astronomy@iowa

Emmy-award winning composer Alexander Courage died several weeks ago at the age of 88. Although he wrote musical scores for hundreds of television shows and movie musicals, he will be forever remembered as the composer of the theme to NBC’s television show “Star Trek.” He composed additional scores for just a handful of the show’s episodes, but did compose scores for many episodes of “Lost in Space,” which aired on rival network CBS.

After the end of World War II, Courage was discharged from the Army Air Corps and hired by MGM. While working for the studio he went on to arrange scores for some of the most famous musicals of the 1950s, including “The Band Wagon,” “Funny Face,” “Gigi” and “Guys and Dolls.”

When the Phoenix lander made its final descent to the Martian surface Sunday evening, something new in the half-century history of the space program happened—the landing of a spacecraft on an alien world was witnessed and photographed. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed Phoenix with its HiRISE camera. The camera is actually a telescope with a 19.7-inch aperture and a focal ratio of f/24. That’s ideal for making high resolution observations and the telescope is capable of seeing detail as small as 12 inches from an altitude of 185 miles.

Although photographed against the backdrop of a 6-mile wide crater, Phoenix was never in any danger as it was still at a very high altitude. The spacecraft eventually drifted to a safe touchdown on a barren landscape strewn with small boulders.

For additional information and photographs, visit the website of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment.

If all goes well Sunday the Red Planet will receive a new guest. A little past 6:30 p.m. CDT the Phoenix lander is scheduled to touch down on the high plains of Mars’ northern hemisphere. Given the track record, however—over half of the 39 recent missions to Mars have ended in failure—one can understand the trepidation with which the mission scientists and engineers look towards Sunday’s landing. Designing a spacecraft that must survive a careening descent that takes it from 13,000 mph to a mere 5 mph in seven minutes would make anyone nervous.

Unlike the tireless little rovers that captured the public imagination a few years ago, Phoenix will not be a rover. You see, no matter where one looks, the Martian high plains look pretty much the same. There’s not much reason to go anywhere, just set up operations and get to work. One thing that scientists hope to discover is what role water has played in the Red Planet’s soil. We know there is water at the Martian poles, but scientists hope to find what other chemicals and minerals are present in the soil and what clues can be determined about climate change on the planet. The spacecraft is capable of digging about five or six inches below the surface and while its instruments can’t detect the presence of life, they may discover evidence that it did once exist. Of course the holy grail of planetary astronomy would be the actual detection of life currently thriving below the martian surface. Considering that the total biomass below the surface of Earth surpasses the biomass above ground, digging into the red soil isn’t a bad idea if we want to find signs of life.

The mission will last a short three months before the sunlight striking the northern high plains grows too feeble to provide power to the spacecraft’s solar array.

Mission home page: Phoenix Mars Mission
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Calech/University of Arizona

Astronomers estimate that every 30 to 50 years a star explodes somewhere in a galaxy. That number is based on observations of supernovae—violent explosions of stars reaching the end of their lives—in other galaxies and if our Milky Way is typical, there should be two or three supernovae observed per century in our own cosmic backyard. The question is, where are they? Tycho Brahe observed a supernova in 1572 and his assistant and successor, Johannes Kepler, observed one in 1604. The last supernova observed in the Milky Way occurred in 1680.

Supernovae come in several distinct varieties: the “classic” Type II supernova and the more exotic Type I supernova. A Type II supernova results when a star at least nine times the mass of our sun reaches the end of its thermonuclear life and suffers a catastrophic collapse of its iron-rich core. Within a fraction of a second a shock wave is created as infalling matter rebounds off the now rigid degenerate neutron core. Eventually the shock wave rips the supergiant star apart leaving behind a tiny neutron star core, or in more extreme cases, a black hole.

A Type I supernova occurs when a sun-like star—which is part of a binary star system—has reached the end of its life and evolved into an Earth-sized white dwarf star bereft of nuclear fuel and destined to slowly cool into a stellar corpse of carbon and oxygen. Normally that white dwarf would live out its remaining time uneventfully, but when that star is part of a binary system, the white dwarf may accumulate material on its surface that is drawn from the surface of its companion star. If that happens at a sufficiently rapid rate, the material building up on the white dwarf’s surface may explosively detonate in an enormous fusion reaction as the deposited hydrogen is converted into helium. Normally this reaction occurs in the core of a star, but in this instance the reaction occurs on the stellar surface and rapidly consumes the white dwarf. Think of an Earth-sized hydrogen bomb that contains as much material as our sun. The ill-fated white dwarf is believed to blow itself out of existence in the detonation of the hydrogen.

So, back to our supernova count… While we seem to have a supernova deficit in our Milky Way, a new supernova remnant has recently been discovered by the Chandra X-ray observatory. With the assuming name “G1.9+0.3″ (the supernova remnant’s name derives from its location near the center of our galaxy), G1.9+0.3 is thought to be the result of a supernova that occurred about 140 years ago. It went undetected because the dense dust clouds surrounding it absorbed all but a tiny fraction of the visible light produced by the explosion. The orbiting Chandra observatory—named in honor of the Indian Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Subramanayan Chandrasekhar, who spent much of his career studying the dynamics of stellar evolution—was able to detect the x-ray emission of the young supernova remnant, however.

If estimates of supernova rates are correct, there should be about a dozen more supernova remnants waiting to be discovered in our galactic backyard. Given the arsenal of instrumentation available today, astronomical sleuths sifting through the dusty ribbons and star clouds of the Milky Way have a better chance than ever finding the missing supernovae.

Okay, it’s not exactly astronomy-related but he did record an entire album of songs about the Moon. He was also a legendary night owl who probably saw more dawns than most contemporary astronomers so I figure it’s worth noting the 10th anniversary of the passing of The Voice. Besides, it’s hard to miss the spate of movie and television re-broadcasts, the release of a stamp (see above), new DVD releases of movies and several new CD compilations that have come out this month. He also lived in the public spotlight for over 50 years and an incredible amount of ink was spilled reporting on his every alliance, every affair and every feud. Some of it was even true.

In the end, however, it was the monumental body of work that remains and is testament to what he truly loved—making music. A few years ago I looked through one of my books (Sinatra: The Man and the Music—The Recording Artistry of Francis Albert Sinatra 1939 – 1992, by Ed O’Brien and Scott P. Sayers, Jr.) to settle a debate about just how prolific he actually was and found that in one year in the mid-1950s Mr. Sinatra recorded over 70 songs and made 5 movies! That was a busy year, no doubt, but that one year surpasses the total output of many of the celebrities whose work lines the shelves of record stores or fills the shopping carts of iTunes users today. Looking at the recent compilations and boxed sets, I also think it says a lot about us as society when most living entertainers of any musical genre can’t match the current output of someone who’s been dead 10 years and whose vast archive still yields lost or forgotten treasures.

So, what’s my point? It’s fair to say that every serious music lover needs at least a couple Sinatra recordings in his or her collection. If you’re young, you may not understand their significance or relevance yet, but you will. Trust me on this. If you’re old enough to have suffered a few setbacks and broken hearts, you’ve already completed the prerequisites. In no particular order, here are a couple of suggestions:

• “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (1956)
• “Wave” (1971)
• “What is This Thing Called Love?” (1955)
• “All I Need is the Girl” (1968)
• “Angel Eyes” (1958)

That should give any iPod a respectable representation although it’s by no means a definitive list (for more on that see my web pages starting at brentstuder.com/diversions/sinatra.html).

If you choose to wade in a bit deeper after testing the water, there are several albums—yes, albums where all the songs are thematically linked—that are essential starting points. Happily they also represent extremes on the emotional spectrum. They are Songs for Swingin’ Lovers from 1956 and In the Wee Small Hours from 1955. If you choose to acquire “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “What is This Thing Called Love?” you might as well get them with the original albums. Alone, they are incredible performances. In context they are sublime. All the more amazing is that each song was recorded in a single evening along with three other songs before the days of multi-track recording equipment, stereo, and every other electronic technique that moves the musician one step further from the intimacy of performing. These are essentially live performances; removing mistakes was time-consuming and not worth the effort since it involved splicing tapes and not simply moving a cursor and pressing a mouse button to mark a digital file.

Forget everything you’ve heard about Frank Sinatra, just listen.