Set Phasers to Science

I am an astrophysicist working on things that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. For the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, I am rewatching the Original Series and snarking on the science.

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In our latest Skype chat with another professional astronomer, Jeff and I talk to Dr. Natalie Gosnell, a professor of Physics at Colorado College. She works on stars that have crashed into each other, and is also an awesome mentor for her students.

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One of the best things about being a professional astronomer is having really cool friends. Since I now live on the other side of the world from most of them, my latest project involves Skyping with fun astronomers to talk about their work.

I’m very excited about this latest one, because it features the awesome Moiya McTier (who also featured in the panel following my screening of Galaxy Quest last year) talking about an amazing project figuring out how we might discover mountains on extrasolar planets. This woman is seriously cool!

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The lovely people at Astronomy on Tap Santa Barbara have uploaded this talk I gave on the science of Star Trek at their event last July (from 1:08:46 in this video - you can also check out my former colleague Dr. Jeffrey Silverman talking about exploding stars in the first half).

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The last in my series of talks on science in the movies at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin celebrates the 30th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation with a look at the “science” in the movie First Contact. In this one, I even break my own rule and talk about warp drive!

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A talk I gave about the science of 2001: A Space Odyssey at a screening held at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas. This might be one of the more accurate science fiction movies, but I find plenty to nitpick, because obviously.

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A full hour-long version of my talk on the science of Star Trek, as livestreamed (over shaky hotel wifi, sorry!) from the @kiscon-blog convention in Los Angeles.

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2017 is the 35th anniversary of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and to celebrate I held a screening of the movie at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas. Here’s the post-movie talk I gave analysing the science (yes, science!) in this movie.

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My talk on the science of the movie Apollo 13 at the Alamo Drafthouse last week, featuring weird Moon behaviour and Tom Hanks’ questionable math skills...

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Last month Austin hosted the American Astronomical Society meeting and the Women in Astronomy meeting back to back. To take advantage of the influx of astronomers into the city, I assembled a crack team of super-nerds to nitpick the science of the historical document Galaxy Quest. This is the discussion that took place after the screening of the movie at the Alamo Drafthouse cinema.

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Here’s the video of a talk I gave at the Alamo Drafthouse movie theatre in Austin, Texas about the science in the movie The Martian. Spoiler: it’s mostly pretty great, but obviously I find things to nitpick, because that’s my job.

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A quick digression: here’s a talk I gave last week at a screening of the movie Gravity, about what Physics they got right and wrong. (Usual disclaimer that the movie theatre spotlight looks fine in person but doesn’t work on camera. But you can see the slides, and no one needs to see me anyway)

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Spock has a tendency sometimes to make wild leaps of logic unjustified by the available information, and it’s even worse when Kirk eggs him on.

The flying pizza monsters of Operation Annihilate are pretty different to any other known lifeform. But they’re not even as different as, say, the Horta, and no one suggested that might have come from a whole other galaxy. It’s not weird to find life on other planets that evolved along a completely different pathway to humans; in fact, it’s far weirder that there are so many humanoids in the galaxy. So weird that the Preservers will be invented in season 3 to explain them.

But ok, let’s say the flying pizza monsters did originate from another galaxy. Imagine they infected a super-advanced species capable of traveling the 2.5 million light years from Andromeda, our closest galaxy. This wouldn’t really help this argument, because the same physical laws that apply here also apply in Andromeda. And even further afield than that; as far as we know, in the entire observable universe.

To get to somewhere with a whole other set of physical laws, you would have to go to a whole other universe. At least, according to some multiverse theories which explain that the reason the physical constants in our universe are so perfectly tuned to allow life is that this is just one of a multitude of universes all with different values of the key fundamental constants. Of course, if the flying pizza monsters are advanced enough to travel between universes, it’s weird that they can’t build their own ships in this one, but what do I know, I’m just a single-universe dweller.

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I am by no means an expert on parasites (I had nightmares after a so-called “friend” compelled me to google the emerald wasp - don’t do this if you’re remotely squeamish). However, it seems like a parasite that drives its host so mad that it drives itself directly into the sun is kind of counter-productive. If you’re using your host for transport, you want it to retain sufficient mental faculties to take you to your desired destination. Which, in the case of the flying pizza monsters of Operation Annihilate, is definitely not the center of a burning sun.

That aside, the Enterprise makes a noble but futile attempt to rescue the infected Denevan, which proves difficult because the proximity to the sun considerably heats up the ship’s hull. Which is an excuse to talk about something really neat about stars: the corona.

The visible “surface” of the Sun (the quotes are because it’s not a solid surface, but you know what I mean) is about 5800 Kelvin (at these high temperatures Kelvin is about the same as degrees Celsius, but if you’re wedded to Fahrenheit we’re talking about 10,000 degrees F). You might think it would get hotter the closer you get to that surface, but it turns out that’s not true! Due to the weirdness of magnetic waves, there’s a region known as the corona that extends millions of miles out into space where the temperatures are around a million Kelvin/ degrees C (1.8 million degrees F).

How far from the star the Enterprise would have to be to experience hull temperatures of 1000 degrees depends on too many things to be able to calculate (what kind of star it is, the heat capacity of the ship’s hull, etc.) but suffice it to say, you probably don’t want to hang out right next to a star.

And since we’re talking about how awesome the corona is, you can see the corona of our Sun with the naked eye* during a solar eclipse. If you’re in the US, there’s one coming up this year on August 21st, and here’s a cool interactive map of where you can see it.

*Note that when I say “naked eye” I obviously mean through suitable protective eyewear such as eclipse glasses. Unless you are a Vulcan and have magical protective inner eyelids. Even then, it’s worth splurging a dollar to be safe.

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The far-left star in Orion’s belt, which Kirk cites as the home of a future author, is Alnitak, also known as Zeta Orionis.

There’s some disagreement about how far away from us this star is, but it’s somewhere in the region 1000 light years. That’s a year away at warp 10, although as we’ve already learned, distance is pretty flexible in Star Trek.

The star we call Alnitak is really a system of at least three stars. The main one is a blue supergiant somewhere between 14 and 30 times the mass of our Sun (depending on how far away it really is), and it has a companion of about half that mass orbiting pretty closely, at about the orbit of Saturn. There’s then a third star - around the same size as the smaller one in the main double system - orbiting about 75 times further away.

Because these stars are so hot (more massive stars = hotter), the habitable zone is pretty far away - around 300 times further from the main star than Earth is from the Sun, or 10 times further out than Neptune. We don’t currently know of any planets in this system, but if one exists it hasn’t had much time to cool down, let alone evolve life: the larger and hotter a star is, the shorter its life, and these stars are only around 7 million years old. For comparison, we think it took around a billion years for life to arise on Earth, so we wouldn’t expect to see anything in this system. So this author wouldn’t be a species that originated on that planet, but maybe there’s a colony there on a still-cooling planet, for... reasons? Maybe his parents study planet formation and he grew up in a scientific research outpost? I’m going with that.

(ETA: Thanks anon for pointing out my typo)

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Edith Keeler drops a massive hint early in City on the Edge of Forever that she’s going to turn out to be important to the future by being able to predict it.

She starts by saying that “soon, man is going to be able to harness incredible energies, maybe even the atom.” This is pretty prescient for 1930, considering the neutron would not be discovered until 1932 and the first nuclear fission reaction (splitting the atom) would not occur until 1934.

The basic theory behind extracting energy from the atom was already in existence, though; it comes from Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2, published in 1905, which states that mass and energy are equivalent. The mass, m, in an atom is tiny, but the speed of light, c, is large, so you get a lot of energy from a small amount of mass.

Keeler goes on to say that this nuclear power will one day be used in spaceships. There have indeed been nuclear powered space missions, including Voyager and New Horizons, which were heading too far from the Sun to get sufficient power from solar panels. And if we’re ever to manage interstellar travel, nuclear fusion is one of the suggestions of how that might be done.

Her further predictions that nuclear power will be used to find ways to feed the hungry and cure diseases have also, alas, not come to pass. 

Incidentally, the world’s first nuclear powered aircraft carrier was launched in 1960, just a few years before this episode was written. It was called the USS Enterprise.

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Like the Guardian of Forever, I’ve been questioning Spock’s science knowledge for a while.

Mostly, though, I just wanted an excuse to gif this scene for everyday use.

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City on the Edge of Forever opens with the Enterprise in orbit around something that’s setting off the fireworks in the navigation console in front of poor Sulu. Spock is unperturbed, though, because he’s chasing Science: specifically, something he calls “ripples in time.”

Now, obviously, we know these time ripples are caused by the Guardian of Forever. But it’s pretty cool that we’ve actually observed an effect like this recently from Earth: we call them ‘gravitational waves’.

Gravitational waves are a consequence of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, which says that massive objects (by which I mean anything that has mass) distort the space around them. When dense objects like neutron stars or black holes orbit each other, these distortions radiate outwards as gravitational waves, which are essentially ripples in spacetime. Although Einstein suggested this around a hundred years ago, they were only detected for the first time by LIGO in September 2015.

When the gravitational field changes, so does the speed of time. So technically, your head - which is further from the Earth’s center of gravity - is aging faster than your feet (although the difference is tiny - something like a few billionths of a second over an average lifespan). Hence, those gravitational waves also contained “ripples in time,” albeit very, very tiny ones, because they came from far away.

So ripples in time are real! Does that mean the LIGO detection was not a pair of merging black holes as has been assumed, but actually the Guardian of Forever? I vote yes.