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The IAU isn't an official body with any authority other than what they have taken on themselves. And if they are going to let historical politics cloud scientific thinking, they certainly aren't going to speak for me. I'd like to see some textbook publishers take a stand too.

The thing is, if you don't accept the IAU's authority, then whose authority are you going to accept? Textbook publishers? They're one notch above those scammers who sell you the "right" to name a star. The IAU's membership is over 12,000 professional astronomers, which as best as I can tell is a pretty good percentage of the people with careers in astronomy. The next largest professional group is the American Astronomical Society, with about 7,000 members all in the Americas. Their stance on the issue is decidedly neutral. In the end, the definition of a planet is merely semantics. What's important is that whatever definition you decide to use is functional, allowing generalized statements to be made easily without running afoul of the terminology. In that respect, I don't have a problem with the division between "planet" and "trans-Neptunian object" and dwarf planet. They are different enough and the terms selected for them, although not perfect, are definitive enough to make statements and issue papers about them without tripping over the semantics.

And yet only 424 of them were allowed to vote on the matter, on the last day of a conference.

I can't find the source, but I read somewhere that a previous measure, agreed to by most, would have preserved Pluto as a planet. Thinking the matter settled, most of the delegation went to play golf or drink beer, and a small minority pushed their agenda through.

The IAU isn't an official body with any authority other than what they have taken on themselves. And if they are going to let historical politics cloud scientific thinking, they certainly aren't going to speak for me. I'd like to see some textbook publishers take a stand too.

The thing is, if you don't accept the IAU's authority, then whose authority are you going to accept? Textbook publishers? They're one notch above those scammers who sell you the "right" to name a star.

The IAU's membership is over 12,000 professional astronomers, which as best as I can tell is a pretty good percentage of the people with careers in astronomy. The next largest professional group is the American Astronomical Society, with about 7,000 members all in the Americas. Their stance on the issue is decidedly neutral.

In the end, the definition of a planet is merely semantics. What's important is that whatever definition you decide to use is functional, allowing generalized statements to be made easily without running afoul of the terminology. In that respect, I don't have a problem with the division between "planet" and "trans-Neptunian object" and dwarf planet. They are different enough and the terms selected for them, although not perfect, are definitive enough to make statements and issue papers about them without tripping over the semantics.

https://eclipse.aas.org/eye-sa...

You can wear welding masks as long as they are shade 14:

https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/s...

Experts suggests that one widely available filter for safe solar viewing is welders glass of sufficiently high number. The only ones that are safe for direct viewing of the Sun with your eyes are those of Shade 12 or higher.

- NASA AAS

Myself, I used a Thousand Oaks SolarView filter on a C8.

Amazon recalled some glasses which they believed to be counterfeit. Amazon has also said that customers who did not receive an email purchased glasses that were safe to use. The plaintiffs did not receive an email. Reading the suit, it doesn't make any claim that counterfeit glasses were received, but rather that they got glasses made by American Paper Optics, a reputable vendor according to the American Astronomical Society.

Further, the plaintiffs claim eye damage, but offer no evidence, not even a claim to have seen an ophthalmologist.

I smell some bloodsucking lawyers and plaintiffs trying to scam a big payoff.

That KGW video is crap. **Which** brands are effected???

Here is a list of safe glasses:

https://eclipse.aas.org/resour...

* American Paper Optics (Eclipser) / EclipseGlasses.com / 3dglassesonline.com
* APM Telescopes (Sunfilter Glasses)*
* Baader Planetarium (AstroSolar Silver/Gold Film)* [see note 1]
* Celestron (EclipSmart Glasses & Viewers)
* DayStar (Solar Glasses)
* Explore Scientific (Solar Eclipse Sun Catcher Glasses)
* Halo Solar Eclipse Spectacles
* Jaxy Optical Instrument Co., Ltd.* [see note 2]
* Lunt Solar Systems (SUNsafe SUNglasses) [see their unique kid-size eclipse glasses]
* Meade Instruments (EclipseView Glasses & Viewers)
* Rainbow Symphony (Eclipse Shades)
* Seymour Solar (Helios Glasses)
* Solar Eclipse International / Cangnan County Qiwei Craft Co.*
* Thousand Oaks Optical (Silver-Black Polymer & SolarLite)
* TSE 17 / 110th.de (Solar Filter Foil)*

Note 1: Baader Planetarium's AstroSolar Safety Film and AstroSolar Photo Film, sold in the U.S. by Alpine Astronomical and Astro-Physics (see below), are not certified to meet the ISO 12312-2 international safety standard and are not designed to work as eclipse shades or handheld solar filters. Baader's AstroSolar Silver/Gold Film, on the other hand, does meet the ISO 12312-2 safety standard for filters for eyes-only direct viewing of the Sun.

Note 2: Jaxy doesn't sell direct to customers; they manufacture for other companies. Their solar viewers could be described as "too safe" â" they block a bit more visible light than the ISO 12312-2 standard allows, rendering a safe but rather dim view of the Sun. Technically, they aren't compliant with ISO 12312-2, but because they are safe, and because several trustworthy vendors are selling eclipse glasses made by Jaxy, we include them here.

Numerous other astronomy- and science-related enterprises and organizations sell eclipse glasses made by the companies listed above. If you buy from any of the following businesses, you know you are getting ISO-compliant safe solar viewers:

--
Man Cave, noun, a place where a man can to play with all his expensive toys. Also see Garage.

If you (like me) bought glasses and then got a warning email from Amazon, the American Astronomical Society has a guide to checking your glasses

How can you tell if your solar viewer is not safe? You shouldn't be able to see anything through a safe solar filter except the Sun itself or something comparably bright, such as the Sun reflected in a mirror, a sunglint off shiny metal, the hot filament of an unfrosted incandescent light bulb, a bright halogen light bulb, a bright-white LED flashlight (including the one on your smartphone), or an arc-welder's torch. All such sources should appear quite dim through a solar viewer. If you can see lights of more ordinary brightness through your eclipse glasses or handheld viewer, and you're not sure the product came from a reputable vendor, it's no good. Safe solar filters produce a view of the Sun that is comfortably bright (like the full Moon), in focus, and surrounded by dark sky. If you glance at the Sun through your solar filter and find it uncomfortably bright, out of focus, and/or surrounded by a bright haze, it's no good. You should contact the seller and demand a refund or credit for return of the product, then obtain a replacement from one of the sources listed on the AAS’s reputable-vendors page.

The glasses are so dark that for a moment, I thought I'd gotten scammed into buying opaque glasses. The sun shows up as a moderately bright disk. It's very weird to look at the sun.

Baader has several different films. Their silver/gold film is certified safe for visual observation under the ISO standard; their photo film is not. It lets through a little more UV than the ISO limit. It's designed for use on cameras, where the glass in the lens will block enough of the UV to make it ISO-compliant. But if you use it to view the sun directly, you're going to be slightly over the ISO limit.

While I'm sure AgenaAstro is fine, I wouldn't put it past some fly-by-night shop making glasses out of the photo filter film (because he was unable to purchase the visual filter film). So Amazon is justified in their caution. Where they're screwing up is in bringing up this issue so close to the eclipse, and not reviewing the documentation AgenaAstro sent them in a timely manner.

Solar scientists are unable to explain these temperature differences. The American Astronomical Society recently had a gathering (http://aas.org/meetings/tess2015/) where evidence was presented about yet another conjured-up feature/explanation: "nano-flares" in an attempt to explain the unexplainable. Solar scientists still mention magnetic reconnection as a possible mechanism. The electric universe group suggest more weight be given to observational evidence instead of mathematical constructs. That perhaps gravity is not the only force actively shaping the cosmos. Instead of resorting to more bizarre phenomena such as dark matter/ dark energy, WIMPS, and so on - created mathematically to decipher the unknown - to make-it-fit in a gravity-only schema that electricity, evidence of which is acknowledged to be present in space is not a benign force. Instead of dismissing the electrical universe theory with derogatory hateful words simply agree to disagree.

• Immediately: take an introductory astronomy course at a local community college or continuing education program at your local university to demonstrate your interest,
• Then: assess your IT skills, and apply them directly to the support of an upcoming large ground- or space-based observatory. This is an especially sensible route if you do any database related work. The future of astronomy is big data and massive virtual observatories which collect together and make useful petabytes of information from a wide variety of facilities.
• Check the job listings at the American Astronomical Society, looking in particular for IT support positions where your domain knowledge would outrank that of PhD-trained astronomers (who learn to program "on the job" and rarely master grittier back-end systems). Realize that almost all existing and (especially) new astronomical facilities have substantial IT/engineering staff, and that your skills do not exist among traditional PhD scientists. Example: the LSST will produce 30 TB of data per night, which needs to be processed in semi-real time. Example #2: the incredibly successful Sloan Digital Sky Survey partnered with Microsoft database engineers to build its (at the time) state-of-the-art public-facing data archive. The late Jim Gray was instrumental in building the Sloan backend, and said his favorite thing about astronomical data is that it was "worthless" (by which he meant the usual access control layers were not necessary, freeing him to focus on much more rewarding and useful tools).
• Relocate to a mission control or operations center for the facility. These are often located at major research universities, or equivalent national facilities like the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the National Radio Observatory in Charlottesville, VA, the Gemini Observatories (Hawaii/Tucson/Chile), etc. Advantage? You will very likely be immediately mixed in with groups of professional astronomers. You will be strongly encouraged to learn to speak their language, and to become more involved in the scientific aspects of the project. You will learn a great deal just through osmosis. You will likely be able to attend seminars, sit in on classes, bend the ear of willing faculty, etc. And the most significant advantage? You could be contributing directly to the forefront of astrophysics research within 3-5 years. Disadvantages: the pay might be somewhat less than similar background applied in the financial or health industries. Often the intellectual rewards bring talented engineers anyway. Also, may projects are time limited, so you positions are typically not permanent (but new projects are coming online all the time).

It shouldn't have just been denied an oral presentation, it should have been caught by the program committee and never reviewed. You can't read 3 sentences of that abstract without knowing that it's garbage.

Presumably someone DID review this and deny it an oral, but didn't follow up with the program committee to make sure it was pulled entirely.

I've never been to a conference which pity accepts papers. CVPR, a IEEE conference on computer vision, has a 25% acceptance rate for posters. I think this paper is quite an embarrassment to IEEE.

Meh. As others have noted, it was for a poster session. This conference isn't in my field, but at the conferences I've been to in my field (astronomy and astrophysics), pretty much anything gets accepted for poster sessions. At AAS meetings, I've seen particularly wacky posters in extragalactic astronomy and cosmology all clumped together in a kind of ghetto; and back when I was a grad student, during free time between oral sessions or at the end of the day, someone among my friends and I would say "hey, let's go look at the crazy stuff" and we'd take a look at the posters about space potatoes or the Plutonium Atom Totality or whatever. On occasion, I've even seen oral sessions -- typically one of the last ones on the last day -- devoted to something like "Speculative Ideas in Cosmology" with some of the nuttier talks tucked in there (as well as ones which are almost certainly wrong, but aren't in the same league of crazy as we're talking about, unfortunately).

These conferences are for professional astronomers to share research and probably have very limited appeal to laymen and kids. There's probably a $100 or more admission fee (which is intended to cover not just the space, but speaker honarariums, too).

However, if it's convenient and you can get as far as the print out without paying admission, it would be pretty cool. Look here for contact information related to the conference and call TODAY, because it's the last day.

...the Cassini-Huygens spaceprobe made a descent over two years ago onto Titan, the only moon in the solar system known to have an atmosphere.

it's an abstract for a meeting (see http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006AAS...209.3703J and http://www.aas.org/meetings/aas209/), so it was probably either a presentation or just a poster.

Well, after doing some actual research on this, it looks like there are some possible contributors to spherical harmonics on Saturn, but that probably isn't the source of the hexagonal structure, since a similar structure does not appear at the south pole. Apparently it's probably due to a polar jet, similar to the ripples you see around a bathtub drain.

Where there's water there's almost surely life.

      What, like this place?

      http://www.aas.org/publications/baas/v33n3/dps2001 /58.htm

n. pl. constituencies

1. The body of voters or the residents of a district represented by an elected legislator or official.
2. The district so represented.
3. A group of supporters or patrons.
4. A group served by an organization or institution; a clientele: The magazine changed its format to appeal to a broader constituency.

ie. the voters and/or lobbyists. Add 'scientific' in there, and he's most likely talking about groups like the American Geophysical Union and the American Astronomical Society

ps. There's a thing called a dictionary for when you find words that you don't understand.

http://www.aas.org/publications/baas/v37n4/aas207/ 765.htm

"... radial velocity measurements of red giants in the Galactic dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxy Leo I based on data taken with Gemini's Multiobject Spectrograph GMOS. These data, reaching out to the galaxy's nominal tidal radius, permit us to trace its velocity dispersion profile across the whole area of Leo I. By means of detailed dynamical modelling we discuss the implications on this dSph's dark matter halo and mass profile."

Tough guy bullshit. You stupid fuck. Look at the universe around you. Cheap energy is a historical blip, and there is nothing written into the laws that govern the universe that says it should or will continue indefinitely.You sound like some stupid fucking libertarian, living life with complete disregard for the effects of their actions.

Sorry, I'm with the other guy. The activites of humans, even on a "local" cosmological scale (solar system, or ~5-10 light years) is completely negligble.

If mankind ever gets to the point where we are consuming a non-negligble portion of the sun's output, I'll change my tune. As is, the largest fusion reactor the mind can possibly fathom will be running waste free, for the forseeable future.

Sorry if me not looking beyond 5-10 billion years is ignoring long-term economic effects. Eventually, if man gets that far (or whatever species we evolve into), we'll have to come to grips with the heat death of the universe.

But right now, our energy consumption/generation on a cosmological scale can be easily rounded off to ZERO.

Wake me up when we are moving planets, terraforming mars (rapidly), or are in the process of constructing multiple rings of sun-orbit solar power generation facilities.

The universe is not some cold, dark place which mankind sends ripples through by our technological monstrocities.

The universe IS a place with extremes, with very, very cold dark places, and very, very hot bright places. Much of it is silent, however the places of interaction are very violent, with forces (read energy) on a scale that the human mind simply cannot comprehend. We can talk about it in numbers, we can work out the details; but really, neither you nor I can fully appreciate the output of the sun, let alone the output of a galaxy, let alone the forces involved in catacylsmic events (Galactic Collisions, anyone?, or even the more mundane Supernova)

Wake me up when we are dealing with energy and mass densities capable of cause local and extreme relativistic effects.

Limiting our vision to the small quantities of energy we currently dealing with dooms mankind to our 3rd rock from the sun. On a timescale of millions of years, we should dream about construction projects on a cosmological scale.

The only thing it takes is time, and energy. On a very large, very grand scale.

And also without direct observation of the poster by the scientists in question, since they already presented their poster the day before yesterday at the poster session at AAS. When I first read in TFA that they'd be presenting their results at the AAS Winter Meeting , I thought it might be cool to see the talk or poster, but alas, it already happened.

Although I'm actually a condensed-matter physicist, as per the other posts on the phase-transitions thread I just typed up. But my girlfriend will be at AAS, so that's always a good excuse to anonymously crash the festivities :-)

And also without direct observation of the poster by the scientists in question, since they already presented their poster the day before yesterday at the poster session at AAS. When I first read in TFA that they'd be presenting their results at the AAS Winter Meeting , I thought it might be cool to see the talk or poster, but alas, it already happened.

Although I'm actually a condensed-matter physicist, as per the other posts on the phase-transitions thread I just typed up. But my girlfriend will be at AAS, so that's always a good excuse to anonymously crash the festivities :-)

Perhaps you meant the cool proposed spontaneous photon blueshifting where light is actually blue-shifted according to the strenght of the gravitational potential. This is based on the subquantum kinetics theory rather that GR.

So comes the hard part of determining how far out the spacecraft would have to meet the asteriod and glide along beside it so as to veer the asteroid to a safe range of R kilometers from Earth. Any ideas?

Essentially, European astronomers have found something they call 2003 EL61 and what American astronomers call K40506A.

There are questions on how reflective the object is, which means we don't have that much information on how big it is or how far away it is. The guesses by astronomers, at this point, are pretty speculative, according to the BBC, which is tracking this breaking story.

NASA has published a wild guess as to the orbit, in Java.

The other known super-large (1000Km or bigger) Kuiper Belt objects are:

• Sedna (Diameter unknown, less than 1500 Km)
  
• 2004 DW (Diameter probably about 1500 Km)
  
• Quaoar (Diameter of 1200 Km, +/- 200 Km)
  
• Ixion (Diameter 1065 Km, +/- 165 Km)
  

A few people have suggested launching something very similar to HST, with the new instrumentation that was supposed to go up in servicing mission 4. One such proposal is the "Hubble Origins Probe"; they had a poster at the last American Astronomical Society meeting, the abstract of which you can read here.

That abstract begins, "A no-new-technology HST-class observatory with COS and WFC3 as its core instruments ..." (COS and WF3 are the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and new Wide-Field Camera, respectively.)

There's also a brief article about this at New Scientist.

I'm not crazy about this idea, for a bunch of reasons, but it is under active investigation.

Abstract

[11.14] NICMOS Imaging of 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254 - A Planetary-Mass Companion Candidate

G. Schneider (Steward Obs., UofA), I. Song (Gemini Obs.), B. Zuckerman, E. Becklin (UCLA), P. Lowrance (Caltech), B. Macintosh (LLNL), M. Bessell (ANU), C. Dumas, G. Chauvin (ESO)

2MASSWJ 1207334-393254, a likely member of the nearby TW Hya association (age app 10 Myr and app 70 pc from Earth), is an app 30 Mjupiter brown dwarf (M8V spectrum due to its youth) for which a putative candidate planetary-mass companion was identified by Chauvin et al (Astron. and Astroph. 425, L29) with VLT/NACO observations in April 2004. Earlier, 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254 had been scheduled for observation in HST cycle 13 in a NICMOS H-band coronagraphic companion detection survey (GO 10176), but was re-programmed as an early "follow-up" observation given the ground-based derived implications for shorter wavelength space-based detection and efficacious diagnostic photometric measurements. Here, we present NICMOS camera 1 imaging photometry observations of 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254 and its point-like companion candidate in three bands: F090M (0.80 - 1.00 microns; similar to I-band), F110M (1.00 - 1.20 microns) and F160W (1.40 - 1.60 microns; similar to H-band) obtained on 28 Aug 2004. For the 773.7 +/- 2.2 mas (app 55 AU projected separation) distant companion we find in-band magnitudes for the companion candidate of F090M = 22.34 +/- 0.35 (delta-F090M = +7.14), F110M = 20.61 +/- 0.15 and (delta-F110M = +7.02) F160W = 18.24 +/- 0.02 (delta-F160W = +5.62). The NICMOS [0.90] - [1.6] micron color index of +4.1 +/- 0.4 is consistent with expectations for the spectral energy distribution of a mid to late L-dwarf (e.g., I - H of app +4.4 for spectral type L4). At the likely age of this candidate, the NICMOS and longer wavelength VLT/NACO derived photometric measures may implicate an object of several Jupiter masses. If the candidate companion is (as is yet to be) demonstrated to exhibit common proper motion with 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254 then the first image of a gravitationally bound companion of planetary mass may have already been secured. This work is supported through grants to the GO 10176 and 10177 teams from STScI, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555.

This work was supported by NASA's Maryland Space Grant Consortium.

I could think of a few dozen better things for NASA to spend its money on. And another quote from the same page.

The economic benefit that astronomers could provide the world through shepherding this simple reform would easily and indeed more than repay all that the world has kindly spent on astronomical research.

Folks around the world have been producing antiparticles for quite some time. They're also created by natural processes, but don't last long in high matter density environments.

Solar Physics is free to authors but quite expensive to subscribe to. ApJ is expensive to publish in, but is quite cheap to subscribe to (at least for AAS members).

Perhaps in part because of the funding structure, Europeans seem to prefer publishing in Solar Physics while many Americans seem to prefer ApJ. It may have something to do with how science is funded: in the U.S. most of us are on soft money and budget page charges into our grants and/or overhead rates, while in Europe most folks are on fixed departmental budgets. But it's hard to say, because Solar Physics is published in Europe while ApJ is published in North America -- so it may just be the home team advantage in each case.

I tend to alternate between the two.

It's a search engine, for the most part.

I'm one of the programmers on the Virtual Solar Observatory. The poster I'm presenting today at the American Astronomical Society explains a little bit about what we're trying to accomplish.

The problem is that there are lots of places out there that are making recordings, but not all of the data are being shared with other researchers. Much of the time, it's because people don't know the data is even out there. For instance, if someone finds some odd reading out there, before they go and spend a lot of time on it, if they can compare the data to some other telescope reading at the same time, that's at a different location, they might be able to determine if it was an error on the instrument, as opposed to a legitimate event.

As instruments only point at a fixed region, if you find something on a wide angle picture, you can try to find out if someone else was pointing at the region of interest with a better resolution at that point in time.

You can argue all you please about how Hubble is out-of-date and needs cancellation, but the real experts will disagree with you. Astronomers are quite irate about the Hubble's cancellation, and rightly so. Politicians should not dictate how NASA spends its paltry budget - and doubly so in an election year when your poll numbers are looking grim.

Sean O'Keefe was picked for the head of NASA precisely because he has a reputation as a budget cutter. The man knows *nothing* about space science.

But don't take my word for this. The American Astronomical Society - an organization that includes essentially all the professional astronomers in America, and rarely if ever takes a political stand - released a statement pleading to reconsider the cancellation:

AAS's cancellation statement

I believe there's a statement from the UK's Royal Astronomical Society there, too.

About 30 seconds after posting the above I found this link, to an abstract of a scientific paper detailing Hubble observations of the spokes.

The wheels have started to turn. Check this out.

A summary of what's known about Plutino statistics reveals that they're all pretty eccentric (good) and some are reasonably close to the ecliptic (good), but they cluster longitudinally well away from Neptune, which makes a Neptune GA tough to pull off in a reasonable time. That was my main hope for getting there. So, you'd have to fly by one, and hope that you get lucky with another - probably not a Plutino per se at 40 A.U. mean solar distance, but a KBO is certainly possible.

I just wouldn't describe Eddington's experiment during an ellipse as gravitational lensing

But our knowledge of the timeline of planet formation is far from complete. So this way classifying may not be feasible for now.

It would be cool though, because then it be similar to the biological classification, where "relatedness" of two species (in terms of similar DNA) is strongly correlated with how early they diverged from one another.

It may be a surprise to people, but a Pluto mission is not a high priority for a lot of planetary scientists. There are many other targets that they would like to focus their attention on. The resurrection of the Pluto mission has been largely due to constituents telling their representatives that they consider it a high priority!

(Also, a lot of people in NASA and the community would rather do the mission using nuclear electric propulsion, since the mission would arrive at Pluto much more quickly. But, that technology is not expected to be mature until the end of the decade.)

Last year planetary scientists drew up their "Decadal Survey" which is basically a list of planetary exploration priorities for the next decade. (Congress wanted the list, and will probably consider it a "checklist" of what they should fund for the next ten years.) It's subject to changes based on new findings, but it gives a good idea of what scientists want to focus on. They did eventually decide to include this mission on the list. But, they didn't name it the "Pluto-Kuiper Belt Explorer;" they named it the "Kuiper Belt-Pluto Explorer." Kuiper Belt objects in general are considered important, and Pluto stands out merely because it's the largest of that population of objects.

If you'd like to get a feeling for what planetary scientists want to fly over the next few years, skim that documents. There's some very cool plans in there.

- A friendly neighborhood astrophysicist

There are two things that make me think there is probably no life on Titan.

One is that at 90 Kelvin, not much chemical activity goes on. Your intuition about hot spots is not unreasonable, but hot spots come and go on geological and evolutionary short timeframes, and the life formed in such a hot spot would have to get to the next hot spot across a 90 Kelvin desert. Maybe not impossible, but not really conducive to happy bacteria.

The second reason is that the current dogma holds that life started out on Earth in a prebiotic soup that resembles Titan today, and that life modified that soup to what we see today. If there is life on Titan, it doesn't look like it has modified the soup. Perhaps it doesn't have to, but Earth-type life is all we know at this time.

The AP article gets some things wrong that are correctly stated in the articles it points to. For example, the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, not "methane, ethane and hydrogen cyanide".

Also, cloud formation has been seen on Mars and arguably on other planets. And the idea of giving such low temperatures in Fahrenheit is ludicrous, even to people like me, who use Fahrenheit on a daily basis for the temperatures I normally encounter. I had to convert to Kelvins to get an idea of what other things (superconductors, liquification of gases) happen at those temperatures.

The moon has the highest ratio of mass to its parent body as than any other moon in the Solar system.

it would be a lot more correct to say that the Earth-Moon system was a dual planetoid system and not a planet-moon system.

With greater use of the spectrum, and the potential for software defined radios to use any frequency they want to transmit on, we're going to close out the possibility of ground based radio astronomy. This is not a good thing!

Radio astronomy produced many of the basic technologies that todays wireless communications revolution depends on, but is seeing none of the (financial) benefits and is gradually getting squeezed out of its own very limited parts of reserved spectrum. Maybe there should be a 1% levy on all radio licenses dedicated to help astronomers get around this problem and properly police their parts of the spectrum. Or maybe all the money raised from spectrum auctions should be dedicated to establishing space-based astronomy in the radio - probably on the backside of the moon to get away from all the noise!

There are needs for regulation to protect the other users of spectrum that wireless networkers forget about. Total spectrum freedom is not possible or a reasonable goal.

For more information see:

AAS webpages.

Organic means orbital hybridization (s and p orbitals merging into sp3, sp2, and sp orbials). The term organic used to concern only the compounds of life, then only carbon based compounds, and now any compound with hybridization. So the discovery of methane, ethane, methanol, and formaldehyde is not evidence of life on Mars.

• Dan Goldin, NASA Admin, mentions this as a future goal for NASA
• Use of this tech for SETI
• Use of Light-sails to put a telescope at this distance

This article points out that some stars in the cluster could have been as close as 130 light-years away around 2 million years ago. The local bubble itself is only 150 light-years across, so the earth would have been within the necessary range for damage to occur.

There's also a theory floating around that a star in the cluster actually made the local bubble.

We have found that the excursion times between X-ray minima in Cyg X-2 can be characterized as a series of integer multiples of the 9.8 binary orbital period... In the black hole candidate system LMC X-3, the excursion times are shown to be related to each other by rational fractions. We find that the long term light curve of the unusual galactic X-ray jet source Cyg X-3 can also be described as a series of intensity excursions related to each other by integer multiples of a fundamental underlying clock. In the latter cases, the clock is apparently not related to the known binary periods.

But that doesn't mean that the model is wrong. Their model involves a third object with its own orbital period that disturbs the disk, causing the flares. This would have a period unrelated to the orbital period of the binary, and the multipliers would not be completely random but would have a predictable propability distribution.

Other non-terrestrial auroras can be found:

...at Saturn here and here (Hubble)
...at Neptune (Voyager)

Neptune's aurorae occur near its equator, due to the alignment of that planet's magnetic field... I couldn't find a definite page or photograph of aurorae on Uranus, although I did find an AAS paper that discusses auroral emissions.

--
Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos

On the practical side, though I do not know the details, I imagine that the receivers on the iridium satellites are much less efficient that receivers being used for astronomical research and SETI. Also, it may be cheaper to build a network of small telescopes on the ground then to retask and maintain the Iridium satellite network.

Personally, as a radio astronomer, I'm happy to see that network fall. I am disheartened by the fact that corporations can essentially buy their way into protected frequencies, and astronomers can do very little to stop them.

For more information about radio interference please visit the AAS committee on Light Pollution, Radio Interference, and Space Debris homepage.