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Saturn Moon Continues to Delight and Baffle
vic_1066 writes to tell us that BBC News is reporting on the many interesting discoveries made by the Cassini probe. The Saturn moon, Enceladus, apparently continues to provide confusion and excitement for scientists the world over. The Cassini probe has been making waves ever since its arrival to the Saturn system.
An off the cuff guess? About that warm spot and tiger stripe at Encaladus's south pole?
a ssini-080505.html
Meteor impact, and seismic aftereffects.
After all, it has the "Death Star" moon for a neighbor: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/c
It's funny, Richard Hoagland is on Coast-to-Coast AM pretty regularly. (What can I say? I'm an insomniac and it's an entertaining show.) On the radio, he sounds very smart and usually quite rational. The web site, on the other hand, is so kooky it's almost hard to believe that it's written by the same person. He seems to be extremely fond of zooming waaay in on heavily compressed JPEG images and imagining all kinds of artificial formations in the compression artifacts. I wonder sometimes if he really believes all this stuff, or if it's just a ploy to get attention and presumably bring in $$$.
FWIW, his own biography says he was a museum curator, a NASA consultant (whatever that means), and a science advisor to CBS news. It's a more impressive resumé than your garden variety conspiracy nut, but he wasn't exactly a "big wig at NASA".
That would be fine, except that every single one of these press releases is filled with wild speculation -- subsurface water, volcanism, recent meteor strikes, martians, what have you -- anything and everything except the only thing that has ever been observed to cause (e.g.) polar heating.
Never mind trotting out black holes, billion-solar-mass black holes, "dark matter" (imagined to constitute 90% of the mass of the universe), "dark energy" (part of it? supposed to repel matter), the "Great Attractor", galactic lensing, "magnetic reconnection", WIMPs, MACHOs, the Big Bang, Inflation, zero-point energy, and worse, without even a trace of embarrassment. That, and cropping from Hubble pictures anything embarrassing, such as quasars actually in front of opaque nearby galaxies.
After the last cosmic background experiment concluded, Georg Smoot at a podium announced, in the the most smug of terms, that it proved the Big Bang theory "correct, once and for all." Of course no single experiment, or even a dozen, can do any such thing, and Big Bang is looking iffier every month.