Sciency Words: Voorwerp

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 5 Comments

Today’s post is part of a special series here on Planet Pailly called Sciency Words.  Each week, we take a closer look at an interesting science or science-related term to help us expand our scientific vocabularies together. Today’s term is:

VOORWERP

In 2007, Dutch schoolteacher and citizen scientist Hanny van Arkel was participating in the Galaxy Zoo project.  She was sorting through photos of galaxies (there are so many galaxies out there, scientists need help sorting through them all) when she came upon the image of a weird, green, blob-like object.

This mysterious object came to be known as Hanny’s Voorwerp, because voorwerp is the Dutch word for object.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

It’s hypothesized that the spiral galaxy in the upper part of the image had a quasar flare up at some point.  The resulting super accelerated jets of radiation must have hit a giant dust cloud, which we now see glowing green.

The quasar has since stopped, or at least calmed down for now, but that distinctive green glow can persist for tens of thousands of years. The color is almost certainly caused by ionized oxygen atoms.

Hanny’s Voorwerp is enormous, roughly the same size as our own Milky Way Galaxy.  We now know of several other glowing green blobs hanging around other suspected former quasers.  This paper identifies nineteen of them, and this collage from Wikipedia shows eight.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

These are commonly known as voorwerpjes. I have to admit I don’t know anything about Dutch (my linguistic education focused on Latin and Greek), but according to Wiktionary.org the j-part creates a diminutive form.  So Hanny’s Voorwerp is the big “object” and the others are like cute, little “objectlings.”  Well, little on the astronomical scale, at least.

Future research on Hanny’s Voorwerp and those voorwerpjes may tell us more about how quasar activity fluctuates over time. Also, it seems that getting zapped by a quasar may have triggered star formation inside Hanny’s Voorwerp. So we may be witnessing the very, very earliest beginnings of a brand new galaxy.

New Horizons: The Road Goes Ever On

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 9 Comments

The New Horizons mission has been on my mind recently, in part because of my post last week on Ultima Thule, but also because I just started reading Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon.

New Horizons has already visited the most distant “planet” in the Solar System (Pluto was still considered a planet when New Horizons launched), and now it’s going to explore an object even more distant than that. And after that?  Onwards to interstellar space, just like Voyager I and Voyager II, to continue exploring the universe for us.

But as I said, all this has got me thinking about travel and exploration and discovery, and also strangely (or perhaps not so strangely) about J.R.R. Tolkien.  So today I’d like to share a piece of Tolkien’s poetry, something that fit nicely into The Lord of the Rings but also fits nicely (I think) into the ongoing saga of the New Horizons mission.

Molecular Monday: Transparent Aluminum

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 1 Comment

Welcome to another episode of Molecular Mondays, a special biweekly series here on Planet Pailly where we take a closer look at the atoms and molecules that make up our physical universe, both in reality and in science fiction.

As a lifelong Star Trek fan, I’ve known about transparent aluminum since I was a little kid.  It’s a see-through material that’s incredibly strong while also being incredibly lightweight.  In fact, it’s kind of unrealistic how strong and light it’s supposed to be.

But last week, while I was searching for something molecular to write about for today’s post, I found out that transparent aluminum is a real thing.  It’s more commonly known as ALON (or AlON, with a lowercase L).  The name, I take it, is based upon the substance’s chemical composition: Al for aluminum, O for oxygen, and N for nitrogen.  The more technical sounding name is aluminum oxynitride.

According to this video from Wonder World, aluminum oxynitride starts out as a white powder.  It’s pressed into a mold and heated for several days, after which it comes out looking cloudy white.  It’s then polished to make it clear.

ALON is now a product manufactured by Surmet, and according to Surmet’s website, ALON is 85% transparent to electromagnetic radiation between the near-ultraviolet and mid-infrared, a range which includes the full spectrum of visible light.  Its scratch proof and shatter proof, and relatively thin sheets of ALON do a better job stopping bullets than much thicker sheets of bullet-proof glass. Based on that, I presume it would also be good for making spaceship windows that can resist micrometeor impacts.

Surmet claims they acquired the rights to ALON in 2002 following a laboratory demonstration, but I was able to find video of the actual invention of this material dating back to 1986. Enjoy!

Sciency Words: Ultima Thule

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 7 Comments

Today’s post is part of a special series here on Planet Pailly called Sciency Words.  Each week, we take a closer look at an interesting science or science-related term to help us expand our scientific vocabularies together. Today’s term is:

ULTIMA THULE

It just so happens that the New Horizons space probe, which flew by Pluto in 2015, will pass near another Kuiper Belt Object at the start of 2019—on New Year’s Day, in fact!  And that Kuiper Belt Object is called Ultima Thule (pronounced thoo-lee).

I first heard this name on a podcast called Are We There Yet? (click here, it’s about 20 minutes long), and I was initially confused.  I had thought New Horizons was heading toward an object named MU69; what the heck in an Ultima Thule?  Turns out they’re one in the same.  “(486958) 2014 MU69” is the official name approved by our old friends, the International Astronomy Union (I.A.U.), but NASA recently held a contest to see if the public could come up with something better.

The New Horizons mission team selected “Ultima Thule” as the winner, making it the official unofficial name, if that makes sense. And it’s a good name, a name with a long history going back to medieval times.  Thule was the name for a mythical island that was said to be as far north as you could possibly go, somewhere right at the edge of the world as Mankind knew it.  So Ultima Thule was an even more mythical land somewhere beyond that, beyond the limits of the known world!

The metaphor, I think, is that Pluto is Thule: the most distant planet (sort of) in the Solar System, and now we’re going to a place even farther than that.  Ultima Thule will be the most distant object ever visited by one of our space probes, and it will stretch the boundaries of human knowledge.  So yeah, the name seems appropriate.

But it’s interesting to me that NASA and the New Horizons mission seem to have picked this name without consulting with the I.A.U. first. They’ve done this sort of thing before, assigning a whole bunch of names to surface features on Pluto, and putting those names into official, scientific documents without asking for the I.A.U.’s permission first.  This reportedly annoyed the I.A.U.  And some of the scientists from New Horizons are still fighting to get Pluto’s planet status back, which I’m sure also annoys the I.A.U.

According to this press release from NASA, the New Horizons mission will submit an official naming proposal to the I.A.U. after the New Year’s Day flyby, once they know exactly what it is they’re naming. I’m guessing the I.A.U. will accept Ultima Thule, but if there does end up being a bit of a spat over this between the I.A.U. and New Horizons team, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Correction: I spent much of New Year’s Eve watching NASA TV, and everyone there pronounced the name as Ultima Too-lee rather than Thoo-lee. So I guess that’s how you say it.

IWSG: Punching My Problems in the Face

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 30 Comments

Today’s post is part of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop where insecure writers like myself can share our worries and offer advice and encouragement.  Click here to find out more about IWSG and see a list of participating blogs.

Over the last few months of Insecure Writer’s Support Group posts, I’ve been telling you that I’m struggling with certain real life problems (without going into any specific personal details, of course, because this is still the Internet).

In January’s post, my muse came up with an interesting solution to this: use writing as an excuse to just not deal with real life stuff. And that worked, sort of, for a while.  But you know how real life problems are.  They don’t just wander off and bother somebody else when you ignore them. They nag you… and nag you.  And in turn, that makes writing harder.

After March’s post, I started doing better, thanks in large part to all the encouragement I got from IWSG members and all my regular readers. By April, I was starting to worry less about real life and more about writing, and for the first time since I’ve known her, my muse had something insightful to say about the business side of writing (and also art) rather than just about the craft of writing itself.

So now it’s the beginning of May.  I suppose I could tell you how I’m doing right now, how well writing is going, and how optimistic I feel.  But you know what?  I think I’ll just let this drawing speak for itself.

Not my finest work of art, I admit, but that may have been the most satisfying, most therapeutic drawing I’ve ever done.

Hooray for Citizen Scientists!

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

In last week’s episode of Sciency Words, we met “Steve” and learned how this strange and unexpected aurora-like phenomenon ended up with such a friendly, normal-sounding name.  But there’s another important aspect of Steve’s story that I didn’t really touch on: the role of citizen scientists.

Photo of “Steve” by Elfie Hall, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Toward the end of this paper from Science Advances, the same paper which linked Steve to another aurora-related phenomenon known as S.A.I.D., I found a paragraph that I feel is interesting enough and important enough to quote in full:

STEVE has highlighted the importance of citizen science.  Although independently observed previously by auroral photographers both amateur and professional, citizen science has proven to be a bridge between amateur observers and traditional aurora scientists.  This bridge has facilitated the advancement of our understanding of both the night sky and magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling.  We emphasize that this collaboration with the citizen scientists was not simply through crowdsourcing and image analysis of a large data set. Citizen scientists discovered a new category of auroral observation by synthesizing complex information and asked the scientific community for input on these observations.  This example can help change the nature of scientific engagement between the scientific community and citizen scientists and move communication from one way to two way, with curiosity transitioning to participation and finally to stewardship.

Citizen science is often portrayed as something new, something that’s only become possible thanks to computers, the Internet, and technology in general.  And I think that’s fair.  The mystery of Steve might not have been investigated as thoroughly as it has been, or it might not have been investigated at all, if not for Facebook.

For most of the 20th and early 21st Centuries, cutting edge science has required a lot of extremely powerful, extremely sensitive, and extremely expensive equipment.  If modern science is seen as inaccessible to the average person, that might be in part because the average person could not afford to perform science him or herself.

But it wasn’t always so.  Most of the great scientists of the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries were essentially hobbyists, people who indulged their curiosity using the kind of tools they either bought off the shelf or built with their own hands.

So in a way, I think of citizen science as science returning to its roots, with ordinary men and women contributing once more to the important discoveries of our time (like the discovery of Steve).

Sciency Words: Steve

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Today’s post is part of a special series here on Planet Pailly called Sciency Words.  Each week, we take a closer look at an interesting science or science-related term to help us expand our scientific vocabularies together. Today’s term is:

STEVE

In 2014, photographer, citizen scientist, and weather enthusiast Chris Ratzlaff was out looking for the aurora borealis when he saw something weird in the sky.  Something that looked like an aurora but could not possibly be an aurora.

For one thing, it was in the wrong part of the sky.  It was too far south, well outside the auroral oval, the region encircling the pole where, on any given night, aurorae are predicted to occur.

And for another thing, this mysterious something was the wrong color.  It was purple. Now I was a bit confused about this part at first, because I thought purple was one of the normal colors in an aurora (along with green).  But aurora purple is more of a reddish or magenta-ish purple, whereas this new phenomenon was a true purple.  A purplish purple, so to speak.

According to this interview with Canadian Geographic, Chris shared pictures of the whatever-it-was on a Facebook group called Alberta Aurora Chasers.  Other members of the group then went out and got more photos.  Hundreds of photos.  And time-lapse sequences.

But still, nobody knew what this purple thing was.  An early guess that it was something called a proton arc got shot down by an expert, at which point Chris wrote “[…] until we know what it is, let’s call it Steve.”  This was a reference to the DreamWorks Animated film Over the Hedge.

In the film, a group of animals are confused and alarmed by the appearance of a neatly-trimmed hedge.  One of the animals says, “I would be a lot less afraid of it if I just knew what it was called,” to which another animal replies, “Let’s call it Steve!”


This bit about being less afraid of a thing simply because you know its name is, in my view, a profoundly true statement about the power of language.  But I digress.

According to this research paper from Science Advances, we now know, thanks to all those photos and time lapses from the ground, combined with satellite observations from orbit, what “Steve” is.  Or at least we know that it’s associated with another phenomenon called an S.A.I.D. (SubAuroral Ion Drift). Thanks to Steve, we now have a new way to observe and study S.A.I.D.s and learn more about the interaction between the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field.

As such, Steve has been assigned a more proper-sounding scientific name: Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (or S.T.E.V.E. for short).

Didymos, Didymoon, and Didy-me

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 13 Comments

I’m a huge space enthusiast and science enthusiast, but I am not an actual scientist.  I’m an outsider looking in, drooling a little as I watch all those real scientists doing all that real science.  But even as an outsider, I still sometimes get the chance to contribute in my own small way to the cause of science and space exploration.

Coming up in June of 2018, the Didymos Observer Workshop will be held in Prague, Czeck Republic.  For those of you who don’t recognize the name, Didymos is a large asteroid with an orbit that sometimes brings it alarmingly close to Earth.  It’s also one of those asteroids that has its own tiny moon, a moon which is informally known as “Didymoon.”

The Didymos Observer Workshop will be discussing the upcoming AIDA mission, a joint venture between NASA and ESA.  According to the workshop’s website, “AIDA will be the first space experiment to demonstrate asteroid impact hazard mitigation by using a kinetic impactor to deflect an asteroid.”  In other words, we’re going to whack Didymoon really hard to see how much we can change its orbit around Didymos.

Honestly, I feel a little bad for Didymoon, but the results of this experiment will help us prepare for the day when we need to smack an incoming asteroid off of a collision course with Earth. This is important for science, and someday it may save a whole lot of lives.

And I am really, really proud to say that one of my drawings is being used (with permission, of course) in the Didymos Observer Workshop’s promotional material.  Click here to check it out!

Molecular Monday: In Desperate Need of Nitrogen

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 4 Comments

Today’s post is part of a bi-weekly series here on Planet Pailly called Molecular Mondays, where we take a closer look at the atoms and molecules that make up our physical universe, both in reality and in science fiction.

Imagine you’re a traveler in space, living in a time two or three centuries hence, engaging in the trade of resources between Earth, the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt.  What is the rarest and most precious resource necessary for your survival out there?

You might think it’s oxygen, or perhaps water.  Those are difficult resources to find in space, but not that difficult.  A surprising number of asteroids do, in fact, have a surprising amount of frozen water on them or inside them.  And if you can get water, you can easily split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen through the magic of electrolysis.

No, of all the resources you absolutely must have to stay alive, the hardest one to find out there may actually be nitrogen.  I first read about this nitrogen problem in a book called Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy, which says:

Nitrogen presents a more significant problem [than other essential resources]. Because of the great stability and high volatility of molecular nitrogen, it is poorly retained by solid minerals and poorly represented in meteorites.

Volatility, in this context, refers to the tendency of a chemical substance to turn itself into a gas. Planets and moons and asteroids (especially asteroids) have a really tough time holding onto volatile chemicals, also referred to as “volatiles.”  And the closer a celestial body happens to be to the Sun, the more likely it is to lose its volatiles to the solar wind.

Your best bet for finding nitrogen in space would be the carbonaceous asteroids that tend to be found in the outer reaches of the asteroid belt.  They’re a little bit farther from the Sun, and therefore have held on to their volatiles a little bit better.  These carbonaceous asteroids are also one of the best places to go looking for water.

But according to Asteroid Mining 101, nitrogen has been found to make up only about 0.25% of the mass of carbonaceous meteorites, mostly in the form of organic polymers.  “The figure of 0.25% is not very impressive […],” the book goes on to say (what an understatement of the problem!), but if you manage to capture a large enough carbonaceous asteroid, you could still potentially harvest a fair amount of nitrogen from it.

Of course if we were to imagine ourselves living in the even more distant future, in an era when humanity has expanded well beyond the asteroid belt, perhaps making it all the way out to the Kuiper belt, then nitrogen might not be such a ridiculously scarce resource. Based on what we’ve learned about Pluto and other Kuiper belt objects, it seems frozen nitrogen is a whole lot more common out there.

Sciency Words: Encephalization

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 12 Comments

Today’s post is part of a special series here on Planet Pailly called Sciency Words.  Each week, we take a closer look at an interesting science or science-related term to help us expand our scientific vocabularies together. Today’s term is:

ENCEPHALIZATION

I’m going to let my friend Og the Caveman handle the definition of this term.  Og?

Thanks, Og!

The process of encephalization was rather important to humans of Og’s time.  The term refers specifically to the gradual, somewhat clumsy evolutionary process whereby an organism’s brain becomes larger over time.  The word itself derives from the Greek word for brain, which in Greek appears to be a compound word (en+ kephale) meaning “in the head.”

My first encounter with this term was in a recent issue of Scientific American, in an article about the social behavior of whales and dolphins.  According to the article, brain size can be correlated to social behavior.  Animals that have evolved larger brains (relative to overall body mass) tend to have more complex social interactions with each other and also tend to live in larger social groups.  This seems to be true for both primate and cetacean species.

Now it seems pretty clear to me that the word encephalization is intended only to describe the gradual process of brains growing larger over time, over the course of many, many generations of evolution.  It would be totally inappropriate, therefore, to use the term as part of the origin story of some brainiac super villain… to write about an “encephalization machine” that went haywire during a top secret government experiment.

Nope.  It would be woefully inappropriate to use the word in that way.

P.S.: Though if some hack of a Sci-Fi writer were to do that, don’t be surprised if the encephalized brainiac super villain teams up with that Mars rover NASA reprogrammed for science autonomy.