Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Moon Above Politics

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jAlE_HLDj8 This morning's announcement that NASA wants to build a manned moon base by 2017 suggests Democrats and Republicans can agree about something big and expensive. Earlier this year, the idea of an American moon base by 2020 emerged not from the Obama administration, but from then-Republican presidential nominee Newt Gingrich. Dismissed as crackpot grandstanding -- Gingrich got a lot of that -- the NewtBase became a semi-serious talking point during the primary campaign. It took off particularly when the Republican nominees reached Florida, ... Read More

NASA Discovers Strangely Familiar Planet

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NASA's Kepler probe has discovered a solar system orbiting twin suns. Thrilled scientists announced the discovery of the Kepler 47 system a few hours ago, via a reference to Star Wars (naturally). "It's Tatooine, right?" said astronomer Michael Endl of the University of Texas' McDonald Observatory, which is working with the Kepler data. NASA's Kepler probe flies around the galaxy looking for places with the conditions for life. A NASA description of the mission (read it here, it's fun) explains that the probe "is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to ... Read More

Researchers & Discoveries: Black Hole Hunter

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What’s her story? In January, Andrea Ghez became the first woman to win the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Crafoord Prize, one of the highest honors in astronomy. How’d she do that? Proved that a supermassive black hole sits at the center of our galaxy. Ghez helped develop optical technologies that cut through the sight-muddying effects of Earth’s atmosphere, enabling her team to see the Milky Way’s center — 26,000 light years away — far more clearly than ever before. Which let them monitor thousands of previously invisible stars. Their orbital trajectories, Ghez showed, ... Read More

Las Cumbres Helps Confirm Planet With Two Suns

Las Cumbres Helps Confirm Planet With Two Suns

Three years ago, Lisa Conti told us about the retired Google honcho who set about ringing the globe with a network of telescopes available to both school kids and astrophysicists. That effort paid a dividend, made public this week, as the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network contributed to discovering a planet that orbits two suns, the first such planet definitively identified by human astronomers. This “circumbinary planet,” to use its fancy name, was detected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope near the constellation Cygnus. (Even NASA couldn’t resist drawing attention to ... Read More

Developing World’s Scientific Literacy May Lie in its Stars

A couple of blocks from one of Cape Town's glistening oceanside promenades, a few dozen people are cloistered inside a darkened hotel conference room, sitting through an afternoon of PowerPoint presentations on communicating astronomy with the public. As they enthusiastically type notes into netbooks, it's hard to remember that South Africa is still considered a developing nation. The view from the hotel pool is more reminiscent of St. Tropez than Soweto. But 15 years after the end of apartheid, shantytowns still line the motorway between the airport and the five-star residences ... Read More

How Bright is Orion? Take a Look

On a moonless night this month, you can look up at Orion, count the visible stars in the constellation — if there are any — and make a report online for a worldwide survey of light pollution, hosted by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. Stargazers of all ages are invited to participate, tonight through March 16, sending their measurements to the GLOBE at Night Web site. Orion will be in the southern sky at 8 p.m. around the world, looking much like an hourglass at arm's length, a couple of fists above the horizon. Participants in the survey can record their latitude and ... Read More

Starry, Starry Skies

If the Star of Bethlehem, that "star with royal beauty bright," were to appear this Christmas, it would be obliterated in most of the world by an orange halo of glary city light. Light pollution — the artificial sky glow that dims the stars — now affects 63 percent of the world's population and 99 percent of people living in European Union and continental United States, according to some estimates. The Milky Way is not visible in most cities, much less a meteor shower, Orion's shield, or, in the biggest cities, the North Star. "The sky is fading," says a report this month in Physics ... Read More

Project Keeps Sky Watchers in Eternal Dark

Wayne Rosing’s plan for a series of telescopes to connect schoolchildren and astrophysicists on every continent with the universe is barreling forward with the intensity of a flaming meteor. By remotely linking groups of small and medium-sized telescopes around the world, an uninterrupted 24-hour view of the night sky will facilitate the mission of the nonprofit he founded for research and outreach education. The telescopes will have sophisticated electronic detector arrays for deep-space imaging and will be distributed in groups at five or six sites around the world. Most important, they ... Read More

The Search for Intelligent Light

Even the most casual driver need strap in to negotiate the perilous twists of the single-lane road that winds up California’s Mount Hamilton to the Lick Observatory. But the biggest twist of the evening will require something of a mental seat belt. It lies inside the control room of the three-meter telescope, where University of California, Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy and his colleague from San Francisco State, Debra Fischer, train their lens on distant stars and search for a telltale sign of advanced stellar civilization: lights. Yup, these are reputable scientists looking for ... Read More