As we approach the winter solstice, you might find yourself cursing the increasingly short days. But if you’re an astronomy fan—or just a hot cocoa enthusiast who enjoys a good show—the long hours of dark will be a blessing this weekend as the Geminid meteor shower, one of the most visible and reliable showers, makes it appearance.

The Geminid shower peaks the night of December 13/14. Although often considered a poor cousin to August’s Perseid shower, the Geminids often put on a better show [Astronomy]. And this year the moon won’t hinder the Geminid display—it won’t rise until nearly 6 a.m., when dawn will already be upon us.

Like the Leonid meteors we see in the constellation Leo, which made an appearance last month, the Geminids are so named because of their apparent origin, the constellation Gemini. The shower’s radiant, the point in the sky from which they all seem to originate, is near Castor and Pollux. It’s well up in the east by 9 or 10 p.m. and crosses near the zenith (for mid-northern observers) around 2 a.m [Sky & Telescope]. The Geminids are strange, too. Their parent object isn’t a comet, which is the case for the Leonids and most other showers, but rather an asteroid with a trail of debris. Astronomers aren’t 100 percent sure what’s going on here; the asteroid could be the nucleus of a comet that lost all its other material.

If you brave the cold Sunday night, you could get quite a show. Depending on dark your location is, and how much of the sky you can see, meteors may streak into view that night at an average rate of one or two per minute [SPACE.com].

Related Content:
80beats: Leonid Meteor Shower Set To Light Up the Tuesday Morning Sky, from November
80beats: Study: 20 Million Year Meteor Shower Turned Earth Warm & Wet
Bad Astronomy: Catch a Shooting Star This Weekend, on last year’s Geminids

Image: NASA

You simply must read science journalist Fred Pearce’s take on the PR blunders made in “ClimateGate,” especially by the University of East Anglia and other institutions. He writes:

The media blizzard that has descended on climate science since the hacking of hundreds of e-mails held on the webmail server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, is set to become a case study — in public relations disasters, in the folly of incontinent electronic communication, in the shortcomings of peer review, and, very probably, in “how not to save the world.”

And again:

The failure of the University of East Anglia to respond substantially to the avalanche of invective from climate skeptics has been a PR disaster that undermined the reputation of science as well as the institution itself. One angry media insider says: “Their response will be taught in university communications courses. Because I’m going to make sure it is.” The university’s failure for a full fortnight to put up a single scientist to defend Phil Jones amounted to cruelty.

Ah, but will scientists and heads of scientific institutions take those communications courses? As we explained in Unscientific America, this is still a rarity, at best.

“ClimateGate” is really the ultimate in demonstrating that the scientific world has got to work vastly harder on communications.

Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory have just revealed the first images from their new telescope called VISTA: the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy. If ever there was an appropriate name for a ’scope, that’s it.

Why?

Here’s why:

Oh baby. Yeah, click it to embiggen.

This image is of the Flame Nebula, a star forming gas cloud in Orion. The image itself covers about half a square degree on the sky (twice the area of the full Moon) and shows details of the nebula, including the core made up of stars invisible to optical telescopes. The bright star in the image is the monster blue supergiant Alnitak, which is the easternmost (left, to northern observers) star in Orion’s belt. Get a good look at it, because in a million years or so that star is gonna blow.

Can you spot the famous Horsehead Nebula in this picture? It looks a little different than you usually see it, because VISTA operates in the visible and near-infrared. It uses a 4.1 meter mirror (that’s big, folks) to suck down light from the sky. It is extremely sensitive and produces very high-resolution images… as you’d expect from a ’scope that has a 67 million pixel detector.

That’s so many pixels you’d think they’d make an image you could zoom into. Oh wait: they did. You’ll have some fun playing with that; in fact, if you spend more than 14 minutes playing with it you’ll have spent longer than it took to take this image! That’s right, that gorgeous shot is only a 14 minute exposure.

Here’s another phenomenal picture. It’s an amazing 2 x 1.5 degree field toward the center of the Milky Way, revealing about a million stars! It’s taken completely in the near infrared, just outside of what the human eye can see, and shows dust and stars mostly invisible in optical light. As you can see, the center of our Galaxy is a mess. Getting images in different wavelengths of light allows us to get a better handle on what’s happening in this incredibly crowded volume of space.

And yeah, this image is zoomable too. You absolutely want to take that little tour; I literally gasped when I saw it.

There’s also this very pretty shot of the Fornax galaxy cluster, a collection of galaxies 60 million light years away. This 25 minute exposure captures quite a few galaxies. Like before, it’s shots like this that help scientists get a handle on not just individual objects, but the environment in which they live, too. If you want to see that environment for yourself, why, tour the zoomable image.

Finally, let me leave you with this remarkable photo, showing the VISTA camera itself. Note the dude standing on the left. VISTA is huge! It weighs three tons, and I suspect most of that is the support equipment for it, including a dewar that holds the liquid nitrogen needed to cool the detector down to -200° C. See the glass in the front? That’s the largest IR-transparent window ever created.

It’s hard to believe that such a hulking camera can take such fine, detailed images, but that’s how these things work. A lot of times in astronomy, bigger is better… especially when it allows us to take such deep images of the cosmos.

Credits: Credit: ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit; ESO/Y. Beletsky.

The latest column by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post is a fascinating read. He starts out with a well reasoned account of why the stolen climate emails from East Anglia cannot be taken to undermine the global edifice of climate science:

But the hacked climate e-mails reveal a scandal, not a hoax. Even if every question raised in these e-mails were conceded, the cumulative case for global climate disruption would be strong. The evidence is found not only in East Anglian computers but also in changing crop zones, declining species, melting ice sheets and glaciers, thinning sea ice and rising sea levels. No other scientific theory explains these changes as well as global warming related to the rise in greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Over millennia, the climate shifts in natural cycles. But we seem to be increasing the pace of change so rapidly that plants, animals and humans may not be able to adequately adjust.

Bravo! This is better than I could have put it. And yet unfortunately, Gerson then somehow goes on blame the scientists quoted in the emails for undermining the whole scientific enterprise:

This professional objectivity is precisely what the hacked e-mails call into question. Some of these scientists are merely activists, deeply invested in a predetermined outcome. They assume that political change is the goal; the scientific enterprise is the means — like a political ad or a campaign speech. But without trust in disinterested, scientific judgments on climate, most non-scientists will resist costly, speculative, legislative actions. When the experts become advocates, no one believes the experts or listens to the advocates.

It is an irony of the first order. Having accused others of a “war on science,” it is climate scientists who are assaulting the authority of science more effectively than anyone else.

I’m not saying that every scientist whose emails have been quoted in “ClimateGate” behaved in a perfectly appropriate manner. However, although he whirls around the phrase “war on science,” Gerson clearly doesn’t know what it means.

What it means, among other things, is that the very scientists now in question were at that moment, when they were writing those emails, subject to politically motivated data requests, harassment, and attempts to seed the scientific literature with questionable papers, all activities tied to fossil fuel interests and their supporting think tanks and politicians. All of this is documented amply in The Republican War on Science.

So for Gerson to describe the scientists as arrogant, “a community coddled by global elites, extensively funded by governments, celebrated by Hollywood and honored with international prizes”–this is ludicrous. These are people who are regularly slandered, pulled before Congress, and indeed, subject to email hacking. They have been under intense and politically motivated fire for years. And, yes, they developed a bit of a siege/herd mentality as a result. Who wouldn’t?

The East Anglia emails cannot be read in any other context but this one.

I’m about to fly out of Boston to Reykjavik, and then on to Copenhagen, arriving tomorrow at about local noon. It is going to be a packed week: I’ll be blogging daily for Mother Jones’s Blue Marble (crossposting here), and thereby contributing to the Copenhagen News Collaborative, whose feed can be found on the right sidebar.

I’ll also do a blog post for Science Progress on Wednesday, and it looks like I may be doing a Bloggingheads, and perhaps some other spin off articles.

Plus, I’m participating in two panels:

1) On Sunday December 13, following a screening of Robert Greene’s geoengineering documentary Owning the Weather, I’ll be sitting on a panel to discuss the film and the role of geoengineering in the larger climate debate.

2) On Wednesday the 16th, I’ll be appearing with climate journalist and Guardian columnist George Monbiot at an event sponsored by FORSKERforum on the topic “Climate-spin – Science and Politics.” More on that when I have it.

So it’s going to be a busy time, and I expect the blog to be hopping. Check in frequently….

Carl Buell, who illustrated many lovely critters for my new book The Tangled Bank, has been adding some new paintings to his Flickr stream. Here’s his holiday ground sloth.

In the caption, he writes: “I’ve certainly drawn and painted enough of them over the past 15 years. Ground sloths are a favorite subject. Too big to hide from the weather, this big guy just hunkered down and slept through the storm. It’s hard to imagine these guys in snow, but Megalonyx ranged as far north as Alaska. Another Card idea that never got off the ground.”

Card or not, I’m glad he’s sharing his handiwork.

This fall I gave a number of talks about the flu, and how evolutionary biologists are helping to make sense of this vexing virus. The University of British Columbia, where I spoke in November, has posted the lecture I gave there on YouTube. For ease of viewing, I’ve embedded all six segments of the talk below.

A few caveats. A couple labels got lost in the conversion of my Keynote to Powerpoint during the preparation of the video. And the numbers I gave for the 2009 H1N1 flu are now a bit out of date. As of this week, the Centers for Disease Control estimate that about 50 million people in the U.S. have come down with the new flu strain since it first hit the country in April. 2009 H1N1 is responsible for just about all the flu so far this year. For the past few weeks it has been subsiding, but it may come back for another whack at us in a few weeks. Meanwhile, there hasn’t been any seasonal flu yet. Of the people who contracted 2009 H1N1 in the United States, about 10,000 have died. (As I mention in the talk, 36,000 people a year die of the seasonal flu in the U.S.)

And now, without further ado, I give you the flu!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Part 6:

UPDATE:  SOLVED!

Last week it took about 4 hours to solve the riddle, so this week it’s much simpler.  Really.  It’s very simple.  I’ll be surprised if it’s unsolved for longer than 15 minutes.  Really.

Are you ready?  GO!

Although thought of as a single object, it is not.

This was well-known in antiquity, and was once thought to effect terrestrial events.

Can be seen from almost every inhabited region on Earth.

It’s been described as being three different colors.

Has been mentioned in literature since the 7th century BC, and is well represented in popular fiction.

Has been seen as a sign of both good and evil fortune.

This is sometimes visible to the naked eye in the daylight.

Sometimes it shows up twice in one night.

What is it?  I’m hanging out in the comment section (as usual), so give it a guess!

Hey, does this look vaguely familiar?

That is not a different view of the Norway spiral light; it was taken in Russia over a day later. It looks like the Russians are testing more rockets, and creating more lights in the sky.

Despite the lunacy involved with the last time we saw spirals in the sky, this picture is clearly of another Russian missile test. To recap: a weird spiral light thingy in the skies over Norway last week was caused by the sub-based rocket launch of a Bulava missile, a new system being tested by the Russians. The spiral(s) were due to the rocket spinning and venting some sort of gas, though the details are still being determined. It may have been done on purpose as part of a gyroscopic-stabilization move, or it may have been spinning out of control. The former would explain why the spiral is so beautifully symmetric.

This one wasn’t quite so well-formed, but is clearly the same thing. There’s video, too:

This new one was seen just a little over a day later inside Russia, and was from a Topol missile, the land-based version of the Bulava. According to space historian, NBC News consultant, and space folklore specialist James Oberg:

It was launched from the ‘Kapustin Yar’ missile range on the lower Volga, an old test range that goes back to the late 1940s. The missile impacted in
the Sary Shagan military reservation in eastern Kazakhstan. [...] Since the flight path was completely internal, no navigation warnings were issued.

TASS claims it hit the target, and you can see in the video there appears to be a spiral there too; that supports the idea the spiral was on purpose and may be part of the stabilization. Interesting. Note that in this second picture, you can see the spiral expanding from the inside out, again, like last time, exactly what you expect from material being spewed out from a rapidly rotating booster.

Another important thing to people like me, though, is that the cause of this is clearly a rocket — it fits what we know about how these things work, there are good explanations of it, and we even have a mea culpa from Russia. But if you read the comments from the Norway lights post I made, or really anywhere this was discussed on the web, you’ll find hordes of people making claims that are pretty silly at best.

I have no doubt this will continue with this new sighting, as well. After all, why make one interdimensional holographic portal from the future when you can make two?

It just goes to show you that this sort of non-rational thinking will be with us forever. It’s rather ironic to think that the reality of a complicated and advanced rocket system sparks retro-fantasies of UFOs. It makes me wonder if the captain of the first starship will carry a lucky rabbit’s foot along.

In reality, I know we can never stamp out such irrationality. All we can do is hope to minimize it. I can be satisfied with that.

Picture credit: ww.e1.ru. My thanks to my friend James Oberg for notifying me about this.

Hannah Rosa writes: “I am a Science teacher in Central London. My tattoo is part of the Ext-inked project and my endangered species is the narrow bordered bee hawk moth. I decided to sign up for the project as I have worked closely with endangered species in the field as part of my degree studies and understand the importance of closely monitoring and preventing the extinction of these species. I wanted to become a life long ambassador so that I can educate others about the impacts of climate change and other human activites which are threatening hundreds of species in the UK alone.”

(For more pictures from the Ext-inked project, visit Flickr.)

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Messengers look at Mercury. Click for larger. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

As the Messenger spacecraft approached Mercury for its third and final flyby, it took this image of the planet.  Taken through red, green and blue filters we can see Mercury in full color.  I am a little surprised at how much color there is actually, I had expected a rather bland grey tone with the occasional bright crater.

Mercury is a pretty remarkable planet.  It’s a pretty bright place too.  Apparent brightness is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, so if Mercury is 3 times closer to the Sun, the Sun appears 3² or 9 times brighter than it does to us on Earth.

You would think that being so close to the Sun the orbit of Mercury would have a pretty circular orbit, it doesn’t, it has the most elliptical orbit of ANY of the planets!

Of course you know it’s hot, as hot or hotter than the oven in your kitchen, but you knew that. A long hot day on Mercury is really long too, 176 days long actually.   As hot as it is, the nights are bone chilling to say the least, how about -279 ^oF!  At one time there was speculation there may be ice in some of the craters in the perma-shade at the poles – sound familiar?  I”m not sure what the current thinking is on that.

Mercury is very dense, 5.43 grams/cc, almost as dense as Earth at 5.52 grams/cc.  How come?  Mercury has a HUGE iron core, the iron core is about 75 percent of the radius of Mercury. Messenger has found that iron is also prevalent in the mantle.  This was kind of an unexpected finding, the conventional thinking was the mantle was mostly basalts like the moon.

How the iron core came to be is for another time.

Head over to the Messenger site for much more on Mercury.

Hubble's image of a portion of M83. Click for larger. Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. O'Connell (University of Virginia), the WFC3 Science Oversight Committee, and ESO.

Hubble was trained on the spiral galaxy M83 and the new camera took this image. WOW!  This is just a portion of the galaxy, click the Hubblesite link below to see the image in it’s full context.

M83 is the designation in the famous Messier catalog for the galaxy is also known as the Southern Spiral.  Here’s the SEDS page.

I really enjoyed the description of the image from Hubblesite (click the link for more images) be sure to give it a read:

The spectacular new camera installed on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope during Servicing Mission 4 in May has delivered the most detailed view of star birth in the graceful, curving arms of the nearby spiral galaxy M83.

Nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel, M83 is undergoing more rapid star formation than our own Milky Way galaxy, especially in its nucleus. The sharp “eye” of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) has captured hundreds of young star clusters, ancient swarms of globular star clusters, and hundreds of thousands of individual stars, mostly blue supergiants and red supergiants.

The image, taken in August 2009, provides a close-up view of the myriad stars near the galaxy’s core, the bright whitish region at far right.

WFC3’s broad wavelength range, from ultraviolet to near-infrared, reveals stars at different stages of evolution, allowing astronomers to dissect the galaxy’s star-formation history.

The image reveals in unprecedented detail the current rapid rate of star birth in this famous “grand design” spiral galaxy. The newest generations of stars are forming largely in clusters on the edges of the dark dust lanes, the backbone of the spiral arms. These fledgling stars, only a few million years old, are bursting out of their dusty cocoons and producing bubbles of reddish glowing hydrogen gas.

The excavated regions give a colorful “Swiss cheese” appearance to the spiral arm. Gradually, the young stars’ fierce winds (streams of charged particles) blow away the gas, revealing bright blue star clusters. These stars are about 1 million to 10 million years old. The older populations of stars are not as blue.

A bar of stars, gas, and dust slicing across the core of the galaxy may be instigating most of the star birth in the galaxy’s core. The bar funnels material to the galaxy’s center, where the most active star formation is taking place. The brightest star clusters reside along an arc near the core.

The remains of about 60 supernova blasts, the deaths of massive stars, can be seen in the image, five times more than known previously in this region. WFC3 identified the remnants of exploded stars. By studying these remnants, astronomers can better understand the nature of the progenitor stars, which are responsible for the creation and dispersal of most of the galaxy’s heavy elements.

M83, located in the Southern Hemisphere, is often compared to M51, dubbed the Whirlpool galaxy, in the Northern Hemisphere. Located 15 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra, M83 is two times closer to Earth than M51.

Image:  NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute  –  Cassini

Cassini has weathered its Nov 2, 2009 flyby of the Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, in good shape.  The flyby placed the spacecraft at about 100 km (60 miles) above the surface of Enceladus at its closest point, and directly through the plume you see imaged here in the south polar region.  Water vapor, sodium, complex hydrocarbons such as propane and ethane, and other organic molecules have been detected in the plume in previous flybys.  This closer look at the material in the plume might help answer some of the questions science has for Enceladus.

Currently thought to have an ocean of liquid water under a mantle of ice, and known to be geologically active, Enceladus looks like a good place to search for extraterrestrial life.  Material released from Enceladus is also thought to be the source of Saturn’s E ring.  Modest in size (its diameter is only about 500 km), this moon certainly is an interesting study.  As it’s surface is covered in water ice, Enceladus reflects almost 100% of light reaching it.  In addition, it has a source of internal heat, and it even has a thin atmosphere composed of water vapour, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane.

Here is a beautiful image of Enceladus with Saturn behind it, and the rings below it:

NASA/JPL ESA SSI Cassini Imaging Team

This natural color image was taken early in 2006.  The marks on Saturn in the upper left of the image are ring shadows.

NASA scientists will be working to interpret the information Cassini collected as it passed through the icy plume Monday.  I’m hoping we’ll gain more of an idea of what lies beneath the ice crust of Enceladus.

You can read more about Cassini by going to the Mission homepage.

The Witch Head Nebula. Click for larger. Image Credit and copyright: APOD and Star Shadows Remote Observatory (Steve Mazlin, Jack Harvey, Rick Gilbert, Teri Smoot, Daniel Verschatse).

This is an Astronomy Picture of the Day selection from last year featuring the Witch Head Nebula.

The Witch Head Nebula is about 1,000 light-years away in the constellation of Orion.  The nebula is known as a reflection nebula because it is illuminated by a nearby star or group of stars, in this case the star is the blue supergiant Rigel.

I was going to use a different version of this nebula for today, but this one is just too good not to use, the bright star Rigel just makes the image all the better.

You can see this image in it’s original context AND links to other scary sights (be very sure to look at the link for the veiled spectre) at APOD.

The original image: A “Witch by Starlight”  Credit & Copyright: Star Shadows Remote Observatory (Steve Mazlin, Jack Harvey, Rick Gilbert, Teri Smoot, Daniel Verschatse).  I tried to image the Witch Head a couple years ago and had very little success so in my book this image isn’t just good, it’s extraordinary.

If you are out and about tonight HAVE FUN AND BE SAFE!

Oh and when you go to the APOD site you can get a larger version so you can put it on your desktop.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I had a meeting out of town and missed the launch, so I thought I’d put it up in case you did too.  I like the imagery from the rocket.

Some were trying to do their best to make the launch a failure because of a partial parachute failure for the booster section as it returned.  Partial = one of three parachutes and the one that failed actually deployed first.

The parachutes are being checked out this weekend and it could be a failure of he suspension system and not of the chute material.

It may be a moot point.  The Obama administration may be heading towards ending human spaceflight anyways.  Some will cheer this news I suppose, I don’t exactly cheer the “dumbing down” of America any more than we have.  Even from an economic standpoint it’s not a great move either, unless  putting thousands more out of work is good.

Course, the argument is well we can leave these things to someone else and just get what we need from them.  Them being somebody else, anybody else.  Yep that is true, and look how good that’s working for us in general.  In the whole country we don’t even have a single manufacturer for the flu vaccine for crying out loud.  We have allowed ourselves to be at the mercy of everybody else because we have lost the ability to do for us.

It’s a disgraceful situation.  Oh and for the record, the handling of he H1N1 thing is an embarrassment, good thing it’s not a more serious flu we’d really be up the creek.

Here’s the video source.

Confessions of an Alien Hunter, by Dr. Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute, is a look at SETI from the inside.  In addition, Dr. Shostak talks about who, and what, our first alien contacts may be (aside from microbes or pond scum).  You know me; I would be excited out of my tiny little mind with a microbe.

The hope, the belief, that we are not alone in the universe has been with us since we could envision ourselves as “self”.  We have always looked to the sky and wondered.  Science now tells us that there must be other life; the universe is simply too big for there not to be.  Life is ubiquitous on Earth, it’s found from the bottom of the Mariannas Trench to the summit of Mount Everest.

The SETI Institute was officially funded and created by NASA in 1971, although the first SETI experiment took place eleven years earlier at Green Bank, West Virginia.  Now privately funded, SETI uses scientific methods for the systematic search for evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life.  They aren’t looking for pond scum.

Confessions of an Alien Hunter is published by the National Geographic Society, one of the world’s largest non-profit organizations.  National Geographic is involved in natural science, education, geology, archaeology, exploration, and conservation… just to name a few.

Dr. Shostak gives televised lectures and interviews, in addition to writing books.  Here is a link to just one of them.  I’d recommend you take time to watch as Dr. Shostak is an incredibly interesting speaker.

This is the link to SETI@home, if you’re interested in linking your computer to assist SETI during the times you aren’t busy.  It functions much like a screen saver.  I’ve had my computer linked to SETI for over a year, and haven’t had any trouble, although some people say it makes their computer over-heat.

Dr. Shostak has already promised us an interview in the future, so if you have any questions for him, let me know and I’ll ask him.

Region of Taurus Littrow valley around the Apollo 17 landing site. Click for larger. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this look at the landing site for Apollo 17. If you click the image above you will get a larger version of the image. You can see an enlargement of the Challenger Descent Stage and the immediate area by clicking here.

Want to know what the more cryptic annotations mean? Here’s the LRO press release:

Apollo 17 Lunar Module Challenger descent stage comes into focus from the new lower 50 km mapping orbit, image width 102 meters. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.

LRO maneuvered into its 50-km mapping orbit on September 15. The next pass over the Apollo 17 landing site resulted in images with more than two times better resolution than previously acquired. At the time of this recent overflight the Sun was high in the sky (28° incidence angle) helping to bring out subtle differences in surface brightness. The descent stage of the lunar module Challenger is now clearly visible, at 50 cm per pixel (angular resolution) the descent stage deck is 8 pixels across (4 meters), also note that the legs are also now distinguishable. The descent stage served as the launch pad for the ascent stage as it blasted off for a rendezvous with the command module America on 14 December 1972.

Tracks are clearly visible and can be followed to the east, where astronauts Jack Schmitt and Gene Cernan set up the Surface Electrical Properties experiment (SEP). Cernan drove the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) in an intersecting north-south and east-west course to mark positions for laying out the SEP 35-meter antennas (circle labeled “SEP” marks the area of the SEP transmitter). The dark area just below the SEP experiment is where the astronauts left the rover, in a prime spot for monitoring the liftoff.

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.

The Jewel Box, NGC 4755 from the ESO. Wallpaper links below. Credit the ESO.

The Jewel Box is another name for the open cluster NGC 4755. From the looks of this ESO image, it’s little wonder how English astronomer John Hershel came up with the name when he coined it in the 1830’s.

NGC 4755 is an open cluster, a collection of stars bound loosely by gravity evolved from the same “nursery”, or cloud of dust and gas, so they tend to be similar in age and composition.  Because they are all of the same approximate age, but do vary in mass so they can be at differing life stages.

Higher mass stars will age faster than lower mass stars and sometimes you can see stars in the red giant phase (more mature and nearing the end of their lives) right along with other stars that might only be half way through their lives or even less.

Located about 6400 light-years away, in the constellation of Crux, near the Southern Cross, I know many readers can see it just fine, sadly it’s too far south for me.  No matter, The Jewel Box is stunning and I decided it would make a very nice desktop.  While I was at it I made up a few different sizes, most required some clipping of the image.  Many thanks to the ESO for  sharing this.

Here’s the wallpapers:

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!

Related posts:

1. .Astronomy 2009 Dates .Astronomy 2009 will be held in the Lorentz Center, part...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.