December 26th show...

... is now online. This was an "all-news", trying to wrap up the latest results on the calendar year. I'll post a synopsis shortly and, as always, please leave comments and/or questions below. Hope you enjoy, and Happy New Year!

50th Anniversary of Explorer 1...

.. which was the United States's entry into the Space Race, occurs on 2008 January 31, and to commemorate the event Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) will be hosting a conference on this event for educators, museum staff, and high school students this January 26 & 27 in Pasadena, CA. Registration by January 22 is required, and there is a registration fee of $40. If interested, send a check payable to Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as well as your name, citizenship, title, school/organization, subjects taught, grades taught, address, state, zip code, and contact info for last minute changes (email or phone) to:
History Educator Conference
Attn: Trisha Wheeler
Mail Stop 180-109
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA 911109
(818) 393-6667

If any one goes, I'd be very interested in hearing what was discussed.

New Poll: Most Exciting Astronomical Result of the Year?

Every year, Science Magazine publishes their list of the top 10 science breakthroughs of the year, and this year only one Astronomy results made the list - the assertion from Pierre Auger that the arrival directions of the highest energy particles in space are correlated with the position of active galactic nuclei, supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies which are accreting ("eating") a lot of material (several fractions of the weight of the sun per year or more). What do you think this was the most interesting result of the year? I put up a poll with some of my favorites, though I have to admit I am heavily biased by my research interests (supernova explosions, neutron stars, that sort of thing). What were yours? Please list what interested you the most below.

Thanks a lot, and happy holidays.

Neat movie...

courtesy of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Hubble Space Telescope, of Mars rotating. This was compiled using images taken by Hubble at the most recent closest approach between Earth and Mars.

Interview with Michael Bank

... of the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association (MHAA) is now available here. Hope you enjoy!

December 19th show...

... is finally online. Sorry for the delay, but it is the holiday season... On this program, I discussed:

• News: Congratulations to the Custer Institute and Observatory in Southold, Long Island for being chosen as a recipient of a Fund for Astrophysical Research grant, to be used to purchase optical equiptment to start a search for extrasolar planets and supernovae (if interested in helping, please contact Donna L. McCormick) as well as Cal Tech and the UC system for being awarded $200 million dollars to start designing the Thirty Meter Telescope; new software package called Montage designed to combine images of the sky from different sources, wavebands, etc.; initial data from the largest yet digital survey of the Milky Way (called IPHAS) is released; NASA diverts Epoxi mission to Comet Hartley 2 since initial target, Comet Boethin, disappeared; NASA's GLAST satellite arrives at Naval Research Laboratory for final round of pre-launch testing; new international task forces called IMARS is formed to determine the best way to return samples from Mars to Earth; NASA announces plans to select next major Solar System mission soon.
• Solar System
• Sun: SOHO sees evidence for the next solar cycle beginning.
• Earth: NASA's AIM satellite releases initial results concerning "night-shining" clouds; THEMIS releases new measurements of Northern Lights.
• Mars: Made its closest approach to the Earth for this year; Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter detects "lace" and "lizard skin" terrain on Mars, likely from vents of carbon-dioxide gas forcing through the icy surface; Mars Rover Spirit discovers a rock composed of silica-rich rock believed to form naturally only in hot springs or volcanic vents, implying Mars used to be much warmer; organic material and molecules dicovered on meteorite Allan Hills 84001 which is believed to have come from Mars.
• Jupiter: New strategies discusses to probe under the ice shell on Jupiter's moon Europa.
• Saturn: Small moons Pan and Daphnis around Saturn show evidence of sweeping up ring material, getting larger in the process; rings around Saturn appear to have different ages, with material being recycled between them; current of charged particles detected around Saturn in a ring, which appears to be rotating with Saturn and changing in size and shape on short timescales.
• Outer Solar System: Voyager 2 crosses "heliosheath," where the Solar wind is decelerated by the interstellar medium - the material between stars that fills most of the volume of the Milky Way, at a much closer distance that Voyager 1, implying the solar system is "squashed."
• Wednesday Morning Astronomer: My weekly discussion on the "A Cosmic Thought" section of the Tuesday Morning Quaterback article written by Gregg Easterbrook.
  
• Calendar of Events in the New York area
• Interview with Michael Bank of the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association on amateur astronomy in the mid-Hudson / Poughkeepsie region.

Hope you enjoy and, as always, please email or post below any questions or comments you might have. Happy Holidays! -- Yosi

Interview with Dr. Savin,

Senior Research Scientist at Columbia University, on laboratory astrophysics is finally online and available here. Laboratory astrophysics, the field of replicating astronomical systems on Earth and making measurements, is extremely important and very underappreciated - especially among professionial astronomers, so I encourage all of you to listen. If you want learn more about this work, check out Dr. Savin's personal webpage, as well as an article in Sky & Telescope (in PDF format) he co-authored on the subject.

As always, please leave questions and comments below, and hope you enjoy.

Happy Holidays -- Yosi

December 12th show

Unfortunately, I wasn't unable to record this show (CD-R malfunction) so I can't post it. There was lots of research results released last week, but I just focused on news and new results concerning the Sun:

• News: Congrats to Alexander Sharpe, Joshua Leviton, and Alistair McGregor for winning the Cassini "Scientist for a Day" competition, Prof. Geoff Marcy of UC-Berkeley for being chosen to deliver the annual John N. Bahcall Public Lecture at the Smithosonian Air & Space Museum, and Prof. Hinz, Dr. Kuchner, and Dr. Serabyn for being awarded time on the Keck inteferometer to study the disks left behind around stars after they form; design for the optical telescope system on the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope passes its preliminary design review; NASA announces plan to use a series of high altitude balloons called BARREL to study Van Allen belts and a new mission to the Moon called GRAIL to measure its gravitational field.
• Sun: The 7 December 2007 edition of Science was devoted to initial results of the Hinode satellite (for more information on this mission, go here) which studies X-ray emission from the Sun. One very puzzling aspect of the Sun and other similar stars is that the outermost layers, called the chromosphere and the corona, are significantly hotter than the photosphere, which is the region of the Sun where most of the visible light we see originates. Before I discuss the new results on this region, I want to first briefly describe the current best picture of what goes on inside the Sun. The Sun is quite a complicated object, with an extremely hot and dense center where fusion takes places (for example, "hydrogen turning into helium" as quoted in the song which I being many shows). These fusion reactions releases energy in the form of light. However, the region of the Sun that is hot and dense enough to sustain fusion reactions is nowhere near the size of the entire Sun, and how this energy goes from the inner center to the outer regions is quite complicated. In the region of the Sun just around the Hydrogen burning core, this energy radiates outward. However, this radiative region does not reach the surface, and this radiative core is surrounded by a convective envelope - meaning that gas heated by the radiative core rises up, and as it rises it cools, causing it to fall and get heated again, just as happens on the Earth from solar heating and similar to steam from a boiling kettle. This process of hot gas rising/cool gas falling is actually a very efficient method of getting the energy from the hot interior to the outer regions of the Sun, and most of the optical light we see from the Sun is from the top level of this convective layer called the photosphere. (The name "photosphere" is just a contraction of photon sphere, ie. the sphere where the photons - light - we see come from). However, it was discovered that outside this photosphere, where a large fraction of the energy generated by the fusion reactions in the center of the Sun escapes in the form of sunlight and travels into space, are hotter layers called the chromosphere and corona which are responsible for the solar wind, solar fares, coronal mass ejections, etc. Why? Well, since most of the light produced in these regions of the Sun is emitted in the X-ray band, not optical, to figure this out one needs high-resolution and sensitive X-ray observations of these regions, which Hinode was designed to provide. Astronomers had long suspected that the magnetic field generated in the convective layers of the Sun (all the gas in the Sun is ionized, meaning that it is in the form of electrons and atomic nuclei - mostly protons, and moving ions can produce electric and magnetic fields) was responsible, specifically through magnetic field generates by different patches of moving gas in the Sun interacting through each other. This speculation was believed to by confirmed by Hinode observations which detected a lot of "X-ray jets", X-ray emission produced by fast moving material believed to be created when these magnetic fields overlap, many more than had been detected before, which occur often enough and produce enough energy to explain most of the solar wind and coronal mass ejections. This just one of the many exciting results this satellite announced, and I encourage all of you to check out the Science issue
  
• Calendar
• Interview: with Dr. Daniel Savin of the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory (Columbia University) on the field of Laboratory Astrophysics.

As always, comments and questions are appreciated.

December 5th show...

... is finally online, now that I have a nice friendly place to put it, and is available here. This was also an all-news-and-views show, and on this program I covered:

• News: JPL announces new version of PlanetQuest, a database with information on extra-solar planets; new NASA competition for high school and college students on aeronautics (good luck!); European Space Agency (ESA) announces a new program for recently graduated students interested in a career in the space industry, extension of Integral and XMM missions until 12/31/2012.
• Solar System: Solar flares possible accelerate electrons in "magnetic islands"; first results from the Venus Explorer mission are released, including detection of lightning and evidence that the solar wind is at least partially responsible for deficiency of water in its atmosphere; Mars Express marks 5000 orbits around Mars; Cassini detects complex hydrocarbons in atmospher of Titan, Saturn's largest moon; Voyager 2 expected to reach the "termination shock" where the Solar Wind collides with the interstellar medium soon.
• Milky Way: "Santa-shaped" cloud of very hot gas detected in Orion Nebula; giant jets (very fast, narrow, columns of outflowing material) detected around forming star L1157; evidence for planets forming around very young star UX Tau A; discovery of young, fast moving white dwarfs in globular star cluster NGC 6397 - origin of these velocities still a mystery; discovery that neutron star RX J0822-4300 is moving with a velocity >3 million miles an hour - extremely fast and extremely puzzling.
• Calendar of Astronomy events in the greater New York Area
• Cosmology: Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to do this news item the justice it deserves, but simulations suggest that the interaction between massive stars and their environment can smooth out the density of dark matter in the center of dwarf galaxies, which could explain why the observed density of matter in these galaxies is a lot smoother than previously predicted by Cold Dark Matter models, which are the currently favored model for solving the "missing mass" problem (that when one uses the velocity of stars/galaxies to estimate the mass of a galaxy/galaxy cluster, the required mass is much higher than can be explained by the mass of all the observed stars/galaxies).

As always, if you have any questions or comments please email me or leave them below. Thanks a lot, and hope you enjoyed -- Yosi

All fixed now...

I hope. All of the interviews and radio shows which were previously available have been moved to a new site, and I believe I have updated all of the links here. Please let me know if you have any problems downloading material or, if any of you subscribe to this site via podcast servers, they have problems as well.

Thanks a lot, and don't forget to tune into tomorrow's show - special Dr. Daniel Savin of Columbia Astrophysical Laboratory (Columbia University) will be on to talk about laboratory astrophysics, an extremely important yet very under-appreciated field of astronomy (don't worry, I'll post this show and interview online as well) -- Yosi

Sorry...

... for any broken links below and not putting last week's show online yet, but I just learned that I lost the space I had from my previous institution which was hosting all of this material. Don't fear, since I hope to get everything back online tomorrow. Thank you for your patience -- Yosi

Looking for a holiday card....

... for the Astronomy enthusiast in your life? Download some holiday cards courtesy of Hubble for free. Enjoy!

November 28th show...

... is finally online here. Since there was no show on 11/21, this was an "all-news" program. On this program:

• News: United Kingdom withdraws from Gemini Observatory, Thailand begins construction on a new optical observatory, Sloan Digital Sky Survey celebrates 5 years of operation, first HDTV "Earth Rise" taken by Japan's Selene mission, NASA announces success test of parachute system for next generation Moon rocket.
• Solar System: NASA extends SORCE satellite which studies the Sun's effect on the Earth's climate, similar chemical composition of Earth and Moon result of mixing between debris disk which formed the Moon and magma ocean which covered the Earth, Spitzer observations of nearby stars suggests Moon-like objects rare in other Solar Systems, Hubble observes core of Comet 17P/Holmes which is now bigger than the Sun, Mars doubles in brightness due to its polar caps now facing the Earth, evidence for a magma ocean covering surface of Mars for a long time in early Solar System.
• Milky Way: Evidence for rocky planets forming around stars in the Pleiades Star Cluster, discovery of white dwarfs with Carbon atmospheres,
  
• Extragalactic / Cosmology (1): Most luminous supernova to date SN 2006gy possible result of two stars colliding, merging, and then blowing up or result of a collision between shells of material expelled from surface of the star.
• Calendar
• Extragalactic / Cosmology (2): Detection of acidic molecular clouds in other galaxies, NASA's GALEX satellite finds evidence for spiral galaxies transitioning to elliptical galaxies, a lot of the "missing baryons" (missing normal matter) might not be in the form of hot gas between galaxies after all, supporters of modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) claim that this model can also explain the Bullet Cluster.
  

As always, if you have any questions or comments please email me or leave them below. Hope you enjoy, and thank you for your patience.

NASA Competition for High School and College Student

The Fundamental Aeronautics Program of the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters just announced a new competition for high school and college students for the 2007-2008 academic year. Students are asked to think about a next generation type of aircraft which would revolutionize transportation of both goods and people. High school students are invited to write an essay describing how this might be revolutionized with a new type of aircraft, while college level are invited to design the aircraft, using guidelines provided by NASA, and suggest a minimum of three valid operational scenarios for their proposed vehicle. Prizes include cash up to $1500 For more information, please go to http://aero.larc.nasa.gov/competitions.htm, and good luck!

Sorry...

... for the lack of updatesm the lack of a Thanksgiving show, and the broken link below to the interview with Dr. Tran (it has been fixed now), but I was out of the country and unfortunately did not have internet access. Weekly shows will resume tomorrow with a program devoted to Astronomy results which came out during the last two weeks. Thanks a lot for your patience, and hope you had a great Thanksgiving.

Interview with Dr. Kim Vy Tran...

... on the formation of the most massive galaxies is now available here, uninterrupted by Emergency Broadcast System or anything else. Have questions? Please leave them below, and I'll do my best to get the answers.

November 14th show...

... is now online here. The program was on:

• News: ESA comet chaser Rosetta had its second fly-by around the Earth, NASA committee has narrowed down list of potential landing sites for future Mars rover "Mars Science Laboratory" to six, planning has started for future ESA (European Space Agency) X-ray satellite XEUS, CSIRO (Australian equivalent of NSF and DOE) announces new initiatize to figure out how to deal with massive datasets expected from future Astronomy facilities like the Square Kilometer Array, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA announces two conferences for high school teachers and students: "Basics of Interplanetary Space Flight" from 2007 December 1-2 and "Space Exploration's Rich History" from 2008 January 26-27, go here for more details.
• Extragalactic: Pierre Auger (in Argentina, not Chile as erroneously and stupidly say on the show) announces the ultra high energy cosmic rays are correlated with active galactic nuclei (AGN), Hubble detects shells of stars around quasar MC2 1635+119, analysis of Spitzer and Chandra images of other galaxies discovers that many more have active galactic nuclei than previously thought, rotating wind discovered around quasar PG 1700+518, Hubble images interaction between galaxies NGC 3808 and NGC 3808a (Arp 87), Hubble detects warp in spiral galaxy NGC 134.
• Galactic: Analysis of velocity of stars in seven dwarf satellites galaxies around Milky Way strongly suggests they contain lots of dark matter, Spitzer observes bubble of hot gas around young star HH46/47.
• Solar System: Modulation in bursts of radio emission from Saturn result of interaction with solar wind, tail of Comet 17P/Holmes has broken away from the comet
• Calendar
• Interview: with Dr. Kim Vy Tran of University of Zurich on the formation of the most massive galaxies. Sorry for the interruption by the emergency broadcasting system.
  

Please email or leave questions, comments, suggestions, corrections below. Thank you very much for listening, and hope you enjoy -- Yosi

November 7th show...

... is online here. Since I didn't get a chance to do any news on Halloween, and there actually has been a lot to talk about, this was (yet another) all-news show. The outline of this show was:

• News: Congrats to Prof. Charbonneau (Harvard University), Dr. Bakos (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), and Dr. Kaltenegger (Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory); NASA creates new Lunar Science Institute, offers $2 million prize for a lunar lander competition; NASA tests a long duration balloon mounted Solar telescope; China launches Moon satellite; new era of space exploration based on international cooperation?; Comet Holmes P still very bright but getting fainter and expanding,
  
• Wednesday Morning Astronomer (A discussion of any Astronomy issues raised in Gregg Easterbrook's weekly column on ESPN Page 2, which last week was found here): Earth studies very controversial now, not surprising that funding agencies shying away from it, and star formation, even of massive stars, is quite common in the Milky Way.
  
• Solar System: Mechanism to transport material from hot regions near the sun to the cold outer edges of the solar system when it was forming has been identified; ice used to extend all the way to the equator on Mars; bizarre feature on Martian Surface called MFF is likely a combination of ice and dust; asteroid Vesta might be source for weird composition meteorites which have landed on the Earth; new evidence that rings on Saturn created in catastrophic break-up of a moon.
• Astronomy Calendar in the New York City area
  
• Galactic: WASP project found three new planets around other stars, all very close (closer than Mercury to Sun) to parent star with masses similar to Jupiter; fifth planet identified around 51 Cancerae; magnetic filed powered collimated outflow observed from a forming star.
  
• Extragalactic / Cosmology: New most massive black hole created in the collapse of a single star identified; peculiar supernova observed - believed to be result of merger of two white dwarfs; exploding white dwarfs at earlier times produced more energy that exploding white dwarfs today; very short burst of radio emission observed from some unknown object outside the Milky Way.
  

Thanks a lot for listening, hope you enjoy it, and as always, please leave comments and questions below. And don't forget about the upcoming special Thanksgiving Q & A show!

Special Thanksgiving Show

I unfortunately will not be able to do my radio show on November 21st live, so I would like to do a pre-recorded show devoted to answering listener-submitted (aka. you) questions on anything Astronomy related, including about news items you've heard on this program and questions raised by the interviews which have been broadcast and I've put online.

Please submit questions either below or by email, and if you email me please include your address so I can send you some "Astronomy goodies". Only questions received by 5 PM EST (or is it EDT? Whatever time it is in New York now) November 16th can be answered.

Halloween show...

... would have been online, if not for the Halloween gremlins which struck during the show so I wasn't able to record it. Thankfully, however, they did not get their little hands on the interview I did with Josh Schroeder at Columbia University, available here, on pseudo-science on the internet, which is really interesting and I encourage all of you to listen to it. Pseudo-science is not incorrect science, but philosophy masquerading as science.

Thank you very much for everyone who tuned in, and - as always - if you have any questions or comments please leave them below.

Pretty sight this Monday

Tomorrow morning, Nov. 5th, space shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station will be gliding over many US towns and cities, hopefully easily visible and moving quickly across the sky. Should be need, and for more info, go here.

Spooky Astronomy Sounds

courtesy of Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), just in time for Halloween. As all of you who are fans of the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" know, there is no sound in space (technical reason: sound is just waves moving in air - the air equivalent of water waves resulting from dropping a rock in a puddle, so no air in space means no sound in space), so JPL has taken some interesting light signatures are converted them into audio files, which are available here. Enjoy!

Interesting article...

... in the NY Times today about the Manhattan Project, specifically that it is called the "Manhattan Project" for a reason since it started in Manhattan, which the initial research being conducted in the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia University. It discusses some of the different sites in Manhattan where related work was carried out, and is worth a read. Granted, it isn't particularly relavant to Astronomy, per se, but of potential interest regardless.

Don't forget to turn in for the special Halloween show tomorrow!

October 24th show...

... is now online here. The program of this episode is the following:

• News: NASA announces "retirement" of FUSE (ultraviolet) satellite, ESO decommissions TC-1 part of the Double Star mission, Rosetta mission to asteroid and comets approaches Earth for a boost and course correction, Integral (hard X-ray) satellites marks five very productive years from launch.
• Recent Results: Genesis mission measurement of Ne and Ar isotropic composition of solar wind, chemical composition of near-Earth asteroid Apophis measured, Solar mission Ulysses flew through ion tail of comet - discovered much longer than expected, new results from long Chandra (X-ray) observation of Galactic supernova remnant G292.0+1.8, black hole in "nearby" galaxy M33 has been measured to have a mass of 16 times that of the Sun - the most massive black hole created by a single star that we currently know of, bright optical flash seen in galaxy M85 not from stellar merger but a low energy supernova explosion.
• Calendar
• Interview with Prof. Rothman of Princeton University on detecting gravitons, available by itself here.

As always, please send me questions / comments via email or leave them below.

Want to be a scientist

for a day? The Cassini mission is sponsoring a contest for students in Grades 5-12, where you get to control where Cassini points for 90 minutes. Details, rules, etc. are available at here. If you have any related science questions, please ask and I'll do my best to answer. Good luck, and don't forget about the Catch a Star contest!

Also, Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena recently announced two conferences for high school science/physics teachers, go here for more info.

Special Halloween Show

I've decided to devote the Halloween edition of this show to pseudo-science: what it is, how to identify it, and what distinguishes science from pseudo-science. I would love to answer any questions you might have, as well as present a list of the wackiest theories out there. Please email them to me or leave them in the comments field below. No guarantees, and this not a contest (contests have rules and are complicated), but if you send me a question/wacky theory and your address (don't leave them below for security's sake) I will send you an Astronomy-related goody or two.

October 17th show...

is finally online (sorry for the delay) and available here. As promised last week, this was an all-news and events show. Don't worry, I got plenty of interviews for you, and they will return starting tomorrow. On this show, I discussed:

• Recent Events: Google Sky now has multi-wavelength data from AEGIS survey of distant universe, NASA has announced plans to put its lunar archives online as well, site for Giant Magellanic Telescope has been chosen, telescope transporter for ALMA has been built, Allen Telescope Array now online, SOFIA - a mid-infrared telescope attached to a Boeing 747 - beginning test flights, NASA will carry two Russian made science instruments on next two missions to Mars. Dawn mission's engines works well. Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity extended one more year.
  
• Competitions and Conferences: ESO announced "Catch a Star" competition for students (more info below in a previous post), Jet Propulsion Lab announces two conferences for science teachers (more information at http://education.jpl.nasa.gov).
  
• Solar System: New short-period asteroid has been identified, Asteroid renamed in honor of Sputnik, peculiar isotope of CO2 identified in atmosphere of Venus, Pluto-bound New Horizons mission makes precise measurements of Jupiter's magnetosphere, Cassini mission to Saturn celebrates 10 year from launch, patches on Saturn moon Iapetus due to boiling and condensation of water ice, outflows from Saturn moon Enceladus connected to fractures resulting from tidal heating, Saturn moon Titan has lakes on its South Pole and has methane rain showers.
  
• Calendar
• Galactic Results: Dust disks observed around three nearby stars forming Pluto-sized object, Earth-like planet possibly will form around a nearby star, observations of young star cluster reveal most massive stars actually binaries, new distance measured to Orion Nebula, new "most luminous" supernova explosion identified (SN 2005ap), evidence of cosmic ray production in supernova remnants.
• Extragalactic and Cosmology Results: Evidence for dust production in winds of material powered by supermassive black holes in centers of galaxies, identification of a very low mass galaxy at very early times, Dark Matter has long lifetime, properties of Dark Energy could be inferred from distribution of neutral hydrogen at very high redshifts.
  

Hope you enjoy. As always, questions and comments are very appreciated.

Interview with Dr. Dan Babich

is now also online. For more information on the CMB, inflation, etc., please check out the following pages:

• Introduction to the Cosmic Microwave Background: http://background.uchicago.edu/~whu/beginners/introduction.html
• WMAP Cosmology 101 - Cosmic Microwave Background: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101bbtest3.html
• LAMBDA: http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/

This last site isn't really an educational site, but a repository for all of the different CMB measurements which have been made. If you find any more websites you like, or have any questions about what you find out these webpages, please post them below.

October 10th show...

is now online. This program is a little different from the others, since (to fit in my interview with Dr. Dan Babich), it is devoted solely to the Cosmic Microwave Background and I didn't discuss any news and discoveries from the last week. Don't fear though, next week's show (10/17/07) will probably be entirely devoted to news and I will cover events that happened from 10/3 - 10/10...

If you have any questions, comments, etc. please leave them below or email them to me and I'll answer them on-air.

October 3rd show...

... is finally online. The program was:

• News:
  
• Meteorite hits Peru, evidence that asteroid impact responsible for end of Pleistoscene era, nearby supernova explosion probably not responsible for odd isotope of Iron found deep in the ocean floor, Oxygen was present in Earth's atmosphere before "Great Oxidation Event", astronomers modeling atmospheres of wide variety of Earth-sized planets for future observations of transiting planets.
• NASA announces design for new lunar rover to build future Moon base, NASA runs new Lunar Collision observatory to study the distribution of nearby space rocks.
• NASA will send Stardust to Comet Tempel 1 hit by Deep Impact to study the crater left behind, Stereo observed a comet losing its tail due to a collision with a "coronal mass ejection" from the Sun, SOHO discovers a new, short-period "periodic" comet arounds the Sun, Mars rover gets to its located in Victoria Crater, Dawn is working just fine, variability seen in outer rings of Uranus.
• Very Large Telescope (VLT; and yes, that is the telescope's name) discovers dust ring in Ant Nebula, around red giant star which will one day form a planetary nebula possible likely the Ant Nebula
• X-ray emission from magnetar XTE J1810-197 used to infer size of area which caused a large outburst of X-ray emission and strength of surface magnetic field.
• Very bright outburst of radio emission seen in the direction of the Small Magellanic Cloud, but not from this object. Origin is still completely unknown.

• Calendar
  
• Interview with Dr. Dan Babich of Cal Tech, talking about the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Full interview will be broadcast this Wednesday! I apologize for the weird audio format of the interview (my questions coming out of the left channel, his answers out of the right, and will rectify this for future shows).
  

As always, please email me, or leave in the comments section below, and questions / corrections / complaints you might have. Hope you enjoyed it.

APOLLO project

On the first radio show, the quest was James Battat of Harvard University discuss the APOLLO project, which measures the distance from the Earth to the Moon with millimeter (!) accuracy to test General Relativity. On astro-ph/ (a great resource by the way) they have posted several papers:

• APOLLO: the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation: Instrument Description and First Detections http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0710.0890
  

• The First Lunar Ranging Constraints on Gravity Sector SME Parameters http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0710.0701
  

• Testing for Lorentz Violation: Constraints on Standard-Model Extension Parameters via Lunar Laser Ranging http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0710.0702

The last two first-authored by James. Enjoy!

Catch a Star!

Well not literally, unfortunately. But ESO is sponsoring a new competition called Catch a Star, which has lots of great prizes - including trips to Astronomical observatories in Chile and Austria. For more info, please go to http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/eduoff/cas/cas2008/index.html
and good luck!

Podcast!

I think I've finally figured how to "podcast" recordings of this show. The URL for the feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/astroshow

Enjoy! Please let me know if you have any technical problems.

50th Anniversary of the Launch of Sputnik

While I know that this technically isn't Astronomy related, today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik. Sputnik was definitely not an Astronomical satellite, though the famous radio "beeps" it emitted aren't that different from the Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) that can be used to test General Relativity, but starting the so-called "space race" or "space age" it is indirectly responsible for a lot of the wonderful Astronomical satellite that have been launched and will be launched, and without these facilities and investments our understanding of the Universe would be much, much smaller than it is today.

Since I wasn't alive when Sputnik was launched, I am very interested in hearing any stories any of you might have about it... Please leave them below, I'd be fascinated to read them.

27 September 2007 Radio Show...

... is finally online, available in mp3 format here. If you have any questions or comments concerning anything I said, please email me or leave them below.

Are two telescopes in hand...

... worth one under construction? As I mentioned on last week's show, two weeks ago a group of Astronomers went to Capitol Hill to lobby for increased funding for Arecibo, a giant radio dish in Puerto Rico, which is in danger of being closed due to support the construction of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). As one would imagine, among Astronomers this is a very divisive issue. On one hand, people argue that Arecibo and other installations (e.g. the Very Long Baseline Array - VLBA) have already done their best science and should be closed to make room for new facilities. On the other hand, the capabilities of Arecibo and VLBA are not currently replacable, and are still doing good science, and therefore should remain open especially since they are relative inexpensive relative to the cost of new facilitie. Additionally, since the new facilities won't be available for a decade, there will be a painful gap -- especially in training future astronomers to use the new facilities when they come online -- if telescopes are closed now.

The procedure by which these decisions are made is complicated. The relevant funding source is the National Science Foundation, which is funding agency (full disclosure, I am currently being paid by the NSF, and this radio show is a direct result of their financial support), which makes decisions based on the recommendations of panels of Astronomers on what is required to do the best science in the future. There are many more examples of this problem, with the Arecibo & VLBA vs. ALMA debate going on now.

What do you think? Do you think a high-expense / likely high-reward versus a lower expense / possible high-reward but most likely smaller steps is the correct approach for Astronomy? Discuss below...

Interview with Prof. Chromey

Sorry, for the late update (I know I should have done this earlier), but a mp3 version of my interview with Prof. Chromey of Vassar College which I aired last week is available here. I apologize in advance for the not-so-great sound quality. If you have any questions on what he said, please email me and I'll do my best to answer them.

I also hope to post a mp3 version of last week's show online soon...

Science Times special on Space Age

The New York Times today has a giant section devoted to discussing the "Space Age", including how much of a space age this period (post-Sputnik to now) has really been. It's pretty interesting, discussing a lot of the motivations behind the work done in 1960s, as well as what the future of space exploration might be and what countries could potentially lead it. What do you think the next steps should be? What role should Astronomical concerns/desires have in setting space policy, US or otherwise? This second issue was not discussed much in the Times today, so I'd be curious what you thought of it.

Time Change

Sorry to do this to you, but the time of this program has changed to Wednesday 7-8 AM. I know it's early, but what better way to start your day than learning the latest news about the night?

I hope to post summaries, and links to the interviews, after each show if you are interested.

Laser Ranging Information / Links

If you want to hear the full interview with James Battat (Harvard University) on the Apollo Lunar Laser Ranging Project, please click here. Also, for more information, please check out these websites:

• APOLLO Lunar Laser Ranging project: http://physics.ucsd.edu/~tmurphy/apollo/apollo.html
• International Laser Ranging Service: http://ilrs.gsfc.nasa.gov/

If you have any questions about this project, please post them below or email me and I'll do my best to answer them (or get James to since he is, by far, the expert on this subject).

Should we send humans to the Moon and Mars?

The recent documentary on the Apollo project "In the Shadow of the Moon" ends on somewhat of a sad note because the capability of human travel to the Moon has been lost since the end of the Apollo program - though China has plans to sent "taikonauts" to the Moon sometime in the next 10-20 years. NASA has recently started developing ways to not only return astronauts to the Moon, but also eventually send humans to Mars (and bring them back safely). This project will require much effort (aka money), and many scientists have worried that such an endeavor will prevent NASA from pursuing other projects, e.g. the Beyond Einstein program. Supporters say that this isn't necessarily the case, and even if it was, that sending people to other planets is such an important goal that it is worth the cost.

What do you think? Please vote in the poll to the left, and leave comments below.

First show!

The first show will be on Monday, September 17th between 4-5 PM! The basic outline of this program is:

• Discuss recently publish and announced Astronomical results
• Calendar of upcoming events in the greater New York
  
• On-air guest to discuss their research, outreach events, etc.
• Answering listener questions (please email me) and other features such as TV and movie reviews, trivia, etc.
  

I'll post more information on the first program as I figure it out. Please bear with me, and thanks a lot. Your humble host -- Yosi Gelfand