Still image from the timelapse, "Illusion of Lights: A Journey into the Unseen." Credit and copyright: Brad Goldpaint Photography.
It’s an old story: a couple leave their jobs, sell everything, and live in motorhome to capture footage and imagery of the night sky.
Wait… what?
This unique story is exactly what Brad and Marci Goldpaint did. They left their jobs and traveled throughout the western US in an RV to begin educating the public about the damaging effects of light pollution. They wanted to help reconnect people with the simple beauty of the night sky and have been teaching photography workshops and gathering footage for a new timelapse called “Illusion of Lights: A Journey into the Unseen.”
With breathtaking scenes and soaring music, this video “introduces you to the concept of movement and time that visually explores our night skies,” says Brad on Vimeo.
We’ve featured images and timelapses from Brad before, and he shared how the sudden loss of his mother caused him to reassess his goals and priorities. Since 2009 he’s been working on outdoor photography and has now dedicated his work to sharing images of the night sky with others.
For this timelapse, Brad said he “spent countless nights traversing in the dark, carrying heavy camera equipment, and braving the dark unseen.” He dealt with lightning storms, dangerous winds, and up-close encounters with bears and other wildlife. Sometimes, after spending days hiking to a remote location and with optimistic weather reports, Mother Nature showed up and ruined his opportunity to get the shot.
A few highlights: at about 2:00 there is an exploding meteor with a persistent train that is stunning. You’ll also see strange lights on Mount Rainier. Brad explained these lights are from people climbing the mountian at night in hopes of reaching the summit by sunrise the following day. The white lights you see are from their headlamps. “Can you imagine climbing up a mountain in the middle of the night?” he asks?
Another still from “Illusions of Light.” Credit and copyright: Brad Goldpaint Photography.
New images returned by the Planck telescope (right) begin to rival the complexity and beauty of a great artists imagination - Starry Night.A visulization of the Planck data represents the interaction of interstellar dust with the galactic magnetic field. Color defines the intensity of dust emisions and the measurements of polarized light reveals the direction of the magnetic field lines. (Credits: Vincent Van Gogh, ESA)
From the vantage point of a window in an insane asylum, Vincent van Gogh painted one of the most noted and valued artistic works in human history. It was the summer of 1889. With his post-impressionist paint strokes, Starry Night depicts a night sky before sunrise that undulates, flows and is never settled. Scientific discoveries are revealing a Cosmos with such characteristics.
Since Vincent’s time, artists and scientists have taken their respective paths to convey and understand the natural world. The latest released images taken by the European Planck Space Telescope reveals new exquisite details of our Universe that begin to touch upon the paint strokes of the great master and at the same time looks back nearly to the beginning of time. Since Van Gogh – the passage of 125 years – scientists have constructed a progressively intricate and incredible description of the Universe.
New images returned by the Planck telescope (right) begin to rival the complexity and beauty of a great artists imagination – Starry Night.A visulization of the Planck data represents the interaction of interstellar dust with the galactic magnetic field. Color defines the intensity of dust emisions and the measurements of polarized light reveals the direction of the magnetic field lines. (Credits: Vincent Van Gogh, ESA)
The path from Van Gogh to the Planck Telescope imagery is indirect, an abstraction akin to the impressionism of van Gogh’s era. Impressionists in the 1800s showed us that the human mind could interpret and imagine the world beyond the limitations of our five senses. Furthermore, optics since the time of Galileo had begun to extend the capability of our senses.
A photograph of James Clerk Maxwell and a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh. Maxwell’s equations and impressionism in the fine arts in the 19th Century sparked an enhanced perception, expression and abstraction of the World and began a trek of knowledge and technology into the modern era. (Credit: National Gallery of Art, Public Domain)
Mathematics is perhaps the greatest form of abstraction of our vision of the World, the Cosmos. The path of science from the era of van Gogh began with his contemporary, James Clerk Maxwell who owes inspiration from the experimentalist Michael Faraday. The Maxwell equations mathematically define the nature of electricity and magnetism. Since Maxwell, electricity, magnetism and light have been intertwined. His equations are now a derivative of a more universal equation – the Standard Model of the Universe. The accompanying Universe Today article by Ramin Skibba describes in more detail the new findings by Planck Mission scientists and its impact on the Standard Model.
The work of Maxwell and experimentalists such as Faraday, Michelson and Morley built an overwhelming body of knowledge upon which Albert Einstein was able to write his papers of 1905, his miracle year (Annus mirabilis). His theories of the Universe have been interpreted, verified time and again and lead directly to the Universe studied by scientists employing the Planck Telescope.
The first Solvay Conference in 1911 was organized by Max Planck and Hendrik Lorentz. Planck is standing, second from left. The first Solvay, by invitation only, included most of the greatest scientists of the early 20th Century. While Planck is known for his work on quanta, the groundwork for quantum theory – the Universe in minutiae , the Planck telescope is surveying the Universe in the large. Physicists are closer to unifying the nature of the two extremes. Insets – Planck (1933, 1901).
In 1908, the German physicist Max Planck, for whom the ESA telescope is named, recognized the importance of Einstein’s work and finally invited him to Berlin and away from the obscurity of a patent office in Bern, Switzerland.
As Einstein spent a decade to complete his greatest work, the General Theory of Relativity, astronomers began to apply more powerful tools to their trade. Edwin Hubble, born in the year van Gogh painted Starry Night, began to observe the night sky with the most powerful telescope in the World, the Mt Wilson 100 inch Hooker Telescope. In the 1920s, Hubble discovered that the Milky Way was not the whole Universe but rather an island universe, one amongst billions of galaxies. His observations revealed that the Milky Way was a spiral galaxy of a form similar to neighboring galaxies, for example, M31, the Andromeda Galaxy.
Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein were human wrecking balls in their respective professions. What began with Faraday and Maxwell, van Gogh and Gaugin were taken to new heights. We are encapsulated in the technology derived from these masters but are able to break free of the confinement technology can impose through the expression and art of Picasso and his contemporaries.
Einstein’s equations and Picasso’s abstraction created another rush of discovery and expressionism that propel us for another 50 years. Their influence continues to impact our lives today.
The Andromeda Galaxy, M31, the nearest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, several times the angular size of the Moon. First photographed by Isaac Roberts, 1899 (inset), spirals are a function of gravity and the propagation of shock waves, across the expanses of such galaxies are electromagnetic fields such as reported by Planck mission scientists.
Telescopes of Hubble’s era reached their peak with the Palomar 200 inch telescope, four times the light gathering power of Mount Wilson’s. Astronomy had to await the development of modern electronics. Improvements in photographic techniques would pale in comparison to what was to come.
The development of electronics was accelerated by the pressures placed upon opposing forces during World War II. Karl Jansky developed radio astronomy in the 1930s which benefited from research that followed during the war years. Jansky detected the radio signature of the Milky Way. As Maxwell and others imagined, astronomy began to expand beyond just visible light – into the infrared and radio waves. Discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson is arguably the greatest discovery from observations in the radio wave (and microwave) region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
From 1937 to the present day, radio astronomy has been an ever refining merger of electronics and optics. Karl Jansky’s first radio telescope, 1937 (inset) and the great ALMA array now in operation studying the Universe in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. (Credits: ESO)
Analog electronics could augment photographic studies. Vacuum tubes led to photo-multiplier tubes that could count photons and measure more accurately the dynamics of stars and the spectral imagery of planets, nebulas and whole galaxies. Then in the 1947, three physicists at Bell Labs , John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley created the transistor that continues to transform the World today.
For astronomy and our image of the Universe, it meant more acute imagery of the Universe and imagery spanning across the whole electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared Astronomy developed slowly beginning in the 1800s but it was solid state electronics in the 1960s when it came of age. Microwave or Millimeter Radio Astronomy required a marriage of radio astronomy and solid state electronics. The first practical millimeter wave telescope began operations in 1980 at Kitt Peak Observatory.
An early work of Picasso (center), the work at Bell Labs of John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley and the mobile art of Alexander Calder. As artists attempt to balance color and shape, the Bell Lab engineers balanced electrons essentially on the head of a pin, across junctions to create the first transistor.
With further improvements in solid state electronics and development of extremely accurate timing devices and development of low-temperature solid state electronics, astronomy has reached the present day. With modern rocketry, sensitive devices such as the Hubble and Planck Space Telescopes have been lofted into orbit and above the opaque atmosphere surrounding the Earth.
In 1964, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) was discovered. In the early 1990s, the COBE space telescope returned even more detailed results and now Planck has refined and expanded upon IRAS, COBE and BICEP observations of the CMB. Inset, first light observations of the Planck mission. (Photo Credits: ESA)
Astronomers and physicists now probe the Universe across the whole electromagnetic spectrum generating terabytes of data and abstractions of the raw data allow us to look out into the Universe with effectively a sixth sense, that which is given to us by 21st century technology. What a remarkable coincidence that the observations of our best telescopes peering through hundreds of thousands of light years, even more so, back 13.8 billion years to the beginning of time, reveal images of the Universe that are not unlike the brilliant and beautiful paintings of a human with a mind that gave him no choice but to see the world differently.
Now 125 years later, this sixth sense forces us to see the World in a similar light. Peer up into the sky and you can imagine the planetary systems revolving around nearly every star, swirling clouds of spiral galaxies, one even larger in the sky than our Moon, and waves of magnetic fields everywhere across the starry night.
I don’t want to freak you out, but you should be aware that there’s a gigantic galaxy with twice our mass headed right for us. Naw, I’m just kidding. I totally want to freak you out. The Andromeda galaxy is going to slam head first into the Milky Way like it doesn’t even have its eyes on the road.
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Transcript
I don’t want to freak you out, but you should be aware that there’s a gigantic galaxy with twice our mass headed right for us. Naw, I’m just kidding. I totally want to freak you out. The Andromeda galaxy is going to slam head first into the Milky Way like it doesn’t even have its eyes on the road.
This collision will tear the structure of our galaxy apart. The two galaxies will coalesce into a new, larger elliptical galaxy, and nothing will ever be the same again, including your insurance premiums. There’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. It’s like those “don’t text and drive commercials” where they stop time and people get out and have a conversation about their babies and make it clear that selfish murderous teenagers are really ruining everything for all of us all the time.
The Andromeda Galaxy will collide with the Milky Way in the future. Credit: Adam Evans
And now that we know disaster is inbound, all we can do is ask WHY? Why this is even happening? Isn’t the Universe expanding, with galaxies speeding away from us in all directions? Shouldn’t Andromeda be getting further away, and not closer? What the hay, man!
Here’s the thing, the vast majority of galaxies are travelling away from us at tremendous speed. This was the big discovery by Edwin Hubble in 1929. The further away a galaxy is, the faster it’s moving away from us. The most recent calculation by NASA in 2013 put this amount at 70.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec. At a billion light-years away, the expansion of the Universe is carrying galaxies away from us at 22,000 km/s, or about 7% of the speed of light. At 100 million light-years away, that speed is only 2,200 km/s.
Which actually doesn’t seem like all that much. Is that like Millenium Falcon fast or starship Enterprise Warp 10 fast? Andromeda is only 2.5 million light-years away. Which means that the expansion of the Universe is carrying it away at only 60 kilometers per second. This is clearly not fast enough for our purposes of not getting our living room stirred into the backyard pool. As the strength of gravity between the Milky Way and Andromeda is strong enough to overcome this expansive force. It’s like there’s an invisible gravity rope connecting the two galaxies together. Dragging us to our doom. Curse you, gravity doom rope!
The Hubble Space Telescope’s extreme close-up of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. Picture released in January 2015. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and L.C. Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler
Andromeda is speeding towards us at 110 kilometers per second. Without the expansion of the Universe, I’m sure it would be faster and even more horrifying! It’s the same reason why the Solar System doesn’t get torn apart. The expansion rate of the Universe is infinitesimally small at a local level. It’s only when you reach hundreds of millions of light-years does the expansion take over from gravity.
You can imagine some sweet spot, where a galaxy is falling towards us exactly as fast as it’s being carried away by the expansion of the Universe. It would remain at roughly the same distance and then we can just be friends, and they don’t have to get all up in our biz. If Andromeda starts complaining about being friend-zoned, we’ll give them what-for and begin to re-evaluate our friendship with them, because seriously, no one has time for that.
The discovery of dark energy in 1998 has made this even more complicated. Not only is the Universe expanding, but the speed of expansion is accelerating. Eventually distant galaxies will be moving faster away from us than the speed of light. Only the local galaxies, tied together by gravity will remain visible in the sky, eventually all merging together. Everything else will fall over the cosmic horizon and be lost to us forever.
This annotated artist’s conception illustrates our current understanding of the structure of the Milky Way galaxy. Image Credit: NASA
All things in the Universe are speeding away from us, it’s just that gravity is a much stronger force at local levels. This is why the Solar System holds together, and why Andromeda is moving towards us and in about 4 billion years or so, the Andromeda galaxy is going to slam into the Milky Way.
So, if by chance you only watched the first part of this video, freaked out, sold your possessions and joined some crazy silver jumpsuit doomsday cult, and are now, years later watching the conclusion… you may feel a bit foolish. However, I hope that you at least made some lifelong friendships and got to keep the jumpsuit.
Really, there’s nothing to worry about. Stars are spread so far apart that individual stars won’t actually collide with each other. Even if humanity is still around in another 4 billion years or so, which is when this will all go down. This definitely isn’t something we’ll be concerned with. It’s just like climate change. Best of luck future generations!
What do you think, will humans still be around in 4 billion years to enjoy watching the spectacle of the Milky Way and Andromeda collide?
This annotated artist's conception illustrates our current understanding of the structure of the Milky Way galaxy. Image Credit: NASA
We have a lot of crazy informal names for space sights. Sometimes they’re named after how they are shaped, like the Horsehead Nebula. Sometimes they have a name “borrowed” from their constellation, such as the Andromeda Galaxy. But what about our own galaxy, the Milky Way? Why does this band of stars across Earth’s sky have a name associated with food?
First, let’s back up a bit and talk a bit about what the Milky Way actually is. Astronomers believe it is a barred spiral galaxy — a galaxy with a spiral shape that has a line of stars across its middle, as you can see in the picture above. If you were to fly across the galaxy at the speed of light, it would take you an astounding 100,000 years.
The Milky Way is part of a collection of galaxies called the Local Group. We’re on a collision course with the most massive and largest member of that collection, which is the Andromeda Galaxy (also known as M31). The Milky Way is the second-largest galaxy, and the Triangulum Galaxy (M33) the third-largest. There are roughly 30 members of this group all told.
To get a sense of its immense size, you’ll be glad to hear the Earth is nowhere near the Milky Way’s center and its powerful, supermassive black hole. NASA says we’re roughly 165 quadrillion miles from the black hole, which is found in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.
The magnetic field of our Milky Way Galaxy as seen by ESA’s Planck satellite. Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration.
As for how our galaxy got its name, it is indeed because of its milky appearance as it stretches across the sky. While spotting the galaxy’s arms is a challenge from our current light-polluted centers, if you get out to a more rural area it really begins to dominate the skies. The ancient Romans called our galaxy the Via Lactea, which literally means “The Road of Milk.”
And according to the Astronomy Picture of the Day website, the Greek word for “galaxy” also derives from the word “milk”. It’s hard to say if it was a coincidence, because the origin of both the Milky Way’s name and the Greek word for galaxy are long lost to prehistory, although some sources say that it was inspired by the Milky Way’s appearance.
It took thousands of years for us to understand the nature of what we were looking at. Back in the time of Aristotle, according to the Library of Congress, the Milky Way was believed to be the spot “where the celestial spheres came into contact with the terrestrial spheres.” Without a telescope, it was hard to say much more, but that began to change in the early 1600s.
Beautiful view of our Milky Way Galaxy. If other alien civilizations are out there, can we find them? Credit: ESO/S. Guisard
One important early observation, the library adds, was from the noted astronomer Galileo Galilei. (He’s best known for being credited for the discovery of four of Jupiter’s moons — Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede — which he spotted through a telescope.) In his 1610 volume Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo said his observations showed the Milky Way was not a uniform band, but had certain pockets with more star densities.
But the true nature of the galaxy eluded us for some time yet. Other early observations: the stars were a part of our Solar System (Thomas Wainwright, 1750 — a claim that was later shown as erroneous) and that the stars appeared to be denser on one side of the band than the other (William and John Herschel, in the late 1700s).
It took until the 20th century for astronomers to figure out that the Milky Way is just one of a large number of galaxies in the sky. This came, the library says, through a few steps: doing observations of distant “spiral nebulas” that showed their speeds were receding faster than the escape velocity of our own galaxy (Vesto Slipher, 1912); observations that a “nova” (temporary bright star) in Andromeda was fainter than our own galaxy (Herber Curtis, 1917); and most famously, Edwin Hubble’s observations of galaxies showing that they were very far from Earth indeed (1920ish).
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field seen in ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI)
There are in fact more galaxies out there than we could have imagined even a century ago. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, periodically astronomers have used the powerful observatory to gaze at a tiny patch of the sky.
This has produced several “deep fields” of galaxies billions of light-years away. It’s hard to estimate just how many there are “out there”, but estimates seem to say there are at least 100 billion galaxies. That’ll keep astronomers busy observing for a while.
The summertime Milky Way from Scorpius to Cygnus is broader and brighter than the winter version because we look into the direction of its center. Credit: Stephen Bockhold
The Milky Way is our home galaxy, the spot where the Earth resides. We are not anywhere near the center — NASA says we’re roughly 165 quadrillion miles from the galaxy’s black hole, for example — which demonstrates just how darn big the galaxy is. So how big is it, and how does it measure up with other neighborhood residents?
The numbers are pretty astounding. NASA estimates the galaxy at 100,000 light-years across. Since one light year is about 9.5 x 1012km, so the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is about 9.5 x 1017 km in diameter. The thickness of the galaxy ranges depending on how close you are to the center, but it’s tens of thousands of light-years across.
Our galaxy is part of a collection known as the Local Group. Because some of these galaxies are prominent in our sky, the names tend to be familiar. The Milky Way is on a collision course with the most massive member of the group, called M31 or the Andromeda Galaxy. The Milky Way is the second-largest member, with M33 (the Triangulum Galaxy) the third-largest, NASA says. Andromeda appears much brighter in the night sky due to its size and relatively closer distance. There are about 30 members of this group.
The Andromeda Galaxy will collide with the Milky Way in the future. Credit: Adam Evans
Because we are inside the Milky Way’s arms, it appears as a band of stars (or a fuzzy white band) across the Earth’s sky. Casting a pair of binoculars or a telescope across it shows a mix of lighter areas and darker areas; the darker areas are dust that obscures any light from stars, galaxies and other bright objects behind it. From the outside, however, astronomers say the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy — a galaxy that has a band of stars across its center as well as the spiral shape.
If you’re looking for the center of the galaxy, gaze at the constellation Sagittarius, which is low on the summer sky horizon for most northern hemisphere residents. The constellation contains a massive radio source known as Sagittarius A*. Astronomers using the Chandra space telescope discovered why this supermassive black hole is relatively weak in X-rays: it’s because hot gas is being pulled inside the nebula, and most of it (99%) gets ejected and diffused.
Sagittarius A in infrared (red and yellow, from the Hubble Space Telescope) and X-ray (blue, from the Chandra space telescope). Credit: X-ray: NASA/UMass/D.Wang et al., IR: NASA/STScI
Based on observing globular clusters (star clusters) in the galaxy, astronomers have estimated the Milky Way’s overall age at 13.5 billion years old — just 200 million years younger than the rest of the universe.
However, scientists are beginning to think that different parts of the galaxy formed at different times. In 2012, for example, astronomers led by Jason Kalirai of the Space Telescope Science Institute pinned down the age of the Milky Way’s inner halo of stars: 11.5 billion years old. They used white dwarfs, the burned-out remnants of Sun-like stars, to make that measurement.
Kalirai’s group’s research indicates that the Milky Way formed in the following sequence: the halo (including globular star clusters and dwarf galaxies), the inner halo (whose stars were born as a result of this construction) and the outer halo (created when the Milky Way ate up nearby ancient dwarf galaxies).
Artist’s impression of the structure of the Milky Way’s halo. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)
While we’ve been focusing on the parts of the galaxy that you can see, in reality most of its mass is made up of dark matter. NASA estimates that there is about 10 times the mass of dark matter than the visible matter in the universe. (Dark matter is a form of matter that we cannot sense with conventional telescopic instruments, except through its gravitational effect on other things such as galaxies. When masses gather in high enough concentrations, they can bend the light of other objects.)
We have written many articles about the Milky Way for Universe Today. Here’s an article about the rotation of Milky Way, and here are some facts about the Milky Way. We’ve also recorded an episode of Astronomy Cast about galaxies. Listen here, Episode 97: Galaxies.
Gamma ray bursts are the most energetic explosions in the Universe, outshining the rest of their entire galaxy for a moment. So, it stands to reason you wouldn’t want to be close when one of these goes off.
If comics have taught me anything, it’s that gamma powered superheroes and villains are some of the most formidable around.
Coincidentally, Gamma Ray bursts, astronomers say, are the most powerful explosions in the Universe. In a split second, a star with many times the mass of our Sun collapses into a black hole, and its outer layers are ejected away from the core. Twin beams blast out of the star. They’re so bright we can see them for billions of light-years away. In a split second, a gamma ray burst can release more energy than the Sun will emit in its entire lifetime. It’s a super-supernova.
You’re thinking “Heck, if the gamma exposure worked for Banner, surely a super-supernova will make me even more powerful than the Hulk.” That’s not exactly how this plays out.
For any world caught within the death beam from a gamma ray burst, the effects are devastating. One side of the world is blasted with lethal levels of radiation. Our ozone layer would be depleted, or completely stripped away, and any life on that world would experience an extinction level event on the scale of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Astronomers believe that gamma ray bursts might explain some of the mass extinctions that happened on Earth. The most devastating was probably one that occurred 450 million years ago causing the Ordovician–Silurian extinction event. Creatures that lived near the surface of the ocean were hit much harder than deep sea animals, and this evidence matches what would happen from a powerful gamma ray burst event. Considering that, are we in danger from a gamma ray burst and why didn’t we get at least one Tyrannosaurus Hulk out of the deal?
This artist’s impression of a gamma-ray burst shows the two intense beams of relativistic matter emitted by the black hole. To be visible from Earth, the beams must be pointing directly towards us. (Image: NASA/Swift/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith and John Jones)
There’s no question gamma ray bursts are terrifying. In fact, astronomers predict that the lethal destruction from a gamma ray burst would stretch for thousands of light years. So if a gamma ray burst went off within about 5000-8000 light years, we’d be in a world of trouble.
Astronomers figure that gamma ray bursts happen about once every few hundred thousand years in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way. And although they can be devastating, you actually need to be pretty close to be affected. It has been calculated that every 5 million years or so, a gamma ray burst goes off close enough to affect life on Earth. In other words, there have been around 1,000 events since the Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago. So the odds of a nearby gamma ray burst aren’t zero, but they’re low enough that you really don’t have to worry about them. Unless you’re planning on living about 5 million years in some kind of gamma powered superbody.
We might have evidence of a recent gamma ray burst that struck the Earth around the year 774. Tree rings from that year contain about 20 times the level of carbon-14 than normal. One theory is that a gamma ray burst from a star located within 13,000 light-years of Earth struck the planet 1,200 years ago, generating all that carbon-14.
Clearly humanity survived without incident, but it shows that even if you’re halfway across the galaxy, a gamma ray burst can reach out and affect you. So don’t worry. The chances of a gamma ray burst hitting Earth are minimal. In fact, astronomers have observed all the nearby gamma ray burst candidates, and none seem to be close enough or oriented to point their death beams at our planet. You’ll need to worry about your exercise and diet after all.
So what do you think? What existential crisis makes you most concerned, and how do gamma ray bursts compare?
Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain) Special Guest:Andy Weir , author of “The Martian”
Andy was first hired as a programmer for a national laboratory at age fifteen and has been working as a software engineer ever since. He is also a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of subjects like relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. “The Martian” is his first novel.
A still photo from an animated flythrough of the universe using SDSS data. This image shows our Milky Way Galaxy. The galaxy shape is an artist’s conception, and each of the small white dots is one of the hundreds of thousands of stars as seen by the SDSS. Image credit:
Dana Berry / SkyWorks Digital, Inc. and Jonathan Bird (Vanderbilt University)
Imagine a single mission that would allow you to explore the Milky Way and beyond, investigating cosmic chemistry, hunting planets, mapping galactic structure, probing dark energy and analyzing the expansion of the wider Universe. Enter the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a massive scientific collaboration that enables one thousand astronomers from 51 institutions around the world to do just that.
At Tuesday’s AAS briefing in Seattle, researchers announced the public release of data collected by the project’s latest incarnation, SDSS-III. This data release, termed “DR12,” represents the survey’s largest and most detailed collection of measurements yet: 2,000 nights’ worth of brand-new information about nearly 500 million stars and galaxies.
One component of SDSS is exploring dark energy by “listening” for acoustic oscillation signals from the the acceleration of the early Universe, and the team also shared a new animated “fly-through” of the Universe that was created using SDSS data.
The SDSS-III collaboration is based at the powerful 2.5-meter Sloan Foundation Telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. The project itself consists of four component surveys: BOSS, APOGEE, MARVELS, and SEGUE. Each of these surveys applies different trappings to the parent telescope in order to accomplish its own, unique goal.
BOSS (the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) visualizes the way that sound waves produced by interacting matter in the early Universe are reflected in the large-scale structure of our cosmos. These ancient imprints, which date back to the first 500,000 years after the Big Bang, are especially evident in high-redshift objects like luminous-red galaxies and quasars. Three-dimensional models created from BOSS observations will allow astronomers to track the expansion of the Universe over a span of 9 billion years, a feat that, later this year, will pave the way for rigorous assessment of current theories regarding dark energy.
At the press briefing, Daniel Eistenstein from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics explained how BOSS requires huge volumes of data and that so far 1.4 million galaxies have been mapped. He indicated the data analyzed so far strongly confirm dark energy’s existence.
This tweet from the SDSS twitter account uses a bit of humor to explain how BOSS works:
It turns out that in space, everyone can hear you scream, if you do it in the early Universe and set up acoustic oscillations #aas225
APOGEE (the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment) employs a sophisticated, near-infrared spectrograph to pierce through thick dust and gather light from 100,000 distant red giants. By analyzing the spectral lines that appear in this light, scientists can identify the signatures of 15 different chemical elements that make up the faraway stars – observations that will help researchers piece together the stellar history of our galaxy.
MARVELS (the Multi-Object APO Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-Area Survey) identifies minuscule wobbles in the orbits of stars, movements that betray the gravitational influence of orbiting planets. The technology itself is unprecedented. “MARVELS is the first large-scale survey to measure these tiny motions for dozens of stars simultaneously,” explained the project’s principal investigator Jian Ge, “which means we can probe and characterize the full population of giant planets in ways that weren’t possible before.”
At the press briefing, Ge said that MARVELS observed 5,500 stars repeatedly, looking for giant exoplanets around these stars. So far, the data has revealed 51 giant planet candidates as well as 38 brown dwarf candidates. Ge added that more will be found with better data processing.
A still photo from an animated flythrough of the universe using SDSS data. This image shows a small part of the large-scale structure of the universe as seen by the SDSS — just a few of many millions of galaxies. The galaxies are shown in their proper positions from SDSS data. Image credit: Dana Berry / SkyWorks Digital, Inc.
SEGUE (the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration) rounds out the quartet by analyzing visible light from 250,000 stars in the outer reaches of our galaxy. Coincidentally, this survey’s observations “segue” nicely into work being done by other projects within SDSS-III. Constance Rockosi, leader of the SDSS-III domain of SEGUE, recaps the importance of her project’s observations of our outer galaxy: “In combination with the much more detailed view of the inner galaxy from APOGEE, we’re getting a truly holistic picture of the Milky Way.”
One of the most exceptional attributes of SDSS-III is its universality; that is, every byte of juicy information contained in DR12 will be made freely available to professionals, amateurs, and lay public alike. This philosophy enables interested parties from all walks of life to contribute to the advancement of astronomy in whatever capacity they are able.
As momentous as the release of DR12 is for today’s astronomers, however, there is still much more work to be done. “Crossing the DR12 finish line is a huge accomplishment by hundreds of people,” said Daniel Eisenstein, director of the SDSS-III collaboration, “But it’s a big universe out there, so there is plenty more to observe.”
DR12 includes observations made by SDSS-III between July 2008 and June 2014. The project’s successor, SDSS-IV, began its run in July 2014 and will continue observing for six more years.
Here is the video animation of the fly-through of the Universe:
