by Paul Gilster | Jun 21, 2006 | Deep Sky Astronomy & Telescopes |
What exactly is the object recently discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys in the constellation Boötes? If it’s a supernova, it’s an odd one, since it took five times longer (100 days) to reach peak brightness than a normal supernova. In fact, indications are it brightened by a factor of more than 200 since late January. As discussed in a June 19 New Scientist story, its spectrum is unusual, its color has not changed since the first observations came in, and it does not seem to be situated in a host galaxy.
If distance measurements of 5.5 billion light years are accurate, it is also brighter than a Type 1A supernova should be at that distance. Then again, redshift uncertainties make the distance readings problematic. An unusual supernova at a far greater distance, perhaps as much as 12 billion light years? Nobody knows at this point.
The object was flagged by the Supernova Cosmology Project headquartered at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, an online library of whose papers and presentations can be found here. An image and finding chart are also available online (look under ‘Unidentified Transient F-006,’ and thanks to Larry Klaes for the pointer). In the context of our recent discussions of macro-engineering and SETI — and in hopes of discovering a new class of stellar object — it goes without saying that this find will receive scrutiny from many different quarters.
by Paul Gilster | Jun 20, 2006 | Culture and Society |
Going to the stars is a matter of hard science, but it’s also a question of inspiration. I know scientists who found their calling by reading Poul Anderson’s novel Tau Zero, and others whose love of the early Star Trek forever changed their career path. But for some of us, growing up in the 1950s, it was Tom Corbett, Space Cadet that did the trick, and for me, it was a book by Carey Rockwell called Danger in Deep Space (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1953). The second in the Tom Corbett series, the book exposed this space-crazy kid to a planet orbiting one of the Alpha Centauri stars, and before long the thought of habitable worlds around stars other than our own became an obsession.
Which brings us to Frankie Thomas, who died recently of respiratory failure at the age of 85. A workmanlike actor who appeared in a number of pre-WWII films and Broadway plays, Thomas took up radio and television work after leaving military service and was cast as Tom Corbett in 1950 (beating out a young Jack Lemmon for the role — I kid you not). The show became a hit, running on CBS, ABC, NBC and the DuMont network at one time or another, and spawning a wild assortment of products bearing the Corbett name. Kellogg’s even named a cereal after it: Kellogg’s Pep, the Solar Cereal.
Tom Corbett, Space Cadet seemed to draw on Robert Heinlein’s 1948 novel Space Cadet, but the series quickly diverged in the hands of science fiction writer Joseph Greene. It would run from 1950 to 1955, spawning a radio show, comic books and a newspaper strip and the eight hardback books many of us remember most clearly from the Corbett phenomenon. In a future where the Solar Guard safeguards a colonized Solar System and conducts advanced scientific research, the show followed Corbett and fellow cadets Astro and Roger Manning as they worked their way through the rigors of the Space Academy. Their spaceship was the Polaris, a 200-foot atomic powered marvel.
Image: Actor Frankie Thomas, who died in May, became the embodiment of science fiction in the early television era.
Hey, you just couldn’t beat this stuff in its day. Here’s the Polaris being taken out for a run in Danger in Deep Space:
The giant ship began to shudder as the mighty pumps on the power deck started their slow, whining build-up. Tom sat in front of the control panel, strapped himself into the acceleration chair, and began checking the dials and gauges. Satisfied everything was in order, he fastened his eyes to the sweeping red second hand on the solar clock. The teleceiver screen brought a sharp picture of the surrounding base of the spaceship, and he saw that it was all clear. The second hand reached the ten-second mark.
“Stand by to raise ship!” bawled Tom into the intercom. The red hand moved steadily, surely, to the zero and the top of the clock face. Tom reached for the master switch.
“Blast off minus five–four–three–two–one–zero!”
Tom threw the switch.
I particularly love that sweeping red second hand, just as I love the slide rules Hal Clement’s crew uses in the SF classic Mission of Gravity.
Thomas would go on to become a TV and radio writer as well as a novelist, but the Corbett role seems to have been the one that most pleased him. At his request, he was buried in the costume he wore for the show. Hearing of his passing, I was reminded by a reader of two other deaths that should have been noted here. Ed Kemmer, who played Buzz Corry on the radio and TV show Space Patrol, died in 2004, while George D. Wallace, who played Commando Cody in the Republic serial Radar Men from the Moon and also appeared in the 1956 gem Forbidden Planet, among many other credits, died last July.
Great art they were not, these early television and movie serials, but my memory of both Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and Space Patrol is still bright, and it’s an agreeable thought that such popularizations led to scientific careers for some young viewers. An ongoing interest here is the development of the first science fiction magazines and their treatment of science in non-fiction articles as the genre matured. One suspects that the shelves of some scientists may still sport, like mine, at least a few issues of the old pulp magazines. But if not, I’ll bet many still have memories that refuse to fade of the early television era, when the idea of getting into space could energize an entire nation and a mission to the stars seemed just around the corner.
by Paul Gilster | Jun 19, 2006 | Culture and Society
Centauri Dreams often uses planetary peril as one good reason for expansion into the universe. As the human species spreads out onto multiple worlds, the chances of survival continue to increase even if our planet meets catastrophe in the form of a rogue asteroid or comet. But another good reason is the need for exploration that seems to be hard-wired into our nature, in which case interstellar expansion becomes more or less inevitable if we can solve the technological riddles it involves. Do humans really have an innate drive for exploration, and if so, how does it operate?
References for the notion are numerous, but a new study out of University College London gives a highly analytical look at what may be going on. Nathaniel Daw and John O’Doherty argue that pushing into the unknown involves a different part of the brain than staying on familiar territory. By analyzing how the brain works while people gamble, they show that what exploration demands is an overriding of the desire for immediate profit. Exploration, in other words, calls for long-term thinking, and a willingness to put aside present pleasure for a more uncertain future goal.
Daw refers to the two poles of this behavior as ‘exploring’ and ‘exploiting,’ and sees a continuing balancing act occurring between the two. “Most people switch between exploring and exploiting seamlessly,” says the scientist, “and this has always made it hard to distinguish between someone who is doing something they know will offer the highest pay-out and a person who is testing out new options. By using some of the systems used to program robots to learn and make decisions, we have now found which areas of the brain are responsible for these different behaviours.”
The paper outlining Daw and O’Doherty’s work, which involves a comparison of human and robotic behavior and the use of MRI scans to measure brain activity, is “Cortical substrates for exploratory decisions in humans,” Nature 441 (15 June 2006), pp. 876-879, abstract available here. But for a much broader analysis of the question, see Charles Pasternak’s all too unheralded Quest: The Essence of Humanity (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003). Pasternak believes that quest, the need for physical and intellectual seeking, is what distinguishes humans from all other species. Centauri Dreams, reading Daw, Pasternak and others on the subject, suspects that exploration is an imperative that even the most inward-turning era cannot stifle. Long-term thinking trumps the immediate no matter how long it takes. Make no mistake, we are going to the stars whether that journey departs a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand years from now.
by Paul Gilster | Jun 17, 2006 | Antimatter |
Exciting news on the antimatter front with the launch of PAMELA, a probe designed to detect antimatter in space. Standing for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics, the PAMELA spacecraft lifted off from Baikonur on June 15. The mission should be a significant upgrade to previous balloon-borne attempts to survey antimatter inflows in the cosmic rays falling on Earth.
Image: A look at PAMELA, a dedicated mission to study antimatter. Credit: Firenze/INFN.
“It’s the first serious, dedicated space experiment to detect cosmic rays,” says Felix Aharonian, an astrophysicist from the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, in a news story by Mark Peplow on Nature.com. Which makes PAMELA an intriguing thing indeed, and worth considering in light of other studies of antimatter in space, such as James Bickford’s recent work on antimatter collection in the Solar System, and the long-term prospect of antimatter factories working around a gas giant like Jupiter, where naturally-forming amounts of the stuff may be surprisingly abundant and collectable.
But Centauri Dreams also likes the dark matter angle, which goes like this: particle collisions with the type of dark matter candidate called WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle) may produce an excess of antimatter with a distinctive signature. That could be one more observational clue to the nature of dark matter, which remains, like dark energy, one of the biggest mysteries in the cosmological catalog.
It may seem unusual to see a particle physics slant to a space mission, but that’s the result of that community’s involvement with this concept from the start, as opposed to the traditional space science community at NASA and ESA. The mission is, in fact, a collaboration between Russia, Italy, Germany and Sweden, and the betting here is that it will prove unusually productive. In addition to Nature.com, New Scientist is also covering PAMELA’s three-year flight in a story by Maggie McKee that is not yet sequestered behind the magazine’s firewall.
by Paul Gilster | Jun 16, 2006 | Administrative |
The cleanup after the big splash continues. I am now working in an office that is more or less dry, with the help of constant dehumidifiers, but am inexplicably plagued by software problems that have shut down operations on one of my machines. Add to that a hardware glitch that surfaced just yesterday and it’s clear that I may not be back at full speed today. It will probably take the weekend to get things sorted out — I’m online, but there are lots of things that need doing here. Just moving books to drier ground is occupying plenty of time, though I’m glad to report little actual damage to anything important.
On a different note, I’m hearing from some readers that commenting on Centauri Dreams stories is a problem. You have to register to comment, and although most people have done that without incident (and the comments duly appear), some have found that the software won’t take their registration. I have no explanation for this and am hoping that someone more knowledgable about WordPress than I am may be able to help. I understand that WordPress problems re commenting are not uncommon. If you have any ideas, please pass them along.
