Telectroscope!

In the Slightly Old News column, here's a story I read about a few weeks ago but didn't get a chance to write on: an art installation that connects London and New York via an oversized intercontinental telectroscope. One end of the scope emerges near the banks of the Thames in London; the other pops out by the Brooklyn Bridge. New Yorkers peer in and see Londoners, and vice versa. It's up to the viewer to imagine the subterranean tunnel connecting the two ports. Only spoilsports would point out that its sculptural Skype.

I know, it's not astronomy, but it captures the thrill of looking in to a telescope and finding a whole other world on the opposite end of the scope.

For pictures, click here.

Dust to dust

In my last Visible Universe column, I wrote that the Horsehead nebula can be a scientific downer for stargazers who believe the famous Hubble image is just what they would see with their own two eyes.

Now, I'm sad to say, the news may be even worse for fans of this celebrity nebula. The iconic Pillars of Creation tucked inside the nebula have been destroyed. According to Nicolas Flagey of The Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in France (a visiting graduate student at NASA's Spitzer Science Center at Caltech), the pillars were toppled 6,000 years ago by a supernova blast. We won't see the pillars go down for another millennium or so, but light from the nebula is well on its way to our telescopes, carrying all the gory details of the pillar's last stand.

Flagey, apparently not wanting to go down in history as a spoilsport, told NASA:

"I remember seeing a photograph of these pillars more than a decade ago and being inspired to become an astronomer....Now, we have discovered something new about this region we thought we understood so well."

Pretty cold comfort. But physics is indifferent to beauty. As they say, physics giveth and physics taketh away.

Happy April Doom's Day!

The rundown of cosmic doomsdays now posted on the FQXi Community isn't a joke exactly, but please don't take it too seriously. Sure, the world could end tomorrow via vacuum nucleation, a baby black hole, or a burst of gamma rays, but the odds are, as the physicists say, vanishingly small.

However, if the FQXi article piqued your interest, check this out: There's a star with all the right ingredients for a gamma ray burst, it could blow at any time, and it's pointed at us! Should you start running for cover from this death star? Not quite yet. As the Bad Astronomer writes,

It is possible that one of the stars may explode as a GRB, and it’s possible it’s aimed at us, but we don’t know. And we don’t know exactly what effects it would have on us. So if it’s less than 10,000 years from exploding and if it blows up as a GRB and if it’s aimed at us and if there isn’t much junk between us and it, then yeah, we may have a problem. But that’s an awful lot of ifs.

First Annual Visible Universe Astronomy Gift Guide

It might be a little presumptuous to publish a First Annual anything in a column that has only been around a year and a half, but volunteer columnists have license to be bold. For your shopping convenience, here are some of the items featured in Friday's column, The First Annual Visible Universe Astronomy Gift Guide:

• Donate online to the Arecibo Observatory


• Buy Bulfinch's Mythology at Amazon or Powell's


• Buy H.A. Rey's The Stars at Amazon


• Buy the SegaToys HomeStar Pure Home Planetarium


• Subscribe to Astronomy or Sky and Telescope magazine

Happy spending!

Playing catch-up

It has been too long! Let me catch you up on the projects I've been working on while I've been neglecting this blog.

Over at the Foundational Questions Institute Web site, I've written four scientists profiles, and have two new articles in the works.

• Through the Looking Glass Marcus Aspelmeyer's experimental tests of entanglement (Currently an FQXi Editor's Choice!)


• It's All Relative Olaf Dreyer's new take on the measurement problem


• Magic Numbers How Ekkehard Peik is testing the constancy of constants


• Talking Heads A mythological sea serpent talks quantum theory with Matthew Leifer

And from the Boulder Daily Camera, where The Visible Universe columns appears every alternate Friday:

• Black holes capture the imagination What is our obsession with black holes?


• Playing fast and loose with time Why get all upset over daylight saving time when time itself is shifting underfoot?


• SETI and the "Geek" "Beauty and the Geek" and other guilty pleasures

New friends and the leaky pipeline

The Visible Universe has two new friends in the blogosphere: Sorting Out Science's Sam Wise, who featured The Visible Universe in the 25th edition of the Carnival of Space, and Astronomom, who is a real-life friend as well.

Astronomom's brand-new blog chronicles life as post-doc and a new mother. Why start a blog with so much already on her plate?

If I'm going to be part of the leaky pipeline in science because of having had a baby as a postdoc then I want that recorded, and maybe my experience will help others. If I do manage some kind of balance, then I'd like that recorded too.

Responding to the FOXNews.com story on the astronomy job market, she writes:

I calculated at the start of graduate school that someone was investing 1/4 million dollars in me getting my PhD alone...! I've used telescopes that cost 10s of thousands of dollars a night to run - and I've had many nights on those telescopes. Surely it would be a huge waste to the field if I just disappear from Astronomy.

But as part of astronomy's "leaky pipeline," I don't believe that money is wasted if a student doesn't pursue a research career. There are many fields where individuals with real, hands-on science experience are desperately needed--science policy, science journalism, education--and having scientifically trained people in those positions can only be a good thing for the field.

Of course, some students take their PhDs and head for private-sector positions in investment banking, software design, and the like. Who can blame them when jobs within their field are so scarce? I agree with Astronomom that, in the long run, an oversupply of highly-educated astronomers isn't good for anyone: Yet, the more students are clamoring for degrees and courses in astronomy, the more tenure-track faculty should be necessary to instruct them.

That's in theory, anyway.

Dear Sir or Madam

Here's a story I never thought I'd see outside the AAS newsletter. The astronomy job market is in the doldrums. Those who get coveted tenure-track positions keep them long past traditional retirement age, and thanks to federal penny-pinching, few new research positions are opening up.

According to FOXNews.com's Sebastian Thaler:

Are we to tell our children that the universe is good for looking at, but that when it comes to choosing a career, it's best to keep one's gaze firmly bound to Earth? In effect, that's what's happening now.

So go ahead, make a wish upon the first star you see tonight — and wish luck upon whoever wants to study it.

Well, I could have told you that. But catching the story on FOXNews.com was a surprise--like opening the New York Times and finding your face on the front page.

Not to compare FOXNews.com to the front page of the New York Times, of course, but you get the idea. And when you consider how small the astronomy community really is (the American Astronomical Society claims about 6,500 members, not all of whom are even active researchers), and the granularity of the story (even the Astrophysics Jobs Rumor Mill got a mention), the my-life-is-news sensation isn't quite so crazy.

Is this how Heidi and Spencer feel?

Where's the romance?

If you liked the thrill is gone, you'll love Friday's column, a more detailed take on the pros v. amateur debate. One thing: The Camera left off the first sentence of the story, so you will have to mentally paste it back in: What's the difference between professional astronomers and amateurs?

(And by the way, have you noticed that there are sure a lot of love songs with this "thrill is gone" theme? There's You Don't Bring Me Flowers. And the one from Top Gun. Any others? Come on, readers, I know you're out there! Or, actually, I don't. So show yourselves!)

Another opening, another show

The first phase of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA)--the new UC Berkeley/SETI Institute radio array under construction at Hat Creek--is now up and running. This new radio array exploits cheap 20-foot aluminum radio dishes to synthesize a large collecting area and wide field of view. The ATA is also a multitasker: It can can look at different parts of the sky at the same time (the telescopic equivalent of having eyes in the back of your head), maximizing available observing time.

The ATA can pull the same trick in the frequency domain, taking data anywhere between 0.5 and 11 Gigahertz on any dish at any time. If you were to compare that to how the human ear processes sound, it would be no great shakes--we can process sound waves spanning about ten octaves. But for a radio telescope, it's like suddenly being able to hear the whole orchestra when, before, you could only pick up the flute or the bass.

The ATA will also be a full-time SETI instrument. That's not to say that it won't be doing "traditional" radio astronomy, too: It can do both at the same time. So data will be piping through the SETI computers 24/7, stepping up the speed of targeted searches by 100x.

This first phase included forty-two dishes; the plan is to bring that number up to 350--when more money comes along. Half of the $50 million spent on the ATA to date came from Paul Allen's foundation. (For ideas on where they might come up with the rest, check out last week's column.)

The thrill is gone

The New York Times has been working the amateur astronomy beat, following up their June 8 story on astronomy villages with today's Home and Garden feature on luxury home observatories.

No more lugging telescopes out into the cold and the dark for these "baby boomers and wealthy tech types," reports the Times. No more red flashlights, clunky tripods, and star parties. Amateurs are spending tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to work like the professionals, installing rooftop domes that house serious scopes:

For comfort, most home observatories have a separate insulated and air-conditioned control room that houses all the computer equipment. These rooms often look like studies, with lots of space photography hanging on the walls.

I always envied the amateurs their connection with the sky: The amateurs were the ones who knew the constellations backward and forward, who could point out a star and tell you all that you could see within a pinky's-width. They were the ones drawn to the romance of cold, still air, and the low-tech pleasures of binoculars, 800-speed film, and their own eyes.

The professionals got the comforts of climate-controlled computer rooms, computer-driven domes, and point-and-click slewing. But for all this technology, we might go a whole night without actually seeing a single star. Automation severed our connection with the sky.

As Geoff Marcy, the UC Berkeley planet-hunter, lamented to Reuters in a story picked up by The Gist:

"There are no eyepieces anywhere [at the Keck telescope]. In fact, we don't have an eyepiece for the Keck telescope....Some of the romance of astronomy is gone."

Professional astronomers, of course, aren't in the business of romance: They're in it for the science, and for that they sacrifice the pleasures that amateurs get to keep.

But apparently the amateurs--provided they have the money--don't want those pleasures any more. And with that attitude, how long will it be before Richard Branson is launching personal a Hubble for every baby boomer with a suitable portfolio?