Description of September 3rd Radio Show: Galaxy Formation

I know it has long been available here, but below is a detailed description of the September 3rd radio show:

• Calendar of upcoming Astronomy/Science events in the greater New York City / Poughkeepsie area.
• Interview with Prof. Debra Elmegreen of Vassar College, available here.
• News: NASA's Mars rover Opportunity climbs out of Victoria crater (link 1, link 2); ESA's spacecraft Rosetta on track to rendezvous with asteroid (2867) Steins on September 5th (link) - rendezvous will be blogged live here; NASA announced new name for GLAST last week, now called Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, released first image of gamma-ray sky from this telescope (link); IBEX spacecraft continues to go through final tests before October 5th launch; space shuttle Atlantis moved to launch pad was scheduled for September 2nd, but delayed due to Hurricane Hanna; mock-up of NASA's Orion crew vehicle crashed during test of parachute system; NASA announced new Carl Sagan postdoctoral fellowships; NASA signs agreement with Challenger Center for Space Science to develop educational activities designed to get more students to study math and science.
• Wednesday Morning Astronomer (an Astronomer's take on the astronomy content of Gregg Easterbook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column): Gregg Easterbrook questions the wisdom of building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) since he says that its main purpose is to give work to physicists especially given its supposedly non-zero possibility of destroying the Earth. I feel that society spends a lot more money on other endeavors that poses much more of a threat to humanity. Also, he advocated the closure of Fermilab, arguing that it has produced a groundbreaking science result in over a decade and is expensive. Fermilab cost the US government ~$160,000/employee, not an outrageous sum - especially since almost all of it spent in the surrounding area and goes back into the local economy. Additionally, it has produced lots of good science during this period, and is critical for any future US involvement in particle physics. And no, the Earth being swallowed by a black hole would not produce a gamma-ray burst.
• Galaxy Formation: The current thinking is that stars formed first, grouped together into proto-galaxies, which merged into galaxies. However, creating the first stars has always been difficult to understand due to lack of heavy elements in primordial gas believed to be critical for the formation of stars today, as I discussed on August 6th. Recently, a computer simulation of star formation in the early universe was able to make proto-stars, critical in understanding how stars formed in this period, and what their properties (e.g. mass) were (link, article). As Prof. Elmegreen discussed in her interview, to understand how galaxies formed it is extremely important to detect and determine the properties of these proto-galaxies. The Spitzer space telescope, which operates at the Infra-Red wavelengths where most of the light from these galaxies is now detected, has been very important for this. Spitzer observations have found that the clumping of galaxies at earlier times (high redshifts) supports the sketch of galaxy formation discussed above, and have measured the mass of galaxies at early times where a Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) occurred and found they have masses much smaller than galaxies today too - also consistent with smaller galaxies merging to form bigger ones. In addition, to detect GRBs, it is possible to discover galaxies at high redshift by their absorption of light of even more distant quasars (link) or through gravitational lensing - a very massive object (like a galaxy cluster) between the Earth and the more distant galaxy will also focus the light from this distant galaxy onto the Earth just like a lense does, making it bright enough to detect (link)

. Thank you very much for listening, and hope you enjoyed it. As always, any feedback is greatly appreciated. Again, thanks a lot!