Science – Page 44 – Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler

Paleontology News for August 2018.

Paleontology is in a very real sense the study of origins, of beginnings. Paleontologists study the history of life in order to discover when and how different kinds of living creatures came into being. This month I’d like to discuss two such origin stories. In one case the discovery of the earliest known Pterosaur, those flying reptiles who shared the ancient Earth with the dinosaurs but first some new discoveries about the very beginnings of all the animals on Earth, including you and me!

Today pretty much everybody knows that more than a billion years ago the first living creatures here on Earth were tiny, microscopic single-celled organisms like bacteria and amoeba. Sometime in the distant past some of these single celled creatures learned to live together in groups like those in a sponge. In time, although still many millions of years ago, some of the cells began to perform one function, like digesting food while other cells performed other functions like motion or grabbing food.

Groups like this, where different cells concentrated on different functions to the mutual benefit of all the cells were the first multi-cellular organisms. It is from these creatures that all of the living things see every day have evolved.

The earliest fossils we have of multi-cellular life are collectively known as the Ediacaran Biota because they were first discovered in the Ediacara region of Australia. Since their first discovery Ediacaran fossils have been found throughout the world and have been dated to between 635 and 541 million years ago.

Because these creatures lived before the evolution of hard parts like bones or bark or shell they do not fossilize well and can be very difficult to study. In some cases paleontologists cannot even tell whether a specimen is a plant or an animal. The images below show several different types of Ediacaran creatures.

Dickinsonia costata from the Ediacaran Period (Credit: Alamy)

Spriggina a fossil from the Ediacaran Period (Credit: NetMassimo)

Tribrachidium heraldicum from the Ediacaran (Credit: Yale News)

A new study published in the journal ‘Paleontology’ seeks to clear away some of the mystery in the Ediacaran Biota and definitively identify the earliest known animal. The study, co-authored by Jennifer F. Hoyal Cuthill of Cambridge University and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, boy I wouldn’t want her commute between jobs, and Jian Han of the Shaanxi Key Laboratory of early life at Northwest University in Xi’an China has provided an evolutionary link between several species in the Ediacaran period to a later species of animal in the Cambrian period (540-485 Million years ago).

The animals in question certainly look more like plants; see artist’s impression below. Known collective as the Petalonamae because of their petal like branches only close examination of the anatomic details in the fossil remains show that the animals are in fact more highly evolved relatives of the sponges. The image below shows a fossil from the Ediacaran period on the right while the fossil that belongs to the Cambrian is on the left.

reconstruction of a Petalonamae(Credit: Jennifer H. Cuthill)

Ediacaran Fossil (r) compared to Cambrian descendent (l) (Credit: Jennifer H. Cuthill)

The results of the study by Doctors Cuthill and Han reveal some of the details of how the animal kingdom itself came into being. A rather important chapter in the history of life.

Another chapter in the history of life deals with those flying reptiles, the pterosaurs who filled the sky during the time of the dinosaurs. Now a new species has been identified in fossils unearthed in the state of Utah. At an estimated age of 210 million years old the new pterosaur is some 65 million years older than the previous oldest known flying reptile.

The new species has been named Caelestiventus hanseni by its discoverer Professor Brooks Britt of Brigham Young University. While the specimen was not yet fully grown it already had a wingspan of a meter and a half. The images below show first the almost perfectly preserved skull of C. hanseni and below that an artist’s impression of what the pterosaur might have looked like.

Skull of Caelestiventus hanseni (credit: Nate Edwards)

Caelestiventus hanseni (Credit: Michael Skrepnick)

Thanks to the work of dedicated researchers like Doctors Cuthill, Han and Professor Britt we are slowly, bit by bit filling in the missing pages to the story of life on Earth.

Theo Jansen and his Strandbeesten, is he an Artist or an Engineer, and Why can’t He be Both.

There’s always been a close connection between art and science. For example everyone is aware of the fact that Leonardo de Vinci was as interested in inventing things as he was in his paintings. Many well-known artists have also been architects designing magnificent buildings while many of the world’s great engineering feats; bridges, skyscrapers and the like are also considered works of art.

So it isn’t really all that surprising that Dutch artist Theo Jansen studied physics as a student at Delft University of Technology. Born in Scheveningen in the Netherlands on March 14th, 1948, Jansen was from his childhood interested in both science and art. The Image below is of Theo Jansen.

Jansen’s work has consisted of a large number of what are known as kinetic sculptures, literally sculptures that move. His first attempt came in 1979 when he built and flew a four-meter wide flying saucer made from PVC pipe and filled with helium. As you might guess the artwork was mistaken for the real thing by many people and caused quite a stir.

Then in the mid-80s Jansen developed a ‘Painting Machine’ which employed a photoelectric cell to turn ON or OFF a spray can of paint allowing the machine to paint the outlines of people as well as other objects.

Jansen’s chief fame however has come from his design and construction of what he calls Strandbeesten (Dutch for Beach Beasts) starting in the 1990s. Usually powered by the wind the Strandbeesten are large constructions that walk across the sand much like a living creature, indeed Jansen himself describes his creations as artificial life. The image below shows one of Jansen’s Strandbeesten.

One of Jansen’s Strandbeesten (Credit: Chicago Reader)

All of the Strandbeesten are constructed around a basic mechanism that converts the rotation of an axis into a walking motion of six or more legs using triangles and linkages made of sections of PVC. Although still made from simple materials like PVC, wood and fabric for the sails, Jansen’s creatures have evolved a great deal over the last twenty-five years. Some are now able to actually detect the ocean water when they step in it and alter their course to avoid going in any deeper! Another version can detect a storm approaching and anchor themselves to the ground to prevent any wind damage.

A More massive Strandbeesten (Credit: ArtFutura)

A Snake like Strandbeesten (Credit: Domus)

In the future Jansen hopes to design and construct entire herds of Strandbeesten to wander the Dutch coastline. Also NASA is considering using Jansen’s basic motion mechanism in a design for a possible Venus lander. The environmental conditions on Venus are so harsh that conventional motors and wheels won’t work so Jansen’s approach might be a possible alternative.

I’ve included several images of Jansen’s creations in this post but to fully appreciate the Strandbeesten you must see them in motion. The links below will take you to some youtube videos that show better than I can ever say in words just how weirdly wonderful they are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsqlnGMzMD4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On8v-Wr3XxU

Theo Jansen is just another example of how art and science can not only compliment each other but actually merge together to form some of humanity’s most beautiful creations.

Space News for August 2018.

The future of manned space flight takes center stage this month. There’s some good news, some bad news and a big announcement so let’s get to it!

Starting with the good news a major new survey has been published in the journal ‘Genes’ discussing the research and advances in biotechnology that could help us grow food on Mars. Obviously such technology will be absolutely necessary for any long term human base on the red planet, let alone a settlement.

Authored by the Australian scientists Briardo Llorente, Thomas C. Williams and Hugh D. Goold the survey article is entitled ‘The Multiplanetary Future of Synthetic Biology’. The article begins by reviewing the difficulties that we know will be encountered when we try to grow food on Mars. Chief among these will be the fact that the surface of Mars receives only 43% as much sunlight as does the Earth because of the red planet being about 75 million kilometers further from the Sun.

The authors point out however that in general the plants of Earth only absorb about half of the light that falls upon them, in fact plants reflect almost all green light, that’s why they look green! Genetic modification of Earth plants to enhance the process of photosynthesis is a real possibility with our growing knowledge of the chemistry of chlorophyll (see my Post of 23June2018).

At the same time any plants we attempt to grow on Mars will have to be ‘designed’ to survive and grow in an environment extremely hostile to most life on Earth. Some of the hostile factors that plants on Mars will have to endure include extreme cold and long periods of drought. However there are already plants here on Earth that have adapted to such conditions and genetic studies of those plants should provide clues to help genetically engineer other plants to adapt to them as well. The image below illustrates some of the genetic engineering of traits that will be needed to develop plants suitable for life on Mars.

Desired Plant characteristics to be Genetically engineered (Credit: Llorente, Williams, Goold)

Another study however puts something of a roadblock in the way of terraforming Mars by adapting plants to endure the conditions there. Now everybody knows that the process of photosynthesis requires two main ingredients, sunlight and carbon-dioxide. Well, we’ve already mentioned sunlight but a new study by Bruce Jakosky, professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Christopher S. Edwards, Assistant Professor at Northern Arizona University has concluded that Mars lacks sufficient CO2 to either promote plant growth on a large scale or to help raise the planet’s temperature by using the CO2 as a greenhouse gas. The image below shows an artist’s impression of what a terraformed Mars could look like compared to the Mars that we see today.

The study was funded by NASA and made use of all of the available data from the many spacecraft, both landers and orbiters that have been studying Mars over the last several decades. This implies that the results of the analysis conducted by Professors Jakosky and Edwards is based on the best knowledge humanity has so this study could be bad news for those planning on colonizing Mars.

Of course it has already been suggested that Mar’s deficiency in CO2 could be fixed by importing the gas from elsewhere in the Solar System. Comets are known to possess large amounts of CO2 as well as even more water, which Mars could certainly use as well.

Imagine the possibility of rerouting the orbit of a couple of comets so that they are captured into Mars orbit allowing their resources to be sent down to the planet’s surface. Sounds like the plot of a science fiction novel, ‘The Comet Cowboys!’

Finally today there was a big announcement today by NASA of the astronauts selected for the first four missions of the space agency’s Commercial Crew Program. These missions, with spacecraft designed and built by the private corporations Boeing and Space X will be the first time in seven years that astronauts will launch from American territory.

The initial, unmanned test missions for Space X’s dragon and Boeing’s Starliner capsules are scheduled for later this year while the first actual manned missions will take place early next year. These test missions will then be followed up with the first operational mission to the International Space Station (ISS) at a later date.

As I mentioned above the first test mission for each spacecraft will be unmanned, the crews for the second test mission are:

Space X’s Dragon: Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley

Boeing’s Starliner: Astronauts Eric Boe, Nicole Anapu Mann and Boeing Astronaut Chris Ferguson.

The crews for the first operational flight to the ISS are:

Space X’s Dragon: Astronauts Victor Glover and Mike Hopkins

Boeing’s Starliner: Astronauts Josh Cassada and Suni Williams

The image below shows the chosen astronauts with the Space X Dragon and Boeing Starliner Capsules in the background.

Astronauts selected for First Commercial crew Program Missions (Credit: Engadget)

For the latest information about the crews selected for the Commercial Crew Missions click on the link below to be taken to NASA’s official site!

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-astronauts-for-first-us-commercial-spaceflights-0

Scientists Create Fastest ever Man-Made Spinning and Vibrating Objects.

Most people are aware of the fact that in order to learn more about the Universe scientists are constantly striving to develop more precise, more sensitive measuring instruments. Now scientists at Purdue University have succeeded in constructing the world’s fastest man-made vibrating and rotating objects. Devices that could be turned into scientific instruments of unparalleled sophistication.

What Professors Tongcang Li and Jonghoon Ahn of Purdue’s Department of Physics and Astronomy along with the Birck Nanotechnology Center have done is to fabricate silica particles in a dumbbell shape as small as 170 nm in length (that’s less than one fifth of a millionth of a meter). These particles are then levitated in a vacuum chamber by means of a 500 mW laser. Think of how light these particles must be if they can be held up by half a watt of light! The images below, taken with an Scanning Electron Microscope or SEM, show several of the silica particles.

Silica Nano-Particles (Credit: Li and Ahn, Purdue University)

Now, laser light is a part of the electromagnetic spectrum and therefore contains electric and magnetic field components which oscillate at the frequency of the light. These oscillations can take two forms known as polarizations, the first is called linear polarization, see animation below, because the electric and magnetic field components go up and down, or back and forth on a line.

Linear Polarization (Credit: Edmund Optics)

The second form of polarization is called circular polarization because the field components rotate around in a circular motion. See figure below. The circular motion can be either clockwise (Also called left handed) or counter-clockwise (right handed).

Circular Polarization (Credit: Wikipedia)

The effect of these two kinds of polarization on the silica dumbbells is quite different. Linear polarization causes the dumbbells to begin to vibrate along the line of polarization while circular polarization causes the dumbbells to rotate. With the technology that they have developed the researchers at Purdue have surpassed one billion vibration or rotations every second. The image below shows Professors Li and Ahn at work in their Lab.

Professors Li and Ahn in their Lab (Credit: Purdue University)

Impressive as those results are, how does that make these silica nano-dumbbells more sensitive, more precise scientific instruments? Well the dumbbells themselves held up by the laser are functionally identical to an instrument know as a torsion balance that was invented by Henry Cavendish to measure the value of Newton’s gravitational constant. The scientists at Purdue hope that their version of Cavendish’s instrument will be capable of measuring gravity at the atomic level giving physicists clues into the nature of quantum gravity!

Also, the rotating particles could be used to study the nature of the quantum vacuum through an effect known as vacuum friction. If you’re thinking that there’s nothing in a vacuum to generate friction you have to remember that we’re talking about the quantum world here. According to Quantum Field Theory virtual particles pop into and out of existence continually and these can interact with the rotating dumbbell causing friction. Vacuum fiction was predicted decades ago but has still never been directly observed, hopefully Purdue’s rotating particles will soon give us a better window into the reality of the quantum field.

Experimental measurements are the way we actually know things, theories on the other hand are the connections between our measurements. The more precisely we can measure things, the more different ways we have to measure things the more we know. It’s as simple as that.

Nobel Physicist Burton Richter, Discoverer of the J/ψ Particle, Dead at the Age of 87.

Experimental Physicist, Director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and 1976 Nobel Laureate Burton Richter passed away on July 18 2018 at the age of 87. Best known for his work in establishing SLAC as one of the premier scientific institutions in the world Dr. Richter was one of the founding fathers of the ‘Standard Model’ of particle physics due to his discovery at SLAC of the J/ψ Particle in 1974.

Burton Richter (1931-2018) (Credit: AZ Quotes)

I was fortunate enough to meet Dr. Richter twice in my life. The first time was as an undergraduate student at Drexel University when Dr. Richter came to give a seminar. The second time was at SLAC itself when I visited there in order to consult with two of SLAC’s engineers on a program for which I was engineering manager. I can still remember the first time I drove down Interstate 280 from San Francisco over the 3.2 kilometer long building that holds the Linear Accelerator at SLAC, see images below.

SLAC as you see it driving along I280 near Palo Alto, Ca. (Credit: Terra Galleria)

The Linear Accelerator at SLAC (Credit: Flickr)

In order to understand the significance of Dr. Richter’s discovery of the J/ψ Particle in 1974 I’ll have to back up a bit and discuss the Quark theory of the 60s. Throughout the 1950s and early 60s a new generation of atom smashers were discovering a myriad of new particles in addition to the familiar Proton, Neutron and Electron. Some of these particles had masses midway between the electron and the proton/neutron and were called mesons of which the π-mesons (now just called pions) and K-mesons (Kaons) are examples. Other particles were even heavier than the proton/neutron such as the Δ and Σ (Delta and Sigma) particles.

This particle zoo confused everybody and the theorists went to work trying to find a simple scheme to make sense of it all. It was theoretician Murray Gell Mann who figured it all out. Dr. Gell Mann predicted the existence of three new particles which he called quarks, the Up, Down and Strange quarks.

The middle mass mesons, Gell Mann proposed, were composed of a quark-antiquark pair while the heavier particles were composed of three quarks. For example the proton is composed of two ups and a down while the neutron is composed of two downs and an up. The still heavier particles had one or even two strange quarks in them which would eventually decay turning their particle into either a proton or neutron.

The strange quarks were well named. There was no real theoretical reason why it should decay at all or why it should only decay into up quarks, never the down quark. Throughout the 1960s Quark theory seemed a little too strange for most physicists.

The first experimental evidence for quarks came in 1969 when Burton Richter and his team used the linear accelerator to fire electrons off of protons in what is known as ‘deep inelastic scattering’. The results of these experiments indicated that protons were in fact made up of smaller ‘chunks’ and probably three of them.

Then in 1973 theoreticians suggested that if there was a fourth quark, given the name ‘Charm’, it would suppress the strange quarks ability to decay into a down quark, matching observations. So the hunt was on!

Quarks have a peculiar property however, they are never found alone. You can find a quark-antiquark pair or three quarks together but never one all by itself. Therefore the easiest way to find a charm quark would be to find a charm-anticharm meson.

It turned out to be a tie. Dr. Richter and his team found their ψ particle on almost the same day as Samuel Ting and his team at Brookhaven National Laboratory found their J particle. It was quickly recognized that the two particles were both the charm-anticharm meson and because the two teams had discovered them simultaneously it become known as the J/ψ meson. A fourth quark had been discovered and Burton Richter and Samuel Ting shared the 1976 Nobel Prize for their work.

Samuel Ting and his team To Brookhaven National Laboratory (Credit: BNL)

Discovery Peak in Energy for the J/ψ Particle (Credit: Wikipedia)

In the years since the discovery of the charm quark two more quarks have been found, bottom and top and physicists have learned that quarks come in pairs, up and down, strange and charm, bottom and top. These pairs are known as generations and whether there are any more generations, or just why exactly there should be generations is still unknown.

The breakthroughs that Burton Richter achieved are now a large part of the standard model of how the Universe works at its most basic, elementary level. Not a bad way to have spent one’s life.

Charles Messier’s Catalog, What it is and How it gives us a Quick Survey of What Sort of Objects make up this Universe of Ours. Part 2 of 2.

(Note: This blog post is the second of two posts because the subject of the objects in Messier’s catalog turned out to require a wide ranging and lengthy discussion. This is Part 2; Part 1 was published on 21 July 2018.)

In my last post I mentioned how a good night of star gazing had inspired me to write about the French astronomer Charles Messier and his catalog of 110 fuzzy objects that you can see in the night sky with binoculars or a small telescope. I mentioned how these fuzzy objects, and others like them, are now the subjects of intense study by astronomers.

I mentioned further how the Messier objects can be broadly divided into six types before I began discussing at some length three of those types, Open Star Clusters, Globular Star Clusters and Gaseous Nebula. In this post I will complete my survey by describing the remaining three types, Planetary Nebula, Supernova Remnants and finally Galaxies.

Planetary Nebula (M57 the Ring Nebula): The best known planetary nebula is the famous Ring Nebula, M57 in the constellation of Lyra. See image below. To find the Ring Nebula first find the brilliant star Vega, the third brightest star visible in the northern hemisphere and the brightest star in Lyra. The second brightest star in Lyra (β Lyra) is about a fist’s distance to the south of Vega and the Ring Nebula is near β Lyra. Be warned however, the ring nebula can be quite difficult to spot, which of course is another way of saying I often have difficulty finding it.

Ring Nebula, M57 as Photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope (Credit: NASA)

Planetary nebulas are so named because about two hundred years ago the French Mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace hypothesized that planetary systems, like our own Solar System, formed from a disk of material around a new star. (See my blog Post of 5July2018)

Several of the objects in Charles Messier’s catalog seemed to resemble the disks of material Laplace talked about and so they were christened ‘Planetary Nebula’. Unfortunately we now know that planetary nebula are actually dying stars, stars who have used up all of their initial hydrogen fuel and who have begun burning helium. At this stage in a star’s life it puffs up to many times its previous size and begins expelling much of its outer material. It is this expelled material that forms the disk observed as the planetary nebula.

About five or six billion years from now our own Sun will become an object very much like the Ring Nebula. It will, over the course of several hundred million years expel about half of its mass back into interstellar space leaving behind only an intensely hot but nevertheless dead core known as a white dwarf star.

Supernova Remnants (M1 The Crab Nebula): To find the Crab Nebula you need to find the horns of Taurus the bull. The Crab Nebula sits between the points of the two horns, closer to and below the horn on the left. Again the Crab Nebula is not easy to spot but you can find many images of it on the web, such as the one below.

Crab Nebula as Photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope (Credit: NASA)

Not all stars die as slowly and quietly as did the star that formed the Ring Nebula. Large, heavy stars that are more than five times the mass of our own Sun are fated to end their lives as Supernovas, massive explosions that can briefly increase a star’s brilliance hundreds of billions of times. The material flung outward by the force of the supernova will become a type of nebula known as a supernova remnant.

The famous Crab Nebula in the constellation of Taurus is one of these. The supernova that gave birth to the Crab Nebula was actually observed and recorded by Chinese astronomers way back in the year 1054 C.E. Today we know that what remains of the actual star that went nova is an incredibly dense neutron star, spinning on its axis thousands of time a second spewing out radio waves in pulses making it an object known as a Pulsar. If you’d like to hear the actual radio emissions from the pulsar at the heart of the Crab nebula click on the link below to be taken to Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory’s web page of pulsar transmissions. (The Crab Nebula is the sixth one down but Pulsar Number 1 is actually a better one to listen to!)

http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/pulsar/Education/Sounds/

Galaxies (M31: The Andromeda Galaxy): So far all of the objects in Messier’s catalog that I’ve described have been members of our own galactic neighborhood. The final type of Messier objects are other galaxies of which the most famous is the Andromeda Galaxy. Andromeda is a naked eye visible object; indeed at some two million light years distance it is the farthest object that can be seen with the naked eye. The image below shows what Andromeda looks like through a powerful telescope.

To see the Galaxy without binoculars or a telescope however you’re going to have to find REALLY dark skies because it is just a very faint smudge of light. The Galaxy itself is just off of the knee of the constellation Andromeda.

If you do succeed in finding the Andromeda Galaxy it is worth considering that that small smudge contains thousands of each of the other types of objects we’ve been talking about. It was of course the astronomer Carl Hubble who first measured the distance to Andromeda proving that it is indeed another galaxy every bit as large as our own Milky Way. By the way, the word galaxy is just Greek for Milky Way.

As I mentioned in the first part of this post, much of what we now know about the Universe comes from studying all of these objects that Charles Messier cataloged so that he wouldn’t mistake them for the comets he was searching for.

I was inspired to write this article by a very good night of stargazing during which I managed to find and spend some time studying seven of Messier’s objects. It turned out that I also managed to spot the International Space Station as it flew over New Jersey, and it was followed the Cygnus unmanned resupply module as well so I got a good look at both of them!

I’ve seen the space station dozens of times now along with NASA’s space shuttle and the Soyuz space capsule. The station itself is easy to find if you know when and where in the sky it will appear for your particular location.

Hey, ya know, that might be a good idea for another post!

Charles Messier’s Catalog, What it is and How it gives us a Quick Survey of What Sort of Objects make up this Universe of Ours. Part 1 of 2.

(Note: This blog post turned out to be more than twice as long as my usual posts so I’ve split it into two. This is Part 1 and Part 2 will follow immediately.)

We’ve had some really clear skies here in Philadelphia the last few nights, just perfect for stargazing. Two nights ago I spent a good hour observing the four planets that are visible during the evening right now, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. However last night I wanted to see some deep space objects. Star clusters, Nebula and Galaxies.

Problem is that the light pollution inside the city is so intense that you simply can’t see anything that faint. Oh, the planets and a few of the brighter stars are easy enough to see if you can just get away from the streetlights but the fainter, more interesting objects, well just forget it.

Typical Light Pollution in a City (Credit: Tes)

So I drove over to New Jersey, halfway to the ocean in fact, to a spot I know of where I can get some ‘Dark Sky’. After letting my eyes adjust I could see thousands of stars along with the Milky Way. Taking out my binoculars I spent the next hour observing seven of the objects from Charles Messier’s catalog.

What’s Messier’s catalog you ask? Well, let me tell you.

Born in 1730 Charles Messier was the son of a minor member of the French Court. Inspired by a very spectacular ‘seven tailed’ comet in 1744 Charles got a job working at the French Naval Observatory, in those days astronomy was very important in navigating around the globe. The image below is of Charles Messier.

Charles Messier (Painting by Nicolas Ansiaume 1729-1786)

At that time the cutting edge of astronomical research was comets. Using Newton’s law of gravity Edmund Halley had predicted in 1705 that the comet now named for him would return in 1758 and when it did all of Europe went comet crazy. During his lifetime Charles Messier is credited with the discovery of thirteen comets.

As Messier spent night after night searching for comets he often came across fuzzy, comet-like objects that didn’t move against the fixed stars as a comet would. Remember, comets may have very long, stretched orbits around the Sun, but they still orbit the Sun, they still move against the background of fixed stars. Anyway, rather than being constantly sidetracked by these comet-like objects Messier began to compile a catalog of them so that he, and other astronomers could ignore them.

Messier published the ‘final’ version of this list in 1784 with 103 objects cataloged. After Messier’s death in 1817 however researchers going through his notes found that he had discovered another seven objects so astronomers now recognize 110 objects as Messier objects.

Funny thing is, Messier complied his catalog so that he wouldn’t be distracted from his comet search by them. Today however astronomers are far, far more interested in the Messier objects than they are by comets. Messier objects come in six main types; open star clusters, globular cluster, gaseous nebula, planetary nebula, supernova remnants and finally galaxies. I’ll discuss each type using a well known example from Messier’s catalog.

Open Star Clusters (M45 the Pleiades): The easiest Messier object to find is the cluster of stars known as the Pleiades or ‘Seven Sisters’ that form a very small dipper on the back of Taurus the Bull. Although six or seven stars are visible with the naked eye binoculars will show over twenty and a good telescope reveal more than a hundred. The image below shows the Pleiades with the seven sisters named but you can easily see that there are many other stars in the group as well.

We now know that an Open Star Cluster is what happens when a gas cloud that has given birth to several hundred or even a thousand stars is dissipated by the energy being given off by those young stars. If the gas cloud is the stellar nursery then the open cluster is the star’s kindergarten. For several million years the stars in a cluster will travel together around the milky way but in time the gravitational pulls of the rest of the galaxy causes the stars apart to drift apart. So open clusters only last for a short period of time. Four and a half billion years ago our Sun must have been in an open cluster but the Sun’s brethren are now long gone.

Globular Clusters (M4, Globular Cluster near the star Antares): M4 may not be the biggest Globular Cluster but I’ve always considered it to be the easiest to find because it is so near Antares, the bright red heart of the constellation Scorpio. The name Antares means the rival of Mars and because of the star’s position near the plane of the ecliptic the planet and star do sometimes come close enough to rival each other. Once you find Antares look with binoculars just a short distance to the left and you’ll see a very pale, faint cotton ball. That is the globular cluster M4. See image below.

Globular Cluster M4 (Credit: European Southern Observatory ESO)

Globular Clusters are quite mysterious and very ancient. Containing hundreds of thousands or more than a million stars globular clusters last for billions of years. In fact it appears that many of the globulars in and around the Milky Way are actually older than the Galaxy is. Some astro-physicists speculate that globular clusters are the building blocks that form galaxies but in that case, how do globular clusters form?

Gaseous Nebula (M42, The Orion Nebula): We now know that gaseous nebula are in fact the gas clouds where stars are formed. The Hubble and other space telescopes looking into gaseous nebula in the infrared spectral region have now learned much about how stars form in such gas clouds. The Orion Nebula is a very easy example of a gaseous nebula to spot because I think the constellation of Orion is one of the easiest to spot. Once you’re found Orion look for the three stars of his belt. The Orion Nebula is just a short distance below the middle star of the belt. See image below.

I’m going to end for today right here. I’ll discuss the last three types of Messier objects in Part 2 of this post coming soon.

Space News for July 2018; Space X and Boeing Prepare for Unmanned missions for their Commercial Crew Capsules!

The big news this week is the arrival at Cape Kennedy of the first “spaceworthy” crewed version of Space X’s Dragon Capsule, see image below. This arrival is in preparation an unmanned test launch to be conducted later this year.

Space X Manned Version of their Dragon Capsule (Credit: Space X)

Know as Demonstration Module 1 (DM-1), the capsule had just finished two weeks of environmental tested at NASA’s Plum Brooke Station in Ohio. Here the DM-1 was placed in the facilities huge vacuum chamber and exposed to all of the hazards of a trip in Earth Orbit. In addition to a vacuum the chamber can also subject whatever equipment is being tested to either the intense, unfiltered sunlight or the absolute darkness of space, the extremes of heat and cold.

These tests were all conducted to verify that the DM-1 capsule is ready to take human beings into space as a part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program which will take astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). The fact that these tests were successfully completed in only two weeks is a good sign that the DM-1 is ready for its test mission later this year. The image below shows an unmanned Dragon supply capsule taking off on its way to the ISS, a preview of the forth coming DM-1 mission.

Launch of an Unmanned Space X Dragon Capsule (Credit: Space X)

While this first test mission will be unmanned it will still conduct a full mission profile, rendezvousing with the ISS and ending with a re-entry and splashdown, just as a manned mission would. The mission is currently slated to begin on August 31st 2018 but NASA has indicated several times that the launch date will probably be pushed back until sometime in the fourth quarter of the year with the first actual manned launch sometime in the first half of 2019.

Meanwhile Space X’s competitor Boeing is also making considerable progress in preparing their proposed manned capsule the Starliner, see image below. The Starliner’s initial, unmanned test flight is also still scheduled for August but it is also likely to be pushed back into the fourth quarter of the year.

Boeing Starliner Capsule (Credit: Boeing)

Part of the reason for the slippage is the already heavy schedule of launches at Cape Kennedy along with the already scheduled crew transfer and resupply missions to the ISS. Hopefully NASA will work out the scheduling conflicts while both Space X and Boeing finish preparing their capsules. NASA’s is soon going to run out of purchased tickets on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft so by next year the US will have no other way of getting into space.

There was also a second story this week which has a certain, it’s about time quality to it. The United Kingdom has just decided on the location of their spaceflight launch facility. Sixty years into the space age and Britain, one of the world’s most advanced nations, a leader in space technology has only now decided from where to launch its satellites.

There are a couple of very good reasons as to why the UK waited so long before getting into the satellite launch business. Britain is a small, densely populated country with little room from which to safely launch big rockets. Also most launch facilities, like Cape Kennedy and the European Space Agency’s launch site in Guyana, are close to the equator where the spin of the Earth can actually give a 1500 KPH start to any launch.

In recent years however, miniaturized satellites launched into polar orbits have become a sizeable slice of the space industry market and the UK wants to grab a piece of that pie. The chosen location of Sutherland on the A’Mhoine peninsula on Scotland’s north coast will allow rockets to be fired due north. This would place the satellite into an orbit that will allow the Earth to rotate beneath it so that eventually the entire planet can be observed by the satellite’s sensors. See the map below.

Sutherland County Scotland (Credit: Wikishire)

The UK Space Agency will build the launch facility with the help of the American firm Lockheed-Martin and hopes that the first launches will take place sometime in the early 2020s.

Paleontology News for July 2018

Since my last post (11July18) was a review of the new dinosaur movie Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom I thought this might be a good time to discuss several items of interest in the field of paleontology. Since T-rex is one of the heroes of the Jurassic Park franchise, well at least to me, I’ll start with a recent discover about them.

The word dinosaur itself means ‘terrible lizard’ and the first scientists who studied their fossil bones did actually think of them as simply enormous lizards. Over the last two hundred years we’ve learned a great deal about just how different dinosaurs are from other types of reptiles and now a new study takes us another step further by examining dinosaur’s tongues.

Most representations of dinosaurs, including those in Jurassic Park, show dinosaurs as having tongues similar to those of lizards, long, only attached at the back and therefore able to stick out, pretty much the way ours do, see image below.

Old View of the Dinosaur Tongue (Credit: Spencer Wright)

According to Julia Clarke, professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study however dinosaurs probably had a tongue more like those of the crocodiles and alligators. A tongue that was firmly attached to the bottom of the mouth along its entire length and one would be completely unable to stick outside of the mouth, see image below.

Dinosaur Tongue were actually more like those of a Crocodile (Credit: Shutterstock)

Since the soft parts of dinosaurs, such as tongues rarely survive the study based the study’s conclusions are based on an examination of the bones in the mouths of dinosaurs, in particular the hyoid bones that anchor and support the tongue. What the researchers found was that the short hyoid bones of dinosaurs more closely resembled the hyoid bones of the crocodilians rather than the hyoid bones of the lizards. So it turns out that we may have still been incorrectly thinking of dinosaurs as just big lizards.

One of the best known types of dinosaurs are the huge sauropods, the long necked, long tailed behemoths who were without doubt the largest animals ever to walk on Earth. Our modern whales may be as large but of course they swim in the ocean. See image of a brachiosaurus below.

The Brachiosaurus (Credit: Todd Marshall)

Now paleontologists working in Argentina have unearthed what they consider to be earliest known member of the sauropod group, and animal that they have named Ingentia prima. As might be expected for a very early member of a group I. prima looks a good bit different, see image below.

The Early Sauropod Igentia prima (Credit: The New York Times)

Comparing I. Prima to the brachiosaurus it’s easy to see that I. prima’s neck is a good bit shorter and while the legs of the brachiosaurus strongly resemble those of an elephant the legs of I. prima look more like those of theropod dinosaurs. To me the rear legs look a bit like the legs of T-rex.

I. prima lived during the Triassic period, about 215 million years ago, not long after the very first recognizable dinosaur evolved. While smaller than its later descents at an estimated ten tons and nearly ten meters in length I. prima was probably the biggest creature in the world at that time.

Paleontologists have long known that the huge sauropods evolved from much smaller, two legged dinosaurs and I. prima still shows some evidence of that two legged past. Researchers hope that further study of I. prima’s bones will give them further insight into how the sauropod group of dinosaurs evolved.

These studies are just two more examples of how, piece by piece, paleontologists are filling in the gaps in our knowledge of the history of life on Earth.

What is causing the Massive Die off of Bats in the Eastern United States?

For many years, one of my favourite things to do on a summer’s evening was to watch for the bat’s to come out about a half an hour after the Sun went down. To be honest I usually combined this with some backyard stargazing, but still the bats were certainly fun to watch. One of the most interesting parts was the timing, the bats always appeared just a few minutes after the last bird flew to its roost, never before, and never more than ten minutes after.

Over the last few years however my nocturnal flying friends have disappeared, along with millions of other bats throughout eastern North America and the cause has been identified as an epidemic of the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans, commonly know as White Nose Syndrome. The first image below shows a Little Brown Bat, Myotis lucifugus, that has been infected by white nose syndrome while the second shows the fungus itself.

Bat Infected with White Nose Syndrome (Credit: Marvin Moriarty / USFWS)

Fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Credit: Gudrun Wibbelt et al)

Now P. destructans causes harm to bats in several different ways. The most obvious symptom is the fungal growth and lesions around the mouth and on the wings which inhibit the bat’s ability to eat and fly. The fungus is also known to infect the lungs causing respiratory distress.

However it is actually thought that White Nose Syndrome does its greatest harm by interfering with a bat’s winter hibernation. You see during hibernation bats, and other mammals as well, lower their body temperature in order to stretch body fat reserves throughout the winter. The fungus however prevents the bats from entering the torpor stage of hibernation, where the body temperature goes lower, and therefore the animals literally starve to death while trying to hibernate.

P. destructans was first spotted in a cave in New York state back in 2006 and has since spread to 33 states in the U.S. along with 5 provinces of Canada. The effect of the disease has been devastating with a decline of more than 90% in the bat population of caves where the fungus has been for over four years. By 2012, that’s six years ago now, 5-7 million bats are thought to have perished! The image below shows that areas of North American where White Nose Syndrome has been identified.

Present Extent of White Nose Syndrome in North America (Credit: Enwebb)

So where did White Nose Syndrome come from, how did it get here? The answer is simple, Europe. The fungus P. destructans has been known to infect European bats for decades but it seems that the European bats have acquired at least a partial immunity to the disease. It looks as if this is yet another example of a disease whose original population has evolved to survive, leaping into a related population with no immunity and causing a devastating epidemic. Well know examples of this phenomenon are smallpox among the Native Americans and Measles among the Hawaiian Islanders. And I’m afraid that once again Human Beings are probably the transmitters of the disease because it appears that people who like to explore caves, known as spelunking, can get the fungus on their clothing, which can then be passed to other caves they visit, even caves on different continents.

Spelunking, people having fun in a Cave (Credit: Phys.Org)

Now I know some of you are saying, who cares about bats? They’re icky anyway! Well remember that bats eat insects, a lot of insects and without bats we’re going to have a lot more destructive, disease carrying insects around! In fact the Forest Service estimates that 1.1 million kilograms of insects will go uneaten. That’s a lot of bugs eating our crops and spreading germs that infect people!

At the moment there is no known way of fighting White Nose Syndrome. There is research underway but only a little. There’s not a lot of funding to combat bat diseases. So, barring a providential discovery we can only hope that, like their European cousins, American bats will acquire the immunity to survive White Nose Syndrome.