Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Cosmic Rants From Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer

Episode Date: April 4, 2011

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Phil Plait joins us for a helping of Bad Astronomy this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. The Bad Astronomer himself finally returns to our show, bringing with him three of the stories in the news that have him burning hotter than a supernova. Stick around for a fun conversation. Emily Lachdawalla is just moments away. The Planetary Society blogger previews what's in store around the solar system during April, and we'll talk about the images and other

science results starting to flow from MESSENGER at Mercury. Bill Nye celebrates the first estimate of Earth-like planets in our galaxy that is based on real data, and Bruce Betts will call in from Manassas, Virginia, where he is helping to prepare microorganisms for a trip aboard space shuttle Endeavour. helping to prepare microorganisms for a trip aboard space shuttle Endeavour. Endeavour is still scheduled to begin its last mission on April 19, and it looks like I'll be watching the launch with our own Bill Nye, who says you don't get second chances in life.

Listen for our special coverage in about three weeks. And if you're going to be in Southern California on May 28, why not join us for the taping of Planetary Radio Live? Yes, we're going to do it again. More details next week. Emily, before we get to talking about beautiful images coming in from Messenger already, say a word or two about your regular monthly feature, What's Up in the Solar System? This is a feature that I've been doing for more than a year. I realized that I was starting to lose track of what was going on with some of the active and ongoing space missions. So about a year ago, I started summarizing the current activities of

the approximately 20 spacecraft that are exploring across the solar system. This list does reflect my planetary bias. I don't really talk about the astronomy missions, and I don't talk about solar observing missions. It's pretty much only the planetary and small bodies observing missions. And it's been interesting to sort of check in with all of these active spacecraft once a month. This month, April, Messenger will start doing its scientific operations at Mercury and we'll also see Dawn starting to do its first observations of Vesta as it begins to approach. Vesta's already probably a pixel or two across in its navigational camera, and it's just going to slowly grow over the course of the next few months, which is very exciting.

And of course, there's lots of missions that have been active for many years, and two of our favorites on this show are the Mars Exploration Rovers, and on Mars, Opportunity has finally left Santa Maria Crater and is beginning to roll again towards Endeavor. On Mars, Opportunity has finally left Santa Maria Crater and is beginning to roll again towards Endeavor. And Cassini this month will be continuing its observations of mostly Saturn and Titan. It's going to be continuing to watch atmospheric motions with Saturn's new northern storm and look for more rain on Titan. And there is much more to see in this entry, which is March 31st entry in the Planetary Society blog. But we want to save about a minute anyway, at least, for MESSENGER itself, because it sure looks like operations are underway already. There are some great images. Right now, they're just commissioning the spacecraft, but scientists wouldn't take any

old pictures for commissioning. They took ones that they wanted to see the most, and some of the ones they wanted to see the most were the previously unimaged parts of Mercury. There's only about 5 or 10% of the planet that hadn't been imaged before, mostly concentrated at the poles. So these first observations, they did focus on the poles. And as one of my Twitter friends remarked, I can predict that it's going to be cratered in gray. And he was right, it was cratered in gray. There weren't a lot of big surprises here, but it is always exciting to fill in black areas of the map. And we should say you have a visitor in the background there that we can hear sneezing.

So I hope she's not getting over a cold. You have an image as well, a chart that shows what the magnetometer will be up to on Messenger. That's a big part of this mission and an important part for Sean Solomon, since this is the area that he studies. Sean, who was just on the show last week. That's right. And I think that that magnetometer graphic and another one that they showed of their Mercury laser altimeter is probably the most exciting thing to come out of this first press briefing, because it shows that those two instruments are on and working. And unlike the cameras, there's been nothing like these magnetometer and topographic data sets at Mercury

before. With the cameras, we've seen most of the planet at least once, but we've only got like six magnetometer measurements for the entire time that we've been observing Mercury. And so already there's three times as much data from the magnetometer as we've had from six previous flybys. So it's very exciting to see the beginning of the building of those data sets. Much, much more to come. And we will have more to come next week when we talk once again with Emily. She is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. And that is her daughter, Sanaya, who you hear in the background. Emily, thanks again.

Thank you, Matt. Here is Bill. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here. This week, really exciting findings from the Kepler spacecraft. Well, not from the spacecraft, from scientists who've analyzed the data. Now, get this. There may be a 1 in 37 to 1 in 70 chance that a star out there has an Earth-like planet. Well, let's call it 1 in 40. Okay, if there are 400 billion stars in our galaxy, heck, that's 10 billion Earth-like

planets. 10 billion. I mean, this is the first estimate of the famous Drake equation. How many stars are there? How many planets? How many Earth-like planets? How many planets that could have liquid water? How many planets that might have life? How many planets could have intelligent life? Well, this is the first such study based on actual facts. There could be as many as 10 billion Earth-like planets. This will take us so much closer to answering the question, are we alone? I mean, shooting from the hip, you got to say, probably not. Are we ever going to be able to communicate with those other life forms on those other Earth-like planets?

Are they going to emerge at the same time we did? Or are they going to get through it and we're going to get through it at the same time and communicate? And then we'll know that we're not alone. And then we're still in the middle of space nowhere. But we're so much closer to believing that life is likely. And this, I hope, changes your worldview. I hope it changes the way you view your place in space.

It's based on data, you guys. I've got to fly. Bill Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. Phil Plait has become the go-to guy for dispelling, discrediting, and just generally dissing astronomical nonsense. Dr. Plait earned his stripes with study of supernovae, exoplanet hunting, and other research. Now he's more a science writer than doer, and has set his sights on much more than astronomy,

as you will see if you visit his website, badastronomy.com. I like everything there, including his movie reviews. He's found time to run the James Randi Foundation, author books, and host a TV show. But I get the feeling that none of his activities get more of Phil's attention than the blog he writes for Discover Magazine. He is serious about his crusade against

bad astronomy and bad science, but it's a crusade that is chock full of humor. He joined me via Skype from his Colorado home as March was coming to an end. Phil, while I believe you were on the show once early on in our run, it has been far too long. Thanks for coming back to Planetary Radio. Thanks for having me on again. I know one of the toughest things for you to decide was what stories, what three stories we'd be able to consider in our small amount of time together,

because I guess there's a real wealth of astronomical nonsense at the moment. I don't know if I would use the word wealth. Sadly, there's never a lack of media-related bad astronomy out there. Well, let's start with your first choice, and that was, or is, Apophis, that asteroid that is no doubt going to kill us all in 2036, according to some rather authoritative journalistic outlets. If by authoritative you mean wrong. In this case, yeah.

You know, as soon as Apophis started making the news a few years ago, I knew this was going to be a thorn in my side. This is a 200-meter-wide asteroid that orbits the sun and crosses the Earth's orbit. And every seven years or so, it makes a relatively close pass. And in 2029, it's going to pass so close to the Earth that the Earth's gravity is going to shift the orbit of Apophis so much that we don't know exactly where it's going to be. And there is a tiny, tiny chance that seven years later in 2036, Apophis will hit the earth. And by tiny, I mean like one in a million, literally. And the problem is we don't know exactly. And with the media, one in a million is exactly the same as more than zero. And so they can say there is a chance. And so

every few months, for no reason I can really discern, the media starts talking about Apophis and how it might hit us. And this has been happening over and over again over the past year. And the latest one was just a series of articles that came out because a journalist interviewed a Russian astronomer and basically just totally misquoted him, saying that Russian astronomers have predicted that the Apophis asteroid may strike the Earth in April 2036. And it will approach at a distance of this and it's likely collision will occur, blah, blah, blah. And they mentioned this guy's name, Leonid Sokolov. So I emailed him and it turns out he's a real astronomer. And he said, no, no, no.

I said, you know, there's a tiny, tiny chance. And I was misquoted and all this kind of stuff. But of course, once that's out there on the web, people start picking it up and it went everywhere. And it was just picked up by all of these, you know, quote unquote, mainstream outlets like Huffington Post and those sorts of things. And I started getting email and I had to post and say, no, a tiny, tiny chance. You know, I'm not worried about this. One in a million, your chances of getting hit by lightning are better. So don't sweat it. Now, how do you feel generally about the effort by a lot of folks around the world to prepare us for something like this?

Because someday it's going to happen again. Well, look, you know, this is a real threat. Astronomers take this seriously. You could ask a dinosaur how they feel about it, but you can't because they're dead. That's because of an asteroid impact 65 million years ago. We have to worry about this kind of stuff because it only takes an object a few hundred meters across, like Apophis, to have catastrophic effects on the Earth. It doesn't have to wipe out all life to do some serious damage to us.

Our economy is global. You don't want one of these things blowing up over a major city or even over some country's breadbasket, because that would cause a lot of global distress. So there are astronomers looking for these. There are engineers trying to figure out how to push them out of the way in case one is seen that's headed towards the Earth. We should take it seriously, but we shouldn't panic about it. And we certainly shouldn't panic about them when there's nothing to panic about. Let's move on to something that is considerably larger than Apophis. Does our own moon have it in for us?

There were a lot of people who became kind of nervous about that gigantic moon that we just had earlier this month. I looked at it. It didn't look that big to me, but my vision's not that great. Even if your vision were that great, it wouldn't matter. This was the so-called supermoon, when you get a full moon, or when the moon is basically aligned with the sun. The Earth and the moon and the sun form a line,

which happens twice a month at new and full moon. But at this particular full moon the moon was at app it was excuse me was at perigee when it's at its closest point to the earth and the the closest point of the moon's orbit to the earth changes over time and this was a particularly close one and so people were calling this a super moon and just to give you a hint of how silly this was that term was coined by an astrologer astron not an astronomer. Those authorities on all knowledge, cosmic and otherwise. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I hate to cast aspersions at, you know, the source of something like this, but, you know, that should give you a hint about how

serious this is, which is not at all. Now, look, you know, at a full moon, we do get higher high tides and lower low tides because the gravity of the sun and the moon do align a little bit and we get tides from both of these objects. And so they add together. This is called the spring tide. And when the moon is at perigee at a full moon, you get what's called a proxigian tide. I love these words. And so you might expect a little bit of extra flooding, which is kind of what we saw from this Proxigian moon whenever it was a couple of weeks ago. March 19th, yeah.

March 19th, right. And people, but people were putting all kinds of blame on the moon, like the Japanese earthquake and all this stuff. And that was just silly because the moon was actually farther than average from the earth when that earthquake hit. The moon had nothing to do with it. And studies have shown that the moon has almost nothing to do with earthquakes on the Earth, and certainly nothing to do with large earthquakes. So blaming the supermoon on this was just nonsense and just an

excuse for people to panic again for no real reason. And I guess this is another example of how easy it is to sort of twist statistics because I guess this was it this astrologer who conveniently only pointed to major disasters in the past that happened to correlate with moons like this supermoon. That's precisely correct. You look at all the big earthquakes on the earth and then you look for ones that happened near a full or near or new moon that happened at Perigee. And sure enough, you find a you find a couple but what this guy didn't point out is that there are lots and lots of major earthquakes all the time you have to actually say do we see more at the full and new moon and statistically speaking we don't i like to tell

people 90 of all murders occur within a week of the full or new moon and when people think about it they laugh because that that's basically the month. A week before or after the full moon is roughly the same as a week before or after the new moon. And so the moon cycles through every month. And so it's true that 90%, even maybe 95% of all murders occur within a week of the new or full moon. But that's because I'm taking a bin size. That's the entire month. You can you can phrase things this way statistically, make it sound really important, make it sound like there's something real going on when in fact there isn't. My guest is Phil Plait, the bad astronomer. The truth is he's really not a bad astronomer, but he does talk a lot about bad astronomy. And that's what we're talking about today. Call it

his his cosmic rant session. You can find him, of course, at badastronomy.com. And we'll come back after this quick break and consider one more thing, maybe not to worry about. It's a little far away, but it has gotten a lot of attention lately, and that is not a super moon, but a super planet. We'll be right back with Planetary Radio. Not a super moon, but a super planet. We'll be right back with Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society.

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Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan of The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. My guest is Phil Plait, the bad astronomer, who you can find all over the place, actually.

Badastronomy.com is really sort of bad astronomer central, I guess. And we'll tell you a little bit more about, you know, that book that you still have out, Death from the Skies, which is still available from Amazon and has five stars, I noticed yesterday. So I highly recommend it if you really want to be scared to death about how we're all going to die. And it's fun. I got to admit. The purpose of writing that book.

I love the little dramatic vignettes up front, too, where you have all these heroes with very short lifespans. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. That was almost like a dabbling in science fiction. I enjoyed writing those. You know, somebody experiencing whatever particular scenario I'm about to write about, a nearby supernova or a black hole passing through the solar system, just to give it a little bit of a sense of fun. And it comes off pretty well. A lot of fun. A lot of fun.

little bit of a sense of fun and it comes off pretty well a lot of fun a lot of fun uh let's talk about giant planets so far out there that they haven't been discovered yet this is something that we've actually brought up with uh mike brown mike uh pluto killer brown who is uh looking for more objects out there in the quaper belt but you wrote about a couple of guys who uh say that it's just possible that some data has been collected which might reveal one of these bodies. And who knows? It could be big. Yeah, this is a great news story because it's a perfect storm of good science and terrible journalism. So basically the idea is that we know of the eight planets in the solar system, if you want to call it that.

I'm not going to get into that right now. But past Neptune, we have these objects like Pluto and Sedna and Eris that are smaller icy bodies. But we don't know if there could be another major planet way out in the solar system, you know, 200 times the Earth's distance from the sun, so far out that it would be actually very difficult to detect. Well, there are two astronomers, John Matisse and Daniel Whitmire from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. And they said to themselves, how would we detect a planet if something like that were out there? And they thought, well, you know what? Comets come from deep space. These long period comets come from way out in the solar system. If there's a big planet out there, maybe the gravity of this planet would affect their orbits and we could see that. So they mapped the orbits of a bunch of comets.

And sure enough, they found something that was interesting. It wasn't really statistically significant, but it looked like there was something that they could look into further. I read that paper. And again, it's interesting, but it doesn't prove anything. And they came out and said, look, NASA has launched this infrared survey telescope called WISE that does an all sky survey in the infrared. And if there is a giant planet out there like Jupiter, it would be brighter in the infrared than visible light. And WISE might be able to see it. And if it could see it, then it's sitting in that data. We just have to tease it out. And what happened was this got picked up in an article by The Independent, an online newspaper, that basically was saying, and this is a quote, scientists now believe the proof of this planet's existence has already been gathered by a NASA space telescope and is just waiting to be analyzed.

And of course, this got picked up as everybody saying they've discovered, they've got this proof of this planet out there. But in fact, we have no idea if this planet exists or not. If it's out there, WISE may have detected it, but we don't know that it planet out there. But in fact, we have no idea if this planet exists or not. If it's out there, WISE may have detected it, but we don't know that it's out there. And I talked to John Matisse about this, and he actually said, yeah, you know, we're not saying this planet's out there. We're just saying that WISE may have seen it. And this just got blown up everywhere on the internet. And I was scrambling to have to write about it and saying, look, you know, there could be giant planets out there we don't know about, but we have really no evidence of them and we should really cool our jets about this until we have definitive evidence.

Will anybody be more thrilled than you if that evidence surfaces? Well, probably Mike Brown. Every astronomer would be excited. When I was working on Hubble Space Telescope, we were finding evidence of giant planets orbiting other stars much farther out than Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune orbit the sun. So we know that planets like that can exist. The question is, is there one orbiting the sun? We don't know. There is basically zero solid evidence for it. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. We have to keep looking. Phil, this has been every bit as fun as I hoped it would be.

I hope that we can have you back before too long. No, thanks. I really appreciate it, man. And keep up the bad work. I will. Phil Plait is the not really so bad astronomer. You can read all about him at badastronomy.com. And I recommend the blog, which he does in cooperation, or I guess

for Discover Magazine. Do I have that right? Yeah, Discover Magazine. All kinds of other places, master of all media. One of his books, still available from Amazon, is Death from the Skies, five stars on that service. We're going to move on to yet another astronomer, one we visit with every week. That's Bruce Betts, who is on the other side of the nation this week. He'll tell us why when we come back for this week's edition of What's Up. Well, this is unique.

We have Bruce Betts, not on Skype, but the phone line this time, because he is all the way across the country. Where are you, Guy? Welcome. Hello. I'm in Manassas, Virginia, at ATCC, where we are in the process of loading organisms for the next space shuttle flight, Shuttle Life. We will be flying several different organisms in space. Well, you are the director of projects, and this is a prime project from the Planetary Society. And remind us very quickly, what's the idea here? The idea is it's tied to our

Phobos Life experiment, flying on the Phobos grunt mission later this year. And it's to test the survivability of organisms in space, particularly related to the hypothesis of transpermia. Can life travel between the planets? Could it be form on Mars, be ejected in a rock and travel to Earth, for example? This is basically a wet run where we get to go through and do some real science testing things in low Earth orbit while simultaneously having a point of comparison for Phobos 5. A wet run.

I love that. You got people there with you? Yes, I do. It includes Dr. Tim Lilburn. He's a senior scientist here at ATCC, and he's coordinating our activities here along with Amy Smith. Tim's here. If you want to say hi.

Yeah, could I? Sure. Thank you. Hand in the phone over here. Hi Amy Smith. Tim's here. If you want to say hi. Yeah, could I? Sure. Thank you. Hand in the phone over here. Hi, Matt. Hey, Tim. Thanks for joining us. You bet.

Listen, we're going to, I think, have a more extensive conversation with you or some of your colleagues in a couple of weeks on the show, or during launch when most people hear this. This is what you guys do, right? You handle little critters. That's right. It's a biorepository. We have thousands of strains of bacteria, many cell lines, all kinds of stuff. And how are our critters doing in their astronaut training?

Well, they're pretty good, you know. They're doing all right. We got them in the tubes anyway. That's good. Kicking and screaming. Yeah, we'll seal those up. All right. Well, we look forward to talking to you again in a couple of weeks, and I hope everything goes well there. Treat Bruce well, too. Don't put him in any tubes.

Okay. I'm back. He said he wouldn't put you in any tubes. I asked him to treat you well. I appreciate that. They're really, really tiny. And don't worry, they don't let me touch any part of the experiment. Well, tell us what else is up very quickly. Well, in the night sky, Saturn's our big friend, reaching opposition April 3rd, so on the opposite side of the Earth

from the Sun. And so it'll be rising around sunset and setting around dawn. Check it out in the east in the evening, high overhead in the middle of the night, and over in the west in the pre-dawn. In the pre-dawn, you can also look over to the east, very low, and check out extremely bright Venus. And then that's kind of the sky roundup. I'm going to go straight to random space fact.

Not nearly as dramatic over the phone. Well, I didn't want to scare any of the people here too much. I think they're already a little bit scared just with that. I think they're probably frightened by the fact that your colleague referred to the organisms they deal with as critters three times in about 60 seconds. At least you're making me look better. So anyway, on to our random space fact. The Messenger spacecraft, which, of course, we just heard about recently and went into orbit around Mercury, it completed 15 orbits of the sun prior to going into orbit around Mercury.

So over its six-and-a-half-year period, as it adjusted its direction and its velocity and migrated in, it did 15 orbits of the Sun. Do you know that I actually counted those in the animation on the website? I mentioned this to Sean Solomon last week. He said yes 15 times. All right, let's move on to the trivia contest. We asked you what was the second orbiter at Mars. second orbiter at Mars. How did we do, Matt? Lots of responses this week. I don't think people had too much trouble discovering that apparently it was Mars 2,

the Soviet spacecraft that followed our Mariner 9 by not very long at all, just a matter of days, and then hard on its heels, Mars 3, less than a week later. Mars 2, and it was John Vamishi, John Vamishi of Davison, Michigan, who was chosen by Random.org to receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt for this. And I guess you know Mars 2 wasn't just an orbiter, right? Right. Well, I mean, functionally it mostly was an orbiter. In practical terms. But technically, it had something that was supposed to land.

And it kind of did, but very fast. An impactor. Yeah, right. A penetrator, though not designed as one. What do you have for next week? Well, we're going to keep thinking about critters in space, to use your technical term. What was the first kind of animal that ever flew in space? Just a little hint.

I said flew in space, not orbited. But the first kind of animal to fly in space. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. What are we giving away this week, Matt? I think we're going to do another Planetary Radio t-shirt because they are quite popular. I mean, unless you have something else in mind. No, no, I could grab things off people's desks here. Would you? Let's go ahead and go with the Planetary Radio t-shirt. Nothing that's a

biohazard, I hope. I can't guarantee that. Anyway, we should stick with the shirt. Get us your answer by Monday, April 11 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to be part of this latest competition. And we'll see you back here, big guy. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about microorganisms everywhere around you, inside you. Thank you, and good night. Critters. I told you, they're critters. Oh, I'm sorry. Critters. Think about critters. He's Bruce Betts,

the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Space Shuttle Endeavor's last launch, the Shuttle Life Experiment, and a field trip to JPL to see Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover.

These are just a few of the great shows we have planned for you in the coming weeks. And don't forget that you can join us for our live taping of Planetary Radio Live if you'll be in Southern California on the Memorial Day weekend. I'll have more details to share next week, including

how you can get your free tickets. Our special guest will be Mike Pluto Killer Brown. Along with all the regular characters. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Thanks for listening. Clear skies. Thank you.