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 spent last week in Denver at the American Meteorological Society conference

on Broadcast Meteorology.

You should know that of all the Meteorologist who belong to the AMS in this
country, very few work on TV! There are many many more who work for NOAA, NASA,
and private firms. Researchers, climate scientists, university professors etc.

Having the conference in Denver gave us the ability to visit two key research
facilities. The first was NCAR- The National Centers For Atmospheric Research.

NCAR is funded by Universities, NOAA and the National Science Foundation. Almost every person working in the field of Atmospheric Science knows someone who worked at or works now at NCAR. I have two friends who work there. Some of the first research into dual polarimetric radar was initiated there.

NCAR has a nice audio tour with exhibitions, so if you find yourself in Boulder, bring the kids up and take the tour. They even have stromatolites..the very oldest fossils of life on earth. They are thought to have developed very early on the evolutionary time line.

After NCAR I went down the road a bit to ESRL. The NOAA facility at the Earth Systems Research laboratory. We had a nice briefing on the latest Climate Change research and I saw the fabulous Science on A Sphere invented by Dr. Sandy McDonald the director of ESRL. We must get one of these in Huntsville!!! I hope to talk some big local high tech company into donating the $161,000 to get one at Sci Quest. NOAA will provide it at cost.

http://sos.noaa.gov

Imagine walking into a dark room and in front of you hanging in space is the Earth is all it’s colour! The sphere makes it possible to show everything from real time images from the GOES satellites to plate tectonics and climate models. I think it is one of the best educational tools I have ever seen. Imagine following Alabama’s place on the earth through 550 million years of earth history. Radically cool dude!

Last but not least is the bad news. The updates on our climate are full of bad news. In spite of the junk science on internet sites and blogs, the peer reviewed science is full of data indicating the planet is perhaps approaching a tipping point in our climate. Arctic sea ice is diminishing at a much more rapid pace than the IPCC forecasted. Sea level is also rising at a rate above the IPCC midlines.

The public in general is very confused on climate change issues because they have difficulty in picking out science from opinion. The way to do it is Peer Review, and my next blog entry is going to be on just that topic!

Forecasting is my job..Science is my passion….Email me anytime with a science question..I iwill try and find the answer for you!

Later,
Dan

One of the last things I had to do before I finished my Masters in Earth Science was a presentation on James Hutton. Hutton is not one of the famous great scientists like Newton, Darwin or Galileo. He probably deserves to be a name that everyone knows, but such is not the case.

Hutton is known today as the founder of modern Geology. He was a Scottish naturalist who had a medical degree but never practiced. He was also a farmer who gave it up to do chemistry and study rocks and minerals. He had some famous friends, like Joseph Black the person who discovered Carbon Dioxide.

They invited him to join the Royal Society of Scotland. This was (and still is) a prestigious organization of the brightest minds of the time.

Hutton lived in the 18th century and after much prodding he agreed to deliver a paper to the society stating his views on the age of the earth. He created a sensation when his paper to the societywas published. In it he made his famous statement (Well famous to Geologists at least) that in regard to the age of the earth “We see no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end”. In an age where almost everyone believed the Earth was no more than 6,000 years old, this was a phenomenal statement.

The criticism came almost at once. Much of it from the religious leaders of the day who believed it to contradict the bibles version of earth history. Even Isaac Newton ,before his death, had pondered the question. He came up with about 6,000 years. In an age where you could still be put under house arrest for offending the church this was a safe thing to do!

Hutton’s study of rocks and the earth had convinced him that the fossils he saw in rocks were from once living animals and that the only way that fossils on a mountain top could be there, was if that land had once been beneath an ocean. Since he believed that the same processes acting now acted in the past, the only explanation for this was time..DEEP TIME. Time so liong that it was almost impossible to imagine.

Hutton never gave an age for the earth but probably thought it could be millions of years old at least. We know now that it is 4,500 million years old-give or take.

To prove his theroy, he searched for what geologists now call an unconformity. A sequence of rocks with a missing gap of time in them. Imagine if you will a set of rocks from 500 million years ago on top of rocks from 900 million years sgo. What happened to the rocks in the missing 400 million years? That is an unconformity.

Hutton found his unconformity on a sunny June day in the late 1700’s off the coast of Scotland. The location, then and now is called Siccar Point. It is south of Edinburgh and his a place of homage for Geologists the world over. It is called Hutton’s Unconformity. This sequence of rocks went a long way in proving his theories. I hope to visit it the next time I am in beautiful Scotland.

If you want to learn more about James Hutton, I highly recommend the following book:
The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of Earth’s Antiquity

by Jack Repchek

It takes courage to stand up and tell everyone that what they have always thought about something is wrong. Hutton did just that. Perhaps someday he will be given the same recognition of other brilliant scientists like Einstein, Darwin, Newton and Galileo.

Cheers,

Dan

My wife always laughs when someone asks me the time because I will tend to give the unsuspecting questioner the response…WHERE?

Time depends on where you are. (It also depends on how fast you are moving but let’s leave the relativity stuff for another blog)

I’m also asked what the “Z” means on radar images and satellite images we show.

The answer is GMT.

Z stands for Greenwich Mean Time. The official time of science.

Science must have a single reference for time that everyone agrees upon. By world wide agreement that reference is GMT.

GMT is the time in Greenwich, England at Longitude zero. Why Greenwich, and why is it at longitude zero??

Well that is a great story…Read on!
If your at sea on a ship, finding your latitude above the equator is not too difficult. Just look at the North Star (Polaris). At the North pole, Polaris is 90° degrees overhead. At the equator, it is on the horizon. If you go out at night here and measure the angle of Polaris above the horizon you will get 35° degrees. Our latitude here in Huntsville.

You can also do the same with the sun at local noon… as long as you know the date. Mariners have done this for several centuries now!

The difficult thing for ship captains of the past, was not latitude but Longitude. It was nearly impossible to find out accurately how far East or West of “home” they were. Many times the error in position was only found when a ship ran into an Island or continent at night and promptly sunk!

In the early 1700’s, when British sea power ruled the waves, A prize was offered to anyone who could solve the problem of longitude. Enter James Harrison. He solved it and then had to fight for years to get his prize. (An appeal, directly to the King himself was at last successful!) & (A&E screened a film a few years ago based on these events called “Longitude“.)

Harrison realized a key fact. If you divide the spherical earth into 360° degrees and it takes 24 hours for the earth to rotate, then the sun moves 15° degrees per hour.

Say for instance, we are in the Atlantic ocean. 15° degrees longitude west of Greenwich. The sun will reach it high point at noon precisely 1 hour later than it does back in England.

It would be a simple thing to produce a table of exactly when local noon was in Greenwich. This was already known in the 1700’s very precisely. Harrison knew he could solve the longitude problem simply by inventing an accuarate clock!

Easier said then done. Clocks of the day used pendulums and they did not swing to well on a ship riding out a storm on the North Atlantic. Even if they could keep it running, the accuaracy would not be good.

To get an accuarate reading of longitude, a clock was needed that would only be off a few seconds in a year. If the clock ran fast or slow at a certain rate, that would be ok! The correction could be added in.

Harrison built 4 clocks. He called them Chronometers. The famous explorer James Cook took one with him around the world inthe 1770’s and it was found to be very accuarate.

Cook would mark the time when the sun was at noon wherever he was. He would then look at the chronometer to see what time it was in Greenwich. A few calculations and BINGO…he knew where he was on the planet.

In an age of great inventions, Harrison’s Chronometer was one of the greatest.

As Chronometers came into wide use, a single reference point for time was needed. That reference was already there. Greenwich England. Home of the Royal Observatory for the past 400 years!

It is still today the world standard for time. Now they have an atomic clock though!
I visited Greenwich a few years ago and stood on the zero longitude line! Harrison’s clocks are on display there as well!

Gosh it is 0948GMT! I gotta get to bed!

Later,
Dan