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Last Friday (13th Jan) we hosted a meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society on “Planetary Systems of Evolved Stars”; that is, planets around dying stars like white dwarfs. By “we”, I mean myself, my Leicester colleague Sarah Casewell (@astronomerslc25) and Prof Boris Gaensicke from Warwick. I should add that most of the organisation was done by Sarah, for which Boris and I are most grateful. The meeting was part of the series of monthly “Specialist Discussion Meetings” the RAS holds at its HQ at Burlington House on Piccadilly in London. In fact, we were allocated the lecture theatre in the Geological Society , which is an excellent and historic venue. This is where the infamous Piltdown Man “discovery” was announced in 1912. I hope the centenary of that unfortunate event is just a coincidence…..Anyway, the RAS not only hosted the meeting, providing refreshments in the lovely Geological Soc library, but also kindly allowed us to invite some key speakers, expenses paid, from Europe. I didn’t take a head count, but across the day I guess we had between 30-40 people attending, including a few early arrivals for the monthly RAS ordinary meeting which followed, which gave an opportunity to advertise our field to some who may be unfamiliar with it. We were pretty pleased overall.

So what did we discuss? Basically, what happens to solar systems after their host stars evolve away from the main sequence into first Red Giants and finally, white dwarfs. I first wrote a paper discussing the possibility of finding planets around white dwarfs and how those systems might have evolved back in 2002, and since then we’ve hunted for such planets from the ground with 8m telescopes and from space with HST and Spitzer. In recent years there’s been a lot of activity in the theory community modelling what happens to solar systems and the planets themselves as stars evolve to the white dwarf stage. Since around 2005 there’s also been many more discoveries of dust disks around white dwarfs which are widely accepted to be the remains of asteroids and small planets that have been ripped apart by the white dwarf’s strong gravity. Indeed, these dust disks not only tell us the fraction of white dwarf progenitors (that’s 90% of stars) that form rocky planets, but also what they are made of. Way better than Kepler

Oh look, a star and its planets evolves to the white dwarf stage. And there’s a dust disk formed from a rocky planet that got a bit too close. (image by Mark Garlick / Warwick Uni).

Of course, you may not have heard about this stuff, which is one of the reasons we wanted to have the meeting at the RAS. Indeed, the most disappointing aspect of the day was the non-attendance and interest from many “mainstream” extra-solar planet investigators, but that’s not new. I’ve long been used to feeling that what I’m doing is somehow “left field”, even within my own department. The better news is that view is slowly changing, and at least some UK groups are getting more funding for this field. Sadly, my team at Leicester isn’t one of them, having lost our PDRA support recently. That’s a gripe for another blog really. Partly it can be attributed to the “Mason cuts” in astronomy funding in the UK finally catching up with Leicester, although I have issues with how STFC are currently distributing some of their PDRA awards……

Anyway, I tweeted some of the science highlighted by our speakers during the meeting and collected these with Storify (below). To summarize:
- The survival of planets to the white dwarf stage is a battle between engulfment by the Red Giant, tidal forces, and mass loss from the host star (Eva Villaver, Madrid).
- Terrestrial bodies as large as Pluto seem to be being disrupted and then accreted onto white dwarfs (Boris Gaensicke).
- Anomalous eclipse timing measurements from close white dwarf / red dwarf binaries (including interacting cataclysmic variables) suggests some may be orbited by circumbinary giant planets (Tom Marsh and Madelon Bours, Warwick). Tom urges caution: other effects may mimic planets, but is “70% sure” in the case of NN Ser and 50% sure in 4 or 5 other systems. These things were found before the Kepler circumbinary planets by the way.
- Instabilities set up in two-planet systems at the white dwarf stage can scatter planets and planetesimals into the inner solar system where they can be disrupted to form the observed dust disks (Dmitri Veras, Cambridge).
- At least 3% of hot subdwarf stars have close, brown dwarf companions (Stefan Geier, ESO, Munich) which may have assisted the formation of those objects through common envelope evolution.
- Close brown dwarf companions to white dwarfs can be irradiated and display extraordinary variability at wavelengths from the optical to mid-infrared (Sarah Casewell, Leicester).
- The number of brown dwarf companions to white dwarfs continues to slowly grow and such objects can be used as “benchmarks” to test evolutionary models, since the white dwarf ages are relatively simple to determine (Avril Day-Jones, Santiago, Chile).
- A very widely orbiting 6-9 Jupiter mass companion to a white dwarf has been found in our Spitzer survey data, but it’s difficult to tell whether it is a a bona fide planet or should be regarded as a brown dwarf (the key is formation mechanism). Planets in orbits equivalent to our solar system and other exoplanet systems have not yet been found around white dwarfs (me).
- But there is a habitable zone. And white dwarfs are so small you can find Earth sized and smaller planets around white dwarfs by the transit method……

The full programme from the meeting is here.

Stefan Geier, Eva Villaver and myself enjoying a post-meeting pint or three in Jeffry Barnard and Private Eye’s favourite Soho watering hole, the Coach and Horses

 

 

 

 

 

[View the story "RAS meeting on Planetary Systems of Evolved Stars" on Storify]

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This week I am at the observatory on the Canary island of la Palma, helping to commission a new telescope. The telescope has a main mirror 1m across – that’s small compared to most of the telescopes professionals use, but much bigger than most amateurs have. It’s perfect for the job we want it to do, and more importantly we could afford it (“we” means a consortium of various universities clubbing together. My university, Leicester, kindly gave us a substantial contribution from one of the last government’s infrastructure funds, which sadly don’t exist any more). We’ve christened the telescope the “SuperWasp-Qatar Follow-up Telescope” or SQFT, which in my warped mind reads “Squiffy-T”. Its job will be to take light curves of candidate transiting extra-solar planets discovered by the SuperWasp and Qatar surveys, so we can confirm which are real, and study them in further detail. Our goal is to make it fully robotic, but this week we have been installing the CCD cameras, testing software and cleaning lots of dust that has accumulated on every surface. Here’s the telescope, looking a bit like a doomsday machine from a sub-James Bond movie:

I’m here with Don Pollacco, shortly of Warwick University, and his ex-PhD student James McCormac who now works for the Isaac Newton Group of telescopes on la Palma. Here’s James struggling to tighten a crucial bolt on the main camera we’ve just mounted at the Cassegrain focus:

It’s now two years since we built the platform and the dome – various reasons for that, not least people’s time….. but it’s great to make good progress and see the project coming to fruition. Hopefully we may get on sky later this week and I’ll be in the dome running it. No comfy control room! Fortunately it shouldn’t be too cold. As with the rest of the northern hemisphere, la Palma is having freak weather. It’s 30 degrees during the day up here at over 8000 feet. Huge clouds of dust from the nearby Sahara are sitting over the island trapping the heat. The local astronomers say the heat is very unusual. Anyway, here’s the view of sunset through the “calima” (dust) from the Squiffy-T platform:

That’s the William Herschel Telescope in the background. For those who know the observatory on la Palma, SQFT is located by the side of the road up to the JKT and the solar observatory, opposite SuperWasp and just after the Nitrogen plant building.

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This morning, our “enlightened” Government had a bright idea. From April 1st 2013, all science research papers produced using UK taxpayer funding must be published in what’s called “open access” journals. That is, journals that anyone can access, where papers can be downloaded and read for free.

Sounds great. After all, in a democracy and meritocracy like our own, it seems absolutely right that taxpayers should be able to access all the papers we write.
Indeed, we astronomers have been doing this for years. In addition to publishing in refereed, “high impact” journals, we place almost all those papers on a preprint server, which anyone can access, called astro-ph. And we’ve been doing this since the early 1990s. After all, our cousins, the particle physicists, did invent the World Wide Web.

So this Government diktat is to be welcomed. At least, until you think it through. And then you realise that this is in fact opens a magnificent can of worms with potentially severely impacts on research budgets, and could lead to all sorts of unintended consequences, some damaging to careers, especially of young people. It is also a very handy way to transfer money from government science budgets directly to publishers, money which otherwise would be used to do, err, research. A number of these issues have been highlighted by Peter Coles (@telescoper) and his commentors on his blog.

Reading the various blogs and newspaper articles today, there is also clearly a large degree of misunderstanding occurring, and of course the usual malicious misinformation being spread around. So let’s clear up a few things first:

- UK scientists aren’t about to stop publishing in established journals. All that is happening is that the journals will agree to make our papers freely available to everyone, in return for us paying them for each paper they publish (instead of buying a subscription). That way, the publishing industry is completely safe. We could ignore the journals and publish online ourselves. We could even come up with ingenious ways to referee those papers. But the Government will almost certainly not allow them to be included in submissions for its league tables. They have to be in established high impact journals you see, otherwise how can we possibly be sure they are of sufficient quality? In any case, the Government have decreed “all research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access”.
What a wonderful bonus for the publishing industry!

- This researcher is absolutely in favour of open access to all journal articles. But not via the model proposed today.

- The journals astronomers publish in do not spend large amounts of money refereeing, typesetting and proof-reading our papers. They get us to do that. For free.

Right, now we’ve covered some of the more obvious bits of bullsh!t I’ve seen today, I’ll highlight a few, largely astronomy specific, concerns I have here.

If we are forced to publish in open access journals, does the British government expect the leading non-UK astronomy journals to become “open access” too? If not, does that mean UK astronomers cannot publish in ApJ, A&A, and indeed, Nature and Science? What if you are a co-author of a paper being sent by your foreign collaborator to a non-open access journal? Will we have to withdraw our names?

The UK Government are, in true ConDem style, making no new money available to pay the expected journal publication charges. Which will be on average £2000 per paper. Currently, our library buys subscription to the journals. That money will not be transferred to us. So we will have to use money that would otherwise pay for other activities. The only sources of cash I have access to are through my group. Budgets that are normally used to pay for conference travel, computers, and employing people. Budgets that are shrinking every year. So will my Head of Group
decide whether I can publish a paper? Will it be a choice between that and a conference (at which I would publicize the work)? Will the research councils provide additional funding so students can publish? What is their limit? What if the student is exceptional?

Maybe an internal committee would decide which papers produced in the dept will be published, since the budget will not be infinite. How would they decide? One can already see the potential for bias, incompetence, and nepotism…. My paper or the boss’s? Young temporary postdoc’s paper or that led by aging Professor in need of a submission for the REF? The paper by a “good chap” with “a great future ahead of him” or that by the recently married young lady “who will be pregnant within a year”?
What if the paper contains only null results? What if the field is one that gets relatively few citations? What if the committee man deciding my paper’s fate dislikes me, or sees me as a rival for promotion? How can we even contemplate the possibility of these situations occurring? How can we possibly contemplate allowing a situation in which we prevent our colleagues’, employees’ and students’ papers and work the opportunity of being refereed and published? Isn’t that what we are here for? And if not, what the f*** are we here for?

And dear reader, before you naively shake your head and say, “Burleigh you silly ar$e, of course this won’t happen”, I can assure you we already have internal committees deciding which of us are allowed to apply for postdocs. This recently caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth, not least from yours truly….

The Government are also insisting that all data that makes the paper should be freely accessible. Again, that’s a great idea in principle. And again, astronomers are largely ahead of the game. Many of the large telescopes and satellites we use already have public archives, usually with a year long proprietary period. But not all data comes that way.

For example, I have access to a privately funded telescope. Why should I make my private data available for a Yank to analyse, when they won’t reciprocate? I could be altruistic, but quite frankly I’ve been f***ed over enough times by people taking my data from an archive the day it becomes public. People who have no qualms about who they upset (a simple courtesy email or phonecall might have saved many a scientific relationship). I have no intention of giving those kinds of win-at-all-cost scientists any further advantage over me.

I also have access to telescopes which don’t maintain their own archives. Again, should I be forced to make my data available, when no-one else using those telescopes has to? Including potential rivals working on the same objects and topics.

What about theoretical models? I use models provided by foreign collaborators who, while happy to see the results published, do not wish for their models to be published. Does that mean I have to give up those collaborations and deny myself access to those models?

Should I just give up research? Or at least, research in such an environment as proposed today? I can assure you, plenty will, and they’ll take their ideas abroad.

Just a few worms crawling out of the can…. And a 15 minute conversation over lunch with some colleagues revealed many other concerns and pitfalls. For example, should we publish the raw data we collect, or the final calibrated data (which may have taken months of hard work)? Which bits of the theoretical models should be published? The point on the main graph or every timestep in a terrabyte-size simulation? Who pays for that data storage for 10 years, and is it affordable?

Open access sounds such a wonderful, liberal idea that who could possibly object? Indeed, I don’t. But I object to this stupid plan, and can only conclude that very little in depth thought has gone into this. A committee of allegedly eminent people has apparently spent many hours coming up with this recommendation to Government. One that completely favours the publishing houses and clearly screws the researchers. This so obviously flawed plan stinks to high heaven. And it is almost certainly unimplementable. By April 1st next year. Or at least, if it is implemented, it will do enormous damage to British science and scientists.

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So tomorrow morning there will be a “once in a lifetime” opportunity to see Venus transiting across the face of the Sun. “Once in a lifetime” for people under 8 years old anyway. Because there was another transit back in 2004, which was visible in its entirety from the UK. In fact, June 8th 2004 was a wonderfully sunny, cloud free and warm morning, perfect for observing the transit . At Leicester, we had our solar observatory set up to project a large image of the Sun into the lab below the roof, and I had two undergraduate students, Mike Briggs and Liz Smith, observing the transit with a webcam as part of their final year project. Mike went on to do a PhD at Edinburgh. Liz was a mature student who graduated through
our foundation programme to become one of our most dedicated students.

Since tomorrow morning is likely to be cold, cloudy and wet here in the UK, you can relive the 2004 transit here (warning, big file)

http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~mbu/images/transit4.avi

There seems to be far more publicity surrounding this transit than the one back in 2004. Perhaps it is the influence of social media (my twitter timeline is full of this stuff today, which is better than the bloody Jubilee sychophany-fest). Or perhaps it is the fact that America gets to see the whole of this one (in 2004 the West Coast couldn’t see it at all). Even if it was sunny here in the UK tomorrow, which it won’t be, we’d only get the last 30 minutes. At 5.30 in the morning.

But it is significant that these transits of Venus are occurring just at the time astronomy is revealing  hundreds of planets transiting across other stars. Ah, NASA’s Kepler mission…..half expecting yet another “first Earth 2.0″ tomorrow, or maybe just “Venus 2.0″ this time…..

Time to plug our new project, the Next Generation Transit Survey , which will find Neptune sized planets around bright nearby stars. And maybe the odd Super-Earth.

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Oh dear, here we go again. The world’s media are falling over themselves to report, for what seems like the two millionth time, the discovery of the “first Earth-like planet around another star”. This one is called Kepler-22b, has been discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission, and lies in the so-called “habitable zone” of its parent star, ie the region where conditions are just right for life as we know it to exist. See the
NASA press release and an example of hyperbolic media nonsense on the BBC website here .

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard exaggerated claims of the discovery of the “first Earth-like planet in habitable zone around another star”. Check out this story from 2010 for example.

So what’s wrong with this announcement?

Well, first of all, Kepler-22b is significantly larger than Earth. Indeed, its radius is 2.4x bigger than ours. And we don’t know its mass. Unfortunately, as with a lot of Kepler’s candidate planets, it orbits a star that is too faint for us to measure the planet’s mass by the radial velocity method. If we assume it has the same density as Earth, then it has a mass around 13x that of Earth.

For comparison, Uranus has a mass 14.5x Earth’s, and a radius about 4x Earth’s.

So in truth, we have no idea whether Kepler-22b is rocky, or a gas planet like Uranus.

Then there’s the claim that the planet’s temperature is 22 degrees centigrade. That’s right, as precise a measurement as 22 degrees. Pleeeeeze. Meteorologists often cannot agree on the temperature in their own back gardens. It depends on whether you place the thermometer in the shade or in the Sun, for a start.

Kepler-22b is clearly an interesting discovery, and I don’t have any quibble with the claim that it likely lies in its host star’s “habitable zone”. But it is tiresome, and in the long-term potentially damaging to astronomy’s credibility, to exaggerate the claim that it is “Earth-like”, when that can simply be shown not to be true.

One day, someone (quite possibly Kepler) will find a bona fide one Earth mass, one Earth radius rocky planet orbiting a Sun-like star at just about the same distance we do. Let’s hope we haven’t Cried Wolf once too often before then…..

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If it wasn’t for Trade Unions, your children would all be at work today.

My pension

I am a member of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS). In contrast to many public sector pension schemes, USS is not funded by the taxpayer. My pension on retirement is based on my final
salary, calculated at 1/80th of that figure for every year I have worked. The
maximum number of years one can contribute is 40, so that the maximum pension
one can claim is 40/80ths (ie 50%) of final salary. A pretty good scheme and one I didn’t hesitate to join.

Thinking that I would be retiring at the then statutary limit of 65, I joined
USS in 1996 at age 25 when I started my first salaried research postdoc job,
following completion of my PhD. I thought that by doing so I would get the
maximum possible benefit when I retired at 65 (ie, after 40 years service).
I have paid into USS consistently since.

What are the main changes USS is making to the arrangements that I signed up to 15 years ago, and what are my objections to these changes?

(1) My contributions will be increased by 1.15% (from last April in fact) to
7.5% of my salary.

I actually don’t have a big problem with this. We all know that people are living longer, although I simply don’t believe some of the more hyperbolic claims that vast numbers of today’s youngsters will live to 100. The same papers that report those dubious predictions also happily report that today’s kids are so fat they won’t live as long as their parents. You can’t have it both ways….

PS, remember that the 1.15% increase in my contributions is not a 1.15% increase on what I was already paying. It is 1.15% percent of my salary. In other words, it’s the same as having income tax increased by 1.15%.

(2) Upon retirement, annual increases in the pension will be calculated in line
with the CPI measurement, not RPI as at present

This follows government policy for state pensions. The point is that because of the way CPI is calculated, it is almost always lower than RPI. A nice way to save on the money you have to pay out, and a nice way to reduce pensions over time. My objection to this is best done by
quoting Paddy Briggs, Pensioner elected Trustee of the Shell Contributory Pension Fund, in his recent blog :

“In effect this [switch to CPI] is a retrospectively applied income tax. Pensions are deferred earnings – during years of employment workers accrue rights and make contributions and thus they defer some of their income until later (pension) years. To change this after employment is finished [or long after they started contributing, my words] is a highly questionable action – almost a breach of contract (the social contract if not the legal one). “

I don’t for one moment think the government or any pension scheme will change back to RPI, but I can object.

(3) The pension age will change in line with the state pension age

This is a change that peculiarly affects a minority in the scheme like myself.
I joined at 25 thinking that I would retire at 65, having paid the full 40 years contributions to get the maximum final salary benefit. But for people my age (40, born 1971), the government have changed the statutary retirement age to 67.

Now, hang on, the USS rules are quite clear. The *maximum* number of years one
can pay in, and maximum benefit one can therefore claim, are 40. Since I started at 25, how does increasing my pension age to 67 work? Clearly, the state pension cannot be claimed until 67. But USS?

Well, in a decision so obscure I cannot find any reference to it on the web, just in a correspondence I received, USS are kindly going to *recalculate* my pension contributions such that I, and only the tiny minority like me, must pay over 42 years. USS assures me that I will not actually end up paying any more than someone who pays over 40. I might be minded to believe them, they are
accountants and actuaries after all.

Now you might think this is trifling. But recalculating my contributions
to account for the change in retirement age is not good enough. Here’s why.
Let’s think about my 25 (and 26) year old self. I started my first postdoc on a pitiful salary. To make ends meet, I rented a one room bedsit, sharing a bathroom with 3 other bedsits. I could have
done with a bit more money, but I didnt mind because my contract with USS said
that if I paid in over 40 years I’d get maximum pension benefits. I did, and still do, regard my pension as *deferred pay*.

But now the rules have been changed. Suddenly I have to pay for 42 years, but
only get 40 years benefit. In other words, my 25/26 year old self was
fraudulently deceived (even though no fraud was been committed *at the time*)
into paying into the pension scheme for two years at just
the time in my life (lowest career salary) that I could have done with the extra income. As pointed out above, this is a highly questionable action – almost a breach of contract (the social contract if not the legal one).

I owe it to my 25/26 year old self to protest against the money that he was
deceived into unnecessarily paying.

(4) New entrants (and re-joiners after a career break) for USS will have their pensions calculated not by final salary, but by a career average re-valued earnings (CARE) type scheme.

Everyone agrees that the benefits from a career average scheme are not as good
as final salary (see USS and UCU websites for comparisons). In creating a two tier pensions scheme, USS is sowing the seeds for future resentment and problems between older and younger staff. Indeed, older staff need younger staff to be incentivised to join the pension scheme
otherwise it will not be able to fund their pensions. (If you think about it, all pension funds are at some level Ponzi schemes….)

But in any case, precedent tells us that two tier pension schemes are financially and politically
unsustainable. When introduced elsewhere, especially in the private sector,
existing members have *in every case* been forced into the inferior, lower tier
within four or five years. That outcome would make my objections detailed above seem pretty trivial. I wouldnt just be being defrauded for a couple of years, but over my entire working lifetime thus far.
So my striking yesterday was one of those moments in life where you have to stand up for yourself,
because if you don’t you are only storing up far worse problems for the future.

A word about “deferred salary”

Anyone who decides to work in the public sector, especially in an area that
requires substantial educational qualifications like academia, accepts that their
career earnings are likely to be substantially below that of their intellectual and age-group peers who
went instead into finance, industry, business etc. For the first ten years or so of my career I was on pitiful salaries (and don’t forget that because I did a PhD I didnt start earning until 25). I saw friends buy houses and cars that I could never afford at that stage (and still haven’t bought a house thanks to rampant house price inflation and the subsequent banking and lending crises). However, like all academics I always knew that the USS pension scheme provides excellent benefits compared to most private sector schemes. Thus, it is seen as “deferred salary”. I accepted a low salary in the
first stages of my career in return for a decent pension at the end. Later on
in an academic career salaries rise, and I am currently on what I regard as a pretty reasonable salary for my position and responsibilities, but it is still substantially below what a similar colleague could expect to be paid in the USA. None-the-less, the “deferred salary” aspect of USS has helped to
attract leading academics from the USA to work in the UK, with obvious
benefits for out best universities and the knock-on for UK PLC.

Enough. Now some answers to stock Tory / ignorant objections to my right to strike:

* I pay your salary through my taxes, how dare you strike you arrogant public sector bastard.

Here’s some news for some of you: public sector workers pay tax too! Indeed,
because they pay their taxes through PAYE, they have no way of avoiding them. Unlike say, oh, the numerous “tradesmen” we all meet in real life who like to
sometimes be paid “cash in hand”…..

* We all have to pay our bit to relieve the country’s debt and budget deficit

Public sector workers didn’t cause the banking crisis, which increased the
nation’s debt by about half. Bankers did. Tax them properly first. But in any
case, public sector workers are just like the rest of the workforce. They are
not aliens, or robots trying to defraud everyone else, or non-domiciled residents who pay no tax. They are losing benefits like everyone else. They have had their pay rises frozen like everyone else (and will do for next few years). They are affected by the deliberate policy of letting inflation run high, like everyone else. They pay increased VAT like everyone else. Indeed, the government even admits that the ~3% rise in contributions it is demanding from eg teachers won’t go into their pension “pot”, but simply into the Treasury’s general coffers. It is, in fact, just an
increase in taxation specifically for public sector workers! Imagine the outcry from all you private sector types if income tax was suddenly increased by 3%….

* Private sector pensions are terrible, so why should the public sector have
good pensions?

Err, that’s a weird argument. So, let’s follow the logic all the way shall we. A race to the bottom. Why don’t we just bring back slavery! We could start in the private sector, and then drag the public into slavery too. “You lucky public sector bastards, we private sector slaves were whipped 45 times this morning. We demand public sector slaves get whipped 50 times!”

Seriously though, it is absolutely disgraceful what has happened to private sector pensions. Many private sector workers have tried to do something about it,
although many, not believing in trades unions, have found themselves fucked
without any recourse. The behaviour of many companies in ending their schemes
is sheer greed, and passes the burden of paying for old age onto the
taxpayer. Those of you moaning about public sector drains on the taxpayer
might like to consider that for a moment.

There is also the matter of the many members of the private sector who have chosen to bury their heads in the sand and never bought into a pension scheme. These
people have to some extent contributed to this country’s housing crisis by
piling into the buy-to-let business in lieu of a proper pension, forcing massive increases in prices for potential first time buyers (and subsequent rent rises that inhibit the ability of young people to save for a deposit). And if BTL goes tits up, or they just never bother with any investment for old age, these people will expect the taxpayer (including all those public sector taxpayers) to pick up the bill when they are too infirm to work any longer.

* I’ve had to take time off work to look after my kids because of you striking bastards

Hmm. Well, no-one said that strikes weren’t meant to cause pain. After all, the whole idea is to draw attention to an issue. But it’s one day. And I’m sure teachers in particular thought long and hard before striking in the full knowledge they’d be hurting parents. As for students, well they got to watch Homes Under the Hammer without the guilt complex of skipping lectures!

Judging from some of the foam-mouthed reaction you’d have thought it was 1984 or 1979 all over again. But look, we’ve all had to take days off for a white van delivery driver (quite possibly paid cash in hand) who then never showed up. Live with it, everyone has the democratic right to strike.

* The strike is costing the economy [insert large made up number while placing little finger against lower lip]

Back in April there was a Royal Wedding and we were all given the day off. No-one complained about the damage to the economy. Especially foaming at the mouth Daily Mail readers. Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that yesterday shopping centres did a roaring trade as public sector workers and mothers forced to take a day off to look after their kids went and did some Xmas shopping. We should strike more often! As for the 12 hour queues at immigration at Heathrow, what a load of utterly predictable bollocks. Quicker than normal, my spies report.

* Public sector strikers should be shot in front of their families – Jeremy Clarkson

As an employee of the BBC, Jeremy Clarkson is in fact one of the highest paid public sector workers in the country. I believe he lives near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, next to Rebekka Brooks and David Cameron. I’ll see you all there when Jeremy is the first to be lined up against the wall.

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This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics has today been awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Reiss for the discovery in the 1990s that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. In turn, this implies the existence of “dark energy” driving the acceleration. We don’t know what dark energy is, but it appears to constitute about 3/4 of mass of the Universe. The discovery is obviously incredibly important to our understanding of the nature of our Universe, and the Nobel Prize is well deserved.

The accelerating expansion was detected from observations of Type Ia Supernovae (SN Ia for short) in distant galaxies. A supernova is the catastrophic explosion of a star. When observed, SN Ia characteristically have no hydrogen lines in their spectra, and so they are thought to result from the total destruction of a white dwarf star. White dwarfs are the remnants of the cores of stars that were once like the Sun. Over 90% of stars end their lives as white dwarfs. Since stars burn hydrogen (and subsequently helium) in nuclear fusion reactions, white dwarfs are largely composed of the products: mainly carbon and oxygen. An earlier Nobel prize winner, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, described how white dwarf stars prevented themselves from collapsing under their own gravity (since they don’t undergo nuclear fusion in their cores), and calculated the maximum mass for a white dwarf: about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. Beyond this, they will collapse, presumably catastrophically. Hence, it is generally believed white dwarfs are behind SN Ia.

Not only that, but since all collapsing white dwarfs will have the same mass, then all SN Ia should have the same intrinsic luminosity and can be used as “standard candles” to measure distance and the speed with which distant galaxies are receding from us. By this method, Perlmutter, Schmidt and Reiss determined that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating and hence showed the existence of dark energy.

And this is the story you will read in the papers and online today and tomorrow.

The problem is: we don’t really know what causes SN Ia. We believe a white dwarf is involved based on the evidence we have. But we don’t know for sure how the white dwarf gains enough mass to exceed the “Chandrasekhar limit”, nor how the explosion proceeds, and we’ve never, despite huge effort, discovered a bona fide progenitor of an SN Ia.

There are two main candidates.

The first is a short-period (say few hours) binary system containing a white dwarf and a Sun-like star that has probably started evolving away from the “main sequence” (it’s become a red giant). The white dwarf, having a large gravitational field, pulls matter off the red giant and accretes this onto it’s surface. If the white dwarf had sufficiently large mass to start with, it may accrete enough to push it over the Chandrasekhar limit and explode as an SN Ia.

The second candidate is also a binary system, this time containing two white dwarf stars. As time goes on, the orbit of these two stars shrinks through the emission of gravitational wave radiation. Eventually, they will merge, and if their combined mass is greater than the Chandrasekhar limit, the merged object will explode. Maybe.

As a white dwarf specialist I’m pretty familiar with the searches for both these types of progenitors. Unfortunately, despite huge effort, *no convincing progenitor of either type* has ever been found. Sure, there are a small number of extremely interesting objects that could be argued may represent a progenitor (eg the subdwarf+white dwarf binary KPD 1930+2752, Maxted et al., 2000). But they are not universally accepted. Indeed, it may be the case that both the scenarios described above can
lead to SN Ia.

My white dwarf colleagues and I were a little perturbed by the use of SN Ia as standard candles when Perlmutter and Schmidt’s results were announced in the late 1990s, and remain so to this day. And while I understand cosmologists are happy that other methods appear to support the SN Ia results and that the existence of dark energy is widely accepted, it is worth re-iterating we still don’t know what causes SN Ia. Personally, I think that’s a little bit worrying, especially when Nobel prizes are being handed out.

Throughout my career, the white dwarf field has remained pretty small compared to
the main extragalactic and cosmology communities. There’s maybe 150 people,
including students and theoreticians, seriously investigating white dwarf stars worldwide. As a result, it’s hard to get grants and telescope time. And those important citations are few and far between. Yet, understanding white dwarfs and their evolution is clearly of utmost importance to Nobel Prize-winning science.

As my colleague Stu Littlefair (@slittlefair) tweeted: “Today just provided me with the first sentence for many grant and telescope applications to come!”

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Yesterday Science announced the amazing discovery of an incredibly dense object that appears to be made of a crystalline form of carbon: possibly, ultra-dense diamond (Bailes et al. 2011, Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1208890).

The object orbits a recently-discovered pulsar, PSR J1719-1438, every two hours and ten minutes. It has a slightly higher mass than Jupiter (technically, its minimum mass), but the lack of evidence for direct interaction with the pulsar places a maximum limit on its diameter of 55,000km, or about 4x the diameter of Earth (Jupiter is about 10x the diameter of Earth). This means its density is on average at least 23 grams per cubic centimeter (or about twice that of lead). If it is made largely of carbon (see below), then compressed to this high density it should literally be squeezed into a crystalline form: probably, diamond.

Obviously the discovery of a unique, exotic object like this is incredibly exciting and has the wow factor that attracts press attention: see Sky and Telescope , Astronomy Now and New Scientist (including a video made by lead institute, Swinburne University, Australia) for starters. Also check out Steinn Sigurdsson’s blog.

What you’ll immediately notice is how the object is labelled a planet, or even better, a Diamond Planet. The densest planet ever discovered. This is understandable: it has the mass of Jupiter (in truth, most likely between 1 and a few Jupiters), squeezed into a body with the diameter of no more than 4 Earths. It orbits a star (a neutron star). Therefore it is a planet.

Or is it?

You’ll also notice how some of the media articles explain that the “Diamond planet was once a star”. This is indeed true. Here’s how this object formed. Once upon a time there was a binary system of two relatively normal stars, albeit one of them was pretty massive. The massive one collapsed and exploded as a supernova, and a pulsating neutron star (pulsar) was left behind. The pulsar, having a very high gravity, began to strip material off its neighbour. Basically it ate it. When the pulsar accreted this material, it also gained angular momentum, and spun up to rotate once every 5.7 milli-seconds. Hence it’s name, a milli-second pulsar. Eventually, all that was left of the star it accreted from was the core, which collapsed to become a White Dwarf, the kind of star I’ve spent my career studying.

There are many milli-second pulsars known with white dwarf companions. These white dwarfs are often much less massive than the majority of white dwarfs which evolve from ordinary, isolated Sun-like stars. Say about 0.1 solar masses (or 100 x Jupiter) compared to 0.5 solar masses (500 x Jupiter) in a common-or-garden white dwarf. That’s because the pulsar has stripped away so much mass. What we have here in PSR J1719-1438 is a white dwarf that has been stripped to an absolute extreme. There’s so little of it left that the atmosphere, which once consisted of H and He, has gone, and just the core remains.

But as Sky and Telescope ask, “Can a stripped-down star be called a “planet”?”. Indeed, beyond the title of their paper,
“Transformation of a Star into a Planet in a Millisecond Pulsar Binary”, the discovery team are a bit reluctant to make that claim. In their abstract they call it an “ultra-low-mass carbon white dwarf”, which is exactly what I am arguing it is. Lead author Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University in Australia told Sky and Telescope: “…. technically it is [also] a stellar remnant.”

But then Bailes also says: “… But all the rocky planets are composed of elements that were once in stars.” For me this is a bit disingenuous. Yes, all the planets in our solar system are composed of atoms once made in previous generations of stars, but that’s not the same as a stripped-down star. Our planets were born in a disk of dust and gas that surrounded the early Sun. For me, that distinction is important and Alex Wolszczan, the discoverer of the first planets around a pulsar, gets the description right: “This spectacular discovery provides yet another demonstration of nature’s cleverness in creating planet-mass bodies,” (my italics).

But there are other views. Sara Seager of MIT told Sky and Telescope: “If the mass is less than 13 Jupiter masses, the exoplanet community would certainly agree this is a planet.” I don’t agree with Sara. 13 Jupiter masses is an entirely arbitrary limit based on the minimum mass needed for any kind of nuclear fusion (to fuse deuterium). It used to be the point at which we called an object a brown dwarf. But then we started finding isolated brown dwarfs with masses less than 13 Jupiters. And transiting planets with masses greater than 13 Jupiters. What’s probably more important in defining a planet (and I’m not getting into the Pluto debate here, which is about minimum mass) is the formation mechanism. Did it form in a disk of gas and dust around a star? Interestingly, the pulsar planets found 20 years ago by Wolszczan and Frail quite possibly did form from a disk of material left around the pulsar after the supernova explosion that created it.

I had an exchange of tweets yesterday with Marc Kuchner (@marckuchner) who, together with Sara Seager, predicted the existence of carbon planets (arXiv:astro-ph/0504214). Marc’s view was that “it’s how the pizza tastes, not how it’s made”. My reply was, “If it looks like a white dwarf, smells like a white dwarf and tasted like a white dwarf, it’s a white dwarf”. Clearly, we beg to differ, although Marc also suggested that “Maybe it’s both a planet AND a white dwarf!”.

Does any of this matter? Well, not in the sense that astronomy in general doesn’t really matter. If the economy really collapsed tomorrow, we astronomers would soon be out of a job. On the other hand, wealthy, advanced, cultured societies like ours are happy to spend a small amount of money indulging the pursuit of knowledge, to benefit from any technological and scientific spin-offs, and to inspire and educate. For this reason, I think it is important to debate these things. There is another point. All of us scientists are under increasing pressure to produce papers, to gain more funding, to show our work has impact and relevance. In short, to justify ourselves to our political masters. Hence, we are all tempted or indeed need to “sex up” our results.

I’ll leave it there. Maybe you agree with Marc Kuchner and Sara Seager, or maybe with me? Hell, why not have a completely unscientific vote

.

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In all the furore surrounding the run out of Ian Bell in the Second Test on Sunday, and his subsequent reinstatement, one factor seems to have been largely over-looked. Surely, the ball was dead before the bails were removed and the Indians appealed?

“Law 26.1.(b) The ball shall be considered to be dead when it is clear to the bowler’s end umpire that the fielding side and both batsmen at the wicket have ceased to regard it as in play.”

Eoin Morgan hit the ball to the boundary, where Praveen Kumar dived successfully to stop it. Unfortunately, Kumar failed to realise he had done so. Although he managed to flick the ball back, he tumbled over the boundary, sat up on his backside for a second looking befuddled, and then languidly got up and strolled slowly over to the ball, which he then threw in. There can be no doubt that he had assumed a boundary had been scored, and the he regarded the ball as having ceased to be in play.

Seeing Kumar’s actions and body language, there is no doubt that the batsmen, Bell and Morgan, also regarded the ball as no longer being in play.

What of the rest of the fielding side? Watch the video of the incident again. None of them appears to be acting in a particularly urgent manner, as they would normally be if they seriously believed a run out was imminently possible. Rahul Dravid has picked up the spare fielding helmet kept some yards behind wicket-keeper Dhoni, and like Bell, Morgan and his fellow slip Laxman is making his way nonchantly towards the pavilion, possibly anticipating his tea time fairy cake. Dhoni collects the throw from Kumar, and tosses it to Mukund who is standing by the stumps, and he does indeed remove the bails, although neither of them makes a big deal of the situation or launches into a vociferous appeal. Their actions are hardly those of players who seriously believe the ball to still be in play.

It seems to me that the criterion of Law 26.1(b) has been fulfilled: “…the fielding side and both batsmen at the wicket have ceased to regard it [the ball] as in play.”

In which case, the umpire at the bowler’s end should have called “dead ball”, and we could all have been saved the subsequent overblown pompous debate about the “spirit of cricket”, whatever that is.

The only point of contention here is whether Dhoni and Mukund believed the ball to be “in play”. In throwing the ball (slowly, underarm) to Mukund, it could be interpreted that Dhoni (and Mukund) did indeed believe it was still live. On the other hand, the manner in which they carry out this act is that of players who are merely trying their luck and have no real expectation of success.

In any case, in interpreting Law 23.1.(b) common sense must of course be applied. How many of the fielding side need to be convinced that the ball is dead before the umpire can deem it so? What if, say, that well known eccentric Sreesanth suddenly decided on a whim, because he could and because it was a Sunday in a month with a “u” in it, that the ball was never ever dead, no siree, like in a game of Indoor Cricket? It would be nonsense of course.

In any case Kumar’s actions and body language on the boundary suggested to all and sundry that the ball had gone for 4 and was dead. I’ve seen it a zillion times in club cricket when some space cadet teenager misfields on the fine leg boundary and then sits lost in a daze while the ball lies quietly at his feet and the players all shout at him to confirm whether it has crossed the imaginary line between the boundary markers. No-one is seriously going to attempt to run out the bemused batsmen at that point.

I should also mention here Law 26.2: “Whether the ball is finally settled or not is a matter for the umpire alone to decide”. This simply emphasises that the umpires could have immediately called “dead ball” and saved all the subsequent debate, the beatifying of St Dhoni by cricket’s establishment (a man who had refused to withdraw his appeal 3 times on the field and, in any case it seems, had his mind subsequently changed by St Sachin), the confirmation in some fans minds that Ian Bell is still more Sherminator than Terminator, and Australians all over the globe agreeing with each other that the Indians (and English establishment) are as soft as they always thought they were.

And let’s not even think about what would have happened had England run out Sachin in that manner.

(My thanks to Paddy Briggs and the anonymous commenter on his blog on this subject for prompting me to write this).

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Yesterday news came from Lord’s of a wonderful new idea to tackle the scourge of match-fixing in cricket. Make everyone take a lie detector (polygraph) test. To demonstrate the simplicity and effectiveness of this idea, Steve Waugh, a man who never pretended he didn’t touch the ball or catch it on the bounce, took a test in front of the massed ranks of the cynical hacks. Of course, he passed with flying colours. (SPIN, Guardian).

The idea is Waugh’s. He is chairman of an MCC world cricket committee working party that was charged last year with investigating ways that corruption might be eradicated from the game. The MCC WCC is an august body of distinguished cricketers that meets annually to discuss weighty matters of the cricket world, much like the lads do in the Red Lion every Saturday evening. No doubt as the day wears on, and more Carlings and London Prides are consumed, the discussions become weightier and more earnest until Mike Brearley tells Martin Crowe he’s talking utter shite again, like that Cricket Max bullshit, and they all retire to the darts board for a game of killer to ease the tension. At least, that’s generally what happens in the Red Lion. Certainly, this polygraph idea is worthy of the kind of nonsense we come up with over Carling, Harvest Pale and Poacher.

You see, not to put too fine a point on it, lie detectors and polygraphs are, basically, bollocks. Their use and effectiveness are widely rejected and discredited by the scientific community. Indeed, it would be fair to say they come under the category “pseudo-science”. Now, Steve Waugh is not a someone I would readily pick an argument with. This is a man whose reputation is so fearsome that James Foster didn’t even bother to appeal for a blatant caught behind in the closing stages of the 2002 Boxing Day Test. He probably felt it wasn’t worth the hassle.

Waugh is obviously quite taken with this polygraph idea. His test was supervised by “one of Australia’s foremost polygraph examiners” (David Hopps words in the Guardian, not mine), Steven Van Aperen, a former Victoria police detective. Polygraph tests must, of course, be highly reliable to be of any practical use. Van Aperen claims that “Nearly 2,000 studies suggest an accuracy of about 96-98%.” About the same as the UDRS. The difference though, is that if the UDRS fails, well a batsman gets a bum decision or a bowler is denied a wicket. If a polygraph test gives a false result, an innocent man could have his reputation ruined or worse, end up in jail.

In fact, the quality and validity of many of these tests is often criticised. In 2003, a report from the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) found that the majority of polygraph research was “Unreliable, Unscientific and Biased”, concluding that “57 of the approximately 80 research studies that the American Polygraph Association relies on to come to their conclusions were significantly flawed”. In essence, it is extremely difficult to design a test of human emotional responses whose accuracy can be reliably established. It is also known that polygraph results can vary with the culture of the subject. The CIA discovered Eastern Europeans were better at beating the polygraph than Americans, and the then Director concluded this was because “we are raised to tell the truth and when we lie it is easy to tell [we] are lying” (make of that what you will of course!). And there are numerous incidences of (later convicted) criminals and murderers passing polygraph tests and, unfortunately, innocent people being condemned through their results.

This is why it matters. If Waugh and his polygraph expert are right, then only 2% of tests would give a “false positive” result. If the wider, more skeptical science community is right, then 20-40% of results might be incorrect. Now let’s apply this to international cricket. Let’s say we’re going to test all international players, tests, ODIs, T20, the lot. Across the 10 senior cricket nations, each with a squad of say 25 over the three formats, that’s 250 players. If the polygraph test is wrong 2% of the time, that’s 5 innocent players immediately under a cloud of suspicion. Is that fair? And if the scientists are right and the test is wrong at least 20% of the time. 50 players under suspicion? That’s a one in five chance one of them is called Tendulkar….

Hopefully this silly idea will be put to bed immediately. For good reason, polygraph tests are rejected by the police forces and inadmissible in the courts in most European countries, Canada, New South Wales, and Israel. Unfortunately, it is still used in many US states, despite repeated criticism by bodies such as the Supreme Court, and where frying people is still considered a good way to deter crime.

It seems to me that the real problem for cricket here is the failure of the bodies set up by the ICC to detect and prevent match-fixing and spot-fixing. The News of the World’s scoop last summer (hopefully not involving phone-tapping…) left us wondering what the ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit had been up to for years. Of course, it doesn’t help that gambling is illegal in the Indian sub-continent, and therefore unregulated and controlled by criminal elements. It also doesn’t help that several of cricket’s leading nations have administrations with direct links to corrupt and chaotic governments. It’s wonderful that a good man like Kumar Sangakkara felt able to stand up to corruption in his nation, and I am sure there are many Pakistanis who would like to do the same but know such a gesture would be career-ending. My best wishes to the ICC in trying to reform these boards. But until they are, and probably until betting in certain cricket mad countries is effectively regulated (which means it has to be legalised), then I fear cricket is fighting an uphill battle and we won’t be seeing the last of cunning plans like lie detectors.

(Jarrod Kimber suggests Steve Waugh can make everyone confess with his stare, but science has yet to comment and has been wary of such experiments since the last time they tried to ascertain the effectiveness of the Medusa’s glare).