The author filling an instrument with liquid niitrogen at the Isaac Newton telescope
My ebook, “A Breathtaking Window on the Universe: a guide to the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory” will be on sale in a couple of months. It explains why the observatory is on La Palma and how a telescope works, and gives details of each telescope, plus many anecdotes and over 60 photos.
You can get full details on this site as soon as they’re available.
Happy New Year.
Are we all going to die?
Yes. That was certain as soon as we were born. But is the whole world going to end?
No.
Well there’s always the small chance that some crazy person will do something incredibly stupid with nuclear weapons, but that’s about the same every year.
Is the Earth going to collide with planet Nibiru?
No. If there was anything that big and that close, we’d have seen it coming. In fact by now we’d be able to see in with the naked eye in daylight. And did you know that this was originally going to happen in May, 2003? Obviously they’ve been wrong once.
Does the Mayan calendar end on December 21st, 2012?
No. That will be the the end of the 13th “long cycle” or b’ak’tun, but the ancient Maya seem to have regarded this as just an excuse for a really good party, rather like the millennium. There’s nothing in the original ancient writings that suggested they thought the world would end then. And how good was Mayan science anyway? I’m sure they weren’t stupid, but we’ve got an extra thousand years-worth of knowledge.
Will the Earth, sun and the centre of the Galaxy line up on the 21st?
Yes. They do every year. If you think about it, since the Earth goes around the sun once a year (that’s the definition of a year), then they’re going to line up with any arbitrary point once a year.
Is the asteroid Apophis going to hit us in 2012?
Again, no. At one point it looked like there was a chance it would hit us in 2029 (not 2012!), but the measurements waken in 2004 showed that it will be a very near miss. It will pass closer than geostationary satellites -that’s parting our hair- but it won’t hit us. There is a small chance that it will hit the Earth on its next approach in 2036, and we should know better in 2013 and definitely in 2029. Even if it’s heading for us then, given 7 years warning and maximum priority, I think NASA or ESA could nudge it into a safe trajectory.
Put it this way, Wikipedia has a list of dates when the world was supposed to end here. It’s a very, very long list, but we’re still here.
I don’t worry about astronomy killing us all. Global warming, and the people who believe it’s their god-given mission to bring about the end of the world, now that’s a different matter.
Comet West in 1995
The 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to the Supernova Cosmology Project, which used distant supernova to measure the expansion of the universe, and prove that the expansion is accelerating. The Supernova Cosmology Project was a big job, and it has 32 co-authors, including M. Pilar Ruiz Lapuente from the University of Barcelona, who contributed observations from the William Herschel Telescope and the Isaac Newton Telescope, both at the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma.
M. Pilar Ruiz Lapuente’s name isn’t on the Nobel Prize – that honour goes to the team leader Saul Perlmutter from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who shares the prize with two people from the High-z Supernova Search Team.
The universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang, 13,700,000,000 years ago. Until recently, physicists thought that gravity must be slowing down this expansion. The work done by the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search Team showed that it is accelerating. Cosmologists are having a wonderful time trying to work out what the fudge is going on.
Talks on astrotourism
La Palma now has 25 businesses that specialise in astrotourism to some degree. (It’s not surprising: all you have to do is look up on a cloudless night to see why) These businesses got together between November 24th and 30th to swap ideas on how to help each other give tourists a good time. There were talks and excursions to restaurants that offer stargazing with a special menu, a chance to try the delicious new “star quality” malvasia wine in advance (available by Christmas, and over the internet with a much pretty bottle than the one shown here.)
Advance tasting of "Star Quality" Malvasia wine
And since they’re all interested in astronomy, they grabbed the opportunity for some stargazing through a small telescope. On Friday night they had nocturnal observations (obviously!) and on Saturday afternoon they observed the sun.
Observing the sun at the Roque de Los Muchachos observatory
The Isaac Newton Telescope in winter
Most of La Palma has good weather nearly all year. But the observatory is up at 2400 m (almost 8,000 ft) and occasionally in winter dramatic storms come howling in, dump half a metre of snow overnight, and disappear almost as fast as they came.
If you’re planning a trip to the observatory between November and March, be sure to check the road conditions before you leave. You can do this at the Isaac Newton Group weather station or the Galileo weather station.
1957: Sputnik 1
The first ever artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched by the Russians on October 4th, 1957. It weighed just 83.6 kg (184.3 lb) (less than me, I’m sorry to say) compared to the International Space Station which weighs 450 tonnes (rather more than I do.)
Sputnik 1 had a very elliptical orbit, taking 96 minutes to complete one orbit, which means that it averaged a little higher than the ISS, which orbits in 91 minutes.
But we’ve come a long way in 54 years.
2011: The International Space Station
The diamond planet races around a pulsar
Astronomers have found a diamond half the size of Jupiter.
Like most planets outside our solar system, nobody’s seen it. In this case, the astronomers were looking at its parent star (a pulsar) and found that the star was being pulled slightly backwards and forwards by the mass of a planet, something as heavy as Jupiter and orbiting very close to the star indeed – just 600,000 kilometres, or 1.5 times the distance from the Earth to the moon. That’s so close that the star ought to be pulling it apart, especially if it were made of hydrogen, like Jupiter. So the planet must be small enough to stay out of the destruction zone, which means that it’s very dense.
Meanwhile, the pulsar is spinning extremely rapidly, so fast that it suggests that it’s pulled mass from a companion star – but there’s no star there now, just the diamond planet So the theory is that the pulsar pulled the outer atmosphere off a companion star, leaving behind a dense core made of carbon. And the carbon is so dense that it must be diamond.
Astronomers are divided on whether it’s actually sparkly.
Perseid meteor
Enjoy!
Nasa image of the planet Mercury
Mercury is the planet nearest to the sun. In fact, it’s so close that it whizzes around its orbit in just under 88 days.
Because it’s closer to the sun than we are, we always see it close to the sun in the sky, making it difficult to observe. But tonight (Tuesday 19th July) it will be at its maximum distance, 27º away. Look for a small star in the west after sunset, just south and a little above where the sun disappeared. If you hold up a fist at arm’s length, your fist is about ten degrees wide, so Mercury will be a little under three fist-widths from the sun along the ecliptic. If you have a clear horizon, it will set about an hour after the sun. If you’re on La Palma, you’ll need to be on the west side of the island.
Because Mercury is closer to the sun, it goes through phases, like the moon. Tonight, with binoculars or a small telescope, you’ll be able to see the sunward half of the disc lit up. DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN THROUGH BINOCULARS OR YOU WILL GO BLIND. Wait until after sunset to use the binoculars.
Incidentally, seeing the phases of Venus and Mercury is proof that the planets orbit the sun, not the Earth.