The Bad Astronomy Newsletter

Bad Astronomy Newsletter #36

Contents:

1. MAPping the Universe
2. Talk by Stephen Hawking in Davis, California
3. The Amazing Meeting
4. Moon Hoax interview on "The Edge" archived
5. New family of asteroid found
6. Subscribe/Unsubscribe info

1) MAPping the Universe press conference

Last week, dramatic news was unveiled: The Universe is 13.7 billion years old, is flat, and is made mostly of stuff we cannot see. These details were revealed by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a NASA probe that was designed to look deep into the Universe and investigate the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. In the billions of years since the Bang, the heat from the initial fireball has cooled to a chilly 2.7 degrees about absolute zero, and the bulk of the light is emitted in the microwave range. By studying this radiation, a lot can be determined about the state of the early Universe.

For example, the distribution of this light is incredibly smooth. In other words, no matter where you look in the sky, the amount of microwaves you detect looks pretty much the same. WMAP is able to look so precisely that it can see incredibly tiny fluctuations in the sky; it can see temperature changes as small as 0.0002 Celsius! These temperature changes are indicators of density changes; where the temperature is a bit higher, there is more "stuff", and where it's lower there is less stuff. WMAP has detected little fluctuations like this all over the sky. According to modern theories, these changes are the seeds of galaxies and clusters of galaxies we see today. Back then, just a few hundred thousand years after the Universe formed, these little lumps were able to coalesce, eventually forming all the types of structure we see in the Universe today!

The equations governing how the universe behaved back then are complex. However, by taking the results from WMAP and putting them into the equations, some very solid results come out. For one, they can nail down the age of the Universe to 13.7 billion years, give or take a hundred million years. These results, if they hold up, will resolve many long-standing arguments in cosmology (though I sincerely doubt it will shut up the creationists, who are already posting misleading statements and misinterpretations of the WMAP results).

WMAP has also lead to better determinations of the geometry of the Universe, what it's made of, and some of the history of it as well. It would take me 5000 words or more to describe all this, so instead I'll point you to the WMAP website which has great descriptions and graphics. We are discussing these results on the Bad Astronomy Bulletin Board.

UCLA Professor Ned Wright has a fantastic page about cosmology, the study of the Universe, and he discusses WMAP too.

Oh, and what the heck: here is the creationist page I mentioned as well: The debunking has already started. Jeffrey Bennett, an astronomer at Colorado, has also written some thoughts about WMAP. I posted them to my bulletin board.

Astronomers will be debating these results for decades. I suspect that no one will be able to seriously assail the basic arguments, but the details will be haggled for a long time. Science is pretty cool.

2) Talk by Stephen Hawking in Davis, California

I received an email recently announcing a conference in Davis, California about cosmology. There will be some great public talks there, including one by Steven Hawking. Here is the message:

The latest data and theories on cosmic inflation and the origins of the universe will be discussed at a conference at the University of California, Davis, March 22-25. The meeting comes at a profoundly exciting time in cosmology, as a flood of data from satellites and balloon experiments allows cosmologists to put their theories to the test. The Davis meeting will be the first opportunity for major figures in the field to debate findings from NASA's Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) satellite, said UC Davis cosmologist Andreas Albrecht, one of the principal organizers of the meeting. Confirmed external speakers include Alan Guth, MIT; Andre Linde, Stanford University; Stephen Hawking, Cambridge University, England; Martin Rees, Cambridge University and Astronomer Royal, England; Paul Steinhardt, Princeton University; David Spergel, Princeton University; Michael Turner, University of Chicago; and Joe Silk, Oxford University, England, among others. In addition to the scientific meeting, Hawking will give two public lectures at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis on March 23 and 28. Rees will also give a public lecture in Davis on March 31. For more info, go to the UC Davis site at http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=6260

3) The Amazing Meeting

I have wrestled for a few days about writing down my thoughts on James Randi's The Amazing Meeting I attended a few weeks ago. It's perhaps still not complete, but you can read it now. I also posted images from the meeting. I suspect most of the images won't be of interest to everyone, but some are pretty funny.

4) Moon Hoax interview on "The Edge" archived

"The Edge" is a late-night radio talk show that deals with a lot of fringe theories and other silliness. Sometimes they support these theories, and sometimes not. I was interviewed for a half hour about the Moon hoax on February 12, and it went so well that they had me on again the next week. The problem was, they had none other than Bart Sibrel on right after me. Actually, it wasn't much of a problem, since I could anticipate the looniness he would spew.

Sure enough, the host of the show was able to counter a lot of what Mr. Sibrel said with help from my site and www.clavius.org. The first interview is archived on their website and the second should be up shortly.

5) New type of asteroid found

In an astronomy news tidbit, a new asteroid was found in a remarkable orbit: one that is always inside the Earth's orbit! That means it is always closer to the Sun than the Earth. Astronomers have been looking for this type of asteroid for a long time, but they are hard to detect: because of the orbit geometry, they can only be found shortly after sunset or before sunrise.

There may be a whole class of objects in orbits like this. In fact, my good friend Dan Durda is looking for asteroids called Vulcanoids that orbit the Sun closer than Mercury does! If he finds them, it'll open up a whole new field of research. Read about the new asteroid here. Here is info on Dan and Vulcanoids.

6) Subscribe/Unsubscribe Information

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Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
badastro@badastronomy.com
http://www.badastronomy.com