December 10, 2024 Issue #811
Politics
As Dave Barry said, “Poli” = many and “tics” = blood-sucking parasites
As you may have heard by now, Trump has nominated billionaire Jared Isaacman to be the new head of NASA. I don’t know much about the guy personally; from what I’ve read he seems a decent chap (especially for a billionaire, which definitely invites brain rot) and is definitely invested in space travel. Literally, since he funded his own trips into space via SpaceX.
If you want the measure of him, here are three articles that came out after his nomination:
1) The Planetary Society has a fairly neutral, factual writeup.
3) Space science communicator Swapna Krishna has a more skeptical view, including potential conflicts of interest with Isaacman and SpaceX.
He does seem interested in science, and has talked about climate change being an important issue, so that’s good news — and honestly, it’s shocking Trump would nominate him, since he’s not a MAGA lickspittle like, say, Musk. He’s probably the biggest surprise of anyone Trumps nominated, since he’s actually competent and not an obvious crook. He’s a CEO, though, and doesn’t have governmental public service experience, so that at least is SOP for Trump.
This still has to go through the Senate approval process, but nothing obvious has been aired that would through a monkey into the wrench there, so my guess is he’ll take over the space agency when the time comes. After that, well, we’ll see.
Shameless Self-Promotion
Where I’ll be doing things you can watch and listen to or read about
I did a couple of interviews recently that y’all might enjoy.
The first was for “Living On Earth”, a public radio program about the environment and related science topics, and is currently heard on 250 stations across the country. I spoke with Aynsley O’Neill about my book Under Alien Skies, which is always fun (the show page has a transcript, too, if you’d rather read it). We talked mostly about Mars, including why sky colors are backwards on the Red Planet, and what it would be like to live on a planet orbiting a binary star, like Tatooine in Star Wars. But we covered a lot of cosmic ground, so go give it a listen!
It’s funny; I’ll go months without doing any interviews, and then two publish on the same day. COINCIDENCE? Well, yeah. Statistics, really. But whatever; I like talking about my work, and it’s always fun to chat about science.
Astro Tidbit
A brief synopsis of some interesting astronomy/science news
Astronomers have discovered an adorable little galaxy in our neighborhood, just 11 million light years away from us [link to journal paper]. They’ve called it Corvus A, and here’s its snapshot:
Corvus A. Credit: Jones et al., 2024
It’s what’s called a dwarf irregular galaxy. As you can see it doesn’t have much of an overall shape, hence the “irregular”. And it’s wee; the scale bar is 500 parsecs, or about 1,600 light years. The Milky Way is 120,000 light-years across, to give you an idea of just how small this one is.
The scientists found it in observations taken by DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which is a camera on a telescope in Arizona. DESI takes spectra of wide swaths in the sky, getting information on the distances to a ton of galaxies to try to better figure out how the Universe is expanding. Mostly it’s concerned with very distant galaxies, but closer ones turn up in the data, too.
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