Collision of worlds

Recently I've done posts about exploding lakes and colossal solar storms and places where continents are being torn in two, so it seems fitting to end the week on an appropriately cataclysmic note with the discovery of the remnants of a collision between two giant ice planets.

The coolest part of all of this is that one of the people who first realized something weird was going on was an amateur astronomer named Arttu Sainio, of Järvenpää, Finland (who is listed as an author and credited as "Independent Researcher" in the paper that appeared in Nature this week -- how awesome is that?).  Matthew Kenworthy, of Leiden Observatory, was scouring the data looking for evidence of rings around stars that might be involved in planet formation, which would be indicated by a periodic dimming and brightening of the light from the parent star.  Kenworthy found a candidate -- a sunlike star called ASASSN-21qj, 1,800 light years from Earth -- and posted his find on Twitter, saying, "It's amazing, this star is fading!"  Sainio saw his tweet and responded, "But did you know that it is brightening in the infrared?"

Sainio had been looking at data from NASA's NEOWISE orbiting telescope, and found that nine hundred days before the star had begun dimming, it had shown a strong uptick in the infrared region of the spectrum.  This clued in Kenworthy that his hopes of finding a ring were dashed -- but that maybe there was something even cooler going on here.

He assembled a team of astronomers to analyze the data, including Sainio's peculiar discovery, and they came to the conclusion that the best explanation for the anomalous brightening in the infrared and dimming in the visible light region was the collision of two Neptune-sized planets -- leaving an incandescent cloud of debris orbiting the star which radiated in the infrared as the heat from the collision dissipated, but partially blocked the star's visible light at the same time.

Artist's conception of the planetary collision around ASASSN-21qj [Image courtesy of artist Mark Garlick]

What will happen to the debris cloud next is a matter of speculation, because this is the first time anyone's seen an event like this occur.  While planetary collisions aren't uncommon -- our own Moon, for example, is thought to have formed when a huge protoplanet slammed into the Earth, blowing a blob of molten rock into space that eventually coalesced as the Moon -- no one's ever watched it happen more-or-less in real time.  It's probable that the debris will pull together gravitationally and eventually form one or more planets, but there's no certainty about how long that'll take.

"It will be fascinating to observe further developments," said Zoe Leinhardt, of the University of Bristol, who co-authored the paper.  "Ultimately, the mass of material around the remnant may condense to form a retinue of moons that will orbit around this new planet, but whether that will take ten years or a thousand, we don't yet know."

So a sharp-eyed amateur astronomer tipped off a whole bunch of professional astronomers and astrophysicists to take a closer look at a star that was behaving oddly, and ended up discovering something no one had ever seen happening before.  Just goes to show what a dedicated enthusiast can accomplish.  I've often felt awkward about my lack of credentials in the field I worked in -- I taught biology for over three decades with a bachelor's degree in physics and a master's in historical linguistics -- but I suppose there's nothing wrong with being a deeply curious, passionate-if-uncredentialed amateur.

Dilettantes FTW!

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The missing day

Can I make the not-very-earthshattering observation that if you are explaining evidence supporting a belief, your argument is not made stronger by lying about it?

Especially if that belief is that your own personal religion is not only superior morally, but one hundred percent true?

I'm referring to a story of dubious provenance that has been showing up all over the place lately, mostly on Christian apologetics sites, and then forwarded by people who (1) don't understand how science works, (2) don't know how to do a Google search to check for accuracy, or (3) would prefer something sound good than be correct.  Or all three.  I ran into it via the site Calvary Pilot ("Piloting Souls to the Cross"), but other versions I've seen are substantially similar.  Here are a few excerpts, edited only for length:

For all you scientists out there and for all the students who have had a hard time convincing these people regarding the truth of the Bible – here’s something that illustrates God’s awesome creation and shows He is still in control.

 
Did you know that NASA’s space programmes are busy proving that what has been called ‘myth’ in the Bible is true?  Mr. Harold Hill, President of the Curtis Engine Company in Baltimore, and a consultant in the space programmes, relates the following incident: "One of the most amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts and space scientists at Green Belt, Maryland.  They were checking out the positions of the sun, moon and planets out in space where they would be 100, and 1000 years from now. We have to know this as we do not want a satellite to collide with any of these in its orbits."

So we're off to a flying start, with the claim that NASA has to be very careful to make sure that satellites in orbit around the Earth don't collide with the Sun or Neptune or anything.  You can see how that could happen.

Computer measurements and data were run back and forth over the centuries when suddenly it came to a halt, displaying a red signal, which meant that either there was something wrong with the information fed into it, or with the results as compared to the standards.  They called in the service department to check it out, and the technicians asked what was wrong.  The scientists had discovered that somewhere in space in elapsed time a day was missing.  Nobody seemed able to come up with a solution to the problem.

Which brings up the awkward question of how you'd discover that a day was missing.  Were the technicians sitting around, monitoring the satellite transmissions, and suddenly one of them got this horrified look on his face and said, "Wait... where the fuck did I put last Tuesday?"  Then all of the other technicians and engineers and physicists and so forth all start searching under desks and in storage closets and behind garbage cans and so on, but to no avail.  Last Tuesday is definitely AWOL.

Finally one of the team, a Christian, said: “You know, when I was still in Sunday School, they spoke about the sun standing still…”  While his colleagues didn’t believe him, they did not have an answer either, so they said: “Show us.”  He got a Bible and opened it at the book of Joshua where they found a pretty ridiculous statement for anyone with ‘common sense’.  There they read about the Lord saying to Joshua: “Fear them not, I have delivered them into thy hand; there shall not be a man of them stand before thee.” (Joshua 10:8).  Joshua was concerned because the enemy had surrounded him, and if darkness fell, they would overpower him.  So Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still!  That’s right – “And the sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is this not written in the book of Ja’-sher?  So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hastened not to go down about a whole day.” (Joshua 10:13).

The astronauts and scientists said: "There is the missing day!"

So there was much rejoicing.  But then one of them pointed out that it wasn't a whole day that had been found -- it was only 23 hours and 20 minutes. Which left forty minutes unaccounted for, "which could mean trouble 1000 years from now."  Why it isn't trouble now, I have no idea, but concern for our distant descendants sent the NASA folks back on a search for the missing two-thirds of an hour.

And you'll never guess where they found it.

The Bible.  See, I told you you'd never guess.

As the Christian employee thought about it, he remembered somewhere in the Bible which said the sun went backwards.  The scientists told him he was out of his mind, but once again they opened the Book and read these words in 2 Kings.  Hezekiah, on his deathbed, was visited by the prophet, Isaiah, who told him he was not going to die.  Hezekiah asked for some sign as proof. Isaiah said: “Shall the sun go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?”  And Hezekiah answered: “It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees; nay, but let the shadow return backwards ten degrees.”  Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord, and He brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.” (2 Kings 20:9 -11).  Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes!  Twenty-three hours and twenty minutes in Joshua, plus 40 minutes in 2 Kings accounted for the missing day in the universe!

Which would have been the cause for even more rejoicing, if the whole thing hadn't been made up.  I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist (a real one,  I mean, like they have at NASA) to find the story eye-rollingly ridiculous, but it has been so widely circulated -- I've seen it three times on Facebook just in the last week -- that it actually has a Snopes page dedicated to it.  In it, we find out that Harold Hill was the president of Curtis Engine Company of Baltimore, but that's pretty much the only thing in the story that is true.  First off, Hill wasn't a NASA consultant.  It turns out that Hill was an evangelical Christian with a fairly loose interpretation of the word "true," because he'd read about the "lost day" legend in a book by Harold Rimmer entitled The Harmony of Science and Scripture and decided that the story would carry more punch if he claimed he'd witnessed the whole thing happening.  He embellished his account -- adding, of course, accolades such as "NASA consultant" for himself -- and repeated it many times in public speeches.  He even devoted a whole chapter to it in his 1974 book How to Live Like a King's Kid, apparently because by then, he'd told the tale so many times that he actually was beginning to believe it.

John Martin, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still over Gideon (1816) [Image is in the Public Domain]

And now with the amazing bullshit conduit that is the internet, the story has roared into life again.  What's funny, though, is that the claim is so ridiculous even Answers in Genesis is saying Christians shouldn't use it as an argument for the Bible having a scientific basis, and heaven knows AIG isn't exactly an exemplar of factual accuracy.  Snopes writer David Mikkelson says about it:

To those who've given over their hearts to God and the Holy Word, this is a deeply satisfying legend.  Faith is, after all, the firm belief in something which cannot necessarily be proved, a quality that can leave believers (especially those who find themselves in the midst of non-believers) feeling unsatisfied.  As steadfast as their certainty is, they cannot prove the rightness of the path they tread to those who jeer at their convictions.  And this is a heavy burden to shoulder.  A legend such as the "missing day explained" tale speaks straight to the hearts of those who yearn for a bit of vindication in this life.  Being right isn't always enough: sometimes what one most longs for is sweet recognition from others.

Which may well be the case, but doesn't take away from the problem of a devout follower of a religion that considers "Thou shalt not bear false witness" as one of its fundamental teachings passing along a story that is essentially one long lie.  It makes me wish that as a corollary of the ninth commandment, Yahweh had seen fit to add, "And this meaneth that thou shalt spend five minutes and do a Google search before thou postest this shit on Facebook."

So anyway.  No, NASA is not spending its woefully tiny budget paying scientists to verify the Old Testament.  There's no evidence whatsoever of a "lost day," because against what clock would you be able to verify that time had stopped three-thousand-odd years ago?  I'd be much obliged if the people who think that God is going to bless them if they pass along this nonsense would just stop already.  Thank you.

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There goes the Sun

And to end the week on an appropriately surreal note, yesterday I received a friendly email from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia of the "You think that is stupid, wait till you see this" variety.  As well-intentioned as these usually are, I always hesitate to read further, because my general impression of human foolishness and gullibility really doesn't need any further reinforcement.

This one was in response to my recent post about "activating your etheric DNA," so already we've set the bar for comparative idiocy pretty high.  But as I continued to read the email (yes, I succumbed to my 'satiable curiosity), I found that said bar was cleared in a single leap by this particular claim.

So without further ado: the idea that makes the etheric DNA people look sane and sensible.  Ready?

The Sun doesn't exist.

According to a group of loons calling themselves "asunists," what we're calling the Sun is just an illusion generated by light collected and beamed at the Earth by an array of curved mirrors.  You might be asking, "Light coming from where, exactly?", but that is only the first of the many problems we encounter upon delving into the situation.  Apparently the idea came about when someone googled "solar simulator" and found that there is a device that approximates the radiation spectrum and illuminance of the Sun, and is used for testing solar cells, sunscreen, plastics, and so forth.  So in a classic case of adding two and two and getting 147, they then interpreted this to mean that the Sun itself was a simulation.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Who is responsible for this?  Well, nasty old NASA, of course.  Same ones who keep the Moon hologram going and are suppressing information about the Earth being flat and/or hollow, not to mention the impending catastrophic visit by the fabled planet Nibiru.

What evidence do we have?  The producer of the above-linked YouTube video explains how he knows that the Sun isn't real, and a lot of it seems to be the fact that in some photographs, the outline of the Sun is "fuzzy."  It used to be clear and sharp, he says, but now because of "chemicals in the air" the Sun has gotten all blurred.  So apparently we used to have a real Sun, but now it's been replaced by a simulator which just isn't as good as the real thing.

My question is -- well, amongst my many questions is -- don't you think someone would have noticed when the real Sun was taken down, and the simulator put in place?  Oh, and what did they do with the old Sun?  Was it sent to the stellar retirement home?  Was it just turned out into the cold vacuum of space, to wander, lost and forlorn forever?

Of course, the question that applies to all of these wacko conspiracy theories is why anyone would bother to do all of this.  Don't you think that if the Sun really was a big bunch of mirrors, the Earth was flat, or whatnot, the scientists at NASA would simply tell us?  What could they possibly gain by pretending that the Sun exists and the Earth is an oblate spheroid?

The oddly hilarious postscript to all of this is that the whole the-Sun-doesn't-exist conspiracy theory received a boost from none other than Ray "Mr. Banana" Comfort, the outspoken young-earth creationist who a few years ago got his ass handed to him when he showed up to distribute creationist literature at a talk by Richard Dawkins hosted by the Skeptic Society.  Well, Comfort has picked up on the "asunist" thing and used it as an argument against atheism (in Comfort's mind, everything is an argument against atheism).  He tells us about his perception of the "asunists" -- mischaracterizing their claim as stating that they believe we're actually in the dark -- and compares that to atheists' conclusion that God doesn't exist.

Which just shows you that there is no idea so completely stupid that you can't alter it so as to make it way stupider.

So to the loyal reader who sent me the email, all I can say is "thanks."  I now am even more convinced that Idiocracy was a non-fiction documentary.  It's time to get myself a cup of coffee and try to reboot my brain so that I can try to write something halfway sensible on my new work-in-progress.  Also time to start watching for the sunrise.

Or the solarsimulatorrise.  Or whatever.

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Look upwards

Since (surprise!) we've all once again survived the apocalypse, and Saturday September 24, 2022 turned out to be less of a "day to remember" than a "day I've already kind of forgotten," today I'm going to turn to one of my favorite topics, namely: space.

I've been continually wowed by the images coming in from the James Webb Space Telescope.  When it was first deployed, the astronomer and engineers responsible for it told us we were going to be blown away by the quality of the data it would send us, and if anything, that's been an understatement.  We've seen images of astonishing crystal clarity, not only photographs of galaxies further away than anything yet studied but detailed views of objects much closer to home.

It's one of the latter that prompted me to write today's post, because the latest posted image from the JWST is of the planet Neptune.  Just a couple of months ago I did an entire post on how generally weird Neptune is; a lot of our information on it is old, however, having come from the Voyager 2 flyby a little over thirty years ago.  Since then, we've had to study it from farther away, and a lot of what we've learned has raised more questions than answers.

So I was really eager to see what JWST would find out about the eighth planet.  And it's started out with a bang.  Check out this image, showing the planet with its rings and several of its fourteen moons:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The rings are made of dark material -- this is actually the first time they've been directly observed since Voyager 2 (even the Hubble Space Telescope didn't have the optical resolution to see them).  The bright spots in the atmosphere are clouds of methane ice; the planet itself is not its usual deep cobalt blue because this image was taken in the near infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

I find it deeply inspiring that despite the continuing turmoil down here on Earth, the scientists still have their eyes trained on deep space.  It also keeps us humble, you know?  Even as a child, when I'd look up at the sky through my little telescope, it always gave me a feeling of awe at how majestic, magnificent, and absolutely huge the universe was.

It reminds me of the words of Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, about his experience of seeing the Earth from space: "The thing that really surprised me was that it [Earth] projected an air of fragility.  And why, I don’t know.  I don’t know to this day.  I had a feeling it’s tiny, it’s shiny, it’s beautiful, it’s home, and it’s fragile."

It's a perspective we all should have.

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A spoon full of embarrassment

Of all the unpleasant feelings in the world, I think I hate humiliation the most.

I once said that I would rather be physically beaten than humiliated.  I can't even handle watching when other people embarrass themselves, which is why I kind of hate most sitcoms.  I mean, sometimes it can be undeniably funny, like my friend's experience at a restaurant:

Server:  What would you like?

My friend:  I'd like the fried chicken half, please.

Server:  What side?

My friend (uncertainly):  Um, I don't know... Left, I guess.

Server:

My friend:

Server:  Ma'am, I meant which side order would you like with your dinner.

My friend: *resolves never to set foot in that restaurant again*

But even in situations like that, I totally understand my friend's reaction of never wanting to see that server again.  In her place, I'd be absolutely certain that the server would see me across the street or something, and elbow her friends and say, "Hey, look!  It's left chicken guy!"

So I can barely even imagine what it must be like to humiliate yourself while being watched by millions.  This is what happened in 1973 to self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller, who was invited to demonstrate his supposed abilities on the Johnny Carson Show.  Before his TV career, Carson had been a professional stage magician, so he knew how easy it is to fool people -- and he knew all the tricks a faker would use to hoodwink his audience.

Uri Geller in 2009 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dmitry Rozhkov, Uri Geller in Russia2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

He set Geller up with props like the ones he used in his "psychic demonstrations" -- and wouldn't let Geller use his own props, nor handle the ones Carson provided before the show.  The result was twenty minutes of the most cringeworthy television I've ever seen, as Geller failed over and over, blaming whatever he could think of -- Carson's disbelief, the hostile atmosphere, the response of the audience.  He finally settled on "I'm not feeling strong tonight."

Here's a clip of the incident, if you can stand to watch it.

Every time I think of Geller, I always am baffled by why this single experience didn't lead him to vanish entirely.  If something like that happened to me, I'd probably change my name and consider plastic surgery.  But no -- after a brief time when he seemed set back by his catastrophic performance with Carson, he bounced back and became more popular than ever.

So this is two things I don't get, combined into one; how Geller didn't retreat in disarray, and how anyone continued to believe that what he does is anything more than a clever magic trick.  But neither happened.  In fact, the reason this comes up today is because a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that Geller is still at it, almost fifty years later, this time with a pronouncement warning NASA to get ready, because we're going to have an alien invasion soon.

The most amusing part of it is the reason he thinks we're due for ET to land; the discovery of a peculiar radio source that pulsates -- but (compared to other pulsating radio sources) with a verrrrrry long period.  This source flashes on and off every twenty minutes; a more ordinary pulsar flashes on twenty times a second.  So far, astronomers are still trying to figure out a natural phenomenon that could cause this really slow pulsation rate, but at present all they have are guesses.

But here's the funny part, apropos of Geller; he claims that this radio source is the signal that the aliens are about to land.  Unfortunately, this runs head-first into the fact that the anomalous astronomical object is four thousand light years away.  Which means that if the aliens were sending that signal toward Earth, it was intended for the Sumerians.

Be that as it may, Geller said we better get ready.  "A team mapping radio waves in the universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before," Geller posted on Instagram.  "No doubt in my mind that this is connected to alien intelligence way way superior than ours.  Start deciphering their messages!  They are preparing us for a mass landing soon!  #nasa #hoova #spectra #spectra #aliens."

I'm curious about what he thinks we should ready ourselves.  I mean, what's he personally going to do to save humanity from the aliens?  Bend a spoon at them?

Anyhow, I guess not everyone overreacts to being humiliated the way I do.  Probably a good thing, that; one of my many faults is taking myself way too seriously.  But really.  How does Geller do it?  To me that's more impressive than any of his alleged psychic talents.  He should bill himself as The Amazing Impervious Man, or something.

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It's obvious to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I'm fascinated with geology and paleontology.  That's why this week's book-of-the-week is brand new: Thomas Halliday's Otherlands: A Journey Through Extinct Worlds.

Halliday takes us to sixteen different bygone worlds -- each one represented by a fossil site, from our ancestral australopithecenes in what is now Tanzania to the Precambrian Ediacaran seas, filled with animals that are nothing short of bizarre.  (One, in fact, is so weird-looking it was christened Hallucigenia.)  Halliday doesn't just tell us about the fossils, though; he recreates in words what the place would have looked like back when those animals and plants were alive, giving a rich perspective on just how much the Earth has changed over its history -- and how fragile the web of life is.

It's a beautiful and eye-opening book -- if you love thinking about prehistory, you need a copy of Otherlands.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The eye in the sky

It's been awfully hard to keep my spirits up lately.

There are the ongoing issues -- the Omicron spike of COVID worldwide (and watching helplessly as callous politicians turned vaccination into a partisan trump card), and the slow slide of my own country into something very like fascism -- but above and beyond that, I've had a hell of a run personally.  For a variety of reasons I've cut ties with the publisher I worked with for six years, I lost one good friend after a valiant fight with multiple sclerosis only days after another had suffered a debilitating stroke, and I hurt my back this summer and have been unable to engage in my favorite pastime of running for six months.  I blogged about the loss of our beloved old dog from some kind of nasty virus last month -- made worse by the fact that three days later, our other dog got the same disease (we spent most of Thanksgiving Day in the emergency veterinary hospital with him), and just last week, our new dog got it, too. 

Both, fortunately, made a complete recovery, but was touch and go with both of them for a while.

When you get a run of calamities like this, it's easy to slip into despondency.  I've definitely had my moments in that dreadful place in the past year.  The only remedy, I've found, is to force my vision to turn outward, away from the troubles in my life large and small, and remind myself that even when things seem like they're terrible, we're still immersed in a grand, awe-inspiring, and beautiful universe.

That's why I found the launching of the James Webb Space Telescope on Christmas morning such a welcome respite.  It's easy enough to look around you and come to the conclusion that all humans are awful -- certainly, the media thrives on fostering that view -- but when you see something like this come off without a hitch, it's a nice reminder that our species is capable of truly amazing things.

"The James Webb Space Telescope represents the ambition that NASA and our partners maintain to propel us forward into the future," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "The promise of Webb is not what we know we will discover; it's what we don't yet understand or can't yet fathom about our universe. I can't wait to see what it uncovers!"

The JWST is the successor to the famed Hubble Space Telescope, and is the largest, most powerful, and most sophisticated space observation apparatus ever launched.  The array of astronomical phenomena it will study is mind-boggling -- everything from exoplanets to the galactic distribution of dark matter to the unimaginably luminous and distant quasars and the cosmic microwave background radiation that is the remnant of the first microseconds after the Big Bang.

[Artist's rendition of the James Webb Space Telescope is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

"The launch of the Webb Space Telescope is a pivotal moment -- this is just the beginning for the Webb mission," said Gregory L. Robinson, Webb's program director at NASA Headquarters.  "Now we will watch Webb's highly anticipated and critical 29 days on the edge.  When the spacecraft unfurls in space, Webb will undergo the most difficult and complex deployment sequence ever attempted in space.  Once commissioning is complete, we will see awe-inspiring images that will capture our imagination."

It's anticipated that it will take six months before the JWST is fully operational, and I can't even imagine how it must feel for the people who have invested so much time, energy, and effort into building and launching it.  When the first images come rolling in, probably some time in June of 2022, you can bet there'll be champagne flowing liberally.

Of course, as an astronomy buff, the whole thing is tremendously exciting to me, but more than that, to me it's a symbol that even as dismal as things have been, there's still reason to hope.  Yes, we're capable of horrible things -- acts of hate and violence, narrow-mindedness, power-hungriness -- but we're also capable of dazzling flights of the mind, tremendous creativity, and amazing beauty.  It reminds me of the end of Max Ehrmann's famous poem "Desiderata," which (although I've read it many times) never fails to bring me to tears.  It seems like a fitting way to end this post:

Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.  Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.  And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.  With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be cheerful.  Strive to be happy.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson has become deservedly famous for his efforts to bring the latest findings of astronomers and astrophysicists to laypeople.  Not only has he given hundreds of public talks on everything from the Big Bang to UFOs, a couple of years ago he launched (and hosted) an updated reboot of Carl Sagan's wildly successful 1980 series Cosmos.

He has also communicated his vision through his writing, and this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is his 2019 Letters From an Astrophysicist.  A public figure like Tyson gets inundated with correspondence, and Tyson's drive to teach and inspire has impelled him to answer many of them personally (however arduous it may seem to those of us who struggle to keep up with a dozen emails!).  In Letters, he has selected 101 of his most intriguing pieces of correspondence, along with his answers to each -- in the process creating a book that is a testimony to his intelligence, his sense of humor, his passion as a scientist, and his commitment to inquiry.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Mushrooms on Mars

So far loyal readers of Skeptophilia have sent me four different links to the same underlying story, along with a message along the lines of "Whaddya think of this?"  The links all take various angles on a paper by Rhawn Gabriel Joseph and Xinli Wei in Advances in Microbiology claiming that photos taken by the Mars rover Curiosity show the presence of live fungi.

Without further ado, here are the photos, which are real enough:

[Photos are in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

When I saw the top photo, my immediate thought was that if you think the only way to explain wiping away stuff and having it reappear is if the stuff is a living organism, you need to come take a look at how long furniture in my house remains clean after being dusted.  I'll admit that I'm kind of housework-impaired, and chances are one day I'll go missing and when people come to investigate they'll find me trapped inside an enormous dust bunny, but still, the fact remains that "dirt blows around" seems to be a universal tendency.  Second, the lower photo looks like a fungus or at least fungus spores, but saying "it looks like X, so it is X" is not how science is done.

The claim has generated a lot of hype and also a lot of backlash from actual science types, such as this scathing piece by Tristan Greene over at TheNextWeb, wherein Joseph and Wei basically get their asses handed to them for leaping to an entirely unwarranted conclusion based on a handful of photographs that can be explained by any number of other, more likely hypotheses.  There are lots of microscopic round things besides fungal spores, so without any sort of biochemical analysis there's no way these can conclusively be labeled as alive, much less as terrestrial-type fungi.

Rhawn Gabriel Joseph, however, is not a man to take this sort of criticism lying down.  Saying Joseph is "combative" is a little like saying Stalin had "anger management issues."  He has sued NASA for ignoring his previous claims about life on Mars, sued Springer (the academic publishing company that publishes the journals Nature and Scientific American) for retracting one of his papers, and on his website defiantly proclaims that he has "published major scientific studies in the fields of neuroscience, development, embryology, evolution, quantum physics, consciousness, genetics, and astrobiology."

Funny, if he's an expert in basically everything, how just about every reference to him in actual scientific journals describe him as a "crank," a "kook," and "a self-aggrandizing spotlight seeker."

Then there's the issue of the journal the paper is published in -- Advances in Microbiology.  AiM is one of the journals owned by SCIRP -- Scientific Research Publishing -- a China-based company long associated with predatory, pay-to-play practices:

[T]here may be some strong and honest articles published in SCIRP journals. However, these articles are devalued and stigmatized by association with all the junk science that SCIRP publishes.  The authors of the good articles are being victimized by the publisher’s policy of publishing pseudoscientific articles like “Basic Principles Underlying Human Physiology.”  SCIRP only rarely retracts articles, preferring instead to protect the interests of its customers, the paying authors.

Oh, and apropos of not much, here's the photo of himself he has on his website:

No, I'm not joking.

The issue here goes back to the ECREE Principle; Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.  Okay, maybe those are Martian fungal spores.  But before you can conclude that, you'd better have some damn good evidence supporting your claim, something more than "we see stuff moving around":

Hundreds of dimpled donut-shaped "mushroom-like" formations approximately 1mm in size are adjacent or attached to these mycelium-like complexes.  Additional sequences document that white amorphous masses beneath rock-shelters increase in mass, number, or disappear and that similar white-fungus-like specimens appeared inside an open rover compartment.  Comparative statistical analysis of a sample of 9 spherical specimens believed to be fungal "puffballs" photographed on Sol 1145 and 12 specimens that emerged from beneath the soil on Sol 1148 confirmed the nine grew significantly closer together as their diameters expanded and some showed evidence of movement.

Look, no one would be more excited than me if the rovers did discover Martian life.  Honestly, it's not that I think microbial life on Mars is all that unlikely.  It's just that you don't support your claims in science by pointing and yelling, "Hey, lookit that!" over and over.  If these are fungal spores, then there are a lot of them, so it's only a matter of time before they'll be detected by the actual rigorous biochemical analysis the rovers are equipped to do.

And I can guarantee that the results will be published in a reputable science journal, not an open-access affair like Advances in Microbiology, and almost certainly the lead author won't be some Disco-Era refugee who claims to be the intellectual equivalent of Stephen Hawking, David Eagleman, Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, and Gregor Mendel put together.

So, sad to say, that's where the issue stands.  If I'm wrong, I will happily eat crow and publish an update and/or retraction.  I'd like to think the firestorm Joseph has ignited will cause him to retreat in disarray, but his motto seems to be "Death Before Backing Down," so I'm guessing this isn't the last we'll hear from him on the topic.  Stay tuned.

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I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Knockin' on heaven's door

It's been awhile since we've have a truly goofy claim to consider, so to take a brief diversion from more serious issues, today I bring you:

NASA space telescopes have photographed the Celestial City of New Jerusalem, as hath been prophesied in the scriptures.

I wish I was making this up.  The claim appeared on the ultra-fundamentalist site Heaven & Hell, and the post, written by one Samuel M. Wanginjogu, reads like some kind of apocalyptic wet dream.

It opens with a bang.  "Despite new repairs to the Hubble Telescope," Wanginjogu writes, "NASA refuses to release old photos or take new ones of Heaven!"

Imagine that.

He goes on to explain further:

Just days after space shuttle astronauts repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in mid December, the giant lens focused on a star cluster at the edge of the universe – and photographed heaven! 

That’s the word from author and researcher Marcia Masson, who quoted highly placed NASA insiders as having said that the telescope beamed hundreds of photos back to the command center at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., on December 26. 

The pictures clearly show a vast white city floating eerily in the blackness of space. 

And the expert quoted NASA sources as saying that the city is definitely Heaven “because life as we know it couldn’t possibly exist in icy, airless space. 

“This is it – this is the proof we’ve been waiting for,” Dr. Masson told reporters. 

“Through an enormous stroke of luck, NASA aimed the Hubble Telescope at precisely the right place at precisely the right time to capture these images on film.  I’m not particularly religious, but I don’t doubt that somebody or something influenced the decision to aim the telescope at that particular area of space.

“Was that someone or something God himself?  Given the vastness of the universe, and all the places NASA could have targeted for study, that would certainly appear to be the case.”

Unsurprisingly, NASA researchers have "declined to comment."

Then we get to see the photograph in question:

After I stopped guffawing, I read further, and I was heartened to see that Wanginjogu is all about thinking critically regarding such claims:

I am not an expert in photography, but if you scrutinize the photo carefully, you find that the city is surrounded by stars if at all it was taken in space...  If the photo is really a space photo, then it could most likely be the Celestial city of God because it is clear that what is in the photograph is not a star, a planet or any other known heavenly body.

Yes!  Surrounded by stars, and not a planet!  The only other possibility, I think you will agree, is that it is the Celestial City of God.

Wanginjogu then goes through some calculations to estimate the size of New Jerusalem:

If an aero plane [sic] passes overhead at night, you are able to see the light emitted by it.  If that aero plane [sic] was to go higher up from the surface of the earth, eventually you won’t be able to see any light from it and that is only after moving a few kilometers up.  This is because of its small size.  Yet our eyes are able to see, without any aid, stars that are millions of light years away.  This is because of their large size. 

The further away an object is from the surface of the earth, then the bigger it needs to be and the more the light it needs to emit for it to be seen from earth.

The city of New Jerusalem is much smaller than most of the stars that you see on the sky.  To be more precise, it is much smaller than our planet earth.  Remember that here we are not talking of the entire heaven where God lives but of the City of New Jerusalem.  The city of New Jerusalem is currently located in heaven.  Of course, heaven is much larger that the city itself.  The photo seems to be of the city itself rather than the entire heaven.

Some solid astrophysics, right there.  He then goes on to use the Book of Revelation to figure out how big the city prophesied therein must be, and from all of this he deduces that the Celestial City must be somewhere within our Solar System for Hubble to have captured the photograph.  He also uses the testimony of one Seneca Sodi, who apparently saw an angel and asked him how far away heaven was, and the angel said, "Not far."

So there you have it.

The best part, though, was when I got about halfway through, and I found out where Wanginjogu got the photograph from.  (Hint: not NASA.)  The photograph, and in fact the entire claim, originated in...

... wait for it...

... The Weekly World News.

Yes, that hallowed purveyor of stories about Elvis sightings, alien abductions, and Kim Kardashian being pregnant with Bigfoot's baby.  Even Wanginjogu seems to realize he's on shaky ground, here, and writes:

This magazine is known to exaggerate stories and to publish some really controversial articles.  However, it also publishes some true stories.  So we cannot trash this story just because it first appeared in The Weekly World News magazine.  It is worthwhile to consider other aspects of the story.

He's right that you can't rule something out because of the source, but this pretty much amounts to something my dad used to say, to wit, "Even stopped clocks are right twice a day."   But suffice it to say that here at Skeptophilia headquarters we have considered other aspects of the story, and it is our firmly-held opinion that to believe this requires that you have a single scoop of butter-brickle ice cream where the rest of us have a brain.

Anyway, there you are.  NASA photographing heaven.  Me, I'm waiting for them to turn the Hubble the other direction, and photograph hell.  Since that's where I'm headed anyway, might as well take a look at the real estate ahead of time.

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The advancement of technology has opened up ethical questions we've never had to face before, and one of the most difficult is how to handle our sudden ability to edit the genome.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a system for doing what amounts to cut-and-paste editing of DNA, and since its discovery by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the technique has been refined and given pinpoint precision.  (Charpentier and Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for their role in developing CRISPR.)

Of course, it generates a host of questions that can be summed up by Ian Malcolm's quote in Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."  If it became possible, should CRISPR be used to treat devastating diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia?  Most people, I think, would say yes.  But what about disorders that are mere inconveniences -- like nearsightedness?  What about cosmetic traits like hair and eye color?

What about intelligence, behavior, personality?

None of that has been accomplished yet, but it bears keeping in mind that ten years ago, the whole CRISPR gene-editing protocol would have seemed like fringe-y science fiction.  We need to figure this stuff out now -- before it becomes reality.

This is the subject of bioethicist Henry Greely's new book, CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.  It considers the thorny questions surrounding not just what we can do, or what we might one day be able to do, but what we should do.

And given how fast science fiction has become reality, it's a book everyone should read... soon.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Perseverance

In the episode of Doctor Who called "The Ark in Space," the Fourth Doctor says, "Homo sapiens.  What an inventive, invincible species.  It's only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk.  Puny, defenseless bipeds.  They've survived flood, famine and plague.  They've survived cosmic wars and holocausts.  And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life.  Ready to outsit eternity.  They're indomitable."

I immediately thought of that quote yesterday afternoon as I watched NASA's Mars Rover Perseverance make a textbook-perfect landing on the surface of Mars.  It traveled a total of about 480 million kilometers, and despite being launched from a moving target at a different moving target, landed right where the scientists and technicians wanted it to.

To put that into perspective, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and found that launching an object from Earth and hitting anywhere on Mars -- much less exactly the spot you wanted -- is analogous to aiming for, and hitting, an object the size of a pinhead from three hundred kilometers away.

The first image sent back by Perseverance.  Don't be concerned by the distortion and the blur; this was taken with the landing camera, used by the onboard computer to target the landing site.  Subsequent images will be a great deal clearer.  [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Everywhere we've looked lately we've seen bad news.  The pandemic.  Here in the United States, the economy, the nasty partisan divisiveness, the lying and sniping and blaming amongst people who are desperate not to be held responsible for what they've said and done.  Just this week, the horrible cold wave and winter storm that hit as far south as Texas, leaving people without electricity and water, the casualties of which have yet to be tallied.

We're a species capable of awful things.  What we do to each other based upon race, religion, sexual orientation, political beliefs, and gender is mind-boggling.  If there's a deity up there keeping score, humanity will have a lot to answer for.

And yet.

We are also capable of incredible beauty, kindness, courage, compassion, love... and perseverance.  We are as surprising in the loftiness of our spirit as we sometimes are in the depth of our selfishness.  We're complex, full of contradictions and paradoxes, but can reach soaring highs, achieve things that almost beggar belief.

There were cheers and applause and high-fives when the announcement came that Perseverance had made a safe landing and was already sending back images from Mars's surface, and sitting here in my office, I was cheering along with them.  It illustrated once again how when we band together to accomplish something worthwhile, the sky is -- literally, in this case -- the limit.

I know that to people who aren't astronomy buffs, the Mars Rover Mission is probably no big deal, and might elicit a shrug and the question, "Why did they put all that money and time into this?"  Perseverance, and other endeavors like it, are important not only for the advancement of science, but are symbolic of what we can achieve.  It represents hope, it represents the potential for good in humanity, for reaching toward something beyond our petty concerns -- which often gets lost in all the bad news and dismal accounts of how we've fallen short.

So I hope you will watch as the images start to roll in, photographs of a landscape on another planet, and you will catch a little of the wonder of this moment.  Let it remind you that despite everything you read and hear, we're a pretty amazing species.  I'll end with another quote, this one from a poem that is justly famous -- "Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann.  I've read it many times, and even so it never fails to bring me to tears.  Here's how it ends, which seems a fitting way to wrap up this post:

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.  Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.  And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.  With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be cheerful.  Strive to be happy.

*********************************

Back when I taught Environmental Science, I used to spend at least one period addressing something that I saw as a gigantic hole in students' knowledge of their own world: where the common stuff in their lives came from.  Take an everyday object -- like a sink.  What metals are the faucet, handles, and fittings made of?  Where did those metals come from, and how are they refined?  What about the ceramic of the bowl, the pigments in the enamel on the surface, the flexible plastic of the washers?  All of those substances came from somewhere -- and took a long road to get where they ended up.

Along those same lines, there are a lot of questions about those same substances that never occur to us.  Why is the elastic of a rubber band stretchy?  Why is glass transparent?  Why is a polished metal surface reflective, but a polished wooden surface isn't?  Why does the rubber on the soles of your running shoes grip -- but the grip worsens when they're wet, and vanishes entirely when you step on ice?

If you're interested in these and other questions, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for you.  In Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, materials scientist Mark Miodownik takes a close look at the stuff that makes up our everyday lives, and explains why each substance we encounter has the characteristics it has.  So if you've ever wondered why duct tape makes things stick together and WD-40 makes them come apart, you've got to read Miodownik's book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The astronomical pogo stick

It's all too easy lately to find reasons to criticize humans.  I'm guilty of contributing to it myself, by my focus on pseudoscientific nonsense; you can jump from "some humans do stupid stuff" to the cynical "all humans are irreparably stupid" without even realizing it.

It's worthwhile focusing instead on our accomplishments, some of which are downright amazing.  This year, I think we all need something to cheer us up and make us feel a little more optimistic about our potential as a species.  So today we're going to look at: the mind-blowing reconnaissance mission NASA has undertaken to collect, and bring back to Earth, material from the asteroid Bennu.

Bennu is interesting from a number of standpoints.  It's a carbonaceous asteroid, meaning it is high in the carbon-containing compounds that were probably abundant in the early Earth's atmosphere -- carbon dioxide and monoxide, methane, and hydrogen cyanide.  Because these were the raw materials from which the first biochemicals were synthesized, it's of serious interest to people like me who are obsessed with the possibilities of extraterrestrial life.  Astronomers tend to be more curious about Bennu because its composition is thought to be very similar to the material from which the Solar System originally coalesced, so learning about it might give us a lens into our region of the galaxy's very distant past.

And if you needed another reason, Bennu is one of the asteroids which periodically crosses the Earth's orbit, making it high on the list of eventual Earth strikes.  (Not to worry: it's not going to hit the Earth, or anything else, for at least another two hundred years, and the current surmise is that it's much more likely to hit Jupiter than it is to hit Earth.)

So in 2016, NASA launched the OSIRIS-REx mission, which first did a near pass and mapped out its surface to look for good spots for rock collecting, and then on the second encounter -- which happened three days ago -- dropped onto the asteroid with a maneuver that looked like someone bouncing on a pogo stick.  The six-second contact stirred up material from the surface, which was sucked into a collector.  OSIRIS-REx then zoomed back off into space for its return voyage to Earth, carrying what scientists hope is a sixty-gram sample of the surface of the asteroid.

Okay, that's already impressive, right?  If you want your mind boggled further, consider this:

OSIRIS-REx's trip (one way) from Earth to Bennu covered about 820 million kilometers.  The asteroid's diameter is about 530 meters; the spacecraft's is a little under seven meters.  I did a bit of back-of-the-envelope calculation, and discovered that our ability to hit Bennu from this distance is equivalent to hitting a target the size of a bacterium with a bullet the size of a virus -- from a kilometer away.

Oh, and it's hardly standing still.  Bennu is a fast-moving target, zooming along at 28 kilometers per second.

If that doesn't impress you, I can't imagine what would.

OSIRIS-REx's sampling arm, seconds before impact on asteroid Bennu on October 20, 2020 [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

"The spacecraft did everything it was supposed to do," said mission principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona.  "I can’t believe we actually pulled this off."

His elation and incredulity are understandable considering all of the things that could have gone wrong, and how slight the error would have to be to result in the spacecraft either plunging into a destructive crash or else missing the asteroid entirely.  And at that point, OSIRIS-REx had to function perfectly on its own -- at that distance, radio signals traveling at the speed of light take over eighteen minutes to reach Earth, and (even assuming an instantaneous response by NASA scientists) another eighteen to send back a command like "NO NO NO DON'T DO THAT!"

By that time, the spacecraft would either be rubble or else zooming away into space, and away from the target.

So the mission went off without a hitch.  Well, the first half of it -- they still have to get OSIRIS-REx back to Earth safely.  But I'd say given how flawless the first bit was, there's a good chance they'll accomplish the whole shebang, and we'll have some really interesting stuff to study.

When you consider things like this, it's reassuring -- the capacity for human accomplishment is limitless.  Yes, I know there's still idiotic stuff going on down here.  But I'm not ready to give up on humanity yet.  I find the OSIRIS-REx mission incredibly inspirational.

Gives me hope that there may be a bright future for our species yet.

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Have any scientifically-minded friends who like to cook?  Or maybe, you've wondered why some recipes are so flexible, and others have to be followed to the letter?

Do I have the book for you.

In Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine, by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz, you find out why recipes work the way they do -- and not only how altering them (such as using oil versus margarine versus butter in cookies) will affect the outcome, but what's going on that makes it happen that way.

Along the way, you get to read interviews with today's top chefs, and to find out some of their favorite recipes for you to try out in your own kitchen.  Full-color (and mouth-watering) illustrations are an added filigree, but the text by itself makes this book a must-have for anyone who enjoys cooking -- and wants to learn more about why it works the way it does.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Looking for Martians

When I first read C. S. Lewis's book Out of the Silent Planet, when I was in high school, one of the things that struck me was his vision of life on Malacandra -- what we here on Earth call Mars.

Malacandra, Lewis tells us, is evolved sentient life much earlier than the Earth did, and is therefore approaching the end of its habitability -- the planet is cooling (the majority of its surface is too cold, and the air far too thin, to support life), and its three species of intelligent life have retreated to the deepest parts of the canyons, where the hot springs keep things comfortable.  Given that this is Lewis, there are supernatural overtones to the story, and it's a rollicking good adventure, but what stuck with me most is his vision of a planet that is dying.  Just about every other science fiction novel or movie or television show at the time seemed to picture things as static -- whatever the civilization was, it was just kind of there.  You got the impression things could go on that way forever.

Lewis, on the other hand, recognized not only that organic life forms evolve, but that the planets they live on change as well, and not just in relatively minor ways such as the arrangement of the continents and the depth of the oceans and the presence or absence of ice caps.  The entire planet can shift in such a way as to become uninhabitable -- and, as Lewis points out, that will be the ultimate fate of the Earth as well.

Mars just happened to be closer to the end than we are.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESA - European Space Agency & Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research for OSIRIS Team ESA/MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA, OSIRIS Mars true color, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO]

The truth of Lewis's vision has been realized lately in our discovery that long ago, Mars was warm enough to have liquid water and a significant atmosphere.  And this week, a paper came out in Nature Communications that analyzes date from the HiRISE camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showing that Mars's rivers and oceans left behind layers of sedimentary rock -- a site where future exploration might look for fossils of Martian life.

"Unfortunately we don’t have the ability to climb, to look at the finer-scale details, but the striking similarities to sedimentary rocks on Earth leaves very little to the imagination," said lead author Francesco Salese, from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, in a press release.   "To form these 200-metre-thick deposits we needed conditions that would have required an environment capable of maintaining significant volumes of liquid water."

What this means is that not only was it warmer, the atmosphere was thicker.  The current thin atmosphere on Mars's surface means the pressure is low enough that water would evaporate away post-haste.  A billion years ago, Mars's climate was a great deal more like Earth's is today, but why the change happened isn't known.

I doubt it was the evil eldil from Thulcandra smiting the planet with his mighty fist, but otherwise, Lewis's picture of Mars's evolution toward the dead world it currently is was remarkably prescient.

"We’ve never seen an outcrop with this amount of detail on it that we can definitely say is so old,” said study co-author Joel Davis, postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in London.  "This is one more piece of the puzzle in the search for ancient life on Mars, providing novel insight into just how much water occupied these ancient landscapes...  The rivers that formed these rocks weren’t just a one-off event — they were probably active for tens to hundreds of thousands of years."

I hope this will spur us to launch more projects with landers that can excavate and analyze these rocks, looking for (amongst other things) fossils.  What we can do remotely, albeit amazing, is still pretty rudimentary -- we can't launch an electron microscope into space yet -- but even a preliminary analysis of the sedimentary layers could produce some fascinating results.

Unfortunately, even if further exploration will discover traces ancient Martian life, I doubt they'll resemble Lewis's hrossa, séroni, and pfifltriggi.  A pity.  Those things were pretty cool.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a phenomenal achievement; the breathtaking mission New Horizons that gave us our first close-up views of the distant, frozen world of Pluto.

In Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, you follow the lives of the men and women who made this achievement possible, flying nearly five billion kilometers to something that can only be called pinpoint accuracy, then zinging by its target at fifty thousand kilometers per hour while sending back 6.25 gigabytes of data and images to NASA.

The spacecraft still isn't done -- it's currently soaring outward into the Oort Cloud, the vast, diffuse cloud of comets and asteroids that surrounds our Solar System.  What it will see out there and send back to us here on Earth can only be imagined.

The story of how this was accomplished makes for fascinating reading.   If you are interested in astronomy, it's a must-read.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]