Month: February 2024

Space News for February 2024

There’s plenty to talk about this month in Space. For both manned and unmanned spaceflight there’s good news and bad news so let’s start with manned spaceflight first.

Manned spaceflight began with the flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961. His single orbit of the Earth made him the ‘First Man in Space’. (Credit: ThoughtCo)

The good news of course is the successful launch on January 18th of the Axiom-3 (Ax-3) private mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Although the mission is a private one the crew are not millionaire tourists, they are astronauts representing four different nations. Mission Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria is a dual US-Spanish citizen who has previous flown in space with NASA. The other three crewmen are all space novices with Walter Villadei of Italy serving as Pilot along with Marcus Wandt of Sweden and Alper Gezeravci of Turkey as mission specialists. Astronaut Gezeravci represents Turkey’s first astronaut.

Launch of the Ax-3 mission aboard their Falcon-9 rocket. Although the four passengers were not tourists they were paying costumers of a private company that can arrange for anyone to travel into space. For about $55 million USD! (Credit: The New York Times)

After docking at the ISS on January 20th the four astronauts spent two weeks performing experiments before returning to Earth on their Dragon capsule. The Ax-3 mission is Space X’s twelfth manned mission and as I’ve said before Space X is making the whole process of traveling to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) a routine affair. While the return of the Ax-3 mission was delayed by two days owing to bad weather at the landing zone in the Gulf of Mexico off of Pensacola, Florida the actual re-entry was uneventful, the four astronauts splashing down on February the ninth.

The Ax-3 capsule floats peacefully in the waters off of Florida while awaiting recovery by Space-X personnel. The whole operation of traveling into space is becoming just as uneventful, which is the whole idea! (Credit: Orlando Sentinel)

That’s the whole point of the Space X – Axiom collaboration. Using Space X’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon Capsule the cost of space travel is steadily coming down, the four nations involved in Ax-3 mission each paid $55 million dollars to send their astronauts into orbit. because of that small countries and corporations can now send scientists and engineers into LOE to do research aboard a new generation of space stations, and the cheaper it gets the more that will do so.

In the Movie ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ the Orion Shuttle takes passengers to an orbiting space station. We’re not quite there yet but it won’t be long now! (Credit: CultTVMan’s Hobbyshop)

Getting beyond LOE is another matter however. Only one nation, the US has ever succeeded in taking astronauts to Earth escape velocity and the last time they did that was back in 1972. Back in December of 2022 NASA finally succeeded in sending an unmanned, but man capable Orion capsule on a journey around the Moon on its Artemis 1 mission. At that time it was anticipated that the first manned mission, Artemis 2 another trip around the Moon, would take place later this year.

Launch of the unmanned Artemis-1 mission to the Moon. Although no astronauts were aboard this was the first flight of a man capable mission to the Moon since 1972. (Credit: Wired)

That mission has now been delayed however. On January 9th NASA announced that the Artemis 2 mission would take place No Earlier Than (NET) September of 2025. That schedule change will then affect all subsequent missions in the Artemis program. Artemis 3, the first mission to attempt a landing, will now take place NET late 2026 and most likely will be pushed back into 2027.

In just a few years one of these landers will be taking humans back to the Moon. Space X on the left or Blue Origin on the right. Which is still up in the air at the moment. (Credit: Tesmanian)

The major reason for the delay is the Orion capsule’s heat shield, which during reentry on the Artemis 1 mission did not behave in a ‘nominal’ fashion. Finding out exactly what happened is taking longer than expected and with several additions technical issues as well it was decided to announce the delays now.

When a spacecraft re-enters our atmosphere it is traveling at thousands of kilometers per hour. Friction causes the capsule to slow down but all of the heat generated by that friction has to be dissipated by a heat shield. (Credit: All About Space)

The delay in the Artemis missions does not mean that the Moon is lonely however. In January there were two separate attempts at landing a robotic probe on the Lunar surface and again with mixed results. The first to launch was the Peregrine probe that represented the first try at a landing on the Moon by a private corporation; Pittsburgh based Astrobotic Corporation. Sounds a bit like the Ax-3 mission doesn’t it. Similarly to Axiom Space, the idea in the Peregrine lander was that countries or corporations could pay to put an instrument or experiment onboard Peregrine, which Astrobotic would then launch to the Moon.

The launch of the Peregrine Moon lander went well. The first ever mission for the new Vulcan rocket was flawless. The lander itself didn’t work so well however. (Credit: Astrobotic Technology)

Peregrine started out with an auspicious launch, the first ever for the new Vulcan rocket from United Launch Alliance (ULA). Vulcan performed well, lifting off from Kennedy Space Center and putting Peregrine into a trajectory for the Moon. However, almost immediately after separating from it’s launch vehicle the probe suffered a fuel leak that spelled disaster for the 1.2 tonne lander. Peregrine never succeeded in leaving Earth orbit and in fact about a week after launch the probe fell back into Earth’s atmosphere and burned up.

This did not happen. The Peregrine lander failed to even leave Earth orbit and fell back into the atmosphere after just a few days in space. (Credit: New Atlas)

The Japanese space agency JAXA was a bit luckier with its Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon or SLIM lunar probe. The landing on the Moon went extremely well with SLIM making the most precise touchdown ever on the Lunar surface, within about 100m of it’s intended position.

Launch of Japan’s SLIM Lunar lander. (Credit: Al Jazeera)

Almost immediately however the engineers in Japan noticed that the power levels in the lander’s batteries were dropping rapidly, the craft’s solar arrays were not providing any power to recharge them. Acting quickly the engineers downloaded every image, every bit of data they could from SLIM. Then, about three hours after touchdown on the Moon’s surface the lander was shut down to conserve the last 12% of battery power remaining.

The launch went well and the landing was almost exactly where it was intended but SLIM is upside down! In this position its solar panels are unable to generate full power and it’s questionable how long the lander can continue to operate. (Credit: Reuters)

After several days of investigating what happened the engineers at JAXA realized that the spacecraft had somehow landed on its head, it was upside down on the Lunar surface. In that position its solar panels weren’t getting enough of the Sun’s light to fully power the probe causing the drop in electrical power.

With no clouds to obscure the Sun solar power on the Moon is even more efficient than here on Earth. But you do have to point your solar panels at the Sun. (Credit: IEEE Spectrum)

The Sun does move across the sky during the Lunar day however and on the 28th of January SLIM’s solar arrays began to produce enough power to allow the engineers in Japan to bring it back to life, for a while at least. The long Lunar night is coming during which time the probe will have to depend on whatever energy is stored it its batteries, so whether SLIM can survive to continue its mission is questionable.

Whether on the Moon or here on Earth a dead battery is never a good thing. (Credit: Interstate Batteries)

That’s the reality of operating in space however; there are successes, failures and sometimes even partial successes. Like a child learning to walk we are learning how to live and work in space, you have to expect an occasional fall now and then.

People have had some crazy ideas about how we’re live in space but what’s not crazy is the idea that before too long we will be doing so! (Credit: IFL Science)

One last sad note, NASA’s venerable Voyager 1 spaceprobe is in trouble. The probe, which was launched way back in 1977 and is now 24 billion kilometers from Earth is the farthest man-made object ever and has for the last 10 years been sending back data about conditions in interstellar space.

It must be lonely out there. Voyager 1 has now officially left our Solar System. Until 2 months ago it was still sending back data about the conditions in interstellar space but unless NASA engineers can figure out what’s wrong with it the venerable probe could be lost forever. (Credit: Interesting Engineering)

The trouble started back in November when the data sent back from Voyager suddenly became a repeated pattern of meaningless 1’s and 0’s before turning into what’s known as a ‘carrier tone’, nothing more than a steady hum that at least let’s engineers at NASA know the probe is still there. After several months of investigation the engineers are convinced that the problem lies in the spacecraft’s Flight Data Subsystem and could be something as simply as a single corrupted bit in the memory.

Sometimes even just a single corrupted bit in a program is enough to cause everything to go haywire. (Credit: ResearchGate)

Fixing Voyager’s problem is going to be a very difficult problem, if it can be done at all. The probe is so far away that it takes 45 hours to send a radio signal and get a response back, and right now Voyager isn’t responding. Also, the spacecraft is more than 45 years old, making it older than some of the engineers trying to fix it.

At least when you try to fix an old car you have the car itself in front of you. Voyager 1 is now 24 billion kilometers away. Try fixing that! (Credit: YouTube)

Now Voyager 2 is still transmitting, sending back data from outside our Solar System. Nevertheless, sooner or later we are going to have to accept the loss of both Voyager space probes, let’s just hope it’s not yet!

Book Review: ‘Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism’ by Anne Case and Angus Deaton

We all are aware of how the economic conditions in this country have changed over the last 30-40 years. Where once assembly line manufacturing was the main driver of the GDP here in the US now it’s high-tech engineering, microchips and software, industries that require far fewer employees but those with greater education. These changes in the economy have brought with them demographic changes as millions of high school graduates lost well paying jobs with benefits while people with a college degree were in ever greater demand, and therefore saw at least a modest increase in their income and wealth.

I could have picked any of a hundred different graphs all saying the same thing. The higher the education a person attains the higher the average salary they will earn throughout their lives! (Credit: Fox Business)

One unexpected outcome of these economic changes is the effect on the overall health of the American people caused by a massive growth in ‘Deaths of Despair’ that is drug overdoses, suicide and alcoholism. ‘Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism’ by Anne Case and Angus Deaton examines the increase in drug overdoses, suicide and alcoholism from both an economic and sociological perspective, both authors are retired professors of economics at Princeton University and Professor Deaton was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2016.

While the difference in salary between College graduates and High School graduates may be understandable the difference in Life Expectancy is harder to grasp. That’s the thesis of ‘Deaths of Despair’ by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. (Credit: World Socialist Web Site)

‘Deaths of Despair’ begins by demonstrating just how large a problem drug overdoses, suicides and alcoholism have become. In fact these social diseases were actually causing a decline in the average life expectancy of Americans before the Covid-19 pandemic. The book then goes on the show how these ‘Deaths of Despair’ reside almost exclusively in the white male population without a college degree, exactly the part of the population that has seen the most economic turmoil in the last 40 years. That turmoil being the driving force behind the despair a large part of our population now feels.

Cover art for ‘Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism’ by Anne Case (l) and Angus Deaton (r). (Credit: YouTube)

The central portion of the book is a detailed examination of how the economy has changed over the last 40 years and why damage generated by those changes seem to have almost targeted white males with only a high school education or less. In addition to the lost of income in going from a well paid factory job with benefits to a low paid service job with few benefits ‘Deaths of Despair’ also considers such factors as the loss of pride and community that accompanied the switch from buildings cars at General Motors to flipping burgers at McDonald’s. At the same time social changes of the last few decades added to the despair of white, blue-collar males. The advancement of both woman and minorities only increased the feeling of lost prestige and privilege.

Symbol of a population left behind economically, a factory that once drove American prosperity left to rust and decay. What happened to the people who once worked here earning a good life for themselves? (Credit: Wikipedia)

Then, at just the time when these changes were generating despondency within a large section of the population the pharmaceutical industry began a campaign of selling synthetic, non-addictive opioids as a cure all for any kind of pain. Of course we now know that OxyContin and its relatives are actually highly addictive and can even act as gateway drugs to worse opioids like heroin and fentanyl. The callous greed of the drug companies who made billions by turning millions of Americans into addicts, or in all too many cases corpses is graphically detailed.

As a large portion of the American working class saw their once comfortable life disappearing many of them got caught up in the opioid epidemic. Notice how the number of overdoses among men is nearly twice that among women. (Credit: Wikipedia)
In ‘Deaths of Despair’ the authors cover the effects of suicide, alcoholism and the opioid epidemic on those with less than a college education. However they completely miss the equally tragic effect of education on smoking rates with high school graduates smoking, and dying because of smoking at more than twice the rate of those with a college degree. (Credit: Medical Express)

In the final section of ‘Deaths of Despair’ the authors give their recommendations on how to rebalance the economic system so as to better serve all Americans not just the top 1% or even the better educated. To be honest however the authors are academics and as such they are cautious in their suggestions.

While since 1975 many nations have seen the top 1% grab a larger share of the wealth here in the US that increase is significantly greater. Leaving that much less for the average person. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The most fundamental change put forward in ‘Deaths of Despair’ is a complete reform of the healthcare system in the US, which the authors contend does not even meet the criteria of a true capitalist marketplace. Not only are the drug companies and health insurance corporations criticized in detail but hospitals, ambulance services and even doctor’s associations are shown to be guilty of acting as an Oligopoly. (An Oligopoly is a small group of merchants or corporations that by colluding together rather than competing virtually become a monopoly, raising prices while using their power to destroy any competitors) According to the Authors this is why Americans spend more for their healthcare than any other nation while both life expectancy in the US and approval of our healthcare system rank amongst the lowest for any industrialized, wealthy country. In ‘Deaths of Despair’ the authors estimate that a through reform of the health care system could free up as much a a trillion dollars a year in GDP that could be used to maintain our infrastructure, improve education etc, etc, etc.

As a fraction of our countries wealth (GDP) the costs of Health Care have more than tripled since 1960! Are we living three times as long or has the Health Care Industry simply become inefficient and wasteful? (Credit: Kaiser Family Foundation)

While reform of the healthcare system is the author’s main recommendation they also suggest a stronger social safety net for those who lose their jobs due to changes in the economic system, the safety net must be of longer duration and include retraining for newer jobs. On the other hand they do not recommend simply raising taxes on the wealthy as a means of fixing income inequality nor do they endorse programs like the Universal Basic Income (UBI).

A dream of Socialists since the 19th century Universal Basic Income would make certain that no one falls into poverty despite lack of education, layoffs, sickness or any other circumstance. Conservatives counter that it simply promotes laziness. (Credit: The Nation)

Now, back in May of 2019 I reviewed the book ‘Dying of Whiteness’ by Jonathan M. Metzl, see my post of 5 May 2019, which covers much the same subject as’ Deaths of Despair’. Mr. Metzl however was a state health official while Professors Case and Deaton are among the world’s leading economists so there is a very different perspective in the two books, to my mind in a way that they compliment each other.

Jonathan M. Metzl and his book ‘Dying of Whiteness’ (Credit: Seminary Co-Op Bookstores)

So while I do highly recommend  ‘Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism’ I do so with the proviso that it is a very technical book written by scholars who are among the best in their profession. Those readers who really want to understand the complexities of our current situation, both economic and political will gain a great deal from it.

Two stories from Nature about the primary ways animals interact with each other, communication and sex.

Every individual from nearly every species of animal must from time to time interact with other members of its own species. The most important reason for such contacts is surely procreation but there are countless others such as safety in numbers, hunting in packs or even just agreeing upon separate territories so as to minimize the number of interactions. In all of these contacts there must be some form of communication in order to facilitate the outcome of the meeting.

The annual Red Crab migration on Christmas Island. Even usually solitary animals like these still have to interact with their fellows on occasion. (Credit: Parks Australia)

We humans of course have the best, most versatile form of communication, language but we know that the howling of monkeys, the songs of birds and the barking of dogs are simpler, courser forms of language. At the same time we wonder if some of nature’s other most intelligent species, dolphins or chimpanzees for example, may have languages approaching ours in complexity. Over the past fifty years or so there have been numerous studies to try to ‘talk with the animals’ as Doctor Doolittle would say.

Rex Harrison as the original, and still the best Doctor Dolittle. He taught the parrot to speak English and the parrot taught him to speak animal. (Credit: DiscDish)

Recently an experiment in communicating with humpback whales has been carried out by a group of researchers from the University of California at Davis, the Alaska Whale Foundation along with the SETI Institute. Humpbacks are well known to communicate with each other using long songs that seem to repeat themselves with slight variations and that can travel for thousands of kilometers in the ocean.

Researchers with UC Davis, the Alaska Whale Foundation and SETI succeeded in carrying on a ‘conversation’ with a wild Humpback Whale for 20 minutes. We’re not quite certain what the conversation was about but the whale seemed to enjoy it. (Credit: YouTube)

What the team did was to take a boat out to an area of the ocean where humpbacks were known to be and played a recording of a humpback song that was well established as a form of greeting. The humans then waited for a response from one of the whales. They didn’t have to wait for long as a humpback who had been given the name of Twain not only replied to the call but approached the boat and began circling it.

No, we haven’t gotten there just yet, but it sounds like an interesting book! (Credit: Amazon.com)

The researchers then began playing other recorded whale calls and each time Twain replied with a different call of his own. Now the scientists had only the vaguest idea of what their calls actually meant in the humpback language, let alone what Twain’s replies meant but they still managed to continue the ‘conversation’ for about twenty minutes.

Considering all the problems we have communicating with other humans it’s gonna take a while before we’re really talking to animals. (Credit: English Tips)

While a twenty-minute exchange of only half understood messages can hardly be considered a ‘communications breakthrough’ it is nevertheless data that can be analyzed by the mathematical principles known as information theory. And with each additional such encounter scientists will learn a little bit more about how to communicate with the other intelligent creatures that share our world with us.

The gorilla Koko became famous for being able to speak in sign language. Just how well she understood language is still controversial but she certainly represented a major step forward in animal communication. (Credit: The Franklin Institute)

Another interesting point about the study is the inclusion of the SETI or Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence Institute, an organization dedicated to seeking out intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, not here on Earth. However the people at SETI recognize that learning how to communicate, or even just being able to recognize an attempt at communication with non-human life here on Earth will help them to better find and contact alien intelligences. Slowly we humans are coming to understand the other intelligences here on Earth and one day soon we’ll be having real conversations with them.

The SETI institute is usually concerned with communicating with Extra-Terrestrials but they are also interested in communicating with non-human life forms here on Earth. (Credit: The Indian Express)

However, as I said above the most important reason living creatures have for interacting with members of their own species is mating, producing offspring to keep the species going, sex! Now we all know that the many different species here on Earth have quite a variety of different ways to have sex. Some species of fish for example gather in large numbers of both genders and then just release both their eggs and sperm into the water knowing that most of the eggs will get fertilized by somebody’s sperm. Many plants actually use an intermediary like a bee to carry their pollen from one flower to another so that fertilization can occur. The only set rule of mating is that, if it works it works.

When coral spawn they simply release their eggs and sperm into the water. Some of the eggs get fertilized, many don’t. It works for them however, they’ve been here at least half a billion years. (Credit: CoralGardening)

It was thought that all mammals basically had sex the same way we humans do. The male’s penis penetrates the female’s vagina where it releases the male’s sperm in order to fertilize the female’s egg. Certainly dogs, horses, whales and even egg laying mammals like the platypus do it that way.

It was thought that all mammals, even dolphins and whales, mated pretty much the same way that we humans do. The male penetrates the female leaving his sperm inside her to fertilize her eggs. (Credit: YouTube)

Now however a new study from the journal Current Biology has called that assumption into question for one large group of mammals, the bats, based upon videos taken in a church steeple in the Netherlands. The species of bat in the study is known as serotine bats who are native to a wide area of both Europe and Asia. Since bats are nocturnal and often live in hard to access places not a great deal is known about their mating habits in general and the serotine bats in particular were considered mysterious. You see the penis of the male serotine bat was simply too large to fit inside the female’s vagina!

Unlike mammals, when most species of birds mate there is no penetration by the male. Instead he simply spits his sperm at her vagina and enough of it gets in to cause fertilization. (Credit: Shutterstock)

So researchers, led by Dr. Nicholas Fasel filmed hundreds of hours of the bats in the steeple of an Old Dutch church where they succeeded in catching several instances of the bats mating. What they found was that serotine bats mate by simply touching their genitals together in a manner similar to the way most species of birds mate, not mammals. This finding raises the question of whether other bats have sex the same way, quite a few species are known to have oddly shaped if not oversized penises.

In Serotine bats the male’s penis is fully seven times larger than the female’s vagina making what we consider normal copulation difficult if not impossible. The recent study has concluded that Serotine bats copulate in the same fashion as bird’s do. (Credit: Daily Mail)

So if serotine bats mate by just touching their genitals then why do the males have such large penises? Well, Dr. Fasel points out that the female serotine bat has evolved a flap of their leathery wing as a covering for their vagina in order to prevent an unwanted male from being able to mate with them. He theorizes that perhaps the male has evolved his large penis as a means of pushing that flap out of the way. In other words we may be witnessing a literal battle of the sexes in evolution.

The Battle of the sexes is even a standard problem in Game Theory. The best solution is to do something together. (Credit: Springer Link)

All of which shows that when it comes to interactions between members of the same species nature keeps coming up with odd and interesting ways of doing things.

Arno A. Penzias, co-discoverer of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the first evidence for the Big Bang has died at the age of 90.

Most people I suppose have never heard of Arno A. Penzias, but everyone has heard of the Big Bang Theory, the idea that about 14 billion years ago, give or take a couple hundred million, the entire Universe underwent an unimaginable explosion and the expansion caused by that explosion continues today. Well it was Doctor Penzias, along with his colleague Robert W. Wilson who provided the first actual evidence that the Big Bang really happened.

Robert W. Wilson, left, and Arno Penzias, Bell Lab employees who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics, are shown standing in front of their microwave antenna at Bell Labs in Holmdel, N.J., Oct. 17, 1978. (AP Photo)

The story of Doctor Penzias contains within it several of the themes that often occur in both science and human history at large. Arno Penzias was born in 1933 in Munich, Germany to Jewish parents. If you can imagine a worse place and time for a Jewish boy to enter the world, well I can’t. Arno was lucky however for he and his brother were part of a British program that brought 10,000 Jewish children out of Nazi Germany just before World War 2 began. Later Arno’s parents also succeeded in escaping Germany and the whole family arrived in America in 1940. Arno was therefore one of the very large number of talented scientists who came to America and who made their discoveries here after fleeing Nazi tyranny.

From Left, Neils Bohr, James Franck, Albert Einstein and Isidor Rabi. Four Nobel Physicists who came to America to escape persecution in Europe. Actually Rabi’s parents fled to America, he was born here but you get the idea! (Credit: Arkiv.org)

Interested in science from an early age Arno first intended to become a chemist but switched majors to Physics while attending the City College of New York. Arno would eventually receive his Ph.D. in 1962. Even before becoming a Doctor however, in 1961 Arno accepted a job on the project that would lead to his greatest discovery.

After WW2 the GI Bill and a booming economy allowed a huge increase in the number of young Americans who attended college. (Credit: Old Magazine Articles)

In the early 1960s Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey was one of the centers for ‘space age’ technology. The transistor had been invented there, as had the Laser. Communications satellites were the next big thing and indeed Telstar; the first communications satellite was built at Bell Labs. The engineers who were designing Telstar needed to know, once their satellite was up in orbit, what kind of radio sources there were in the Universe at large that could cause static interference with Telstar.

Bell Labs in Holmdel N.J. circa 1060 when Arno Penzias would have started working there. (Credit: Reddit)

That was the job that Arno Penzias and his colleague Robert Wilson were assigned, survey the entire sky at microwave frequencies and catalogue all of the radio sources that could cause problems for communications satellites. To accomplish their task Penzias and Wilson used the brand new Holmdel Horn antenna, especially designed for communicating with satellites and at the time one of the largest radio antennas on Earth. With such a powerful instrument in their hands the two physicists were determined to not just survey and catalogue radio sources, but to study them as well.

In the early days of Radio Astronomy measurements were used to develop contour maps of radio sources like this one of the center of the Milky Way. (Credit: ResearchGate)

As the two men carried out their survey they quickly ran up against an annoying, so they thought, little problem. No matter where they pointed their antenna, no matter when, there was always a persistent background hiss that they couldn’t get rid of. The hiss didn’t come from any source, it was everywhere, so they initially thought it had to be man made noise from something nearby. Working methodically the two men eliminated radar from nearby airports as the cause, noise from many sources coming from nearby New York City even the possibility of radiation from nuclear tests. One of their efforts to eliminate the noise has become something of a anecdote in physics departments. Noticing that several pigeons were nesting inside the big horn antenna they wondered if the bird’s droppings could be the cause of the hiss so they gave the entire horn a through clean out. No good, the noise remained.

In our modern world there are all sorts of things, both natural and man-made, that can generate radio noise that will interfere with communications. (Credit: IQS Directory)

Looking through the literature for some idea as to what could be going on they came across a paper written by physicists George Gamow and Ralph Alpher about how the Big Bang, if it had actually happened, should have left behind a measurable amount of heat, the way a frying pan on your stove stays warm for a while after you turn off the burner. After billions of years Gamow and Alpher calculated that residual heat would now be observable in the microwave region, just where Penzias and Wilson’s hiss was. (For more information on George Gamow and the prediction of the CMB see my post of 30 October 2021.)

The first prediction of a Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in the November 1948 issue of the journal Nature. (Credit: TheCuriousAstronomer)

Since Gamow and Alpher were teaching in Colorado and Texas respectively Penzias and Wilson decided to contact physicist Robert Dicke at nearby Princeton University. In another of those coincidences that no one could ever imagine Dicke and his students were actually planning on looking for the CMB and were gathering up the equipment they’d need to look for it. As remembered by Nobel Prize winner James Peebles, a graduate student of Dicke’s at that time he was in his mentor’s office when the call came from Wilson. “We’ve been scooped!” Dicke said as he put down the phone.

From right, Robert Dicke, Jim Peebles along with physicist David Wilkinson in their lab at Princeton University. (Credit: Nobel Prize)

That was in 1964 and the news of the discovery of the CMB spread quickly turning the subject of cosmology from a few people working on a few ideas to a major study on which thousands of researchers around the world are working. Penzias and Wilson were awarded with the 1978 Nobel Prize for their discovery. The moral of this story is to keep alert, if some unknown factor is effecting your measurements don’t just ignore it, find out what it is. Like Rontgen and the discovery of X-rays, sometimes that unknown factor is more important than the thing you started out trying to study. In both cases the scientists became famous for discovering something they never even planned on looking for.

Penzias and Wilson saw the CMB as a constant everywhere they looked but today’s measurements, from the Planck satellite, show a very small variation in the temperature. These variations form the seeds out of which today’s galaxies and stars would form. (Credit: New Scientist)

Arno A. Penzias died on the 22nd of January at an assisted living facility in San Francisco. His death was due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease. There were a huge number of major scientific discoveries made during the 20th Century; Arno A. Penzias’ discovery that ‘the Universe began, not with a whimper but with Bang’ may have been the biggest.