Astronomy & Cosmology

It took nearly 4 months, but finally, last week, my very own Galileoscope arrived in the mail.  Yup, I had placed my order back in March and well, they had a few production problems and delays, but now they're finally shipping.  What is it you may be asking?  The Galileoscope is a project of the International Year of Astronomy.  The goal of this project was to create an inexpensive telescope that could be easily purchased by schools and individuals to help promote science and the hobby of astronomy.

So, now that I have mine, what do I think about it?  First let me say, you can't beat the price, it was only $15 plus shipping.  They've recently raised the price to $20, but it's still a bargain.  It does require some assembly and the instructions that come with the telescope leave a little to the imagination.  Luckily, they've provided more detailed instructions online that help clear up some of the misunderstandings.  The biggest issue for me was assembling the two eyepieces.  The optics are provided in 6 pieces and the purchaser is required to set them into the eyepieces in the correct order.  They are rather small and it's somewhat difficult to see which of the optics are concave and which are convex.  The online instructions provide a much better idea of which way they should be placed in the eyepieces. The second issue is it was very difficult to not get fingerprints on the optics during the assembly process.  As small as they were, it was difficult to only touch them on the sides of the lenses.  I would have preferred if the eyepieces were pre-assembled to avoid the issues mentioned, however, I assume that would have raised the cost.

Once assembled, we took it for a spin.  It's very difficult to hold steady with just your hands, so I would recommend a good tripod mount.  Also, the focusing is done by pushing a plastic tube in or out of one end making fine adjustments difficult, but overall, the telescope does a fine job of basic sky viewing.

In my view, the Galileoscope project met their goal of designing and manufacturing a low cost relatively high quality telescope that can be used to introduce students and adults alike to the wonders of astronomy and the night sky.

I've posted a few videos/websites before showing the scale of objects in the Universe.  Well, here's another one and it does a really good job of trying to explain just how big some things in the Universe are.

And this only covers the size of stars...just imagine how large some of the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are.  It's always humbling to me when I see these types of comparisons.  One understands just how small and insignificant our problems really are when you consider the massive scale of the Universe in which we live.

I thought I would post a few videos I've found on the concept of Dark Matter.  If you've been following along, I've been posting my understanding of the topic based on my some reading I've been doing lately.  But I know most probably don't want to hear my view on this, but would rather hear from real physicists.

The first video is for the ADHD crowd, it's from TED and it's only about 16 minutes long.  It provides a really good overview of how gravitational lensing provides evidence for Dark Matter.

This next video is from physicist Kim Griest.  It's about an hour long and provides a bit more detail about Dark Matter and Dark Energy.  Also, the questions at the end are very informative.

And finally this video from an Authors At Google talk given by Sean Carroll who is also a contributor to the blog CosmicVariance.  It's the longest at about an hour and 15 minutes and also touches on both Dark Matter and Dark Energy. 

So there you have it.  Enough to keep you busy for a while and hopefully provide some interesting information that at least for me is very awe inspiring.

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy and as I mentioned in an earlier post, I've decided to take this opportunity to educate myself on a topic that interests me...Dark Matter.  In Part 1, I talked at a high level about what Dark matter is and why astronomers think it exists.  In this post I'm going to talk in a bit more detail about the evidence astronomers have gathered that points them toward the existence of Dark Matter.  I'm not an astronomer, I'm an Engineer, so I'm coming at this from a layman's perspective and as such I'll be writing at a level that matches that perspective.  I've gathered some resources (which I'll post at the end) that I'm using to educate myself and most of the information in this series is a synopsis from those resources.

In my previous post on Dark Matter I talked about why astronomers think Dark Matter exists and the reason was that the luminous mass of a galaxy does not account for the gravitational mass required to keep the galaxies together.  In fact, they should have flown apart.  But how did astronomers actually measure this motion?  How do they know distant stars are traveling so fast?  To help understand this, I'll talk about how astronomers actually measure the mass of a galaxy and the velocity of the stars within it.  We'll also talk about galaxy clusters and what those can tell astronomers about the presence of Dark matter.  Finally, we'll talk about what these measurements say about the amount of Dark Matter that must exist to keep the galaxies together and where it resides.

As part of the International Year of Astronomy, one of the projects was to create an inexpensive telescope that could be purchased in quantities by schools and individuals.  Well, I received an email today that let me know they are ready to be ordered.

We are now taking orders for delivery beginning in late April.

The Galileoscope is a high-quality, low-cost telescope kit developed as a Cornerstone Project of the International Year of Astronomy 2009.  For just US$15 plus shipping by postal/parcel service, you get a 50-mm f/10 refractor that snaps together in less than 5 minutes and gives great views of the celestial wonders that Galileo first glimpsed 400 years ago and that still delight stargazers today....The Galileoscope comes with a 25x eyepiece and 2x Barlow lens and incorporates features such as achromatic optics, stray-light rejection, and a 1.25-inch focuser normally found only on telescopes costing at least 10 times more.

Galileoscopes are in production and will begin shipping to customers in late April 2009!

You can go to their website and order one for yourself.  And if you like, you can order additional scopes to be given away to schools.  It's a great inexpensive way to get into the hobby of astronomy and it's especially great for kids.

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've decided to take this opportunity to educate myself on a topic that interests me...Dark Matter.  This is Part 1 of what will (hopefully) be a multi-part series.  In this post, I'll try to give a high level explanation of what Dark Matter is and why astronomers think it exists.  I'm not an astronomer, I'm an Engineer, so I'm coming at this from a layman's perspective and as such I'll be writing at a level that matches that perspective.  I've gathered some resources (which I'll post at the end) that I'm using to educate myself and most of the information in this series is a synopsis from those resources.

For 400 years, since Galileo pointed his spyglass to the sky, astronomers have been studying the light they could gather from distant objects.  The amount of information contained within light is more than most people realize.  From spectrum information to understand what elements these distant objects are made of, to determining velocity, temperature and mass of objects, to understanding the effects of gravity and the curvature and expansion of space.  All this can be derived from analyzing the light that left those distant objects so many years ago to be captured by us tiny creatures here on Earth.

Stars, galaxies, globular clusters, nebula and such comprise what we can see when we look into the night sky.  These objects are luminous.  That is, they give off light that we can see.  But beyond that, are there objects out there that we can't see?  Dark objects? Or, on a more fundamental scale, Dark Matter?  It turns out yes, Dark Matter exists.  In fact, the luminous matter makes up only about 4% of the total mass of the Universe (how do we know that?  Well, that's for another post).  So for the last 400 years, astronomers have been studying a very small portion of what's out there in the Universe.  But they have still been able to piece together an incredible amount of information about the Universe in which we reside.

Fresh off of the recent 200^th birthday of Darwin, today marks the anniversary of the birth of another great scientist, Galileo Galilei.  He was born on this day, February 15^th, in 1564.  We all know the story of Galileo.  He improved on a design of a looking glass and pointed it to the heavens.  With his observations of the moon, Venus and of Jupiter, he was able to confirm the Copernican theory that the Earth was not the center of the Universe, but that the Sun was at the center of the solar system and that the Earth moved.  The heliocentric system.

For this, in 1633, the church condemned him.  It took hundreds of years before the Church finally recanted and accepted that they had made a mistake.  And it wasn't until 1992 that the Church publicly stated they had mis-handled the situation and accepted that the Earth was not stationary.

With that, I'll shut up and just post a few videos about Galileo.

I know I'm a bit late with this, but I just got back from Taos, NM where I had little access to the Interwebs, so I couldn't post this on New Year's Day.

For those who don't know, 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy.  It's an effort to remind everyone of the impact of astronomy and other fundamental sciences on their everyday lives.  And it's not just an effort going on in the United States, hence the international part, but a global effort with chapters in well over 100 countries.

I began the IYOA by spending the first evening of the new year in a hot tub on the side of a mountain in the secluded area of Arroyo Seco, NM gazing up at the night sky.  There was very little light pollution to obscure the view and it was spectacular.  It's amazing how much we miss out on in the "big" city.

For me personally, the IYOA means spending some more time on a hobby that I enjoy.  I've never gotten into the concept of learning constellations, although I see the value, but instead I've been attracted to the more "strange" concepts of astronomy, like black holes and cosmology.  But this year I plan to spend some time reading up on the elusive concept of Dark Matter.  Why?  Well, it's amazing to me that we think we know so much, but we don't know what makes up 95% of our universe.  You see, normal matter, the kind that you, me, stars and planets are made of, is only about 5% of what's out there (we think).  The rest is Dark Matter and this stuff called Dark Energy.  No one really knows what Dark Matter is made of, but I want to read up on it and find out more about what the experts think it is.  There's plenty of active research going on into Dark Matter, so I don't think I'll have any trouble finding things to keep me busy.  I'll post occasionaly about what I find and hopefully learn something that I didn't know before.

2009 should be a great year for astronomy and science in general since it's also the 200th birthday of Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species.  There will be celebrations galore for those interested in science this year.  And finally...Happy New Year!

I've been busy lately with work and getting ready for our trip, so I've neglected to keep up with what my Tivo is recording.  Well, I finally decided to sit down and watch a Nova episode and it was fascinating.  It's an old show from 2006 that they had replayed, but I'd never seen it before.  It was about the search for the neutrino.

It started back in the 1930's when radioactive decay was being studied and they realized that some of the energy was missing.  Based on the law of conservation of energy, the amount of energy at the beginning of a reaction should be the same as that at the end.  But in the case of radioactive decay, a small amount was missing at the end.  So Wolfgang Pauli postulated that there must be some other bit of pure energy produced in the reaction and he called it a neutrino.  This meant that the particle must be massless and therefore travel at the speed of light.  Since it had no charge, it didn't interact with things making it very difficult to detect.  And as such, no one even tried for many years.  Well, this was the sad state of affairs until the late 1950's when a couple of physicists working on a nuclear reactor proved the neutrino exists.  That lead to the 1960's when a theoretical physicist by the name of John Bahcall took that bit of information about the neutrino and calculated how many neutrinos the sun would produce.  It turns out to be alot.  One way to envision it is to realize that roughly 50 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second.

Well, with that, Ray Davis decided he had to devise a way to test this hypothesis and the calculation, so off to work he goes.  To test this, he basically went into an abandoned mine deep under the earth and filled a large vat with a cleaning fluid which is mostly chlorine.  The thought was a few neutrinos would strike the fluid and cause bits of it to decay to argon.  This was supposed to happen about 10 times in a week, so out of all this fluid they would sift through and try to count the quantity of the argon atoms and see if the counts matched their expectation.

That alone sounds like a feat unto itself, but what they found was the number didn't match to the calculated value.  They only found about one third of what they expected.  So the empirical data didn't match the hypothesis.  The two scientists went back and forth trying to figure out who was at fault.  Well, it turns out neither of them were.  To make a long story short, the initial assumption was that neutrinos were massless, but it was determined that they had a very small mass and this helped to explain quite a bit and set things right.

The side beneift was that this also might explain the disparity in the universe between normal matter and anti-matter.  That is, why is there so much more normal matter than anti-matter.  Well, they think the neurtino might be the reason.

What was fascinating to me about this was the dedication of these two scientists to the work they were doing, not knowing whether their work would ever amount to anything.  They basically spent about 40 years of their lives on this endeavor and most of it having to defend their calculations and experiments.  Now that's dedication.

The other fascinating thing to me is that this is a classic example of science in action.  Someone postulated the existence of the neutrino, another scientist took that information and came up with a testable hypothesis and another scientist worked to test the hypothesis.  And when they found the results didn't match, they went on to try to understand why and in so doing uncovered something that may explain one of the great unanswered questions about the universe.

Now if that isn't awe inspiring, I don't know what is.  As you can probably tell, this show had an effect on me.  These are the people who should be held in high regard in our society.  These people work in obscurity to further the understanding of mankind, without the thought of fame or fortune.  Very few scientists ever become household names, but their contributions to our understanding are incalculable.

Go over and look at the picture from the Astronomy Picture of the Day for January 25th.  This has to be one of the most amazing images I've ever seen.  Click on the image to get the full resolution picture, save it to your PC and make it your background image.  You will be seriously amazed.  It is frickin' awesome.

If you don't want to click on over there, I've put a small version of it below to entice you.

Believe me, you won't be disappointed.