The Universe

Listen, I know it may be tough to keep up with my blistering blogging pace of late, but just bear with me... Here I give you a map of everything:



The image is from a BBC News article about mapping done by the European Space Agency's Planck Telescope:

This is the extraordinary place where we all live - the Universe.

The picture is the first full-sky image from Europe's Planck telescope which was sent into space last year to survey the "oldest light" in the cosmos.

It took the 600m-euro observatory just over six months to assemble the map.

It shows what is visible beyond the Earth to instruments that are sensitive to light at very long wavelengths - much longer than what we can sense with our eyes.

Researchers say it is a remarkable dataset that will help them understand better how the Universe came to look the way it does now.

"It's a spectacular picture; it's a thing of beauty," Dr Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency's (Esa) Planck project scientist, told BBC News.

Dominating the foreground are large segments of our Milky Way Galaxy.

The bright horizontal line running the full length of the image is the galaxy's main disc - the plane in which the Sun and the Earth also reside.

One book I'm currently reading is Edward Casey's Getting Back into Place, which discusses the nature of place from a philosophical perspective. One of the book's themes is that our lived experience 1) always occurs in discrete places (as opposed to abstract space, for instance) and 2) our understanding of, or feel for, place is inherently a function of embodied experience. That is, it is only by virtue of being embodied beings that we understand places in the way we do. (To give one example, the verticality of certain buildings - think of the soaring cathedrals of Europe - evoke the natural verticality of the human form, and so we experience such buildings as inherently dignified, aspirational, and literally uplifting.) (Yes, I know that is a little broad and might sound vague or just weird. There's just no way to really do much more than gesture broadly like this. But check out the book if you're intrigued by this kind of stuff.)

And of course, one of the places we all share, and a place we are always in, is the universe. But what's odd about this place (well, among other things) - or in particular, what's odd about our experience of this place, is that it seems to totally baffle our intuitions as embodied beings. The scale is just so vast, it's literally incomprehensible. I mean, I can sort of imagine myself circumnavigating the globe. In fact, I have flown clear to the other side of the world. Which seemed like a very far way to go, but it was nonetheless a scale to which I could (barely) relate my own body: I can sort of imagine the world divided up into chunks on the scale of like a landscape that I might behold from a ridge, say, and thereby imagine the whole as constituted of so many chunks. Does that make sense?

Okay. But the universe is just so obviously beyond that scale. We can't imagine what a light-year is - we can't relate it to the scale of our sensory experiences in the way I just tried to do with the Earth as a whole (which was already pushing it). And it's 4 light-years to the nearest star. And the numbers! Are there 100 billion stars in the universe? 50 quadrillion? It really doesn't matter, because again, the numbers are so far beyond anything we can imagine in terms of our embodied experience that they are just meaningless. We hear numbers like this and we just think: really big number. We don't comprehend them in the way we can comprehend "3" or "8" or "100" or even "10,000."

Anyways, what's great about the map above (and the accompanying BBC video might help you to "read" it) is that it represents this greatest possible whole, the universe itself, in a way that makes it sort of comprehensible. Of course, the scale of the universe reamins beyond the ken of our intuitions as embodied beings. But this representation at least helps us to imagine the whole - to take it in, in a sense, like we would a landscape. And this must be to the good: this place is our home, after all. We ought to get to know it as well as we can.

Powers of Ten

The classic Eames film:



Because I'm feeling rather logarithmic this week.

If Aliens are Watching Us...

this is what they are seeing:



It is humbling and awe-inspiring to think that we humans are the seat of self-consciousness in the universe - the organs through which the universe imagines itself. Just contemplating that fact can be akin to a spiritual experience.

Contemplating old episodes of Three's Company zipping out past Pollux and Arcturus, on the other hand, is humbling in a really quite different way.

Sun Clock

Happy solstice, everybody! Before you head out to jump your bonfires and search for your magic fern blossoms, you may want to check to see whether it is night or day. To that end, this map can help:



There are a bunch of versions of this out there, but this one's especially attractive. This image, from timeanddate.com, shows the division of night and day on the Earth's surface at 5:45am UTC, June 20, 2009 - this morning, the precise moment of the summer solstice.

What would be cool is if I could embed a sun clock in this post so that it would always be current. It seems like the sort of thing that ought to be possible, but unfortunately I am dumb, so I can't figure out how to do it. And, unlike the proverbial broken clock, this one will only be accurate once a year; still, you can click on it to see the present night/day situation.

Come to think of it, the next summer solstice will happen at a different time of day, so this clock won't ever be entirely accurate again. Shoot.

Mapping the Neighborhood (Broadly Construed)

Via The Map Room, something called the Six-Degree Field Galaxy Survey (shortened, with the sort of radical anti-melliflousness only a team of astronomers could muster, to 6dFGS) has mapped a chunk of the nearby universe containing more than 110,000 galaxies.



The survey covers more than 80% of the Southern sky out to 2,000 million light years; it documents where galaxies are and where they're going. According to Universe Today, the study also measured the mass of the galaxies indirectly: by "measuring the galaxies’ movements, the researchers were able to map the gravitational forces at work in the local Universe, and so show how matter, both seen and unseen, is distributed."

As Jonathan Crowe notes, the scale of the map (as he posted it) is about one to eleven quintillion - "almost certainly the smallest scale we will ever see."

I'm going to take that as a personal challenge.

Earth and Moon

This is a very simple image, but I don't think I've ever seen it before and I like it. It just shows Earth and the Moon and the distance between them to scale.



Found at the blog Page F30, in a post that argues that Ceres might be a better target for colonization than Mars.

UPDATE: A commenter points to a similar image at Wikipedia which also depicts the speed of light at the same scale.

Help Map the Universe

Galaxy Zoo is asking the internets for a favor: help describe the universe. Specifically, they want laypeople to help classify the hundreds of thousands of galaxies in their database:

The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, no less). In order to understand how these galaxies — and our own — formed, we need your help to classify them according to their shapes — a task at which your brain is better than even the fastest computer.

You look at images like these:



And answer questions like these:



And by doing so you will have contributed to the wisdom of crowds. And, as we're evidently meant to be learning about astronomy over the next few days, Galaxy Zoo is trying to classify a million galaxies in that time, so you can help them hit that goal. What's more, since human beings are the organs by which the universe perceives itself, this project is an attempt by the universe at self-perception; and who wouldn't want to take a few minutes out of their day to expand the self-awareness of the universe?

Water on Mars? Eh, Maybe So. Plus: Exoplanets!

Some pictures taken last May by the Mars Phoenix Lander may show water droplets on the leg of the craft:

Phoenix landed near Mars's north pole last May, and several "self portraits" taken to assess the craft's health show material spattered on the legs.

This substance is probably saline mud that splashed up as the craft landed, study leader and Phoenix co-investigator Nilton Renno of the University of Michigan told National Geographic News.

Salt in the mud then absorbed water vapor from the atmosphere, forming the watery drops, Renno said.

Of course, it was already known that there was water underground on Mars, as shown in this detailed map of "water-equivalent hydrogen," based on data from the Mars Odyssey. This map ought to roughly correspond to amounts of water in the Martian soil.



In other astromapping news, I just found out about the Kepler mission - a NASA project that's scheduled to launch on March 6th. It's going to be looking for earth-sized planets in a large chunk of the milky way (and by large, I mean small - it will only be a narrow sector of one arm of the milky way; and by small, I mean unimaginably vast - because even this small slice of the galaxy contains over 100,000 stars). This galaxy map shows the Kepler search space (as well as our location in the milky way, in case you were curious). The mission will be using the transit method - watching for fluctuations in the brightness of stars that would indicate an Earth-sized planet is passing in front of the star. For this to work for a given star, that means the planet has to be orbiting on a plane that's lined up with the Kepler craft; otherwise a planet might be there and Kepler'd never see it. The odds of a planet lining up in this way for a given star are about 1 in 210. So...

the 1 in 210 probability means that if 100% of stars observed had Earth-like terrestrial planets, Kepler would find about 480 of them. The mission is therefore ideally suited to determine the frequency of Earth-like planets around other stars.

In other words, if this project works out, we ought to be able to determine roughly how many other Earths are out there. Fun stuff.