One of the things I do is help scientists describe their work to the public. Sometimes this means writing a press release or reading over an article someone has written for a publication. Whatever it is, my job is to find the most important parts of the story and bring them forward so that the scientist and the public (reporters, usually) can have a meaningful discussion about the work. That's not always easy, since there are stark differences in the way scientists write up their work for their peers and the way they might tell their story to the public. You can chalk those differences up to the rigors of scientific publishing, where the methods of doing a science experiment are as an important part of the story as the results.

Every discipline in science has its jargon, its ways of communicating among the participants. For example, if you go to the doctor and have an examination of your right side above your waistline, your doctor might write up that the examination centered on the abdominal RUQ. Jargon, to be sure, but it's a shorthand that describes exactly what was examined. Or, let's say you go to a talk about the early universe, as given by one astronomer to a group of colleagues. You might hear the following: "We're using long-period gamma-ray bursts as a probe of the intergalactic medium neutral fraction at z=6.3."

Translated, that means that they're looking for long-period gamma-ray bursts (longer than a few seconds, typically), which scientists think happen when a huge star explodes and emits a jet, or when a white dwarf star merges with either a neutron star or a black hole. The action emits a huge burst of radiation, which speeds across the universe. As it goes along, it passes through clouds of gas, clouds of gas and dust, and through clusters and possibly other galaxies. As it does, that radiation (light) is absorbed by whatever is in the way. You can see that absorption when you study the light with special instruments called spectrographs. The results tell you the chemical makeup of any clouds of cold gas, or gas and dust in the space between galaxies back in the early universe (more than about 9 billion years ago). So, in that one sentence, the scientist says a lot, but it's buried in specialized language.

In a science paper, the typical form is to describe (briefly) a finding, and then go into details about how that finding was made (equipment, constraints, etc.), and then go into the details of the finding. Often this means that the "news" of a paper is buried IN the paper, and not up in the first few sentences, as you'd see in a newspaper story. This is perfectly normal and nothing to be worried about—unless you're also trying to explain the "newsworthy" part of a science discovery to the public. Then you have to find the "meat" of the story, and lead with it in the first few sentences. So, a story about the gamma-ray bursters might read like this if you saw it in the paper: "Scientists at Gemini Observatory are using the 8-meter telescope to peer back about 9 billion years to study bright flashes of light called gamma-ray bursters. The light, which passes through clouds of gas and dust on its way across the universe, can tell astronomers the makeup of that gas and dust, as well as how quickly it's moving."

That's my job—to identify the news in a story and help tell that story. I might do it for a press release or a newspaper article or a magazine article, or (my favorite) for a planetarium show or documentary.

So, a few weeks ago I was talking to a scientist who studies the effects of space weather on our communications systems. Spaceweather (which you can learn more about here, and here, and most especially here) is basically a catch-all term for interactions between material that has been belched out from the Sun and our planet's magnetic field and upper atmosphere. Auroral displays (northern and southern lights) are the most obvious manifestation of space weather that we can see.

Aurora on April 1, 2007, over New Aiyansh, British Columbia. Taken by Yuichi Takasaka. Courtesy Spaceweather.com.

There's another side to space weather, however. A strong event can knock out telecommunications systems, power grids, and GPS satellite service. This last is important because we depend on GPS timing signals for an incredible number of things in our daily lives.

So, back to the scientist. She was asked to give a presentation at last week's Spaceweather Enterprise Forum in Washington, D.C. She came to me for advice on how to identify some strong talking points for her presentation. So, we set to work on her statement. The science is very compelling, very straightforward: spaceweather can harm GPS systems. We need to know that and construct backup systems as well as harden the systems we have. Otherwise a strong solar burst could knock out more than just communications. I asked her for some examples of what GPS effects are in our daily lives. She mentioned a few, including one I hadn't thought about: financial transactions. Bank transfers depend on accurate timing from GPS. So, I said to her that this was a point that would grab people right in the wallet. To me it was a point that would grab the attention of bottom-liners in business as well as government. So, I suggested that she make that one of her talking points.

We quickly came up with a few more talking points, such as how we can't predict when large solar outbursts are going to take place. We were totally surprised by one last December that partially shut down GPS systems for (as she put it) tens of minutes. That's a long time in communications and financial circles.

We honed her statement down and off she went to the meeting. And, lo and behold, her statements got picked up by nearly every news agency in attendance. Even though she was the last speaker on the podium, she got maximum "sound bite" out of a simple truth: space weather can and does affect things on this planet. (If you're interested in what she had to say, go here and click on the link for Anthea Coster of MIT's Haystack Observatory. Heck, listen to all of them!)

It's a lot of fun being a space writer and doing what I do. Sometimes it gets me in on a story before it hits the news!

Labels: science writing, solar storms, space weather

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2.12.2007

Electric Space

A auroral display seen over Fairbanks, Alaska. Courtesy Jan Curtis. I'm working on a project for a local museum about what happens to the upper part of our atmosphere when the Sun barfs up some plasma and sends it our way in the solar wind. The result is called "space weather." How does it work? Well, you start with our planet's upper atmosphere. It's a huge electrical circuit up there, formed by magnetic field lines and charged particles. Toss a lot of charged particles (a plasma) at it (oh, say from the Sun during a solar storm) and the result can be anything from an auroral display to a power outage. An artist's view of electrons (charged particles) spiraling down Earth's magnetic field lines. They collide with neutral atoms and molecules of oxygen and nitrogen in our upper atmosphere. The collision releases energy in the form of light in different wavelengths. Image courtesy European Space Agency It all happens over our heads without us knowing much about it, unless the solar storm is fairly strong. In that case, then we usually see northern or southern auroral displays (if we live far enough north or south). If it's a hugely strong storm, the circuits can, well, short-circuit, which can affect power grids here on the planet. Oh, and also disrupt satellite communications, fry spacecraft electronics, and pose radiation hazards to any astronauts who happen to be on orbit in the shuttle or the International Space Station. Space weather's a big deal, then. The exhibit I'm working on is for a children's museum, and it's supposed to teach them about how we learn about space weather, what the Sun's role is, and what we do when space weather happens. It's a fairly complex subject, and truth to tell, scientists are still nailing down the details of how our upper atmosphere (the ionosphere) reacts to varying levels of solar activity. There's a fair amount of space weather research going on at Haystack Observatory. They're also supplying a lot of the material for the exhibit. Space weather is a huge area of study, and so a lot of people around the world are trying to figure out how it all works. The European Space Agency is using a set of orbiting sensors called the Cluster satellites to look at the processes that electrify our upper atmosphere. Some of their results show that the electrical circuits that form auroral displays are very complex, and that the circuits may be changing very rapidly in response to changes in plasma (the charged particles) in the area. You can read more here. So, why should we care about these circuit changes and plasma variations and aurora thingies going on over our heads? Space weather, as I mentioned above, affects power systems here on the planet. It can sizzle electronics on orbiting spacecraft. But, it can hit you where you work and live, too. Think about that GPS unit in your car. Or the cell phone you can't live without. Or the Blackberry. They all depend on communication between orbiting spacecraft and receiving stations here on the planet. Your radio does, too. So does your TV. Many kinds of long-distance communications depend on the ionosphere for "signal bounces" from place place. Disrupt the ionosphere and you disrupt the signals for all these technologies. Understanding space weather is supposed to help us harden our technologies, or at least turn them off in the event of a big storm. It's all part of understanding our planet and what can happen to it.

Labels: space weather

posted by CCP on 2/12/2007 03:53:00 PM | * |