Ray Villard
Cosmic Ray is Moving
Cosmic Ray is joining his blogger colleagues as part of
Discovery News Space coverage. Check out the
expanded Discovery News Space
team to follow my future posts. Thanks for visiting!
Journey to the Center of the Galaxy
Because of increasing light pollution, the most spectacular
structure in the sky is seen by fewer and fewer people these days – the Milky
Way. During the summer months you are in fact peering in the direction of the downtown
hub of our pinwheel galaxy. The central
region straddles the constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius that are low on
the southern horizon when viewed from northern latitudes.
Alien Abductions: Idiocy of the Worst Kind
Today the much-hyped film, “The Fourth Kind,” debuts in
theaters with a predictable poster of a pair of other-worldly eyes staring out.
Sci-fi film buffs will remember Steven Spielberg’s sappy
1977 film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” where flying saucers outfitted
with disco lights buzz lone cars and farmhouses, and in a messianic ending aliens
carry a few chosen people skyward in a “mothership” that looked more like a
chandelier.
Color-Challenged Astronomers Are Lost in a Latte' Universe
God was sitting up late one night designing the universe. He
took care of simple things first. Gravity would construct stars, galaxies and
planets. Biological evolution would ensure a robust diversity of life forms.
But what color to make the universe? God looked down into his foamy cup of latte' and decided that the color beige would be just perfect. In reality God hadn't invented the other colors yet so He didn't have much of a choice at the time.
The Night That Martians Took Broadway!
The Balloon Boy saga from a couple weeks ago will go down in
mass media history as one of the great hoaxes. Network news was riveted on
following the wayward balloon for over two hours because they were convinced
there was a stowaway child onboard. Maybe we were primed for this sort of hoax (more later).
But 71 years ago today the mother of all media hoaxes took
place. On the night before Halloween in 1938 CBS Radio presented an hour-long adaptation
of H. G. Wells' classic science fiction story “The War of the Worlds.”
Rocket Ready To Go Nowhere
Like someone who just bought a new car, earlier this week
NASA proudly rolled out its next generation spaceship, the Ares I-X. The spindly
rocket looks anemic compared to its predecessors, the space shuttle, Saturn V,
and Saturn IB. But at a height of
310 feet it casts a long pencil-like shadow over the Kennedy Space Center causeway.
Ironically, the Augustine Commission report that formally
came out this week cast a black eclipse shadow over this arrow-craft that is
scheduled for its maiden test flight in just a few days.
Flying Saucer Scam Busts Pseudoscience
The human melodrama aside, last week’s “Balloon Boy” debacle
was also an inevitable demonstration of pseudoscience run amok.
I don’t want to give the purported hoax of
the runaway flying saucer balloon any more attention that it has already sucked
up in world news. But I do want to point out that beyond the reckless hubris of
its accused perpetrator, Richard Heene, the event is an indictment of our sensationalist
and fuzzy-brained TV culture.
Forgotten Planet
There’s another dwarf planet to add to the list of solar
system bodies that share minor
league status with Pluto.
Newly published Hubble Space Telescope pictures show that
the large asteroid Pallas is nearly spherical. In other words the body has enough
gravity to pull itself into ball where all surface features are essentially the
same distance from the core.
This is one criterion for a planet according to the
International Astronomical Union (IAU). Hubble’s sharp view can resolve the disk
of Pallas and shows that it is slightly
egg-shaped, and roughly the width of West Virginia.
When We’ll Really Nuke The Moon
The dust is still settling from the public blowup over
NASA’s LCROSS experiment to go prospecting for water on the moon by crashing a
rocket booster into it last Friday. The impact was a PR flub. There were no
dramatic images for any evidence of the smashup.
Nevertheless, I have subsequently received a few angry
e-mails from people who are incensed that we would harm Earth’s only natural
satellite.
The tersest note was from a retired Marine:
“Stop bombing the fu*king moon.”
In a subsequent communication he philosophized:
Moon Survives Unprovoked Attack!
Internet traffic on blogs, YouTube, and discussion boards was nearly predicting the end of the world today.
It didn’t happen.
People warned that a missile launched by evil government scientists was going to plow into the virgin Moon and explode. The effects on Earth from disrupting the celestial harmony would be unpredictable but devastating: tsunamis, meteorite showers, volcanoes – and even more global warming.
What happened instead? Early morning news anchors were speechless at the NASA live TV feed. That’s because absolutely nothing was seen happening at the ground zero moment.
