Tenser, said the Tensor

Goodbye, Xena...

...hail Eris!  (And all hail Dysnomia, too.)

Eris seems like a fitting name for the object that triggered the Great Planet Debate.  Do you think it would be appropriate to start Google-bombing its Wikipedia page with the phrase planet Eris?  Or would that be sowing too much discord?

[Update:  Oh, I just got the joke.  Dysnomia is named after the daughter of Eris, but the Greek word dysnomia means 'lawlessness'.  How much you want to bet that's a Xena reference?]

They've Given You a Number...

Former planet Pluto is now minor planet number 134340.  (That's the numbering system used for asteroids, as opposed to periodic comets.)

Lame.

Defining Planet

If you've been keeping an eye on any of the wire services (or Language Log), you may have noticed that the members of the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague have been wrangling, Vatican-style, over the definition of the word planet.  Judging by the periodic puffs of contradictorily-colored smoke the meeting is emitting, it sounds like they may be getting bogged down in the details.  (That's where the Devil is, you know.)  Well, defining words involves language, and language is what linguists study, so that means this is a linguistic problem.  Let's roll up our sleeves and see what all the trouble is.

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Bright with Sinuous Rills

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

...

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

Norwegian Meteorite

Check out this report of a large meteorite landing in northern Norway and exploding with the force of an atomic bomb.  Yikes!  Good thing it came down in the middle of nowhere and not over a city.

I found this clause orthographically entertaining:

...Norway's best known astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told Aftenposten.no.

I think it could be improved, though.  How about:

...Nørway's best knøwn astrønømer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard tøld Aftenpøsten.nø.

Yeah...that's more like it.

The Foe

In reading about different types of supernovae on Wikipedia, I read about a new-to-me unit of measurement—the foe:

A foe is a unit of energy equal to 1044 joules.

To measure the staggeringly immense amount of energy produced by a supernova, specialists occasionally use a unit of energy known as a foe, an acronym derived from the phrase fifty one ergs, or 1051 ergs. This unit of measure is convenient because a supernova typically releases about one foe of observable energy in a very short period of time (which can be measured in seconds). In comparison, the total output of the Sun over its entire lifespan (billions of years) is about a tenth of a foe.

1051 ergs, huh—better put on some sunscreen.  As long as we're talking about absurdly high energy measurements, also check out the article about the so-called Oh-My-God particle, a cosmic ray particle observed in 1991 with about the same amount of energy as a fastball.  (hat tip for getting me reading about this stuff: today's APOD)

Physics Envy

I was watching a recent episode of Nova about the neutrino titled "The Ghost Particle", and at one point I was nearly overcome by a powerful wave of pure physics envy.  In discussing the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, a huge ultraclean spherical acrylic tank of heavy water located two kilometers below the surface of the Earth in a nickel mine in Ontario, Canada, Prof. David Wark said:

When the SNO detector was finished, the exact center of the SNO detector has the lowest level of radiation of any point in the Solar System.

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Flatworms in Action

The Wife just sent me a link to a short article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled "8 Hot Tips for Wild Romance" that details oddities from the world of animal mating.  It's behind the subscription wall so I can't include a link, but it includes the following tidbit:

It's a battle of the sexes ... Scientists at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, recently discovered a new species of marine flatworm, Imogine lateotentare, that engages in penis fencing, reported The Sydney Morning Herald. Hopped up on oysters, the two-centimeter flatworms, which have both male and female parts, reproduce by stabbing each other with their genitals. The first to penetrate transfers sperm to the de facto female and goes on to joust with other flatworms while the "loser" lays and protects the eggs.

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I'm able to provide you with the following link (NSFW if any of your co-workers is an invertebrate) to a video of flatworms penis fencing.  (You'll have to sit through a short ad.)  I'm not sure how they can tell that the flatworms are hopped up on oysters, but they're the experts, so I guess I'll take their word for it.

Distributed Astronomical Microscopy

Over at A Voyage to Arcturus Jay Manifold writes about a project in which volunteers will help process data from NASA's Stardust mission, which is expected to deliver aerogel samples with space dust embedded in them back to Earth shortly.  It sounds interesting, but what I really wanted to highlight was the title of the post, which I thought was excellent: "An Army of Clyde Tombaughs?".  It's perfect—the sort of person who'd get the reference is just the sort of person who'd want to volunteer for the project.  It'd also be a great name for a band.

The post also includes one of my favorite bits of astronomy vocabulary: Blink-Comparator.  I seem to find myself doing blink comparison pretty regularly on computer screens (e.g. Alt+Tabbing back and forth to see how two versions of a document differ), but when I use that term to explain to someone else what I'm doing, I usually get a blank look.  Come on—blink comparison!  It means what it says!

[Extra credit for astonomy geeks:  Name the artist who painted the picture of a red giant that Jay uses for a banner image.  Extra-extra credit:  What star is it?]

Mad Scientists Win Nobel

This year's Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren for their discovery of the bacterium that's responsible for most peptic ulcers.  There, that sounds nice and polite, doesn't it?  The real story is nastier and much more entertaining.

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