Looking Out on a Cosmic Aegean

by | Oct 5, 2009 | | 33 Comments

Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage is one of my favorite CDs, as definitive a statement of Hancock's jazz artistry as, say, A Song for My Father is for Horace Silver's craft, or Giant Steps for John Coltrane's. But Maiden Voyage, particularly the title track, has that sense of relentless, questing motion that energizes me about all journeying. It's restlessness mixed with inevitability, an Odyssean fling with great events in a vast and unknowable sea. Such thoughts come to mind this morning because I've been paging through Giulio Magli's Mysteries and Discoveries of Archaeoastronomy (Copernicus, 2009) while listening to Hancock's work. It's a lively and amusing book, amusing because Magli (Politecnico of Milan) enjoys taking swipes at colleagues as well as earlier scholars, and it plumbs the depths of sites around the world where our ancestors either did or might have aligned their structures with celestial objects. Some of these places remain controversial, because there are a lot of...

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Herschel: Lighting Up the Interstellar Medium

by | Oct 3, 2009 | | 0 Comments

Sometimes we're reminded in a stunning way of how much material exists in the star-forming regions of the galaxy. Take a look at the image below, which comes from the Herschel Space Observatory. Herschel's SPIRE camera, which works at wavelengths between 250 and 500 microns, is combined here with data from the observatory's other camera, called PACS, which operates between 70 and 170 microns. The combination reveals detailed images in the far infrared, locating star-forming regions that would otherwise be difficult to detect at a single wavelength. Image: Five-color composite image of a 2 x 2 degree area in the plane of our Galaxy, combining the PACS and SPIRE observations. In this image the SPIRE and PACS images have been combined into a single composite; here the blue denotes 70 microns, the green 160 microns, and the red is the combination of the emission from all three SPIRE bands at 250/350/500 microns. Credit: ESA. The infrared range these instruments cover should tell us much...

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Arecibo in Context: Watching for NEOs

by | Oct 1, 2009 | | 12 Comments

Some things to keep in mind with regard to near-Earth objects: NASA is working with a Congressional mandate from 2005 that it discover ninety percent of all NEOs that are 140 meters in diameter or greater. The deadline for this task is 2020, and the interim report Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies (written by a committee appointed by the National Research Council) says the surveys currently in progress are not capable of meeting this goal. The final report is to appear in December. Now switch to Arecibo. The radio telescope there, run by Cornell University and the National Science Foundation, has run into serious funding questions. NSF must decide whether the current cooperative relationship between Cornell and NSF should continue, and whether the observatory itself should be funded. You may recall that an NSF panel recommended in late 2006 that Arecibo's operating budget be reduced in a series of steps, ultimately taking it from $10.5 million to $4 million...

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Charter

In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For many years this site coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation. It now serves as an independent forum for deep space news and ideas. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image courtesy of Marco Lorenzi).

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