Go Hard-Core with Science!

By the time you read this, I'll be at the Romance Writers of Australia Conference 2019 in frigid Melbourne, AU. For the past month or so I have been so focused on getting my writing career together for this, that I haven't had any chance to science at all. AT ALL.

So, while I'm off being an author, you can get your science on.

Science is this beautiful, wonderful pursuit by the human race as they explore their world and the universe, from the smallest known particle to the largest mega-structure their marvelous minds can conceive.

Because you are a human being, do not be afraid to go hard-core when it comes to science. You don't need a fancy degree or even a knowledge of the vocabulary to dip in your toe.

But you must dip in your toe. Follow it with your foot, and then plunge right in. Do not make the mistake that oh-so-many online denizens do of learning one little factlet from some meme someone posted to their Facebook timeline and running with it, never more choosing to research deeper. That's just irresponsible and leads to issues like Flat Earthers, Anti-Vaxxers and the "Mobile Phones Cause Cancer" crowd.

There's a lot of hard-working, dedicated scientists out there who are doing the hard research. When they do, they publish their results so everyone can have access to them and see what their work is on.

And yes, you can read these papers as well (or their abstracts at least).  Abstracts are free. Sometimes the papers are behind paywalls. Sometimes they're free-and-easy access on arXiv.org.

DO NOT BE AFRAID TO LOOK AT THESE PAPERS! Do not think that they are limited to just scientists. You can read them too. If you come across a word you are unfamiliar with, the Dictionary is your friend. Consider it leveling up by learning new vocabulary. It's not that scientists are being deliberately obtuse; quite the opposite--they are aiming for precision. English is one of those beautiful languages with hundreds of thousands of words (okay, most of them obscure) that precisely define something. When a scientist chooses a particular word, it defines and constrains the  meaning to an exact definition.

So, how do you find these papers?  For astronomers and astrophysicists, we use a database called...

The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System

Here's a good place to start your search.

Say you wanted to see what's been published regarding Water on Mars in the past few years?

I put in a range of dates from 2016 up to next month. My keywords were "water on Mars".  I hit the search button.

These were my results. It pulled up 1,605 papers that had anything to do with water and Mars. Now, some of the titles make even my eyes glaze over, but I trawled through until I found something interesting.

I was torn between "Squeezing Marsquakes Out of Groundwater" and "Follow the Oxygen: Comparative Histories of Planetary Oxygenation and Opportunities for Aerobic Life". 

Hmm, which one to choose?  Best way is to read the abstract.

An abstract is kind of like a back-cover blurb that gives away the ending of the story. Most useful if you're trawling through looking for a paper about a particular topic.

After reading both abstracts, I chose to have a closer look at Follow the Oxygen.

Here's the abstract: 

Aerobic respiration—the reduction of molecular oxygen (O2) coupled to the oxidation of reduced compounds such as organic carbon, ferrous iron, reduced sulfur compounds, or molecular hydrogen while conserving energy to drive cellular processes—is the most widespread and bioenergetically favorable metabolism on Earth today. Aerobic respiration is essential for the development of complex multicellular life; thus the presence of abundant O2 is an important metric for planetary habitability. O2 on Earth is supplied by oxygenic photosynthesis, but it is becoming more widely understood that abiotic processes may supply meaningful amounts of O2on other worlds. The modern atmosphere and rock record of Mars suggest a history of relatively high O2 as a result of photochemical processes, potentially overlapping with the range of O2concentrations used by biology. Europa may have accumulated high O2 concentrations in its subsurface ocean due to the radiolysis of water ice at its surface. Recent modeling efforts suggest that coexisting water and O2 may be common on exoplanets, with confirmation from measurements of exoplanet atmospheres potentially coming soon. In all these cases, O2accumulates through abiotic processes—independent of water-oxidizing photosynthesis. We hypothesize that abiogenic O2 may enhance the habitability of some planetary environments, allowing highly energetic aerobic respiration and potentially even the development of complex multicellular life which depends on it, without the need to first evolve oxygenic photosynthesis. This hypothesis is testable with further exploration and life-detection efforts on O2-rich worlds such as Mars and Europa, and comparison to O2-poor worlds such as Enceladus. This hypothesis further suggests a new dimension to planetary habitability: "Follow the Oxygen," in which environments with opportunities for energy-rich metabolisms such as aerobic respiration are preferentially targeted for investigation and life detection.

Oh-kay... lots of big scary words if you're not an astrobiologist. But once you look them up, you'll see that Lewis, Vlada, Kevin and Woodward were being rather precise when they wrote the abstract.

Let's take bits of this apart and see what it really means:

"Aerobic Respiration..." - essentially, breathing oxygen, specifically, life forms breathing oxygen. While they gave a very detailed definition (and they had their reasons for it), essentially, the whole sentence is about how breathing oxygen is the preferred method of using oxygen in our metabolisms here on Earth.

"Aerobic respiration is essential..."  Advanced lifeforms like us and the cats in our laps need to breathe oxygen. Lots of oxygen on our planet means lots of life.  

"O2 on Earth is supplied by..."  photosynthesis. We all know that from Third Grade science. Plants make the oxygen we breathe.

But what if we could manufacture oxygen a different way? Do we need plants? Do we even need life, or can we source plentiful oxygen from a non-living method--an abiotic one that doesn't require a life's metabolism?  "...that abiotic processes may supply meaningful amounts of O2 on other worlds."  

The big question is, which came first? Oxygen or photosynthesis? If there's plenty of oxygen on another world produced abiotically (by a method not dependent on life, like a tree), could it be that this is what could allow multi-cellular life (like amoebae and rats and elephants) to be developed on other worlds? This is what the authors are thinking.

Until recently, space exploration has been dancing to the tune of "Follow the Water". Maybe it should be "Follow the Oxygen".

"This hypothesis is testable..." is music to every scientist's ears. Everyone loves a good idea, especially if it can be proven or disproven. Someone came up with an idea, and a way of proving it (or disproving). This is what makes science so groovy.  [end abstract]

Reference

Ward LM, Stamenković V, Hand K, Fischer WW (2019) Astrobiology, 19, 6   (Yeah, that's ApJ referencing style.)

Now, if only the article wasn't behind a paywall (or you are a university student whose library has e-subscriptions to Astrobiology magazine (Vol. 19, No. 6 is the issue this appears in). Maybe I should have gone for "Paleo-Rock-Hosted Life on Earth and the Search on Mars: a Review and Strategy for Exploration" instead. Here's a link to the full article. It's about rock-eating life bigger than a single cell. It happened on Earth a long time ago. Maybe it's also happened on Mars. "These findings suggest that rock-hosted life would have been both more likely to emerge and be preserved in a martian context," the authors say.

B is for a Picture of a Black Hole

Yes, Katie Bouman, you should be excited. You and the rest of your team who brought us this really cool science image.  A few other people who were involved are Sandra Bustamante, Feryal Ozel, Heino Falcke, and all these people from the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. Congrats, guys!

In case you've been living under a rock or off the grid, you will have heard the news of the first image of a black hole. It looks like this:

A direct image of the black hole at the core of galaxy Messier 87.

Papers linked at the bottom, for those who wanna go hardcore.

A black hole is a final object (greater than ~2M☉) that has collapsed down due to gravity, because there's no other force (like thermal pressure) to counter the gravity.

Theoretically, we've known about black holes since 1915-ish when Einstein had a few theories about gravity, and Karl Schwarzschild talked about the gravitational fields of mass points. Even the idea behind something so massive that even light cannot escape its gravity has been around since the 18th Century.

Are black holes a real thing? Yes. We know them by their gravitational influence, as well as a few other clues. Here's a couple of recent papers that cover a few things about one of the best-studied black holes, Sagittarius A*, in delightfully nerdish details:

• A geometric distance measurement to the Galactic Center black hole with 0.3% uncertainty
• Test of the Einstein Equivalence Principle near the Galactic Center Supermassive Black Hole

So yeah. Black holes, totally real, and we've known and studied them for at least a hundred years. Thing is, due to their nature, we haven't been able to take a picture of one.

It's hard to take a photo-graph of something that doesn't emit or reflect any photons. So, how did they do it?

In their reportings in the Astrophysical Journal, the team shared, "Einstein's general theory of relativity not only predicts the existence of black holes, but also provides a means to directly observe them. Photons can escape from near the event horizon via an unstable circular orbit, whose observational manifestation would be a bright ring of emission surrounding a dark interior black hole "shadow". The diameter of the shadow for a black hole...as seen by a distant observer is predicted to be...larger than twice the...radius of the event horizon due to light-bending effects...."

This method is only successful if: "(i) there are a sufficient number of emitted photons to illuminate the black hole, (ii) the emission comes from close enough to the black hole to be gravitationally lensed around it, and (iii) the surrounding plasma is sufficiently transparent at the observed wavelength."

And it was. I'm impressed.

(I can't believe I've not devoted an entire blog entry to black holes before! Bad astronomer! No cookie!) If you want to see more science content from  me on my blog, please comment below. I'm happy to oblige. If not, go buy my books and register your opinion that way.

Dr Katie gave a TED talk a couple of years ago about how one would go about imaging a black hole:

Do watch this video. She's so excited and passionate by the science. It's contagious.  I love her line, "I can't show you a picture of a black hole today [in 2017]." 

Well, Katie, you can now:

Papers here for those who want to go hardcore:

• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole
• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. II. Array and Instrumentation
• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. III. Data Processing and Calibration
• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. IV. Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole
• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. V. Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring
• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. VI. The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole

Never be afraid to go hardcore on science. Even if your gaze glosses over and your brain turns numb, don't ever let that deter you. Read enough abstracts, and eventually things will begin making more sense. Also, whuffie.

My Thesis has Taken Over My Brain

Some Random Thoughts...

Please send chicken nuggets.

The problem with a History of Astronomy project is that much of the original source material is print-only, and mostly out-of-print.  I live in Western Australia. Is eBay my friend? Time will tell.

This guy and I are supposed to be best buds for the next few months. But I'm not feeling the love.

Librarians and I are mates, and they're willing to help me, as much as they can.

I now have more library memberships and accompanying cards than a sane, reasonable person should have.

Look, a mango!

Yesterday my mother turns to me as we're walking out of the airport and says, "I just realised, I could have checked that book out of the library [where she lives] and brought it along for you."  Yes, you could have. Oh well.

Why do many critics of Sagan say, "Don't get me wrong; I am a fan. But..."

Professors are supposed to be your mates. Why aren't they helping more?!

A BA degree is a degree in BS. I am confident I will be able to spin words of some kind.

Remember to reference! (Kneale 2019)

This guy spent lots of money so the US Library of Congress could acquire Carl Sagan's personal papers.
I kid you not.

To a fiction author, twenty pages is a doddle. You can crank that out easily in an afternoon. For a MS thesis, 20 pages is a lifetime plus fifty years, with interest.

You might think print books are romantic. They are not. They are fickle, they are rare, they are forgotten and they have this funny smell that makes your nose itch. Also, many of them do not inhabit Western Australia.  Digital is an excellent way to go.  All my books are available in digital format.  God of the Dark is free. Go get your free ebook and leave an honest review somewhere useful.

Where are my chicken nuggets?!

This is the weather in Australia right now.

Is it morally reprehensible to mark a library book lightly with an erasable pencil?  It's morally acceptable for music scores. In fact, it's expected. Just be kind and erase your markings before returning the score. Every musician knows that.

If I wrote in the style of Sagan, would more people wanna buy my books?  

_____________________________
Her Grace's brain is being eaten by a thesis.

"The Influence of Science Popularisation: a Case Study of Carl Sagan"

Obituary: Opportunity Rover on Mars

Yeah, I'm crying. And you're crying too. Admit it.

Essentially, the last message Opportunity sent before going dark in June 2018. (credit: REDDIT)

On 14 Feb, NASA officially declared the Opportunity mission at an end.

XKCD made a joke about Oppy's long life.

You can't help but cry. For a mission with a life expectancy of 90 days, Opportunity became our hero for living and exploring for a good fifteen years.   Every day beyond that 90 was a beautiful gift. Nearly every day we got data. We're still analysing it. We're so lucky we got so much science from it.

Oh, the science has been marvelous! 

I did a major research paper in my Planetary Science class on water and Mars, and some of my data came from the Opportunity mission. So yeah, I'm crying. We spent some time at school together.

Back in June, Mars experienced a planet-wide dust storm, as it does from time to time. Oppy had weathered them before, but no guarantee that it would weather them again. Each time a dust storm came, we'd cross our fingers and hope-HOPE-hope that Oppy would survive.

NASA had been trying to contact Oppy for eight months, with no luck. So when the Martian weather cleared and, unlike other times when Oppy was able to keep calm and carry on, there was no reply.

NASA finally accepted that we would never again hear from Opportunity. Winter has come where Oppy lies, and some components weren't designed to last the bitter cold without its heater.

It's okay to cry.

Lots of grief has been expressed online. You're not alone.

Here, go learn more about NASA's Spirit and Opportunity missions. 

Some day humans may make it to Mars. (We're awesome like that.) If/when we do, I hope we get the chance, no the 'opportunity' to go lei some flowers on Oppy's camera stem.

Abby Garrett expressed it well.

What impact did Opportunity have on us Earth-side humans?  I think XKCD put it best:

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Her Grace is going to go cry some more.

Creepy or cool: planetary nebulae that look like eyes

Here are several pictures of planetary nebulae.  Many of them look like eyes staring back at you. Is this creepy or cool?  Feel free to comment below.

A planetary nebula (plural: nebulae) has nothing to do with planets. Astronomers are strange when it comes to naming things. Oftentimes, an object or phenomena gets named because of what it looks like (or what astronomers think it is), only to be waaay off base. Planetary nebulae got their name because they looked like hazy planets in gentleman scientists' early homemade telescopes. Fr'ex, the Saturn Nebula, which looks like the planet Saturn.

Really, planetary nebulae are the ionised gas clouds that got expelled at the death of a low-mass star. Towards the end of its life, a star puffs up in its red giant phase, only later to blow away all that matter, leaving the slowly cooling corpse known as a white dwarf. That matter expands through the interstellar medium, glowing brightly from the energy radiated from the white dwarf.  Planetary nebulae don't last long, often only a mere five to fifty thousand years or so.

The Hourglass Nebula is looking at you. (credit: ipod.nasa.gov)

The Helix Nebula is also looking at you.
This one is also known as the Eye of God.
(credit: Hubble Space Telescope)

The Cat's Eye Nebula is staring at you.
Did you use a can opener? (credit: The Stars and Planets)

Nebula ESO-456-67  is giving you the Evil Eye.
(credit: Sci Tech Daily)

This hazel eye stares right back at you, don't it?
(Credit: Hubble Space Telelscope)

This eye has a cataract. (credit: European Southern Observatory)

All hail the Hypnotoad! (credit: Observatorio de Sierra Nevada)

Science: Us Figuring Out the World

Hello random Internet user,

Chances are you are here because you read Natasha Hurley-Walker's excellent article "What is Space Made of? It's Complicated..."  It's really good, and not just because of my very simple explanation of the Periodic Table of the Elements for Astronomers.  (And here I was thinking you were here for my books.)

Anyhoo, astronomers really do classify the elements of the universe as Hydrogen, Helium and metals.  Everything that isn't H or He is called a 'metal'.  For those into etymology, this is rather ironic, as the word metal comes from the ancient Greek word métallon, which means mine or quarry, suggesting that metals were something that were found, not made, like wood or wool or fire. In Astronomy, H and He are 'found', whereas metals were made by stars, in one way or another.

Various elements do have certain significance to astronomers for one reason or another.

The  CNO Cycle  is a fun one, and the Lithium Problem is another. The first goes to show us how much we know about the Universe, while the second shows us how little we know.

Probably our most interesting use of the metals in astronomy is through the observation of spectral lines.  Astronomy is almost purely an observational science, with very, very little hands-on experience. Pretty much everything we know about the universe has come because the information came to us, usually in the form of variances in the EM spectrum. As energy moves through the universe, the universe acts upon it, either by bending it, dilating it, or absorbing/re-emitting it.

Matter in the universe tends to absorb or emit at certain frequencies. If we find spectral lines that we know match up with certain elements, then we know that element is present.

Each and every elements does have a particular significance, and we're quite grateful for that mere 1-2% of non-hydrogen and non-helium in existence, which allows us to learn so much about our universe.

But yeah, ask an astronomer about the periodic table of the elements, and they're all, Hydrogen, Helium, and.... everything else.

The spectrum of the Sun, showing absorption lines, demonstrating its metallicity.
The Sun is a Population I star, meaning it's rather metallic, aka, it's full of dirt.

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More into astronomy and not so much into Romance novels? I have posted astronomy posts, including an A to Z series about Astronomy.  Go ahead and read those.  Otherwise, go read my novels. I've got three more out in October.

NaNoWriMo Day 1 - Epiphany

Welcome to NaNoWriMo, that month of insanity where millions of authors all over the world attempt to create 50K of a novel. (If you're one of them, feel free to buddy up, though I will be mostly working and not so much socialising. I've got goals.)

This is my 15+ year of doing this.

Before I started this year, I vowed to myself I would play with voice. I'm not happy with my voice and want to enrich it. Put some thought into what kind of imagery I wanted, read a few really good flash fiction with voice and did the whole imagine pre-writing idealism to get in mind what I wanted.

Attended an official NaNo Write In on Wednesday night. Sat down and, with the goal of voiciness in mind, cranked out 3K words. Cranking out wordage is a doddle for me. But when I got home and re-read my stuff, I saw my usual dull voice had drifted back in, despite my best efforts. Drat. I'd rushed things.

Spent Thursday morning on a NoNo for NaNo: editing.

The thing with NaNoWriMo is that once you push into pure wordage, habit takes over. For those who don't have a writing habit, it's pushes your boundaries. But for me, with more than a million words under my belt as an author, sheer speed doesn't challenge me.  Currently voice is a challenge for me, and to play with that, one must slow down.

So I went back and edited. I examined each sentence to see what it did right, and what it did wrong. I analysed my word choices and structure. I recast several until they sang instead of sat there.

However, when I was done, I was much happier with my words. Subsequent wordage for the month will go forward not so much with a focus on quantity but quality. If it means I must slow down, then I shall slow down.

Oh, I'll be able to get my 50K in, no problem. Not my first rodeo.

First Lesson Learned: Focus on your true goal. You don't get a Grade 8 piano player stumbling over a B Major grand scale. It flows under their fingers. But only if you make the thumbs fall where they need to.

To aid in this, my reading for the month is "Daniel Deronda" by George Eliot. Talk about voice!

November is a busy month for me, with the end of the semester (applying for Hubble time!), ladyships' end-of-year concerts and Thanksgiving as well as NaNoWriMo. While I've been doing my best to read more indie authors, I'm finding they don't quite have the voice I'm looking for. I'll be putting them aside for the month for tried-and-true Classic literature.

Second Lesson Learned: the Classics are classic for a reason. Yes, many a high school student finds them boring and dull and difficult to read, but if you move your focus from the tedious plot and the depressing characters and look at the pure beauty of how words are being used, that is where the classic-ness is to be found.

______________________________
Her Grace is also pushing herself by hoping to reach 80K instead of the recommended 50K.

Alas, no #QueryKombat for me

Sad to say I didn't get into QueryKombat this year.

Oh well. Over three hundred fifty of us entered for a chance of 64 spots to battle for the attention of an agent.

Even though I didn't get in, I'm going to keep following, as I want to see what everyone else's queries look like.  If I am to be beaten, I want to be beaten by the best.

Meanwhile, I'll keep querying, because that's what you do until you run out of agents.


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Her Grace's week hasn't been all losses.  Her Astronomy project "Wet Mars, Dry Mars, White Mars..." receieved an HD (that's an A for those of you who don't know what a High Distinction is).

A to Z Challenge Reflection

(Apologies for the long post. I learned a lot.)

I learn new things whenever I do the A to Z challenge. I employed the lessons I learned last time, and it made for a better go-around this year.

What I Learned

1. Pre-planning. I pre-planned my theme and populated my alphabet. I then did my posts ahead of time (when I could, on my own time) and scheduled them to post on the correct day. This pre-planning really helped A LOT. Most of my posts were done by the end of March.
2. Audience. I thought about what audience I wanted to cater to, and this helped me focus my posts and have a consistency throughout. I wanted to make my posts interesting to an audience with varying levels of education. I tried to design them so people who didn't know much about astronomy could understand my concepts, yet be intricate enough to push those who had a bit more knowledge about the subject.
3. Consistency. I wanted a certain level of quality control, so you pretty much knew what you'd get from post to post. Again, I was able to pull this off through pre-planning.
   
   That said... the topic I chose is completely not relevant to my usual blog. My blog's about writing books generally and Romance specifically. So what topic did I choose?  Astronomy!! The two rarely cross paths (except in a novel of mine that's coming out next year). Why did I choose my topic?
4. Stand out. I wanted to stand out and offer something unique that the other AtoZers weren't offering. And while there were a few who tackled the same subject, none of them approached it in the same way I did, and that was good. I didn't feel I was duplicating anyone else's efforts. I thought if I blogged about writing,  I'd get lost in the crowd. Probably was right, as there were quite a few writers writing about writing. However, I might go back to that next year and pull a Frain.

A to Z Changes

Part of the A to Z Challenge involves reading others' blogs. This year the Challenge ran a few things differently--no Linky List! This was a boon and a bane.

Boon: No long list of people who'd signed up, then never bothered to blog. You only heard about the people who were being active, and could go straight to their posts.

Bane: Having to post EVERY SINGLE DAY to the AtoZ blog to let people know you had stuff up. I don't get online every day, so this became quite a pain. I wish one could schedule comments the way one schedules blog posts. Since most of my entries were completed ahead of time, it would have been nice not to have to get online every single day to promote my blog. Also, if I came across an interesting blog, and forgot to Favourite it, I'd have to trawl through the blog comments to find it again.

I'd love to see a combination of the old Linky List with the new Blog Comment format. Bring back the Linky List, but you can only get on the Linky List if you've posted an entry. Then, post a weekly Linky List blog post where, if we posted entries that week, we can list them. The pre-registering is probably too much

I was amazed at how many bloggers there were who couldn't figure out how to make a simple anchor tag work, even when shown how.

Also, the absolutely best way to make me scroll past a comment on the A-to-Z daily letter blog post? Posting this:

 . Here is my blog.
 . LINK

Nothing is more boring than that. At the very least post your theme. No, not your name, or even your blog's name, but your theme.  That's what I'm looking for.  Roslyn Core announced how she was cross stitching a Buffy the Vampire Slayer alphabet.  You bet your sweet bippy that got my attention! (No, I'm not a Buffy fan, or a cross stitch fan. But what a juxtaposition!)

What Worked and What Didn't from This Reader's Perspective

What worked for me was a blog that was regular-ish, that had a clearly defined theme or topic, and provided interesting content.

Regular posts is good, because nothing is more disappointing than to come back day after day to find nothing new. That's a good way to lose me.

A clearly defined topic is necessary. It lets me know what to expect on a blog. Now, some topics simply didn't catch my interest because I wasn't their target audience. But the few posts I read were well put together and if I was interested in that, I would have definitely stuck around to read more.

What definitely turned me off were the "personal" or "inspirational" blogs that chronicles someone's inner journey. A lot of people did these, and frankly, I found them very boring. Topics like these are excellent for an audience of one. For the rest of us, "You" are not a sufficiently interesting topic. I'm sorry. Blog entries like "Gratitude" or "Spirituality" only have impact for you.

I noticed there were quite a few story blogs as well, writers posting fiction. Author J R Vicente had a clever "choose your own adventure" style, where the commenters got to choose what the blog post would be for the next day. She gets points for that.

Most of the fiction blogs couldn't hold my attention because the voice wasn't compelling enough. Sometimes I'm not your audience, and sometimes your writing's not as good as you think it is. Fortunately, the more you write, the better you get. I would never tell someone to stop writing simply because they weren't good.

And then there were some story blogs that completely blew me out of the water. John Frain. John Frickin' Manuscript Frain. If you didn't read any of his AtoZ this April, go back and read it. If you've read NOTHING ELSE this month, go back and read John Frain.

Frain wrote a flash fiction story a day, with him as a character that got killed. Every. Single. Time. (or did he?)

I don't think I will forget that one for a long time to come.

Blogs I Enjoyed

It's always fun going through the different blogs and see what others have posted. Some of the more memorable blogs this year were:

• Sharon Himsl wrote about "Female Scientists Before Our Time" --ancient women, pre-industrial women, women from thousands of years ago. Doing science!
• Spies and Spying by Sue Bursztynski. Totally nifty if you like spy stuff.  
• Chris Votey put up some cool Character Astrology Profiles, which combined Greek and Chinese zodiacs to come up with some rather interesting character types. Not your grandma's newspaper horoscope.
• Megan Morgan's "26 Things to Hate about Writing".  Amen, sister. 
• Totally got involved in the story of Sandra Williamson's ancestor Martha Sarah Ellis. I love a good family history story.
• Sara Snider's Herbarium was also good, with mystic connections to plants. 
• Zalka Csenge Virág (posting as A Tarkabarka Hölgy) totally got her weird on with "Weird Things in Folktales".
• Ozzypip quilted her way through the alphabet.  Yes, quilt blocks have names.
• Sage also posted about Astronomy, though focused more on constellations and the stories behind them.  (Note: Jupiter's a jerk who can't keep it in his pants.)

I read one blogger, who was rather new to blogging, never mind the A to Z Challenge. No, she didn't post every day, and that was understandable. She wrote about being a single parent to a high-needs child after a bitter divorce. Hers was a deep story about a hard life and I'm glad I got to read it. But can I find it again? No. I want to know how her story ends.

There were a few others I popped in from time to time.  Overall, there were plenty of great blogs to read.

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Her Grace will now be crawling back under a rock, as May is a very busy month for her in the Real World.

A to Z - I'm done!

And that's all, folks!

Thanks for coming on a tour of the universe with me. I hope you learned something about astronomy and weren't too overwhelmed by the hardcore science.

The skies above us are a fascinating place, one I've loved for nearly half a century. I encourage you to go out and look up tonight. What can you identify that you couldn't a month ago?  Any new celestial favourites?

While this blog is mostly for me to ramble on about Romance and writing and reviews and my own books (Buy my books!), it's also a place to post about what I love. For the month of April, that was astronomy.

Never be afraid to look beyond the world you know and try something new.


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Her Grace shall always love the stars.

Z is for Zodiac

This isn't about telling your horoscope, but knowing where the Sun is at any particular time of the year. (Those born under the sign of Ophiuchus the Snake-bearer know that Astrology is not a science because nobody has been able to prove its reasoning through the scientific method.)

In Astronomy, there are thirteen constellations that reside along the ecliptic (the path the Sun takes through the sky year-round). This means as the Sun moves through the sky from month to month, it will be found within the boundaries of certain constellations.

Astrologically, the sky is divided into twelve "houses" of 30° each. In astronomy, the constellations of the astronomical zodiac is not so evenly divided, and we've thrown in one more constellation because the Sun does spend some time in one corner of it. The planets and the Moon also move within the ecliptic.

Because the Earth is tilted, the ecliptic doesn't match up with the equator except on equinoxes twice a year.

The red line is the path the Sun takes. The green line is the equator.

When it comes to measuring where stuff is in the sky, there's two axes of celestial coordinates: declination (DEC) and right ascension (RA).

Declination measures north/south in degrees: North (90°) to Equator (0°) to South (-90°).
Right ascension measures eastward from a point of origin (the vernal/spring equinox) in hours, with there being 24 hours in a full circle, due to the rotation of the Earth. This is because astronomers measure right ascension by timing when an object passes through the highest point in the sky, or the meridian. Each hour is about 15° in width.

Anything anywhere in the sky can be given a set of coordinates.

Looking at the star of Betelgeuse:  DEC +07° 24′, RA 05h 55m

This means Betelgeuse sits about seven degrees north of the equator, and on the spring equinox (21 March), it takes about five hours and fifty-five minutes before it reaches the meridian of the sky.

Let's look at the Zodiac astronomically.

Here's the actual map:

As you can see, the constellations take up different areas of real estate. Sometimes the Sun will spend as little as a few days in some constellations and several weeks in others.

Right ascension starts on the spring equinox and is also called the "First Point in Aries"... however, due to precession, the spring equinox actually lies in Pisces today!  Here's how much it's shifted over the past seven thousand years:

(A brief word about something called precession: the Earth wobbles on a long-term cycle of about 26,000 years, where her north pole points to different parts of the sky. (Polaris isn't always going to be the North Star.) Because of this, the constellations have shifted from where they were originally observed a few thousand years ago, and don't line up with the calendar we know and love today. Your astrological zodiac sign no longer corresponds with the constellation of the same name. Sorry.)

We'll start on the vernal equinox and have a look at all the Zodiac constellations.

Constellation:	Coordinates:	Sun enters/exits:	Time in constellation:
Pisces	RA: 1h DEC: 5°	12 March – 18 April	38 days
Aries	RA: 2h DEC: 15°	19 April - 13 May	25 days
Taurus	RA: 4h DEC: 15°	14 May - 19 June	37 days
Gemini	RA: 7h DEC: 20°	20 June - 20 July	31 days
Cancer	RA: 9h DEC: 20°	21 July - 9 Aug	20 days
Leo	RA: 11h DEC: 15°	10 Aug - 15 Sept	37 days
Virgo	RA:13h DEC:0°	16 Sept - 30 Oct	45 days
Libra	RA: 15h DEC: -15°	31 Oct - 22 Nov	23 days
Scorpio	RA: 17h DEC: -30°	23 Nov - 29 Nov	7 days
Ophiuchus	RA: 17h DEC:-30°	30 Nov - 17 Dec	18 days
Sagittarius	RA: 19h DEC: -25°	18 Dec - 18 Jan	32 days
Capricorn	RA: 21h DEC: -20°	19 Jan - 15 Feb	28 days
Aquarius	RA: 22h DEC: -10°	16 Feb - 11 March	24 days

Which is your favourite zodiac constellation?

What is your astrological zodiac sign, and what is your astronomical zodiac constellation (based on your birthday)?

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Her Grace is fond of Scorpius, because it really does look like a scorpion.

If you wish to explore more Astrological applications of the Zodiac, check out Chris Votey's "Madness of a Modern writer" A to Z challenge where he's been combining the Greek and Chinese Zodiacs to create character profiles.  It's been fun for me, from a writer's point of view.

Y is for Year

Happy Birthday to you, if you happen to have a birthday this year. (Sorry, Leap Year Babies. No birthday cake for you.)

Essentially, a year is the time it takes for the Earth to go around the Sun. So yes, Venus has a Venusian year (0.6a) and Mars has a Martian year (1.88a). But for the purpose of today, I'm going to talk about how the Year is a standard unit of measurement.

Astronomers need a way of measuring things. Since there's no standard galactic measuring stick for, well, everything, we've taken what's most familiar and made that our basis. For example, the mass of planets is measured by the mass of the Earth (M_⊕) and the mass of stars is measured by the mass of the Sun (M_☉). Short distances are measured by Astronomical Units (AU), which is the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun and long distances are measured by lightyears (ly) (the distance it takes for light to travel a year).

In astronomy, one measurement of time is the Julian year (symbol: a), which is exactly 86,400 seconds (as seconds are the base unit of time in SI). This equates to about 365.25 days, if that makes your brain hurt less. That's a very familiar number, with our calendar years being 365 days, except for every four years, when we add up the .25 of a day, and tack on an extra Leap day, so our days can sync up with our years. Our current Gregorian Calendar is based off this cycle.

While we've known about this extra quarter-day for a few thousand years, we didn't realise exactly how precise we'd not calculated it, so our earlier calendars had a bit of drift going on, and occasionally needed serious correction. That's why the ten days of Oct 5-15 1582 AD (CE) don't actually exist. Also why Ramadan appears to drift in relation to our civil calendars. And if you were born in Sweden in February 30, 1712, I am very, very sorry for you. Here's three hundred years' worth of birthday cake to make up for that double-leap day.

Let's put calendars aside and talk astronomy.

Julian years are used to measure duration. For example, how long would it take light to reach us from Alpha Centauri? About 4.6 years. (A Julian year is what they use to calculate a lightyear.)

How long does it take for Jupiter to go around the Sun (aka a Jovian year)?  11.8618 (Julian) years.

There's other types of years such as the sidereal, tropical and draconic years, used to measure stuff in relation to Earth but for general astronomical purposes in measuring duration in the rest of the Universe, we prefer the Julian year. Feel free to go hardcore if you wish regarding the other year types.

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Her Grace does not mind collecting years as she goes along. Old age is a privilege denied to many.

X is for X-ray

Finally, an AtoZ blog entry where I don't have to stretch to find an entry.

We've talked a bit about the electromagnetic spectrum during the A to Z--Radio, Infrared, Visible (Optical) and Ultraviolet--because light is primarily the only tool we have to explore the universe.

While other bloggers are really pushing it to find something for the letter X, here's something that comes naturally to astronomers: X-rays

We all know about X-rays for their medical uses: broken a bone or been to the dentist, chances are you had an X-ray photograph taken.

X-rays are cool because they can penetrate certain types of matter and show us other types. This is because they're highly energetic. Naturally, this is a good thing for astronomers. We like looking at high-energy things.

X-rays were discovered in 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen. Here's his original paper: German,  English Translation

"Hand mit ringen," Will said.
His wife said, "I have seen my death!"  Drama queen.

In fact, X-rays are often called Röntgen rays. What did Wilhelm Röntgen call them?  X-rays, with X standing for "mysterious", because he really wasn't sure what they were at first. Eventually he and a few scientists figured it out.  A few early articles about Röntgen's mysterious X-rays.

And, like any other scientist that thought science stuff was nifty, he played around with it, and even freaked his wife out by using her hand as a guinea pig by taking the first X-ray photograph.

This was fascinating, as it's really the image of an X-ray shadow, as the minerals of the bones block out the X-rays. Lead is also good for blocking out X-rays.

So, what makes X-rays so useful for astronomy?

Remember how stars come in different colours, depending on how hot they are?  If you boost the temperature of an object in outer space to waaay hot (more than a million Kelvin), its peak colour goes on beyond blue all the way up into X-rays.

This makes X-rays really useful for detecting high-energy events and objects.  Neutron stars and accreting black holes emit X-rays. Supernovae emit X-rays. (Stars emit X-rays, as they emit through the whole EM spectrum, though not to the same degree the Really Powerful Stuff, like active galactic nuclei, does.) Want to know where all the moving and shaking is happening in the universe?  Look for the bright X-ray spots.

Now, X-rays are absorbed by our atmosphere (thankfully), so any X-ray observatories need to be in orbit, like the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Here's some cool pictures taken in X-ray:

Looks very different from the hand mit ringen, as these are not images of the shadows of X-rays, but rather the emissions of X-rays. That's why they're so bright.

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Her Grace once calculated how much X-rays she emitted. Answer: not much.

W is for Wobble

Lots of things wobble. This is due to gravitational influence by something else.

Mass has gravity, and gravity is a very social thing. Two bits of mass spy each other across the room (or the universe) and try to get closer. If they get close enough, they end up in an orbit around each other, possibly in a spiral until they collapse together, though this doesn't always happen if the escape velocity is sufficient to keep them from falling into each other.  (That's what most orbits are: falling, but failing to hit the ground.)

The centre of gravity about which these object spiral about is called the barycenter.

Looks like this:

Do-si-do.  The barycenter is the red cross in the middle.

When the objects are of a similar size, the barycenter will be somewhere in between the two objects, as is the case with Pluto and Charon:

Pluto and Charon and their barycenter, the cross in the middle.

Pluto has a small orbit around the barycenter while Charon has a larger one. So they kind of wobble like an uneven barbell.  Because the barycenter is outside of Pluto, some people would like to call Pluto/Charon a double planet, rather than a planet and a satellite. I'm cool with that.

When one object is distinctly more massive than the other, the barycenter will be located within the larger object, such as the Earth and the Moon:

This gives the Earth a little bit of a wobble, instead of a full-on do-si-do.

We noticed our Sun has a bit of a wobble, due to the gravitational influence of the planets about it. In fact, the Sun's wobbled quite a bit:

Notice how sometimes the barycenter's inside the sun and sometimes its not?

Yeah, not surprising, considering what we know about gravity. Then some clever soul thought, if our Sun wobbles due to planets pulling on it, wouldn't other stars wobble for the same reason?

Whoa! Mind blown! So we started looking at nearby stars with this Wobble Method (also called Radial Velocity or Doppler Spectroscopy Methods) to see if they had a wobble.

Ohmigosh, they did! Thus, we discovered exoplanets.  And we said, "That's so cool!!!" (Then we felt slightly stupid because we hadn't figured something so simple out until now.)

Gamma Cephei Ab was the first exoplanet detected in 1989 (confirmed in 2002), and since then, we've uncovered evidence for thousands of exoplanets.

Nice to know we're not alone.

Now, there's lots of other methods for detecting exoplanets, but it all started with noticing how gravity made things wobble.

Wobbling isn't just for detecting exoplanets. Lots of other discoveries are due to the observation of wobbliness.  Go hardcore and check out wobbliness from asteroids with moons to entire galaxy clusters.  Even browsing through the list of titles is fascinating. Never be afraid to read an abstract. Save your freaking out for the paper itself.

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Her Grace believes that love makes the world go round, but gravity rules the universe.

V is for Visible Spectrum

Until the past century, pretty much all astronomical work took place with the observance of the visible spectrum. MK-1 Eyeball (the naked eye) was how observation took place.

The visible spectrum isn't terribly big--only 390 to 700 nm--considering just how wide the electromagnetic spectrum is. Yet within that short range, we've been able to accomplish some magnificent astronomy.

Before we discovered calorific rays (infrared) or chemical rays (ultraviolet), we were playing with the visible spectrum. Spectroscopy allowed us to divide up light into its different wavelengths and observe the universe. You can tell a lot about the composition of something by the frequency and amplitude of the light it emits.

Early scientists (like Herschel), noticed that certain spectra had dark lines. These are absorption lines, when atoms (like hydrogen) absorb certain light frequency.

Johann Balmer noticed that hydrogen absorbed certain frequencies. This helped us discover just how much hydrogen was out there, and also determine the nature of the hydrogen atom itself. (Hardcore: the absorption lines happen when a hydrogen electron absorbs that photon's energy, thus causing it to jump or transition to the next electron shell.)

All elements exhibit absorption lines. While some are seen only "off-stage" (ie, in the infrared or ultrviolet or beyond, especially if red-shifted), many can be seen in the visible spectrum.

Here's the visible spectrum of the Sun. As you can see, there's plenty of dirty metals lurking within our nearest and dearest star. (Can you find sodium?  Hint: it's orange.)

Click here to embiggen.

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Her Grace is best viewed in the visible spectrum.

U is for Ultraviolet

Yesterday we talked about lightbuckets and the light we can capture in them. Today we'll talk about one of those frequencies, Ultraviolet.  Most people know about ultraviolet from sunscreen commercials, and good old Slip Slop Slap campaigns.

In 1800 Herschel discovered Infrared (he called them Caloric Rays because they felt warm). Like any good scientist, he wondered if something similar could be found on the violet end of the spectrum. Alas, when he set up his thermometer on beyond violet, he didn't detect any heat. Oh well, he said, and focused on what he knew.

Then in 1801 Johann Wilhelm Ritter refused to be daunted by the violet end of the spectrum. See, he'd read Herschel's paper, and thought that Herschel hadn't gone far enough in his investigations. As a chemist he was familiar with the photosensitivity of certain chemicals. He knew that silver chloride turned dark when exposed to sunlight, reacting stronger to blue light, rather than red.

When he exposed a piece of paper coated with silver chloride to a spectrum, he discovered the strongest reaction was in the “invisible” side of violet light. Because of the chemical reaction, he named this invisible band of light “deoxidizing rays” or “chemical rays”. Essentially, he was one of the first to create a "photo-graph", or a literal recording of light.

He'd discovered Ultraviolet.

But what he also discovered was ionising radiation.

The electromagnetic band is divided into two different kinds of radiation: non-ionising waves, like radio waves, and ionising radiation, like X-rays.

Ionising radiation is radiation that's strong enough to knock electrons off an atom or molecule. The ability to cause a reaction in a chemical such as silver chloride is due to ionisation. It's the scary stuff that can potentially damage DNA and cause cancer.

Fortunately, most of the harmful ionising radiation (from UV on up to gamma rays) gets filtered out by our atmosphere. Still, visible light and some near UV get through. These are the frequencies that start to chemically affect stuff. (This is also why you don't store your beer in sunlight.)

Non-ionising radiation like radio waves can pass through our atmosphere, but doesn't pose a threat to us. (FYI, the radio wavelengths that mobile phones use is safely in the radio waves range. Mobile Phones do not cause cancer. Feel free to carry them in your bra.)

Ah, so what's the benefit of the ultraviolet spectrum in astronomy? It's good for detecting hotter objects. UV is very good for detecting chemical composition, very old stars or very young stars, and for identifying star-forming regions, which denotes active galaxies.

This UV images of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) shows it's active star-forming areas:

When the variable star Mira was imaged in UV by GALEX in 2006, scientists were amazed to discover it had a tail. Mira moves through space rather quickly for a star (130km/s), so fast, it even has a bit of bow shock in the interstellar medium (ISM) and a tail of matter streaming behind it for thirteen lightyears:

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Her Grace likes to think of UV as the "hot and bothered" frequency.

T is for Telescope

The Universe is full of light. Therefore, if we want to know more about the Universe, we need to sample some of that light for analysis. One of the best ways to capture that light is in a lightbucket called a telescope.

For thousands of years astronomers only had one method of capturing light--MK-1 Eyeball, aka the naked eye. Look up in the sky, what do you see?

Lots of stars, most of the major planets and a few other fuzzy objects were easily observable with the naked eye. It had its limitations, as it only detected wavelength between 390 to 700 nm. Also, it was limited in its resolution and the number of photons it could capture.

For a few thousand years humans knew that carving glass into certain shapes could bend light, focusing it, bringing more photons to the human eyeball. Then really recently, in the early 1600's, a few bright sparks put a couple of lenses in a tube, looked through and yelped, "Wow! I can see far! Tele-scope!" The first refracting telescope was born. Thomas Harriot thought it would be nifty to look at the sky through this thing. He was right. To him, the Moon looked awesome. He could see such detail!

Galileo and his refractor.

About the same time, Galileo built his own and looked upwards. To his amazement, he found four moons orbiting Jupiter. These details were not visible previously. The ability of the telescope to capture more photos and resolve very distant objects was totally amazing.

Newton's reflecting telescope.

Humans are lots of fun because they'll take an idea and run with it, seeing if they can improve on the original design. Another bright spark (some guy named Newton) wondered if a parabolic mirror could serve just as well for focusing the light. Sure enough, it worked wonders.

So lots of gentleman scientists played with this new tele-scope technology, improving it in size and quality, and peered into the heavens with it. At first, it was mostly planets they stared at, and various nebulae, as the stars were too far away to resolve to anything but points of light.

That didn't stop them from having fun with the light they captured. Prisms were notorious for breaking plain light up into pretty rainbows called spectra (singular: spectrum). When that happened, they then discovered things like absorption lines, infrared,  and ultraviolet.

You can go really big with radio telescopes,
like they did in Arecibo.

The infrared and ultraviolet discoveries really sparked some imagination. Could there really be "invisible" light beyond the visible spectrum? If so, could we capture it?

Sure.

With lower frequencies such as radio waves, they discovered they could be captured with antennas. Later, radio dishes (very similar in shape to the parabolic mirrors used to capture light) helped focus radio waves onto the receiving antenna, instead of just trying to pick up any old radio wave that happened to bounce by, like the aerials on our rooftops.

X-ray telescopes, same thing. A large parabolic mirror focuses X-ray wavelengths onto an X-ray detector. Problem with X-ray telescopes is that they're rather useless on Earth, as our atmosphere blocks out most stellar X-rays. So if we wanna gather X-rays, we've got to put our light buckets into orbit.

X-ray telescopes, like the Athena X-ray Observatory, can have lots of fun capturing the emissions of X-ray sources from orbit.

By the end of the 20th Century, humankind had come up with all kinds of telescopes to observe different kinds of electromagnetism. We're very good at capturing photons of all wavelengths, studying them, and thus, through sheer observation alone, we know about our Universe.

Do you have a telescope? If not, have you had a chance to look through one? If you haven't, see if you can find a local star party. Many planetariums and astronomical clubs hold them regularly. I recommend waiting a few months for Saturn to rise, for that is one spectacular planet to look at through a telescope.


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Her Grace observes through a Celestron Nexstar 130SLT 5" reflector.