Bad Astronomy

Yay! Asteroid 2011 AG5 will not hit us in 2040! Up until now, I couldn’t say that with perfect certainty.

Here’s the scoop: Last year, a 140-meter rock was discovered on an orbit that takes it very near the Earth. Projecting the orbit forward in time showed that it had a small but non-zero chance of impacting the Earth in the year 2040. That would be bad: It would explode upon impact with a yield of more than 100 megatons, far larger than even the biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated on Earth. While that wouldn’t cause a worldwide extinction event—this is no dinosaur-killer—an explosion equal to blowing up 100 million tons of TNT is something to be avoided.

The odds of impact were only about 1 in 500, but that’s still too high to rest easy. The problem is that initially, the asteroid’s orbit was difficult to determine well enough to predict where it would be more than a few years in the future. The analogy I like is pretending you’re an outfielder in a baseball game, and as soon as the batter hits the ball, you have to close your eyes. How do you know where the ball will be when it comes down? If you can only get a second to look at it after it’s hit, you only have a vague idea where it will land. But the longer you can track it, the more accurately you can see where it’s headed. Track it long enough and you can catch it.

It’s the same with asteroids. Earlier in 2012 only a few observations of AG5 could be made before it got too close to the Sun to see. Those allowed the crude estimate of where it would be in 2040, and that big fuzzy volume of space included the Earth.

However, new observations taken with the monster Gemini telescope in Hawaii allowed a far better orbit to be calculated. The path of the asteroid in 2040 was found, and now clearly does not include the Earth. It will be a clean miss, by about 900,000 kilometers (550,000 miles). This is more than twice the distance to the Moon, if that helps.

The diagram above shows this: The upper picture shows the uncertainty in the region of space the asteroid would pass in 2040, and Earth is in that region. The lower picture shows the new calculations, with the asteroid missing us entirely.

I reported on this asteroid back in March 2012. At the time, with the impact risk of 0.2 percent, some people were concerned about AG5. One of those was Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who is now with the B612 Foundation, a group dedicated to understanding and preventing asteroid impacts. He urged NASA to work on a plan to do something about the asteroid, should further observations make the odds for an impact higher.

Part of the problem at the time was that the asteroid was too close to the Sun to observe, and while there was a short window to observe in October 2012, it wouldn’t be until September 2013 that AG5 would be clear enough from the Sun to easily observe it. Schweickart didn’t want to lose a whole year should the asteroid prove dangerous.

Eventually NASA did perform an initial investigation into this, but now, happily, it won’t be needed. The October window worked out, the orbit refined, and now we know it’ll miss.

But this exercise was hardly a waste of time. The lessons learned were important. There are more asteroids out there, and given enough time the odds climb to certainty that we will be hit if we do nothing. The good news is we are looking for them, and hopefully, should we find one with our name on it, we’ll have enough time to be able to do something about it.

As for what we can do, stay tuned. I’ll have more about that shortly.

Tip o’ the Whipple shield to AsteroidWatch on Twitter.

Happy solstice!

I’ve been saying that today’s date is meaningless when it comes to doomsdays, which is true. But it does have astronomical significance, and for Northern Hemisphereans it’s a happy one: Today, at 11:12 UTC (06:12 Eastern time) it was officially the winter solstice. That means the nights are getting shorter, the days longer, and that half of winter is behind us.

There are a lot of different ways to describe this. One is to observe the Sun over the course of the year. In the summer it’s higher overhead at noon, and in the winter it’s lower. If you keep careful track of the arc the Sun makes in the sky every day, you’ll find it’s highest around June 21 every year, and lowest around Dec. 21. That’s a rough guide to the time of the solstices.

Another way is to measure the position of the Sun against the background stars. Astronomers use a coordinate system for the sky that’s much like using latitude and longitude on the Earth, but (for historical reasons) we call them Right Ascension and declination. Just like latitude measures your position north or south of the Earth’s equator, declination measures a star’s position north or south of the celestial equator (which is really just the Earth’s equator projected on the sky). If you measure the Sun’s position on the sky, you’ll find that every year around June 21 it reaches its northernmost declination, and around Dec. 21 its southernmost. What astronomers define as the winter solstice is the exact moment the center of the Sun’s disk reaches its southernmost declination. Today, that was at 11:12 UTC.

So what causes this? The Earth’s tilt! We orbit the Sun once per year in a path that is very close to a circle. The Earth also spins once per day, of course. The axis of that spin, though, is not exactly perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. Instead, it’s tilted by roughly 23 degrees. That’s why every school globe you’ve ever seen is tilted, in fact!

As the Earth orbits the Sun, the axis stays pointed in one direction on the sky—the north pole more or less points toward the north star Polaris. So sometimes the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun, sometimes away. When we’re tipped toward the Sun, the Sun gets higher in the sky, heating the ground more directly, warming us up. It also means the Sun stays up in the sky longer (days get longer) so there’s more time to warm up every day. It’s summer!

The opposite is true in the winter: We’re tipped away from the Sun; the Sun is lower in the sky; it heats the ground less efficiently; and days are shorter. It gets cold: Welcome to winter.

Today, the Northern Hemisphere was tipped as far away from the Sun as it gets: the winter solstice.

But that’s a good thing! Every day for the next six months, we’ll slowly round the Sun and have our axis point more toward it. The Sun will get higher, the days longer and warmer.

That’s why ancient civilizations celebrated the solstice. It meant the return of the Sun and warmer days ahead. While in the United States we tend to call this the first day of winter, I think it’s more like the halfway mark. After all, the past six weeks the Sun has been getting lower in the sky, and for the next six it gets higher. The solstice is the midway point between those two, so for me it makes more sense to call this midwinter’s day; the midpoint of winter.

And I can’t help but mention this: The end-of-the-world crowd really screwed this one up. For ancient peoples this wasn’t a day for doom and gloom! It was generally a day to be happy, to celebrate. And I suppose it still is. We have a far greater understanding of astronomy now, and how the Earth interacts with the Universe around it. And we still get to enjoy the idea that warmer days are afoot.

It’s the best of both—of all—worlds.

Worried about the Maya Notpocalypse™ tomorrow? You shouldn’t be. As I’ve shown over and over and over and over again, it’s all nonsense. The Maya calendar didn’t end, the predictions made by people are scientific piffle, and even if the claims were true (like a planetary alignment, or a rogue planet, or the Sun aligning with a black hole) they wouldn’t hurt us anyway.

But other than that …

And the thing is, this isn’t even the first doomsday prophecy based on nonsense. Remember Planet X in 2003? The planetary alignment in 2000? Or asteroid TU 24?

No? Of course you don't remember those. They were all spun out of thin air and evaporated as soon as their dates came and went. How about this one: The Large Hadron Collider was going to create a black hole and kill us all! That one made the rounds a few years back, and a couple of crackpots even tried to sue to get it shut down (in case you think me maligning them by using the word “crackpots,” I’ll note they sued the United States, when the LHC is run by CERN, a European consortium. That is not the action of a fully intact pot).

I had a little fun back then about it. In 2009 I was in London running a skeptic conference, and one of our guests was physicist Brian Cox, who works at CERN. I did a brief interview with him about the LHC destroying the world:

If that doesn’t convince you, perhaps this extremely useful site will: Has The Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?

Of course, there’s always this, and even this.

Still and all, remember: Doomsday prophecies come, and doomsday prophecies go. If you want the real scoop on how the world will end, read my book Death from the Skies! If you want my guess, we have probably six billion years or so left before the Sun swells into a red giant and fries the Earth (or, if you want to pick nits, a few hundred million years before the increasingly-warmer Sun turns the Earth into a replica of superhot Venus). So there’s that.

My point? Have a nice Notpocalypse™! It won't be the last.

I don’t say this very often, but drop whatever it is you’re doing (unless you’re holding another human or a priceless crystal vase) and click this image to embiggen it. Because holy wow.

That is Saturn, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft on Oct. 17, 2012. It’s a mosaic of 60 images (taken in violet, red, and infrared light seen here in false color), methodically stitched together to produce this jaw-dropping view, and you absolutely positively must grab the bigger, higher-resolution version. It's stunning.

There’s a lot going on here, so let me explain. In fact, let me number these items for you to make it easier!

1) Cassini was almost directly behind Saturn when these pictures were taken; that is, Saturn was directly between the spacecraft and the Sun. Cassini was deep in Saturn’s shadow, and the visible half of the planet itself is almost entirely dark. In other words: You’re seeing the night side of Saturn.

2) The rings are in full sunlight, and we see them from “below”, looking up. The rings at the bottom of the picture are farther away; you can see the disk of Saturn blocking them.

3) The rings near the top are closer to us, coming around into Saturn’s dark side.

4) In fact, the shadow of the planet itself cuts across the rings!

5) The glow on the planet’s dark side (seen as green here) is sunlight reflected from the rings onto the planet’s atmosphere. If you were floating there, above Saturn’s clouds, you’d see the rings off to the side brilliantly illuminated by the Sun; that light is what’s illuminating Saturn. Ringlight! It’s like our own bright Moon lighting up the dark part of the Earth at night.

6) The dark bands going across the planet are the rings themselves, seen in silhouette. This is the part I had to wrap my brain around, and draw myself some diagrams. The cloudtops of Saturn are lit by the parts of the ring in sunlight (#5), but the arc of rings in Saturn’s shadow blocks our view of the gently illuminated cloud tops.

7) The bright arc of teal light (though remember, this is false color) going around the planet is sunlight scattered by Saturn’s clouds. Saturn isn’t solid; it’s a gas giant, and sunlight can get through the thinnest, highest-altitude part of the cloud layer. It gets bent a bit toward Cassini, so we see it. This is the same as a spoon looking bent when it sits in a glass of water; light gets bent, or refracted, when passing from one medium to another, like air to water, or the vacuum of space to an atmosphere.

8) The outermost ring of Saturn—the E ring—is faint and diffuse, but we can see it here as a fuzzy glow. It’s normally difficult to spot, but with the glare of Saturn so diminished in this picture, it’s far easier to see.

9) Two moons are visible on Saturn’s left side, too (I put in lines pointing at them): Tethys, lower and to the left, and Enceladus, above and the right.

All in all, a helluva view, ain’t it?

I’ll note that in September 2006, Cassini sent back a similar view. There, you could see the tiny dot of Earth. In this newer picture, the spacecraft was closer to Saturn than it was for the earlier shot, and the planet itself eats up more of the sky, blocking both the Sun and the inner planets—including us.

These images are incredibly gorgeous, but also serve a scientific purpose. Seeing the planet’s atmosphere and rings this way makes it easier to see faint details. The way the light scatters in different colors can also give hints about the atmosphere’s physical characteristics, as well as the composition and size of the countless icy particles making up the rings.

And, it just goes to show you: Science is beautiful.

Astronomy is a beautiful science.

I mean that literally and figuratively. Of course, astronomy is literally telling us our place in the Universe, how everything works, how it fits together … and it’s done on the grandest of scales. There’s a beauty in the tapestry of the cosmos.

But it’s also just beautiful. Nebulae, galaxies, stars, planets, aurorae; from the near sky to the most distant realms, the Universe is filled to overflowing with pure, simple beauty.

That’s why, every year, I gather together my favorite images taken over the past twelve months and present them to you, my readers. It’s a difficult task, winnowing down the thousands of pictures taken of the sky that I’ve seen, gathering them into groups, picking the best of the best, and then putting them together. It's a tough but admittedly joyful process: I'm sifting through gorgeous depictions of the science I love! And in the end I have a collection of polished gems to share with you. I pick them for their beauty, of course, but also for their remarkableness, their outstanding nature. Something different, something unique, something just plain cool.

This year, as always, we had an amazing crop of pictures from all over—and above—the world. So, from our Earth's atmosphere to quite literally the very edge of the observable Universe, may I present to you: The Top Astronomy Pictures of 2012.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Unless you’ve buried your head in the sand—which, to be honest, would be a better use of your time—you’ve heard the world is coming to an end today, Friday, Dec. 21, 2012.

OK, for those of you who are impatient and want to cut to the chase, here’s the scoop: No, it isn’t.

If you frequent online bulletin boards, fear-mongering websites, or the History Channel, you might think otherwise: It’s hard to avoid people screaming about the prophetic Maya calendar predicting global catastrophe.

And if you haven’t heard of it, then I wish I were you. Because I get email, tweets, Facebook messages, and probably smoke signals about it all the time, and have been for years. It turns out that a lot of people are concerned about these claims, despite zero evidence for them. Still, it’s worth taking a look at them, if only to assuage some fears.

Here’s the deal: According to the doomsday prophecy, the ancient Maya predicted the end of the world would occur on Dec. 21, 2012. We know this because that’s the date their calendar ends. While they weren’t specific about how Armageddon was to come about, there are a host of astronomical events that can and/or will occur that can reduce the Earth to a burned-out cinder.

Except not so much. Not a single thing I wrote in that previous paragraph basks in the warm glow of reality, despite being repeated ad nauseum by doomsday promulgators. It’s all nonsense, garbage, taurine feces, flim flam, and pifflery.

How so? Well, it just so happens I know a bit about this, and will happily (though grumpily) be your tour guide through this latest in a long (and, ironically, unending) series of dead-wrong end-of-the-world claims.

Welcome to the Maya Notpocalypse™.

Date With Destiny

The Maya were a clever bunch of folks. Their civilization got started several thousand years ago and reached its height by 900 A.D., spread over the Yucatan Peninsula in present-day Mexico. They had a sophisticated culture and were adept in agriculture and architecture. They had a complex written language and a keen system of mathematics. They were excellent astronomers, understanding the patterns of the stars and planets in the sky. And, of course, they had an advanced calendar. Several, in fact.

Keeping time is of paramount importance to any civilization. The Maya used different calendars for different purposes (we do too; there are fiscal calendars and monthly calendars and others that are arbitrary and headache-inducing, so don’t be too hard on the Maya). The calendar we’re interested in here is called the Long Count.

It had as its basic units a day (called a k’in) and a 360-day period called a tun. The Maya understood that a physical year was five days longer than a tun, and had other calendars to deal with that. They had longer units, too, like the ka’tun—just shy of 20 years—and most importantly for apocalypse aficionados, the b’ak’tun—roughly 394 of our years. The starting point for their calendar (Year Zero, if you like) is 3114 B.C., the date they figured the Earth was created.

Knowing all this, we can match their calendar to ours and convert any date they used to our more familiar system. If you do the math, you’ll find that we are nearing the end of the 13^th b’ak’tun. In fact, it ends on Dec. 21, 2012.

That’s today. Friday. Cue the spooky music.

The thing is, there is no suggestion, not even a hint, in Maya writing that they thought the end of this current b’ak’tun had any connection to doomsday. It’s entirely possible it may have even been thought of as a time of celebration (just like we celebrate New Year’s Eve).

The Maya also had bigger units of time, including the piktun (which was either 13 or 20 b’ak’tun), and the alautun, which was—get this—63 million years! So it doesn’t sound like they were predicting the end of the world ever, let alone by this weekend.

Anyway, it hardly matters. Just like our calendar, theirs was based on cycles. At the end on a cycle, you reset all the current units and move the biggest one up a notch. It’s what we do on December 31: Reset to the first day of the first month, and increment the year by one. Happy New Year! Same thing with the Long Count. After the last day of the 13^th b’ak’tun, they’d start over at the next one.

So even the very basis of all this fear-mongering is wrong. But why let facts get in the way of a good doomsday?

The Fault Lies in the Stars

There’s a modern day land-grab in the field of doomsday prediction based on the Maya calendar. Books, videos, magazine racks, web sites, TV shows, Hollywood movies—doomsday is big money. You can find any information you want about the end of the world this week, as long as reality is something you’re willing to sacrifice.

So what are these prophets claiming? What could possibly destroy the Earth? After all, our planet is pretty big, so Earth-shattering kabooms are hard to come by (Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulators notwithstanding).

Predictably—at least by me, but I’m biased—they turned mostly to astronomy. Space is filled with scary stuff, a lot of which seems bent on our destruction. Rogue planets, killer solar flares, and monstrous black holes are the Mayan apocalyptanators I see the most.

So, could these spindle, fold, or mutilate our world?

Exing out Planet X

Back in 2003, there was a big doomsday rumor flying around the web about a giant planet named Nibiru (or, more ominously, Planet X) that orbits the Sun every 3600 years. On May 15 of that year, so it was said, the planet would sweep past the Earth and cause all sorts of disasters. A lot of people really believed it, too.

You may remember that date as being one when the Earth wasn’t destroyed.

When the date came and went without Nibiru coming and going, I made a prediction: We hadn’t seen the last of it. Year 2012 nonsense is growing, I said, and I just bet Planet X will have its day in the spotlight again.

I hate being right all the time.

Nibiru is back, and as popular as ever. You can easily find a ton of web sites practically drooling over the idea. They claim that Nibiru is a giant planet (or possibly a brown dwarf, an object more massive than a planet but not quite a star) that will swing by the Earth, and its gravity will do us grave harm. Earthquakes, floods, bad weather, cats and dogs living together: You know the drill.

But a planet massive enough to have that effect on us would have to be big. Like, Jupiter big, and Jupiter’s big. It would also have to be close by now, since we’re down to the wire on the doomsday thing: It would have to be no more than a few million kilometers away at most. That’s really close. Close enough to be fairly obvious in the sky, literally as big and bright as the full Moon! I’m thinking someone would’ve noticed by now.

So where is it?

Nowhere, is where it is. It doesn’t exist.

By the way, the Maya didn’t have telescopes, and while their math was good, advanced orbital calculations would’ve been beyond them. I suspect they wouldn’t have known about Nibiru even if it did exist. And of course, they never mentioned it. Because it didn’t. Exist, I mean.

So if doomsday is to come, it ain’t coming from a planet that wasn’t there. But what about a star? The nearest star, in fact?

A Flare for the Obvious

The Sun seems so friendly and helpful, lighting our sky and warming our planet. But it’s a feisty beast.

Every 11 years, the Sun’s magnetic field goes crazy. It gets amped way up and pops through the solar surface in dozens of places. We see these regions as sunspots, which are slightly cooler and darker than the rest of the Sun, but don’t be fooled: There is crazy violence in store there.

The tangled solar magnetic field lines contain ridiculous amounts of energy, and they can short out like crossed wires. When they do, they release all that stored energy in a single catastrophic blast called a solar flare. A big flare can explode with energy that can be a million times the combined nuclear arsenal of our entire world!

And, it so happens, we’re approaching the peak of the Sun’s cycle. Oh my god! The Maya were right!

Well, if you believe what the doomsdayers are saying, at least. They’ve been making this claim for five years or more, saying the Sun’s magnetic cycle will peak right around December 2012. That is, now.

But there’s just one problem: The Sun’s cycle won’t peak for another year. Oops.

We’re getting moderate activity on the Sun right now and have been for some time. And a few years back it did look like the peak would be right around now, but the Sun zagged when people thought it would zig: The quiet time between magnetic peaks lasted a lot longer than expected. That delayed the next peak, and it’s possible it won’t even happen until 2014.  Not only that, but the really big flares tend to occur well after the peak by a few months.

Don’t get me wrong: Solar flares (and other storms from the Sun) are a cause for concern. They can damage satellites and cause power outages on Earth. But they can’t directly kill us here on the ground. They’re powerful, but they’re far away. The Sun is 150 million kilometers (90 million miles) from the Earth, which dilutes solar flares’ oomph by a lot. A widespread blackout would surely suck (especially if it lasted for weeks or months) and could cripple our civilization in many ways, but even a monster flare won’t cook us or irradiate us or anything like that.

Mind you, 2003 was a period of very intense flare activity on the Sun, and we made it through that. I would like for power companies to take this threat more seriously, but the odds of a global catastrophe occurring this Friday aren’t terribly high.

And need I mention it again? The Maya didn’t know anything about sunspots, flares, or the Sun’s solar cycle.

Science: 2. Doomsday: 0.

But there’s another endtimer’s claim predicting dark days ahead. And not just dark, but black. Like a hole of some sort. Say.

Galactic Battlestar

At the heart of our galaxy lies a monster.

OK, mixed metaphors aside, there is something scary there: a black hole. And not just any black hole, but a supermassive one, as astronomers call it. Sitting smack dab in the center of our galaxy, it tips the cosmic scale at four million times the Sun’s mass.

Black holes, of course, are well-known for being the Universe’s ultimate vacuum cleaners, with gravity so strong nothing, not even light, can escape.

So of course it’s being (ab)used by doomsday purveyors. On Dec. 21, so they say, the Sun will align with this black hole, which will wreak havoc on our tiny world.

This one’s funny. Some of this is true: The black hole exists, for one, and the Sun does kinda sorta align with it. But that’s about it.

As the Earth makes its annual orbit around the Sun, we see the Sun make a circle against the starry background of the sky. Every year, the Sun passes through the constellation of Sagittarius, coincidentally the direction toward the center of the Milky Way, where that black hole lies. And it does do this in December!

But alas for the catastrophists, on its circuit of the sky the Sun never gets any closer to the black hole than five degrees away, a distance 10 times the size of the full Moon on the sky. That’s a pretty crummy alignment.

And even if it did perfectly align, it wouldn’t matter. Why not? That black hole is huge and massive and scary … but it’s really really far away. Its distance is about 26,000 light years from the Sun, or 260 quadrillion kilometers (150 quadrillion miles) from Earth! That’s 260,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers. A bit of a walk. Better pack a lunch.

If you do the math, you find that the force of gravity from the black hole on the Earth is a measly one-trillionth that of the Sun. You feel more gravity from your car when you’re standing next to it than from that black hole. When it comes to gravity, distance wins every time.

Oh, by the way: Guess what day the Sun actually passes the black hole in the sky. Go ahead, guess.

It’s December 19th, not the 21st. The doomsdayers didn’t even get the date right!

In the End

I could go on. And on and on and on until the Earth really does come to an end. I’ve seen claims of asteroid impacts (no asteroid we know of is on an impending collision course with our Pale Blue Dot), superstorms that will make Sandy look like an afternoon breeze (we can’t predict if it’ll rain next week, but the Maya could predict a huge storm centuries in advance?), the Earth flipping over (that turns out to be, ah, pretty hard to do), and even nebulous claims of some sort of cosmic vibrational uplifting (um, what?).

But there’s no real need to get into every single claim. The very calendrical basis of the doomsday idea is wrong, the claims themselves make no physical sense and are generally just wrong, and the Maya themselves make no mention of this date being doomsday in the first place.

If you’re still worried, ask yourself this: if the Maya could predict the end of the world 1,000 years in advance, why couldn’t they see the pending collapse of their own civilization?

When Saturday comes, and I can finally put a big X through Dec. 21 on my calendar, I will breathe a hearty sigh of relief. But my next breath will be a deep one, to prepare for the next bit of apocalyptic nonsense to come down the road. Because just as surely as this doomsday is nonsense, another will be along to replace it soon enough. I don't know what it'll be exactly, but I can be pretty sure it will be just as wrong as this one.

And I'll have to write about it. The funny thing about the end of world: For skeptics, it's actually job security.

If you’re much like me, you wait until the last minute to send holiday cards to your friends and family (if you’re exactly like me then you just give up and never send them). But time is short, and if you haven’t gotten any by now you may be out of luck at the stores.

So why go at all? If you’re reading this blog (and I have to assume you are), then you like spacey stuff, and your luck just changed: Head over to the Hubble Space Telescope site and check out their selection of Hubble Holiday cards!

They have a pretty nice variety of cards featuring gorgeous Hubble images (some of them integrated into the cards in very clever ways). And they’re free: You download the pictures themselves and print them on your own card stock. Each card has a brief blurb telling you what it is: a supernova remnant, a planetary nebula, a star field, a massive galaxy cluster bedecked with boughs of dark matter. Why give your friends someone else’s made-up sentiment when instead you can give them the whole Universe?

Speaking of which, I want to quickly plug two calendars you can get for 2013 along this line.

The first is The Year in Space, created by Steve Cariddi. It’s a 16” x 22” wall calendar loaded with pictures, facts, Moon phases, and more. He made it in cooperation with The Planetary Society, so it has lots of space exploration tidbits as well. Steve sent me one, and it would be really nice for the space aficionado in your life.

The other calendar is America By Starlight, which features the astrophotography of Tony Rowell. I’ve featured his work on my blog before; he takes exceptional long-exposure photographs of the night sky and has created time-lapse videos as well. He sent me a copy of his calendar, and it’s gorgeous.

Among the pictures on the calendar is his amazing photograph of Orion and a meteor seen right through the Granite Arch in the Sierra Nevada mountains (the photo here is a very small version of it). It’s stunning.

I’m sure there are tons of other inexpensive space-themed holiday gifts y’all know about. Feel free to leave them (with links!) in the comments below. Share your love of the Universe, because hey! It’s quite literally all there is.

In November, in an interview in GQ magazine, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made an interesting statement about the age of the Earth:

I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.

I took great exception to this, as did many other people. The two points I wanted to make were that, from science, we do in fact know the age of the Earth to great precision, and that science is extremely important to our economic growth. Rubio dismissed a lot of science in his short statement.

However, now he appears to be backtracking. In a second interview, he attempted to clear things up:

The key statement he makes in this interview is: “The answer I gave was actually trying to make the same point the President made a few years ago, and that is there is no scientific debate on the age of the Earth. It’s established it pretty definitively; it’s four and half billion—at least four and half billion years old. […] I was referring to the theological debate.”

He then goes on to say that religious people, including himself, can accept the scientific result and still reconcile it with their personal faith.

Let me be clear: The scientific result is correct. If you believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old, you have that right, but you are incorrect. However, I do think that if people can reconcile their religious beliefs with what we know to be true, then more power to them! Seriously, that’s great. We know a huge amount of information about the Universe due to our scientific investigations over the centuries, and we’re now quite adept at unveiling its secrets. People should be trying to fold that into their own beliefs.

However, I still take exception to Rubio’s comments. Note the last two lines from his first interview, saying we’ll never know the true age of the Earth, and it’s one of the great mysteries. That says a lot to me, because it’s not a great mystery. It’s actually pretty well known through various different scientific processes. Rubio is now saying he was caught off-guard by the question and was referring only to the theological debate, not the scientific one. But it’s telling that for a scientific question, he automatically went to a religious answer, and not a scientific one.

Rubio’s point about agreeing with Obama is interesting. At a forum on religious matters before becoming president, Obama was asked a similar question, and gave a similar—but not identical—answer (and truth be told, I feel the same way about the religious parts of his answer as I do Rubio’s). But if you read the transcripts of that interview to get the context, you’ll find Obama also goes on to give a lot of credence to science, saying for example he thinks evolution is true and global warming is real, and people should try to reconcile their own beliefs to those realities. Since that time he has been clear that scientists need to be able to investigate the world “free from manipulation and coercion” and has generally supported science.

Note, importantly, that Obama was asked this question in a religious setting, yet still supported science—he went out of his way to do so. When Rubio was asked the same question in a secular setting, he turned to religion. While some people (including Slate’s own Daniel Engber) see an equivalence between the two answers, the context shows there is in reality a huge gulf between them.

It’s important to note that in the second interview, Rubio also says that science should be taught in school and people should still be free to believe what they want. I agree, but this is a very, very thorny issues, and despite the First Amendment to the Constitution being clear about it, a lot of religious politicians want to mandate the teaching of religious belief as fact in the public schools. I want a leader for this country who turns to science first in a situation like that.

I am somewhat mollified by Rubio’s follow-up comments, but given his initial statement, I will continue to watch him with a very skeptical eye. Given that he is one of the media darlings for the Republican nomination for the 2016 Presidential race, we all should watch him with a skeptical eye.

Speaking of the space station, I don’t know how I missed this when it came out, but Italian student filmmaker Giacomo Sardelli used thousands of photographs taken by astronauts in space and made a lovely time-lapse video called Further Up Yonder:

If you think that’s pretty, grab the 2048 x 1152 version (mp4)! Wow.

There have been a lot of these kinds of videos, but Sardelli wanted to do more, to tell a story. I won’t steal his thunder; you can read about it on his blog. It’s a fun idea.

One thing he did that I appreciate is take care to sync the timing of the video with the music. There’s an added kick when the scene changes in time with the music; it ties together the two senses of sight and sound and adds depth to the experience.

And his message ties in with what I was saying yesterday about the space station. We’ve learned a lot from it, and at the very least I hope we get to use those lessons for a long, long time to come.

Before she came back to Earth in a ball of fire surrounding her Russian re-entry capsule, astronaut Sunita Williams took time out of her packing for the trip home to give a nickel tour of the International Space Station.

When I clicked this, I figured I’d watch for a minute or two … and found myself watching the whole thing, because it was simply fascinating.

What struck me the most was the paradoxical nature of the station itself. It seems so cramped, yet at the same time the ability to move in three dimensions makes it seem almost roomy. I knew this intellectually; I’ve been reading science fiction my whole life, and I can’t tell you how many authors describe that very situation. But to see it through the eyes and words of someone actually living there is amazing. The ISS is pretty big—a hundred meters across its longest dimension—but following along with her as she sails down the long passageways makes it really hit home.

I also was drawn in by the personal touches. The crescent moon on the bathroom door had me laughing out loud, and the stickers everywhere were cool. If weightless acrobatics are your thing, Williams rotating around to show how to go into the four-pronged cross-shaped sleeping quarters should make you happy.

Also, fluffernutter? I hope she keeps that under tight control. That would make a mess if it got loose. That’s also how you get ants.

I know the video’s long, but if you have the time I do suggest watching the whole thing. I have very mixed feelings about the space station; it cost a lot of money, and in my opinion it hasn’t lived up to the scientific potential NASA promised when it was being designed. But watching this video reminded me of the good that’s come out of it: There is science being done there; we’re learning how to design and build hardware for long-term space travel; we’re learning just how to live in space (and NASA just announced it will be sending humans into space for an entire year, an unprecedented experiment); and we’re finding new ways for nations and individuals to cooperate in space.

Don’t just dismiss that last bit. I grew up in the Cold War era, so seeing Russians and Americans working together in space—where they were once stone-faced enemies with their fingers on The Button—makes me wonder what good we humans can do when we see our similarities more than our differences and really focus on the long goals.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Fark.