This film shows the known universe as mapped through astronomical observations.

Every satellite, moon, planet, star and galaxy is represented to scale and in its correct, measured location according to the best scientific research to-date.

The data is maintained and curated by research astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History as the Digital Universe Atlas.

Impressive. Most impressive.

[via Daring Fireball]

UPDATE: Awww, the mission is likely to be scrubbed due to a fuel leak discovered in the external tank…

This is a tough week for us space buffs. Tomorrow marks the 23rd anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and Monday will mark the 6th anniversary of the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia. Of course, Saturday will be the 48th anniversary of Ham the Chimp’s successful suborbital flight aboard the Mercury-Redstone 2, so it’s not all doom and gloom…

Space.com’s Brian Berger:

While the questionnaire, a copy of which was obtained by Space News, also asks NASA to provide a cost estimate for accelerating the first operational flight of Ares 1 and Orion from the current target date of March 2015 to as soon as 2013, NASA was not asked to study the cost implications of canceling any of its other programs, including the significantly overbudget 2009 Mars Science Laboratory or the James Webb Space Telescope.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — An approaching cold front could thwart NASA’s plans to launch space shuttle Endeavour on Friday on a flight to the international space station.

“We are rumored to have stowed away at least seven turkey dinners”

Calling a Zeiss projector an “overhead projector” is like:

• calling an aircraft carrier a “troop transport”,
• calling Warren Buffet or Bill Gates “rich”,
• calling the Sun a “ball of hot gas”,
• calling a sex “pleasurable”, or
• calling John McCain a “straight talker”.

And don’t get me wrong: I don’t see this as “yet another example” of John McCain being anti-science. I mean, he is anti-science — compeltely (and that’s really beyond debate at this point) — but not because of this remark.

MythBusters
NASA Moon Landing
TV-PG

On this episode of MythBusters, the team tackles the tallest tale of all in Moon Landing Hoax Hour. Did NASA pull off the greatest cover-up in human history?

and they’ve released this trailer for the show.

Once the space shuttle fleet is retired, work will focus on the Ares rocket and Orion capsule that are planned to return astronauts to the moon.

Super-Earths are more massive than Earth but less massive than Uranus and Neptune. Spotting true Earth-sized planets is challenging with current technology, but the presence of super-Earths suggests finding a world like ours is just a matter of time, researchers say.

The Discovery Channel will air “When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions” in June.

“Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare,” he then quickly added: “Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.”

Aristotle provided powerful arguments, none of them instantly dismissable, that the heavens moved and not the Earth, that the Earth is stationary and that the Sun, the Moon, the planets, the stars, rise and set by physically moving once around the Earth every day. With the exception of this kind of motion, the heavens were thought to be changeless. The Earth, while stationary, had all the corruption of the universe localized here.

Up there was matter, which was perfect, unchanging, a special kind of celestial matter that is, by the way, the origin of our word “quintessential.” There were four essences down here, the imagined four elements of earth, water, fire, and air, and then there was that fifth element, that fifth essence out of which the heaven stuff was made. And that’s why the word “quintessential”–”fifth essence”–comes about. It’s interesing to see a kind of linguistic artifact of the previous worldview still present in the Oxford Unabridged.

Now, in the fifteenth century, Nicolaus Copernicus suggested a different view. He proposed that it was the Earth that rotated and that the stars were in effect motionless. He proposed moreover that in order to explain these apparent movements of the planets against the background of more distant stars, the planets and the Earth, in addition to rotating, revolved around the Sun. That is, the Earth was demoted. You know the phrase–another linguistic artifact–the world, or the Earth. What is the definite article saying? It’s saying there is only one. And that also goes straight back to pre-Copernican times, as does the phrase, natural as it is, of the Sun rising and the Sun setting.

Copernicus, by the way, felt his idea to be so dangerous that it was not published until he was on his deathbed, and even then it had an outrageous introduction by a man named Osiander, who was worried that it was too incendiary, too radical. Osiander wrote, in effect, “Copernicus doesn’t really believe this. This is just a means of calculating. And don’t anybody think he’s saying anything contrary to doctrine.” This was an important issue. Aristotle’s views had been accepted fully by the medieval church–Thomas Aquinas played a major role in that–and therefore by the time of Copernicus a serious objection to a geocentric universe was a theological offense. And you can see why, because if Copernicus were right, then the Earth would be demoted, no longer the Earth, the world, but just a world, an earth, one of many.

And then came the still more unsettling possibility, the idea that the stars were distant suns and that they also had planets going around them and that, after all, you can see thousands of stars with the naked eye. Suddenly the Earth is not only not central to this solar system but no longer central to any solar system. Well, there was a period in which we hoped that we were at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. And the definitive disproof of that occurred only in the 1920s, to give you an idea of how long it took for Copernican ideas to reach galactic astronomy.

And then there was the hope that, well, at least maybe our galaxy was at the center of all the other galaxies, all those many billions of other galaxies. But modern views have it that there is no such thing as a center of the universe, at least not in ordinary three-dimensional space, and we are certainly not at it.

So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations. A grinding of heels can be heard screeching across the last five centuries as scientists have revealed the noncentrality of our position and as many others have fought to resist that insight to the bitter end.

I’ve read all of Dr. Sagan’s books–well, everything from Broca’s Brain forward. I won’t list them all here, but will point out those that I found particularly meaningful. The Dragons of Eden, Comet and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors were all wonderful. Contact was delightfully entertaining and thought-provoking — much more so that the motion picture, which was itself very good. Pale Blue Dot and Billions and Billions were simply beautiful, in a manner and sense that I’m unable to put into words. And, of course, Cosmos (the book and the documentary) and The Demon-Haunted World are two books that literally changed my life. I’ve said it many times to many people and it’s as true today as it was when I first made the comment in 1996 that if I could have only one book to read for the rest of my life, without hesitation I would choose The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan.

So, over the next few weeks (I’m intentionally reading this book slowly–like a fine meal, I want to savor the experience) I will be excerpting certain passages here that I find particularly interesting or meaningful. I’ll start with this from Chapter 1: Nature and Wonder: A Reconnaissance of Heaven:

Let me read a passage from Thomas Paine, from The Age of Reason. Paine was an Englishman who played a major role in both the American and French revolutions. “From whence,” Paine asks–”From whence, then, could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world becase, they say, one man and one woman ate an apple? And, on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, and apple, a serpent, and a redeemer?”

Paine is saying that we have a theology that is Earth-centered and involves a tiny piece of space, and when we step back, when we attain a broader cosmic perspective, some of it seems very small in scale. And in fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe.

Now, we can say, “Well, that’s just because the right words weren’t available back when the first Jewish or Christian or Islamic holy books were written.” But clearly that’s not the problem; it is certainly possible in the beautiful metaphors in these books to describe something like the galaxy and the universe, and it isn’t there. It is a god of one small world, a problem, I believe, that theologians have not adequately addressed.

I don’t propose that it is a virtue to revel in our limitations. But it’s important to understand how much we do not know. There is an enormous amount we do not know; there is a tiny amount that we do. But what we do understand brings us face-to-face with an awesome cosmos that is simply different from the cosmos of our pious ancestors.

Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we are admiring. If we seek that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or whould He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.

The rocky “Super-Earth,” with a radius about 50 percent greater than Earth’s, circles a small red dwarf star 30 light-years away in the constellation of Leo, scientists from Spain’s Superior Council for Scientific Investigations said.

The new lightweight record-holder weighs in at about 3.8 times the mass of our sun and is only 15 miles (24 kilometers) in diameter.

“This black hole is really pushing the limits,” said study team leader Nikolai Shaposhnikov of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “For many years astronomers have wanted to know the smallest possible size of a black hole, and this little guy is a big step toward answering that question.”

Fuller analysis and testing of the problem with the rocket, the Ares I, indicated that the vibrations, termed “thrust oscillations,” would not be strong enough to harm either it or the astronauts it will carry, the officials said in a telephone news conference.

In addition, they said, repairs will most likely dampen the residual vibrations, so that they will not interfere with the astronauts’ duties, like reading instruments and writing, during the climb into space.

G. David Low, an astronaut who flew three space shuttle missions and later became an executive in the space industry, died March 15 near his home in northern Virginia. He was 52.

Early Wednesday morning, a spot of light just barely visible to the human eye (about fifth magnitude in astronomical parlance) appeared in the constellation Bootës. Astronomers say it was the toasted remains of one of the most titanic examples yet of the explosions known as gamma-ray bursts. News about the burst, in a galaxy seven billion light years away, began circulating by e-mail in the astronomical community when it was detected by NASA’s Swift satellite on March 19.

That seven billion light years, astronomers say, would have been far and away the record for long-distance sight by the naked eye, at least in the present sky — had anybody seen it. So far, according to Dr. Gehrels, there is no report that anybody did. Within an hour, the glow had faded below the range of human visibility.

Methane, composed of carbon and hydrogen, has been detected on most planets in our solar system, but never before on a world orbiting another star.

On a smaller, more hospitable planet, methane could be indicative of biological activity, though methane can be produced by non-biological processes. Methane generally breaks up quickly in Earth’s atmosphere through chemical reactions; this same process could occur on other small planets. And on a small planet, the hydrogen from the broken-up methane would likely escape quickly to space. So if a high amount of methane is detected on an Earth-sized planet, it could be the result of biological processes, because non-biological processes tend not to produce large amounts of the molecule. Astronomers plan to use the James Webb Telescope to search for water and methane on other extrasolar planets.

According to an official NASA report released Saturday, nearly 32 percent of all prayers exiting Earth are deflected off satellites orbiting the planet—ultimately preventing the discharged requests for divine intervention from ever making it to the Gates of Heaven. “After impact with the satellite, these diverted prayers typically plummet back into the atmosphere, where they either burn up or eventually land, unanswered, in a body of water,” the report read in part.

[via The Onion, hehe!]

Imagine! 50 years in space. 197,000 orbits.

[via Bad Astronomy Blog]

[via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

The Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are approaching each other, two cosmic steam engines chugging down the tracks at each other at 200 kilometers per second. Remember when I said big galaxies eat small ones? Well, when two big galaxies smack into each other, you get real fireworks. Stars don’t physically collide; they’re way too small on this scale. But gas clouds can, and like I said before, when they do they form stars. So you get a burst of star formation, lighting up the two galaxies.

Hubble image of The Antennae, two colliding galaxiesIn the meantime, the mutual gravity of the two galaxies draw out long tendrils from the other, making weird, delicate arcs and filaments of stars and gas. It’s beautiful, really, but it indicates violence on an epic scale.

Eventually (it takes a few billion years), the two galaxies will merge, and will become, what, Milkomeda? Andromeway? Well, whatever, they form a giant elliptical galaxy when they finally settle down. In fact, the Sun will still be around when this happens; it won’t have yet become a red giant. Will our descendants witness the biggest collision in the history of the galaxy?

How cool is that?

Now, I’m a big Phil Plait fan. I found Phil’s website, BadAstronomy.com, a bunch of years ago after Fox aired their notorious Moon Hoax show. I was looking online for a site that would help me “straighten out” a co-worker who bought the whole Moon Hoax “hook, line and sinker” as they say (after all, it was on TV). Phil’s excellent analysis of the show point-by-point was exactly what I needed. A year later I bought his first book Bad Astronomy and loved it (in fact, I’ve been meaning to re-read it). And, of course, being a long-time skeptic and a long-time fan/follower of James “The Amazing” Randi, I’ve watched Phil for several years now on the DVD-sets of “The Amaz!ng Meetings”–I’ve never been able to attend (cha ching [I shouldn't say that--it's just that I have kids, know what I mean]) so I buy the DVDs (see sidebar for countdown to the next Amaz!ng Meeting).

Anyway, that’s why I’m a Phil Plait fan. You should check out his website and blog–there’s really something for almost everyone there.