Felicia Day, Cosmic Buzzkill

October 26, 2009

Via io9 and uber-fanboy Phil Plait, here's a genuine treat: actress and all-around Web goddess Felicia Day (Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog, The Guild) shows off her science chops in a new PSA from the Spitzer Science Center on behalf of the Spitzer Space Telescope. Apparently there was a bit of public consternation earlier this year when the folks at Spitzer announced the "imminent" collision of two distant galaxies.

Our intrepid heroine battles condescension and sarcasm from a highly misguided director -- not to mention awkward cameo voice-overs from Sean Astin -- to reveal the far less scary truth about what really happens when galaxies collide. "Once again, Felicia Day sucks all the fun out of our film," the director snipes; she clearly finds truth to be a buzzkill.

But wait! Maybe it's not entirely the director's fault! Consider the slightly sensational tenor of the opening paragraphs of the press release the Spitzer folks issued back in March:

A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope offers a rare view of an imminent collision between the cores of two merging galaxies, each powered by a black hole with millions of times the mass of the sun. The galactic cores are in a single, tangled galaxy called NGC 6240, located 400-million light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. Millions of years ago, each core was the dense center of its own galaxy before the two galaxies collided and ripped each other apart. Now, these cores are approaching each other at tremendous speeds and preparing for the final cataclysmic collision. They will crash into each other in a few million years, a relatively short period on a galactic timescale. [emphasis mine]

No wonder the Spitzer Science Center found they needed a PSA to correct public misconceptions. The universe is an awe-inspiring place, and I'm all for punching up the prose stylings a bit when communicating science broadly. But if you describe colliding galaxies as "cataclysmic," don't be surprised if there are a few directors out there who get the wrong idea. As Felicia herself points out (in the name of Joss Whedon), real science is pretty darn cool all on its own. You don't need to punch up the verbiage quite that much.

Comments

[cerberus40]

If you like this, you should check out more IRrelevant Astronomy videos at http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/videos/irrelevant/ There's one with the real Sean Astin, not just the audio book.