thinking about these situations, is to imagine I am watching Doctor Who. Would I think the interruptions were fair?

Tonight, I would have said yes.

The real problem was missing Earth Hour! I turned out the lights at the same time as those in Vancouver and San Francisco though!

Later,
Dan

PS, England 4 Slovakia nil

Do sun spots control Earth’s climate?

YES!

So does El Nino, La Nina, and the myriad of other oceanic oscillations. So do the slow regular changes in our orbit around the sun, and so do the ever increasing amount of greenhouse gases, in our atmosphere.

The affect of the sun spot cycle on our climate has been investigated quite well. Thanks to bogus claims that the warming of the 20th century was due to sun spots, and cosmic rays, this has actually been investigated to a greater degree, than would normally be the case.

Now, don’t go telling everybody, but the sun is late. Nothing to panic about yet, but our normally active sun has gone very quiet.

Above image courtesy NASA

The sun goes through an 11 year sunspot cycle (It actually takes the sun 22 years to complete one cycle, but this cycle includes two sun spot maxima.) Amateur radio operators are quite familiar with this cycle, as it affects radio transmissions. NASA keeps an eye on it as well, because when the sun spot cycle is peaking, there can be large solar flares that can affect Astronauts and satellites.

In between one of the moon landing missions, there was a gigantic flare that could have been fatal for moon walking astronauts. NASA had a contingency for this. One Astronaut would lie on top of the other on the moon. The water in his body would block the radiation, and the guy on the bottom would escape a fatal dose. The Astronaut on top would not be so lucky.

There are a lot of cross polar flights now, and the airlines have to monitor the sun closely. A large flare will knock out high frequency radio, and the FAA demands constant contact with commercial aircraft. Passengers would also get a dose of radiation crossing the pole during a flare. It would not be serious, but the air crews on the flights, could end up with multiple doses if this was not watched.

So it is watched!

NOAA now has a Space Weather Center at the Earth Systems Research Lab. in Boulder,Colorado. I visited it last June.

The solar cycle reached it’s bottom late last year, and the sunspots should be starting to increase again now.

Except they aren’t!

At first thought, one might expect the sun to be cooler, with a bunch of dark spots on it’s surface, but the opposite is true. The sun puts out a bit more energy when there are a lot of spots, especially in the ultraviolet. This solar cycle  does affect planetary temps. The planet cools slightly when sun spots are low, and warms a little when the sun is active. Feed-backs, caused by Ozone in the stratosphere, magnify it slightly as well.

Slightly. The change in solar radiation at our distance from the sun is from 1365 Watts/M(sq) to 1367 W/M(sq). This equates to about 0.1 deg. C of change. Not much. In contrast, the Earth’s temperature varies back and forth, about .3-.5C , because of all the factors I mentioned above. The current La Nina, acts to cool the planet somewhat. (In spite of that, the February temperature of Earth was the 10th warmest on record).

While the sun has been in it’s quiet phase for an unusally long time, it is nowhere near a record. It was quieter longer in the frst part of the 1900’s. It also seems that indeed the sun has been fairly active over the last 50 years compared to the past several hundred. So we may indeed be going back to a quieter sun. This will undoubtedly bring out those claiming that the warming of the past 50 years, was all the sun’s doing. Read the paragraph above!

Better yet look at the image below. The bottom 3 graphs are the sun. The Blue curve at top is temperature. The green curve is the Carbon dioxide levels from Mauna Loa.

In the late 1600’s and into the 1700’s, there was an almost complete lack of sunspots for several decades! It is called the Maunder Minimum. The planet did indeed cool, although part of that was likely due to volcanic activity. Volcanoes have been very well documented to cause much greater fluctuations on Earth’s temp. than the solar cycle.

If we were to go into a new extended period of low sunspot activity, would this wipe out the affects of the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?? For that answer, we have  Dr. James Hansen (NASA’s top Climate Scientist). He ran the numbers.
At the rate of CO2 increase (Around 2 parts per million per year) the cooling from a sun in long term quiet phase, would be wiped out in just 7 years.

Soon there will be gaggle of internet Climate experts claiming that the sun has gone quiet ,and we will cool back down now. It was all the sun’s doing! Told ya so!

This kind of thing reminds me of a true story about W.C. Fields. As he lay dying in a California hospital, a friend walked into his room. She was surprised to see the firmly agnostic comedian reading the Bible. “What are you doing??” she asked.

W.C. Fields replied- “Looking, —   for loopholes“.

Later,
Dan

Thanks to NASA Earth Observatory/James Hansen NASA GISS for the info/data.

This coming Saturday at 8:30pm local time, millions of people will turn off their lights for an hour. It’s called Earth Hour. The idea is to get people thinking about our planet.

We waste a tremendous amount of energy everyday. If incandescent bulbs were outlawed tomorrow, you could shut down several coal fired power plants immediately! They will be phased out starting in 2014, and they already have been in my house. (Saved 25$ a month on my bill too.)

These old fashioned bulbs are really heat lamps, that put out light. If you live in a warm climate, then your air conditioner is having to cool your house several extra degrees because of them. Switching to CF bulbs, will save you even more money in the Summer, for just this reason.

No, even if a Billion people turn off their lights for an hour, it will not make a meaningful difference in the amount of Carbon in the atmosphere. It’s a totally symbolic action of course.

History shows that such symbolic events make a difference. Disagree? Look up the following on Wikipedia:

Boston Tea Party

The Bastille

Martin Luther (and King)

Rosa Parks

Take the hour, and go outside to look at the stars. You may very well see them a bit better than normal. Especially, if you get your neighbors to take part. For the first time in all of Human history, the vast majority of people, have never seen the night sky in all it’s glory. That is sad.

So, this Saturday, turn off the lights, look up, and think about how we can solve the problem we have gotten ourselves into. Think about the kind of world your Great Grand Kids will live in.

I usually do not write much here about the political side of Climate Change. Frequent brushes with it perhaps, but never as a main subject.

This post is an exception. They will be very few. Science is much more fascinating than politics.

George Will’s column on Climate Change last month in the Washington Post has been attacked in the blogosphere by far better writers than I. The Post itself has taken a big hit in it’s journalistic credibility. Deservedly so, for allowing something to be published, that could never pass any serious fact checking. The Ombudsmen’s original defense of the article made it even worse.

Frankly, I thought George Will was a very smart person. That was the biggest surprise to me. How someone of his intelligence, could defend such indefensible tripe. Was he just throwing a bone to those , who could care less about fact, and just want to be told that they are correct in their belief that Climate Change is a hoax? I don’t know. These people are easy to spot, and frankly, I never waste my time with them. Nothing I say will convince them otherwise.

Just because someone may have a different political outlook than I, doesn’t mean they aren’t intelligent. George Will obviously is a very smart person. That’s why his column is so confusing.

Today, two responses to it were published. Michel Jarraud the Sec. Gen. of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and Science Journalist Chris Mooney, both have well written, and most importantly, scientifically ACCURATE responses.

Read them both. They are based on real Science.

Later,

Dan