Venus, Saturn, Mars and Ophiuchus

We have a beautiful trio of planets over in the West, following the setting Sun.  Venus is by far the brightest, and you can easily see it even before the sky gets very dark.  To the left of Venus, Saturn and Mars appear right next to each other. 

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If you look directly south, you’ll find the bright star Antares, low in the southern sky, in the constellation Scorpius, and directly above it is a big constellation of fairly faint stars called Ophiuchus, the snake holder.  And up here in Ophiuchus, astronomers have discovered a truly amazing world.  There’s a tiny little red dwarf star up here called GJ 1214, which you can only see with a telescope.  A few months ago, a team of astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian observatory, announced that they had discovered a planet orbiting this star which is only about six times more massive than the earth, so we call it a super-earth.  Astronomers have discovered more than 450 planets orbiting around other stars, but most of these are huge Jupiter-sized gas giants.  This newly discovered world is more earth sized.  The planet orbits its star every 1.6 days, and it just happens to pass in front of its star from our perspective, allowing us to measure its size.  The density of this planet is much lower than the earth, telling us that this world may have either a thick atmosphere, or even huge ocean of water, surrounding a core of rock.  Could there be life in the oceans of this world?  Stay tuned, because we’re going to be studying this super-earth very carefully over the next few years!

So take a look at Venus, Saturn, and Mars in the West, as well Ophiuchus in the south, with its newly discovered super-earth, up in our Beautiful Montana Skies!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Moon, Scorpius and Antares  

We’ve got a beautiful gibbous moon out tonight, low in the Southern skies.  Each day this week, the moon will move farther east, passing through the stars of Scorpius on Wednesday, then keep going until the moon becomes full this weekend.  The brightest star in Scorpius is Antares, the heart of the Scorpion.  Antares is a red supergiant star that is 600 light years away.  Now, how do we know how far away it is?  Nobody’s ever been there!  Nobody ever took a tape measure to Antares!  We use the method of triangulation, measuring the angle to an object from two different perspectives.  This is why we have two eyes.  Now, because our eyes are just a few inches apart, we can only estimate the distances to objects out to a few yards away.  However, if you were to rip out your eyes, and hold them farther away, you could figure distances out to a hundred yards.  Kids, don’t try this at home!  And even better, if you put one eye on a plane to Europe and the other eye on a plane to Japan, you could figure the distance to the moon.  Or, we could just compare pictures taken by two different telescopes.  To measure the distance to the stars, we need two perspectives even farther apart, so we let the earth do the moving for us.

We take one picture when the earth is on one side of the sun, in June, and the other picture six months later, in December.  From these two different angles, we can calculate that Anatares really is 600 light years away!

So take a look at the Moon and Scorpius with distant Antares, low in the south, up in our beautiful Montana Skies!

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Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Mars, Saturn and Mighty Venus

We have three amazing planets out tonight, low in the western sky, following the setting Sun.  Mighty Venus is the brightest planet by far, and to the left of it you can find Mars and Saturn.  This week a little crescent moon will appear out of the sunset, and move just below these planets, passing Venus on Wednesday, then Saturn and Mars by Friday.  Venus is the brightest planet we can see, and so it was very important to many cultures around the world, including the ancient Maya civilization which flourished in southern Mexico and Central America more than a thousand years ago. 

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The Maya built great stone cities and pyramids, developed advanced mathematics, created very accurate calendars, and wrote books about their work, including one book about astronomy, which today is called the Dresden Codex.  This ancient Maya book, written a thousand years ago, shows how they could predict the motion of the planet Venus, which they used to plan their rituals, wars, and human sacrifices.  Is that right?  Did they really do that?  Why yes they did!  The Maya brought unusual creativity and enthusiasm to the human sacrifice experience!  If you were a human sacrifice for say the Aztecs up in Mexico City, you’d be just one of several thousand prisoners to march up the pyramid and get your heart cut out, exactly the same as everybody else.  Bo-ring!  But as a human sacrifice in Maya country, you never know what will happen next.  Perhaps you’ll be drowned in a Cenote, or crushed under large rocks, or bled to death, so your blood could be used in fascinating rituals.  Book your tickets today!

So take a look at Mars, Saturn, and mighty Venus, in the west following the setting sun, up in our Beautiful Montana Skies!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Summer Triangle

If you go outside tonight, face due East, and look way up in the sky, you’ll find the very bright star Vega, in the constellation Lyra.  Down and to the left of Vega, you’ll find the star Deneb at the tail of Cygnus the Swan.  Even farther down and to the right, you’ll find the star Altair, at the tail of Aquila the eagle.  Vega, Deneb, and Altair form the large summer triangle.  Inside this triangle is a faint little constellation called Vulpecula, the fox, where a truly amazing object was discovered in July of 1967 by the astronomer Jocelyn Bell.

The object she discovered was so strange, so bizarre, that she initially called it LGM-1, for Little Green Men signal 1.  She was using an early radio telescope, when she discovered a source sending out regular pulses every 1.34 seconds, like a heartbeat.  Thump, thump, thump.  Could this be a beacon from an alien civilization?  What could do this?  Stars can give out regular signals if they are spinning.  Our sun spins once every month, and some spin faster.  But it’s impossible for the sun or any normal sized star to spin once every second, because it would have to spin ten times faster than the speed of light!  Jocelyn Bell discovered an entirely new type of star, a neutron star, a solid ball of neutrons just a few miles across, which is still more massive than our entire sun.  Neutron stars are so tiny, with gravity so strong, that they can spin once a second.  If a neutron star has a strong magnetic field, then it gives off pulses of radio waves.

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Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Mars, Saturn and Arcturus

This week we have three beautiful planets gathered together in the Western sky.  You’ll see Venus first; it is astoundingly bright, then to the left, Mars, and Saturn.  If you look up above these planets

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you’ll find the big dipper high in the northwestern sky, with the arc of its handle pointing to the amazingly bright star Arcturus.  Right between the big dipper and Arcturus, is a strange little galaxy called NGC 4631:

Here, the orange colors are a visible light picture from the mighty Hubble Space Telescope, while the blue and purple show x ray light, from NASA’s orbiting Chandra x ray telescope.  X rays are simply light with wavelengths much shorter than the human eye can see.  Now, there are a lot of bizarre misconceptions about X rays, many of which were displayed in the classic 1978 movie Superman.  Lois Lane is interviewing the man of steel and says, “If you have x ray vision, well then, what color underwear am I wearing?”  “Well, I can’t see through that lead planter, but oh yes, they’re pink.”  What is this, bizzaro world?  If Superman really had x ray vision, he would be blind, because there aren’t enough x rays bouncing around to see anything.  It is true that x rays are blocked by lead, but they pass right through human flesh, as well as anyone’s polyester underwear.  What’s superman gonna say, “Nice pelvic bone Lois!”  And pink is a color of visible light, so there’s no such thing as pink x rays.  Fortunately NASA’s orbiting Chandra telescope handles x rays much better than the man of steel

So take a look at Venus, Mars, and Saturn in the West, with the big dipper and Arcturus above, up in our Beautiful  Montana Skies!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Titan   

Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, when the Sun rises farthest North of East, comes highest up in the sky at noon, and sets farthest North of West, which gives us the shortest night.  But you can still see a beautiful waxing gibbous moon, low in the southern sky.  Each day this week the moon will get thicker, and move farther down into the Southeast, passing through the stars of Libra, then into Scorpius, and finally it will be full on Saturday, when it reaches the stars of Sagittarius, low in the Southeast.  Through a small telescope or even binoculars, the Moon is a spectacular sight:

When we start to study the other moons in our solar system, we realize that our Moon is a strange, bizarre object, because it’s so fantastically huge compared to the Earth.  Our moon is 27% of the earth’s diameter.  Now there are bigger moons:  Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is the biggest moon in the solar system, but it’s only 4% of Jupiter’s diameter.  Saturn’s moon Titan is the second biggest moon, but again it’s only 4% of Saturn’s diameter.  Remember, our neighboring planet Venus has no moon at all, and nMontana Skies!either does Mercury.  How did we end up with a moon and a strangely big one too?  The analysis of moon rocks tells us that there must have been an enormous collision more than four billion years ago, when the earth was still forming.  An object the size of Mars smashed into the young earth, and the debris of this collision ended up in orbit around the Earth, where gravity slowly gathered it together to form our enormous moon.

So take a look at our bizarrely big moon, up in our Beautiful Montana Skies!

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Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Cat's Eye

Over in the Western sky, following the setting Sun, the fantastically bright planet Venus is now joined by a lovely crescent moon.  Each day this week the moon will move farther up and to the South, passing Mars by Thursday, then Saturn on Friday. 

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If you face northeast, you’ll find a very bright star, rising over here:  Vega in the constellation Lyra.  Just to the left of Vega are the faint stars of Draco the Dragon, which curls around through the night sky.  Hiding here is one of the great wonders of the universe, a fantastic sight that we call the Cat’s Eye Nebula.  Although it’s too faint to see with the naked eye, a telescope shows this:

The Cat’s Eye is about three thousand light years away from us, and there’s a dying star in the center of all this amazing structure.  This star was originally about five times more massive than our Sun, but as it has burned through the last of its fuel, its outer layers of hot gas have been blown out into space, creating this amazingly beautiful sight.  If we zoom in on the center with the mighty Hubble Space Telescope, we see this:

The dying star at the center of the Cat’s Eye has lost about 80% of its original mass by blowing this wind of hot gas out into space.  Over the next few billion years this hot gas will cool, until gravity can pull clumps of it together and create the next generation of stars.

So take a look at the Moon and Venus in the West, as well as Vega and Draco with the Cat’s Eye nebula in the Northeast, up in our Beautiful Montana Skies!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Venus, Mars and Saturn  

The planet Venus is amazingly bright, low in the Western sky until about midnight.  Higher up and to the left you’ll find Mars, right next to the bright star Regulus, the heart of Leo the Lion.  One step farther up brings you to the planet Saturn.  Over weeks and months, the planets move through the stars in complex patterns.  The mystery of why they move like this is what launched the science of astronomy, 500 years ago.  One of the most important early scientist was the Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe.

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Tycho realized that to solve the mystery, astronomers needed more data, and so in the days before telescopes he built astronomical observatories.  Night after night he carefully measured the precise positions of the planets as they moved through the stars.  Tycho was more than a bit arrogant and he once fought a duel with swords over who was a better mathematician.  Historians aren’t exactly sure how this happened, but maybe he just said “Hello.  My name is Tycho Brahe.  You say you are better mathematician than me.  Prepare to die!”  “What?  Why you’re that Danish man.  You aren’t serious!”  “Hello.  My name is Tycho Brahe.  You say you are better mathematician than me.  Prepare to die!”  “You’re mad!  You wouldn’t really fight a duel over that would you!”  “Hello.  My name is Tycho Brahe.  You say you are better mathematician than me.  Prepare to die!”  Tycho lost the duel when the other man cut a large chunk out of his nose, and so he wore a false nose of gold and silver for the rest of his life.  Those were the days!

Take a look at Venus, Mars, and Saturn up in our Beautiful Montana Skies!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Saturn, Virgo, & Quasar 3C273

If you face directly south, and look up about 45 degrees above the horizon you’ll find the planet Saturn, which is just to the right of the constellation Virgo.  Up here in Virgo is one of the most amazing, and strange objects ever discovered, the first quasar, called 3C273.  It was discovered in 1959 as a source of radio waves, and in 1963 the astronomer Maarten Schmidt down at Caltech, used a traditional visible light telescope to try and figure out what it was.  It looked like an ordinary, fairly bright blue star. 

You can see with any small telescope.  But, when he measured its motion, he found that 3C273 is moving away from us at 15% of the speed of light, making it the fastest object ever discovered.  It’s being carried away from us by the expansion of the universe, because it’s an incredible distance of 2.4 billion light years away.  So how can it be so bright, if it’s so far away?  It must be fantastically luminous, two trillion times as luminous as our sun.  Where does all that energy come from?  The only thing in the universe that could steadily give off so much energy, so fast, is a supermassive black hole about a billion times the mass of our sun.  As gas swirls around being pulled in by the black hole’s gravity, it gets so fantastically hot that it shines with a luminosity two trillion times bigger than our Sun.  Where did this supermassive black hole come from?  Where does it get all the gas that it’s feeding on?  The quasar 3C273 remains one of the most mysterious objects in the entire universe!

So take a look at Saturn, and Virgo, home of the quasar 3C273, up in our Beautiful

Montana Skies!

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Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Amazing Moon

We have a beautiful waxing gibbous moon in the southern sky tonight, just under the bright star Spica in Virgo.  Each day this week the moon will get a little thicker, and move farther down into the Southeast, until on Thursday, the Moon will be full, as it rises in the Southeastern sky just after sunset.  The first scientist to think seriously about a voyage to the Moon was the German astronomer Johannes Kepler,

who in the early 1600s wrote a book called “The Somnium” or the dream.  It’s sort of a science fiction story where the hero travels to the Moon and sees the Earth and the night sky from a different perspective.  Unfortunately, this being the 1600s, the story was misinterpreted by certain readers, and as a result, Kepler’s mother was accused of some unusual crimes.  At age 74 she was arrested and interrogated.  Although we don’t have detailed records of her first interrogation, most historians think that it went something like this:  “Mrs. Kepler, we have a few questions for you.  Now, your son Johannes has written a book called The Sominex – I mean – The Somnium.  But that book sure didn’t put me to sleep.  I couldn’t put it down.  Almost as if I was under a magic spell.  Hmmm…  In this book, your son talks about visiting the moon by flying through the air, in the dark.  Well isn’t that special?  Now, how did he do that?  What sorts of things fly through the air in the dark?  Let’s see, there’s birds and owls, but I don’t think you and your son are birds.  There’s insects, mosquitoes and butterflies, but I don’t think you and your son are butterflies.  And then there’s…  WITCHES!  And what do we do with witches?  We burn them!  Burn the witches!”  Mrs. Kepler was imprisoned for 14 months, while her son Johannes wrote up a detailed defense, and called in favors from everyone he knew, to prevent her from being tortured and burned at the stake.  Mrs. Kepler was a formidable woman, who refused to confess to anything, and so she was finally set free, a great triumph for the forces of science and reason over paranoia and superstition.

Something to think about while you take a look at the amazing Moon, up in our Beautiful Montana Skies!

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Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Moon, Venus, Mars and Saturn 

Over in the Western sky, following the setting sun, Venus continues to shine wonderfully brightly, now joined by a crescent moon over in the stars of Gemini.  Each day this week the moon will move farther up and to the south.  It will pass the planet Mars on Wednesday, and then continue into the southern sky.

It’s here that the Moon will meet up with the planet Saturn this weekend.  Saturn is the brightest star-like object high up in the sky to the south.  It was the Italian astronomer Galileo who first discovered the rings of Saturn in 1610, although he wasn’t really sure what he was seeing, as he made these sketches

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Galileo said that Saturn had two “companions” and later called them “arms” or “ears.”  It wasn’t until fifty years later that astronomers with better telescopes realized that they were seeing a ring, and then in 1675 another Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini announced a great discovery:  “I’ve been looking at Saturn through my telescope.  Now Galileo he said that Saturn has the ears, but Galileo he had the spots in his eyes. 

It’s a ring that we see, and I’m gonna tell you, I have discovered that Saturn has two rings.  There’s a inner ring, and a outer ring, separated by a dark gap three thousand miles wide.”  Today, astronomers call this gap the Cassini Division.  The rings themselves are made of billions of chunks of ice, each one orbiting separately around Saturn.  The closer chunks of ice orbit more quickly, and the farther chunks orbit more slowly.  Cassini’s Division is caused by Saturn’s moon Mimas, which orbits far outside of the ring system.  Any chunk of ice in this gap will orbit Saturn exactly twice for every one time that Mimas orbits Saturn, causing them to line up again and again.  Mimas doesn’t have a lot of gravity, but every time it lines up with any chunks of ice in the Cassini Division, it gives them a little tug, and these tugs add up over time to destabilize the orbit and empty out the Cassini Division.

So take a look at the Moon, Venus, and Mars in the West, and Saturn with it’s amazing rings to the South, up in our Beautiful Montana Skies!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Mars and Venus  

The glorious planet Venus shines low in the sky, just North of West, following the setting sun, as a fantastically bright evening star.  Meanwhile, the red planet Mars is high in the Southwestern sky, between the stars of Cancer and Leo.  Mars is an exciting planet because we can see that in the past, Mars used to have water.

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Close up pictures of Mars show dry river beds, dry lake beds, ancient river deltas.  If life appeared in the Earth’s oceans, why not Mars, too?  The history of life here on Earth may hold some clues.  The Earth formed four and a half billion years ago, at the same time as the sun and the other planets in our solar system. At first the Earth was a blob of molten lava, but over time it cooled, formed a crust, and water rained down to form the first oceans about four billion years ago.  And in the oldest rocks here on Earth, we find chemical evidence of very simple life, one-celled bacteria, algae, that kind of thing.  Life formed fast!  Maybe this means that given an ocean and the right chemicals, maybe it’s not that difficult for simple life to form.  But then for three billion years, life stayed simple and microscopic.  It’s only half a billion years ago, in what we call the Cambrian period, that suddenly the oceans are filled with big, complex, multicellular organisms, the forerunners of sea urchins, starfish, shrimp, crabs, lobsters, fish, breading, tartar sauce, melted butter…  glorious, delicious seafood!  It took three billion years to make the leap from one celled pond scum to something we could barbecue!  Maybe this means that it’s not so easy to make the leap from microscopic one celled life to real animals.  Maybe it takes billions of years of rolling those genetic dice, generation after generation after generation.  And a generation isn’t a long time when you’re a bacteria!  I mean those little guys really know how to get busy, you know?  When we start studying earthlike planets around other stars, maybe we’re going to find that pond scum is common, but that large plants and animals are exceptionally rare.  I can’t wait to find out!

So take a look at Mars and Venus, up in our Beautiful Montana Skies!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Venus, Mars, Saturn and Everything Else

We’ve got three planets visible in the evening sky.  Amazingly bright Venus follows the setting sun, just North of West, while Mars is high in the Southwestern sky, in the constellation Cancer.

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Saturn is high in the Southern sky, with the bright star Spica just down and to the left of it.  Our universe is so big, so vast, and yet it all had a beginning, the big bang, 14 billion years ago.  The big bang equations were developed in the 1920s and 30s, but for a long time, they were just a hypothesis, a conjecture, an educated guess.  No one saw the big bang happen!  How could we get any real evidence one way or the other?  Then in the 1940s and 50s astronomers realized that because the big bang was so hot, the gas filling the universe would have been glowing for many years after the big bang, and that glow should still be out there, measurable and detectable.  They calculated that the expansion of the universe would have stretched out the light waves, pushing them down into the microwave-radio part of the spectrum.

In 1964, a team out a Bell Labs in New Jersey, led by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, made the great discovery.  “So we’re out a Bell Labs in New Jersey, trying to create a new type of microwave antenna for satellite communication.  But whenever we turn on the antenna, we hear this awful noise.   So we replace all the electronics.  It’s still there.  We even go up on the roof, clean all the pigeon droppings out of the antenna, and blow a few of ‘em away.  Finally, Robert notices that the antenna is pointed up at the sky, and he says:  ‘Try pointing it down at the earth.’  The noise goes away.  It’s real.  It’s coming at us from the sky in all directions, filling up the universe.  We make some phone calls, and pretty soon we’re talking to some guys at Princeton University, who tell us that we’ve discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation, the afterglow of the big bang itself!”  Penzias and Wilson discovered the first real hard evidence of the big bang, and won the Nobel Prize in 1978.

So take a look at Venus, Mars, Saturn, and everything else, up in our

Montana Skies!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Moon, Saturn and Venus

There’s a big, giant waxing gibbous moon rising over in the southeastern sky tonight, right by the bright star Spica in the constellation Virgo.  Almost directly above the moon, you should be able to make out the ringed planet Saturn.  However the brightest planet visible is over in the west, following the setting sun, as an evening star.

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That’s where you’ll find the glorious, glittering planet Venus, so beautiful, so lovely, and so deadly!  With a surface temperature of 860 degrees, surface pressure 93 times larger than the earth, and psychotically evil clouds of sulfuric acid, this planet will fry you, crush you, and eat you alive!  What’s amazing is that we actually have real pictures from the surface of Venus taken by a series of Russian probes, the Venera probes, back in the old cold-war space-race days.  In 1967, Venera 4 put out a parachute within the atmosphere of Venus and transmitted data as it descended down to an altitude of 16 miles, before being crushed by the pressure.  Excited by this success, the Russians send another probe, Venera 5, which transmitted more data, but was also destroyed at an altitude of 16 miles.  The word from the political leaders was clear:  “Build stronger probe!  Stronger!”  So they built Venera 6, stronger, hardier, and it survived down to an altitude of 6 miles, so close it could almost see the ground through all those clouds.  So what did they do?  “We make probe strong like bull!”  So they made Venera 7, which actually landed on the surface, and sent back some readings for 23 minutes before it was destroyed by the heat and pressure.  The word was the same:  “Stronger!  Build probe stronger!”  So they sent Venera 8 which survived for 50 minutes.  “Stronger!  We must make probe stronger!”  And so they sent Venera 9, which not only survived for 53 minutes, but also had a camera and took the first picture from the surface of Venus

And there it is.  Venus is covered with mostly volcanic lava rocks, barren, sterile and deadly!

So take a look at the Moon and Saturn in the East, and Venus in the West following the setting sun, up in our Beautiful Montana Skies!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Moon, Mars and Saturn

We have a waxing crescent moon out tonight, in the Western sky, up in the constellation Gemini.  Each day this week, the moon will get more full and move farther up towards the East, passing Mars on Wednesday.  The Moon and Mars do not have organized magnetic fields the way that the earth does, so if you’re lost on the Moon or Mars, a compass will not help you.  However, if you look over in the southeastern sky,

Click on star charts for larger versions.

you’ll find the planet Saturn, which does have a strong planetary magnetic field, like the earth, so in the neighborhood of Saturn, a compass needle would always point towards Saturn’s North Pole.  It’s not easy to create a planet sized magnetic field:  You need a liquid electrically conducting material that is rotating, and swirling around in a complicated way.  There are a lot of misconceptions about how the earth’s core makes our magnetic field, which lead to a spectacularly bad science fiction movie a few years ago, called “The Core.”  I mean seriously, this was the worst science that I have ever seen in a movie theater.  Okay, in the movie, the earth’s magnetic field goes away because the core stops rotating, and worldwide chaos erupts, microwaves melting the golden gate bridge, birds going psychotic and attacking people, pacemakers stopping, none of which would happen if the earth’s magnetic field stopped.  The only person who notices the disappearance of the earth’s magnetic field is our hero-scientist:  Are there no boy scouts?  “Mister Scoutmaster, my compass needle does not point North today.”  In order to fix the problem a team of scientists have to travel down into the earth, and detonate a bunch of nuclear bombs.  Okay a nuclear bomb is a big deal if you’re a person, or a city.  It’ll ruin your whole day.  But the core of the earth is trillions of times bigger than any city.  Trillions!  That’s a big number even if you’re in congress.  It would take more than all nuclear bombs ever built to have any effect on the rotation of the earth’s core.  Whoever wrote this bizarre “science fiction” movie needs to take a course in very basic science!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Venus and Mercury

The planet Venus is shining gloriously brightly, low in the Western sky, for about an hour after sunset.  And if you spot Venus, try looking to the lower right of it, and you may just be able to see tiny Mercury.  Both of these planets appear in the constellation Aries, the ram, right now, which is just underneath the stars of Perseus, the hero.  For thousands of years people have looked at the stars and wondered:  What are they?  Where does all this come from?  How does all this get started?  One hundred years ago, all the educated people in Europe were completely certain that our universe had no beginning.  Philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Rene Descartes had decided that our universe must have existed forever, with no beginning and no end, eternal, static, and unchanging.  How could there have been a day without a yesterday?  However, when Einstein created his theory of gravity in 1915, everything changed, because his equations would not allow the universe to stand still.  It had to be expanding, contracting, changing in some way.  The great new theory was proposed by this scientist:

This is George Lemaitre.  He was a catholic priest from the French-speaking part of Belgium, who earned a doctorate in astronomy from Cambridge, and in 1925 he proposed the equations that we now call “The Big Bang Theory.”  He proposed that our universe is expanding, and that there was a real beginning.  “Ah the universe, according to my equations she had a beginning, when all of space everywhere was filled with hot dense energy.  There was no place that was not filled with the fires of creation.  This pressure caused space itself to expand, to stretch out, which continues to this day.”   The term “Big Bang” was not invented by Lemaitre, but was coined by the British astronomer Fred Hoyle in 1949, who was arguing against the theory.  “What?  You really think that whole entire universe just started up with a giant explosion, some sort of big bang?  Indeed!  What a cheeky theory!”  It took many years of careful observations of the universe before the evidence became overwhelming, and today we know with confidence that Lemaitre was right:  There was a beginning!

Click on star charts for larger versions.

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Siris, Procyon and Mars

Sirius, the brightest star anywhere in the sky, is a fantastic sight, low in the southwest, to the lower left of Orion the hunter.  To the upper left of Sirius is the bright star Procyon, and one more step farther up brings you to the planet Mars.  Sirius, Procyon, and Mars form a nice straight line in the southwestern sky.  Astronomers are fascinated by Mars, because even though it is very different than the Earth, it’s a whole lot more like the Earth than any other planet.  Mars has an atmosphere, with wind and weather, polar ice caps that grow and shrink with the seasons.  Even more interestingly, billions of years ago, Mars was a warmer, wetter place, raising the possibility that simple life might have formed there long ago.  We’ve sent a small fleet of spacecraft to Mars, taking huge numbers of pictures, and many years ago one of those early orbiters sparked a lot of public interested when it discovered “The Face on Mars.”  It turns out that there’s a hill on Mars, that if you get a picture in just the right light, using the early low resolution cameras, you get a picture that looks a bit like a human face. 

As more modern orbiters have taken better, higher resolution pictures, it turns out the “face” is just a hill.  Here’s a better picture.  If you change the lighting at all, the face goes away.  Of all the millions of hills on Mars, it would be surprising if there wasn’t at least one that happened to look a little bit like a face.  However, recent images have found another face, which is really there, and doesn’t go away when you change the lighting. 

Yes, my friends, this crater is the “Happy Face” on Mars, with two eyes and a smiling mouth.  Now some skeptics may say this is just a coincidence of rocks and geology. But I like to think that the happy face was built by an ancient Martian civilization, as their way to tell us to “Have a nice day!”

So take a look at Sirius, Procyon, and Mars, up in our Beautiful Montana Skies!

Click on star charts for larger versions.

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Moon and Saturn

We’ve got a wonderful full moon out tonight rising in the East.  It is underneath the planet Saturn, which doesn’t look very bright so close to the moon.  Every month the moon is full, when it’s in the opposite direction as the sun, so that from our perspective we see only the day side, the lit up side, of the moon.  Also, in the opposite direction of the Sun is the earth’s shadow.  When the moon’s orbit happens to line up just perfectly with the earth’s shadow, we get an eclipse of the moon.  This means that we can only get an eclipse of the moon, when the moon is full.  Right now the moon is passing just to the south of the Earth’s shadow, which means that, like most months, we will not have an eclipse.  The moon is in the constellation Virgo, which is a delight in a small telescope, because it is crammed with galaxies.  They look like fuzzy little smudges, but each of them is great spiral disk containing hundreds of billions of stars, hundreds of billions of suns, just like our own Milky Way galaxy.  And most of the galaxies out there are moving away from us, as the universe expands, which was discovered in the 1920s by the American astronomer Edwin Hubble:

As you can see from the picture, in the 1920s, all scientists were required by law to smoke a pipe.  So, the universe is expanding, what does that mean?  Well I am not expanding.  The earth is not expanding.  The planets orbiting our sun, the solar system is not expanding.  Our Milky Way galaxy is not expanding.  What’s expanding is the distances between groups of galaxies.  There is no center to the expansion, but instead it’s a general stretching out of space between the galaxies.  If I compare two distant groups of galaxies, I will find that both of them appear to be moving away from us, and the farther one will be moving faster.  This is true whether you’re looking from here, or from any other point in the entire universe.  No matter where you are, the universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, in all of the directions it can whiz!

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Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Moon, Mars and the Stars

We’ve got a lovely quarter moon out tonight, right between the horns of Taurus the bull.  Each day this week the moon will move a little farther towards the East, crossing through the stars of Gemini, and passing the planet Mars on Thursday.  Although Mars looks just like a bright star, in reality it is a totally different thing.  Mars is a planet, like the Earth, with mountains and valleys, while the stars are huge balls of hot gas, millions of times bigger than the planets, and millions of times farther away.  All the stars in the universe are mostly made of the lightest gasses, about 70% hydrogen gas and 30% helium gas.  How do we know this?  Nobody’s ever been to a star, or brought back a sample of one.  In 1835 the French Philosopher Auguste Comte wrote that it would be impossible for science to ever know what the stars are made from.  He said, and I quote:  “On the subject of stars, all investigations which are not ultimately reducible to simple visual observations are…necessarily denied to us… While we can conceive of the possibility of determining their shapes, their sizes, and their motions, we shall never be able by any means to study their chemical composition.”  A few years later, astronomers took the light from a star, broke it up into a rainbow of colors, using a fancy prism sort of thing, and saw this:

You can see a rainbow of colors:  Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.  However, notice the dark lines.  There are colors missing from the rainbow.  In the laboratory, scientists discovered that every type of atom removes a certain pattern of colors from the spectrum, from the rainbow.  So when we see these patterns of dark lines in the colors from the stars, we can measure exactly what types of atoms the stars are made of.  That’s how we know that all stars are made of mostly hydrogen and helium gas.  I gotta tell you, it gives me a special joy, deep in my heart, every time science proves that a philosopher was wrong.

So take a look at the Moon, Mars, and the stars, up in our beautiful Montana Skies!

Click on star charts for larger versions.

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Mars and Cassiopeia

Orion, the ancient Greek constellation of the Hunter, is low in the Southern sky, moving into the Southwest.  To the lower left of Orion is the fantastically bright star Sirius, the eye of Canis Major, the ancient Greek constellation of the big dog.  If you look up and to the left of Sirius, you’ll find the bright star Procyon in Canis Minor, the ancient Greek constellation of the little dog.  Then if you keep going, you’ll find the brilliant planet Mars:  Sirius, Procyon, and Mars make a nice fairly straight line through the sky. 

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If you look over in the northwest, you’ll find a sideways W-shaped group of stars, which are the ancient Greek constellation Cassiopeia, the figure of a queen sitting on a throne.  So what’s up with the ancient Greeks, huh?  All cultures have created their own constellations:  Why do we use the Greek ones today?  Why not some from other cultures, like Spain, or Poland, or Thailand?  Modern science uses the Greek constellations, because the Greeks created the science of astronomy, and their accomplishments were far superior to anything that had ever come before.  All cultures are not created equal!  The Greeks made the most accurate star charts, and wrote the most amazing books, using mathematics and geometry to understand what they saw in the heavens.  And it wasn’t just astronomy:  They created the most advanced mathematics, science, technology, architecture, sculpture, literature that the world had ever seen.  Our concepts of democracy and freedom come from Ancient Greece.  Why?  Of all the places in the world, why did Greece give us so much?  There were lots of places that were more powerful and wealthy than Greece, the great empires of Egypt and Persia.  Back in the good old days, Greece wasn’t an empire, just a bunch of independent little city-states, always fighting with each other.  Maybe that’s why:  People from different cities had different perspectives on things, so the Greeks learned to use discussion and reason to sort through different viewpoints.  Maybe that’s why they gave us the science of astronomy and so much more.

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Saturn and Mars

We’ve got TWO, count them, TWO awesome planets in the evening sky these days.  Mars, is the brightest one.  To find it, face south and look high up in the southern skies, and you’ll find it right next to the twin stars of Gemini.  The other planet out is glorious Saturn with her glittering rings.

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Look for Saturn low in the eastern sky, rising up by around 10pm or so, underneath the bright star Regulus, the heart of Leo the Lion.  I think of Saturn every weekend, because Saturday was named for the planet Saturn.  This dates back at least two thousand years to the days of the ancient Roman Empire, when the seven days of the week were named for the seven planets and their corresponding gods.  Seven planets?  Remember, before the European renaissance when Copernicus discovered that the Sun is the center of the solar system, they thought that the Earth was the center.  In the old days a planet was just an object that appeared to regularly move through the stars.  So the planets included the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, not the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Uranus and Neptune weren’t discovered until after the telescope was invented.  So that’s why we have Saturday, named for Saturn, then Sunday and Monday, named for the Moon.  So, where’s planet Tues, Weds, Thurs, and Fri?  To explain those, we’re going to have to leave the Roman Empire and travel north to the Germanic tribes and the Norse barbarians, the Vikings, “We come from the land of the ice and snow!” who adopted the weekday names from the Romans, but swapped in their own gods.  Instead of Mars, the Roman god of war, they used Tiw, the one-handed god of combat.  Instead of Mercury, the fast moving Roman messenger god, they used Wodan the god who greeted souls to the afterlife and Valhalla.  Instead of Jupiter, king of the Roman gods, they used Thor, god of thunder with his powerful hammer.  And finally, instead of Venus, the Roman goddess of love, they used Frigg, the powerful wife of Wodan.  The seven days of the week are named for the seven traditional planets, and the gods they represented.

So take a look at Saturn and Mars, or is that Tiw, up in our Beautiful Montana Skies!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Sirius, Procyon and Mars

Sirius, the brightest star anywhere in the sky, is shining wonderfully brightly, low in the southern sky these days, to the lower left of Orion.  Sirius is bright because it’s close, only 8.6 light years away.  If you go up and to the left of Sirius, you’ll find the bright star Procyon, at a distance of 11.4 light years.  Then keep going in a straight line and you’ll find the planet Mars.  We can send space probes to Mars, but the stars are much too far away, because the speed of light is the speed limit of our universe.  So what’s up with that?  In science fiction they do it all the time:  “Mister Sulu, Warp Factor Four!”  “You better strap yourself in kid, we gotta make the jump to hyperspace.”  “Maximum warp, number one.  Engage!”  I mean, they used to think we couldn’t break the sound barrier.  You know?  You know?  Sorry, but this is a totally different thing.  Here’s the deal:  Other speed are relative to how you’re moving.  If someone throws a baseball towards you, at 30 miles per hour, and you run towards it at 10 miles per hour, then relative to you the baseball is moving 40 miles per hour.  Light travels at the enormous speed of 186,282 miles per second, and one hundred years ago, we discovered that this speed is not relative.  If you move towards or away from an oncoming beam of light, that speed will not change in the slightest.  Now figuring out how that’s possible took a real Einstein…  Literally! 

In his famous theory of relativity, Albert Einstein explained that:  “Speed is a relationship between distance and time, ya?  So, because the speed of every beam of light is the same no matter how you move, this means that different observers must measure different distances and times.  If you approach the speed of light, then time will slow down for you, and if you could reach the speed of light, then for you, time itself would stop.”  Einstein’s theory has been tested millions of times in the laboratory, and he’s right.  The speed of light is the speed limit for our universe.

And that’s something to think about while you’re looking at Sirius, Procyon, and Mars, up in our Beautiful Montana Skies!

Click on star charts for larger versions.

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Mars and Venus

There’s a lovely moon out tonight, up to the south, in the stars of Taurus the bull, and just above Orion the hunter.  Each day this week the moon will move farther to the East, going through the stars of Gemini, then on Thursday night it will pass the planet Mars as it moves into the faint stars of Cancer the crab. 

       Click on star charts

                     for larger versions.

Over in the Western sky, following the setting Sun, the amazingly bright planet Venus is just beginning move up into the evening.  For now, it’s only visible right after sunset, but over the next few weeks, it will move farther up into the evening sky, as a fantastically bright evening star.  Just above Venus is the planet Uranus, although Uranus is too faint to really see without a telescope.  It was by mathematically studying the orbit of the planet Uranus that in 1846 the French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier was able to discover the planet Neptune.  Le Verrier said:  “The planet Uranus moves in its orbit sometimes faster and sometimes slower than we would expect if it felt nothing but the gravity from the Sun, Saturn and Jupiter.  This tells us that there must be another planet out there beyond Uranus, pulling with its gravity whenever Uranus moves past.  Through mathematical analysis I have predicted precisely where in the sky we must look with our telescopes to find this new planet.”  Le Verrier sent a letter with his calculations to the German astronomer Johann Galle, who found Neptune within just 1 degree of where Le Verrier predicted.  From nothing but observations of Uranus and mathematical calculations, Le Verrier was able to accurately predict exactly where Neptune would be found.  To this day, that remains one of the greatest triumphs of modern astronomy!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Mars and Orion

Orion the hunter is a beautiful constellation during the evenings these days, starting low in the southeast after sunset then moving across to the south as the evening progresses.  Above, and to the right of Orion you can find the bright star Aldebaran, the red eye of Taurus the bull, with his two horns pointed out to the left.

               Click on star charts

                     for larger versions.

But, it’s the planet Mars which is shining so amazingly brightly, high in the western sky by mid evening, as it moves through cancer the crab.  Long ago Mars had lakes and rivers, so lots of astronomers are wondering if simple life might have formed on Mars, and might still be living somewhere underground, beneath the frozen deserts of the red planet.  What would that mean?  What would that do for us?  Suppose we did find some microscopic bacteria, on Mars.  Why would that be important?  You see, I may look very different than a tree, but really I’m not.  Living things look very different from giant whales, to grass, to ferns, to eagles, to the smallest bacteria.  And yet, on a small scale we are almost exactly the same.  All living things on earth are made of cells, and all cells here are made of the same molecules, the same groups of atoms stuck together.  Every living cell is run by DNA, the beautiful molecule of life.  Every living cell is based on proteins, and sugars, and fats, in a bath of liquid water.  Every living organism ever discovered is made of precisely the same set of molecules.  They’re just arranged and put together in different ways in different organisms, and different people:  Tada!  That’s one way that we know that every living thing on earth descended, evolved from a single cell that formed here billions of years ago.  So, what would a Martian cell look like?  Would it be made of the same DNA, proteins, sugars, and fats that we are?  Or would it be totally different?  I can’t imagine that it would be exactly the same, but maybe it would be similar.  Maybe!  When we finally discover a true alien cell, we’re going to be working in the lab for decades to figure out exactly what it’s made of and how it works.

And that’s something to consider while you contemplate Mars and Orion, up in our

beautiful Montana Skies!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Big Dipper and Andromeda  

If you go outside and face north this evening, you’ll find that the big dipper is directly to the right of the North Star, Polaris.  The bowl of the dipper is basically standing on its handle.  The big dipper is a fun constellation if you’ve got a small telescope, because there are several really bright galaxies in here.  Each galaxy is a great big spiral disk containing hundreds of billions of stars, hundreds of billions of suns.  But the brightest galaxy in the sky is over in the west these days.

If you face directly west, you’ll be able to see the great square of Pegasus tilted on its side, which is the body of the flying horse.  Just above the square are a couple of strings of stars that are Andromeda the princess.  And just to the right of these stars, is the Andromeda galaxy, a small fuzzy smudge in the sky that you can see with any pair of binoculars.  Scientists weren’t sure exactly what this thing was until in the 1920s the American astronomer Ed Hubble showed that this thing is really far away, outside of our own Milky Way galaxy.  Modern measurements tell us that the Andromeda galaxy is about two million light years from us, and that’s the nearest big galaxy.  The other galaxies that we see are at distances of tens of millions of light years, hundreds of millions of light years, or even billions of light years from here.  In a way telescopes are time machines:  The farther away we look the farther back in time we see.  The record for the most distant galaxy ever discovered is about 13 billion light years away from here, so the light we’re seeing from it today must have left 13 billion years ago.  Our whole entire universe only formed with the big bang event about 13.7 billion years ago, so we’re seeing that galaxy as it appeared less than one billion years after the big bang itself.  Telescopes are time machines, allowing us to look back to a time when galaxies were young

So take a look at the big dipper in the north, and Andromeda in the west, up in our beautiful Montana Skies!

Click on star charts for larger versions.

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Sirius and Mars 

The brightest star you’ll ever see anywhere in the night sky is mighty Sirius:  Look for it inthe southeastern sky, to the lower left of Orion the hunter.  Sirius is the eye of Canis Major, the big dog, Orion’s hunting dog. 

           Click on star charts

         for larger versions.

But the shining jewel of the night sky these days is the planet Mars, which is to the upper left of Sirius, almost directly east in the evening.  One of the big mysteries about Mars is whether simple life ever formed on Mars, or if it could even still be there today, tiny cells hiding deep underground somewhere.  I’m an optimist about our chances of finding life on Mars, or on other planets in the universe, so sometimes people ask me about UFOs.  There’s nothing wrong with being curious, but I’m always struck by how they ask the question: “Do you believe in UFOs?”  Science is not about what we believe.  Science is about what we can see, measure, test, and verify.  Science is about the evidence, but no one ever asks me “What’s the evidence that UFOs are real?”  No one ever asks “How solid is the evidence that UFOs are alien spacecraft?”  Who cares what we believe?  You can believe the earth is flat.  You can believe the moon is made of green cheese.  It doesn’t matter what we believe.  It drives me nuts when they do it on the news too:  “Scientists believe they have found a new…”  “Scientists believe that inside the earth…”  “Sciences believe that billions of year ago…”  Stop it!  Stop, stop, stop, stop it!  The whole point of science is that we can learn about the world around us by observing it, by gathering evidence that we can double-check and verify.  It’s not about what we believe.  It’s about what we can see and measure.  On the subject of UFOs, I have never seen any evidence that would persuade me that UFOs are anything other than a fascinating phenomenon in human psychology.  Belief’s got nothing to do with it.

And that’s something to think about while you look at Sirius and Mars, up in our Beautiful Montana Skies!

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Moon and Mars

We’ve got a big beautiful moon out this week, high in the southern skies.  It’s more than half lit-up, and it’s getting more lit-up by the day, so we call this a waxing gibbous moon.  Right now it’s in Taurus the bull, and each day this week it will move farther down to the East, going through Taurus, through Gemini.  Then by the weekend it will all the way into Cancer the crab, where it will meet up with…

Mars!  The red planet Mars is super-awesome bright, almost directly east in the evening sky.  The moon will go right past Mars this weekend, when we get our full moon.  Mars is just wickedly sweet these days.  Look carefully and you can even see its orangey-red color, which inspired the Greeks to name this planet after their bloody god of war.  So why is Mars so bright?  It’s close!  This week the Earth is at its closest approach to Mars, and we won’t be this close again for another two years.  Our pictures show that Mars is covered with dry riverbeds, dry lakebeds, dry river deltas, all sorts of things telling us that in the past there used to be liquid water flowing across the surface of Mars.  Long ago, at the same time that the first living cells appeared in the oceans of the Earth, Mars had lakes and seas as well.  If life formed on the Earth, why not Mars too?  And life on Earth is incredibly, amazingly tenacious.  Bacteria and simple organisms have adapted to the hottest driest deserts on Earth, the coldest depths of the oceans, the most acidic volcanic pools.  Drill down, two miles below the Earth’s surface, bring up rocks, you’ll find happy little bacteria living in them.  If simple life formed on Mars, and if it is anything like life here, it should still be there on Mars, underground, hiding, adapting, still eking out an existence.   Is there, was there, could there be life on Mars?  NASA’s got an army of space probes in the works to find out once and for all!

Click on star charts for larger versions.

Story by Professor Kelly Cline, Carroll College.

Copyright ©2010 Beartooth Communications Company. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED