(un)Happy Valentines day in space

Its the 14th of February, or at least thats what the calendar on the wall says, you have been out in deep space heading towards that new colony for so long each day pretty much blurs in to the next. Despite how cold it is outside (and believe me its cold), today is a day to get out the candles, throw a fresh table cloth over the zero g dinning table, open a fresh bottle of onboard engine fermented merlot and splash out on some really rare food cubes (the macaroni and cheese all but ran out several years ago appart from one pack you have been hoarding for a special occasion). Its valentines day and time for romance!

After your romantic meal and your partner retire for a little zero g love making with the hope of producing a little zero g baby to continue the mission (and the human race) onwards towards Earth 2.0 (Earth 1.0 being sadly decimated by giant zombie mutant howler monkeys… dont ask). However according to a new report by NASA scientists making your little bundle of joy is a bit of a longshot. The problem is that space is full of high energy protons which have respect for neither the hulls of spaceships nor human DNA. A study conducted by Dr Straume of the NASA Ames center and his team, seems to conclude that chances are that any fetus conceived in space would be irrevocably damaged by this radiation. Men dont get off any better with decreased sperm counts and generally decreased fertility.

In fact the team conclude that with todays ships, they wouldn’t rate a pregnancies chance of coming to term on a trip to Mars never mind a multi generation journey to the nearest habitable planet. The problem is that radiation like that given off by the sun and found in space can damage out DNA causing defects which in adults can lead to conditions such as cancer. In an unborn baby which is still growing and developing, where DNA is even more important, this effect can be even more catastrophic. Studies in non-human primates have found that about half of all pregnancies failed with a dose of only 0.07 Sieverts (a unit which measures radiation exposure). To put that in perspective, the dose of radiation you would receive on the surface of Mars without shielding is between 0.33 Sieverts and 0.08 Sieverts, much higher than the dangerous level. The report suggest that you might use the soil on Mars to effectively shield against this radiation but notes this level of shielding would be difficult in space.

So where does this leave our budding astro babies ? Well the report also discusses some ways in which the danger from radiation might be mitigated. These range from identifying biomarkers that would identify which astronauts would be the least susceptible to radiation damage, to using electromagnetic fields on ships (big magnets basically) to deflect the charged radiation in much the same way as Earth’s magnetic field protects us here. The problem with this last approach would be the generating the amount of energy required to produce such fields may be prohibitive.

For the new residents of Mars however the team suggest another idea: using Phobos one of Mars moons as a maternity ward. Phobos is closer to its planet than any other moon in our solar system, so much so that Mars covers 25% of the sky. The Mars side of the Phobos also happens play host to a large crater called Stickney crater. Inside this crater our mothers to be could be shielded from as much as 90% of harmful radiation. So perhaps all future Martians will in reality be Phobosians!

Its early days for this kind of research and more study has to be done. Until then space babies are strictly a bad idea and space condoms (possibly lead lined) are a must. Dont say science doenst know how to kill the mood on valentines day!

Tore Straume, Steve Blattnig, & Cary Zeitlin (210). Radiation Hazards and the Colonization of Mars:
Brain, Body, Pregnancy, In-Utero Development, Cardio, Cancer, Degeneration Journal of Cosmology, 12, 3992-4033

Guest post: Dr Chris Evans – behind an unexpected discovery

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The internet has been abuzz this week with news of a recently discovered massive star being booted from its home cluster. I have the good fortune to know one of the scientists involved in this discovery and have asked him to give us an insight in what went in to this find.

So without further delay I introduce our first guest post from Dr Chris Evans, a researcher at the UK Astronomy Technology Center.

Pick a clear night in the southern hemisphere, get out of town, and let your eyes get night adjusted – not only are you assailed by the depth and scale of the Milky Way, but you also see the faint fuzzy patches of the Magellanic Clouds.  Here’s a pretty spectacular shot from ESO, when Comet McNaught was visible.

These are two irregular galaxies outside of our own, only visible from the south, with distances of 160,000 light years to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and 195,000 to the Small Magellanic Cloud.  These are great laboratories for learning about how stars live their lives, from birth in beautiful nebulae, to their deaths, sometimes as spectacular supernovae explosions.

The fruits of some of our work in the Clouds came together early this year with some very cool new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, leading to a journal paper and a press release on a so-called “runaway” star, that we think has been ejected from the centre of the largest stellar nursery in the local universe, 30 Doradus.

Astronomers often have unpublished data from projects that were incomplete due to bad weather, people leaving the subject, the onslaught of more immediate deadlines and so on.  In our case, we had two observations of a bright blue star on the western edge of 30 Doradus; the much bigger project we had planned was thwarted by bad weather. Months later at a conference, Nolan Walborn, based at STScI in Baltimore, was looking through the observations and recognised the tell-tale signs of one of the most massive, rare types of stars called O2 stars. Even with all of our work over the past decades we still only know of a handful of these.  A journalist once asked me if they lived fast and died young?  It’s a cheesy but accurate description. After just a few million years they effectively run out of fuel in their cores, causing a fatal collapse of their atmospheres leading to a supernova explosion. Intriguingly, the speed of this O2 star (relative to the Sun) looked peculiar when compared to the rest of the LMC, but at the time we dimissed this as perhaps being a binary system.

C. J. Evans, N. R. Walborn, P. A. Crowther, V. Henault-Brunet, D. Massa, W. D. Taylor, I. D. Howarth, H. Sana, D. J. Lennon, & J. Th. van Loon (2010). A massive runaway star from 30 Doradus The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 715 (2) arXiv: 1004.5402v1

Hunt for missing spacecraft

This morning sees the launch of the newest project from the zooniverse team, moonzoo ! Using high resolution images from the LCROSS mission, we want people to help us map craters, find unusual structures and help find lost spacecraft. Turns out we dont know where a bunch of stuff we sent to the moon is, LCROSS is the first mission with a high enough resolution to be able to see manmade objects on the surface of the moon. We covered this mission before but now its your turn to pour over the stunning images of the moons surface.

so head over to www.moonzoo.org and happy hunting.

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Astronomy photographer of the year guest gallery

Hey all

Just a quick heads up to advertise a great project run by Greenwich Royal Observatory. The astronomy photographer of the year competition invites members of the public to submit their images of the night sky.

This year they are asking guest astronomers to curate flicker galleries of their favourite entries and have asked me to take part this month. You can find my gallery and links to the flicker pool at here. I cant heap enough praise on the entries, pretty much all of the images are simply stunning and it was a hard job to pick just 18!

Enjoy

Edit!!!!!

oops forgot to include the link

Stuart

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Building a telescope (live tweeting)

Hey everyone

So this morning I head out to a field in Chilbolton to help build the UK node of the LOFAR radio telescope. Today we will be helping lay cabling for the scope and you can, if my iphone battery holds out and signal at the site is good, follow the effort on twitter @allinthegutter. I will have a blog post in the next few days about it as well.

Wish me luck

We need your brains

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Hey everyone… I know what your thinking, who is this Stuart person, I dont remember him.  Well you would be forgiven for thinking that as I have not posted here for quite a long time.

Over the past 6-7 months I have been very busy finishing up my phd, applying for jobs, accepting a job, getting worried and weepy about leaving my beloved beautiful Edinburgh and finally shipping off to Oxford where I am now. Thankfully the job I have started at Oxford and the city itsself are much more engaging than I could have hoped for and as a plus, the pubs in Oxford are almost as good as those in Edinburgh.

So what am I doing? Well I have been very fortunate to have been hired to work on a project that I have been interested in for a long time now : Galaxy Zoo and the Zooniverse. These are citizen science projects which aim to get people involved in real science!

When you think about it, its strange, almost every intrest you have allows you to do something practical involving it. If you like food you can get involved in cooking for friends, if you like watching F1 you might not be able to make yourself a formula one car but you can take an interest in restoring your own car etc etc. Astronomy is a little different, as a result of the increased size and cost of the kinds of telescopes which probe the cutting edge of our understanding, most people who are not professional astronomers have become consumers of the science. Dont get me wrong there is a large community of amateur astronomers who can and do contribute in the hunt for supernove and binary stars, but the time, dedication and money required is more than I would personally be willing to devote!

The creation of these telescopes however has presented professional astronomers with a large problem. We are faced with a deluge of information from automated telescopes which scan huge tracks of, if not the entire sky, taking images of hundreds of thousands if not millions of objects. The problem will only get worse with telescopes like Pan-STARRS and the nightmarish LSST coming online in the next few years.

For some questions we want to ask of this torrent of data, computers give us the answer. Dutifully trudging through repetitive tasks like measuring the brightness or position of objects, is a task which our silicone chums are perfectly suited to. However some tasks such as the precise shape of a galaxy, or how unusual a galaxy is, is a much harder question for a computer to answer. Humans however are ideal at this kind of task. I will show you what I mean, which one of these is a spiral galaxy and which is an elliptical

its pretty obvious right, even without training, without knowing what a spiral or elliptical galaxy actually is, you can instantly pick one our from the other. Isnt your brain awesome !

So how do we utilize the millions of brains out there, idling away thinking about puppies or candy-floss or penguins or candy-floss penguins or what it would be like if we could make a pengin puppy hybrid (which would be called a pupegin obviously) and if that would be the cutest sight in the world… the intrinsic cuteness of a puppy with the mass huddling instinct of penguins, to  make a massive quivering stack of furry awwwwwww….. see in the few seconds it took you to read that (and the subsequent minute worrying about the mental health of the author) your brain could have been put to a higher good classifying galaxies. What we need is some system where by humans can donate their free thought cycles to doing the tasks that computers struggle with.

The internet is great at this kind of thing, people already donate their free brain cycles to kittens with bad grammer, annoying facebook games and arguing about what is better: puppies or penguins (penguins obviously).  So why not some real science? The galaxy zoo and related projects seek to do just that, if you are board or are just trying to avoid work, you can sign on and help find supernove, classify galaxies, detect solar storms and help us figure out how galaxies smash together .

This is really really useful data which is thoroughly welcomed by real scientists who use it to make real discoveries. I am aware this post is getting pretty long so let me leave it just now and talk about some of the really great science the team have done with the project so far and what the future will bring in two follow up posts. Until then stop “browsing” the interent and start doing our work for us !