Models Predict “Megadrought” Risk for American Southwest This Century

12 February 2015 / raminskibba / 3 Comments

Near the beginning of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in San Jose, CA, on a winter day that happened to be warm, dry, and sunny, research scientists held a press conference to announce the conclusions of their work on predicting the risks of future “megadroughts.” They published their paper with the ominous title, “Unprecedented 21st-Century Drought Risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains,” in the first issue of Science Advances, a new digital, open-access journal. (The publisher, Marcia McNutt, gave brief opening remarks about how the journal will “showcase new and exciting research.”)

Benjamin Cook (NASA Goddard Institute), Toby Ault (Cornell University), and Jason Smerdon (Columbia University) obtained surprising results from computer model simulations. According to Cook and Smerdon, who videoconferenced with a shared microphone, previous models—such as those used for the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report—underpredicted drought risks. Cook and his colleagues used drought records documented in more than 1800 tree-ring chronologies over the the past millennium, where ring width decreases in dry years, to develop 17 model projections of 21st century climate in the American Southwest and Central Plains. Their disturbing findings include predictions of megadroughts, lasting 35 years or longer, in both regions worse than any seen in the last 1000 years. In short, they expect climate change to increase drought length and severity in the coming decades.

Mean summer soil moisture and Palmer Drought Severity Index out to 2099. Courtesy: Cook et al. (2015)

The drought risk is twofold, due to reduced precipitation and to warmer temperatures drying out soils of rivers and lakes, in which models predict increasing evaporation. Long droughts due to climate variations have occurred in the past, such as those occurring during the 12th and 13th centuries (the Medieval Climatic Anomaly) that serve as important benchmarks. But with their tree-ring based reconstruction of the climate history, in a “business-as-usual” emissions scenario, they predict a “persistent shift in the future toward longer droughts” that could exceed even those of these extremely dry centuries.

Ault described how risk assessments are made, in terms of the magnitude of impact and the likelihood. “The levels [of risk] that we see are striking,” with an 80% or higher risk of a drought 35 years or longer in duration by the end of this century if climate change is not mitigated. He described the situation like a golf course, which an initial 10% of it consisting of sandpits. If climate change continues unmitigated, the golf course will gradually become almost entirely sandpits!

Risk (%) of decadal and multidecadal drought calculated from three sets of models. Courtesy: Cook et al. (2015)

In the paper, Cook and his co-authors comment on the difficulties people in the Southwest and Central Plains will face when attempting to adapt to these climate conditions. In particular, the current depletion of nonrenewable groundwater reservoirs “will likely exacerbate the impacts of future droughts.” They discussed implications for both the water supply and food supply in the press conference, considering the dependence on agriculture in California and the breadbasket in the Central Plains. “Water security is food security,” as Ault put it, and people need to “take a no-regrets attitude toward preparedness.” Droughts will inevitably occur, and some of them could be as destructive as large earthquakes and hurricanes.

Their ongoing research will focus on examining the future severity, persistence and geographical scope of droughts, and they will attempt to improve the spatial resolution of their simulations, which currently employ coarse-grained averaging. They also plan to consider hydrology and snowpack, in addition to soil moisture. In any case, the soil moisture metrics and PDRI all point to one conclusion: unless people find a way to substantially mitigate climate change and prevent rising temperatures, the American Southwest and Central Plains can expect to face megadroughts like they’ve never seen before.

Finally, if you’re interested, below you can see my photo from the press conference (and I’m the one in the lower left with a cellphone in front of his face.) In other coverage of these results, see this nicely written Science article by Emily Underwood, and I saw a Washington Post reporter writing an article about it too (but I forgot his name), so watch for that.

The Science of Citizen Science: Meetings in San Jose This Week

9 February 2015 / raminskibba / Leave a comment

[This is adapted from a post I wrote on the Zooniverse blog.]

I’m excited about attending the Citizen Science Association (CSA) and American Association for the Advancement of Scientists (AAAS) meetings in San Jose, California this week, and I thought I’d tell you a bit about the citizen science-related events I’m looking forward to. I’ll write about other events and science news later, and in any case, check out the hashtags #CitSci2015, #AAASmtg and #AAAS2015 on Twitter for live updates.

As I mentioned in an earlier post last fall, we’ve organized an AAAS session that is titled, “Citizen Science from the Zooniverse: Cutting-Edge Research with 1 Million Scientists,” which will take place on Friday afternoon. It fits well with the AAAS’s them this year: “Innovations, Information, and Imaging.” Our excellent line-up includes Laura Whyte (Adler Planetarium) on Zooniverse, Brooke Simmons (Oxford) on Galaxy Zoo, Alexandra Swanson (U. of Minnesota) on Snapshot Serengeti, Kevin Wood (U. of Washington) on Old Weather, Paul Pharoah (Cambridge) on Cell Slider, and Phil Marshall (Stanford) on Space Warps. I’ll be chairing the session, but they’ll be doing all the hard work.

And in other recent news, citizen scientists from the Zooniverse’s Milky Way Project examined infrared images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and found lots of “yellow balls” in our galaxy. It turns out that these are indications of early stages of massive star formation, such that the new stars heat up the dust grains around them. Charles Kerton (Iowa State) and Grace Wolf-Chase (Adler) published the results last week in the Astrophysical Journal.

Courtesy: JPL

But let’s get back to the AAAS meeting. It looks like many other talks, sessions, and papers presented there involve citizen science too. David Baker (FoldIt) will give plenary lecture on post-evolutionary biology and protein structures on Saturday afternoon. Jennifer Shirk (Cornell), Meg Domroese and others from CSA have a session Sunday morning, in which they will describe ways to utilize citizen science for public engagement. (See also this related session on science communication.) Then in a session Sunday afternoon, people from the European Commission and other institutions will speak about global earth observation systems and citizen scientists tackling urban environmental hazards.

Before all of that, we’re excited to attend the CSA’s pre-conference on Wednesday and Thursday. (See their online program.) Chris Filardi (Director of Pacific Programs, Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, American Museum of Natural History) and Amy Robinson (Executive Director of EyeWire, a game to map the neural circuits of the brain) will give the keynote addresses there. For the rest of the meeting, as with the AAAS, there will be parallel sessions.

The first day of the CSA meeting will include: many sessions on education and learning at multiple levels; sessions on diversity, inclusion, and broadening engagement; a session on defining and measuring engagement, participation, and motivations; a session on CO₂ and air quality monitoring; a session on CS in biomedical research; and sessions on best practices for designing and implementing CS projects, including a talk by Chris Lintott on the Zooniverse and Nicole Gugliucci on CosmoQuest. The second day will bring many more talks and presentations along these and related themes, including one by Julie Feldt about educational interventions in Zooniverse projects and one by Laura Whyte about Chicago Wildlife Watch.

Furthermore, a couple sessions include some presentations that will interest southern Californians. Barbara Lloyd (Ocean Sanctuaries) will give a talk about “Identifying Sevengill Sharks in San Diego with Wildbook,” and Mark Chandler (Earthwatch Institute) will talk about “Engaging a Diversity of Citizen Scientists around Urban Trees in Greater Los Angeles.”

I also just heard that the Commons Lab at the Woodrow Wilson Center is releasing two new reports today, and hardcopies will be available at the CSA meeting. One report is by Muki Haklay (UCL) about “Citizen Science and Policy: A European Perspective” and the other is by Teresa Scassa & Haewon Chung (U. of Ottawa) about “Typology of Citizen Science Projects from an Intellectual Property Perspective.” Look here for more information.

New Science at the American Astronomical Society Meeting

4 February 20156 March 2015 / raminskibba / Leave a comment

I’d just like to summarize some of the exciting new scientific results presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle last month. I think it will be interesting to those of you science lovers who’re wondering what all the hubbub was about and for you astronomers who weren’t able to make it.

This is my third and final post in a series about the AAS meeting. The first two dealt with science policy, and diversity and sustainability. As I mentioned in a previous post, I enjoyed attending as both a scientist and science writer, and I was happy to personally meet the journalists writing excellent stories about the meeting (some of which I’ve linked to below).

I’ll start with some special sessions and other sessions focused on interesting science that included results I hadn’t seen before, and then I’ll end with some interesting plenary talks given by great speakers. It was a busy meeting and many of the sessions ran in parallel, so it’s inevitable that I missed some things and that this summary is incomplete. (Plus, I’m usually drawn to the sessions about galaxies, dark matter, and cosmology, and I often miss the other ones.) If you know of interesting announcements or talks that I missed here, you’re welcome to comment on them below.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)

After 15 years of great science, it was exciting to see the SDSS have its final public data release—until SDSS-IV data eventually come out, that is. At the press conference, Michael Wood-Vasey gave an overview, Constance Rockosi spoke about the data release, Daniel Eisenstein spoke about the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), Jian Ge spoke about the Multi-object APO Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey (MARVELS), and Steven Majewski spoke about the APO Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE). According to Rockosi, more than 6,000 papers have been published using publicly released SDSS data. The SDSS has observed tens of thousands of stars, hundreds of thousands of quasars, and millions of galaxies.

In addition, members of the BOSS collaboration presented (nearly) final results at a session dedicated to the survey. If you’re interested, check out this article I wrote about it for Universe Today. (Thanks to Nancy Atkinson for editing assistance.)

Distribution of galaxies in a slice of the BOSS survey. (Courtesy: SDSS-III)

3D-HST

Researchers presented newly published results and interesting work-in-progress about the evolution of distant galaxies using spectroscopic data from the 3D-HST survey, which is led by Pieter van Dokkum (Yale Univ.) and Ivelina Momcheva (Carnegie Observatories), combined with imaging data from the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS), taking advantage of instruments aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. The figure below shows the spectral features of tens of thousands of galaxies, which indicate star formation activity, active galactic nuclei activity, and stellar age. If you’re interested, I wrote an article about some of these results for Sky & Telescope. (Thanks to Monica Young for editing assistance.)

Spectral features of high-redshift galaxies. (Courtesy: Gabriel Brammer, 3D-HST)

Andromeda Galaxy

In a session dedicated to Andromeda—known as M31 by astronomers—as well as in other related sessions, research scientists and Ph.D. students presented studies about the stars, globular clusters, molecular clouds, dust, structure, dynamics, surface brightness profile, and stellar halo of the galaxy. The continued interest in our fascinating neighbor is understandable; Andromeda’s only 2.5 million light-years away from our galaxy! Like our Milky Way, Andromeda is a spiral galaxy, and it’s the most massive galaxy in the Local Group.

Many of these AAS results came from the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) Survey, which is led by Julianne Dalcanton (Univ. of Washington), who presented highlights in a press conference as well. Dalcanton and her colleagues released this PHAT panoramic image of the galaxy below, and it received well-deserved press attention, including in NBC and Sky & Telescope.

Map of Andromeda galaxy. (Courtesy: HST, PHAT)

Exoplanets

Many people were understandably excited about extra-solar planets, or exoplanets, detected by scientists with NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Every day of the meeting included talks and posters about the masses, abundances, dynamics, compositions and other properties of exoplanets as well as those of stars and supernova remnants examined with Kepler. In addition, astronomers’ announcement that they now have more than 1,000 confirmed exoplanets with Kepler and follow-up observations garnered considerable media attention (including these articles in Nature, BBC, and New York Times). They have at least 3,000 more planet candidates, and they will surely identify many more as Kepler continues its mission through 2016.

Of course, astronomers seek to find as many as possible Earth-like planets in or near the habitable regions orbiting Sun-like stars (often referred to as the “Goldilocks” zone). When these are successfully identified, the next step is to characterize their properties and try to assess the likelihood of life forming on them. Astronomers have found at least eight Earth-size planets in the habitable zone, including two of the newly announced ones, Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b. They also released these cool old-school travel posters. If you have a space ship that can travel 500 light-years a reasonable time, you should check out 186f on your next vacation!

Kepler’s alien planet travel posters. (Courtesy: NASA)

“Pillars of Creation”

On the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers released new images of the iconic star-forming region in the Eagle Nebula in the Serpens Cauda constellation, known as the “pillars of creation.” Journalists at Slate, CBS, and elsewhere shared these amazing images. At first I thought not much science was done with them, but by combining observations at visible and infrared wavelengths, astronomers can investigate what’s happening with the cold gas clouds and dust grains and assess how rapidly new stars are forming and where. For more, you can also see Hubble’s press release, which coincided with the press conference on the first day of the meeting.

Image of “pillars of creation.” (Courtesy: NASA and ESA)

Other Results

I saw many other interesting talks and posters at the meeting, but I don’t have the time/space to get into them here. On galaxies and the large-scale structure of the universe (which I’m interested in), I saw talks involving modeling and measurements with the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey, the Six-degree Field Galaxy Survey (6dF), and I presented research using the PRIsm MUlti-object Survey (PRIMUS). But the SDSS dominated the field.

In addition, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Sarah Martell, and Dan Zucker presented some impressive early science results from the GALactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey of the Milky Way, which uses an instrument with the Anglo-Australian Telescope. (GALAH is named after an Australian bird.) Astronomers combine GALAH observations with astrometry from Gaia and over the survey’s duration will produce detailed data for 1 million stars in our galaxy! In particular, they utilize a technique called “chemical tagging” to study the abundances of at least 15 chemical elements for each star, allowing for studies of stellar dynamics and merger events from infalling “satellite” galaxies. I look forward to seeing more results as they continue to take data and analyze them; their first public data release is planned for 2016.

PLENARY SESSIONS

I’ll briefly describe a couple of the plenary talks below, but I missed a few others that sounded like they could be interesting, including “The Discovery of High Energy Astrophysical Neutrinos” (Kara Hoffman); “Gaia – ESA’s Galactic Census Mission” (Gerry Gilmore); and “The Interactions of Exoplanets with their Parent Stars” (Katja Poppenhaeger).

Also, Paul Weissman (JPL/Caltech) gave an overview of the Rosetta mission and the comet C-G/67P, and Al Wootten (NRAO) gave an overview of many recent science papers using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). Rosetta and its lander Philae has run a few experiments already, and scientists with the mission have found that the bulk density of the nucleus is less than half the density of water ice and that its D/H ratio is different than the abundance ratio of the Earth’s oceans. More recently, Rosetta detected a crack in the “neck” of the comet, and they’ve abandoned an idea for a close flyby search for the lost lander, which might wake up in a few months when it receives more solar power. And if you’re interested in ALMA science, such as involving the gas kinematics of protostars and protoplanetary disks and the gas and dust clouds of distant galaxies, watch for proceedings from their recent Tokyo meeting, which are due to be published next month.

Cosmology Results from Planck

Martin White (UC Berkeley) gave an excellent talk about cosmological results from the Planck telescope, which he described as having the “weight of a heavy hippo and the height of a small giraffe.” Based on analyses of the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, so far it seems that the standard model of cold dark matter plus a cosmological constant (ΛCDM) is still a very good fit. Scientists in the collaboration are obtaining tighter constraints than before, and the universe still appears very flat (no curvature). They are planning a second data release this year, including more simulations to assess systematic uncertainties and more precise gravitational lensing measurements. White ended by saying, “I can explain to you what really well, but I can’t tell you why at all.”

White also hinted at, but didn’t reveal anything about, the joint analysis by Planck and BICEP2 astrophysicists. That analysis was completed recently, and now it seems that the detected polarization signal might be at best a mixture of primordial gravitational waves produced by inflation and of Milky Way dust, and they’ve obtained only an upper limit on the tensor-to-scalar ratio. Check out my recent article in Universe Today about this controversy.

Courtesy: ESA

Inflation and Parallel Universes

Max Tegmark (MIT) has talked and written about both inflation and the multiverse for many years, such as in a 2003 cover article and a recent blog post for Scientific American and in his book, “Our Mathematical Universe.” From the way he presented the talk, it was clear that he has discussed and debated these issues many times before.

Tegmark began by explaining models of inflation. According to inflation, the universe expanded for a brief period at an exponential rate 10^-36 seconds after the Big Bang, and the theory could explain why the universe appears to have no overall curvature, why it approximately appears the same in all directions, and why it has structures of galaxies in it. In one entertaining slide, he even compared the expansion rate of a universe to that of a fetus and baby, but then he said, “if the baby kept expanding at that rate, you’d have a very unhappy mommy.”

Expansion rates of a baby (human) and a baby universe

He subtitled his talk, “Science or Science Fiction?”, and that question certainly came up. Tegmark argued that inflation seems to imply at least some levels of a multiverse (see his slide below), which makes many astrophysicists (including me) nervous and skeptical, partly because parallel universes aren’t exactly testable predictions. But he made the point that some general relativity predictions, such as about what happens in the center of a black hole, aren’t testable yet we accept that theory today. He discussed “modus ponens” arguments: once we accept “if p then q,” then if p is asserted, we must accept q, whether we like it or not. In other words, if inflation generally predicts parallel universes and if we accept inflationary theory, then we must accept its implications about parallel universes. This is an important issue, and it’s another reason why BICEP2 and Planck scientists are trying to resolve the controversy about polarization in the CMB.

Predictions of different levels of the multiverse.

The Dark and Light Side of Galaxy Formation

Finally, in another interesting talk, Piero Madau (UC Santa Cruz), who was recently awarded the Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, spoke about galaxy formation and dark matter. In particular, he spoke about difficulties and problems astrophysicists have encountered while attempting to model and simulate galaxies forming while assuming a cold dark matter (CDM) universe. For example, he described: the cusp-core controversy about the inner profiles of dark matter clumps and galaxy groups; the problem of angular momentum, which is conserved by dark matter but not gas and stars; the missing satellites problem, in which more simulated dark matter subclumps (“subhaloes”) than observed satellite galaxies are found; and the “too-big-to-fail” problem, such that simulated subhaloes are much more dense than the galaxies we see around the Milky Way. These problems motivated astrophysicists to rethink assumptions about how galaxies form and to consider warm or self-interacting dark matter.

Madau ended by saying that evidence that the universe conforms to expectations of the CDM model is “compelling but not definitive,” and warm dark matter remains a possibility. Considering all of the exciting work being done in this field, this could be “the DM decade”…but then he said people have been talking of a DM decade for the past thirty years.

Jim Toomey, Cartoonist and Marine Conservationist, Speaks at Scripps

29 January 2015 / raminskibba / Leave a comment

[This is adapted from an article I wrote for the La Jolla Light. Special thanks to the editor, Susan DeMaggio. I recommend checking out the article on LaJollaLight.com, and if you quote it, cite the article there. The low-quality photos are my own.]

“It’s the first time I’ve been a distinguished anything!” says Jim Toomey, beginning his presentation as the distinguished speaker for the annual Knowlton-Jackson Lecture of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation (CMBC) at Scripps Seaside Forum Auditorium last Friday afternoon. The speaker series, which began in 2013, is named after Nancy Knowlton, founder of CMBC, and Jeremy Jackson, both marine biologists.

Just outside the auditorium, people appreciated the sunny day on the beach and sounds of the crashing waves, making the place a fitting venue for Toomey’s lecture, titled “Drawing Inspiration from the Sea.”

For the past 20 years, Toomey has been writing and drawing the daily comic strip, Sherman’s Lagoon, which is syndicated in over 250 newspapers in North America and in 30 foreign countries. Its cast of sea creatures includes a lazy great white shark, Sherman, his wife Megan, the sea turtle Fillmore, and the selfish hermit crab Hawthorne.

Toomey joked with the audience that he often speaks before younger crowds and at aquariums, so it was like a nightmare speaking in front of real marine biologists at Scripps, and he thanked the organizers for making his nightmare come true. Sherman’s Lagoon brings together two of his life-long passions—art and the sea—and he claimed to be “equally incompetent in both areas.”

Toomey holds a Masters of Arts from Stanford University, and recently, he earned a Masters of Environmental Management from Duke University. The son and grandson of engineers, Toomey said he considered going into engineering as well, but the ocean fascinated him at a young age, and he enjoyed doodling in class, sharing some of his earliest drawings of sharks.

When holding a globe in his hands, he said he realized that most of it consists of water and that, “if I had a boat, I could go anywhere.”

The audience followed as Toomey told a riveting story about learning to fly small airplanes and struggling with the stall recovery. To attempt the maneuver, he descended in a spiral from 6,000 feet, and while facing the rapidly approaching ocean below, he somehow managed to recover control. Afterward, on his way to the bar, he saw birds spiraling downward to eat with ease and natural skill, and he realized, “I’m being humbled by sparrows!”

He also became aware of the “incredible powers” of ocean creatures. For example, about Sherman he said, “he’s talented without motivation—like some human characters.” He could easily catch more prey if he weren’t so lazy. Fillmore, the turtle, has an incredible ability to navigate; he also has terrible pickup lines. He named many of his characters after streets in San Francisco, where he was living at the time.

To make his cartoons, Toomey starts with the dialogue, “though for me, the hard part’s the writing.” He then demonstrated with Photoshop by drawing the strip above, as the audience watched it take shape on the screen. (He switched from pen and paper to drawing on the computer in 2002.)

With his cartoon, artistic abilities, and speaking skills, Toomey works toward communicating science and environmental issues to a wide audience. For example, he recently conveyed how ocean acidification affects sea creatures, including Sherman’s and other sharks’ ability to smell. He also drew a series of strips about the BP gulf oil spill.

Toomey’s comics and illustrations appear in educational materials published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and he partnered with the United Nations Environmental Program to create videos to raise awareness of the importance of oceans and the coastal environment.

He also created a video about threatened coral reefs with Céline Cousteau, granddaughter of famed ocean explorer, Jacques Cousteau, and the World Resources Institute. Efforts like these earned him the Environmental Hero Award in 2000 and 2010, presented by NOAA, “for using art and humor to conserve and protect our marine heritage.”

Last summer, Toomey dove to the depths of the Gulf of Mexico in Alvin, a Navy deep-ocean submersible vehicle. He described his experience and showed videos of the area teeming with life, including tube worms and a squid with incredibly long tentacles.

The scientists aboard had technology to allow him to call his 10-year-old son’s science class in Annapolis, Maryland from the bottom of the ocean. He has plans to take his family on a boat for a year, and will describe their experiences with autobiographical comics.

Just as he advised scientists trying to engage with the public, “if you want to reach people, you need to be honest, tell a story, and connect with your audience in a human way.” Toomey reaches and inspires many people with his entertaining cartoons and as a passionate and outspoken advocate for ocean conservation.

Science Policy at the American Astronomical Society: NASA, National Science Foundation, New Telescopes

23 January 201526 January 2015 / raminskibba / 3 Comments

Following my previous post, here I’ll write about some science policy-related talks, events, and news at the American Astronomical Society meeting two weeks ago.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

As we saw in President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, NASA’s sending Scott Kelly to join Mikhail Kornienko for a 1-year mission at the International Space Station, where they and their crewmates will carry out numerous research experiments and work on technology development. This could help toward sending manned missions to Mars in the future, which would involve much longer periods in space. Of course, actually getting to Mars involves many other challenges too; and let’s remember that the ISS has an orbit height of about 431 km while the closest distance between Earth and Mars is 54.6 million km–about 100,000 times further away. Reaching Mars is clearly an ambitious goal, but it’s achievable in the long term. (For SOTU coverage, check out these articles in Science and Universe Today.) The new budget extends the life of the ISS until at least 2024, “which is essential to achieving the goals of sending humans to deep space destinations and returning benefits to humanity through research and technology development.” The ISS accounts for most of NASA’s space operations budget, but that only accounts for a few percent of NASA’s total budget, which includes many other activities and missions.

The NASA Town Hall began with with an update on its budget for 2015, and if you’re interested in the details, take a look at my previous post. One important change is that education will not take up 1% of every project as before; instead, the new budget requires that educational activities be centralized in the Science Mission Directorate (SMD).

The National Academies, which include the National Academy of Sciences, organize a massive effort every decade for leaders in the astronomy and astrophysics community to prioritize their goals and challenges and to make recommendations about what kinds of large-, medium-, and small-scale projects should have funding and resources invested in them. The Decadal Survey for 2010-2020, “New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics”, is detailed and well-organized, and you can view it online. It’s complementary to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) “Cosmic Visions” programme for 2015-2025. Astronomers have produced these surveys since the 1970s, and other fields are catching on too; for example, the 2015-2025 decadal survey of ocean sciences just came out today.

The NASA spokesperson pointed out that previous Decadal Survey missions—Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer—have now become household names, and the James Webb Space Telescope and Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope will too. JWST will be great for astronomy and for outreach, but it is nonetheless extremely expensive and over budget, which implies that some smaller projects won’t be funded. According to this detailed article by Lee Billings, JWST is taking an ever-increasing fraction of NASA’s astrophysics budget, and based on the presentation at the town hall, it looks like that will continue for the next few years. In the meantime, WFIRST’s budget will start ramping up soon too.

In other news, at the AAS meeting we also heard updates about research grants in 2014 through NASA’s funding of Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) funding. The Astrophysics Data Analysis Program (ADAP) was funded at $7.5M last year with a 21% proposal success rate, and the Astrophysics Theory Program (ATP) was funded at $3.5M with a 11% success rate. I didn’t catch the stats for the other programs, such as those involving exoplanet research and instrumentation. Grant funding levels have been pretty flat for the past four fiscal years, but because of the increasing number proposals, the selection rate keeps decreasing. Theoretical astrophysicists will be dismayed that no ATP proposals will be solicited in 2015, but they say that there has been no reduction in funding, just a delay.

There were also interesting sessions about education and public outreach (E/PO) and Program Analysis Groups (PAGs) too, and I suggest checking out those links if you want more information and resources.

National Science Foundation (NSF)

I also attended the NSF town hall, and similar to the NASA one, was primarily about budget issues. The NSF budget fared alright for fiscal year 2015 and appears to be between the pessimistic and optimistic scenarios they envisioned. NSF is pursuing partnerships with universities, other institutions, and federal agencies on some projects, such as a NASA-NSF partnership on exoplanet research. NSF analysts expect an approximately flat budget out to 2019, but that could change. They’re already preparing for FY 2016, and the President’s Budget Request will come out in the near future.

For the division of astronomical sciences (AST), NSF research grant proposals had a success rate of 15-16% for both 2013 and 2014. Nonetheless, as with NASA, there appears to be a long-term decreasing trend; in 2002, the success rate was 38%. And as with NASA, this is mostly due to increasing numbers of proposals, and they’re starting to restrict the number of proposals submitted per investigator and per institution. They’re also developing strategies in case success rates drop below 10%, which would be a dire situation. I’ve been funded by NSF grants myself, and it’s stressful for faculty, research scientists, and grad students when proposals are rejected so often.

The NSF spokesperson briefly mentioned NSF “rotator” positions, which are temporary program directors who work at the NSF and collaborate with many people on a variety of policy and budget issues. The astronomical sciences has such a program, and if you want more information about it, look here.

The NSF also funds major telescopes, including the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawaii, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), also in Chile. As you may know, scientists are making progress with ALMA and have obtained interesting results already (see below). DKIST is under construction, and construction will begin on LSST later this year. In NSF’s budget, existing facilities account for about 1/3 of it, individual and mid-scale programs are another third, and the rest of the budget goes to ALMA, DKIST, and LSST.

AAS Science Policy & Advocacy

Joel Parriott, the AAS’s director of public policy, and Josh Shiode, the public policy fellow, organized a great session on science policy and the AAS’s advocacy efforts. They gave an informative presentation about how budgets are determined and about the current budget situation for basic and applied research in the astronomical sciences. I didn’t know that the US currently funds 37% of the world’s R&D, but China is expected to overtake the US in the early 2020s.

Shiode also spoke about the importance of cross-cultural communication between scientists and policy-makers. As a scientist and as a constituent, there are many ways that you can influence your Congress members, and nothing beats interacting with them in person. If you’re an astronomer, I strongly encourage you to participate in the Congressional Visits Day. I participated in it last year (see my blog post about it), and I really enjoyed it. You can find more information here, and note the deadline on 3 February.

There are other ways to get involves as well. You can also call or write to your Representative or Senators as well as write letters to the editor or op-eds for your local newspaper. Note that some Congress members will be receptive to different messages or to different ways of framing scientists’ and educators’ concerns. One concern scientists have these days is that some members of Congress are interfering with the peer-review process in the NSF and NIH.

Telescopes

The AAS meeting also included a session on ALMA, a Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) open house, and a JWST town hall, as well as one for Hubble, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this spring. (I wasn’t able to attend all of these sessions, unfortunately.)

Al Wootten (National Radio Astronomy Observatory) gave a nice talk about science that is being done with ALMA so far. It’s an array of 66 12-meter and 7-meter radio telescopes, and after three decades of planning/construction, ALMA is now approaching full science operations. The US is part of a large international collaboration consisting of a partnership between North America, Europe, and East Asia. Wootten presented interesting results about observations of gas in Milky Way-like galaxies in the distant universe and of gas kinematics in protostars and protoplanetary disks. ALMA had a conference in Tokyo in December, and the proceedings will be published in a few months.

The TMT and JWST are upcoming telescopes that much of the astronomical community and the science-loving public are looking forward to. The TMT is one of the giant telescopes I’ve written about before, and it will have “first light” in 2022. JWST is scheduled to launch in 2018.

[This is my second post in a series about the American Astronomical Society meeting.]

Reporting from the American Astronomical Society Meeting: Impostor Syndrome, Publishing Changes, Sustainability

13 January 201521 January 2015 / raminskibba / 4 Comments

[This will be the first of a series of three posts about interesting events at the American Astronomical Society meeting. I plan on writing about some policy issues and scientific results in separate posts.]

When I was taking the train north, I fell asleep in northern California and awoke to sunrise in Oregon. The dry desert-like environment was replaced by the foggy forests and mountains one typically associates with the northwest. You won’t be surprised that it was rainy when we arrived.

In any case, it was great to visit Seattle. Thousands of American and international astronomers, as well as educators and journalists, converged on the convention center downtown two weeks ago for a busy and exciting American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting, which is annually one of the world’s largest astronomy meetings. I’ll describe a couple of the interesting sessions that involve scientists’ activities and concerns beyond scientific research here and that you might not have heard about elsewhere. (A separate post will address new scientific results and plenary sessions.)

You can view the AAS meeting’s program online, and you can check out everyone’s live-tweeting at #aas225 too.

Impostor Syndrome

Jessica Kirkpatrick, Caitlin Casey, and Kartik Sheth organized an excellent session on the impostor syndrome, and from what I could tell, it was very successful. They packed a large room, and graduate students as well as more senior scientists actively participated in the event. The organizers will soon be posting about it and about survey results on the Women in Astronomy blog, so watch for that.

Many people working in academia have experienced what some psychological researchers refer to as “impostor syndrome.” According to Langford & Clance (1993),

the impostor syndrome is defined by ‘believing that one’s accomplishments came about not through genuine ability, but as a result of having been lucky, having worked harder than others, and having manipulated other people’s impressions.’

As Rachel Ivie and Arnell Ephraim (American Institute of Physics) put it in 2011, “One key aspect of the imposter syndrome is the attribution of your own success to factors beyond your control, such as luck, while attributing the success of others to skill or knowledge.” Based on a survey, they argue that impostor syndrome manifests itself more strongly in women and therefore contributes to a higher
drop-out rate among women than men in astronomy.

Consequently, impostor syndrome is not just harmful to the health and success of the many people who experience it but is also harmful to science in general. Men (including me) experience impostor syndrome too, as do many minority groups such as black and Latino scientists. According to a survey of astronomers planning to the attend the AAS session, 56% of them are experiencing or have experienced severe impostor syndrome. This is clearly an issue we must try to address, and this involves identifying, assessing, and reversing the effects of impostor syndrome.

The session mostly consisted of the participants interacting with each other and going through a series of steps in which everyone talked about the sources of their impostor syndrome feelings and doubts, how they cope with them, and figuring out what to do in order to break the cycle. That last part involves great advice: “Start talking about it. Accept that this is normal. Rewrite your script. Think positive. Redefine success. Stop unrealistic comparisons. Self care. Find a support network. Fake it.”

In my opinion, all of this is great, and more sessions like this should be organized in future AAS meetings. Encouraging everyone and dealing with sources of doubt will help all scientists and students to gain confidence, and this is an important step toward achieving equality in STEM fields. In addition, people at universities and other educational institutions should make an earnest effort especially at the level of graduate programs to discuss and address these issues. Unfortunately, straight white privileged men seem to be the most unaware of these issues are also the people most often in leadership positions and most unlikely to have attended this session. Talking about these issues openly and consistently should help to make everyone more aware of them.

AAS Publishing

In a town hall-style session, people from the AAS publishing program described potential changes to the main journals, including the Astronomical Journal (AJ) and Astrophysical Journal (ApJ) (where I have published papers before). I expect that many of these changes will be officially announced in more detail later this year.

The details will mostly just interest professional scientists who frequently read and publish in these journals. There are plans to balance content in ApJ and AJ and to have one centralized portal for submitting papers. They will eventually do away with ApJ Supplements, as the distinction between them and regular ApJ papers is not as clear as before, and in any case, in an age where most papers are accessed online, the distinction is basically irrelevant. They are planning on technological enhancements in the journals in the future, such as including 3-dimensional figures, video abstracts, and staff support with graphics. Finally, rather than just having ApJ Letters, they proposed the creation of AAS letters, which would highlight the most important research of both the AJ and ApJ and which would not have as strict a length limit.

During the Q&A period, there were comments about open access and about the contrast between the AAS business model and that of the Royal Astronomical Society, which publishes the Monthly Notices of the RAS. In my personal opinion, I think open access journals are generally a good thing, and I prefer the MNRAS model, in which scientists do not have to pay to publish papers; in effect, the cost is paid by libraries and other institutions. In other publishing-related news, a new open-access scientific journal, Collabra, was just introduced in the UK, in which they plan to pay peer reviewers and editors.

Sustainability Efforts

As I wrote in my previous post, where I described my train trip to the AAS, I recently joined the AAS Sustainability Committee. The committee organized a splinter session called “Teach Climate Change!” that was led by James Lowenthal (Smith College), Katy Garmany (NOAO), and others. The session mainly consisted of: (1) discussions about how to teach climate change in an introductory astronomy course; (2) how astronomers can engage in public debate on climate change issues; and (3) how we can address sustainability through control of “light pollution,” though we ended up having not much time for that topic.

We had many lively discussions about these topics and audience members had many excellent ideas. Many people advocated for astronomers to engage in more public outreach programs, including with museums such as the California Academy of Sciences. When teaching a class, it’s useful to assess students’ views anonymously such as with “clickers,” and students can calculate their own carbon footprint on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) website, which would help make these issues more concrete. For interested readers, Lowenthal recommended the 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, which compares climate change misinformation to that of the tobacco industry.

We will make more information and resources available in the future, and in the meantime, I suggest checking out the Sustainability Committee’s website and blog.

Other Sessions

I’ll just briefly mention a few more sessions at the AAS meeting. On the pre-meeting days, there sessions on astrostatistics and databases with R and Python codes, and one on “distributed collaboration” with Github. There also was a two-day teaching workshop organized by the Center for Astronomy Education; I attended it in 2012 and strongly recommended it. There were other teaching and outreach-related sessions too, including one about the Astronomy Ambassadors, but I only could attend a few of them this time. There were also a few events related to the International Year of Light. Finally, the Historical Astronomy Division (HAD) organized many interesting sessions I was sad to miss—you can’t go to everything when there are many parallel sessions—with titles such as “Astronomy and the First World War” and “Preserving the Material Legacy of the American Observatory Movement.”

Science Writing Awards

Finally, at a reception on 6th January, Rick Feinberg, the AAS Press Officer, announced the science writing awards. Alexandre Witze won the 2014 American Institute of Physics (AIP) Science Communications Award for her excellent article, “Spinning the Core” in Science News, on magnetic dynamos. Lee Billings won the award in the book category for his “Five Billion Years of Solitude”, published by Current/Penguin. I look forward to reading it!

You could say that I attended the AAS meeting as an astronomy researcher, astronomy policy analyst, and beginning science writer. Here’s my badge—for the first time, I was registered as both press and as an astronomer. It’s interesting seeing things from the other side.

All Aboard to the American Astronomical Society Meeting!

2 January 201513 January 2015 / raminskibba / 1 Comment

I’m on a train adventure, going through California, Oregon, and Washington to the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Seattle. This post is a modified version of one I wrote for the AAS
Sustainability Committee.

For those of you astronomers and journalists at the meeting, you’re welcome to join us for our Special Session next Wednesday (7th January) at 12:30-14:00 in Room 4C-3. We’ll be starting the new year with ideas and plans for addressing climate change issues in class and with the media.

We encourage anyone who is interested in the Sustainability Committee to contact us and get involved. We will post resources on this website for teaching and discussing climate change with journalists.

It’s important for astronomers to try to make observatories, telescopes, university department buildings, and computer centers as energy efficient as possible, but our largest environmental impact and carbon footprint comes from airplane flights to meetings, conferences, workshops, etc. According to a New York Times article, air travel emissions account for about five percent of global warming, and that fraction is projected to rise significantly as the volume of air travel is increasing much faster than gains in flight fuel efficiency.

It would help this situation to develop better resources and technologies for videoconferencing and remote observing, and these are areas where we should continue to make improvements. In addition, long-distance travel can be difficult for some people, such as for those with families and those in relatively remote locations, and videoconferencing and webcasts can make conferences more accessible to more people.

Nonetheless, long-distance travel is sometimes necessary, including for early-career scientists who need to advertise their work and network at conferences. I joined the Sustainability Committee in 2014, and one thing I am trying to do and trying to encourage others to do is to take more trains. In the US, long-distance trains can be very useful depending on where one wants to travel. They are not always the fastest mode of transportation, but they are comfortable, convenient, have great views, and usually have wireless access if you need to work. And importantly, they save energy.

I work at the University of California, San Diego, and I’m taking the train up the Pacific coast to Seattle via Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, which we just passed, the Bay Area, Sacramento, and Portland. (It makes me think of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”) I’m traveling nearly 1500 miles (2400 km)—nearly the entire distance from the southern to northern border of the US. As I wrote in a blog post last summer, Amtrak trains expend about 1,600 BTUs of energy per passenger per mile, while planes use 2,500 and cars use 3,900. Trains are much more energy efficient than planes, cars, and buses, and by not flying to Seattle, I’m saving tons of carbon dioxide emissions. This is just a start, but I am trying to view flying as a luxury or necessary evil that I will avoid and reduce when possible.

In any case, I’m excited to be part of the new and improved Sustainability Committee, and if you’re interested, join us at the AAS meeting! More importantly, make a resolution in 2015 to reduce your and your institution’s carbon footprint.

Update: US Federal Science Budget for 2015

21 December 201420 January 2015 / raminskibba / 5 Comments

Last week, three months into the fiscal year, the US Congress avoided a government shutdown and finally passed a budget for 2015. Better late than never. As I wrote about during the time of the midterm election, the budget situation is particularly important for science research and development and for education and public outreach. The $1.1 trillion and 1,600 page omnibus bill includes many important non-science issues of course, such as provisions reducing financial regulations and others allowing larger campaign contributions to political parties, and the bill does not address funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which will be decided in February, but my focus here, as usual, is on the implications for science.

Many agencies will receive small budget increases for science and technology relative to FY 2014 and to the President’s initial budget request (but excluding his Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative). According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), federal research and development (R&D) would rise to $137.6 billion, which is a 1.7% increase from last year and consistent with inflation. This was not guaranteed, however, and scientists were braced for the worst. Under the current circumstances, the science budgets will fare rather well.

Importantly, note that the budget bill includes discretionary spending subject to the caps established by the Budget Control Act (“sequestration”) and modified last year. In addition, the cost of mandatory spending, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, continues to increase; without more revenue, these will take a larger share in coming years. The following figure shows federal R&D relative to GDP. It’s courtesy of AAAS, and if you want more details about budget issues, I recommend reading Matt Hourihan‘s writings there, which includes a breakdown by agency. Details can also be found at the American Institute of Physics science policy news.

NASA

For specific agencies, let’s start with NASA. In the omnibus bill, NASA received a budget of $18.01B, a significant increase over the President’s request and slightly larger than the inflation rate. For NASA’s Astrophysics Division, most of the budget increase comes from rejecting the President’s proposal to cancel the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a telescope mounted on a Boeing 747 aircraft that is funded at $70M. They will not have enough funding to implement all of the desired upgrades to the telescope though. The budget also includes $50M for the Wide-field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), which is expected to launch in the early 2020s. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, is funded as expected (under its $8B total cost cap) and is on schedule for a 2018 launch. The Planetary and Heliophysics Divisions also saw budget increases over last year, including $100M for a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa (which might harbor life) and at least $100M for the high-priority Mars 2020 rover mission. Nonetheless, NASA may not be able to advance its smaller Discovery-class space probes and New Frontiers missions as quickly as hoped.

For detailed coverage of NASA’s budget, check out Josh Shiode of the American Astronomical Society and Marcia Smith at SpacePolicyOnline.

National Science Foundation

The budget includes an increase of 2.4% ($172M) to the NSF’s budget, and according to Shiode, this is partly thanks to efforts by the retiring chairman of the House Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies (CJS) Appropriations Subcommittee, Representative Frank Wolf. There will be a 2.2% increase over current funding to research and related activities across the six directorates, while there will be flat funding for research equipment and facilities construction, including expected funding for the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). I’m particularly looking forward to the LSST, which will be located in northern Chile and is planned to have “first light” in 2019. It will observe millions of galaxies and will be a successor to the very successful Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

Department of Energy

The DOE’s Office of Science received approximately flat funding at $5.1B in the budget bill. The Cosmic Frontier program, which includes dark matter and dark energy research, will see a $6.4M (6.5%) increase in its budget, however. The bill reverses potential cuts to nuclear fusion research, and it importantly threatens “to withhold the US contribution to ITER, the multibillion-euro international fusion consortium [based in southern France], if the beleaguered project, which is 11 years behind schedule, does not implement management changes,” according to an article in Nature.

Education

The budget bill has multiple provisions affecting education. It includes legislation for a program that would allow students without a high school diploma to get federal student aid as long as they are enrolled in college-level career pathway programs. It also unfortunately includes a $303M cut in discretionary funding from the Pell Grant program this year, according to Inside Higher Ed. The budget will increase funding to $530M supporting institutions that serve percentages of minority and low-income students through Title III funding.

NASA will receive $42M for education and public outreach, but the agency may have to shuffle its education budget, which has traditionally funded education activities in conjunction with every scientific mission. The NSF will receive $866M for education and human resources, including funding for its Graduate Research Fellowships.

Environmental Protection Agency

I don’t have good news about the EPA, which will now be funded at $8.1B this year, its smallest budget since 1989 according to Scientific American. The bill also includes some environment-related riders in the EPA and other agencies such as the following: President Obama will not be allowed to fulfill his pledge to contribute $3B to the United Nations Green Climate Fund; the Export–Import Bank will lift its ban on loaning funds to companies to build coal-fired power plants overseas; and the Transportation Department will not be able to fund most of its current light-rail projects.

Other Agencies

Finally, there are a few other agencies with science-related budgets. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will receive essentially flat funding (0.3% increase). It will receive larger increases for cancer research, Alzheimer’s research, and the BRAIN Initiative on neuroscience. The bill also includes a multibillion dollar Ebola response that goes primarily to the NIH. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) will get flat funding, including full funding for its GOES-R and JPSS satellites for meteorological and polar research. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) received flat funding as well, and the US Geological Survey received a small increase.

This will be my last post until next year, so happy solstice (or Shabeh Yalda, as the Persians say) and happy holidays!

Thoughts on “Interstellar” and Questions it Raises

16 December 20145 May 2016 / raminskibba / 3 Comments

I finally went and saw Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar a couple days ago. It’s definitely an entertaining and thought-provoking movie, and it’s worth seeing in a theater. This post won’t really be a review of the film, but I’ll give you a few of my thoughts about it and implications of it for our role in the universe. I’m interested in hearing your response to the movie as well. It raised some big and important questions that we humans should explore further. (Note: this post includes a few “spoilers,” so consider yourself warned.)

First of all, if you haven’t seen 2001 or Contact already, then you should rectify that immediately! They’re both excellent, and Interstellar was made with many connections and homages to them…so turn off your computer or tablet or brain implant or whatever you’re reading this with, and go check out those movies! You can come back to this blog later.

Also, if you’re interested in checking out other astronomers’ responses to the movie, you can read the excessively critical review and mea culpa by Phil Plait, the interesting tweets and more tweets by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and this article in Wired magazine by Adam Rogers (and thanks to Lynne Friedmann for giving it to me).

Why are astrophysicists discussing or questioning some aspects of the film? It’s because the filmmakers consulted Kip Thorne and did attempt to get the physics right, and because it’s the big space movie of the year, like Gravity was last year. In my opinion, they did do a pretty good job on many issues, though I wasn’t so sure about a couple others: for example, I’m not sure whether all the time dilation effects were calculated accurately (though their take on the “twin paradox” was interesting), and I’m skeptical about Matt McConaughey’s character’s experience in the black hole (which is the circular saw-shaped image above). And deGrasse Tyson made an accurate and important observation that bothered me too: “Mysteries of #Interstellar: Stars vastly outnumber Black Holes. Why is the best Earthlike planet one that orbits a Black Hole”?

I’m not going to get into these physics issues much here. (I’m happy to try to answer any questions you might have though—just post a comment or contact me on Twitter.) Instead, I’m more interested in exploring questions the movie raised. For example, how much of a priority is space exploration to us as a society? How difficult would it be to find another potentially habitable planet—and what are our criteria for “potentially habitable”? How would we traverse these great distances? How do we transport people (and necessary equipment and supplies) so that they can survive for long periods far from Earth—in spacecraft, space stations, or colonies? How vulnerable is our own planet and which vulnerabilities should we be trying to address? How might we eventually contact or even meet alien species, and what would we tell or ask them? Who would do the talking or asking? Will we behave with empathy or will we act like conquerors? What are own roles and responsibilities as Earthlings and citizens of the cosmos?

(We also learned a few fun things from the movie, such as: wormholes can be convenient; books get pushed off of shelves by space ghosts; NASA will survive even during the worst of times; and watch out if you land on an ice planet and find Matt Damon.)

It’s easy to become focused and fixated on short-term and local problems, as they can seem the most pressing. That’s totally understandable, but we as a society can’t forget the big long-term picture. What are our objectives and priorities as a global community? What do we want to achieve, and how can we work toward those goals and help future generations to realize them?

In the movie, a runaway Dust Bowl—presumably due to climate change—or some kind of “nuclear winter” devastates the world’s food supplies. Though this might seem far-fetched, it’s not out of the question for our planet. People had to struggle just to get through each day and to feed their families, such that exploration was the furthest from their minds and people started believe that the Apollo program was a hoax. But the drive to explore the unknown and see what’s out there is an inherently human trait. Carl Sagan once wrote, “Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.” What are other planets, solar systems, or even other galaxies like, and what do their differences tell us about our own? Just today a Scientific American article came out, where the author discusses the thousands of exoplanets observed so far and argues that “Planets More Habitable than Earth may be Common in Our Galaxy.” These are issues we can’t stop thinking about.

One problem is that space is big. “Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is” (to quote the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Planets that support life are extremely rare, though we don’t know exactly how rare yet. It’s difficult to learn about planets far away, and it won’t be easy to find out which ones humans could visit or which ones might support alien life. Contacting those aliens is more complicated. And then visiting other planets and solar systems, or even setting up colonies on them is literally a multi-generational project. For example, Alpha Centauri is about 4.4 light years away. If astronauts could travel as fast as the Voyager spacecraft…it would take them 77,000 years to get there! They’d wake up from hibernation in their spaceship after all that time, and they wouldn’t even know whether other humans were still alive.

Finally, one of the main points I think we should take away from the movie is that we must take care of our own planet. Earth is rare, and it’s our home. We face many dangers and threats throughout the world, including global warming, drought, floods, famine, air pollution, natural disasters, pandemics, ozone depletion, killer asteroids, and war. We should note that these problems and their effects are related to poverty and inequality too, and that’s not to mention threats to other species on Earth. We might not survive for thousands of years—which is like a blink of an eye for our universe—but we have to try. We have to work together and plan for the future.

On that note, I’ll leave you with the ending of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos:

We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.

Conference on Nearby Galaxies in Memory of Charles Engelbracht

6 December 201413 January 2015 / raminskibba / 3 Comments

I just returned from a small conference on “Observations of Dust in Nearby Galaxies” at the University of Arizona in Tucson. It honored Chad Engelbracht, an influential astronomer in the field who rather suddenly passed away in January, before his 44th birthday.

It was great to be back in Tucson! This was my first visit since I moved away in 2012. I worked as a postdoc at the University of Arizona—an internationally renowned center of theoretical, observational, and instrumental astronomy—for three years, and I spent much of that time working with Chad on research projects with the Key Insights on Nearby Galaxies: a Far-Infrared Survey with Herschel (KINGFISH) and Herschel Inventory of The Agents of Galaxy Evolution (HERITAGE) surveys. Chad has written numerous publications on extragalactic infrared astronomy, especially on the distributions of dust, stars, and gas within galaxies in the “local universe.” He was also the MIPS Instrument Scientist for the Spitzer telescope, which enabled a lot of excellent research by others.

As you may know, I’m trained in theoretical astrophysics, and my expertise is in the large-scale structure of the universe, dark matter, galaxy formation, and cosmology, and when I’ve used data, they’ve usually been in optical wavelengths. Needless to say, I had a steep learning curve to navigate in order to work on my infrared research, and Chad helped me up it. Chad was my friend and colleague, and I really enjoyed working with him. He was patient with me, had a great sense of humor, gave me insightful suggestions and feedback, and helped me produce interesting results. (The two main papers we wrote together are here and here.) If I continue with my academic career, he would be one of my role models.

Chad also liked beer, so we definitely got along well. While I worked at Steward Observatory, he and I and others in the “infrared wing” frequently went to 1702 for pizza and beer for lunch. The night before the conference, many of his old friends and I went back to 1702 for a few pints. Chad also liked to play the computer game Quake, where he was known as “Chuckles the clown.” During her opening remarks at the conference, Joannah Hinz said, “Since no one is admitting to have played Quake, it seems that Chad must have been playing it by himself!” Well, I’ll admit that Chad didn’t have to twist my arm much to convince me to play it when I was at Arizona, and when I’d gotten a new computer, his first task was to make sure that Quake ran on it well. The game made for a good afternoon break and a funny way to interact with people. (If you’re wondering, I played as The Tick.)

Many of Chad’s colleagues and collaborators attended and spoke at the conference, including Rob Kennicutt, Margaret Meixner, Bruce Draine, Maud Galametz, and Dennis Zaritsky. I was moved by all of the personal and astronomical tributes to Chad throughout the conference. It’s clear that he influenced, inspired, and was respected by many people. His legacy lives on.

Chad is survived by his parents and siblings, his wife Sue Dubuque, their three children (Max, Sydney, and Henry), and his numerous friends. He is missed.

Ramin Skibba

Science Writer and Freelance Journalist