17/3/2008
Do you fancy five million years of stellar fog?
Question: What is the difference between this:
and this:
Answer:
the only difference is the "scientific" PR built and inspired by
sanctioned twilight mythologies. Below is the commercial break, complete
with
distortions piled upon absurdities and exaggerations piled upon super-dooper
superlatives. This text should be sent out into space
with the Doritos
advertisement. Next year the guy will be working for foot powder
corporations and TV documentaries about the truth "revealed" by science. Note it
comes with the final absurdity of using the present tense when Relativity says that in
any case what we see in these distant regions vanished millions of years ago.
"The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) could easily be called the "Will Make Awesome Papers" system - it's just after releasing another gift box of cosmological data, accompanied by seven submissions to the Astrophysical Journal and many more to follow. One system hasn't given rise to this much astrophysical publication since Hans Lippershey filed a patent for "a tube with two lenses in it" in 1608.
The
WMAP has the minor task of mapping the entire universe, a job it's been at for
five years now. It achieves a clear view in a complicated Lissajous orbit,
constantly keeping its back to the sun and the Earth and thus avoiding the
electromagnetic interference we constantly pump out. The farsighted satellite
has already scanned the heavens ten times, proving that you can get an awful lot
done if you go somewhere you can't watch TV.
In a field constantly held back by the difficulties in going out and getting
data, the WMAP reports are precious. Already the new data has strongly affected
the development of cosmological theories, disproving some while improving
others. It has found evidence for cosmic
neutrinos, and considering those could
fly through the Earth ten million times and never leave a trace, that's pretty
impressive. It has also produced incredible pictures of the birth of the
universe.
How does it do that? By looking at it. It really is that simple (if you ignore
the incredibly difficult system design, detector launch and data
interpretation). Light takes time to travel, and when the distances involved are
"The entire size of the universe" it can take a while to get here - thirteen
point seven billion years, to be exact. Light from the beginning of the
universe, losing energy over time and shifting down to microwavelengths due to
cosmic expansion, is still visible from the right vantage point - and tells us
about the evolution of this spacetime we call home.
The origin of stars, slowly born over five hundred million years from vast
clouds of stellar fog, has been observed. Even the very Big Bang itself - the
first trillionth of a second of everything - is under closer scrutiny than ever
before. We haven't worked out what's happening yet, but the data brings us
closer than every before. And WMAP is still up there, collecting information for
the next round of universal revelations."
Here's the colour supplement: (looks like Tandoori wallpaper and some Technicolor spew I saw once on the steps outside the Empire Ballroom in xxxx, where I was first tenor sax with the Harry Bence orchestra. Perhaps the only mysteries are the mysteries of Time.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/12/78-billion-a-vi.html
CB