REPOST: This was originally written in 2007 but is being reposted because of some discussion it generate elsewhere.

There is a lot more to the universe than the light you and I can pick up with our eyes and brains. Although its a shame that we can’t see them naturally we can use technology to reveal the wavelengths of light normally invisible to us. Visible light is only part of the electromagnetic spectrum (a very small part) and I thought it would be interesting to see some familiar objects in unfamiliar ways.

The electromagnetic spectrum is usually split into seven parts: the radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, x-ray and gamma ray. You can find a good schematic of the EM spectrum over on Wikipedia. We obviously see things in the visible, but some creatures, such as bees, see some of the ultraviolet (one reason there are so many purple flowers). Here is a picture of a Geranium in the visible and then the UV. You can find more images like these, for all kinds of flowers over at this website.

But this is an astronomy blog and so here are some objects seen in multiple wavelengths. Some of them may surprise you. First up is the Moon. Here we have it in the radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet and x-ray.

The infrared image (top right) shows various bright spots. These are warm areas on the Moon. The brightest spot, in the bottom-center of the Moon is the crater Tycho, which also shows up brightly in the visible and UV images. The X-Ray picture is from ROSAT (bottom-right). Here we see the Moon shown in its quarter phase to highlight that it is only reflecting X_Rays from the Sun and not giving any off itself. The Submillimetre (microwave) image (top-centre) was taken using the SCUBA camera on the JCMT in Hawaii. This is a camera normally used to image dust in nebulae and faint galaxies.

Next let’s look at something more exotic but still familiar, the Andromeda Galaxy. Also called M31, this is closest neighbouring galaxy in the wider universe and is just about visible from a good site. We are seeing this in the radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet and x-ray.

You can really start to see now why observing objects in different wavelngths can tell us something about them that we didn’t know before. The different details in each image are coming from different parts of the galaxy. In the top-center image, which is taken at 175 micrometres, we are seeing the dust lanes between stars in the galaxy. The X-Ray image in the bottom-right shows us only the extremely energetic objects, which as we can see, are located predominantly toward the centre.

Another easy to spot object, which you may know of is M45, also known as the Pleiades or Subaru. Once again here it in the radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet and x-ray.

The most impressive image here in my opinion is the X-Ray image from ROSAT (bottom-right). It looks to me like something from Doctor Who. It is also interesting to note that M45 doesn’t show up as much in radio frequencies. In the top-centre image we can see only some of the stars. This is because M45 is a young cluster and some of the surrounding dust still obscures the stars in this far-infrared image.

I thought I’d save the best til last: here is the Earth. Now its tricky to get pictures of our own planet - because we’re on it. We’re lacking in any good radio images of the Earth because you can do radio astronomy perfectly well without putting telescopes in space. However I really like these images because they really took me by surprise. In order, these images show the Earth in infrared, visible, ultraviolet, extreme-ultraviolet, x-ray and gamma rays.

The first image shows the infrared emission on the Earth from water vapour. Like the two UV images, this picture is from an extensive network of Earth-observing satellites that are attempting to investigate how our planet operates. Tectonics, oceanography and climate change are just three of the many topics being studied to ever-more depth by NASA, ESA and researchers the world over. The X-Ray image (bottom-centre) shows an aurora on the Earth’s north pole. Other than this high-energy interaction between the atmosphere and the Sun, the Earth seems to be invisible at this wavelength.

Finally we have the gamma ray image (bottom-right). What you’re seeing here are extremely high-energy particles, mostly from outer space, reflecting off the Earth’s atmosphere. The edge of the globe is seen to be much brighter than the center because cosmic rays hit the atmosphere at a shallow angle and are more likely to create detections. There is an imbalance btween the East and West due to the Earth’s magnetic field, which is asymmetrical.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little collection, if you know of any other cool multiple wavelength images - astronomical and otherwise - then please leave a comment with a link.

If, like me, you’ve been lucky enough to have flown with an airline that stocks the Sky Mall catalogue then you’ll know it’s brilliant. This is a magazine specially designed for people who have been sitting on an aeroplane for hours and have nothing to do. Why else would you buy anything from it? It’s overpriced and almost totally worthless. It does however make me laugh.

Here are the 10 most ridiculous Sky Mall items that I found in an issue on a Northwest flight home from Alabama last month.

10. The Relax ‘n’ Nap Pillow

Sky Mall tells us that this product “relieves tension on neck, back and shoulders and lets you sleep like a baby!”. It also helps you look like an idiot. But there’s more! The “patented ‘air portal’ ventilation system allows you to rest face down in comfort while breathing fresh clean air.”. Where are you sleeping? A forest? I can just imagine the muffled and inaudible pillow talk now. And it’ll only cost you $60! At prices like that you can’t afford not to look stupid.

9. Kitty Washroom Cabinet

Nothing will quite match the experience of letting house guests use the bathroom knowing that the cat may be in there at the same time. This kitty washroom is designed to go in your own washroom so that the cat can literally scare the crap out of you by appearing at random times during your bowel movements. A steal at just under $100.

8. Super Sized TV Remote

If you keep losing your remote down the side of the sofa then you know there’s only one solution: buy a remote that’s bigger than your children - you never lose them… right? This giant, and apparently extremely basic, remote can also be used as a small coffee table or for attacking burglars. Only $19.95.

7. 8-Day Auto Pet Feeder

Are you a pet owner? Fed up of having to put your pet into someone else’s care while you’re on holiday? Worry no more! The 8-day Auto Pet Feeder means that your dog can sit at home while you’re away and still eat a full meal every day. 8 compartments rotate on a timer to give your pet regular meals. I for one would feel perfectly happy to trust this obviously well manufactured device to dispense unfailingly every day. I also assume there are similar products that will give the animal love and attention for the week you’re away. And another to clean up your dog’s shit and piss daily too. I couldn’t find them on Sky Mall, but I assume they’re there somewhere. They must be or else Sky Mall is a reprehensible company with no regard for animal safety.

6. BOB The Screentime Controller

‘So what exactly is this?’, I hear you ask. Well BOB controls TVs, PCs and other electronic devices with an access code system. It is designed in the words of Sky Mall to be the “answer to the endless fight over screentime struggles in today’s home”. Each child has a code and the parents program in how long they can spend watching TV each day. Each child logs into the TV and after the time is up the TV automatically turns off. Handily, it also eliminates any last trace of discipline left in the household, as well as being so easy to circumvent that it’s laughable (just unplug it!). Parents, you’ll never have to interact with your children again. Only $80.

5. and 4. Pet Travel Systems

Unable to decide which of these two was funnier, I’ve included both. Whilst the dog’s facial expression in the red carrier cracks me up, the image of the little white dog being walked around the park in what is essentially a pram is also deeply disturbing. Best of all these things cost between $100 and $160, making them essentially a tax on idiotic, pampering pet owners.

3. Palette Mag-Titan Bracelet

According to Sky Mall “the Palette bands are made with pure Ti-22 Titanium. Titanium in its pure form has therapeutic power, due to its negative electrical potential, to draw out positive ions from the body.” Whoa, back up there a moment. Titanium is permanently and magically electrically charged?! Why all we need is a source of positive ions and we’d have a machine of infinite power! Surely this bracelet has been cursed by a wizard or warlock? What else could have prevented it from coming under the scrutiny of scientists for so many millennia?

Oh wait, it’s just bullshit. My mistake. $150 worth of bullshit though.

2. Cat Laser Beam Toy

Why not buy this and eventually blind your cat? Better yet, buy it for someone else and blind their cat. Brilliant! Only $19.99.

1. Day Clock

This is the ultimate in stupidity. Ever get confused and not know what day it is? Well not anymore! The Day Clock will always point to the day of the week. Its singular and very slowly moving hand takes one whole week to go around the face of the clock, always steadfastly ensuring that you know what day it is. If you can think of anyone who needs this clock, please report them to the authorities immediately. Oddly it is priced at $39.98, a rather complicated figure for such a ridiculously dumb target audience.

If you can find any other morbidly stupid items which are available at Sky Mall, I’d love to see them, please comment below.

The recent pass of Comet Holmes and today’s close approach of Asteroid 2007 TU24 (shown below, image from space.com) have gotten me thinking again about open source astronomy. I have always been fascinated by the internet and how modern networking technologies bring things into one big mesh, and astronomy fits right into this. All we have to do is synchronise our watches.

Let’s say I have a telescope with a computer attached to it. This telescope always knows exactly where it is pointing in the sky and exactly what time it is. Finally this telescope knows where it is on the Earth in terms of latitude and longitude. Now let’s connect this telescope to the internet and constantly feed the images it produces to a server.

To anyone working in astronomy, this is already true for professional telescopes. In fact Stuart over at Astronomy Blog created his telescope RSS feeds using just this data not too long ago.

Now finally let us do something that isn’t normally the case: let’s connect every telescope to just one server. This central server can use the data to construct an image of any object in all four dimensions using the positions both on the sky and on the Earth from each scope. All you have to do is have enough telescopes looking at the same things.

In the case of Comet Holmes there were a great many telescopes pointed at the object as it flew by, creating a lovely glowing ball that later faded away. The various stages of its evolution were imaged and these images could all be compiled into a kind of virtual space. You ought to be able to fly around inside a computer generated model which is constructed from the images. The projections of those images into virtual space just come from the telescopes own properties and position.

I am trying this technique with another, less exciting dataset. If it works then I may try it with some images from telescopes. However this data is sparse and spread out over the world. I do not have enough of it myself to make a good start. Maybe next time a big event is occuring we, the internet (if there is such a thing) could get organised and try to create a 4D record of an event? Astronomy has eyes everywhere and if these eyes can work together, via Google Earth, AstroGrid or other more novel collaborations, then 21st Century astronomy will be a turning point, and we can all be a part of it.

This is a cool idea: a space book for the visually impaired and blind. Using a combination of braille, embossing and textured images, this amazing new book is aiming to bring space and its beauty to a new slice of the demographic pie.

(This is good timing for the internet, what with the recent YouTube videos of the sounds of Jupiter and Saturn.)

The book also points out that a lot of what we see in images from space is already beyond the human eye’s perception.

By showing these images, we remind readers that most of the universe and its beauty is hidden for all of our eyes unless we use special telescopes - Doris Daou, Co-author

The book contains images of stars, planets, nebulae and some telescopes too. I think this is wonderful and would be very interested to hear what a blind person might have to say about ‘images’ of space. and whether any new insights can be gleaned from them.

If you know any blind astronomers, or are blind yourself, please let me know what I can do to make this sight more easily accessible to the visually impaired.

“Touch the Invisible Sky” was written by astronomy educator and accessibility specialist Noreen Grice of You Can Do Astronomy LLC and the Museum of Science, Boston, with authors Simon Steel, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and Doris Daou, an astronomer at NASA Headquarters, Washington.

For more information, visit the NASA site.

[Via the Bad Astronomer]

If you haven’t already then now is the time to subscribe to the Twitter feeds I made for many cities around the world. As of about the 4th of October it will once again become dark enough that the International Space Station (ISS) will become visible in the evenings over much of northern Europe.

In case you haven’t seen the previous post on the matter you can subscribe to Twitter feeds which let you know half an hour before the ISS goes over your home town. The feeds can be found for the following cities:

Over Aix-en-Provence
Over Birmingham
Over Belfast
Over Cardiff
Over Dublin
Over Edinburgh
Over Hong Kong
Over Indianapolis
Over Milton Keynes
Over Manchester
Over New York
Over Paris
Over San Francisco
Over Sydney

Much of September offered only very early morning chances to see the station going by but October will give us much more opportunities in civilized hours as the length of darkness grows.

Enjoy your station-spotting.

I recently saw a Digg article which linked to a space.com page about the 10 Strangest Things in Space. All but 2 of the items were not pictures at all but computer simulations, or artists impressions. So here to correct this injustice to phenomena everywhere I present the REAL 10 Strangest Things in Space - or at least in my opinion. Feel free to suggest any others in the comments.

V838 Monoceroti Expansion (Hubble)

It wasn’t anything interesting until it happened but the star V838 Monoceroti, which had simply sat in obscurity, flared up in 2002 to become 600,000 more luminous than our own Sun. It didn’t take long for the star to fade back into the darkness but the Hubble Space Telescope managed to get quite a few pictures of it during its active phase. (Click for animated version)

In this series of images you can see how the star’s outer layers were first expelled and then cut away by the powerful radiation from the star. The event was made even more interesting by the fact that a ‘light echo‘ was seen. During the expansion the object appeared to expand faster than the speed of light - the effect was however merely an astronomical optical illusion.

The Egg Nebula (Hubble)

Also known as CRL2688, the Egg Nebula shows a pair of mysterious ’searchlights’ bursting out from a dense cocoon of dust surrounding a hidden, Sun-like star. We see the light escaping in the directions where the cocoon is thinner. Objects like CRL2688 are rare because they are in a phase of their evolution that is short-lived. Images like this one are very important to understanding how stars like our Sun will ultimately die.

The Sun in UV (SOHO)

The surface of the Sun is far more active than most people would think. This ultraviolet video taken by NASA’s SOHO spacecraft gives brilliant detail. It allows us to see one full revolution of the Sun on its axis, which normally takes about 25 days. In this video you can make out large flares erupting from the surface and the striking magnetic loops that seem to whirl about them as they go. (Full 512×512 MPEG Here)
Red Square Nebula Nebula (Hale/Keck)

Discovered in 2007, this ruby-like nebula may be the result of two interacting stars. If one star is dying then the material from it may be dragged into a disc around the orbits of both objects. Material can then only escape from the system along the poles of the disc, resulting in two cones leading out of the stars. When viewed from the edge these cones seem like two triangles. Here the system is seen in the infrared. Structures like this are rarely seen in nebula but there is in fact a Red Rectangle Nebula which is less symmetric but still quite interesting to look at.

Abell 39 (NOAO)

Here we see an almost perfect planetary nebula that sits about 7,000 light years away in the constellation Hercules. The dot at the centre is the original star, which - as it died - released the expanding gas shell also seen clearly here. The ghostly appearance of the shell is due to the blue-green filter used to take the image, which picks out the oxygen emitted light at 500.7nm.

Saturn’s Rings (Cassini)

This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. Cassini was sheltered from the Sun’s glare by positioning itself behind Saturn. Ring structures are revealed here in detail as they brighten substantially at viewing angles where the Sun is almost directly behind the objects. These observations allowed Cassini to detected two new faint rings.

The Horsehead Nebula Swallowed Something (SCUBA)

Observers used the JCMT submillimetre telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to take this image of the familiar Horsehead Nebula, who’s outline can be seen here. When observed at 850 microns, we are seeing the cold dust at temperatures close to absolute zero. This dust is deep inside the optical nebula normally seen, which is transparent at this wavelength. It seems from the image that the Horse has swallowed a ‘lozenge’ which is in fact a region of dense dust that may be collapsing under gravity. In fact this could be a star system in the making.

Gomez’s Hamburger (Hubble)

Arturo Gomez found this odd object in 1985 and it became known as Gomez’s Hamburger for obvious reasons. It is actually a proto-planetary nebula, an earlier version of Abell 39 perhaps. The curves of light (the bun) are reflecting light from the star which is being obscured by a thick band of dust (the burger). The whole thing is only only a fraction of a light year across and located 10,000 light years away in Sagittarius.

The Solar Spectrum (NOAO)

If you could catch a rainbow and put it under a microscope you would see that it was not a continuous blend of colours. Along the width of it would be seen, scattered irregularly, dark patches. Atoms and molecules in the Sun’s atmosphere pick out specific frequencies of light and absorb them, diminishing their intensity by comparison. This images shows the spectrum of light from the Sun stretched out to make these absorption lines visible. We use the reverse of the idea (emission lines) when we make coloured lights. For instance, we excite sodium atoms to emit a signature orange light in street lamps. In this image you can see two prominent dark bands in the yellow-orange section which are the absorption due to sodium.

Update to This Entry

The Sombrero Galaxy in Infrared (Spitzer)

By looking at things in different wavelengths we can see much more than meets the eye. This image is a perfect example. Just as with the Horsehead image above we are seeing cooler material. This time it is dust in the Sombrero galaxy. The red ring is a thick band of dust encircling the whole galaxy. In the optical, this dust ring is what gives the Sombrero its distinctive black, obscuring line.

Oddities in the Orion Nebula (Hubble)

Deep within high resolution images of the Orion Nebula taken by Hubble we can see dark blobs. When you take a closer look you can see that these are like little flattened blobs. Some show a dim, red glow at their centres, others are just dark. These are proto solar-systems.

The red glowing is a protostars attempting to burst through and the dark disks are thick dust regions where one day planets may form. 6 billion years ago, this is what our Solar System may have looked from very far away.

Just the other day I was opining about how the internet needs to get in bed with science a bit more. Well lo and behold here is a fantastic example of just such a thing: Galaxy Zoo.

I saw the link on Chris Lintott’s blog and then later on Digg, but basically this is an exercise in crowd-sourcing - harnessing the power of the multitude to perform tasks usually only done by specialists. In this case, a group of researchers need to identify about a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Computers have always been a bit rubbish an image recognition so they are asking for the population of the internet to go and do it for them - an excellent idea.

You sign up and log in, then take a test of sorts to see if you’re even remotely good at it (I don’t think you have to excel at this test). Then you are given a series of galaxies to identify. Its all explained in the tutorial on the Galaxy Zoo website and is really very easy so I would say just go give it a go. By letting everyone have a go they are maximizing their chances of getting each identification correct.

This is the sort of thing science needs more of. Projects like the folding@home concept on the PS3 and this are examples of why when we network all the people of the world together, we will be greater than the sum of our population. What a nice way for everyone to contribute to astronomy - go be an astronomer now!

If you are on Facebook, they have a Galaxy Zoo Facebook group.

So my name is now on a (soon-to-be) published paper. How and why this happened is a little over my head, but I shall try to explain. One thing you should know however, is that I haven’t really done anything so far to help get this paper out. I haven’t written anything for it. I have never attended a meeting about it or even met most of the people I have co-authored it with. So how am I now a published scientist?

You’ll find ‘my’ first paper here on the astro-ph preprint server (Link), and you can download a PDF version here (Link). It is 60 pages, but about 20 are references and figures. It is titled ‘The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope Legacy Survey of Nearby Star-Formiung Regions in the Gould Belt’.

Science is often done in groups these days. It takes a lot of combined effort and time to get the kudos and the know-how that gets money and recognition. This isn’t always the case but it is more true now than it was a decade ago.

The other day, on the blog, I was talking about how science could be more open. This is one area where, as Stuart pointed out in the comments, astronomy is very much open already. Of the 62 authors on the paper, I would imagine only a few have had a strong, guiding hand in the paper’s creation. A good bulk of them, lets say 80%, will have been involved at least in some significant way. The remaining handful - like myself - will have none nothing or a least very little. Those numbers are guesses since I’m new at this.

In this way, trams of scientists benefit from distributed expertise - each individual contributing their own unique talents and knowledge.
I am however signed up to help execute this survey. I am scheduled to man the telescope if needed for observations of the following areas Serpens, Cepheus, Pipe Nebula, CrA. I signed for it much like you would register for a website or something. A most unusual experience I felt.

The purpose of the survey as the title suggests is to look at the Gould Belt, which is an area in the sky that forms a ring around our position, roughly. It is shown in the image above along with some of the survey’s target areas. This ring, or belt, is home to many of the most active star forming regions in our neighbourhood and some of the brightest O-type stars in the sky as well. It is about 350pc in radius.

It was first seen by John Herschel, observing from the Southern Hemisphere in 1847 and later completed into a ring by a guy named Gould in 1879, hence the name.

By mapping the whole region we will achieve an impressive and broad catalogue of protostars and prestellar sources which will enable us to determine some key information about these young objects as they become stars.

So why am I on the paper? Well the whole team gets credit for each paper in the survey. If and when I go observing and reduce data on the Gould Belt, I will have the help and expertise, as well as the background papers published, by a team of incredible experts. We collaborate to achieve good science by sharing both the workload and the results.

So I’m chuffed with this incredibly low-effort publication and hope to actually have some involvement and maybe a paper ‘of my own’ in the next couple of years.

I had my first day working for SETPOINT Wales yesterday in their mobile planetarium, the Stardome. I went to Crickhowell High School and had a great (if tiring day) giving a space talk and showing, what felt like hundreds of children, the constellations.

The reason I like talking about space is that I like to put across the idea that we are on a round, spinning planet which is orbiting our star, the Sun. I spoke about the solar system and the Milky Way and also a little on black holes. These were Year 9 children which means they were 13/14 years old. I thik on the whole they enjoyed it, and certainly there were a few kids here and there who I could tell were very into it all. So that was nice.

Today I spotted on digg.com/space that there is a great image taken of our little spinning rock, from another neighbouring one. This is just the kind of thing that I really like, because this picture, taken by the Mars Global Surveyor in 2003, shows the Earth and Moon as well as Jupiter and its moons. Both of these planets would be very much visible from Mars. In fact the Earth must appear quite bright in the Martian sky, much as Venus does here. Click for a larger version - which is well worth doing.

So that you can orient yourself, this diagram shows the angle from which the image was taken and below it is a map showing the area of the Earth which was visible at the time of the photo, you can see that the fuzzy blobs visible were in fact the Americas.

If the tail was smarter, the tail would wag the dog.

Two things have just come back to me at the same time and collided wonderfully, thanks to an article over at Universe Today. The article is one about the liquid mirror telescope that a NASA researcher proposes could be built on the Moon in the near(ish) future. The eagle-eyed among you may recalled I blogged the same story back in May, thanks to a link from Wired.

This isn’t me trying to say ‘I got the scoop’, because clearly I didn’t, but it got me thinking about the effect the internet can have on science. I think about the internet quite a bit, and its possible long-term influence on our culture. In fact my friend writes a blog about the internet and its effect on literature and fiction. Also, I found myself an almost-expert on blogs in recent years. So I would say I was a knowledgeable person on the matter.

The Wired article, so far as I can tell, was an original piece (compared to my own which was a link to it). They had interviewed this guy, Roger Angel, and created a journalistic piece on his research for NASA. Digg found the story, as did a host of other astronomy and science blogs (I can’t be bothered to link to all of them) and it did the rounds in the blogosphere. That was all back at the end of May. now, one month later an official NASA news release describes how the technical article for a giant liquid mirror telescope has been made public etc etc. The article is to appear in Nature.

So what happened? Clearly the internet knew about this before Nature could publish it. So this concept had reached the public domain before the journals had processed it. I rather like this fact and it was the first thing that occurred to me when I realised the echoed story had occurred.

The other thing that came back to me today was a book called ‘The Long Tail’, by Chris Anderson the editor of Wired magazine (a coincidence!). I found out it is out in paperback, but I listened to in on audiobook a while ago. The book outlines how massive niche markets have been shaping the economy in recent years thanks to the internet and sites such as eBay, iTunes and Amazon. It turns out that millions of highly selective minor purchases (such as niche music on iTunes) actually make up most of the sales compared with the more popular, mass marketed items (i.e. hit songs). Once the restriction of shelf space is removed, retailers no longer have to only stock certain items and the internet provides a forum for distributing digital media on an unlimited scale. No shelves required. Well its a great book - read it.

Anyway, my point is that science could easily go the way of entertainment because it is now digital. Papers no longer need to be published by journals to be read, they are instead deposited on vast pre-print archives online. Good ideas that capture minds can be distributed via the niche interest blogs, email, and within university department - all instantaneously and without the restriction of paper, time and money.

I am finishing my first year of an astronomy PhD and have never, not once so far, picked up and read any edition of any journal. Weird, huh? Not really, I get an automatic daily email from the astro-ph pre-print server and I browse a daily list of new articles and papers related to my subject. I can also just as easily read a Canadian or Japanese paper as a UK one.

So what about the liquid telescope? Well it seems that in this case, Wired beat Nature to the scoop. In fact there is very little about astronomy which Nature picks up, that I do not hear about first from some other source. Now maybe at this point we still need Nature to tell us, retrospectively, what was important and notable. Perhaps they have the skill as mavens of interestingness.
Imagine if the ocean of scientific ideas was truly democratic, in the internet sense of the word. I don’t know what it would mean for science long-term but I have a feeling that if it could be kept free of the corrupting influence of marketing, then an open source science community could be the future of many discplines.

Digg.com’s science categories are - on the whole - reflective of current interests and may act as an experiment of sorts. The question is whether the old boy’s club of astronomy will be open to the idea of the internet in their lives. I shall be watching very closely.

The other day we were driving along and I found out that a friend of mine’s father is a commercial airline pilot. We chatted about it for a while - apparently his mother was an air hostess and that’s how they met - and I mentioned that he must have time travelled quite a bit.

I wasn’t being facetious by any means. It has always been a fascination of mine that Einstein’s special relativity is something you experience on long plane trips. During my physics A-Level I learned that one of the verifications of relativity was that some researchers placed took two synchronised atomic clocks and placed one of a boeing jet. they flew it around the world a few times at regular commerical speeds and low and behold when it came back the travelling clock had experienced less time than the stationary one.

Like the astronauts in Planet of the Apes, the moving clock had experienced time dilation and lost a few nanoseconds compare to its Earthbound counterpart. I suggest that my friend’s father would had experienced his fare share of time dilation himself, albeit only on the order of nanoseconds.

So here’s a little form to let you figure out how much time you’ve saved in the past year:

So there you are, have a go. See how many nanoseconds you can add to your life by flying endlessly around the world.

What follows is my submitted entry for the Wellcome Trust’s New Scientist Essay Competition 2007. There are prizes involved and the top one is publication of the essay in New Scientist. I am very inexperienced with such things, but thought I’d enter anyway, so just in case I don’t win, I’ll publish this myself on the lowly but kindly Orbiting Frog. The images has been added for the blog entry only.

There is something special about the Sun. At least that’s how we all think here on Earth. Truthfully though, the Sun represents just one type of star – a common one in fact – in a catalogue of stars that is seen to be fairly consistent all over the universe. Understanding where that consistency comes from, and where the trillions of stars and their planets come from, are two of the goals of an area of astrophysics called star formation.

How the Sun came to be in this neck of the galactic woods with its family of planets, dwarf-planets and other miscellany – including us – is certainly worth knowing. It is fortunate then that star formation is about to boom.

ESA’s Herschel space observatory (launching 2008) and the upcoming SCUBA-2 camera (that will be fitted to the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, in 2008) are two examples of a handful of eagerly anticipated instruments set to produce more data than star-formation researchers have ever had. They will enable astronomers to see deeper than ever before into the murky depths of the dustiest regions of the galaxy, where stars are born. Many of these sites are the beautiful nebulae now so familiar thanks to images like those from Hubble. Others are huge, dark clouds that are too cold and dense to see, but give away their location by obscuring background light.

It is hoped that these new facilities with help answer several of the big questions facing astronomy. For example, why do stars form in clusters of hundreds or thousands? Why do they have the same catalogue of masses that is seen everywhere we look? What are the initial conditions of planet formation?

The physics involved crosses huge orders of scale. A good demonstration is this: imagine the Sun were a metre across. At this scale the nebula from which it formed would be the size of France! Incidentally that makes the Earth a mere pea. To compress all that material down by a factor of a million in size involves complex physics. In order to understand where we came from, you need to understand that physics.

As a discipline, star formation slots into almost all areas of astrophysics. For instance, in order to study galaxies you need to know what they’re made of. Even cosmology, often seen by its champions as being less ‘astro’ and more ‘physics’ has recently encountered a star-formation problem. In order to account for observations of stars that appear to be as old the universe itself, they need to explain how a population of stars could have formed so rapidly and so soon after the Big Bang. Whichever angle you look at it from, star formation is vital to modern astronomy.

Star formation is also important to you, personally. This isn’t just because the various stages of stars give you pretty objects like the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades (above) to look at with your telescope. Star formation tells us something very fundamental: we are all made of stardust. The Sun, planets and everything else around us were formed from the same giant cloud of material – most likely a cloud left over from an even older star when it died. Yet that same process creates a whole array of stellar classes and different planetary characteristics. Only star formation can tell us how all of this works.

NASA’s planned Darwin mission and ESA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder will both be able to resolve Earth-like planets around other stars. These, along with Herschel and SCUBA-2 will enable us to look at whole stellar systems from the outside, a perspective we have never had before. Observers will look at systems like our own at various stages of existence, from barely formed blobs about to start collapsing under gravity through to ancient star systems; we will even see planets in formation.

As a subject, star formation is set to explode. It will allow us to see ourselves better than ever before and to understand the origins of our existence. This is inspirational science, and definitely worth keeping an eye out for in the years to come.