Postcards from deep space

It's way too easy to let yourself get caught up in all the ugliness in the news.

Scandals, allegations of crimes of all sorts by various public figures, humanitarian crises, ecological damage done by people who seem to have no real care for the long-term habitability of the Earth.  Hypocrisy, dishonesty, corruption.

Pretty dark stuff, and to judge by the news, it's about all humanity has to offer.

So today I'm going to write about something hopeful -- an indication that we have the capacity for a whole lot of positive things.  Curiosity, innovation, teamwork, and a deep-seated determination to understand the universe we live in.

Ultima Thule is the popular (but unofficial) designation of the object that is, much more prosaically, called MU-69.  It's far out in space by anyone's standards, circling the Sun at an average distance of 44 AU (astronomical units, the average distance from the Earth to the Sun).  By comparison, Neptune -- the outermost actual planet -- orbits at about 30 AU.  Even Pluto (which was downgraded from "planet" to "dwarf planet" status a few years back) orbits at an average 39.5 AU.

So if you reached Pluto, you'd still have a distance of four times the Earth to the Sun to cover before you'd be within hailing distance of Ultima Thule.

And it's not a large object, making me wonder how the hell anyone saw it in the first place.  It's highly oblong, with a long axis of about 33 kilometers and a short axis of 19 kilometers.  So that's the first amazing thing; using the Hubble Space Telescope, we spotted an object only a little more than twice the size of Manhattan Island from a distance of 6.5 trillion kilometers.

Then, astronomers decided it'd be a good place to visit, based on its position with respect to the trajectory of the New Horizons probe, which had sent back stunning photographs of Pluto in 2015.  So off the little spacecraft went, to visit one of the most distant objects known in the Solar System.

The photographs coming back are amazing.  It was known that Ultima Thule was oddly shaped, but as the probe approached, it became clearer and clearer that it was just an oval.  Some of the earliest photographs made it look like a spinning bowling pin.  When it got closer, we were able to see that it was shaped more like a snowman, leading to the inference that it was formed by the collision of two roughly-spherical bodies.  The impact must have been remarkably gentle; too fast, and it would have shattered one or both of the objects.  Instead, they appear to have spiraled in toward one another until finally they kissed -- and stuck together.

[Image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Astronomers are understandably thrilled by this opportunity to study an object close-up that is observable only as a 26th-magnitude speck of light from our position here on Earth.  Astrophysicist and former member of Queen Brian May wrote a song for the occasion, called "New Horizons," celebrating our perpetual drive for extending what we know about the universe.  (This isn't the first time May has worked his scientific background into his music.  One of Queen's best, and most under-appreciated, songs is the bittersweet and poignant "'39," which has as its basis the bizarre effects of near-lightspeed travel -- especially time dilation, which describes how fast travel slows down the passage of time, so that if you were to leave behind your loved ones and travel near the speed of light, you'd age only a year while the loved ones you left behind would age decades.  If you haven't heard it, click the link -- it's fantastic.)

NASA has promised better photographs as more data comes streaming in from the probe, but the ones they've already gotten are pretty amazing.  When you're looking at them, keep in mind that you're looking at something out there spinning space, half again as far from the Sun as the planet Neptune, and be amazed.

So let's take a break from the constant stream of negativity and vitriol, and consider what incredible journeys we can take into wonderment and beauty, journeys that have taken us into the farthest reaches of the Solar System and beyond.  As we sit down here, engaged in our petty squabbles and petty rhetoric, an intrepid little probe is out there relaying back information about are on the very edges of what we know.  And that, I think, is something about which humanity should rightly be proud.

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Carl Zimmer has been a science writer for a long time, and his contributions -- mostly on the topic of evolution -- have been featured in National Geographic, Discover, and The New York Times, not to mention appearances on Fresh Air, This American Life, and Radiolab.  He's the author of this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation, which is about the connections between genetics, behavior, and human evolution -- She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potentials of Heredity.

Zimmer's lucid, eloquent style makes this book accessible to the layperson, and he not only looks at the science of genetics but its impact on society -- such as our current infatuation with personal DNA tests such as the ones offered by 23 & Me and Ancestry.  It's a brilliant read, and one in which you'll learn not only about our deep connection to our ancestry, but where humanity might be headed.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Crash course

As if we needed one, there's another clickbait sort-of-sciencey-or-something site that I should warn you about.

It's called the Mother Nature Network, and it bills itself as follows:

MNN is designed for people who want to make the world a better place.  Its content is engaging, non-political, and easy-to-understand and goes well beyond traditional "green" issues — encompassing topics that include family, health, home, travel, food, and community involvement. It has been labeled “The Green CNN” by Time, “The USA Today of Sustainability” by Fast Company, “Green Machine” by Associated Press, and “one of the hottest web properties out there” by NBC News; highlighted on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon; selected “Best Idea” at Fortune Magazine’s Green Summit; and chosen as a “Top Pick” by Newsweek.

Well, that may be, but it makes me wonder about how Time et al. are deciding who to laud.  MNN is even a cut below I Fucking Love Science as regards to sensationalized headlines, shallow analysis of actual science stories, and the usual smattering of "the world of the bizarre" kind of articles (as an example, on of their "trending stories" is "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016").

My objection, though, is not that there's another clickbaity website that exists solely to grab ad revenue -- heaven knows those are a dime a dozen, and include sites that claim to be legitimate media, such as The Daily Mail Fail.  My main beef with these places is the misrepresentation of science.  Because, heaven also knows that given the general low comprehension of actual science by the voting public, we do not need media making it worse.

As an example, check out their story from this past Wednesday called "A Whole Other Star Is On a Crash Course With Our Solar System" by Bryan Nelson.  Well, don't actually check it out unless you want them to get another click's worth of advertising money.  But let me tell you the gist, and save you the moral dilemma.

First, what the hell is with the headline?  Is Bryan Nelson in third grade?  "A Whole Other Star?"  So, it's not Part of Another Star?  Or the Whole Same Star As Before?

But we'll let that pass.  The topic does sound alarming, doesn't it?  But when you read the text, you find that we've got a while to prepare:

[I]n around 1.35 million years, that's close to what might happen.  Scientists have been plotting the course of a rogue star, Gliese 710, which currently sits in the constellation of Serpens some 64 light years from Earth.  Turns out, it's headed straight for us.

And "close to what might happen?"  What the fuck does that even mean?  Turns out Bryan Nelson isn't really sure either:

The star isn't scheduled to collide directly with Earth, but it will be passing through our solar system's Oort Cloud, a shell of countless comets and other bodies in the outer reaches of the Sun's gravitational influence.  You might think that's a safe distance, but the star is likely to slingshot comets all over the solar system, and one of those could very well have our name on it.

So a star is going to be in our general vicinity over a million years from now, and it might disturb some comets, which are likely to get flung in toward the inner Solar System, and one of them might hit the Earth.  Or not.

But that's not all:

Scientists calculated that Gliese 710 is the star that's expected to come closest to us within the next 10 million years (which is as far ahead as scientists could project), but it's not the only close encounter.  As many as 14 other stars could come within 3 light-years distance in the next few million years, and there are numerous fainter, red dwarf stars with unknown trajectories that could be headed our way too.

So we shouldn't just worry about Gliese 710, we should also worry about other stars which might or might not come close to the Solar System in the next few million years, not to mention other stars which might or might not exist and could do indescribably bad things if they do.

"Hoag's Object" -- the remnants of a collision between two galaxies [image courtesy of NASA]

I decided to do a little research, and find out where all this stuff had come from.  I found a paper in Astronomy Letters from 2010 (i.e., actual research and not hyped silliness) called "Searching for Stars Closely Encountering the Solar System" by Vladimir V. Bobylev, and it included the following:

Based on a new version of the Hipparcos catalog and currently available radial velocity data, we have searched for stars that either have encountered or will encounter the solar neighborhood within less than 3 pc in the time interval from −2 Myr to +2 Myr. Nine new candidates within 30 pc of the Sun have been found. To construct the stellar orbits relative to the solar orbit, we have used the epicyclic approximation. We show that, given the errors in the observational data, the probability that the well-known star HIP 89 825 (GL 710) encountering with the Sun most closely falls into the Oort cloud is 0.86 in the time interval 1.45 ± 0.06 Myr. This star also has a nonzero probability, 1 × 10−4, of falling into the region d < 1000 AU, where its influence on Kuiper Belt objects becomes possible.

Did you catch that?  The "nonzero probability" of Gliese 710 influencing the Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud comets is 1 × 10−4.

For you non-math-types, that's one in ten thousand.

If you needed any more indication that the Mother Nature Network article was sensationalized clickbait, there you have it.

So add that one to our list of suspect media sources, along with the usuals -- Natural News, InfoWars, Mercola, Breitbart, Before It's News, and so on.  My general advice is not to go there at all.  But if you disregard this, whatever you do, don't click on "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016."  You have been warned.