Lights at Night

Star Lights

Early this month I was traveling back to Manila from my holiday vacation. While the bus was on a stop somewhere along the route, I can't help but notice that Sirius and the Orion stars are larger and brighter than I was used of seeing them and there were more stars then I can normally see. Immediately, I realized that it was because I was standing near some rice fields and almost no street lights. The first for a long time, I was away from the city lights that normally pollutes the view of the skies at night.

I remember growing up in the province I was once told that I couldn't count the stars I see because it is infinite. As a child I believed that because when I gaze up back then, I knew it will be difficult to count them. Today when I look up on a clear sky I don't think they would sum up close to a hundred if I count. So why do we not see like as many as there was before? Its because of light pollution.

City Lights

Light pollution is global phenomenon caused by wasteful lighting practices in our attempt to turn night into day. Here in Manila, excessive lighting is most noticable in the streets. Roam around the city and you would notice different areas have differents designs of street lights. It's not so hard to guess which ones are efficient and not.

Light Pollution in Manila

Misguided Street Lights

Efficient lighting is when we direct the lights where it is intended to. This kind of lighting reduces and produces almost no light pollution.

Example of Directional Lighting

I disagree to skeptics who claim the phenomenon is non threatening. They say that is a problem only to astronomers. Aside from blinding the night skies for astronomers and the those gaze up, wasted light big waste of energy and energy cost. In estimate 30% of the light energy we consume are not direted to its proper use and go wasted glarring our atmosphere. Aside from this studies now show that it also has health and environmental consequences.

Global awareness about  light pollution is increasing. Thanks to the independent groups and their websites. This year we can take part in a global survey aiming to measure the amount of light pollution around the world . Go this website-http://www.globeatnight.org/analyze.html and follow 5 easy steps. No need for special tools or knowledge, just naked eye and your observation. Hope that we can increase from only 12 participants from the Philippines last year.

100 Billion Planets in the Milky Way

A six year study reveals that there could be at least 100 billion planets in our galaxy alone as reported in an article in physics.org.

It has been previously speculated by most scientists that about 20 percent only of the stars in the Milky Way would hold at least one planet around them. But this six year analysis using microlensing concluded that planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception.

So now that we are guessing better on how many planets we have in the galaxy, perhaps we can revisit good old Drake equation to estimate how many intelligent aliens out there can we have contact.

N is equal to  R * Fp * Ne * Fl * Fi * Fc * L . So here is my own conservative calculation. 

R - Rate of formation of suitable stars in our galaxy	R =
Fp - Fraction (%) of those stars with planets	Fp =	%
Ne -Number of "earths" per planetary system	Ne =
Fl - Fraction (%) of those planets where life develops	Fl =	%
Fi - Fraction (%) of sites with intelligent life	Fi =	%
Fc - Fraction (%) of planets where technology develops	Fc =	%
L - "Lifetime" of communicating civilizations (years)	L =
R * Fp * Ne * Fl * Fi * Fc * L = N
N - Number of communicative civilizations	N =

6000 planets with civilizations we can contact in this lifetime. 

I guess that gives lots of options and more chances to find one.

Here, try your own calculations - DRAKE CALCULATOR

Stephen Hawking at 70

Stephen Hawking, probably the most popular scientist of today, has celebrated his 70th birthday yesterday. That is itself is amazing as he has continuesly defied odds and medical predictions, with his motor neurone disease known as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), He was diagnosed at age 21 and was not expected to live more than two years. Well, he did far better than that.

But it was said that he is too ill to attend a celebration of his birthday and rather he gave a recorded message in which he urges for interplanetary travel and colonize other planets, arguing that we face a grim future unless we spread out from our terrestrial home. “I don’t think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet,” Stephen's message said.

In the same message, he said "Remember to look up at the stars, not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious."

He is a major icon of science and by being so, I owe some of my interest and facination to the subject from reading of his books like A Brief History of Time and the latest The Grand Design(which i got in an audiobook).

Happy Birthday Professor Hawk!

Exoplanet Zoo

The year 2011 has added 24 new planets to the zoo and a few days only to 2012 and the discovery of 4 more has been announced.

Since the discovery that earth revolves around the Sun,  philosophers and scientist have only speculated for many centuries about the existence of planets revolving in other stars - extrasolar planets aka exoplanets. Since the dawn of human existence the first discovery happened in our generation. Back in 2005 the first confirmed detection was a giant planet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi. Since then, with more people looking, improved technology and observation techniques, and the launch of Kepler in 2009, the number of confirmed detection has dramatically increased. According to explanet.eu, there are 716 confirmed exoplanets as of December 23 2011, plus another 2,326 planetary candidates.

There are several methods in planet hunting. Nasa's Kepler uses the transit method and has added by far the most in the exoplanet zoo.

The most famous was from last year with the discovery an orbiting planet(Gliese 581g) from the star system Gliese 581. It has made media attention when its data has revealed that is was orbiting in a zone which could support life(goldilocks zone).

We may expect further increase in rate in discovery if exoplanets but the question remains--Will we ever get to any of them?

If the Voyagers which was launch 1977 and is now travelling 40,000 miles per hour is headed towards the direction of Gliese 581, Voyager 1 and 2 would take about 320,000 years to reach it. By then, I would like to believe, that we would have developed a better technology to out run it. =)

But we are yet to witness these improvemtents. One in the table right now is the fuel of choice in sci-fi hollywood -- antimatter(like in the movie avatar and startrek).

It makes me feel proud to live in the age that we are discovering these planets. If we want to take part of it in our own way, with no higher knowlege or special tools, we can help anylize data obtained by NASA's Kepler mission. Login to this website- http://www.planethunters.org