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It is the 50 year anniversary of the Apollo moon landing! It is a glorious anniversary: the moon landing was surely one of humankind’s proudest moments to date! Human beings left the Earth and walked upon the surface of a different world and returned to tell the tale! Yet it is a bittersweet anniversary too. Today we are too politically paralyzed, too indebted, and too subservient to world-bestriding monopolies to accomplish anything similarly stirring. It is unlikely we could even repeat the same feat! The president talks of returning to the moon by 2024, but anybody following the affairs of NASA recognizes that this is not going to happen (even assuming the current administration remains in place to push these particular space priorities).
In 1967, the Apollo program, by itself, was taking 4 percent of total government spending. That was an era when the USA’s GDP represented 38% of the total world economic output (it is around 24% today). There are lots of cranks and bumpkins who grouse about such outlays, but that money was spent here on Earth and it yielded rewards far beyond the moon landing itself. The communications, materials, and technology innovations which have changed so many aspects of life largely flowed out of the space program (and its shadowy military sibling programs).
Perhaps you are wondering why this is not a nostalgic & triumphalist post about an epochal human accomplishment. Maybe you are also perplexed about why I am writing about budgets and GDP instead of, you know, about landing human beings on the moon (although there has not been a human on the moon during my lifetime).
This is not just an anniversary post, it is also a polemical post about current policy failures. We are not investing any such vast outlays in long-term, open-ended research today. It is going to come back to haunt us in a future of reduced prospects and lackluster breakthroughs Fifty years hence, are we going to look back on 2019 and enthuse about an Instagram filter, or slight improvements in immunotherapy, or blockchain technology?
Wikipedia blandly notes ” blue-sky projects are politically and commercially unpopular and tend to lose funding to more reliably profitable or practical research.” The real genius of the moon-landing was that the end result was so spectacular and stupendous that it upended this conventional wisdom. U.S. politicians of the sixties had the genius to perceive that the Apollo program could bring us together, boost our national prestige, bankrupt the Russians, and yield enormous technological and scientific rewards all at the same time.
In 1969, it must have seemed like the beginning of a golden age of space exploration. After our heroic moon conquest we would build nuclear reactors on the moon and then create space cities in domed craters. There would be giant lunar rail guns, torus space stations, spaceplanes, and Mars missions (and my floating Venutian city). Instead we have the moldering hulk which is the International Space Station and some worn out space planes in museums. Our vision and our willpower faded as our greed grew greater.
But it is never too late! Space is still out there, bigger than ever. The moon landing showed that the impossible is possible if we work together. That’s still true too and it is something we should all think hard about as we look up at the night sky and make plans for what to do next.
Sorry about the scarcity of posts last week. Ferrebeekeeper opted to enjoy an extended Fourth of July by trying not to look at the internet (which paints a less-than-rosy picture of these (dis)United States of America). I was out experiencing summer fun in the real world. But that doesn’t mean we have forgotten about fireworks of the past. We have just moved our perspective farther afield.
Above is the highest resolution image of Eta Carinae taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Between 1838 and 1844 Eta Carinae nearly went supernova and briefly became the fourth brightest star in the heavens (well really the explosion/ejection event occurred 7500 years earlier and the photons only reached Earth in the mid-nineteenth century). Astronomers are still arguing about what exactly transpired then in this messed up stellar system: one particularly dramatic theory is that the unstable blue super giant η Car A devoured a now unknown third star in the system!
In the actual universe Eta Carinae is almost certainly gone and a vast tsunami of strange electromagnetic radiation is rushing towards Earth…but nobody knows if this is true or when the supernova afterwash will get here. Astronomers recently pointed Hubble at the Homunculus Nebula, the hourglass shaped cloud of matter which expands approximately one light year from the binary Eta Carinae system and took the color enhanced ultraviolet photo above. It is beautiful but ominous…let’s keep it in the back of our minds as we go about our little lives. This universe is a strange & savage place.
Hey, did anybody notice there is a massive spooky ghost galaxy right next door to us? Well, actually the answer turns out to be “no: not really…not until November of last year.” It was only in November of 2018 that astronomers discovered Antlia 2, a galaxy which is a mere 130,000 light-years away from the Milky Way–which really is right next door in terms of cosmic distances (to contextualize this number, the diameter of the Milky Way itself is between 150,000 and 200,000 light years).
Ant2, as it is affectionately (?) called, is closer than the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy with 30 billion stars which is 163,000 light years away and is generally regarded as our closest galactic neighbor. How did we miss this thing? And why are we calling it a ghost galaxy (aside from the fact that that sounds impossibly cool)?
Antlia 2 is a weird sort of celestial object. It has the lowest “surface brightness” of any known galaxy and is approximately 100 times more diffuse than any known ultra diffuse galaxy. Gee! that is really extremely diffuse. Antlia 2 is also a dark matter galaxy: the exiguous stars of which it consists are insufficient to hold it together without a great deal of unknown mystery mass. The ghost galaxy may be more than 99 percent dark matter. Additionally, Ant2 (insomuch as it exists) is hidden by the occlusion cloud above the spiral of the Milky Way. Only with the advanced astrometry readings of the European Space Agency’s satellite observatory Gaia were astronomers finally able to pinpoint this dark shadow in the sky above the southern constellation Antlia (which itself is named after an 18th century air pump).
What the jazz? This post is making less sense than usual, but I am not making any of it up…
I worry that this post is too abstruse for comfort. It concerns an all-but-invisible phantom galaxy made of unknown dark matter. The only reason we even found it to begin with is that astronomers were on the lookout for a hidden galaxy. Some unknown mass must have caused the stylish ruffles in the spiral arms of our own bright & lively Milky Way. Thus the fashion sensibility of space topologists helped us to find Antlia 2. Remind me about this thing in October. I want to draw some ghost galaxies to celebrate Halloween this year!
I am fascinated by Jupiter! Even though I have no plans for it (unlike, say Venus), Jupiter is so dazzling, beautiful, and huge that it is impossible not to be impressed. Also it is so colossally enormous that it is quite difficult to even conceive of it: Jupiter has a mass one-thousandth that of the Sun! Indeed Jupiter is a sort of miniature solar system in itself with several rings, a magnetosphere, and 79 known moons. Ferrebeekeeper has touched on Jupiter’s moons, its poles, its great spot, and on our robot missions out to the planet.
However today is something more mundane, yet also more accessible: tonight Jupiter is in opposition to Earth. This means that On June 10, 2019, Earth is directly between the sun and planet Jupiter. You should run out into the night and look at it! Tonight you can see the largest moons of Jupiter with a small scope (or, if you are very lucky and have eagle vision, with your bare eyes).
Of course it won’t have all the details you see on pictures back from our probes, but it has something else which is special–it won’t be on some glowing screen. It is real and you can see it for yourself with your own eyes. So, go out and enjoy the June night and the sight of our biggest planetary neighbor. There is a lot to talk about and do, but maybe it is worth taking a little astronomy break right now. And if it is raining or you don’t see this post until tomorrow, don’t worry! There will be a few days when Jupiter dominates the heavens (although you can always check out Fourmilab, if you are having trouble locating it).
Astrophysicists have long speculated about the creation of the moon. Since the late twentieth century, the dominant theory has been “the giant impact hypothesis” which posits that a huge object about the size of Mars smashed into the newly coalesced Earth 4.5 billion years ago. Astronomers name this mysterious proto-planet “Theia” after the titan who was the mother of the moon is ancient Greek mythology. They speculate that the Earth and Theia melded together and the iron/heavy metal core of Theia sank into the molten Earth. A great deal of the light material was thrown into orbit around Earth where it coalesced into two moons (the smaller of which was unstable and pancaked into the dark side of the moon a few million years after formation).
These are pretty intense ideas, however they explain many of the features of the moon and Earth (you can look at a comprehensive list on Wikipedia if you like). Yet astrophysicists have not been completely satisfied by the current model of the giant impact hypothesis. The composition of the moon is suspiciously identical to that of Earth (whereas, computer models seem to indicate that it should contain more of Theia).
This week, a scientific paper suggests that the collision was somewhat different than envisioned in the giant impact hypothesis. The paper’s main author is Natsuki Hosono, and he has a revised version of how Theia hit Earth. According to this new hypothesis, the freshly formed Earth was still piping hot and its surface was covered with a lava ocean. Theia banged into Earth and careened off into space like a pool ball but the impact knocked the liquid ocean of lava into space, where it coalesced into one or two moons (which then ultimately amalgamated together). The new hypothesis answers critical questions about lunar composition (and about the ratios of volatile elements on the moon). Yet it does tend to beg questions such as what happened to Theia and what the nature of the Earth’s lava ocean was.
I guess we’ll keep watching the sky and the news to see how the world astronomy community reacts to the revised hypothesis. In the mean time I will see what I can dig up concerning Theia (the goddess or the proto-planet). That seems like the most intriguing part of the story yet details are weirdly exiguous.
Happy Earth Day! I am afraid I am a bit under the weather (which seems appropriate, since our beautiful blue planet is catching a fever too). However it is worth devoting some time today to thinking about our planet and the entwined webs of ecosystems which support all living things (very much including human beings).
The great masters of global capitalism claim that the Earth is inexhaustible and made solely for human delights. To hear them tell it, only if ever more people consume ever more consumer rubbish will we all thrive. However that claim always seemed suspect, and the notably swift decline of entire ecosystems within even my lifetime suggests that fundamental aspects of our way of life and our long-term goals need to be rethought. It is a formidable problem because the nations of Earth are facing a near-universal political crisis where authoritarians are flourishing and democracies are faltering. So far, the authoritarians don’t seem substantially concerned with a sustainable future for living things (or with any laudatory goal, really). This trend could get worse in the future as agricultural failures, invasive blights, and extreme weather events cause people to panic and flee to “safe” arms of the dictators (this would be a stupid choice since strongmen, despots, and tyrants are anything but safe in a any context).
These frightening projections of doom are hardly a foregone conclusion though. A great many people of all political and ideological stripes are worried about the future and are working hard to ensure that humankind and all of our beautiful extended family on the tree of life make it into the future. Part of this is going to involve engineering and biomedical breakthroughs, but political and cultural breakthroughs will be needed as well.
I am ill-prepared to write out my proposals at length (since I would really like to lie down with some ginger ale), but fortunately I am a visual artist and I spent the winter of 2018 preparing a dramatic planetary image to capture my own anxiety for the world and its living things without necessarily giving in utterly to my fears and anxieties. I was going to introduce it later, but EarthDay is a good time to give you a sneak peak (plus it goes rather well with my Maundy Thursday blog post).
Here is the Great Flounder–the allegorical embodiment of how Earth life if everywhere under our feet and around us, but we can’t necessarily fathom it easily, because of our scale. Speaking of scale (in multiple ways I guess), I continue to have trouble with WordPress’ image tool, so I am afraid that you will have to make due with this small image until I learn about computers…or until posters get printed up (dangit…why do we have to sell ourselves all of the time?). In the meantime here is a teaser detail to help you in your own contemplation of if/how we can make Earth a paradise for ourselves without destroying it for the other inhabitants.
We will talk more about this soon, but in the meantime happy Earth Day. We will work together to save our giant blue friend, I know it! Let’s just collaborate to do so before we lose African elephants, numbats, mysterious siphonophores, or any of our beloved fellow lifeforms on this spherical island hurtling through space.
There is an exciting new development in the world of aerospace! This weekend, the world’s largest plane flew for the first time. The plane is a colossal megajet with six engines and a 117 meter wingspan longer than a football field (or a soccer pitch). For years the start-up aerospace firm Stratolaunch has been out in the Mojave Desert working on a giant plane to use as an orbital launch platform. On Saturday (April 13, 2019), the Stratolaunch carrier aircraft successfully left the ground and cruised up to an altitude of 4500 meters (15000 feet) before returning safely to the ground and back to its immense hangar.
The plane is designed to serve as a flying launchpad for firing satellites into low Earth orbit. By carrying the satellites and their rockets to the edge of the atmosphere, the Stratolaunch will eliminate costly and resource-hungry rocket stages. The company was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It is one of the few examples I have seen of billionaires squandering their money in an appropriate fashion (come to think of it, Bill Gates’ humanitarian foundation is another of those rare examples…maybe those guys did know something).
When I was growing up, every picture of a newly developed airplane filled me with covetous awe; yet, for the last decade, that feeling has been missing. Every new plane has looked like a blander (albeit more fuel efficient) version of a previous model. Even the budget-devouring F35 looks kind of like an uninspired GIJoe toy and lacks the hot lines of an F14 or even an F111 (although, admittedly, the F35 has thoroughly demonstrated its awe-inspiring ability to destroy money more quickly and effectively than any other warplane). Yet the Stratolaunch changes all of that. For the first ime in a long time, this plane is weird and exciting. Just look at the tiny twin cockpits like angry little prairie falcon heads, or cast your eye on the hunched up fuselage and the sequential rows of landing gear. I would be proud to run through the neighborhood waving a plastic model of this plane over my head and screaming until I tripped on my shoelace. Additionally, the plane finally shattered an aerospace record which has stood since 1947. The wings of the Stratolaunch are longer than the wings of the Spruce Goose, the magnificent flying white elephant which Howard Hughes built out of wood (in order to work around a wartime aluminum shortage).
Congratulations to the Stratolaunch team and to the late Paul Allen. Ferrebeekeeper will be watching the skies over the Mojave with our fingers crossed to see how the next test missions go.
Messier 87 (M87) Galaxy
Messier 87 is a strange and extraordinary galaxy. For one thing it was discovered and named in 1781…even though the nature of galaxies (and the fact that there are more than one such “island universes” was not understood until 1923). Messier 87 was discovered by the great Charles Messier who was cataloging weird celestial blobs that could confuse comet hunters. The galaxy lies near the center of the Virgo supercluster of which our own lovely (albeit provincial) galaxy, the Milky Way, is a part. Formed by the merger of multiple galaxies, M87 is huge and contains more than a trillion stars–4 times the number of stars in the Milky Way. Additionally M87 is surrounded by more than 12,000 globular clusters (the Milky Way has perhaps 200 of these miniature satellite galaxies). Whereas the spiral Milky Way is “blue and new” with ample quantities of hydrogen to form new stars, the globular Messier 87 is “red and dead”: new star formation has slowed and the great elipsoid mass of stars is slowly dying (insomuch as galaxies can be said to live to begin with). The stars visible now are mostly middle aged main sequence stars or tiny long-lived red dwarves (tiny for stars…still not something you could pick up and put in your hatchback).
47 million year old Adapidae fossil from Germany
Messier87 is approximately 53 million light years away. The light that we can observe from it today originated during the Eocene, when the first little primates evolved on Earth and those photons have been streaking toward us through the great emptiness at 300,000 kilometers per second since when our direct ancestors were anxious lemur-squirrel guys staring pensively up at the stars.
A artist’s conception of such a black hole
The center of this monstrous astronomical entity is a supermassive black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun (for reference, the sun is 333,000 times the mass of Earth–so this black hole has the mass of 2,164,500,000,000,000 Earths). A horrifying & beautiful relativistic jet of ionised matter 1.5 kiloparsecs (5000 light years) long is emerging from the black hole.
Why do I bring this up? Because we photographed the black hole! This is the first time we have accomplished such a feat. You can read about the esoteric details of how astronomers achieved such a thing by clicking on today’s Google Doodle (so I guess today’s blog post will not be a completely original/unique subject), I suspect you have seen the picture already. Yet even the eye-of-Sauron glory of this image (which was taken by a pan-global network of radio telescopes) does not exactly capture the scale of the black hole. My imagination is equiped for may things, but is not really much good for processing numbers bigger than a few thousand. The diameter of this black hole is roughly approximate to the orbit of Uranus and it has the mass of a small galaxy. So I guess keep that in mind when looking at the little orange eye. Now I am going to go lie down and hold my pet cat.
We are living in a glorious new era of super marketing. Usually the results of this are rather hideous: our livelihoods are hostage to “keyword position metrics” and “analytic toolbars”. Every day the press is filled with histrionic drivel about threats which are statistically unlikely to hurt us (but which clearly drive hits). Yet there is a silver lining of a sort: in order to keep people’s attention, quotidian phenomena are being lavished with grandiloquent new names (or old poetic names which have been rediscovered and given new prominence). Speaking of which, don’t forget to check out tonight’s spring equinox super worm moon!
These days, the full moon on each month is given a sobriquet which is reputedly derived from ancient Native American lore. Here is a table of these names:
January: Wolf moon
February: Snow Moon
March: Worm Moon
April: Pink Moon
May: Flower Moon
June: Strawberry Moon
July: Buck Moon
August: Sturgeon Moon
September: Corn Moon
October: Hunter’s Moon
November: Beaver Moon
December: Cold Moon
Now I don’t remember any of this from when I was growing up (although this is possibly because I was playing Pacman rather than hunting migratory elk). The first time I remember hearing anything like this was in Disney’s “Pocahontas”. Yet the names have an obvious and evocative allure which speak to ancient annual rhythms.
The “Worm Moon” of March is called that because the ground softens and worms start to appear (although, come to think of it, the pinkish brown earthworms we all know so well are actually comparatively recent Eurasian invaders), but I like to imagine that it is the WORM moon when Lord Nergal, the God of Pestilence decides whether to winnow the overpopulated Earth. Or perhaps it is the Wyrm Moon, when dragons come out of their winter eyries in the south and fly off to their accustomed fantasy realms…
Ahem. At any rate, tonight marks an unusual occasion when the vernal equinox occurs at the same time the moon is full and at its perigee. This will be the final super moon of 2019 so go outside and enjoy it while you drink traditional spring spirits and discuss beautiful nomenclature.
I have been trying to spruce up my online presence by building some new web pages (more about that soon) and by fixing the site I already have which everybody loves [crickets], um, which is to say Ferrebeekeeper! Unfortunately trying new things doesn’t always work…so kindly forgive me if yesterday’s post looks a bit peculiar. We will work with the web guru to get it all taken care of. In the mean time, speaking of experimenting with new things, let’s check back in on JAXA spaceship Hayabusa2.
Artist’s conception of Hayabusa2 touching down on Ryugu
When last we checked in with Hayabusa2, the Japanese spaceprobe had entered orbit around Asteroid Ryugu (a carbonaceous near-Earth asteroid, which is believed to be composed of pristine materials left over from the dawn of the solar system). Hayabusa2 was deploying tiny 1.1 kilograms (2.4 pounds) hopping droids to jump around the ancient ball of rock and snow and learn whatever they could. These robots would be followed by a larger robot probe, Mascot, which would study the asteroid in depth before Hayabusa2’s glorious showstopping signature move–a descent to the surface in order to fire a projectile into the asteroid (in order to collect an asteroid sample). That’s right: while Americans have been utterly transfixed by the bloviations of our felonious leader, the Japanese have dispatched a spacefaring robot to drop hopping mechanized lice on a primeval space snowball and then to pop a cap in it! Respect to the Land of the Rising Sun!
The probe arrived in perfect condition back in September of 2018, but the next phase of the mission got off to a rocky start…literally! JAXA expected Ryugu to be covered with fine powder, but it was covered with jagged rocks. The tiny hopping bots MINERVA-II1 A and B were really meant to test the conditions for MASCOT, a shoebox like robot-probe with real scientific instruments. On a prior mission these hopping probes were too enthusiastic and, after a single touchdown, they hopped magnificently but suicidally into the infinite void (presumably yelling inaudible robot slogans of honor). Although conditions on Ryugu were not as expected, the second generation Minervabots did a better job this time: they delivered the necessary telemetry, astrionics, and surface conditions to bring the mission to the next phase. Mascot was duly dispatched back in October and it operated faultlessly for 17 hours before its battery ran out and the active phase of its mission ended. [As an aside, I am finding it challenging to describe all of the things happening on a planetoid inhabited entirely by various sorts of robots]
Animation of Mascot probe hopping around Ryugu…such balletic grace!
On February 22nd 2019, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft descended to the surface of the asteroid and physically collected a substantial sample of the regolith by shooting the asteroid with a small projectile. You can watch the video of the brief encounter here. There are a lot of pebbles and shards flying around, but apparently the craft was fine and is now back in orbit while the ground crew looks for a final site to sample in April.
The Surface of Ryugu as imaged by a robot probe (JAXA)
This mission is super exciting, but the precious samples aren’t home yet. We will keep you updated here on Ferrebeekeeper (and we will keep working on our own tech project of building a better site).
