Woodstock and Stardust

August 17, 2009

The famous Woodstock Music Festival ran from August 15 to August 18, exactly 40 years ago. Woodstock is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in music history. During a period of time where incredible scientific endeavors were tarnished by savage warfare in Vietnam, Woodstock became synonymous with a call for world peace (indeed, the slogan for the event was "3 Days of Peace & Music").

In this special guest article for Space Disco, Govert Schilling, author of the outstanding book 'The Hunt For Planet X' and collaborator in the @Twisst project, shares his memories of this musical event, showing how singer Joni Mitchell included some stellar physics in her lyrics...

Canadian folk singer Joni Mitchell did not perform at the legendary Woodstock festival, forty years ago today. Her manager thought it would be better for her to appear on The Dick Cavett Show. In a New York City hotel room, she witnessed the three-day hippie fest in Bethel on television, and right there she wrote her famous song 'Woodstock'.

'We are stardust, we are golden. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.' Beautiful music and wonderful lines - back then, I must have played that record hundreds of times.

Joni Mitchell described the most impressive message of modern science. This is no poetic metaphor of sorts - we really are dust from the stars. Billion year old carbon, as she sings toward the end of the song.

It's the story I like to tell most during public lectures. How one of the countless carbon atoms in my body was forged in the interior of another star, billions of years ago. How it was hurled into space during a supernova explosion, drifted through the Milky Way for hundreds of millions of years, and eventually became part of the cloud that gave birth to our solar system.

How it experienced the geological history of our home planet, was blown into the atmosphere by an active volcano, and was in- and exhaled by Julius Caesar. And, of course, how it ended up in a tiny carrot, which my pregnant mother ate over fifty years ago, so it could become part of my body.

It's a magical story about man's place in a vast, evolving universe. The carbon atoms in our muscles, the calcium atoms in our bones, the iron atoms in our blood - it's all stardust, in the most literal sense of the word.

I imagine 25 year old Joni Mitchell sitting there in her New York hotel room. Saddened about the fact that she isn't performing herself at Woodstock for half a million people. Depressed by all the misery, hatred and warfare in the world. But also hopeful because of the fact that over ten billion years of cosmic evolution has led to so much love, peace and happiness.

Back to the garden, Joni. To play in the grass with the people you love. And to enjoy the beauty of the stars.

--Govert Schilling

Follow Govert on Twitter via @GovertSchilling, @GovertTweets and the ISS service @Twisst.

Galaxies Crash, Dino-Killing Asteroid, Twin Space Shuttles (Video)

April 27, 2009

Up to bat for this week's Discovery Space Wrap Up: Four-way galaxy cluster crash spied by Hubble and Chandra telescopes, Asteroid collision predates dinosaur extinction by 300,000 years, The last time you'll see two space shuttles out at NASA launch pads -- ever:

You Are Small and Insignificant

April 22, 2009

No, seriously. I mean it.

In case you didn't catch my podcast for the 365 Days of Astronomy project, you aren't even a speck of dust in an arena.

And to belabor the point, get a load of this great new video some clever person put together for storming the Internet via YouTube:

It's actually a complete rip-off of a very successful video on YouTube (see here), but the one I posted here is much higher quality, and much more illustrative. What's that saying... Imitation is the highest form of flattery?

Now that you've watched, I hope you feel as puny as I do!

The Creepiest Space Photo You Will Ever See

April 08, 2009

I can't believe Phil Plait -- the Bad Astronomer himself and persistent plucker of pareidoliac photos -- hasn't posted about this gem from NASA's Image of the Day!

Take a look, and prepare to be frightened:

Aaaaaaaaagh!!

I dare you to tell me that this is not the creepiest (legitimate) space image you have ever laid eyes on...
...that's what I thought.

What does it all mean, you ask?

Mars 500, Hubble's Winning Image, Yuri's Night Craziness (Video)

April 06, 2009

In this week's Discovery Space Wrap Up:
Mars500 trial run begins (aka 6 guys stuck in a tube for 105 days), Hubble Space Telescope's winning image of Arp 274 taken, and last but not least some crazy fun Yuri's Night parties:

Map of Galaxies on the Move

April 03, 2009

Whoa. Get a load of this brand-new map of about 110,000 galaxies closest to Earth (click to enlarge this bad boy):

Based on the press release, it sounds like most of these galaxies are as seen from Earth's southern hemisphere. That's a bit puzzling to me, seeing as the telescope used -- the UK Schmidt Telescope -- is in England, aka the northern hemisphere.

Also curious why there's a big two-cone gap in the middle (perhaps the Earth is blocking the view?).

Anyway, what you can't see in this map is the speed and direction about 11,000 of these galaxies are moving! Astronomers now have that data under their belt, too. If you're curious what the nearby universe is going to look like millions and billions of years from now, that is some valuable intel.

Now I know some of you are thinking: "Galaxies move? Aren't they too big to move fast?"

Sorry to burst any bubbles here, but get this: Milky Way Galaxy is booking it at about 343 miles per second. That's a flight from New York to Los Angeles in 7 seconds. And it's on a collision course with the equally hefty Andromeda galaxy in about 3 billion years. *gulp*

Another striking detail is the number of voids with no galaxies, which is about 500 in this computer-rendered snapshot. As we've previously played up here on Discovery Space, that's likely mysterious dark energy in action, pushing the galaxies into a cosmic web of sorts as space continues to expand.

Big thanks to Nancy Atkinson at Universe Today for pointing this out (looks like she got wind of it via the Anglo-Australian Observatory's site).

Photo: AAO

Comet Lulin, Kepler Spacecraft, Milky Way 'Ripples' (Video)

February 23, 2009

The latest video from yours truly:

Note: Thankfully, YouTube has a wonderful annotations editor -- which lets me add in nifty facts and correct my word fumbling that I don't notice until after shooting a decent 3-5 minute take.

Magnetar With a Temper Caught Misbehaving

February 11, 2009

Neutron stars might be tiny, but they can be extremely temperamental.

Case in point is SGR J1550-5418. That's an unwieldy name, but you could deem it a magnetar, pulsar, gamma-ray repeater, or just plain naughty:

This little bugger is 12 miles across but it likely packs more mass than the sun, which is about 21,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.

Just a teaspoon of the neutron star, in fact, would weigh in at about 10 million tons (no spoonful of sugar could help that go down).

So where do these violent outbursts -- at times 20 years worth of sun energy -- come from?

How Superman Sees Outer Space

February 10, 2009

Imagine you're Superman, and you're sick and tired of saving the people of Earth. They take your super-awesomeness for granted, so your home planet Krypton is looking pretty good.

"Forget this," you say. "Peace out!"

Trouble is, Krypton is 50 light-years away (yes, I looked it up). What are you going to do with all of that time, even assuming you can travel twice the speed of light, let alone the standard speed of light (670,616,629 mph, mind you).

Duuuuh: Function as a super-human space observatory and solve the mysteries of the universe!

Here's one thing you might see during your superluminal journey:

One down, about 199,999,999,999 to go!

Cosmic Collisions

January 24, 2009

Cosmic collisions. If those two words don't send your neurons into a tizzy, I question whether you are human.

You should imagine asteroids smacking into the Earth, fire and destruction, and all of that other Armageddon goodness we humans are oh-so-fascinated with. Which is why the Discovery Channel decided to bring you a great three-part special called, well, "Cosmic Collisions."

Click here for the schedule which you can ask to send you an e-mail reminder. Cool right? Very useful for forgetful types (e.g. myself).

As of this posting, the first episode called "Galaxies" is set to air Wednesday, Jan. 28 at 10:00 p.m. ET.

And for the behind-the-scenes scoop on what the show covers, visit the Wide Angle I put together.

You can test your know-how by taking this quiz, browse real and imagined outer space smashups in a slide show, find out what comets have to do with life on Earth, discover the difference between asteroids and meteorites, and investigate what will happen to life on Earth after Andromeda whacks our host galaxy in a few billion years.

By the way: the show's timing couldn't be better! Ever heard of how a Mars-sized object gave Earth the kiss of death about 4.5 billion years ago, resulting in the created of the moon?

Well, get a load of this new story -- we now know the moon cooled from an "ocean of magma" into the solid body we look up at today about 100 million years after obliterating early Earth. That's more than twice as good as the estimate we had before, thanks to a little zircon crystal in a moon rock (which you can bet is more valuable than those impostor diamond rings).

Anyhow, feel free comment about the show below. And for reading all the way to the end of this post enjoy this special treat. It's a little something we cooked up but haven't officially put up on Discovery Space!

Photo: Don Davis, NASA