Author: Mark J. Heinicke

THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER (2017), PART 4: Discovery of Oldest Spiral Galaxy

The fascination of origins—the very long view.

Curiosity about personal ancestry has made Ancestry DNA and 23andMe booming businesses.   Marketing has grown this kind of curiosity into a lucrative appetite.  Indications are that the customer base is doubling annually.

Curiosity about cosmic origins might be growing more slowly, but the explosion of new information about the early universe thrills a lot of folks, without much money changing hands.  To consider where we come from on the largest time scales has a calming effect in  this tempestuous, maddening, frightening, and tragic moment in human history. Launching one’s imagination into the vastness of space leaves behind much of the craziness of our political, social, and cultural (melo)dramas.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

This is a very long post, perhaps of little interest to those who don’t share my fascination with cosmic origins. I present a table of contents of the sections below as a guide to what’s in store.

  • Not just another pretty face: ancient spiral galaxy.
  • The unmiraculous miracle of gravitational lensing
  • Implications of the age of the earliest spiral galaxy
  • Galactic structure, supermassive black holes, and a question of timing
  • Primordial black holes to the rescue!
  • An aside on supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies
  • More on spirals
  • A Family Tree of galaxies
  • THE END
Not just another pretty face: ancient spiral galaxy
The Pinwheel Spiral Galaxy, shown for aesthetic effect- not the “oldest”

Don’t we just love our spiral galaxies?!?  It’s not so much love, it’s more like being awestruck by ineffable beauty, combined with the knowledge that each typically contains hundreds of billions of stars spread out across distances up to hundreds of thousands of light years.  (Another plus is that we actually live in one.) I’ve cheated a bit here by picking a particularly gorgeous example, the Pinwheel Galaxy—a kind of canonical form of which all spirals are variations on a starry theme. (For a spectacular collection of spiral galaxy images, follow the link: glorious spirals in abundance .)

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Is It still a Man’s World? Exhibits B-G: Recognition of Women’s Excellence

More women prominently in the news in politics, STEM, and business

News Item: Kim Jong Un’s sister Kim Yo Jong represented North Korean leadership at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. It was she who communicated to the South Korean government an invitation to highest-level talks in North Korean capital Pyongyang.

News Item: the School Community Council of Salt Lake City decided to rename Andrew Jackson Elementary School to Mary Jackson Elementary School. (A poll had shown the public heavily in favor of the change.) Note this took place in the heart of Mormon country.

  • President Andrew Jackson was infamous for his racism (e.g., chasing escaped black slaves into Spanish Florida) and genocidal persecution of Native Americans.
  • Mary Jackson is famous for  becoming NASA’s first female black engineer, whose career included 34 years at NASA, and authoring or co-authoring 12 technical papers for NASA. Her character is one of the stars of the book(s) and movie Hidden Figures, which celebrate the key role black women played  in the space race.

News Item: in Virginia state elections in 2017, women won 11 of the 14 seats picked up by Democrats.

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Is It Still a Man’s World? Exhibit A: John Kelly

John Kelly’s working assumption on Rob Porter: what’s the problem?

Months ago, Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly guaranteed that he would eventually bring down upon himself the ire of feminists and pro-feminists, when he allowed wife-beater Rob Porter to continue working in the White House. He did this despite having been warned by the FBI that allegations of domestic abuse made Porter a target for blackmail, and therefore he should not be given a permanent security clearance.

If Kelly thought that he could keep the allegations against Porter permanently under wraps, then he is even more politically naive than he has already shown himself to be on several occasions.

However, I hesitate to attribute even to Kelly that level of political clumsiness. Rather—as we now know from Kelly’s fulsome praise of Porter even after Porter’s terrorizing two former wives had been made public—Kelly had taken the news from the FBI  with an attitude that boiled down to “so what?”   It seems very likely that Kelly did not consider Porter’s spousal abuse a disqualification for a position in the White House—after all, Donald Trump himself had bragged about assaulting women, and then gotten elected President of the United States.   And maybe, just maybe, the women were lying.

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Another Tick in the Doomsday Clock – Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Modernization means escalation

It’s hard to say what is the most disturbing thing president Trump said in his State of the Union address, but there’s one that was not just disturbing, but frightening—the idea of “modernizing” our nuclear arsenal.

“Modernization” means, for starters, modifying our strategic force (i.e. big bombs, 100 kilotons of TNT equivalent yield on up) to make it more flexible and deadly.  Sounds bad, right?  Exactly what Donald Trump wants–as always, he wants to be the biggest and baddest dude on the planet. Whatever the cost.  The cost in dollars, of course, will ultimately be measured in hundreds of billions.  The increased risk of strategic nuclear exchanges will be immeasurable.

For a look at what modernization portends, read the executive summary of the latest Nuclear Posture Review to be found here.

On the strategic side, the upgrading will be a bolstering of our forces of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) with Russia.* 

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Freedom from Regulation: No Foul Lines

Give me liberty, or give me strangling regulation!

The self-contradictions in economic libertarianism are acknowledged even by libertarians.  Ron Paul himself has accepted that some constraints on pollution are necessary, to prevent polluters in one geographical area from inflicting harm on people in other geographical areas—acid rain, where smokestack emissions in one place inflict damage downwind, being a simple case in point.  Water pollution operates under a similar principle. Unregulated, uncontained pollution represents an “externalized cost”—there’s a cost paid not by the polluter but by the victims.  In general the victims—people, plants, animals—are indirectly injured, and each individual only by a tiny amount at any one time in any one place.  The damage is cumulative—little noticed in the moment, but with large consequences over long spans of time.

You’d think that externalized costs of many kinds would present difficulties in principle for most libertarians—coal plants release mercury into the atmosphere, causing damage to health outside the coal plant, for which coal plants should be held responsible.*  It’s part of libertarianism that everyone should be free to do what they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt others. Ergo, to be consistent, individuals (to include  corporations, whom the Supreme Court has deemed to have the rights of individual citizens), should be no freer to spew toxic contaminants at the public, than to rob them at gunpoint.

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Pruitt Gets Pushback from Freight Industry

Pruitt EPA: Serving a VERY Special Interest

Let’s not assume that the transportation and freight industries are all on board with every environmentally hostile move made by the Trump administration—in particular the moves of that mendacious boot-licker of fossil fuel interests, Scott Pruitt.

Check out this January 28 piece from The Energy Collective on backlash from the freight industry at Pruitt’s proposal to exempt certain heavy polluters from existing emissions regulations:

Pruitt offers loophole to “glider trucks”

Note especially  the comment of one experienced heavy duty truck dealer referring to “days years ago when our truck shop was so thick with the exhaust from the trucks you could not see the other side of our shop.”  Here’s a guy (I assume a guy) who had first-hand, concrete visual evidence of the damage from heavily polluting vehicles of the past in his own shop—someone for whom environmental unfriendliness is more than a mere leftist catchphrase.  Imagine what he’s telling his grandchildren about Scott Pruitt. (And maybe the entire Trump administration.)

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Confirmed beyond a Reasonable Doubt: ExxonMobile Lied Big-Time

Researchers measure disconnect between science and public relations at ExxonMobil

Most readers of this blog are aware of a discrepancy between what ExxonMobil scientists have been reporting for decades, in a purely scientific context, and the company’s position as reflected in public statements and media “advertorials.”

But how big is the discrepancy? How about, enormous.

Two Harvard researchers undertook to pin down the magnitude of the discrepancy quantitatively—chiefly by content analysis—and the results surprised even me.  The thrust of the analysis rested on the frequency with which ExxonMobil scientists published scientific papers supporting the hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming and Climate Change, versus the public statements and advertorials in media such as the New York Times.

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Cyclists More Law-Abiding then Drivers? Maybe.

Strictly law-abiding cyclists?  Not a majority!

As a generally law-abiding cyclist, I am reluctant to criticize a study that gives cyclists high marks for law-abidingness, but responsibility requires that I call out distortions, such as. . .

As reported in Outside magazine, a study by the Florida Department of Transportation tried to assess whether cyclists are more law-abiding than drivers, and concluded in the affirmative.

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Doctor Confirms Trump is a Monster

Trump out of excuses for toxic behavior

Yesterday we heard the official White House doctor reports President Trump to be in good health (due to “good genes” rather than healthy behavior) and scored perfectly on a cognitive test.

You may ask what sort of pressure was put on the doctor to give Trump a much better than passing grade. But, if we can take the good doctor at his word—keeping in mind whom he’s working for—it means that there are no excuses left for what the President says and does.

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER , PART 3: When Neutron Stars Collide

On August 17th, 2017, the collision of two neutron stars 300 million light years away was observed, initially detected by the arrival of gravity waves. It was a watershed moment in both observational astronomy and astrophysics.

By last fall, you may have become somewhat blasé about gravitational waves: four occurrences had been reported to the public beginning in 2015, all of them involving the merging of black holes in enormously distant galaxies, to little effect on Earth—any tremor you might possibly have felt could equally have been produced by a FedEx van five blocks away going over a speed bump.

Ah—but what occurred last August,* and released publicly to mainstream media on October 16, was an extra special  event, arguably more interesting than any of the black hole stories. Not in the magnitude of gravity waves (again, something we animals would never have felt). . . but in the practice of astronomy, what came out of it was a game-changer, heralded by many as the advent of “multi-messenger astronomy.”

It was an astonishing event in (at least) three important respects:

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