Engineers become dreamers at NASA Future Forum

With a panel of aerospace engineers set to discuss commercial space investments and their benefit to the nation at the NASA Future Forum Dec. 9 at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, one was prepared for some heavy number crunching and rocket science. Instead, the group of representatives of various firms involved in commercial spaceflight focused entirely on the intangibles of inspiration, innovation, and vision.

A great example comes from Sierra Nevada Space Systems, which named its space vehicle Dream Chaser. Mark Sirangelo, head of the company, talked eloquently about the appeal of the industry.

A panel discussed Commercial Space Investments and Benefits 

for the Nation at the NASA Future Forum Dec. 9 at the Museum 

of Flight in Seattle. L-R: Moderator Doug King, president and 

CEO of the museum, Phil McAlister of NASA, Gwynne Shotwell of 

SpaceX, Peter McGrath of Boeing, Mark Sirangelo of Sierra 

Space Systems, Robery Meyerson of Blue Origin, and 

Steve Isakowitz of Virgin Galactic. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“It’s being able to see something built and grow from nothing, from an inspiration,” he said. Sirangelo noted that the companies involved are full of dreamers, and used Seattle’s aerospace giant as an example.

“There was a Boeing. It was a family and it was a person like we are,” he said. “We’re individuals who believe in something and believe that we can make a difference and be able to change something in the future.

“That’s the personal inspiration for me, being able to do something that hasn’t been done in this way before, to be able to fly something that I hope to be able to fly in the next few years, and understand that this is something that we’ve designed and built and developed. There’s no better satisfaction than being able to take that dream and make it a reality.”

Most of the panel participants were of similar age to the author. I was born two weeks before the launch of Sputnik, so my life is the space age and as a kid I was fascinated by the race to the Moon. It is the reason I am interested in space and astronomy today. Everyone on the panel told a similar story. Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, said it’s important to remain interesting to the next generation.

“Space has to be cool. It has to be cool to be technical and enter into these kinds of fields,” Shotwell said. “Space is the best place to inspire children to do great things and study hard and focus on changing the world.” Her message to kids: “It’s OK to be a nerd!”

Peter McGrath of Boeing is a chip off the old block—his father also was an aerospace engineer—but he, too, took inspiration from Apollo.

The St. Nick on duty at the Museum
of Flight seems to have a preference for
the local aerospace company.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

“I would also say it was seeing somebody walk on the Moon,” McGrath said of his career motivations. “We need to create that next environment, somebody walking on the Moon, to really energize the next generation of aerospace engineers.”

“We’re a nation of explorers,” said Robert Meyerson, president of Blue Origin. “Space represents that next frontier. I believe that strong investments in science and technology will make us stronger.”

The engineers did get around to tackling some problems. Steve Isakowitz, chief technology officer for Virgin Galactic, said the cost of space flight is a big hurdle. He noted that technology is making a lot of things easier and cheaper; Moore’s law holds that computer power doubles every 18 months while the cost drops. Unfortunately, that has not yet translated to space.

“In fact if you look at the economics of space travel, the cost has either remained the same or even increased, depending on how you do the math,” Isakowitz said. “I think the challenge to the panel here is to change that, to create our own law. Perhaps every five years the price of space travel will be cut in half, so that more and more people will have the opportunity to enjoy space travel and allow us to push the frontier of space exploration.”

NASA of course remains the major player in the field, but Phil McAlister, NASA’s director of commercial spaceflight development, said it’s perfectly logical for the companies represented on the panel to help take us to space.

“For lower orbit, where the International Space Station travels, that’s a place that we’ve been many times over the last 40 years,” McAlister said. “So we feel like it’s time now to transition some of the responsibility for launching crew and cargo to low-Earth orbit to the private sector.”

McAlister also noted that having the private sector involved will provide a buffer of sorts to the vagaries of federal spending.

“If this commercial crew and cargo industry takes off we’re no longer dependent on just NASA’s budget going up and down,” he said. “The private market will spur these innovations, spur these opportunities, so when kids get closer to high school they’re going to see these opportunities. It won’t just be about NASA. The pie will be bigger.

“That’s why I believe this is the right path not only for NASA but for the nation.”

You can watch the entire panel discussion on the NASA TV video below.

NASA Future Forum panel discusses importance of technology andinnovation

Those looking for real-life applications of all of the cool technology NASA creates need look no further than cleaning appliances or one of the biggest fad toys of a decade ago.

“The computational power that was used to make an Apollo spacecraft successful is now embodied in a Furby,” said Dr. Ed Lazowska. “It’s not clear that this is the greatest social use for that technology, but it’s still a remarkable comment on what we’ve been able to do.”

This panel discussed "The Importance of Technology and Innovation
for our Economic Future" at the NASA Future Forum Dec. 9 at
 the Museum of Flight in Seattle. L-R: are Joseph Parrish and Robert
Pearce of NASA, Dr. Kristi Morgansen of the University of Washington,
Dr. Roger Myers of Aerojet, and Dr. Ed Lazowska, UW.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, was speaking as part of a panel about “The Importance of Technology and Innovation for our Economic Future” at the NASA Future Forum held Dec. 9 at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. He sees robotics as a major area of innovation in the coming decade.

“NASA has been a pioneer in robots in unstructured environments, where they have to be autonomous and they have to respond to unanticipated situations,” Lazowska said. “You see these in your home today in the person of the Roomba vacuum cleaner.”

“This notion of robots in unstructured environments working with us is going to be transformative in the next ten years,” he said.

Robert Pearce, NASA’s head researcher, says today’s jetliners are a prime example of how the agency’s work has made it out into common use. Instrumentation, wing and engine design, the shape of the planes, even the way the pilots work together all were born from the space agency.

“The DNA of everything that flies started at NASA,” Pearce said, though he noted one exception. “When you turn and go down into the airplane and you see all of those tight, cramped, uncomfortable seats—that’s not NASA.”

Joseph Parrish, who moderated the panel and is NASA’s deputy chief technologist, takes exception to the often-expressed view that the space agency is doing little more than blasting scarce tax dollars into space.

“We’re not actually packaging up a bunch of dollar bills into the nose cone of a rocket and firing it out to Mars, to be spent by Martians, on a prank,” Parrish said. “We’re spending that money on planet Earth, and in the process of developing the systems that we do send to Mars and to Jupiter and to Saturn and beyond we’re enabling things here on planet Earth. We’re creating high-technology jobs that in turn inspire new ideas and create and new ecosystems of supporting companies. Think of all the companies that support Boeing. Think of all the companies that are going to support this burgeoning commercial launch industry that NASA is helping to kick off.”

One of those companies is Redmond-based Aerojet. It’s executive director for electric propulsion and integrated systems, Dr. Roger Myers, says his company is working on better ways to get spacecraft from here to there.

“Today’s propulsion systems are pretty inefficient,” Myers said. “That means that you have to carry a huge amount of fuel, you have to launch a tremendous amount of propellant, to get beyond low-Earth orbit. It takes big, expensive, unique rockets to do that.”

“We have to change that paradigm,” Myers added. “If we’re going to explore deep space we need a balanced set of investments, in both the launch architecture, the way that we launch people and cargo, and also we need a parallel set of investments in deep-space transportation architectures.”

Lazowska said that a big problem with technological innovations is that the uses are seldom obvious.

“It’s often not clear at the outset what the real benefit of an innovation is going to be,” he said. “When people were working on the Internet, ARPANET, nobody was thinking about email or the web or ecommerce or digital media. It was for remotely using expensive mainframe computers. You see this pattern again and again.”

Lazowska said the concept of technology transfer is important but often misunderstood.

“The goal of university technology transfer is to put publicly funded innovation to work for the public good,” he explained. “People have to get over the notion that somehow you’re going to float the institutional boat on licensing revenues, and realize that the goal is to make our nation the world leader, and make our regions regions of innovation.”

You can watch the entire panel discussion on the NASA TV video below.

SpaceX flight to ISS announced at NASA Future Forum in Seattle

The NASA Future Forum held Dec. 9 at Seattle’s Museum of Flight was all about the approach of creating a new economy out in space, getting private enterprise to take over the work in low-Earth-orbit while the NASA plans for getting us out beyond the Moon to deep space. As if to underscore that point, NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver broke some milestone news during her keynote address at the forum.

NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver does a live NASA-TV
broadcast in the Great Gallery of The Museum of Flight in Seattle
Dec. 9. Garver was in town for the NASA Future Forum.
Museum of Flight photo by Ted Huetter.

“We have set the target date for launch on February 7 next year for SpaceX’s second commercial orbital transportation services (COTS) demonstration,” Garver announced. “Pending all the final safety reviews and testing, SpaceX will send its Dragon spacecraft to rendezvous with the International Space Station in less than two months.”

It would be the first commercial linkup with the space station.

Garver noted that NASA has invested some significant seed money, about $800 million, in COTS for getting crew and cargo to the ISS. The February mission will give SpaceX the chance to show what it can do.

“It is the opening of that new commercial cargo delivery era for ISS, and it’s great news for NASA and SpaceX together,” Garver said.

Garver said the new approach makes sense. NASA’s gig has always been to learn the unknown and create knowledge and technology. LEO is hardly a mystery any more, and private companies are demonstrating that they can do it. She adds that if the private sector and competition can lower launch costs, it will leave more resources for the science.

“We’re here to learn from each other, just like we have for all of these years, how we can more effectively advance personal and commercial space flight, how we can more effectively transition the technologies that we develop at NASA to the private sector to create those high-paying jobs and open up endless possibilities for economic growth,” Garver said. “Together we are truly developing an industry that until recently had been largely science fiction, but now it stands poised to open the new frontier, that next chapter in human space development.”

Photo: Greg Scheiderer

Commercial space transportation already is a significant industry. In 2009, according to Garver, it generated $208 billion in economic activity in the U.S., employing about a million people who brought home $53 billion in wages.

She disagrees with the notion that the end of the space shuttle program was some sort of signal that the United States was no longer in the space game.

“Our job is just beginning,” she said. “The excitement and adventure is just beginning, and the opening of the space frontier is just beginning.”

She said the agency fully embraces the approach and NASA’s agenda: “Investing the nation’s valuable tax dollars to assure a healthier, more competitive industrial base that advances technology, provides more scientific benefit, and expands humanity’s presence farther than ever before while creating new markets, new industries, and new jobs to enhance our national security and our economic future.”

NASA has always had partners from the private sector, and Garver referred to the aerospace industry as a community.

“What we are trying to do is have our whole community gain a competitive advantage, moving out faster on this ambitious new direction that our nation’s leaders have given us,” she said. “Developing new technologies, developing partnerships, providing opportunities for competition and innovation, and looking for ways to get the most mileage out of all of the hard work over the decades that this community has invested in the fields of engineering, science, aeronautics, and technology.”

“This is what will inspire the next generation.”

You can watch Garver’s entire talk on the NASA-TV video below.

Seattle Museum of Flight gets Soyuz capsule from Simonyi

The new Charles Simonyi Space Gallery at Seattle’s Museum of Flight has landed a cool new artifact: the Soyuz-TMA-13 reentry module that brought Simonyi back from a space tourist trip to the International Space Station in 2009. The announcement was made this morning at a ceremony naming the new space gallery for the high-tech pioneer and philanthropist, who kicked in $3 million of the $12 million cost to build it.

Charles Simonyi returned to Earth from the International Space
Station in this Soyuz capsule in 2009. He's obtained the vehicle
and given it to the Museum of Flight on a long-term loan.
Photo: Space Adventures.

“The naming of the space gallery is a great honor for me and for my family,” said Simonyi in a news release. “I have the highest regard for the Museum of Flight and now that we are at the threshold of a great expansion of civilian spaceflight, I fully support the museum’s efforts to engage the public on the issue of space exploration with a focus on civilian space: past, present and future.”

The gallery was built as part of an effort to convince NASA to retire one of its space shuttles to Seattle. That hope was scuttled last spring, but the museum was awarded NASA Full-Fuselage Trainer as a consolation prize. The FFT, in which all shuttle astronauts trained for their missions, the Soyuz module, and other artifacts from Simonyi will be the centerpieces of the new gallery’s permanent display, expected to open in late spring.

Visitors to the museum can check out a new temporary exhibit that opens on Saturday. Many space-themed activities are on tap.

“This imposing new Charles Simonyi Space Gallery could not have become a reality without Dr. Simonyi’s continued support for The Museum of Flight and his vision about what our future can hold,” said Doug King, President and CEO of the museum. “While we are grateful for his monetary contribution, we truly named the space gallery in honor of Charles to recognize his commitment to aerospace education and his tireless enthusiasm for inspiring the next generation of space explorers.”

Local editor recognized for work on astro newsletter

Vicki Saunders, editor of BPAA Quarterly, the newsletter for the Battle Point Astronomical Association of Bainbridge Island, recently received fourth place recognition from the Astronomical League in the competition for the Mabel Sterns Newsletter Editor Awards. It’s the third time in the 14-year history of the awards, named for the AL’s first newsletter editor, that BPAA has placed. Saunders received honorable mention in 2006, and Bill and Anna Edmonds took fifth place in 2002.

Mabel Sterns, above, was the first editor of
the Astronomical League newsletter, and now
the league's award for newsletter excellence bears
 her name. Vicki Saunders of the Battle Point
Astronomical Association on Bainbridge Island took
fourth place in this year's awards.
Photo: Astronomical League.

Northwest astronomy clubs have not been all that well represented in the Sterns Awards. Rose City Astronomers from Portland took first place back in 2007 with the Rosette Gazette, edited by Larry Deal. Seattle Astronomical Society‘s Webfooted Astronomer, edited by Laurie Maloney, took a third in 2001, and Kathleen Higgins took second in 2002 for the Boise Astronomical Society newsletter.

The awards have a fairly rigorous nomination process, and Saunders noted that the recognition came despite the fact that she ignored one of the league’s strong suggestions, and that was to include the AL logo, preferably on the first page! The judges, former newsletter editors as well as editors of The Reflector, the Astronomical League magazine, apparently ignored that omission in their deliberations and recognized Saunders’ outstanding publication.

As a former editor of The Webfooted Astronomer, I recognize the challenge of putting out a good product month after month. It’s tough to find or create enough content. BPAA president Stephen Ruhl’s nominating letter was quoted in the AL Reflector in praise of Saunders’ work: “Vicki’s efforts create a newsletter that meeets the needs of the association and that draws the community into astronomy and the BPAA. It is the glue that holds our local astronomical community together.” The winter 2011/12 issue is a good one, with seven feature articles created by club members.

Submissions for the 2012 Mabel Sterns Awards are due by March 31. Complete information about how to apply is on the AL website.

Congratulations to Vicki Saunders, and hats off to all of the astronomy club newsletter editors out there who keep their members informed and engaged.

Jupiter as a procrastination tool

Many of us who live in Seattle and who have somehow developed an interest in amateur observational astronomy anyway, despite the city’s persistent cloud cover, have come to see squandering a rare cloudless night as the eighth deadly sin. Personally, I think it’s worse than most of the others, except maybe wrath.

Jupiter tempts otherwise hard-working book reviewers to drag
 the telescope out of the basement for a look on rare clear nights
 in Seattle. This photo is a Cassini shot of the King of Planets.
 The black dot is the shadow of Europa. Photo: NASA.

Thus was created a major moral dilemma this evening. Earlier in the day I finished reading a book about which I’m writing a review for Arches, the alumni magazine at the University of Puget Sound. (Some of my articles for the mag have actually been about space and astronomy.) I’d finished going through my notes and sketching out an outline for the review, which I’d planned to write this evening. I emerged from my basement office around 6:30 for a walk to the grocery for provisions for tonight’s dinner. Lo and behold, the clouds had mostly cleared, it was already good and dark, and there was a lovely crescent Moon out with Jupiter shining as a beacon, high in the southeast sky.

How is a person supposed to write a book review under such adverse conditions?

I had about 40 minutes to weigh the options, about the time it takes to walk to the store, pick out a good steak, find a nice cheese for the appetizer, check out, and walk home. Stick to my guns and write the review? Or put it off until tomorrow, when Jupiter won’t be such a temptation. And maybe I should write a blog post about this deep inner conversation with myself.

This did not turn out to be a difficult choice. As I type this, the telescope is cooling down out back on the deck, an already chilled martini sits on my desk next to the computer, the potatoes are baking in the oven, and after dinner I’ll bundle up and watch the fascinating clockwork of Jupiter’s moons and see how much detail I can tease out in the belts and bands of the King of Planets.

Interestingly enough, even the slightest notion of clear nights gets the interwebs all abuzz around these parts. The promising forecast for the weekend has the Seattle Astronomical Society Google group gearing up for an event that seems more rare than an asteroid passing by Earth with the distance of the Moon’s orbit: a monthly public star party that ISN’T cancelled because of weather. The society has these scheduled into perpetuity—every Saturday nearest the first quarter moon. I would guess that only a handful each year actually happen. Club members have grown so pessimistic about star party weather that most volunteers routinely schedule normal Saturday night stuff, movies and dates, and if it’s clear outside baffled members of the public show up and the outreach isn’t reaching out.

The star parties are on the docket for this weekend, at Green Lake and Paramount Park. We’ll see if the weather holds. If it rains, maybe I’ll write some book reviews.

Battling the giggle factor in the search for extraterrestrialintelligence

Dr. Bernard Bates is fascinated by the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but acknowledges there’s a certain “giggle factor” about the endeavor even as 21st-Century observatories discover planets in orbit around faraway stars on an almost daily basis. Bates, astronomy instructor at the University of Puget Sound, gave an informative and humorous talk this week titled, “The Quiet Sky: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” The event at the Swiss Pub in Tacoma was part of the Science Café series presented by the Pacific Science Center and KCTS9 television.

SETI is listening, but is anyone talking?

Surely part of the giggle factor comes from a half century of listening for electromagnetic transmissions from ET without hearing a peep. Bates said as technology improves so does the hunt, and suggests we give it another 40 years or so.

“If Moore’s law [about rapidly doubling computer power at lower cost] continues, if we don’t stumble upon someone by 2050, we’ve done something wrong,” he said.

That something could be in the design of the experiment.

“The worst assumption we made was that somebody is out there transmitting,” Bates said. “Someone would have to come up with funding on another planet to just send out signals for no apparent reason for a long time.”

Perhaps cash-strapped governments in other systems decided it was cheaper to just listen. Earthlings, on the other hand, have been broadcasting for a little over a century, and the original transmissions of Gilligan’s Island are now crackling out near Theta Boötes. Bates said if we were out there we would figure it out.

“We are really good at what we do. With the technology we have right now, we could find ourselves a quarter of the way across the galaxy,” he said.

It has been 50 years since Frank Drake cooked up the equation which now bears his name as a device for thinking about the factors that affect the chances of intelligent, radio-beaming civilizations appearing around the galaxy. In 1961 all we had for the seven variables were wild guesses. But now we have a pretty good idea about the astronomical variables: the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars with planetary systems, and the number of planets in each system that could support life. That part of the Drake equation suggests there should be 10 civilizations in the galaxy that are emitting electromagnetic signals. Bates said we’re still a little fuzzy on the rest of the variables.

“All of those cannot be incredibly small probabilities, because we’re here,” he noted, so the final answer has to be at least one. “But we just don’t know. Each of those variables represents an area of active research in different disciplines.”

Why all the fuss about SETI? Bates said his nine-year-old daughter drove the point home when she observed recently that she never sees two of anything. There is either just one, or there are many. Bates thinks that may go for extraterrestrial life, too.

“If we find a second genesis within the solar system that means there are probably a lot of them,” he said. “It’s hard to believe that there would only be two examples of life originating in the entire galaxy.”

Bates thinks most of the people working in the field believe there is at least simple life out there.

“It’s complex life that is hard,” he said. “Intelligence might be something that is so rare or so hard to come by that it never appeared again. There might be so many little accidents that had to happen in order for intelligent life to appear that we’re just it.”

Bates thinks we should keep at it, even if we don’t have a clear signal from another civilization by 2050.

“In the end, the worst that could happen is that we just give up and say, ‘OK we’re it. There’s no one else out there to talk to.’”

You can view the entire talk by Bates on the KCTS9 website.

Sobel talks about A More Perfect Heaven

Just as the solar-system-changing work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres by Nicolaus Copernicus took more than 30 years to get from its first writing to actual publication, Dava Sobel’s new book about Copernicus, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos has been in the works for a while.

“I’ve been dreaming of writing a play about Copernicus for a long time,” Sobel said during a talk at Town Hall Seattle Wednesday. “Actually since 1973. That was the 500th anniversary year of his birth. I remember reading an article in Sky & Telescope—I still have the issue with his picture on the cover—and it told this wonderful story about how Copernicus had come up with this idea of reordering the heavens.”

Sobel related that Copernicus had laid out the basics of his heliocentric model of the solar system, written about it to other scientists, and said that he was at work on a big book that would explain everything. Decades went by, however, and the book never appeared.

“Toward the end of his life a young genius arrived and talked him into publishing,” Sobel said. “I remember thinking, ‘That must have been some conversation.’”

The “young genius” was German mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus, who had come to Poland to study under Copernicus, and Sobel’s imagined conversations between the two form the basis of her play around which A More Perfect Heaven is written.

Religious politics of the time made the pairing especially unlikely. Copernicus, in addition to being an astronomer, math whiz, doctor, lawyer, economist, and diplomat, was a cleric in the Catholic Church—his uncle was the local bishop. Feeling the pinch of the burgeoning Protestant Reformation, the local diocese had evicted all Lutherans from the area. Rheticus was as Lutheran as they come, a student of Philipp Melanchthon and a professor at Martin Luther’s University of Wittenberg. His study with Copernicus had to be a covert operation.

Rheticus turned up on Copernicus’s doorstep in May of 1539. On the Revolutions finally hit print in 1543. Copernicus died shortly thereafter. He never knew the praise it received or the controversy it stirred up.

“They printed that book which changed the way people thought about the structure of the universe at a time when people thought you couldn’t discover things about astronomy of that magnitude,” Sobel said. “The only way you could know those kinds of things was by divine revelation. That book got Galileo in trouble.”

Interestingly, Sobel noted that On the Revolutions was never actually banned. The church could hardly burn it after using it to make the calendar more accurate and preventing Easter from slipping into summer. The book instead was listed on the Index of Forbidden Books as “suspended until corrected.” Recent studies of still-existing copies have found that few owners wrote those corrections into their volumes.

Sobel said the play within the book has received mixed reactions from readers.

“There have been some reviews that really liked the idea,” she said. “Some people have found the play the best part of the book. Others have said, ‘The book is really good. What is that nonsense doing in the middle?’”

Wednesday’s reading featured a staged performace of parts of the play by two outstanding Seattle actors, Hans Altweis and Darragh Kennan. The reading was well received by the audience, as Sobel said it has been on the few occasions they’ve done such a performance.

“When people can experience the play as you have tonight you can see what how it might add to an appreciation for Copernicus,” she said.

It’s difficult to overstate his impact. As Sobel read from the conclusion of A More Perfect Heaven:
“Every time the Kepler spacecraft currently in orbit detects a new exoplanet around a star beyond the Sun, another ripple of the Copernican Revolution reverberates through space.”

The world's biggest Foucault pendulum

The world’s biggest Foucault pendulum has been within an easy day trip of Seattle for more than 20 years. Despite being a frequent visitor to Portland, Oregon, I never knew about this wonder of the Rose City until I stumbled upon it this week.

The world’s largest Foucault
pendulum swings inside the north
 tower of the Oregon Convention
Center in Portland.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

I was in Portland for the annual conference of an organization called Net Impact. The gathering was held at the Oregon Convention Center, distinctive and noticeable from all over the city for its twin, 320-foot glass spires. Hanging inside one of them is “Principia,” a Foucault pendulum that swings 20 feet above the convention center floor from the end of a 70-foot cable.

OCC claims to be the largest convention center in the Northwest, and “Principia” is part of the center’s art collection valued at more than $2 million. As a testament to the size of the building, I hadn’t even seen the pendulum until the third day of my conference. It was way around the building and up another wing from where Net Impact was meeting. I likely would not have seen it at all had I not opted for a nice long walk after lunch on Saturday.

A bird’s-eye view of “Principia,” the
Foucault pendulum at Oregon Convention
Center. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

There’s some disagreement about the weight of the 36-inch diameter sphere of the pendulum. A plaque near the installation says it weighs in at 750 pounds, but the website of the artists who built it, Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel of New York, puts it at 950 pounds. At any rate, it is big and heavy. The pendulum swings just above a suspended gilt crown 40 feet in diameter. The blue terrazzo floor is spectacular, inlaid with brass rings and colored stone planets that depict a fantasy solar system. It was all installed in 1990 when the Oregon Convention Center was first built.

I shot a quick video of the pendulum with my iPhone camera, and that’s posted below. You can get a much better-quality look at it on the convention center’s 360 tour. It’s a flash feature and the link doesn’t go directly to the Foucault pendulum. When you get there select “exhibit spaces/Exhibit Halls A and B – Pre-function lobbies” from the green tab in the menu on the left of the page. And you can find a bunch of photographs that are a bit better than mine on the OCC Flickr page.

It’s pretty spectacular. Definitely worth a look the next time you’re in Portland.

Making peace between science and faith

Conflict between faith and science is a popular narrative, but Dr. Jennifer Wiseman isn’t buying the story line. Wiseman, senior project scientist for the NASA Hubble Space Telescope Program, spoke last week at a forum on faith and science at Seattle Pacific University.

Dr. Jennifer Wiseman doesn't find faith
and science to be in great conflict.
“Science can give us a better understanding
 of ourselves and our place in creation.”
Photo: AAAS.

“I don’t think that through traditional scientific study that we can suddenly prove the activity of God,” Wiseman said during a keynote address at SPU’s Day of Common Learning. “I don’t even think that’s a positive way to do science. But I do think that if one is inclined to faith in God, for reasons that I think are well founded, you can learn something about the nature of God by looking at the nature of nature.”

Wiseman is well versed in the dynamic as director of the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She sees three basic models for that dialogue.

The conflict model holds that science and faith are incompatible. Science tells us what can be measured, while religious belief is superstition that relies on faith without proof. The contrast model finds little overlap, as faith and science are pursuing different questions. In the contact model the two sides learn from and inspire each other. It’s the last two models that Wiseman, a Christian, follows personally.

“Science is focused on the natural world. Science tells us how things work in terms of physical cause and effect,” Wiseman said. “Our scripture and our faith focus for the most part on the bigger, even more important questions: Why? Is there a purpose? Who? Is there a God? What does God want of me? How should we live?”

When Wiseman talks about the amazing discoveries in astronomy, God is there. She refers to stars as God’s factories for creating heavy elements, and to gravitational lensing is God’s magnifying glass. But while she finds in science the inspiration for praise and worship, she says that religion doesn’t color her eyepiece or alter scientific fact.

“The beauty of science is that it shouldn’t matter what your faith is,” she said. “I do science experiments with colleagues from many different faiths and cultures, and we all come to the same scientific conclusions. If we don’t, we look into the science and see who’s doing the wrong kind of analysis. Do we have the same philosophical conclusions after we get the scientific conclusions? Not necessarily. That’s when you get into these other non-scientific but important questions of is there evidence for God’s beauty and handiwork and what’s our role in life.”

Wiseman acknowledged barriers for understanding between faith and science. She said lack of good science education can make it difficult for some to find the relevance of science, that it can be tough to disentangle political views from science, and that some theologians are driven into a tizzy by the notion that there may be life elsewhere. Natural disasters also often prove to be a stumbling block.
“Plate tectonics allows life to thrive and our atmosphere to be refreshed,” Wiseman noted. “But say that to someone who has experienced an earthquake. They’re not going to say, ‘Praise God for plate tectonics.’”

“We don’t quite understand the mysteries of how the natural processes of the world that can bring so much good can also bring so much suffering, and that’s a major impediment to faith in God for many people,” she said.

Wiseman spoke glowingly of Hubble and the volumes of data and images it has produced both for scientists to study and for people to enjoy. She said she often gets questions about whether gazing out into the cosmos is worth the expense and effort, given the challenges we face at home on Earth.

“We need a balance between addressing the difficult problems on our planet while also inspiring people and looking out into the big picture of what it means to be human,” Wiseman said.
“Science can give us a better understanding of ourselves and our place in creation.”

MLO intro in Seattle

A promising new weapon against light pollution will receive a formal introduction at an event in Seattle Wednesday. Nancy Clanton, a board member of the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) and member of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES), will present a workshop about the Model Lighting Ordinance (MLO) at 10 a.m. October 26 at the Lighting Design Lab, located at 2915 Fourth Avenue South in Seattle.

A workshop on the IDA/IES Model Lighting Ordinance
will be held Oct. 26 at the Lighting Design Lab in Seattle.

A task force of the IDA and the IES spent seven years hammering out the details of the model lighting ordinance. It is intended as a guide for environmentally responsible outdoor lighting, and was designed to help municipalities develop outdoor lighting standards that reduce glare, light trespass, and skyglow.

Clanton, who co-chaired the task force, says the process took so long in part because the two organizations started with different sets of goals.

“It wasn’t even a compromise,” she said of the final version of the MLO approved this summer. “We actually blended the goals together and got a really good ordinance that addresses everyone’s concerns.”

The stars aligned to bring this rollout of the MLO to Seattle, according to Scott Kardel, public affairs director for the IDA.

“We’ve chosen Seattle to be the first site partly because Seattle and the Pacific Northwest is a progressive, happening area where people are interested in things like energy conservation,” Kardel said. “Also we have a very active chapter of the IDA, Dark Skies Northwest. It’s a good combination of being able to have our local chapter involved in promoting the event but in an area where we think it has a good chance to have good reception.”

Clanton said the four-hour workshop will give participants a lot of good information about the MLO.

“Here’s what it is, here’s how it was developed, and let us show you some examples of how it could be applied,” was her quick outline of the agenda. “It’s going to be an introduction, answering questions about the different parts of the MLO, and an encouragement for people to bring it to their cities and communities and start looking at adoption.” She noted that the workshop would be useful for city planners as well as for interested advocates who want to learn how to bring better lighting ordinances to their communities.

Clanton said that the city of Plymouth, Minnesota adopted an early version of the Model Lighting Ordinance, which was a big help as they worked through the process. Now Anchorage may be about ready to go to work on adopting the version approved this summer. Both she and Kardel noted that often cities will plow ahead on their own with lighting ordinances, using information from the IDA website, but not telling anyone or availing themselves of the association’s technical expertise. Clanton added that the MLO is not a product that’s ready to adopt off the shelf, but more of a template.

“The model lighting ordinance is supposed to be the technical part of a standard lighting ordinance,” she said, adding that they’ve included placeholder language for intent and the like, but that each community should customize the MLO based on its particular needs. “We had to write this ordinance as if it were a small village or New York City.”

Sky glow is a big deal in Tucson, with Kitt Peak, Mount Lemmon, and Mount Graham observatories in the neighborhood. Kardel said that Tucson, also home base to the IDA, is a prime example for us that lighting ordinances work to curb light pollution.

“We’ve had a big increase in population over the last several decades but have been able to hold on to the level of sky brightness, even with more people and more houses and more lights in the area,” Kardel said. “A good ordinance can do a good job to either hold on to what you have or make things better.”

Clanton gave a shout-out to amateur astronomers for their diligence on these issues.

“The astronomy community has been such a wonderful, vocal voice on light pollution,” she noted. “Without them, I don’t think a lot would have been established. They have been the grass roots in all kinds of light pollution ordinances.”

Cost to attend the workshop is $75 and includes lunch. Sign up here or visit the IDA website for more information.

We can READ about the Sun

With old Sol threatening to vanish from Seattle skies until July, we can take some comfort in the fact that we’ll at least be able to read about our life-giving star. Bob Berman’s new book, The Sun’s Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet (Little, Brown & Co., 2011), is here in the nick of time!

Berman is my favorite columnist in Astronomy magazine because of the wry humor he injects into his essays. The book is more of the same: twenty chapters of solid science written in a highly approachable and often humorous way. Even the chapter names are funny. Chapter 11 is titled, “The Sun Brings Death.” Chapter 12 then proclaims, “The Sun Can Save Your Life.” It’s not a contradiction.

The Sun’s Heartbeat is more than just the usual account of stellar formation and life cycle, though that’s all in there, too. Berman includes much about the history of solar science, including interesting tales about how the distance to the Sun was determined and how sunspots were figured out. By coincidence, I was reading the chapter on neutrinos just as the news broke last week that scientists in Switzerland had clocked some of these particles whizzing at faster than the speed of light, much to the chagrin of Einstein’s ghost. The jury is still out on that particular discovery and whether we have to discard the Theory of Relativity.

Berman devotes a good chunk of real estate in Heartbeat to anthropogenic climate forcing, climate change or global warming to most of us, and the Sun’s part in how hot or cool it is on Earth. There’s a great discussion of our current mania for protecting ourselves from all exposure to sunlight, and whether the resultant lack of vitamin D is contributing to maladies such as autism and causing more cancer than the sunblock prevents. It’s quite a dilemma for those of us fair-skinned, freckly, burn-don’t-tan types.

The book is at its most personal and engaging when Berman waxes poetic about his favorite sun-related phenomena. “Nothing outside of a birth or an IRS audit can produce such sobbing or reverential silence like a total solar eclipse or the fabled northern lights,” he writes. He describes beautifully the profound feelings of awe he’s had with every solar eclipse he’s seen, ever since his first in March of 1970 in Virginia Beach. It’s enough to get you to circle the dates now of the next total eclipses that will cross the U.S., on Aug. 21, 2017, and April 8, 2024. The former will be the first such event in the U.S. in 38 years.

The Sun’s Heartbeat is informative and entertaining. Give it a look!

Hindsight and Popular Astronomy a good read

For those interested in the history of astronomy, Dr. Alan Whiting’s book Hindsight and Popular Astronomy is an interesting read. Whiting’s premise is simple: let’s take a close look at nine books, aimed generally at a non-scientific audience, published between 1833 and 1944, and written by some of the giants of the science. Let’s see how well they stand up today, and where there are mistakes, see how they happened and how a lay reader might have seen them coming.

While our vision is pretty acute in hindsight, the book is hardy a “gotcha” tome. Whiting is careful to point out that the authors include some of the great thinkers of astronomy, from Sir John Herschel to Sir James Jeans. In fact, he says that most of what Herschel wrote, for example, would stand up well in astronomy texts today. But there were a few whoppers.

The books Whiting examines in Hindsight are:

• A Treatise on Astronomy, Sir John Herschel, 1833
• A Popular Astronomy, Sir George Biddell Airy, 1848
• Outlines Of Astronomy, 10th edition, Herschel, 1869
• Popular Astronomy, Simon Newcomb, 1878
• In the High Heavens, Sir Robert S. Ball, 1893
• Astronomy for Everybody, Newcomb, 1902
• The Universe Around Us, first edition, Sir James Jeans, 1929
• Stars And Atoms, third impression, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, 1928
• The Universe Around Us, fourth edition, Jeans, 1944

Each book gets its own chapter in Hindsight. Whiting sets the stage, explains the context in which the book was written, talks about what the author got right, then delves into what went wrong and why. While he leaves out the heavy math, he does sprinkle in a few chapters on basic astronomical observation and calculation, astrophysics, and quanta and relativity, just to get everyone, if not up to speed, exactly, then at least a bit conversant in the new topics the writers had to deal with.

Going back to Herschel’s Treatise on Astronomy, as noted Whiting says Sir John got most of it right, but made some major mistakes in his discussion of Saturn’s rings. Herschel noted that the rings were solid, that an eccentric ring would be stable, that the rings were observed to be eccentric, and that a periodic disturbance would stabilize an otherwise unstable ring. All of these statements are wrong. Whiting notes that the errors come variously from unexamined assumptions, relying on the work of others that contained mathematical errors, and trusting your eyes too much.

Throughout, sometimes even the greatest of the scientists fell into such bad habits of being most willing to believe that which supports his own theory.

While accessible, Hindsight and Popular Astronomy is not exactly a beach read. It’s a scholarly book that’s going make you stop often and think. It also makes me want to read some of the original works Whiting examines. Most are available, largely in reproduction format; the links above go to Amazon pages for such books. Skulking about the library or used book shops may be of some help as well.

Whiting is a professional astronomer and an Honorary Research Associate and Visiting Astronomer with the Astrophysics and Space Research Group at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. He’s also a member of the Seattle Astronomical Society, and can often be found on open house nights at the Theodor Jacobsen Observatory at the University of Washington, or sharing observing insights on Through the Clouds, the SAS Google group.

BPAA puts on a good show

The Battle Point Astronomical Association has a great facility on Bainbridge Island and a dedicated and knowledgeable corps of enthusiastic volunteers. The combination adds up to a satisfying visit for stargazers both experienced and new to the hobby. I attended the association’s planetarium show and star party Saturday evening, Aug. 27, and had a marvelous time.

Helix House is home of the Battle Point Astronomical
Association, the Edwin E. Ritchie Telescope, and John H.
Rudolph Planetarium on Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

It all happens in Helix House, an old military radio facility in the middle of Battle Point Park on Bainbridge. The House is home to the Edwin E. Ritchie telescope and observatory, the John H. Rudolph planetarium, and association offices, a meeting room, workroom, and library.

Saturday BPAA president Steve Ruhl put on an engaging presentation about killer asteroids. Using the planetarium’s computer system, Ruhl illustrated the rapid increase in the numbers of known asteroids in our solar system, and the crazy orbits some of them take, including a great many whose orbits often cross that of Earth. He noted that a really big asteroid collision with Earth, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, is about a 1-in-65,000,000 year event.

Oh-oh. As Ruhl understated, that would be a bad day. He showed a PG-13 video imagination of such an impact, which would envelop the surface of our planet in flame within a day. That would be most unpleasant. The hope is that, as methods for detecting and tracking asteroids get more sophisticated, we will be able to spot “the big one” with enough advance notice to be able to do something to prevent it.

A couple dozen people attended the presentation. Ruhl used the planetarium in his talk, though noted that it was a little inadequate for the topic. It’s software includes data on about 500 asteroids, a tiny fraction of the more than 30 million such objects now known.

After the planetarium show many visitors climbed the three-story spiral staircase to get a peek through the club’s showcase, the Ritchie telescope, a 27-inch Newtonian reflector club founders built themselves. On this night, the great instrument was pointed at M 13, the great globular cluster in Hercules, a favorite object at star parties. It was an eye-popping view on a perfect night. The weather was marvelously clear, New Moon was just hours away, and the site has good horizons and a fair amount of protection from Seattle’s city lights.

At least half a dozen BPAA members had their telescopes set up for viewing as well, and stargazers of all ages lined up for looks at what was up in the night sky.

For those interested in learning a bit about astronomy, you can’t lose with a visit to Battle Point. Congratulations to the club for running a marvelous outreach effort. Watch Seattle Astronomy for information on their monthly star parties.

Stalking planetary nebulae from Seattle

Despite a recent run of decent weather in Seattle, the night skies have often as not been cloudy, thus limiting opportunities for astronomical observations. Thus when the stars aligned last night with crystal clear skies, an evening without work, and a reasonably alert stargazer, I dragged the telescope out into the back yard for the first time in a while to hunt for some planetary nebulae.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a slightly more powerful instrument
than your correspondent's 8-inch Dob located in a light-polluted
 urban back yard. The Saturn Nebula didn't look quite like this
from West Seattle; there was a hint of the color but none
of the detail of the object in this Hubble image.
Photo: STSci, NASA.

The targets, NGC 6818, the Little Gem, and NGC 7009, the Saturn Nebula, were chosen because they’re in prime viewing spots in the southern sky these days, and because they’re among the remaining few objects left to be checked off as I work toward the Astronomical League‘s Urban Observing Club recognition. The clubs are a good way to organize one’s observing. The Urban Club list includes 100 objects, all reputedly visible from light-polluted skies, defined by the club as places where the Milky Way is not visible with the unaided eye. I say “reputedly” because several of the galaxies on the list have been extremely difficult to see from my back yard. But, if it was too easy, what would be the point? View all 100 and you get a nifty pin, and your name is added forever to the club membership rolls.

Last night’s nebulae were both easy to locate but tougher to see. NGC 7009 was easier, spotted very near the star Nu Aquarii in the constellation Aquarius. It appeared in the eyepiece of my 8-inch Dobsonian as a greenish-blue blob, with details such as the “rings” that earned it its nickname visible. Higher power definitely revealed more nebulosity, but washed out the color completely. The Little Gem was a bit tougher, just to the west of a “peace sign” asterism in Sagittarius. A couple of magnitudes dimmer than the Saturn Nebula, NCG 6818 revealed just the slightest hint of color. The moon was not helpful with these objects, as it was just a few days past full and low in the east during the pre-midnight hours during which I was observing.

I visited a few old friends during the evening, including the double cluster and the Ring Nebula, before calling it a night a little before 1 a.m.

Seattle amateur astronomer has spectroscopy article in S&T

Seattle Astronomical Society member
Tom Field, creator of RSpec software
for spectroscopy, has an article on the
topic in the August 2011 issue of Sky
 & Telescope. Photo: Greg Scheiderer. 

Local amateur astronomer Tom Field is rapidly becoming the face of spectroscopy for the backyard stargazer. An article by Field, a member of the Seattle Astronomical Society and creator of RSpec spectroscopy software, has been published in the August 2011 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine. The article, titled “Spectroscopy for Everyone”, begins on page 68 of the print edition. Subscribers can view it online as well.

Field spoke about RSpec at a Seattle Astronomical Society meeting a year ago, and I wrote about that talk in my old Seattle Astronomy Examiner column. When he got interested in spectroscopy, Field found existing software difficult to use, prone to crash, not particularly user-friendly, and often in a foreign language. So, as a professional software developer, he set out to create something that worked better for the backyard astronomer, and RSpec was the result.

“It is a big thrill,” Field said of seeing the article in print. He got involved with S&T back in April, when magazine editor Dennis di Cicco interviewed him for the video below about RSpec and spectroscopy. The piece was shot at the Northeast Astronomy Forum (NEAF) in Suffern, New York, and published by Sky & Telescope in May. The current issue of the magazine also features an article and many photos from NEAF, one of the biggest amateur astronomy events in the country.



The lure of spectroscopy for Field is that you can do solid science and analyze the spectral signatures of celestial objects even from light-polluted back yards, and you can do it at pretty low cost. He says that doing spectroscopy also improves his understanding of astronomy; he finds he now reads the literature much more closely.

Authors vote 2-1 against Pluto

Authors of what I call the “Pluto Trilogy” vote 2-1 against planethood for the distant icy world. I just completed reading three recent books about Pluto: How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown, Caltech astronomer and discoverer of Eris; The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet by Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York; and The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference by Alan Boyle, science editor for MSNBC.com and author of Cosmic Log.

Research scientists sometimes turn out prose that isn’t accessible for the non-Ph.D. In How I Killed Pluto Brown, however, weaves an entertaining, witty, and sometimes poetic tale about the years of work that went into the discovery of Eris, a Kuiper Belt object thought to be just a little bigger than Pluto. One need not be an astronomer to appreciate the detailed account of the search for the “tenth planet”, nor a detective to appreciate Brown’s story of the controversy surrounding credit for the discovery of Haumea, now the fourth-largest known dwarf planet in our solar system. The interweaving of stories about Brown’s personal life during the hunt are endearing.

One could not have faulted Brown for holding out for full planet status for Pluto. That would have given him status as discoverer of the tenth planet. As a scientist, though, he believes Eris and Pluto have more in common with the thousands of Kuiper Belt objects than they do with the big eight, and is happy to have them thought of and categorized differently.

While Brown’s discoveries forced the hand of the International Astronomical Union on establishing its controversial definition of planet, it was Tyson and the Hayden Planetarium that inadvertently ignited the Pluto debate when Eris was not even yet a dim, slow-moving glint on Brown’s computer screen.

“I keep getting blamed for Pluto,” Tyson said at a speaking engagement in Seattle last month. “Eleven years ago we opened an exhibit in New York City where we grouped Pluto with other icy brethren in the outer solar system, and the nation’s population of elementary school children got pissed off.”

The Pluto Files is full of letters from those children and cartoons from various points of view in the debate. While the actual IAU debate and vote is almost an afterthought in Brown’s book, Tyson gives it fairly detailed treatment.

Tyson said that the planetarium didn’t set out to cause trouble, but simply considered, in the design of their exhibits, the recent discoveries of thousands of Kuiper Belt objects.

“Some of them have orbital properties that greatly resemble that of Pluto,” he said during his Seattle talk. “So Pluto has brethren out there. Pluto and they look more alike, than either they or Pluto look like any of the other eight planets, and we figured it was time for Pluto to own up to its actual identity.”

Oddly enough, the exhibit was up and running for almost a year without a peep before the New York Times finally took notice and ran a front-page article lamenting that Pluto wasn’t a planet, at least in New York. The mail barrage was on.

Boyle is the most sympathetic to Pluto. In my coverage of his talk here last year, I wrote, “Alan Boyle thinks Pluto should be considered a planet, but ultimately believes a lot of people are taking the question way too seriously.”

The Case for Pluto delves deepest into the IAU deliberations, and includes text of all of the various resolutions about the definition of planet. It’s a great read, full of humorous observations about the personalities involved and the gyrations people go to in order to come to grips with their Pluto issues.

All three books are engaging reads and highly recommended for those interested in Pluto and the solar system. They’re not likely to be the last words, either. Bloggers know that Pluto generates a lot of hits, and publishers are surely watching to see how many books the dwarf planet will sell.

UW observatory celebrates 10 years of outreach programs

For more than 100 years observers used the Theodor Jacobsen Observatory at the University of Washington to view planets and stars and other celestial orbs, but a decade ago the sphere most on astronomers’ minds was the wrecking ball, as the vintage telescope and building, now of no use for serious astronomical research, faced demolition. A spirited letter-writing campaign by alumni and friends of the observatory saved it. Wednesday, in celebration of 10 years back in use for public outreach, TJO held an open house with lectures, solar system tours, telescope making, and stories about the historic instruments housed there.

As is par for Seattle, it was a cloudy evening and there was little to see through the 1892 refracting telescope, which has a 6-inch Brashear objective lens and sits on a Warner & Swasey equatorial mount, save for the flashing red lights atop a couple of nearby construction cranes or the leaves of the trees that now block much of the scope’s potential field of view. Yet a modest but steady stream of visitors dropped by to check it out, and promised to return some night soon when the sky is clear. (Open houses are held at the Jacobsen Observatory on the first and third Wednesdays of the month, March through November.)

The Bamberg Transit Telescope is in the transit room of the
Theodor Jacobsen Observatory at the University of Washington.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

On this particular visit to the observatory I took interest in a piece of equipment I had never really had a look at before: The UW’s Bamberg Transit Telescope, which dates back to about 1904. Fortunately Alan Whiting, an astronomy Ph.D. and member of the Seattle Astronomical Society, was on hand to explain what the scope is all about. (Had Whiting not been on hand this paper by Katherine Blair gives a good account of the history and operation of the scope.) The German-made instrument sits in the observatory’s transit room, where doors can open on the ceiling and north and south walls. The setup was used to make precise measurements of the transits of stars across the meridian, which was how we kept our clocks set on the exact time until atomic clocks came about with their incredible precision.

The scope still looks cool, as you can see by the photo above at right, but closer examination and a peek through it reveal it is badly in need of a little TLC. In fact, all of the gear, and the building, and the Theodor Jacobsen Observatory, could use a little attention.

The facility is worthy. The second-oldest building on campus, it’s on the register of historic buildings, and the outreach is effective, drawing thousands of visitors each year. UW students provide lectures at the open houses, and volunteers from the Seattle Astronomical Society tell about the history of the telescope and treat visitors to a look through it when the skies are clear. The latest evidence that the effort is useful is the birth of the Protostars group, a mentorship program at the UW run by female astronomy undergraduate volunteers and geared toward 12-16 year old girls enamored with astronomy. Protostars will learn the basics of telescope operation, data reduction and gain public speaking skills.

An effort is under way to restore Dr. Jacobsen’s original office at the observatory, which scandalously is in use as a janitorial office. While certainly the custodians need an office, restoring this particular one to astronomy would be a fitting nod to the history, add 300 square feet of badly needed exhibit space, and contribute mightily to the outreach mission of the department. Supporters of the idea can write in here to make their opinions heard, or donate to the Friends of the Observatory or Friends of Astronomy funds to back these efforts.

A new place to look for habitable planets

While the Kepler mission continues to grab the headlines for finding planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, a University of Washington professor is suggesting we start to look around stars Kepler can’t see very well: White dwarfs.

Eric Agol, assistant professor of astronomy at the UW, wrote a paper published March 29 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, pointing out that planets in orbit around white dwarfs would be easy to detect, if they exist, and that those planets might well be hospitable to life.

Eric Agol, assistant professor of astronomy
at the University of Washington, suggests that
white dwarf stars would be worth checking
for habitable planets. Photo: UW.

Agol said an interesting coincidence piqued his interest in looking for planets around white dwarfs.

“The closest we typically see planets around stars is something like twice the Roche limit,” Agol explained. “It turns out that that distance for a white dwarf is .01 AU, and it’s right in the center of the white dwarf habitable zone.”

Stars like our Sun eventually become white dwarfs after going through their red giant phases and then shedding their outer atmospheres, leaving a hot, glowing core that has about 60 percent of the Sun’s mass but is about the size of Earth. Agol said if we look at white dwarfs any possibly habitable planets would be relatively easy to find.

“If an Earth were to pass in front of a white dwarf you would see a very deep dip due to the blockage of the light of the white dwarf by the planet, and that would be a signal that would be easy to detect from the ground,” he said. “You wouldn’t need to build an expensive space telescope.”

Agol describes his paper as “fairly speculative.”

“You need some mechanism of creating these planets after [a star’s] red-giant phase, or migrating them inwards from further out, and it’s not clear how often that should occur,” he said. He also allows that he may have been a bit on the generous side when penciling out the habitable zone around a white dwarf. The planets would likely be tidally locked to the stars, adding another complicating factor for life.

Agol figures that we might have to look at 20,000 white dwarfs to have a good chance to find a habitable planet. Since such planets would be so close to their stars, we wouldn’t have to look long, about 32 hours at most, to see a transit. Still, with that many observations, time adds up in a hurry.

Fortunately, Agol says there is a network of telescopes that may be up to the task. The Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network is a group about 20 one-meter robotic telescopes around the world, at sites in the northern and southern hemispheres. The key is that some of them are always in the dark, necessary to observe the same white dwarf for 32 hours. Even with this network, a white dwarf planet hunt would be an ambitious project.

“Even if you devoted those 20 telescopes to this sort of survey it would still take something like 15 calendar years,” Agol said. A wide-field scope could look at multiple stars at once, cutting down that time, and Agol says scopes such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, in which the UW is involved, could help speed up observations of candidate stars.

Kepler grabs the fame, but Agol says that mission really isn’t much use for such a project. For one, it’s only looking at a small patch of sky. And it’s only able to see stars down to about 16th magnitude.

“White dwarfs out to 100 parsecs are going to be more down to like 19th magnitude,” Agol said of the collection of stars the survey would require. “[Kepler] doesn’t really have the sensitivity to look at stars faint enough to survey white dwarfs.”