Category Archives: Science

Vatican Museum to hold exhibition on Galileo

Posted on by Brad Heap

The TVNZ midday news just reported that the Vatican Museum is to open an exhibition on Galileo and 400 years since his observations showing the earth is round and we orbit around the sun. This has to be one of the most ironic news storys I have heard in a long time. It is the equivalent of the US Army Museum holding an exhibition on why the Viet Cong won the Vietnam War.

The Associated Press reports: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gVhVS3vYYvAwfSrJIEVG0lZK7mLAD9BAAQA80

VATICAN CITY — Rudimentary telescopes, celestial globes and original manuscripts by Galileo are going on view at the Vatican Museums as part of an exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of the astronomer’s first celestial observations.

“Astrum 2009: Astronomy and Instruments” traces the history of astronomy through its tools, from a 3rd century A.D. globe of the zodiac to the increasingly complicated telescopes used in more recent times to gaze at the stars.

At a briefing to launch the exhibit Tuesday, Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s top culture official, declined to revisit the Church’s 17th century condemnation of Galileo for his discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun.

Church teaching at the time placed the Earth at the center of the universe.

Rather, Ravasi said that, while it was necessary to have the courage to admit errors when they were made, “I continue to believe that it’s necessary to look more to the future.”

The church denounced Galileo’s theory as dangerous to the faith. Tried as a heretic in 1633 and forced to recant, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, later changed to house arrest.

The ruling helped fuel accusations that the church was hostile to science — a reputation the Vatican has been trying to shed ever since.

In 1992, Pope John Paul II declared that the ruling against Galileo was an error resulting from “tragic mutual incomprehension.”

The exhibit, and other Vatican initiatives to mark the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope and the U.N.-designated International Year of Astronomy, is part of the Vatican’s continuing rehabilitation effort.

One of the highlights of the show is Galileo’s original manuscript of “Sidereus Nuncius,” the 1610 document in which he excitedly recorded his first discoveries after using his telescope.

Tommaso Maccacaro, president of Italy’s national institute of astrophysics, said it was important to look at the instruments not just from a scientific view but from a cultural one as well, since astronomy has had such an impact on the way we perceive ourselves.

“It was astronomical observations that let us understand that Earth (and man) don’t have a privileged position or role in the universe,” he said in his prepared comments to the briefing. “I ask myself what tools will we use in the next 400 years, and I ask what revolutions of understanding they’ll bring about, like resolving the mystery of our apparent cosmic solitude.”

The exhibit opens Friday and runs through Jan. 16.

It is very funny that the Vatican wishes to hold an exhibition on Galileo in order to shred the image that is hostile to science. However at the same time it is not prepared to discuss the treatment of Galileo and would prefer instead to focus on the future.

New Moon == New Earth?

Posted on by Brad Heap

The news that NASA’s impact with the moon failed to create the huge dust cloud that was predicted has left me wondering if that is evidence that the moon is a lot younger than previous thought. And if this is true then could it also hold that the earth is also a lot younger than the commonly held thought.

Now first I will give a disclaimer I am no moon or space expert, I only hold a passing interest in the subject, and I am happy to be corrected or proved wrong on any scientific information I present below.

Until this morning the view was that the moon was covered in a huge amount of dust (and potentially ice) built up over many millions of years by collisions with space objects (comets and the like), so like the sand on a beach covers the real surface sometimes to metres deep, the moon dust acted like sand and covered the real surface of the moon by many metres of dust.

However the failure to kick up this dust may suggest a few things.

  • The moon is not as old as we expected and therefore there is a lot less dust on the planet.
  • The dust on the moon is a lot stronger than we expected, therefore the chemical bonds and electrostatic bonds between each piece of dust is much stronger than we expected and therefore there was less of a dust storm (a lot like how mud is a lot more sticky than dry dirt)
  • That the ice inside the dust made the dust a lot more sticky than we were expecting.
  • Although the moon collects dust over time there may have been much bigger collisions in the past that have kicked a lot of this dust back into space, so while the moon acts as a giant vacuum cleaner stopping things hitting earth, it may every so often get its own bag emptied with a huge collision.
  • The dust on the moon accumulates much slower than we expected, this could mean there have been less collisions with the moon in the past then what we see today.

My personal preference is for the first idea to hold true, that would give creationists a much stronger leg to stand on if they can show the moon is a lot younger than we thought it was, however, at the same time I am very interested in if any my other ideas hold water. NASA will hopefully reveal some more info on what happened and while the dust cloud didn’t arrive as expected in the next few days, I am hoping it is exciting rather than just another typically NASA we stuffed up moment like has happened plenty of times before.

NASA Fail

Posted on by Brad Heap

So if you didn’t know already late last night NASA deliberately crashed two probes into the moon to try and kick up a dust cloud hopefully containing water. It turns out it was an epic failure with nothing happening.

The spacecraft ploughed into a 60-mile-wide crater called Cabeus, which is permanently in shade at the lunar south pole. Scientists believe the crater may contain frozen water and expected it to be kicked up by the impact. One theory is that the impact site was unexpectedly hard and that rock and soil gouged out by the impact failed to rise high enough to be lit up by sunlight.

“If it turns out to be as dull as it looked, I’d imagine the soil just didn’t respond as was hoped to being hit,” said Vincent Eke, an astronomer at the University of Durham who helped Nasa choose the impact site. “It might mean we don’t get sufficient data, which would be a shame,” he added.

So all those people who called Nasa’s headquarters in Washington DC with a flood of calls from people objecting to the agency “bombing” the moon, fearing disruption to tides on Earth and even their menstrual cycles have nothing to worry about.

But NASA have some explaining to why their predicted impact that would throw up a six-mile-high cloud of lunar dust and rock which could be scanned for evidence of frozen water didn’t happen.

It just goes to show we do not know as much about the world as what we think we do and we should never taken anything in science as fact, it is all theory until a new theory replaces it.

Satellite, Star or Planet?… It’s Jupiter

Posted on by Brad Heap

I ended up going to be very late last night thanks to assignments.

But the one positive thing to come of going to bed late was the fullness of the moon. I got a few photos of it and then noticed a very bright object to its right.

P1090933

At first I thought it may be a satellite and I tried to zoom up on it to get some good shots, most of them turned out blurred or weird because of the lack of light and long exposure time, but I did get a few good ones.

Panasonic DMC-FZ5 1/8s f/8.0 ISO: 100 12x Optical Zoom

Panasonic DMC-FZ5 1/8s f/8.0 ISO: 100 12x Optical Zoom

At this point I began to notice the odd colors coming off it, still convinced it was some form of satellite I zoomed up onto the digital zoom and changed the settings to TIFF format and ISO 400

P1090942

At this point I was thinking okay I have some really bright star, maybe Mars.

It wasn’t until this morning I decided to look up a star map. And what do you know?

Star Map for 00:00 Sep 3 2009 NZST, Look right next to the moon.

So off to the star dome website we go for confirmation.

http://www.ectoolset.com/func/Newsdetails.asp?sid=440&id=10033

Another planet visible at this time is Jupiter. High in the sky to the east, Jupiter is the brightest thing in the evening sky apart from the Moon, making it easily noticeable. A small telescope or good binoculars will reveal some or all of Jupiter’s four largest moons, named the Galilean moons after their 17th century discoverer, Galileo.

You can see the moons too? Okay time for some image correction, Increasing the shadows on the picture and we have a moon there (with a green tinge).

Moon on top of planet

Moon on top of planet

And I am loving the red-shift too.

Update the moon will be IO and it is green in real life it is not a camera trick http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_%28moon%29

August was hottest on record

Posted on by Brad Heap

http://weatherwatch.co.nz/content/hottest-august-record

It’s not global warming, it’s just good weather – last month was the warmest August New Zealand has seen since temperatures were first recorded 155 years ago.

I dispute that. It is well known that temperatures are rising and climate change has been a major cause of this over the past few years. It is global warming and climate change as simple as that.

New Zealanders could thank strong westerly winds coming off Australia for an average temperature almost 2degC warmer than usual, said Auckland climate scientist Jim Salinger.

The average temperature for New Zealand last month was 10.4degC, which gave the normally wintery month the kind of temperatures usually seen in spring.

Regions that registered the highest temperatures above average were areas such as Central Otago and inland Canterbury, where the Australian air kept both days and nights relatively warm.

Auckland and Tauranga shared the title of the warmest main centre for August, while Wellington was both the sunniest and wettest, Dunedin the driest, and Christchurch the coolest.

So in the space of three months we have had the coldest June in 40 years and the hottest August ever. That sounds like climate extremes and climate change to me, too much of a coincidence to happen so near each other.

Climate Change in NZ

Posted on by Brad Heap

I read the snow.co.nz forums quite a bit, and was interested to see a discussion today regarding skiing in the kaimai’s and other areas of the North Island in the past. As part of this discussion one of the forum users posted this image from NIWA showing temperature in NZ over the last 150 years.

Now I am not one to take a chart at face value so I went hunting around the NIWA website to find the source of the data etc and came across this page: http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/information-and-resources/clivar/pastclimate

Now the interesting thing about this chart is it is not based on predictions of the past. It is based on actual records as noted here:

Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2007 inclusive, based on between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the 1971 – 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted line is the linear trend over 1908 to 2007 (0.92°C/100 years).

Further interesting notes are the more recent history.

Points of interest since 1990 include the cool period in 1992-93 associated with the injection of small particles high into the atmosphere by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, and the high temperature in 1998 (the warmest year for New Zealand since measurements began). The 1998 warming was apparent in the Tasman Sea to considerable depth (Sutton et al., 2005; Bowen et al., 2006) and happened to coincide with the end of an El Niño event when New Zealand temperatures are usually below normal.

This whole data set is interesting for a number of reasons. The first is that is shows the increase in air temp in NZ over the last one hundred and fifty years as measured – this is important because almost all other charts that you see are based on predicted temp. The second is that it shows quite interesting the end of the little ice age in 1850 and the subsequent heating of the earth.

Now how this relates to global warming is even more interesting. And this is where this chart comes in:

Wiki Climate Change

This is the average temperature of the world over the last 150 years again based on actual data (thanks wiki: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Temp-sunspot-co2.svg)

If there was ever a time to sign on to lower C02 levels then now must be it. Visit http://www.signon.org.nz and sign on. Do it.

World’s Biggest Brick

Posted on by Brad Heap

The LHC has been delayed yet again with yet another failure.

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/article?issue=30/2009&name=CERNBulletin&category=News%20Articles&number=3&ln=en

During the past week vacuum leaks have been found in two “cold” sectors of the LHC. The leaks were found in Sectors 8-1 and 2-3 while they were being prepared for the electrical tests on the copper stabilizers at around 80 K. In both cases the leak is at one end of the sector, where the electrical feedbox, DFBA, joins Q7, the final magnet in the sector.

Unfortunately, the repair necessitates a partial warm-up of both sectors. This involves the end sub-sector being warmed to room temperature, while the adjacent sub-sector “floats” in temperature and the remainder of the sector is kept at 80 K. As the leak is from the helium circuit to the insulating vacuum, the repair work will have no impact on the vacuum in the beam pipe. However the intervention will have an impact on the schedule for the restart. It is now foreseen that the LHC will be closed and ready for beam injection by mid-November.

As the saying goes: if it scratchs and crawls its biology, if it pops and fizzys it is chemistry and if it doesn’t work it must be physics.

One small step for man, one giant leap for… robotkind?

Posted on by Brad Heap

40 years ago this week man first conquered the moon. And the first man on the moon Neil Armstrong uttered those immortal words

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

But has it really been a giant leap for mankind? During a three year period between 1969 – 1972 we six manned missions landed on the moon. But in the 37 years since we last landed there no one has gone beyond the orbit of the earth. So much for those holidays to the moon, Jupiter and Mars. So much for that giant leap.

What did however have a giant leap was robotkind. In the past 40 years we have sent probes out of this solar system, into the sun, and off to investigate every planet in the solar system. We have landed probes on Venus. And had our best success on Mars where to this day two little robots continue to drive around, having robot fun and teaching us heaps at the same time.

But some 150 or so flights into space later what have we really achieved for mankind? We have an International Space Station that is well behind schedule but at the same time the largest thing ever constructed in space, so large that it can be seen from earth with the naked eye. We have GPS, Satellite TV, and a number of other cool gadgets that have completely changed the way we do business on earth through the use of space. And we have used space telescopes to see where no man has seen before.

So where to now? Do we go back to the moon and then Mars as NASA is now finally pursuing. Or do we just stay in orbit. Doing cool experiments and finding ways to better our lives on earth? I for one would still love to own a holiday home on Mars before I die.

I haz evidence from the Moon

Posted on by Brad Heap

Okay, enough LOL Cats for one evening, but this is cool.

NASA have released new photo graphs taken from their new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of the original lunar landing sites, complete with pictures of what was left behind: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html

Bad Astronomy blog make some interesting points too: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/07/17/apollo-landing-sites-imaged-by-lro/

Apollo may seem like ancient history, but those artifacts on the Moon are still sitting there, in many ways as fresh as the day they were placed there.

In all of human history, there are many dividing lines we can arbitrarily assign. Before and after the use of atomic weapons, before and after the invention of the light bulb, before and after this war or that.

But there is one dividing line that can inspire us, fill us with wonder, make us dream of bigger goals, higher aspirations, better ways to live our lives for the future. And that is the dividing line between the time we were a race shackled to the ground, confined to a single planet… and the time a human being stepped foot on another world.

And there it is, in pictures and in fact. This is what these pictures mean. We humans spend a lot of time looking around, looking out, looking down. But sometimes, for just a brief moment, we look up. We did it once before, and it’s time to do it again.

It is like time is standing still and looking back at us. Some of us believe that the pyramids and other amazing structures were left behind to us by aliens from other lands. Now we have left evidence of our prior existance on another world and imagine if an alien lifeform came across it would they start an eagar search for life on that world?

Of Earthquakes and Supervolcaneos

Posted on by Brad Heap

First it was Geonet reporting that Lake Taupo had increased activity: http://geonet.org.nz/news/article-dec-12-2008-monitoring-activity-at-taupo.html

Now it is time for Yellowstone as well to increase in activity: Earthquake swarms around Yellowstone super volcano – World – NZ Herald News

It seems that we are all doomed.

And Geonet is also reporting that 2008 was quiet: http://geonet.org.nz/news/article-jan-12-2009-volcanic-activity-in-new-zealand-2008.html

I guess it is the calm before the storm.