Royal Institution Shoots Itself in the Foot

May 21, 2013 by davecl | Leave a comment

I had been working up to a further post on the death of Herschel and it’s eventual long goodbye as it drifts away from the Earth in its new graveyard orbit. But I have yet to pull the details together from ESA press releases etc.

Instead, and rather differently, we have a ‘how are the mighty fallen’ post about the Royal Institution’s idiotic attempt to trademark the term Christmas Lecture.

This has been covered in blogs elsewhere, but I thought I should add my name to the chorus of criticism.

The RI and their Christmas Lectures are a part of my childhood. I even went along to a few in addition to watching them on TV. In those days they were broadcast on the BBC and were a season of 6 lectures. Things have shrunk rather since then with, IIRC, last year’s series just being 3 lectures broadcast on BBC4.

At the same time the RI has gone through a financial crisis. It is now emerging from this, something I for one was happy to see, but it’s attempt to trademark Christmas Lecture, official statement here, now leaves me wondering whether the place was worth saving.

I hope this is a momentary aberration, to be abandoned, along with those who suggested such a hugely damaging move, as a response to the inevitable barrage of complaint. I’m not even sure that they can trademark the term, since it is in widespread use across the world.

If it turns out that they can trademark it, then there will be a large number of Lectures At Christmas in 7 months. I may even contribute my own RI Scrooge Lecture if anybody asks me.

There’s also the issue of reputational infection since one of the current leading lights of the RI is Sir Richard Sykes, once Rector of Imperial College, and this idiotic move might reflect back on us at Imperial.

My own contribution to what will hopefully be a very worrying set of messages at the RI today is appended below:

 

Dear Olympia,

When the news of the RI’s financial problems arose last year I was saddened. I was once an RI junior associate and once a member. I have attended and enjoyed both the RI Christmas Lectures and Friday Evening Discourses. I have even taken part in an arts/science exhibit there. I considered, in light of your financial problems last year, rejoining, but never got round to it, things in academia being as busy as they are.

I am now so glad I didn’t.

To park your tanks on the generic term Christmas Lectures in an attempted trademark grab is unconscionable. Many colleagues around the country and around the world give Christmas Lectures. They benefit science and society. And you now want to stop them using that term.

This is a huge public relations error. You will lose far more support than the little benefit you gain. I understand you have problems, but this is not the way to get over them.

Take the shotgun away from your foot before you do yourselves more damage. Admit to this utterly tone deaf error, and apologise to all those who have loved your lectures before you tarnish your brand completely, and people start giving RI Scrooge Lectures this december.

Yours, appalled,

Dr DL Clements, Imperial College London

Herschel: End of Helium

Just after I got back from Skye we heard the sad, but inevitable, news – Herschel had reached the end of its supply of liquid helium, and with that the end of science operations. The ESA press release can be found here, and BBC news coverage is here.

Herschel had a design life of 3 years for science operations, and we managed almost 6 months of extra life beyond that. In the last weeks Herschel’s unexpected longevity was becoming a bit of a problem as the observatory was running out of observations to perform. When the remorseful day came, those of us in the instrument teams were beavering away setting up observations for a new tranche of guaranteed time that had been allocated to us, but sadly that was not to be.

Things don’t finish here of course. There is a vast range of data collected by Herschel that will be studied in detail for many years. A mission archive, containing all the data Herschel collected, uniformly processed and calibrated with the final pipelines needs to be constructed. Even the spacecraft itself will carry on for a month or so more, conducting various technical tests, before finally being pushed away from L2 into an Earth-trailing graveyard orbit for a long and well deserved rest.

Meanwhile, we carry on working with the amazing data we’ve got from Herschel, and carry on planning the next and even greater space far-IR observatory.

Downtime

I’ve been on holiday, visiting friends who have a croft on the Isle of Skye, and thus largely out of contact and unable to post.

I say holiday, but for the last several years what we’ve been doing is helping our friends plant trees on their croft to act as wind protection, to eventually grow into fuel for the wood fired stove and heating, and also to help bring back a small bit of the Great Caledonian Forest that used to cover Scotland until we cleared it and put sheep onto the land.

Here’s a picture of the glen on our last day there, just as the sun was setting on MacLeod’s Tables.

 

Press Release: Star Factory in Distant Universe Challenges Galaxy Evolution Models

We have a Press Release out!

Sadly, the news from Waco, Texas bumped us off the Today programme this morning, but we may be back tomorrow. In the interim you can read about our new results, out in Nature today, below and at other places like ESA and Universe Today.

Imperial College Press Release:

Astronomers have discovered an extremely distant galaxy that is expanding by more than 2000 new stars each year.

Using the European Space Agency’s Herschel space observatory they have seen images of the galaxy as it was when the Universe was less than a billion years old.

This is the most active that astronomers have seen such a young galaxy and since this discovery they are re-thinking some fundamental ideas about how galaxies form and evolve over time.

The newly discovered galaxy, known as HFLS3, appears as a faint red smudge in images from the observatory’s Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES). In reality, this represents the activities of a star-building factory, which is transforming gas and dust into new stars.

“This particular galaxy got our attention because it was bright, and yet very red compared to others like it,” says Herschel researcher Dr Dave Clements from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London.

Tens of thousands of massive, star-forming galaxies have been detected by Herschel as part of HerMES and sifting through them to find the most interesting ones is a challenge.

HFLS3 has one of the highest star formation rates astronomers have seen; over a thousand times faster than our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

According to current theories of galaxy evolution, galaxies as massive as HFLS3 should not be present so soon after the Big Bang.

Even at its young age of 880 million years, HFLS3 was already close to the mass of the Milky Way, with a mass of stars and star-forming material roughly 140 billion times that of our Sun.

The astronomers have calculated that light from HFLS3 has travelled for almost 13 billion years across space, and that by now, it may have grown to be as big as the most massive galaxies known in the local Universe.

The first galaxies were thought to be relatively small and lightweight, containing only a few billion times the mass of our Sun.

They formed their first stars at rates just a few times more than the number the Milky Way does today, then grew by feeding off cold gas from intergalactic space and by merging with other small galaxies.

“With these observations, Herschel has found a rare example of a galaxy bursting with stars at a time in cosmic history when there were very few such galaxies,” says Göran Pilbratt, ESA’s Herschel Project Scientist.

The mere existence of a single such object so early in the Universe poses a challenge to current theories of early galaxy formation, which predict that they should reach such large masses only much later.

The team are continuing to comb the enormous dataset from Herschel looking for more examples of such extreme, early galaxies.

“A DustObscured Massive HyperStarburst Galaxy at Redshift 6.34” by D. A. Riechers et al. is published in Nature, 18 April 2013.

Last Night on the Mountain

Tonight is my last night at JCMT. Things have gone well and I’ve got most of the data I wanted for my project. The weather has been very helpful, with only one night that was too good for my project. The forecast for tonight looks as if it was pessimistic at this point, so I should be able to finish off the last bits before I go home.

The last night of an observing run is a bit like the end of term at school. You’re tired, but buoyed up by the knowledge that some relaxation is ahead. And there is the prospect of getting down to sea level and a real atmosphere with intoxicating levels of oxygen. The trip down is almost like a drug, as your chest can relax, as breathing stops being a chore, an finally your oxygen starved body gets what it needs.

It doesn’t last long, but I think coming down from the mountain is a pretty good drug. Maybe observing is addictive?

Looking down: The Volcano Observatory

Mauna Kea isn’t the only observatory on Hawaii – there’s also the volcano observatory, where people spend their time looking down rather than up.

The Kilauea volcano has been erupting continuously since the mid-80s. At the moment the currently most active vent, Pu’u O’o is rumbling along, with its crater gradually filling with lava.

There are some great images from the Volcano Observatory that can be found here.

Observing Time – not like other kinds of time

Observing time isn’t like ordinary time. You’re working nights, for a start, and in many cases arrive at the observatory with a significant level of jet lag. That’s certainly the case for me at the moment. And then, for Mauna Kea at least, there’s the effect of the altitude. At 14000 feet you’re missing about 1/3 of the usual level of oxygen so nothing, and especially your brain, works properly.

For an impression of what it’s like, have a look at this video – Hotel Mauna Kea.