For instance, look at this fucking supernova:

Taken by the folks at the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the image above shows the Tycho supernova remnant in low energy X-rays (red) and high energy X-rays (blue).

Now look at this fucking motion-controlled time-lapse footage of the South Dakota night sky:

Sub Zero – winter night timelapse from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.

Now read this tragic fucking story. It’s about Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, who was killed on re-entry in his Soyuz-1 space capsule — a death he knew was coming and could not avoid. The complete harrowing account is detailed in the book Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony.

And check out this random fucking space fact: First artificial orbiters, by year:

• Earth: 1957
• Moon: 1966
• Mars: 1971
• Venus: 1975
• Jupiter: 1995
• Saturn: 2004
• Mercury: right now, baby!

NASA’a MESSENGER orbiter entered Mercury orbit on St. Patrick’s Day and it’s been sending back the first-ever close up images of the surface of the Sun’s nearest companion.

I hope these little gems have soothed any existential angst or knee-jerk nihilism caused by the Universe’s undeniable vastness. As you were.

After a much-prolonged absence, I would like to reintroduce readers to the Spacetime Report, which brings you the latest astronomy, cosmology and physics news and oddities.

Let’s start with something pretty. Be sure to play the following video back in 720p and make it full-screen. This array of radio telescopes is located on the Chajnantor plateau, in the II Region of Chile. The stars you see rolling by are therefore southern hemisphere stars, so you Contrarian readers below the equator might recognize some constellations floating by. The lovely Milky Way is recognizable from anywhere.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gmikl0RQP44

John Beddington, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, warns that in the time since we humans have become reliant upon advanced technology (communications satellites, GPS, smart-grid electrical systems, etc.) we’ve been unusually lucky where space weather is concerned. Things have been mostly quiet and non-disruptive. But these technologies are all quite fragile where solar wind is concerned. The biggest “solar storm” on record was in 1859, before we were so dependent on electronic technology. Another event like that could trigger a “global Katrina,” Beddington warns:

“GPS is a critical part of almost everything we do,” said Thomas Bogdan, director of the Space Weather Prediction Centre in Colorado. “The ubiquitous need for an uninterrupted power supply, satellite-delivered services – every time you go to a gas station and purchase a gallon of gas with your credit card, that’s a satellite transaction taking place – and, of course, aviation and communications. We have made our lives increasingly dependent on these things, but each of them carries vulnerabilities to space weather with them.”

Around 10-20 minutes after the initial flare would come a burst of energetic protons. “Now at risk would be satellites at geostationary orbit – if they do not have sufficient shielding around their sensitive electronics, they could be subject to problems with the internal computational activities,” said Bogdan.

Pop quiz: What do you get when you mix Alien, The Blair Witch Project, and Paranormal Activity, give the film the title of a They Might Be Giants album and set it on the Moon?

Answer:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsiKHZ-3fYQ

Okay, smarty pants. What happens when you stick your head into an operating particle accelerator? Well, nothing good, but the one guy who did it (back in 1978) lived. He’s the Phineas Gage of particle physics.

That guy probably could have used an anti-laser. What’s an anti-laser, you ask? Why, it’s like a regular laser, except it has multiple beams trapped in a cavity that exactly cancel each other out and dissipate their energy as heat. Duh. Anyway, some evil geniuses scientists at Yale have gone and built one. Make sure you have one of these with you the next time you want to stick your head into a particle accelerator.

• Dear Media, Hello. It’s me, Science. (see also Dear Homeopathy and Dear Astrology) 
• Hubble images a Klingon Bird of Prey wicked cool comet-like thingy flying through the solar system.
• The headline reads: “Robots learn to evolve cooperation, hunting.“
• The Universe is apparently 30 times closer to its ultimate heat death than cosmologists previously thought.
• Real rules for time travelers.

*Look at this fucking picture of the surface of Mars.

*Once every billion years or so, heat deep with the Saturnian moon of Enceladus causes ice volcanoes to erupt like crazy. It turns out this once-in-a-billion-years event is happening right now as Cassini watches.

*Speaking of volcanos, the first “Earth like” (by which scientists mean rocky as opposed to gaseous) extrasolar planet that’s been discovered is in all liklihood a volcanic hellscape with surface temperatures reaching 4000 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s so close to its star that basically, unless its orbit draws a nearly perfect circle, tidal forces must be warping the planet’s mass all over the place and wreaking geological havoc. Deathklok is no doubt planning a music video shoot there soon.

And New Scientist predicts that in the search for the elusive Higgs Boson, CERN is likely to turn up a neutralino or two…

No one has ever seen one, but it is predicted by the theory of supersymmetry, which fixes many problems that plague the standard model. Supersymmetry doubles the number of elementary particles, adding one heavier super-partner for each standard-model particle.

All supersymmetric particles produced in the early universe would have long since decayed into the lightest such particle, the neutralino. And the neutralino, it turns out, is a perfect candidate to account for dark matter — the mysterious stuff that far outweighs ordinary matter in the universe.

It would be easier to spot than the Higgs, and it might even make its presence felt in 2010. If it does, it would solve two problems at once: confirming supersymmetry and answering the mystery of what makes up the universe’s missing mass. The Higgs would have to take a back seat.

*Look at this image:

This is a photograph of Saturn’s moon, Titan (taken by the Cassini Saturn probe). The bright spot up top is a reflection off of a mammoth liquid lake on Titan’s surface. How cool is that?

*The Voyager space probes, launched in 1977, are still making some pretty great discoveries. They’re currently passing through an interstellar region of gas called the “local fluff” on their way out of the solar system. They’ve detected a strong magnetic field generated by the gas cloud, which helps to explain why the cloud has stayed relatively cohesive rather than dissipating away over time.

*Here are some predictions by scientists and engineers of what the next 50 years will bring in terms of science and technology. If history is any indicator, this is really a list of what almost certainly will not happen, as these sorts of predictions are notoriously wrong.

*Scared of terrorists, plagues, asteroid impacts, disastrous climate change and overpopulation? Here’s a good one to add to your list: magnetar quakes. Five years ago this week, the Earth was hit by a blast of high energy particles from such an event that occurred 50,000 light years away and it wreaked havoc here in our neck of the woods…

The scale of this onslaught is nearly impossible to exaggerate. The flood of gamma and X-rays that washed over the Earth was detected by several satellites designed to observe the high-energy skies. RHESSI, which observes the Sun, saw this blast. INTEGRAL, used to look for gamma rays from monster black holes, saw this blast. The newly-launched Swift satellite, built to detect gamma-ray bursts from across the Universe, not only saw this blast, but its detectors were completely saturated by the assault of energy… even though Swift wasn’t pointed anywhere near the direction of the burst! In other words, this flood of photons saturated Swift even though they had to pass through the walls of the satellite itself first!

It gets worse. This enormous wave of fierce energy was so powerful it actually partially ionized the Earth’s upper atmosphere, and it made the Earth’s magnetic field ring like a bell. Several satellites were actually blinded by the event.

And that was from a small shift in the crust of neutron star 50,000 LY away. Imagine what would happen if the crust of a more local neutron star shifted. Yikes!

With that said, here is my own list of the top ten science fiction movies of the last ten years. For the purposes of this list, I’m allowing myself a fairly broad interpretation of “science fiction” (i.e. I won’t disqualify a film for having wonky physics at work) but I’m specifically omitting comic book superhero movies (e.g. The Dark Knight) and pure fantasy films (e.g. LOtR). Movies on the list must be premised on a specifically science fictional conceit. Here goes…

09 Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). Yes, Avatar makes this list, though it’s at the bottom. It’s possible a little additional hindsight will alter my estimation of the film (moving it higher on the list or taking off the list altogether), but as a science fiction film, it’s got a lot going for it — in particular the depiction of the moon of Pandora. See my review from a couple of days ago for more of my thoughts on the film.

08 Minority Report (Stephen Spielberg, 2002). This is Spielberg’s best SF film, hands down (sorry E.T.). I think it’s underrated by SF fans because it’s a Tom Cruise film but it succeeds despite that handicap, and the supporting cast (Colin Farrell, Max Von Sydow, Tim Blake Nelson, Samantha Morton, Peter Stormare) is outstanding. It’s also one of the precious few good Philip K. Dick film adaptations out there.

07 WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). The film that (hopefully) created millions of SF fans. The message is good, the look is beautiful, the characters are charming and it’s pure SF. Love it.

06 Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005). The decade didn’t really have a lot of space opera (outside of the woefully disappointing Star Wars prequels, two of which were in the last decade and are notably absent from this list), but Joss delivers. If I was including TV shows on this list, Serenity/Firefly would likely rate higher up as a set.

05 Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009). The best nostalgic franchise reboot since Casino Royale. This was a sacred cow of mine and I thought Abrams did right by the spirit of Trek. Plus it’s balls-out action awesomeness.

04 District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009). Expect great things from this Neill Blomkamp character. District 9 could have been at the top of this list had it not degenerated into a run-of-the-mill sci-fi action movie in the third act.

03 Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009). Quiet, internal, spooky, existential SF at its best. Sam Rockwell deserves an Oscar. So does Duncan Jones.

02 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004). This one often gets left off of SF lists but it’s totally science fiction. It’s also the best performance of Jim Carrey’s career. I’d like my Christmas present to be Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry promising to make more films together.

01 Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). I still think this is a film that’s going to have a rich SF history and may be one that serious critics are talking about decades from now. If this was a list of the most important SF films of the decade, Children of Men would be in the top slot without question.

00 Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004). I watched this film twice all the way through in the same night and then watched it with Emily the next day. The film took the top prize at Sundance and a peek at Shane Carruth’s IMDb page suggests that despite the honor, he’s been unable to make another film since. It’s a science fiction masterpiece but it’s utterly unmarketable. It does everything wrong from an audience-building standpoint. There are no stars, it’s incomprehensible on a single viewing and the real payoff only comes after much post-film cogitating. It’s easily the best SF film of the decade. It’s possibly the best SF film of all time. Too bad nobody will ever know about it.

Looking at the list, one thing becomes clear: 2009 was a pretty amazing year for genre films. Four of the top ten SF films of the decade were from this last year. And this list doesn’t include films like Coraline, Watchmen, Zombieland or The Road. It’s like it’s 1982 all over again!

Feel free to take my list apart in the comments.

x-posted at Candleblog.

Today, at 17:47 GMT, the Sun reaches the southernmost point in its annual up-and-down journey in the sky. Because the Earth’s axis is tilted, the Sun gets higher in the sky in the summer, and lower in the winter. Today marks the moment when the center of the Sun just kisses that lowest point. From here on out, every day until the summer solstice next June, the Sun will get higher in the sky at local midday.

Fellow Contrarian contributor Chris Parizo sent me this awesome link to an animation that depicts the the scope of the known Universe, starting from a vantage point in the Himilaya Mountains and leaving Earth, the solar system, the local stars, the galaxy, the local cluster of galaxies and the observable Universe and finally showing the CMBR (light left over from the Big Bang). Then the view returns us to Earth. The relative distances are represented during the journey. It’s like the Charles and Ray Eames film, Powers of Ten, but without the nano-scale parts. Watch it in HD for full awesomeosity. I used to create this same effect using an amazing piece of astronomy software called Starry Night Pro, which let you change your distance from Earth from any starting point. The Hayden Planetarium also has it’s own free atlas software that will let you create your own animations. Neat!

A couple of weeks ago I linked to a cool animation showing what Earth would look like if it had a ring system like Saturn’s. Well leave it to the Bad Astonomer to take the discussion up a notch.

What follows are my next-day thoughts on Avatar. Minor spoilers abound.

Somewhere near the middle of James Cameron’s three-hour long sci-fi spectacle, Avatar, I had to pee. The “medium” Diet Pepsi I’d been nursing was making its presence known in my bladder and the matter was just becoming too urgent to ignore. So I waited until I perceived a relative lull in the narrative, took off my 3-D glasses and exited the theater for the men’s room. In the fluorescent glare of the bathroom it occurred to me that I was experiencing a little meta-moment at the movies. The film is in large part about a guy (our hero) who uses fancy technology to enter a different world and experience things unlike the things he’s used to experiencing. In the course of the film he goes into and out of that new world by connecting to or being disconnected from that technology. And here I was, under the bright men’s room light, having been disconnected from my own fantastic world by disconnecting from technology — my 3-D glasses. The real world (while also technically in 3-D) was vastly less exciting and exotic than the one playing out in the room down the hall from me at that moment. After relieving myself, I went back and reconnected myself to the technology and hence to the virtual experience of the film, making a mental note about this insight so I could blog about it later in yet another virtual world.

[Full review after the jump.]

This insight about the various layers of reality at play in the modern cinema-going experience may be about as deep an analysis as it’s possible to get out of Avatar. For while the film is at heart a morality play with political and moral messages central to its plot, the politics are overly simplistic and the morals are black and white.

Indeed, this is the primary criticism I’ve seen of the film so far — that it’s messages are trite and it’s characters and politics are simplistic. This is true, but so what? Compare the morality play in Avatar to the one at work in, say, Star Wars. Compare Avatar’s political messages to the ones at work in District 9. Does Avatar fare better or worse in those comparisons? Then look at the rest of Cameron’s oeuvre. The Terminator films, Aliens, The Abyss, True Lies, Titanic. We should know what to expect from this guy by now and it’s not deep, meaningful message-films.

Let’s be honest. Cameron isn’t Lars Von Trier. He’s a director of big budget, Hollywood action-adventure sci-fi films, but of course he’s much more than that too.

I’m reminded of that scene at the end of Die Hard when Holly Gennaro McClane realizes that the “terrorists” were really just in it for the money and she says to Hans Gruber, “you’re nothing but a common thief,” and Gruber crawls over to her and spitefully hisses, “I am an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane!”

Well James Cameron isn’t just your common director of big budget, Hollywood action-adventure sci-fi films, he’s an exceptional director of big budget, Hollywood action-adventure sci-fi films.

On the level of storytelling, narrative exposition, yarn spinning, whatever you want to all it, Avatar is quite simply a masterpiece. Cameron has built a complete world — the moon of Pandora — and populated it with a dense and deeply interconnected system of flora and fauna and an indigenous culture that seems real (if a pastiche of various tribal Earth-born cultures). He’s also introduced human characters in a sci-fi setting with backstories and a world of their own (a world, it’s worth noting, that seems almost indistinguishable from the one that the Aliens characters inhabited in terms of technology and corporate/military relationships). A lesser filmmaker could not have gotten the audience hooked into the story of the film without a metric ton of clunky exposition and information-dumps. That Cameron was able to get us to care about the characters and stakes and still spend the last act on a giant action set-piece is simply amazing in this light. Leaving Avatar, I had learned a tremendous amount of information about a completely alien world and I never once became awkwardly aware of story exposition.

In hindsight, I can see that Cameron took all of the standard expository shortcuts — he told the story of Avatar through the eyes of an untrained n00b so the audience learned about the world along with the main character (both the world of the human science/military project and the world of Pandora). He used voiceover narration in the form of a video log that said n00b was required to keep, thereby allowing Cameron to tell us things about the world rather than having to show us, which takes more time. He used a time-compressing montage during which we understand our hero to be developing his skills as a Na’vi hunter as well as developing his relationship with Neytiri. Again, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, these tropes would have seemed obvious and clichéd. But Cameron is a master storyteller, and as a result, we audience members don’t even notice the enormous amount of exposition going on constantly throughout the film.

Cameron also lets his actors really inhabit their roles. As stated earlier, the material in Avatar is pretty two-dimensional. The only moral ambiguity present in any of the characters exists in space of their waffling over whether to choose the just and moral path or the craven and evil one. There is no middle road for any of these characters to tread. Some are unambiguously good (Jake, the scientists, and pretty much all of the Na’vi), some are unambiguously evil (Col. Quaritch) and some just need to make up their minds about it (company man Selfridge, marine pilot Chacon). Given such limited constraints on the characters, it’s impressive how real they seem for the most part. Giovanni Ribisi, for example, does a great job of playing the role of the Half Ted company man. Without many lines, he’s able to convey his moral quandary admirably well.

There are a couple of sour notes that are worth noting because they’re just so bad. The mineral that the humans are looking to obtain from Pandora (the mining of which is the cause of the central conflict in Avatar) is called… wait for it… “unobtainium.” Unobtainium is a word historically used “for any extremely rare, costly, or physically impossible material needed to fulfill a given design for a given application.” Okay, so why not just call it “Macguffinite?” Seriously, why not just make Pandora rich in gold? Why make up a mineral?

And while Avatar is much closer to Aliens than it is to Titanic in form, Cameron decided to use a James Horner-composed theme song (ala My Heart Will Go On from Titanic), crooned by Celine Dion imposter Leona Lewis, for the end credits. The Celine Dion song was easily the worst thing about Titanic but at least it sort of fit the material a bit. Here such a song is totally out of place.

It’s too bad that Cameron needs to reinvent filmmaking and outspend the GDPs of most of the world’s nations in order to come out with a film. He’s quite skilled at making these sci-fi adventures. It would be nice to see him do it more often.

[x-posted at Candleblog.]

• It turns out the Earth’s atmosphere and water is almost all extraterrestrial in origin.
• 40 years after the Moon landing, the UK is finally getting its own space agency.
• California to start receiving electric power from geosynchronous orbiting solar cells in 2016.
• Surprised scientists successfully search for solar tsunamis.
• And finally, those hucksters at NASA are trying to convince us that these images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are evidence of  men having once visited the surface of the Moon. Riiiight…