Category: STEM (Page 2 of 2)

Gaining a Sense of Awe and Perspective from the JWST Images and the Vastness of the Universe

July 20, 2022 / Katie L. Carroll

As a writer, most people know me as a purveyor of words and stories, but I occasionally geek out here on scientific topics, like the Fibonacci Sequence, space exploration, and the Big Bang. I’ve been combining my love of writing and science in picture books drafts about the Mars rovers and the Voyager spacecraft. My hope is to bring these stories, both fiction and non-fiction, to readers starting next year!

First Deep Field
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

When NASA released its first wave of images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on my birthday last week, it felt like the universe was giving me the best birthday present ever: awe and perspective. The above image is known as the First Deep Field. From our earthly perspective, the amount of space we’re looking at in the image is the size of a grain of sand held up to sky at arm’s length (so a very, very, very, very tiny amount).

Many of the reactions to this image were similar to my own of amazement and excitement, but I did see a few less-than-enthusiastic responses. One in particular was along the lines of not getting why people were so excited about a picture of space looking like, well, space.

Without context (and President Biden’s press conference on this image was not exactly illuminating as to the significance of this image), I totally understand the “so what?” reaction. So what is the significance?

First of all, the First Deep Field shows that tiny patch of space in greater detail than we have ever observed before. There are a few stars from our own galaxy there, those are the bright ones that look like sparkly stars. They’re cool to look at, but from a scientific perspective, fairly ordinary. More interesting is that this single image shows a galaxy cluster that contains thousands of galaxies. Our own Milky Way galaxy contains somewhere between 100-400 billion stars, so this image is showing a whole lot of space stuff with an incredible level of detail!

Even more interesting are the distorted-looking galaxies that have a kind of smudged appearance. Due to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, light can bend around objects and be magnified. So those smudged galaxies are behind other galaxies and are at a much greater distance than we’d normally be able to see.

The thing about light is that it’s very fast, but the universe is so vast, light can travel for a very long time before reaching us here on Earth. Our sun is about 8 light-minutes away, so the sunlight you see right now (please don’t look directly at the sun and damage your eyes!) is 8 minutes old. From Earth, we can only see the sun as it was 8 minutes ago. Light allows us to see into the past!

One distorted galaxy in the First Deep Field is 13.1 billion light-years away. So we’re seeing it as it was 13.1 billion years ago. The farther into the universe we can see, the farther into the past we can observe. This galaxy is so far away that we’re seeing to within 1 billion years of when the Big Bang occurred. And that will allow us to discover more about how the universe was formed–the history of literally everything we know!

That’s only a fraction of the exciting information that will come from this one image from the JWST. Gazing at an image of this tiny bit of space makes you realize how very vast the universe is, large on a scale that is hard to comprehend. There is so much space stuff out there, and we here on Earth are a “pale blue dot” in a soup of many, much larger dots.

At first that makes me feel small and insignificant. I’m one person of billions on Earth. Earth is one planet among countless others circling countless stars in the countless galaxies of the universe.

But then I think of how amazing it is that we’re here at all. In all of that space, we have our beautiful, bountiful planet Earth. I breathe in the oxygen and drink the water with my body that is made of stardust. And I sit here at my computer with a brain complex enough to contemplate the vastness of space and the history of the universe. So when a person shows skepticism about a picture of space looking like space, here’s what I have to say.

Images like this give people a sense of awe, both in the beauty of space and the vastness of it. It simultaneously makes us feel insignificant and helps us realize how special it is that we are here at all. At least that’s why I’m so excited. I hope you find something that excites you today!

I’ll leave you with a couple more awe-inspiring images from the JWST.

Stephan’s Quintet, group of five galaxies
*Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI*

Cosmic Cliffs, Carina Nebula
*Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI*

What Nonfiction Picture Books Teach Us About How Rich A Billionaire Is

October 19, 2021 / Katie L. Carroll

Despite the seemingly unrelated headline, this is in fact the third installment of posts about space exploration. To further understand my stance on the first space exploration post of “Let’s Stop the Billionaires from Controlling Space Exploration”, I think it’s important to look at exactly how much a billionaire is and who are the billionaires that are trying to corner the market on space exploration.

Whenever I want to explore a complicated topic I’m unfamiliar with, the first place I turn to are non-fiction or informational fiction picture books (check out “Nonfiction vs. Informational Fiction vs. Narrative Nonfiction: What’s the Diff?” by Wendy Hinote Lanier for more about these different categories of children’s books). If you want a concept explained in an engaging, uncomplicated way, a picture book is where it’s at!

To understand how much a billion really is, I turned to the book MILLIONS, BILLIONS, & TRILLIONS: UNDERSTANDING BIG NUMBERS by David A. Adler, illustrated by Edward Miller. (My kids really enjoyed this book, too!)

A billion (that’s 1,000,000,000) is one thousand million. In the book, it says in order to count to one billion, “at a rate of one number per second without stopping, it would take you almost thirty-two years to reach one billion.”

The book also says, “Someone with one billion dollars could give away ten million dollars every year for one hundred years.” That’s only one billion…imagine having $177 billion dollars, which according to Forbes 2021 Billionaire List was the net worth of richest person Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and “space” explorer, at the beginning of 2021, up $64 billion from his 2020 net worth of $113 billion.

On this same list Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, was listed at the second-richest person with $151 billion net worth. An article from earlier this month, “Elon Musk trolls Jeff Bezos as he widens his lead as the richest person on Earth” by Ramishah Maruf, now has Musk leading the charge with $222 billion. So while we were all working on the front lines or from home and helping our kids learn virtually during this pandemic, these guys were making billions and billions of dollars.

According to the 2021 Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, the top 1.1% of people control 45.8% of wealth in the world. A report in June by ProPublica analyzed IRS data and found that the richest 25 Americans actual pay a very low tax rate when comparing their wealth to how much they paid in taxes (see “Richest 25 Americans have a ‘true tax rate’ of almost nothing: Report” by Aimee Picchi). So most of the wealth is controlled by very few people, and those people aren’t even contributing their fair amount to society.

Two of the billionaires I’ve been talking about in regards to space travel paid zero taxes some years. Jeff Bezos paid zero federal income tax in 2007 and 2011, and Elon Musk paid zero federal income tax in 2018. In 2020, the median income for an Amazon (of which Bezos was CEO) employee was $29,007, while that year Bezos’s Amazon income was 58 times that at $1,681,840.

I know I’m throwing a lot of numbers around in this post. If those don’t interest you or convince you that these massively wealthy guys don’t exactly play fair and shouldn’t be in charge of something as important as space exploration, then maybe their ideas about space might convince you. Unfortunately that would make this a very long post, so stick around and I’ll be exploring that topic next.

Why Bother With Space Exploration?

August 12, 2021 / Katie L. Carroll

This is the second installment of my posts about space exploration. You can check out the first one “Let’s Stop the Billionaires from Controlling Space Exploration” here.

A question that inevitably comes up when discussing space exploration is why bother at all? People will say that space exploration is expensive, that we should focus on fixing all the bad things here on Earth, and what do we humans really get out of it anyway?

Let’s start with that first one of how expensive it is. In my last post, I mentioned that NASA’s 2021 budget at $23.3 billion. To a single individual (unless you’re the likes of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk), that kind of money is an obscene amount, but let’s put in perspective. NASA’s budget is a mere 0.5% of U.S. government spending. Contrast that with the 2021 defense budget of $703.7 billion or the 1964 NASA budget adjusted for inflation of $57.3 billion.

Next, let’s talk about how we should focus on our problems here on Earth rather than exploring space. This one almost doesn’t even require a response because it’s not a this-or-that kind of situation; sending humans to the moon doesn’t keep us from feeding hungry people. But I’ll humor the doubters and give an even more thorough response than that, which also addresses what we here on Earth get out of space exploration.

The work that NASA does can actually help solve our Earthly problems. NASA has a program dedicated to climate change with an entire fleet of instruments and spacecraft orbiting Earth to study climate science. Their scientific data is readily available to anyone on the globe, specifically those in charge of making and changing climate policies around the world.

The agency’s research encompasses solar activity, sea level rise, the temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans, the state of the ozone layer, air pollution, and changes in sea ice and land ice. NASA scientists regularly appear in the mainstream press as climate experts.
NASA’s “Taking a Global Perspective on Earth’s Climate”

Space exploration also pushes the development of cutting edge technology and innovation that leads to applications here on Earth. Ever taken a selfie (the rovers on Mars have…see “Watch (and Hear) How NASA’s Perseverance Rover Took Its First Selfie”)? You can thank space exploration for that. Here’s a video about some more of the technologies that have come out of it, including weather forecasting tools, fire resistant fabrics, and medical applications.

Beyond the tangible benefits of space exploration, allow me to wax poetic for a moment about the intangible. Recent studies have shown that experiencing a sense of awe reduces stress, loneliness, and depression and can even alleviate pain (see “Awe: The Instantaneous Way to Feel Good and Relieve Stress”).

What is more awe-inducing than looking up at the stars and imagining what is up there, thinking about the universe and our place in it? Well, actually knowing what is up there! Because as vast as our imaginations are, the more we explore space, the more we realize that some of it is stranger than we can imagine, like a space cloud that smells like rum or a planet composed of solid diamond.

Space exploration gives us mere mortals a chance to see how far we can go as a species, both in actually going into space and by pushing the boundaries of what our minds can understand. It also puts us in our place. One of my favorite ways to get a sense of awe is watch videos about the scope of the universe.

It reminds me that we are a tiny part of a vast world, barely even a blip in the 14-billion-year history of the universe. Yet (barring any secret alien files the government has) Earth is the only planet we know of that has life on it. And it has a vast array of life, an estimated 8.7 million species, all on this one speck of a planet.

We are insignificant in the scope of the universe, but we are also diverse and important in the complex web of it, probably in ways that we can’t imagine. Understanding our greater place is all part of exploring it. So, yeah, space exploration is important and worth doing.

I’ll leave you with one last quote from NASA before I circle back to those billionaires who want to take control of space exploration on my next post.

Human space exploration helps to address fundamental questions about our place in the Universe and the history of our solar system. Through addressing the challenges related to human space exploration we expand technology, create new industries, and help to foster a peaceful connection with other nations. Curiosity and exploration are vital to the human spirit and accepting the challenge of going deeper into space will invite the citizens of the world today and the generations of tomorrow to join NASA on this exciting journey.
NASA’s “Why we explore”

Let’s Stop the Billionaires from Controlling Space Exploration

July 20, 2021 / Katie L. Carroll

As yet another billionaire is set to head into “space” today (this time Jeff Bezos, founder and former CEO of Amazon…the first occurring earlier this month when Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, went 50 miles above sea level, technically falling short of the 62 miles that is the common scientific boundary of space), I want to say that it’s a bad idea to let these billionaires decide the future of space exploration.

Yes, it takes lots of money to explore space, and NASA has been doing it successfully on what is basically a shoe-string budget (the 2021 budget being $23.3 billion or 0.5% of the U.S. spending). And these billionaires (another one to be mentioned is Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX) certainly have the money to fund it.

SpaceX has already begun collaborating with NASA. Together they once again launched astronauts to space from U.S. soil in March 2020, breaking a dry spell of 9 years. SpaceX has also been contracted by NASA to bring astronauts to the moon as part of the Artemis program. These two events are noteworthy because the March 2020 launch was the first time NASA used a commercially built spacecraft and the Artemis program is a precursor to sending humans to Mars.

This is good financially because it means private companies are investing their own money in developing space technology and the financial burden isn’t solely on NASA (see “Why NASA pays SpaceX and Boeing to fly astronauts to the International Space Station”), which as I mentioned above is funded by the government.

So what’s so bad about that?

Well, the collaboration and the launching of billionaires to space can also be seen as the start of space exploration being turned into space tourism. And that’s where things get tricky.

Space tourism is basically when regular people go into space for recreation or business purposes rather than scientific ones (see “The Space Tourism Industry Is Stuck In Its Billionaire Phase”). So anyone with enough money, and right now we’re talking a lot of money (see “When Can I Buy a Ticket to Space? A Guide for Non-Billionaires”), would be able to take a trip to space.

Again, what’s so bad about that?

Well, while there are some international space laws and an Outer Space Treaty, space is still largely unchartered territory when it comes to governance. Largely, it’s been scientific missions to space that have been lead by organizations like NASA and the European Space Agency, which are meticulous and purposeful in their actions there, thinking deeply about how their missions impact Earth and whatever might be out there in space and on other planets.

I, for one, am very uncomfortable with guys like Bezos, Branson, and Musk being the ones to set space agendas, while I also recognize the contributions of a company like SpaceX as an important step in pushing the boundaries of space exploration.

I’ve read and listened to really smart people discuss the idea of billionaires making space their playground. There are a lot of reasons why it’s bad, including knowing why space exploration is important, the history of colonization, and what it actually means to terraform and colonize Mars. And all of that is far too much for one blog post.

So watch this space (see what I did there?) for more on this topic. In the meantime, you can check out “Could we really terraform Mars?” by Paul M. Sutter and “Mars Is a Hellhole: Colonizing the red planet is a ridiculous way to help humanity” by Shannon Stirone.

Interview With Meg Thacher Author of SKY GAZING

October 13, 2020 / Katie L. Carroll

I’m very excited to welcome fellow New England SCBWI member Meg Thacher to the blog to celebrate the release of her STEM non-fiction children’s book STAR GAZING: A GUIDE TO THE MOON, SUN, PLANETS, STARS, ECLIPSES, AND CONSTELLATIONS. I was very lucky to get an early copy (and the boys were super excited to check it out) and you can read my 5-star review on Goodreads.

Star Gazing: A Guide to the Moon, Sun, Planets, Stars, Eclipses, and Constellations had a bit of an unusual path to publication. What were the circumstances of how you came to write the book?

One day I got an email from Deb Burns, an acquiring editor at Storey Publishing, asking if I’d be interested in writing a book about astronomy for kids. It seemed completely out of the blue, but Storey’s model is to find experts to write books about what they’re experts in. I teach astronomy at Smith College, and by that time I’d written 19 articles for kids’ magazines. So I also had a track record of writing for kids, working to spec, and (mostly) meeting deadlines. Deb and I wrote the book proposal together, she pitched it to her editorial team, and we got the green light. So I highly recommend writing for magazines—it’s a great way to break into the business!

The design of the book is beautiful and it’s filled with so many fun little tidbits. How collaborative was the process of making the book?

Very collaborative. Along with my manuscript, I provided Storey with a list of suggested illustrations—photos, figures from the internet, and little sketches I’d made by hand or (I’m totally serious here) with Powerpoint. After Deb and a copy editor spiffed up my manuscript, my amazing book designer (Jessica Burns) took over. Storey hired an illustrator (Hannah Bailey) to do the diagrams, pictures, and amazing graphic novel sequences. It took three draft layouts and two in-person meetings to get to the final product (this was BC, before COVID). My main job during this process was making sure everything was scientifically accurate. Hannah’s illustrations look SO much better than my sketches, and Jess is just a wizard of putting text and illustrations on a page so that they make sense.

What is your favorite part of the writing process? What is your least favorite part?

I love everything about the writing process except actually writing! I’m a plotter, so I outline like crazy—the only way I can write nonfiction is to know where I’m going at all times. I am a research nerd, of course. And I really like to revise: it’s so satisfying when I find the perfect word or turn of phrase. But my first drafts? Blech.

What is next for you in your writing career? Do you have an upcoming releases or a favorite project you’re working on right now?

No upcoming releases yet. I’m working on a middle grade informational fiction book about a 5^th grade girl who loves astronomy. And like all children’s writers, I have a computer folder full of picture book manuscripts that are slowly making the rounds.

And finally, what is something funny/weird/exceptional about yourself that you don’t normally share with others in an interview?

I’m a really good swimmer. I was never on a swim team, but I lifeguarded and taught swimming from age 18 to 24. I can keep up with people who are in much better shape than I am because I have good form and an efficient stroke. (Just don’t ask me to do the butterfly!)

STAR GAZING blurb:

Sky Gazing is a guide to observing the sky from wherever you are, day or night—no telescope required. Kids aged 9–14 will learn how to find objects in the sky and delve into the science behind what they see, whether they live in a dark rural setting or under the bright lights of the city. Star charts will guide them in spotting constellations throughout the seasons and in both hemispheres while they learn about constellation myths from cultures around the world. Each chapter has guides to special events and binocular observing. Activities engage kids and their grown-ups in hands-on science.

Buy the book on Amazon, IndieBound, Better World Books, or Barnes & Noble.

About the Author:

Meg Thacher has been writing for children’s magazines since 2013, publishing thirty nonfiction features, infographics, scientist profiles, current events, DIY experiments, and a reader’s-theatre-style retelling of a Welsh folktale. Her debut book, Sky Gazing, comes out on October 13. She’s an active member of SCBWI (the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) and two critique groups. She is now in her twenty-second year teaching astronomy at Smith College, where she has also taught writing. She enjoys singing, knitting, and swimming, and lives in a partially empty nest in western Massachusetts.

Website: megthacher.com

Twitter: @MegTWrites

Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/MegTWrites