Getting a comment to a year-old post is a good sign for spam. And indeed, the comment to my post about astronomical april-fools papers which sneaked behind my filter is kind of spam (translated from German):
Funny, the crazy astronomers. Always there for a good joke. I really like that.
Greetings from a half-knowing Astrologer, from Martin
Month-Horoscopes for free
The last line was linked to http://www.sternzeichen-horoskop/.Yes, without domain ending. I first thought some silly astrologer did not even manage to write his URL correctly. But as many browsers automatically append an ‘.com’, you would end up on the correct site. Is that a way to get past spam filters? If yes, it would quite smart.
The website is full of ads and texts about zodiac signs and weeklzy monthly, even yearly horoscopes. Hm… is that really an astrologer? They use to mislike such general horoscopes a lot.
No, in fact is does not seem to be a true astrologer. I did some research, because there was another reason to be suspicious. The comment is signed with “from Martin”, while the commenter calls himself “Dennis” in the form. The email-adress then fits to the person running the Horoscope-Website, an “Alexander”. Who seems to be a webdesigner rather than an astrologer. I guess he tries to earn some extra-money with website advertisments.
It would have been strange if an astrologer would have tried to advertise on my Blog. Why all the different names? Well, at least I would be too embarrased to use my real name when acting as an astrologer. I think such pseudo-astrologers are still better than te ‘real’ ones. At least they are financed by ads and do not take their customer’s money for their fary-tales. And as the ads on such sites are for astrologers, they even take away some of their money.
But still, I don’t like spam, especially when it is as badly made as this one. So I am contemplating whether I should start billing them for posting spam …
After having hosted the Blog-Telescope recently, I will try to point you to the future ones, too. Today, you find it over at austroscepticus, where Christian takes you to space with the Blog-Teleskop. (Everything in German, though).
There it is finally. Our article about dwarf galaxies and dark matter has been published in the current issue of the German popular science magazine “Spektrum der Wissenschaft“, which is the German version of the Scientific American. The text is about testing the current cosmological standard model using the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. In it, my professor, Pavel Kroupa, and I not only describe how predictions of the Cold Dark Matter model can be compared to the Local Group of neighboring galaxies, but also how new doubts in the existence of dark matter arise from the failed tests. The article is even mentioned on the front page and in the editorial and got 10 full pages, which is a lot.
New food for your feed-reader!
While the article is in German, we also have to offer something to our English readers. Spektrum der Wissenschaft has convinced us to start a new blog on the topic to allow a direct discussion. We decided that this blog should be in Englisch. It got the title “The Dark Matter Crisis - The rise and fall of a cosmological hypothesis“ and can be found at the SciLogs. Besides Professor Kroupa and me, also Anton Ippendorf, a student in our research group also working on dwarf and satellite galaxies will write posts there. Currently I am preparing a blogpost for the Dark Matter Blog on the Bullet Cluster, one of the most often heard arguments against alternative gravity theories like MOND or MOG.
Article as free PDF
If you read German, you can buy the current version of Spektrum der Wissenschaft from today on, it costs 7.40 Euro in Germany and Austria. But if you are only interested in our article, you can also download it as a free PDF.
So, now I am waiting for the reactions. Have fun with the text and our new blog!
Florian Freistetter von Astrodicticum Simplex hat mich gefragt, ob ich nicht einmal das Blog-Teleskop verranstalten möchte. Na klar, die Ehre nehme ich gerne an, trotz unerträglicher Hitze, die bei manch einem Blog schon zum Hitzefrei geführt hat . Somit folgt jetzt eine subjektive und unvollständige Zusammenfassung interessanter Beiträge aus den letzten beiden Wochen der deutschen Astronomie-Blogwelt.
“Meine kleine Astrowelt” hat ein Video entdeckt, dass den Einstieg in die Himmelsbeobachtung erleuchtern sollte.
Daniel Fischer gibt einen ziemlich umfassenden Überblick über die Auswirkungen ein halbes Jahr nach Ende des Internationalen Jahres der Astronomie 2009. Respekt, das muss viel Arbeit gewesen sein …
Leonard Burtscher von “Promotion mit Interferenzen” fragt: Warum Berufsastronom? und gibt drei gute Antworten.
Auf “Lichtecho” findet sich ein äußerst lesenswerter Text von Stefan Taube zum Thema Wasser auf der Venus. Warum auch immer nur vom Mars sprechen?
Ludmilla von “Hinterm Mond gleich links” schreibt über den Anfang des Universums. Nein, nicht den Urknall, sondern darüber, dass auch wir hier auf der Erde ein Teil des Universums sind. Ein Update des Milchstrassenbildes gab es dann auch noch. Ist schon spannend, wie sich die Struktur unserer Galaxie durch neue Erkenntnisse “verändert”.
Und zum Schluss wird noch ein Stern ausgeknipst, drüben bei “Himmelslichter”: In der Nacht vom 8. zum 9. Juli wird ein Asteroid eine kurze … nenne wir es Sternfinsternis verursachen.
Da ich mich im Blog auch immmer gerne mit der Fotogrfie beschäftige gibt es zum Abschluss noch Hinweise auf eine Reihe spannender Bilder: Auf “Asterythms” spielten Geduld und die richtige Position zusammen, das Ergebnis ist ein Foto vom untergehenden Mond mit einem Windrad davor. Windparks scheinen übrigens einen guten Vordergrund abzugeben, so auch für das Bild Leuchtender Nachtwolken auf “Astrofan80’s Blog”. Beeindruckende Astrofotografien von Nebeln kann hingegen Jörg vom “Heuchelheimer Himmelsfähnchen” präsentieren. Eine Vielzahl von Aufnahmen mit Astronomiebezug präsentiert Daniel Fischer stets auf seinem Blog “Skyweek Zwei Punkt Null“, da will ich gar keinen speziellen Beitrag heraus greifen.
Das war es von meiner Seite. Wer mag kann gerne noch weitere interessante Beiträge in den Kommentaren ergänzen.
Two weeks ago my professor and me were interviewed by the Deutschlandfunk, which is a big German Radio Station. The topic, of course, was the new study concerning Dark Matter. The (German) broadcast can be found online as a Podcast and in text. This week we got another Interview request, now from NDR Info. As my professor and the other Co-Author from Bonn are at a conference in the US right now, I was the only one to be interview. You can imagine this made me a bit nervous, but it turned out to be fine.
The broadcast (again in German, sorry), will be aired today between 9 and 10 pm in the NDR Info show “Logo”. It will also be available as a podcast (starting at 39:30 into the file). I am curious what it will be like.
For Monday evening I was asked to talk about the Modified Newtonian Dynamics at our institute’s Astro Club. That’s a regular (voluntary) meeting for the younger physics students*, organized by several very committed tutors. They give easy to understand (and usually German) talks and, if the weather is fine, also observe with the institute’s telescope.
After that I hope to find more time for my work again. And for some posts on black and white infrared photography (film, of course), as I have already shown you two of my infrared photos in the post about faked UFO photos. As an introduction, here is another one. It shows the Sydney Harbor Bridge.
As a transition stage back to some photography blogging, I’d like to point you at a documentary: “The Eye 3D“. It was produced last year, as part of the International Year of Astronomy, and shows the “life and work at cerro paranal” in the Chilenian Acatama desert, where the Very Large Telescope is located.
On their website, you can find some 3D still pictures which you can enjoy if you have one of these red/blue glasses. The trailer below is in 2D, but I think it already gives an impression.
It seems to be press-release time at the institute. Michael Marks, a friend and colleague from the research group reports on his new results. No, it is not about MOND or Dark Matter this time, but the topic is very interesting, too.
Michael performed a kind of galactic archaeology. While ha did not dig in mud or had to get dirty for his work, he was looking at extremely old objects nevertheless. The more than 12 billion year old globular clusters still contain information about the time of their formation. From that, he has deduced new insights into the formation of the Milky Way.
He looked at the correlation between age and mass of the globular clusters. While the clusters are more than 12 billion years old, their ages differ by a few hundred million years at most. But the younger ones have lost more stars than the older. From simulations, Michael knows that forces from the outside (similar to the tides on earth, but way stronger) can make a cluster loose stars. The difference in this loosing of stars between older and younger clusters thus means, that the outside forces became stronger between the times of their formation. The Milky Way grew more rapidly than previously thought. The smooth gas clod, which was going to form the galaxy, clumped within only a few million years, and these clumps then influenced the forming globular clusters.
Finally I can tell you why I did not have much time to blog in the past month. Besides my own paper (have no news on this yet) I wrote a popular science article together with my professor. That article will be published in the August Edition of Spektrum der Wissenschaft, which is the German version of the Scientific American.
Furthermore, I participated in another, very important research project resulting in a probably controversial, but scientificaly very important paper. Today it got the first place of the astrophysics preprintserver listing ArXiv: “Local Group Tests of Concordance Cosmology: Towards a new paradigm for structure formation?“. The study is about a test of the predictions of the cosmological standard-model including the dark-matter hypothesis on cosmologically small scales: In the range of the Milky Way satellite galaxies. The clear result is, that the standard cosmological model fails to agree with the observations. In total, the study lists five problems, ranging from the fact that satellite galaxies with different dark matter masses unexpectedly have the same luminosity in their center, to the phase-space distribution of the Milky Way satellite galaxies. Each one is a serious problem for a scientific theory, but taken together the situation looks catastrophic. But, I think, it is good for science in general, because that’s the way science works: A theory makes predictions, which we use to test it. If the theory fails it is falsified and we need another, better description of the world. So it looks like we need an alternative to Dark Matter, which is great because we can expect some new fascinating results from this field of research in the next years.
First author of this study is my Professor (Pavel Kroupa) from the University of Bonn in Germany. Scientists from Germany, Austria, France, Italy and Australia collaborated for this research. And I am one of them. The part of work I did was about the disc of Milky Way Satellite Galaxies, and was large enough to give me place number five in the author list. I already mentioned the disc of satellites in my post about Tidal Dwarf Galaxies, but plan to present my new results in a post soon. So stay tuned.
UPDATE: The article is published in the August issue of Spektrum der Wissenschaft, and is available as a free pdf for download, too. You can find more information on this in this post.
A good friend of mine (Tobias, he occasionally comments here, too) was in Chile for several weeks, observing at the APEX telescope. It is located at an altitude of 5100 meters above sea-level. The astronomers running observations at that height have to take special care, as the air pressure is already very low. This is one reason why their Base Camp, where they sleep and live, is far away, at a much lower altitude.
Tobias shows the effect of increasing air pressure with a simple experiment: by taking a half-filled bottle down from the telescope site to the base camp (which still is at an altitude of about 2500 meters). At 5000 meters, the bottle is filled half with water and with air. The air pressure outside and inside are the same, everything looks normal:
At 4000 meters, the air pressure is higher, but the pressure inside the bottle is still the one from 5000 meters. The bottle starts deforming:
At 3000 meters, the air pressure squeezes the bottle even more …:
… until it is fully deformed at the base-camp height:
A similar effect can be observed without changing your altitude. Especially in winter, when you take an empty bottle (which, of course, has to be easily deformable) from your warm home out into the freezing air. The warm air in the bottle cools down, reducing the pressure inside. That way the bottle gets squeezed. When opening it, air streams in and equalizes the pressure, the bottle can get its shape back.
Obviously, another way to throw away tax-money has been found in Germany: unemployed people can now get a training in Astrology paid by the employment center, as reported by the Hamburger Morgenpost. The German blogs Astrodicticum simplex and Wahrsagercheck Blog have already posted articles about this. According to the Morgenpost-articel, the courses, costing 800 Euro per month and person according to the newspaper, are fully funded. They take at least 17 month to complete and when I understand it correctly, are also available as distance learning courses. They are provided by the Astrologer Helen Fritsch, who offers a number of courses in her ‘Astro-Praxis’ and informs extensively about possibilities for public funding.
At least two unemployed women already get the coursed paid. One of them is cited in the Morgenpost. From a physicist’s perspective her CV is saddening: She dropped out of physics studies, now she learns astrology. That is why I think it is important to teach the scientific method in the very first semester of physics, so everybody understands how critical thinking and evidence-based tests work. But it seems like she was already interested in both, astrology and astronomy, when she started her studies. Obviously, Geore Orwells Doublethink does not work too well in the real world. The other trainee explains how she became aware of the possibility to get her astrology course paid:
„My responsible official at the employment advised me of the training at the Astro-Praxis.“
Oh my … And there seems to be a pattern in this, the other one can tell about a meeting with her official, too:
„The topic of astrology was came up very early in our meeting. However, it was me who first was sceptical, and she was the one who was pushing me into this direction, as she obviously took my interest in this area very serious.“
I can only repeat myself: Oh my …
The ‘educating’ astrologer Helen Fritsch once was a school teacher, she has additional training in psychotherapy. No wonder that her courses are called ‘Psychological Astrology’ (but there are some in ‘Medical Astrology’, too, whatever these are). Whenever I hear this, it raises a question in me: Do ‘astrological life coaches’ or ‘therapists’ aim at the weak, people with problems who would accept every help, even a completely reality-free, and switch of critical thinking? I don’t know. Most probably really think they are helping their customers. But in my opinion, there is a danger to get addicted or better: dependent, to this esoteric ‘help’. People who have psychological problems should be treated by professionals, who do not complicate their patient’s lifes and worldviews with esoteric ballast, astrologically formulated commonplaces and unlearning of rational thinking. I can imagine that these people’s problems might not be solved by astrologers, but only get covered and the customers distracted. This might help them first, but on the long run I don’t see how this can be a solution.
As a life coaching astrologer one can easily counter skeptic’s claims that astrological prognoses are impossible. They can say: Hey, it is not about predicting the future, it is about self-awareness, showing trends in ones character and possible solutions for problems. That this creates more problems (like a distrust in science and evidence-based medicine, because a different view of reality is developed) than it solves is ignored. These problems don’t even exist in the astrological view of things, because their claim of validity is not based on evidence. So, there is no need to have philosophical thoughts about parallel universes, some people already live in one.
Here a quote from Helen Fritsch fits well:
„There is no scientific evidence for our lore. But that does not exist for god’s existence either.“
Well, yes. That is why I am an atheist. An it is not only missing evidence, the reality of astrology is falsified by science. Planets do not have influence on our personality. Zodiac signs are arbitrary combinations of far-away suns on the sky. Horoscopes consist of valid-for-all Barnum-Statements, because people tend to accept vague, general statements as correct descriptions of their personality. The Barnum-Effect, by the way, is a term from psychology … maybe it indeed makes sense for astrologers to have an additional psychological education.
A speaker of the employment office is cited in the Morgenpost article, saying:
„With this job description one has excellent chances on the employment market.“
Great, so let us all become Astrologers. Then we do not have to care for little annoying things like reality, being able to test assumptions and concrete statements. The argument is so good, why not apply it to other sectors? Maybe the employment office would like to pay for re-training unemployed to work as air-guitar sellers or thimblerigger. There are also always profitable markets for people like drug prostitutes or porn actors? But the idea seems not to be new. Placebo-Effect applying ‘alternative’ ‘medical’ ‘educations’** are already paid for: Homeopathy, Bach flowers, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda (See comment here). Self-delusion made easy and cheap.
It is simply ridiculous for the state to pay people so that they get an ‘education’ in astrology. On the one hand, these anti-scientific worldviews are financed, on the other hand, science like astronomy is also paid for (could be better, though ). That reminds me of an astrologer’s talk at the public library in my city, last year because it was the international year of astronomy. I should finally write a report on that. I still can not believe how much crap was told there.
But please don’t get me wrong: Whoever wants to become an astrologer can take these courses. And whoever looks for help by meeting an astrologer is doing so on his or her own responsibility. But an education for this pseudo-scientific, anti-reality propagating job must not be paid by the state. Otherwise, we could go on and include astrological-psychological coaching in our healthcare system. At least the Federal Emplojment Office seems to be critical to this case and does not intend to finance it. Well, there might be a glimmer of hope left.
*: Maybe view of irreality would be the better wording.
. Somit folgt jetzt eine subjektive und unvollständige Zusammenfassung interessanter Beiträge aus den letzten beiden Wochen der deutschen Astronomie-Blogwelt.
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