Okay.  The solar system is, like, really big, you know?  No, I mean really, really big.  Like, super-massive “epic” big, you know?

Sorry about that.  I couldn’t resist.  Although the wording is annoying, the statement itself is correct.  The solar system is a big place; a lot bigger than some people realize.  Beyond the planets (and poor, demoted Pluto), beyond the Kuiper Belt and the scattered disc, we find the Oort Cloud (rhymes with “fort” and “short”).

NASA/JPL  (Artist’s conception of Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud)

It’s mind-boggling to think that the tiny little blue rectangle contains the sun, all the planets, and the Kuiper Belt.

Although no confirmed, direct observation of the Oort Cloud has been made, most astronomers believe it to be the source of all long-period comets (like Halley), and of many of the Centaur and Jupiter class comets.  Loosely bound to the solar system, objects in the Oort Cloud are easily influenced by passing stars and the pull of the Milky Way itself.  These shifting gravitational influences will occasionally dislodge an Oort Cloud object and send it shooting into the inner solar system, where we see the objects as comets.

Composed of an inner and outer region, the majority of Oort Cloud objects are believed to be made up of ices such as water, methane, ethane, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen cyanide.  Object 1996 PW is a rocky asteroid believed to originate in the Oort Cloud.

Comet Hale-Bopp; an archetype of Oort Cloud objects:

Image:  Mkfairdpm; English WikiPedia  (some rights reserved) April 1997

Besides long-period comets, only four objects so far are believed to belong to the inner Oort Cloud:  90377 Sedna, 2000 CR105, 2006 SQ372, and 2008 KV42.

While the exact size of the Oort Cloud is unknown, it is believed to extend about 30 trillion km from the sun (18 trillion miles).  That puts its outer boundaries at slightly over three light-years (a light year is exactly 9,460,730,472,580.8 km).  To put some perspective to that distance, after 32 years Voyager I is only 16.596 billion km from the sun.

If you’re coming to .Astronomy, friggin’ awesome, we can’t wait to meet you. We at .Astro towers thought that maybe it was time to send out some local information to help you all plan your trips and get as excited about the week as we are. Most of the practical arrangements are smoothly taken care of by our excellent Lorentz Center assistant Corrie, so we have the luxure of looking after the fun stuff.

To give you an idea of what to expect, Sarah has put together a map, see below, of useful places and some local favourite hangouts.

We’re currently working on the conference programme and will be back with news on that in early November. If you have any questions or ideas, email us at poc AT dotastronomy.com. We want to hear from you!

View .Astronomy locations in a larger map

Getting there

At a stone’s throw from Schiphol airport and several major transport hubs, Leiden is exceptionally well connected to the world. If you’re flying into Schiphol, there are a couple of options for making your way to Leiden. The most convenient is to catch a train to Leiden Central (Centraal in Dutch), these run about every 10 minutes and take between 15 and 20 minutes. They usually leave from platform 5-6 and a single costs around 5 euro. You have to buy a ticket before boarding and there are plenty of yellow ticket machines and ticket counters in the airport/station hall.

From Leiden Central it’s a 15 minute walk to the Lorentz Center and a little further to the Bastion Hotel. Given the time of year, you can jump in a bus or taxi, both of which can be found just outside the station if you take the “Centrum” exit. The Lorentz Center website has detailed instructions and links to timetables.

You can take a taxi all the way from the airport to Leiden too of course, this costs around 40 euro. But the motorway is often very congested between Leiden and Schiphol so you may not save very much on time.

We’d also like to flag up some alternatives to flying for those who are green minded or don’t like flying. If you’re coming from Belgium, France or Germany we recommend you look into trains. The Leiden area is well integrated on the European rail network – to Belgium and France on the high-speed Thalys trains (get the train to Den Haag/The Hague and change there for a short hop to Leiden), and to Germany on the always efficient Deutsche Bahn services (change at Utrecht or Schiphol for Leiden).

From Britain you can get the boat from Harwich to Hoek van Holland, during the daytime or overnight, from where it’s around 30 mins by train to Leiden.

Local transportation

Leiden is well served by buses, which connect the centre of town to the surrounding villages and the coast. The Lorentz Center and the Bastion Hotel, where most of the out-of-towners will stay, are situated in the village of Oegstgeest, around 2-3 km from central Leiden along the road to Noordwijk and the coast.The Center is co-located with Leiden Observatory, the University’s astronomy department, in the oddly-shaped J.H. Oort building. Again, the Lorentz Center have all the info, directions and timetables on their webpages to help you get around. More bus timetables and travel info can be found here.

There is also the option of renting a bike from the Lorentz Center. This is by far the best way of getting around Leiden and its surroundings, as it’s flat as a pancake and bike rules the roads in the Netherlands. But bring gloves and wet weather gear!

Accommodation

The Lorentz Center will take care of hotel bookings at the Bastion Hotel, which is within walking distance from the Center (see the above map). If you want to look at other options, they can help you with that too so feel free to contact them at the address provided in the email confirmation you’ve received. A listing is provided here.

Eat, Drink and Be Merry

We certainly don’t intend for the week to be all hard work and no play – and Leiden is a great place for relaxing, having a little party, or having a big party – whichever you prefer. On Monday we will have a wine & cheese party at the Lorenz Center. This is usually an occasion to which the rest of the astronomy department, who are located in the same building, are also invited, to give everyone the chance to meet and mingle.

On Wednesday we’ll be having a conference dinner at Scheltema, in an old converted factory in the old town in Leiden. It’s a fabulous location that we’re excited to check out. We’re still finalising the arrangements for this and we’ll be back with info as soon as all is known.

The map above has a selection of local bars and restaurants with some local knowledge to help you make a selection.

Leiden is also connected throughout the night to Amsterdam’s Central Station.

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.Astronomy is a young and growing community and the 2009 conference is being generously supported by the following organisations:

>> ASTRON

>> British Council

>> Lorentz Center

>> NWO

>> RadioNet

The main purpose of the sponsorship is to enable young people to participate, who do not have access to funds to attend this conference.
It will also enable us to acquire some hardware for the Hack Day (eg. Arduino kits) and to socialise during a week that promises to be memorable for everyone.

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The posters for the conference have now begun appearing in astronomy departments. If you’d like to promote the conference online or print your own paraphernalia then you can find a Flickr set containing the images in various forms. If there is a specific format that would suit you better drop me a line in the comments either here on on the photos themselves.

[Flickr set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ttfnrob/sets/72157618407149142/]

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The .Astronomy conference is featured  on the front page of the offical International Year of Astronomy webpage, as a “featured event”. As the 2nd edition of .Astronomy will take place during the IYA, from 30 November to 4 December, we expect that many of our discussions, particulaly on outreach and education, will have an IYA-tinge to them. Indeed, we thing it’s the perfect opportunity to review our experiences and ideas, and look at how the many activities can be continued beyond 2009.

Got ideas? Comment, tweet, or send us an email!

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Preparations for the 2009 .Astronomy workshop (30 November – 4 December) are progressing quite nicely, and we’ve added some details on the venue and programme sections of these pages. Go take a look and let us know if you have any questions.

We’re in the process of putting together a list of people who are maybe interested in attending, so if you have great ideas or you have a pet project that has .Astronomy written all over it, now’s the time to get in touch with us on poc AT dotastronomy dot com, or via twitter (@dotastronomy).

Registration isn’t open yet but you can check out the “official” workshop information page at the Lorentz Center. Places will be very limited and we expect them to fill up fast, so get in touch to stay updated. Registration will be free of charge.

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.Astronomy 2009 will be held in the Lorentz Center, part of Leiden University in the Netherlands between 30th November and 4th December 2009. We aim to explore further the themes outlined in our first conference (Cardiff, 2008) and to have hands-on, hack-day-style sessions where new ideas can be developed.

Registration is not yet open for the conference. When it begins we will announce it here and on our Twitter feed, along with more details. If you would like to be alerted when registration opens please email us on registration@dotastronomy.com.

For general enquiries, please send us mail on info@dotastronomy.com.

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Chris talks about Galaxy Zoo at the first .Astronomy Conference, in Cardiff 2008. Galaxy Zoo is an online astronomy project which invites members of the public to assist in classifying over a million galaxies. It is an example of Citizen science as it enlists the help of members of the public to help in scientific research. An improved version - Galaxy Zoo 2 - went live on the 17th February 2009.

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Over the coming days and weeks, the .Astronomy Conference Archive will begin to fill up. There are a handful of talks available already and more will be added each day.

Each talk that was given as the conference, including the video talks, are available. You can download the presentation slides and watch the video of the talk. Eventually you will also be able to read the conference proceedings with illustrations.

In the spirit of transparency, it has been decided to open the doors to the archive before it is a completed product. As such if you spot any errors or issues then please get in touch and we will correct them. If you are a speaker and would like to make any corrections/amendments, drop me a line using the contact form or via email.

Have fun watching the talks and learning more about networked astronomy and the new media.

Link: .Astronomy Conference Archive

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You can watch us this week as the conference progresses in many ways. We are on Ustream, Twitter and YouTube.

Twitter is integrated into the site in the sidebar of the homepage, but if you want to Tweet  a question to us then simply include the text ‘@dotastronomy’ in your message on Twitter.

YouTube videos are going up during the event, but may be delayed. Not all talks are available via YouTube due to technological constraints.

Ustream will be broadcasting our talks live, for the most part. Talks being given via video are not being broadcast but will appear on YouTube later on.

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Environmental monitoring is often expensive, cumbersome, and time-intensive. Equipment that can run quick and easy tests for pollutants like pesticides in our food are almost nonexistent. However, researchers in Canada are working on a new biomonitoring technique using treated paper on a stick that can quickly identify trace amounts of pesticides in your chicken soup, or your first early morning cup of joe [Technology Review]. Could these dipsticks lead to DIY pollution monitoring one day? That may still be far off, but this technology could give researchers a reliable and cheap way to get a better picture of what pollutants—even at trace amounts—are in the environment, and how they interact with our bodies.

In the study, published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, the researchers describe a new paper-based test strip that changes color shades depending on the amount of pesticide present. In laboratory studies using food and beverage samples intentionally contaminated with common pesticides, the test strips accurately identified minute amounts of pesticides. The test strips, which produced results in less than 5 minutes, could be particularly useful in developing countries or remote areas that may lack access to expensive testing equipment and electricity, they note [R&D Magazine]. If the dipsticks pan out, restaurant customers may one day have more to complain about than a stray hair in their soup.

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Image: ACS

A quick reminder: the Carl Sagan Day celebration will be at Broward College in southern Florida on Saturday! Speakers include James Randi, Jeffrey Bennett, David Morrison, and me. There will be lots of stuff for kids and astronomy enthusiasts of all ages. Check my blog post from Monday for more info.

Also, there will be a reception that night at 8:00 p.m. as well. Requested donation is $10. I hope to see some BABloggees there!

A new baby translator is now available for your iPhone. It won’t translate your babies gurgles and screams into “lavish attention on me, and entertain me,” or “I want what the cat’s eating,” but the inventors claim the app will analyze your baby’s cries and tell you roughly what the little one is trying to say.

According to Fox News:

The Cry Translator uses patented technology to analyze the tone and duration of the cries and match them to one of five possible types: hungry, sleepy, annoyed, stressed or bored.

No, the translator wasn’t built by Herb Powell (of the memorable Simpsons episode), but rather by Spanish developer Biloop Technologic. The developer claims that the app was shown to be 90 percent accurate in clinical trials, although they don’t say if these trials were published in a scientific journal (so presumably not). However, if your wailing baby befuddles you, or if you want to be an obnoxious back-seat parent, you can pick up the translator for $9.99.

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Image: engadget

Leave it to the Boston Globe’s Big Picture to pick out a staggering portfolio of pictures of Mars.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 3
Two studies in PNAS focused on the wildlife and landscape of East Africa. In the first, researchers looked back in history to Kenya’s infamous man-eating lions, which reportedly devoured 135 railroad laborers in 1898. The two lions were eventually shot, killed, stuffed, and shipped to Chicago’s Field Museum for display–which allowed researchers to analyze samples of the lions’ bones and fur. By comparing the isotopes present in the man-eating lions to those found in other lions, humans, wildebeest, and buffalo, the researchers could precisely determine the lions’ diet. The results brought the body count down considerably: The scientists estimate that one of the lions ate 24 people, while the other gobbled up 11. The second study looked ahead, and predicted that Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa, could lose its distinctive ice cap by 2022 due to global warming.

Journal of the American Medical Association, November 4
A new study of hospitalizations in California due to swine flu has highlighted a neglected risk factor: obesity. In the study group of patients whose weight was known, researchers found that 25 percent of the people were morbidly obese, although less than 5 percent of the U.S. population falls into that category. Researchers also found that 58 percent of these hospitalized patients were obese–in the population as a whole, about 34 percent of people are obese. The increased risks come partially from health problems associated with obesity, like heart disease, lung ailments, and diabetes. But physiological factors may also be to blame: The lungs of obese patients are squeezed by the abdomen pressing upward on the diaphragm.

Nature, November 5
A new astronomy study has solved a mystery that began brewing in 1680, when Britain’s first Astronomer Royal spotted a supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia. Supernova typically collapse into a super-dense object like a black hole or a neutron star, but for decades astronomers have looked for such an object at the center of the supernova remnant, to no avail. Now, a new examination suggests that there is indeed a baby neutron star there, but it escaped detection because it’s swaddled in an unusual atmosphere of carbon gas. Further studies of the 330-year-old star will give researchers insight into how such stars mature. Another study brings us from the macro to the micro, with an investigation into the evolution of bacteria. Researchers forced bacteria to evolve in constantly changing conditions, so that natural selection couldn’t produce microbes that were ideally suited to a single environment. Instead, researchers proved that the bacteria hedged their bets by evolving into a strain that could form several different shapes from the same genetic material. The will to survive: It’s an amazing thing.

Science, November 6
The biggest study from Science reveals a very promising treatment for the fatal, inherited brain disease that was made famous by the movie Lorenzo’s Oil. Adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) is caused by a faulty gene that leads to the destruction of nerve fibers’ insulating sheaths; without that insulation, electrical signals can’t be transmitted. The progressive disease is usually diagnosed in young boys, who typically die before adulthood. In the new experimental treatment, researchers used a deactivated HIV virus to ferry a working gene into the stem cells found in the patients’ bone marrows. Since the virus integrates itself permanently into the DNA of the cells it enters, researchers hope the patients will keep the working genes for the rest of their lives. More than two years after the treatment, the patients show no sign of further deterioration, and are able to live relatively normal lives. While the boys will continue to be monitored for side effects, the study brings fresh hope not just to ALD sufferers, but also to those who believe that gene therapy holds tremendous medical promise, despite earlier setbacks.

Current Biology, November 3
When Charles Darwin and the crew of the HMS Beagle arrived at the remote Falkland Islands, 300 miles from the tip of Argentina, they wondered how the islands came to be populated with the strange Falkland wolves. The small wolves were the only mammals present on the islands, and one theory of their origin posited that they were descended from dogs brought over by Native Americans. Now a new genetic study of four museum specimens (sadly, the wolves have since gone extinct) has proven that theory wrong. The study showed that the wolves shared a common ancestor at least 70,000 years ago, which suggests that the wolves arrived on the islands long before the first humans made it to the new world.

Babies pick up their parents’ accents while still in the womb, according to a new study. After studying the crying patterns of 30 French and 30 German newborns, researchers concluded that the French newborns cried with a rising “accent” while the German babies’ cries had a falling inflection [BBC News]. The researchers believe that by mimicking their mothers’ inflections, the babies are attempting to form an early bond with their mothers.

Scientists already knew that a baby in the womb can memorize sounds from the outside world, and is particularly sensitive to the melodies of her mother’s language. But the new research showed an “extremely early” impact of native language and confirmed that babies’ cries are their first proper attempts to communicate specifically with their mothers [Reuters]. The data support the idea that crying seeds language development for infants, according to the scientists, who published their research in the journal Current Biology.

To hear the different between German and French crying babies for yourself, click here to listen.

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Image: flickr / chalky lives

Lead paragraph from the Times Online UK about the latest LHC snafu:

The rehabilitation of the beleaguered Large Hadron Collider was on hold tonight after the failure of one of its powerful cooling units caused by an errant chunk of baguette.

I was going to write about how Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and John Kerry (D-MA) were trying to somewhat slimily slip a provision into the health care bill about paying for prayer-based health services, but then wouldn’tyouknowit, Steve Novella (who apparently does not need to sleep or eat or breathe) beat me to it. Besides his take-down of the odd and wholly unrealistic beliefs of Christian Scientists, I’ll note that is has been pretty definitively proven that prayer doesn’t work in healing. So not only is this provision unconstitutional, it’s just an all-around bad idea.

My latest contribution to the Slate book club on Denialism is here. Most of the discussion concerns how to prompt a broader national debate on the subject of synthetic biology, a branch of science with revolutionary possibility that most Americans have never even heard of. Alas, I’m not optimistic this will change any time soon:

In today’s media world, you really need a national leader to broach such a conversation—e.g., President Obama, as you suggest in your book. While I’d be happy to be proven wrong, though, I doubt he has the time to bring up such a dark-horse topic, especially in light of all the other policy fires that must be put out. Without a presidential initiative, we lack an adequate national forum for discussing the complex and crucial problems that science lays before us. (Don’t expect synthetic biology to come up on Oprah; as you point out, she is too busy providing a platform for vaccine skeptics like Jenny McCarthy.)

As a result, synthetic biology may be fully upon us before people start thinking about it. And it will likely come to broader attention only as a result of some kind of political controversy—just as occurred with embryonic stem cell research or genetically modified foods. At that point, I fear, we’ll simply become polarized over the issue.

You can read my full reply here.