For those that already know me, they are aware that astronomy is probably my favorite field of science. If there had been more employment oppertunities around here I would have gone with that as a career choice. But thebest observational conditions are dry weather away from large population centers, hence why you see most observational centers in places like Arizona, New Mexico or the Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea.
The problem arises from the atmosphere. The Earth's atmosphere, great for allowing life to have formed and evolved over billions of years, is terrible for most observational forms of astronomy. The higher wave-lengths of light, such as x-rays and gamma rays have difficulty penetrating the atmosphere, while the visible and infrared or lower portion of the spectrum gets scattered between the top and bottom of the atmosphere. Modern computers have programs that can compensate to a large part for the scattering, but it's still always there in some form. So there's two solutions. Either build larger so that more light is collected to compensate for the scattering effect, or lauch the telescope into orbit.
Putting a telescope in orbit is more expensive, given the cost of launch. When I wrote a term paper my freshman year of college back in 1999, it cost approximately $1million per pound to put something in orbit, with nearly 80% of that cost being the expense of the fuel necessary to generate the needed thrust to reach the escape velocity of 11.2 kilometers/second (or about 7 miles/second). To put that velocity into perspective, at that speed you could go from New York City to Los Angeles in just under 6 minutes. So to push through the relatively thick atmosphere and escape Earth's gravity takes alot of force, and to get that force at the moment we have to rely on chemical propulsion that is not very efficient and so needs huge fuel tanks.
But once you get out of the atmosphere, the pay off is worth it. Consider the images the public regularly gets from Hubble and how spectacular those snapshots are. That is a level of clarity that I doubt can ever be matched with terrestial-based observations, and so space-based observations I believe will become the dominate form of research in the coming decades.
One of those new telescopes already in operation is the Herschel Space Observatory, launched in 2009 in a joint operation by NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency). Rather than orbit around Earth like Hubble does, Herschel orbits around the sun instead, giving it a much wider range of views as well as more flexibility of where it can be directed to look. As a side, the new telescope is named for Sir William Herschel, the British astronomy who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781.
The Herschel telescope contains an infrared system, which lets it see through the thick dust and gas clouds in galaxies and nebulae that obscures the visible spectrum. One of the recent photographs sent back was this one.
The circle blobs of light? Those are whole galaxies, located 11 billion light years away. The universe itself is about 13.5 billion years old, so these galaxies are from when the universe was still in it's infancy. But the remarkable thing about them is that despite their young age (which means they would not yet be the size of galaxies we see today, such as our own Milky Way or the Andromada), each of them is producing a huge amount of energy. In the infrared spectrum alone, they are generating one trillion (that's 1,000,000,000,000 ) times the total amount of energy the sun will produce in its lifetime, in every spectrum. These young galaxies are also producing stars at a frantic pace, almost 700 times faster than new stars are born in our Milky Way.
That we are able to see something like this, even so far away and with so much time seperating us and the event, speaks volumes of the value and strength of science, and why I prefer it to the supersitions and fallicies presented in the name of religion.
Religion
On the topic of religion, Pope Benedict XVI issued a statement Thursday saying "At present, Christians are the religious group which suffers most from persecution on account of its faith." He went on to say "This situation is intolerable, since it represents an insult to God and to human dignity."
Excuse me a moment while I stare in awe at the sheer hypocracy and gall that it takes to issue statements like that. To imagine that the Christians are the most persecuted cult in the world (and yes, I consider any sort of religion to be a cult, interested only in gaining power and authority over its members and most especially over their finances through fear and mental manipulation) is to completely and utterly divorce oneself from reality. Which considering it is relgion that we are talking about, isn't all that uncommon really but there should be limits that are even too emberassing for someone like the pope to cross.
Now if he had said that Christianity was the most oppressive group, then I could see some validity in that statement, though I think they'd have stiff competition from Islam in that department. But to argue that attacks against christians is somehow an assault on human dignity is laughable. What about the church's attack on same-sex relationships, their behaviour during the child abuse scandals that have been going on for decades apparently, the way they treat women as inferior by virtue of having breasts, the refusal to admit that condoms would help prevent the AIDS epidemic from spreading in Africa, their rabid denial of the benefits of stem-cell research, and a host of other areas where their own positions are a goddamn insult to humanity in general.
Okay, deep breath, count to 10 and all that. Sorry, but organized religion sets off my bullshit-o-meter quicker than anything else I've discovered. And it's not just one denomination, but all of them. Every religion or cult (which the only difference between the two in my opinion is that a religion is simply a socially accepted cult with a larger membership list) follows the same pattern. They present an answer, and forbid their members from searching for themselves if that's the right answer or even if the question is valid. As Christopher Hitchens said once "Arguments that explain everything, frequently explain nothing".
Politics
Which is why it's so sad and depressing in this country that religion and politics have become so intermingled. In Iowa, the newly elected Republican-majority in the House of Representatives is looking to gain enough support to begin impeachment procedures against four of the state Supreme Court justices that joined in the unanimous decision to allow same-sex marriage in the state, on the grounds that the bill passed by the legistature violated the equal rights clause of the US Constitution. And so for that one singular instance, some newly elected conservatives, who aren't even sworn in yet, are trying to have them thrown out of office.
Or the new US House Republicans that are going to be chairing committees dealing with matters that they have gone on record of saying are hoaxes. Global warming comes to mind first, but there's also science education (there have been talks of allowing creationism back into the schools for fuck's sake), the need for renewable energy sources, and a host of other issues that if they had their ways we'd be stuck in the Dark Ages over again. Europe has already surpassed us in many avenues of research and studies, and China is gaining grounds quickly. Yet the only thing these politicians are on TV talking about is tax cuts for the top 2% of the population and giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the military and defense industries. It terrifies me to know that people that have publicly stated they believe the biblical account that the Earth is only 6000 years old and that we'd all be living in paradise right now if the first woman hadn't fallen victim to a talking snake with legs and just been a good, submissive helper like she was suppose to be, is also in charge of the world's largest military budget. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined.
Is it any wonder the rest of the world hates us or pities us? We are slowly devolving from the shining city on a hill that Regan described us as, and turning into a theocracy similiar to Iran. Only with crosses instead of crescent moons.
This is in addition to the fact that the President today signed a bill extending the tax cuts for another two years. You know, those things he campaigned against so hard. Like the rest of his campaign, what he said he'd do and what he has done since being in office have been vastly different. Nevermind that the trade off was 2 years of deficet-inducing tax cuts (which every economist with any sort of credibility says will not help the economy) for a few months worth of unemployment benefit extensions. Or that keeping the tax cuts in place adds hundreds of billions of dollars to our deficet, at a time everyone in Washington is making a big deal out of keeping spending in check. Goddamn hypocrites, every single one of them. We have no democracy any more, or even a republic. We are in a country where our politicians are bought and owned solidly by the corprations and special interest groups.
If the religious nutjobs don't get us first, the corporate taskmasters will.
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