Author: Discover Main Feed

Back in December 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope created the now-famous “deep field” image, which took more than 300 exposures over the course of 10 days to peer deep into the history of the universe and spot more than 1,500 galaxies. A decade and a half later—after failures, upgrades, and the “ultra deep field“—Hubble marches on. Yesterday at the American Astronomical Society meeting, astronomers announced they’d used the telescope to look deeper into the past than ever before.

The new image captures 7,500 galaxies of all kinds and shapes. The oldest galaxies in the image glow an intense blue, indicating high concentrations of the lighter elements hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen fusion inside active stars creates heavier elements such as iron and nickel, which get spread across the universe when massive stars explode. These elements cause modern galaxies to glow in a rainbow of colors, so the extreme blueness of the newfound galaxies suggests that they formed before very many massive stars had lived and died [National Geographic News].

The ancient galaxies are also tiny by galactic standards, containing just one percent of the mass of our own Milky Way galaxy. But they could play an important role in showing astronomers how galaxies formed as the universe aged. These galaxies started forming just 500 million years after the big bang, which is thought to have occurred around 13.7 billion years ago. That pushes back the known start of galaxy formation by about 1.5 billion years [National Geographic News].

Hubble captured this newest image with its Wide Field Camera 3, a new piece of equipment that the last space shuttle flight to upgrade the telescope installed last year. But unanswered questions remain. The big mystery is the era when ultraviolet light from the youngest stars electrically charged early clouds of interstellar gas, triggering magnetic effects that played a role in later galaxy formation, says astrophysicist Mario Livio…. This “re-ionization” era probably played out just before or during the time when the lives of the early galaxies turned up in the new Hubble images [USA Today]. Hubble’s would-be successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, could help sort out this era’s history when it launches in 2014.

Related Content:
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80beats: Space Shuttle Grabs Hubble, and Astronauts Begin Repairs
80beats: A Hot Piece of Hardware: NASA’s New Orbiter Will Map the Entire Sky in Infrared
Cosmic Variance: Well, That Was Fast, on the upgraded Hubble’s initial data
Bad Astronomy: Hubble’s Back, and Spying on Wailing Baby Stars

Image: NASA

I’ve seen this several times, and it still makes me laugh.

Mrs. BA got me a Flip vidcam for Christmas, and I’ve been following around my cat for days. She doesn’t do anything interesting until I have my back turned. Sigh.

Anyway, you may enjoy this strange video of a cat being either happy or ticked. Maybe it’s Schrödinger’s cat, and it’s both.

Things have been so nuts for me over the past few days, I haven’t even been able to blog my Washington Post Outlook piece from Sunday about the need for better science communication in the wake of the devastating blow dealt by the ClimateGate scandal. The piece has been drawing tons of supportive private emails, as well as lots of online critiques and reactions, and fully 800 plus comments on the Post’s website, many of them from climate deniers.

Anyway, the article starts like this:

The battle over the science of global warming has long been a street fight between mainstream researchers and skeptics. But never have the scientists received such a deep wound as when, in late November, a large trove of e-mails and documents stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia were released onto the Web.

In the ensuing “Climategate” scandal, scientists were accused of withholding information, suppressing dissent, manipulating data and more. But while the controversy has receded, it may have done lasting damage to science’s reputation: Last month, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 40 percent of Americans distrust what scientists say about the environment, a considerable increase from April 2007. Meanwhile, public belief in the science of global warming is in decline.

The central lesson of Climategate is not that climate science is corrupt. The leaked e-mails do nothing to disprove the scientific consensus on global warming. Instead, the controversy highlights that in a world of blogs, cable news and talk radio, scientists are poorly equipped to communicate their knowledge and, especially, to respond when science comes under attack.

A few scientists answered the Climategate charges almost instantly. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, whose e-mails were among those made public, made a number of television and radio appearances. A blog to which Mann contributes, RealClimate.org, also launched a quick response showing that the e-mails had been taken out of context. But they were largely alone. “I haven’t had all that many other scientists helping in that effort,” Mann told me recently.

This isn’t a new problem….

Read here, there’s much more….on science communication strategies, how to fight the evolution war, and so forth. In essence, the piece builds on some of the central arguments of Unscientific America, but strained through the new example of ClimateGate, which is surely the number one reason yet that scientists have got to mobilize in the way that we recommended in the book. Hope you enjoy…

Much to the chagrin of a certain Wyoming Senator, the Central Intelligence Agency is poised to fight terrorism and spy on sea lions (Sen. John Barrasso once quipped the CIA should stick to the former occupation). The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests [The New York Times].

The program will have little impact on the CIA’s normal intelligence gathering, say those involved, and will only release data already in hand or data gathered during satellite down time. The images will even have their sharpness decreased in order to maintain some secrecy about the satellites’ true capabilities.

60 scientists, all with security clearances, will oversee the scientific aspects of the project, like analyzing detailed images of the polar ice caps. Of course, not everyone in Washington is on board with the collaboration, and as the attempted airliner bombing on Christmas Day reminded the public of the terrorist threat, the critics are likely to get louder. However, a report from the National Academy of Sciences, which advises the federal government, calls the satellite data essential, saying “there are no other data available that show the melting and freezing processes” [Popular Science]. The program actually began under former President Clinton, but was canceled by former President Bush. Clinton’s vice president Al Gore has been lobbying to restart the program since 2008.

Related Content:
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Image: NASA Earth Observatory

I am not all that big on celebrity endorsements, but I do understand that they can be very beneficial in getting the word out on important topics ot people who might not otherwise hear it.

So I’m pleased to see that Jennifer Lopez did a short video about the benefits of vaccination against pertussis for a website called Sounds of Pertussis (created by the vaccine division of the pharmaceutical company Sanofi Aventis). The video calmly and rationally explains why it’s important to vaccinate for pertussis, also known as whooping cough.

Regular readers know my stance on this: pertussis can kill, as parents David and Toni McCaffery found out when their four-week-old daughter Dana died from it in 2009 — she was infected because not enough people had vaccinated their children, and the herd immunity in that area of Australia was too low. It’s important to talk to your physician about this and find out if you should vaccinate yourself and your loved ones.

The antivaxxers are loud about this issue, of course. Meryl Dorey and her Australian Vaccination Network have spread misinformation far and wide on this issue, even saying that pertussis doesn’t kill anyone… a statement that is so clearly false that it’s difficult to believe someone could honestly utter it. No doubt the antivaxxers will ooze out of the woodwork in the comments below — they always do — and make all sorts of similar false claims. And also no doubt we’ll see the attempts to poison the well by saying the JLo video was produced by a — gasp — pharmaceutical company!

Like Ben Goldacre, I am not a huge fan of a lot of the tactics used by those companies to sell drugs. But that doesn’t mean everything they do is wrong. Vaccinations, as I feel I must point out over and again, have saved hundreds of millions of lives, a number so huge it’s awe-inspiring. But so many antivaxxers seem to want to see us return to the days when children died of measles, when kids were confined to iron lungs when they couldn’t breathe due to polio, and people died by the millions from smallpox and other preventable diseases.

Antivaxxers are wrong. The data are overwhelming that their arguments are false. Vaccines save lives, countless lives. Talk to your physician. Please.

Parasite Rex has made a very special list of books to read after you get dumped. To quote from Lemondrop over at the AOL collective:

Do you need something to so totally fill you with paranoia and fear that you can’t even think about the worm that just dumped you? How about a terrifying book about worms! AGH! You’ll never walk barefoot in the street again, plus you’ll be so full of disgusting factoids that you won’t even have time to mention what’s-his-name at a party — you’ll be too busy grossing people out. FTW!

I would suggest waiting to find a new special someone until the book has cleared your system. I was still single while I was writing Parasite Rex, and the book made going out on dates very awkward.

So, what’s your next book about?

Parasites, and why they’re totally awesome. See, like, there’s this worm that crawls across your eye…

Check, please!

On the plus side, it’s a very quick test to see if your date shares your taste for the grotesque.

Here at DISCOVER, we do our best to keep you informed of all the crap scientific advice that celebrities dispense, be it Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaxxer yarns, Oprah providing a platform for new-age nonsense, or soccer star Robin Van Persie’s praise of placenta massage to heal injuries. But with so many celebrities and so much bad advice, it can be hard to catch it all—TMZ might catalog the whereabouts and philandering of the rich and moderately famous, but not necessarily their quackery.

Never fear, though, because once again the British organization Sense About Science has pulled many of the year’s worst offenses together in a handy compendium. The charity’s annual review pairs celebrity claims with reality-based quotes from doctors and scientists.

Here’s one choice gem: Heather Mills, the animal rights activist and former wife to Paul McCartney, claimed that when you eat meat “[it] sits in your colon for 40 years and putrefies, and eventually gives you the illness you die of. And that is a fact.” Thanks for the info, Heather!

More from New Scientist:

Other celebs have been pulled up this year for apparently not realising that natural substances such as hormones are chemicals, and that ovulation is suppressed naturally by pregnancy and prolonged breastfeeding. Actress Suzanne Somers, for example, was quoted as saying that the contraceptive pill must be unsafe “because is it safe to take a chemical every day, and how would it be safe to take something that prevents ovulation?”

Actor Roger Moore, meanwhile, was taken to task for claiming that foie gras causes Alzheimer’s disease, and Sarah Palin for dismissing evolution.

Apparently playing James Bond not only gets you good tables at restaurants, it also makes you think you have medical expertise.

Related Content:
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Bad Astronomy: Oprah: Shame on You
The Intersection: On Vaccination and Autism: Don’t Believe the Hype

Image: flickr / Wonker

Waltzing black holes, star-destroying black holes; it’s a black hole bonanza as the American Astronomical Society meets this week in Washington DC.

First, the orbiting pairs: Just about every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its heart that is millions if not billions the size of our sun. Logic would suggest that when two galaxies merge, astronomers would see the two great black holes orbiting each other, but so far they’ve had tough luck, astronomer Julie Comerford says. “We expect the universe to be littered with these waltzing black holes,” Comerford said. “But until recently, only a few had ever been found.” Those missing black hole pairs posed problems for theories of how galaxies merge and grow [Wired.com].

Comerford, however, announced at the meeting that her team has found 33 new pairs of black holes in galactic centers. When the black hole dances toward Earth, its light is blueshifted — meaning it has a shorter wavelength. The team identified waltzing pairs by looking for instances when one black hole was blueshifted and the other redshifted [Wired.com]. Those black holes orbit each other at 200 km per second, but they’re not in a close embrace—several thousand light years separate each pair.

Next, the star destroyers: Astronomers see plenty of supermassive black holes, whether paired or not. And they see lots of black holes close to our sun in mass, like the kind a single star’s supernovae creates. But what about the black holes in between? Black holes measuring in the range of hundreds to thousands of solar masses have only existed in theory up till now and observational evidence of these “medium-sized” singularities has been very hard to come by [Discovery News].

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory, however, just discovered one of these intermediate black holes. Not only did Chandra catch a black hole in the missing size hanging around a globular cluster, it also caught the black hole in the process of ripping apart a star. In this case, that star was probably a white dwarf: The observations suggest oxygen is in abundance, but there is a deficiency in hydrogen, suggesting that the material was being stripped from an old, white dwarf star. (The lack of hydrogen shows that the stellar object has burnt up its fuel) [Discovery News].

For more on the Chandra discovery, check out Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy post. And for more about how black holes could have shaped the early universe, read the DISCOVER story “Are Black Holes the Architects of the Universe?”

Related Content:
80beats: Far-Off Quasar Could Be the Spark That Ignites a Galaxy
80beats: Researchers Spot an Ancient Starburst from the Universe’s Dark Ages
Bad Astronomy: Monster Black Hole Devours Dead Star
DISCOVER: Are Black Holes the Architects of the Universe?

Image: NASA / Chandra

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has taken detailed pictures of what scientists are saying is evidence that large lakes of liquid water sat on the planet’s surface relatively recently–which is to say, about 3 billion years ago.

MRO imaged several deep depressions that scientists previously attributed to the sublimation of underground ice 4 billion years ago. However, the new images show that the depressions are connected by long channels, and researchers say these channels could only be formed by running water, and not by ice turning directly into gas. The scientists’ ageing of the region, which on bodies like Mars is done by counting craters, suggests the features formed during the so-called Hesperian Epoch on the Red Planet [BBC News]. Essentially, this means that there was water on Mars a billion years more recently than previously thought. The findings were published in the journal Geology.

The researchers aren’t quite sure how the lakes, which are up to 12 miles long, were filled with water. Scientists had believed that the planet was a frozen wasteland during the Hesperian Epoch, but researchers now suggest that it may have had short-lived warm phases. Mars could have been warmed by volcanic activity, meteorite impacts or even orbital shifts. The result would be a temporary increase in planetary temperature as the gases created in those events thickened the Martian atmosphere [SPACE.com]. Regardless of how it happened, scientists and space nerds are giddy about the possibility that these lakes could have once harbored life.

A few months ago, NASA announced their finding of a huge ice sheet under the Martian surface, and where there’s water, there could have once been life. According to researcher Sanjeev Gupta, “potentially life could have survived in these lakes, we would be talking about microbial life…. But now we have shown that there was standing water, this is another avenue to explore” [Telegraph]. The researchers are widening their search to include spots along Mars’ equator to determine how large an area the lakes covered.

Related Content:
80beats: NASA Finds Big Stash of Water on Mars
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Image: NASA/JPL/Imperial College of London

I’m at the annual winter American Astronomical Society meeting, and just left an interesting address by the new NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden. He’s a former astronaut (he was on the initial Hubble Shuttle mission back in 1990) and Marine corps pilot, but now he’s the top guy at NASA.

It’s a tradition for the NASA head to speak at the AAS meetings. I’ve heard talks from ex-Admins Dan Goldin, Sean O’Keefe, and Mike Griffin, and this one was very different. NASA is at a very tumultuous point in its history, with the Shuttle winding down, the future of the Constellation rocket program uncertain and under fire, and even the direction of the agency itself unclear. Because of this, and because President Obama has not made a public policy statement about these issues yet, Bolden could not give a nuts-and-bolts speech, which is understandable. For those of you who weren’t following my live comments on Twitter during the talk, here are some of the highlights.

He was very clear that we all need to do what we can to inspire kids about science. In a remarkable turn, he literally choked up on stage while talking about putting together a telescope with his granddaughter, and saying we need to get more kids to look through eyepieces. “Look at this!” he said, “This is what we do!” That resonates with me, of course; I’ve made that exact comment on this blog dozens of times.

He also said that manned space flight would not be paid off the back of science. This generated applause from the audience. However, I’ve heard that before, just a few years ago from Mike Griffin… and then saw science missions’ funding cut back to pay for the lunar exploration program. So while I agree with Bolden’s sentiment, I don’t know if he can pull that particular feat off. I sure hope he can.

When asked about the issues with delays in the Shuttle replacement, he stated that “This President won’t be the one who presides over the demise of the manned space program.” (quoting from my memory of what he said). He also stated how strongly Obama supports science; something we already know but it’s damn good to hear it again.

He also said, “If you had told me 20 years ago that we wouldn’t be back on the Moon by now, I’d have said you were smoking dope.” That was great to hear! I know a lot of us outside of NASA have been saying that for years, but it was refreshing and wonderful to hear the head of NASA saying it, and saying it so frankly. He even repeated the statement to make sure we got it. Very cool indeed.

Overall, Bolden reinforced how committed NASA is to science — something that needs to be said when addressing 1000+ astronomers, who traditionally and by large majority tend to support unmanned robotic exploration over the much more expensive and usually less-scientifically oriented manned flight. He stressed that we all need to be teachers, and we all need to be the inspiration for the next generation. I agree in general, and certainly in specifics about inspiration.

So this first date with the NASA chief went as a lot of first dates go. Hopeful, with some reservations on promises made based on the delivery of further evidence, but… hopeful.

[During the talk I sat next to my dear friend and woman-full-of-awesome Pamela Gay, who has posted her thoughts on this as well.]

For evolution to take place, you need DNA or RNA to change through mutation, providing the variations for natural selection to select. Right? Well, it may be more complicated than that. A new study suggests an exception: prions, the infectious protein bits that can cause degenerative brain diseases like mad cow disease. In a paper in Science, researchers document these lifeless structures evolving, despite the fact that they lack any DNA or RNA.

Study leader Charles Weissmann and his team transferred prions from brain cells to other kinds of cells and watched as certain members of the prion population adapted to the new environment and took over, out-competing their brethren. When he transferred the prions back to brain cells, the ones most adapted to brain living got the upper hand and increased in number as they out-competed the prions that had adapted to other cells. Weissmann argues that this shows Darwinian evolution can go even further than we thought: “In viruses, mutation is linked to changes in nucleic acid sequence that leads to resistance. Now, this adaptability has moved one level down- to prions and protein folding – and it’s clear that you do not need nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) for the process of evolution” [BBC News].

In diseases like mad cow and the human version of it, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, proteins in the brain go awry. Mammals produce the normal protein cousins of infectious prions as part of normal cell development, but during infection, misfolded or warped proteins can convert normal host prion protein into its own toxic, misfolded form. When this happens enough times, massive tissue and cell damage can occur [Popular Science].

This pattern of warping proteins could be the key to how this DNA-less evolution occurs, the researchers propose. When a prion converts a normal protein, it typically forces it into the same structure as itself, but at a low probability, other variant structures result. The population of these variants can then expand or contract based on selective pressures [Ars Technica]. This appears to happen more quickly when the prions are transferred to a new host, as happened in previous research when scientists moved prions from sheep to mice—the more virulent variants got a chance to take hold.

Given the problems today with bacteria and viruses evolving drug resistance, the idea of evolving prions seems like more bad news. But, taking a note from DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer’s “Evolving Viruses to Death,” perhaps doctors could use prions’ strength against them: Since infectious prions need their normal cousins to feed their own replication and evolution, therapies that limit the supply of normal prion proteins could essentially starve the degenerative cycle that makes those illnesses so effective at killing their hosts [Popular Science].

Related Content:
80beats: Ripped From the Journals, including a Nature study fingering prions from spreading chronic wasting disease in deer.
The Loom: Return of Mad Cow Memories
DISCOVER: When Bad Prions Go Good
DISCOVER: Prionlike Protein Help Form Memories
DISCOVER: Picturing Prions

Image: Eye of Science / Science Photo Library

The elite online dating club BeautifulPeople.com (yes, this is a real Web site), trimmed 5,000 members from its service because they appear to have indulged in too much Christmas ham.

Feast your eyes on this excerpt from the company’s statement, via CNN:

“As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld,” said Robert Hintze, founder of BeautifulPeople.com. “Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”

Publicity stunt? Probably. Shocking? Hardly. When vain folks sign up for a service so they can be rated by a group of narcissistic pretty people this is bound to happen.

If you’re one of the expelled 5,000, don’t let this get you down. The company says you’re welcome to reapply—after the love handles are gone, of course.

Related Content:
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Discoblog: Researchers Discover How Ice Cream Controls Your Brain

Image: Beautifulpeople.com

I am heartbroken to learn the loss of a member of the physics community in the recent avalanche in Switzerland. I have few details, but it appears one physicist was killed in the avalanche, and that at least two others from the party have been hospitalized. Many others were lost, including some of the rescuers, who were swept up in a second avalanche.

Condolences to all who have been affected by this tragedy.

What’s the connection between Steve Wozniak, the Pope, and Henry Kissinger? That’s right, it’s hacking.

By now a lot of people have seen James Cameron’s Avatar, and a much larger number have formed an opinion about it. Anticipation had been building for months, as people were excited by the prospect that ultra-realistic computer animation would combine with dazzling 3D technology to produce a different kind of movie than anyone had ever seen.

It’s generally not a good sign when the buzz is about the technology behind a movie rather than the story within it, and in the case of Avatar the worries are justified. There’s no question that the moviemaking is truly impressive; not only is it a great technological achievement, but Cameron is an accomplished storyteller. The film is long but never ponderous, the set pieces are thrilling, and one’s heartstrings are tugged at all the right places. As a bonus, the acting is fantastic — Sigourney Weaver’s gruff scientist in particular is a great character.

Alas, in a world that one would like to see fleshed out in shades of gray, Cameron’s contrast knob is stuck resolutely at eleven. (Spoilers henceforth.) Humans have destroyed their own planet, and are now descending on Pandora to set about destroying that. The bad guys are represented by a craven businessman and a scarred ex-Marine. War and capitalism are bad! We get it.

But cartoonish villains don’t necessarily spell doom for a movie, especially one meant to be an elaborate thrill ride. I didn’t leave Raiders of the Lost Ark wishing that the Nazis had been more fleshed-out, and nobody gives thanks that the Star Wars prequels let us in on Darth Vader’s backstory. The problem arises when such banal evil is trotted out in service of A MESSAGE. And if there’s one thing Avatar has, it’s a message — a particularly trite one, which is deeply misguided, but a message nonetheless.

The Na’vi, Pandora’s native race, are presented very bluntly as traditional noble savages. They may be nine feet tall and blue, and find themselves trapped in a series of Yes album covers, but that just provides a convenient excuse to mix and match features of Native Americans and African tribes as the director sees fit. The Na’vi are portrayed as saintly tree-huggers who feel bad when jungle beasts are killed unnecessarily; at any moment you expected to hear “This animal is called the bufa’lo. We use every part of it.”

To drive things home, most of the humans are portrayed by white actors, while most of the actors behind the motion-captured Na’vi are people of color. And to drive things home even more (things worth driving home can never be driven too much, right?), the Na’vi have a literal connection with the natural world around them. Which might be a cool idea worth exploring, if it weren’t deployed as a gimmick to emphasize the pastoral purity of the pre-technological natives. (I can’t wait for Oscar night: “We would like to express our gratitude for all these Academy Awards for technical achievement given to our movie about how true virtue is to be found in wearing loincloths and chanting around trees.”)

And even that wouldn’t be so bad, if the noble savages weren’t portrayed as good-hearted but ineffectual. Eventually they manage to fight off the invading Earthlings, who despite mastering interstellar travel and consciousness-transferal are still stuck using machine guns and tiny rockets when hostilities break out. But they’re only able to do so because the kind-hearted white warrior rides to their rescue. Sam Worthington’s character, the protagonist with whom we are supposed to identify, spends three months as a Na’vi and turns out to be better at it than any of the primitive sods who were actually born that way. Only he is able to tame the legendary beast, bring far-flung tribes together to work for a common cause, and have the wit to appeal to the ecosystem-network for a bit of help.

It’s an old trope, fueled by liberal guilt. “Sure,” the elaborate narrative rationalization goes, “people like me have screwed over people like you for generations. But I’m pretty sure that, had I been around at the time, I would have been one of the shining exceptions who bravely turned against my compatriots to side with the honorable native folk. Who, frankly, could have used my help.” It’s the victors who tell the stories and make the movies.

How one reacts to Avatar depends strongly on how bothered one is by this kind of stereotypically condescending storyline. As a thrilling popcorn movie, it absolutely works; the detailed world Cameron created is breathtaking; and the technological feat is singularly impressive. But when these achievements are in the service of a message that is so ham-handed and ultimately off-putting, I find it hard to enjoy. If the storytelling had been handled with a little more self-awareness and toleration for ambiguity — by the folks at Pixar, for example — it might really have been an historically good movie.

Orbiting our Milky Way galaxy like two bickering siblings are the Magellanic Clouds, galaxies in their own right, though far smaller than ours. The smaller of the two — named, shockingly, the Small Magellanic Cloud — is also the farther of the two, about 200,000 light years to the Larger cloud’s 180,000 or so. The SMC is loaded with gas and dust, and is actively churning out stars.

The Spitzer Space Telescope, which observes infrared light from astronomical sources, took this incredibly beautiful image of the SMC:

[Click to embiggen, including getting access to a huge 7800 x 7000 40Mb version.]

Remember, this is not a visible light image! In the picture, blue represents light at a wavelength of 3.6 microns, about 5 times longer than what the human eye can see. Green is 8 microns, and red 24. So what you see here as blue is really what we would think of as red stars if we saw them with our eyes. Green shows light from big organic molecules called PAHs, for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Red is light from stars deeply embedded in dust, and is where stars are busily being born.

All together, this image shows starbirth on a vast scale, thousands of light years across. And this may be a new phenomenon for the SMC: measurements of the elements in the stars there show that they have far fewer heavy elements (like oxygen, iron, and so on) than stars in the Milky Way, as little as 1/5th as abundant. Since these elements are created inside of stars over time, this indicates that stars in the SMC are on the whole younger than in the Milky Way.

Even though the two Clouds are the closest galaxies we can see — and you can spot them easily with the unaided eye in the southern hemisphere — there’s still a lot we don’t know about them. In fact, we’re not even sure if they are orbiting the Milky Way, or just passing by! Even over decades, measuring their actual motion across the sky is very difficult; their mind-numbing distance of quintillions of kilometers away shrinks any real motion into apparently microscopic amounts. It may be quite some time before this question is finally resolved.

Another image from Spitzer also shows a tail of gas streaming away from the SMC, material ripped out of the body of the galaxy itself by the gravity of the Milky Way. It’s possible that interactions with the Milky Way and the other Magellanic Cloud are what triggered the star formation in the SMC, too.

It’s rather convenient to have such a nice laboratory for dwarf galaxies and starbirth so close to us. That makes it easier to study, giving us access to really high resolution images like this one. And the bonus? They’re pretty, too.

NASA’s new eye in the sky has spotted the first handful of what it hopes will be a flood of new exoplanets. The Kepler telescope, launched last year with the express purpose of planet-hunting, has found its first five new worlds, with the results forthcoming in the journal Science this week. Just don’t get any ideas about living on any of them.

“One of the planets is amazingly light – like Styrofoam,” said William J. Borucki, the astronomer from NASA’s Ames Research Center…. “And all five simply glow,” he said, “they’re like looking into a blast furnace – but that’s simply no place to look for life” [San Francisco Chronicle]. The scalding-hot planets measure in excess of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than molten lava. These planets all orbit their stars in a hurry, taking between three and five days to make a circuit. Ground measurements confirmed Kepler’s findings.

Four of the five exoplanets—including Styrofoam world—are mysteriously light; they’re far less dense than Jupiter despite being 40 percent larger, as you can see in the chart. “This is accumulating evidence that low density is a common feature” among exoplanets, says planetary physicist David Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who was not involved in the research. The problem is that no one has come up with a mechanism that could puff up an exoplanet that way [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Kepler’s first foray found more than just new planets. It also measured the light from 43,000 stars like our sun in its field of view and found two-thirds of them to be about as stable as the sun. That seemingly obscure observation suggests that the majority of stars potentially are as hospitable to life as Earth’s sun, assuming there was an Earth-like planet orbiting at the right distance from the star [Christian Science Monitor].

Related Content:
80beats: New Super-Earth: Hot, Watery, and Nearby
80beats: Meet the New Neighbors: Earth-Like Worlds Orbiting Nearby Stars
80beats: Don’t Pack Your Bags Yet—New Planet-Finder Hobbled By Electronic Glitch
80beats: Kepler Sends Postcards Home: It’s Beautiful Out Here
DISCOVER: How Long Until We Find a Second Earth?
Bad Astronomy: Kepler Works!

Image: NASA

Well, I’ve spent quite a bit of time away from the blog recently, feeling rather overwhelmed as a number of responsibilities accumulated over the last hectic year finally caught up with me. But, for now at least, things seem to be in check and I’m hoping to get a little more writing done.

The last few months of the year were quite a ride. For example,

• I started teaching again (after a sabbatical at Cornell, and then a one semester leave to help me settle in at Penn), and very much enjoyed introducing the complexities (no pun intended) of contour integration, asymptotic methods, Sturm-Liouville theory, etc. to a whole new batch of beginning graduate students at a whole new institution.
• The first (albeit limited) renovations were completed as part of the Center for Particle Cosmology, and helping oversee these, as well as planning for much larger future renovations took up a huge part of the Fall semester. In the end though, this should be well worth it, with a new and highly-functional space for us to work and collaborate in.
• I started doing significant service again; organizing departmental colloquia and sitting on our graduate admissions committee. Plus some new editorial work
• I went to Australia, to speak at the COSPA-09 meeting in Melbourne (if you look carefully you’ll see both Sean and me in the group picture on the main page.) This was my third visit to Melbourne, and once again I was struck by what a liveable and lovely city it is. The conference was great fun, and I saw a number of talks that gave me something to think about back in Philly.
• I finished some papers.
• We ran an intense and, I thought, successful workshop – New Horizons in Particle Cosmology – to inaugurate the Center for Particle Cosmology. This involved some of the biggest names in our field, and included a very well-attended public lecture by Paul Steinhardt. My colleague Justin Khoury deserves considerable praise for taking on most of the organizational work of the conference and lecture.

Right now I’m gearing up for next week’s beginning of my graduate General Relativity class, which is my absolute favorite subject to teach. I’m also preparing for quite a bit more travel this year, although not for a few weeks at least. But most importantly, of course, I’m hard at work on a number of projects that I hope will come to fruition in the pretty near future.

So this post is just intended to get back into the swing of things. I’ll leave you with an interesting new link. NPR is entering the science blogging field with a good-looking new blog featuring, among others, science writer and friend-of-the-blog, K.C. Cole, and former guest contributor, physicist Marcelo Gleiser. Their blog is called 13.7 (for reasons you might try guessing before checking on) and I hope you’ll check them out – we wish them all the best.

I just wanted to post this graph, which I found while researching vaccinations.

Antivaxxers: bite me^*. We win.

This morning I’m back in the District to address the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) about ways to improve the communication of science. With members representing over 90 organizations including NOAA, NASA, and USGS, they work to collect, interpret, and develop applications for Earth observation information. It’s my first talk of 2010 and I’m very much looking forward to spending the day with such a neat interdisciplinary group.