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Very pleasing news yesterday. After many years hard work, our project to find extra-solar planets transiting their host stars, called the Next Generation Transit Survey, has announced its first discovery, a planet called NGTS-1b.

It’s a very unusual planet too. NGTS-1b the most massive planet ever found transiting a type of star called a red dwarf (M dwarf in astronomy classification). These are some of the most common stars in the galaxy, but they are much fainter and cooler than our own Sun. The planet has a mass about 80% that of Jupiter, and a radius somewhere between 1 and 2 times that of Jupiter. There’s a bit of uncertainty because the planet is so large compared to its host star. In fact, this planet is the largest ever found in comparison to the size of its host star. Rather than completely transit the star, its orbital path grazes along the side.

Artist’s impression of NGTS-1b and its red dwarf star (credit Mark Garlick & Uni Warwick)

Like Jupiter, the planet is a gas giant. Out of about 3500 confirmed exoplanets, it’s only the third known gas giant that transits a red dwarf. This discovery confirms not only that large planets can form around red dwarfs, but that they must migrate inwards through the red dwarf’s proto-planetary disk to end up in such tiny orbits. NGTS-1b orbits its host star every 2.6 days, which is too close for the dust and ice grains which originally coalesced together to build the planet to have existed. It’s just too hot there. So the planet must have formed much further away from the star, and then migrated inwards. This process must have occurred for the hundreds of gas giants previously discovered near Sun-like stars, but hadn’t been well established for planets around red dwarfs.

When a planet passes in front of its parent star, as seen along our line of sight, the star’s brightness drops by a small fraction for a few hours.

The dip that gives away NGTS-1b: note that it is V-shaped rather than U-shaped. That’s because the planet is so large compared to the host star, and grazes in front of the star’s edge.

NGTS works by searching for the tiny dips in the brightness of a star when an orbiting planet passes in front of it, as seen by us. This is called a transit. NGTS uses a suite of twelve small, robotically controlled telescopes housed together at the Paranal observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile. Paranal is the home of the European Southern Observatory’s four giant 8m telescopes called the Very Large Telescope, and we are privileged to enjoy what is basically the best site in the world to study the night sky.

The NGTS telescopes monitor millions of stars for months at a time, taking exposures every ten seconds at a precision of 0.1%. This makes it the world’s most sensitive ground-based survey for transiting planets. Full operations began in early 2016 after a lengthy prototyping and commissioning phase (I blogged about the foundation of the project and running the prototype back in 2014). The data are returned to Warwick University where they are processed. Automatic algorithms search for the signatures of transiting planets, but they find far more “candidates” than real planets.

In the end, human eyes have to scan many thousands of candidates to pick out the most likely planets. The best are then sent to some of the world’s largest professional telescopes for follow-up measurements to confirm whether the transits are real, and to measure the masses of the candidates. Many turn out to be binary stars, but in this case we have a genuine planet. NGTS-1b was spotted by us over a year ago, among some of the first data returned from Chile. But it took time to gather all these follow-up data, confirm it was a planet, and write the paper.

This summer and autumn, together with lots of colleagues across our partner institutions (Warwick, Leicester, Belfast, Cambridge, Geneva, DLR Berlin, and the University de Chile), I’ve spent many hours scanning thousands of NGTS light curves looking for the signs of transiting planets, and other interesting stars. It’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve learnt a lot along the way.

All this has been made possible by years of hard work by the team members, in building the telescopes, writing software, and calibrating the detectors (a lot of this latter work was done by my Leicester colleague Mike Goad with PhD students Andy Grange, Alex Chaushev, and Liam Raynard). I’m very grateful to and proud of everyone in the NGTS consortium for their hard work, dedication and enthusiasm. There will be plenty more exciting discoveries to tell you about in the near future…..

The paper, “NGTS-1b: a hot Jupiter transiting an M dwarf” is available from the arXiv

University of Leicester press release

ESO press release

Sky At Night story

 

 

 

 

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Guest blog by University of Leicester PhD student, and NGTS team member, Jack Acton

NGTS recently announced the discovery of an extremely small star, NGTS J0930-18B, in an unusual eclipsing binary system in work led by myself and the team at Leicester (Acton et al, 2020). Finding systems like this is quite rare, and although they might not command the same headlines as bona fide exoplanets, they are extremely important for the future of exoplanet science in general.

The system was discovered using the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), a set of 12 telescopes operating at the ESO’s Paranal observatory in Chile, the home of the four 8m Very Large Telescopes (VLT).  The NGTS telescopes are much smaller however, just 20cm in diameter and survey patches of the sky for months at a time looking for extra-solar planets.  They do this by looking for the decrease in brightness when a planet passes in front of the star, blocking some of the light. The survey has been a great success, with 10 published planets and many more on the way.

Figure 1: The NGTS telescopes parked in their “Shed” at the Cerro Paranal Observatory in Chile. Image credit – Dan Bayliss

However, as well as detecting planets, NGTS is also fantastic at finding eclipsing binaries (systems with two stars in orbit around each other). When one star passes in front of the other it produces a drop in light similar to the effect of a transiting exoplanet. Indeed, determining which signals come from planets and which come from binary stars is a key part of exoplanet science. This is how we found NGTS J0930-18B.

When it was first observed by NGTS back in 2016, we noticed that the star, an otherwise ordinary M or red dwarf, periodically dimmed around every 1.3 days, strongly suggesting it was orbited by a companion of some kind – either a planet or another star. Using these data, combined with more eclipses observed by our team at the South African Astronomical Observatory, we determined that the object causing this drop in light would have a radius similar to that of Jupiter.

However, to figure out whether or not it was a planet we needed a key piece of information – its mass. We measure this by detecting the interaction between the star and its companion.  Just like how a star exerts a gravitational pull on the objects orbiting it, those objects exert a (much smaller) force on the star. By precisely measuring this we can determine the mass of the object orbiting the star. This required specialist observations with a bigger telescope, we used the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) instrument on the 3.6m telescope in La Silla, Chile. Using these measurements for NGTS J0930-18, we found that although the radius was similar to Jupiter, it has a mass that was just over 85 times larger! Meaning that rather than a planet, we had actually discovered an extremely small star.

Figure 2: Lightcurve of NGTS J0930-18. Note the clear drop in light from the star during the eclipse by the companion.

These tiny stars, known as late-type M-dwarfs, are extremely important, and the discovery of one as small as NGTS J0930-18B is fascinating. Stars of this type are known to be the most common in the galaxy, however they are rather poorly understood, particularly at the very lowest mass end. With a mass of 85 Jupiter masses, this is one of the smallest stars to have its’ mass and radius accurately measured (see figure 3) and is almost as small as it is possible for a star to be. Note that Jupiter itself has a radius about 1/10^th and a mass about 1/1000^th that of the sun. Below around 80 Jupiter masses, stars are no longer heavy enough to fuse Hydrogen, and instead become Brown Dwarfs, Jupiter sized objects with masses between 13 and 80 times that of Jupiter.

Figure 3: The mass and radius of NGTS J0930-18B compared with other, previously discovered and well characterised stars of similar size. NGTS J0930-18B is one of the smallest stars ever to have these parameters measured.

What’s even more unusual is that pairs of M-dwarfs in binary systems tend to have around the same mass. However here we have a normal M-dwarf (with a mass roughly 600 times Jupiter) and a companion that is extremely small. There are a few binary systems known containing pairs of M-dwarfs with such greatly differing masses, but none so extreme as NGTS J0930-18 (see Figure 4). It’s not entirely clear how this configuration has been able to form, posing questions for current binary star formation theory.

Figure 4: The mass ratio of known eclipsing M-dwarf binaries determined by dividing the mass of the smaller star by its larger companion, plotted as a function of orbital period. NGTS J0930-18 is shown in red and it is a clear outlier among the known population, with by far the most extreme difference in masses of any such binary yet discovered.

There are a growing number of intriguing planetary systems being discovered around low mass stars, the most famous of which is probably TRAPPIST-1, a system of seven Earth sized planets all of which have orbits shorter than that of Mercury. For us to properly understand these planets, and future planet discoveries, we must understand the stars they orbit. Eclipsing binary systems like NGTS J0930-18 are the best way of doing that because they allow us to precisely measure the component stars’ masses and radii independent of theoretical models.

Our paper ‘An Eclipsing M-dwarf close to the Hydrogen Burning Limit from NGTS’ has been accepted for publication In the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and can be found on arXiv here – https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.07354

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As you enter Preston Cricket Club in Hertfordshire, the ground gently slopes uphill away from you towards the pavilion on the far side. On your right, set back from the boundary rope, is a varnished, wooden bench. It’s a favourite spot for players and spectators as they walk around the edge of the playing field, taking in different views of the action in the middle. And when the Sun starts to set in the early summer evening, when the supporters in the pavilion start to drift away or reach for a jumper as the shadows lengthen, that bench is the best place to watch the play. Sheltered by the slope and the trees behind it, looking north-west and catching the last of the day’s sunshine, it is the warmest place on the ground. The bench has been there for almost three decades. It even features in a painting of the ground we commissioned a few years ago.

Carved into the top of the seat, in smart lettering, is the name “Charles Vyvyan Robinson”. Charles played one season for Preston, in 1989. Thirty years ago today, on 14th October 1989, Charles took his own life. He was 19.

Charles was a year older than me. His family had moved to the village after his father took a position at the Princess Helena private girl’s school, which lies opposite the ground. He wasn’t a particularly brilliant cricketer, and mainly played in the Saturday and Sunday Second XIs, back in the days when we ran only two league sides. He bowled medium pace, long hair flapping as he hustled up to the wicket. His batting was of the village green variety: no point hanging around when you can swing across the line and see how far it will travel.  These days he’d be a happy 3rd or 4th XI cricketer.

Charles was a quiet lad, shy, never saying much. But I enjoyed playing with him, as did the other youngsters of my generation at the club. He came on tour with us that summer, to Bournemouth and the New Forest. Cadnam with its fence to keep out the ponies; Lyndhurst, where the wild ponies charged across the pitch and we stood rock still in terror, praying they wouldn’t run us over;  Fordingbridge, where Lardy scored a famous ton; and Hartley Wintney on the way home, with its pub on the boundary edge, where we could nurse a week of hangovers… all grounds bathed in glorious sunshine in my memory. 1989 was one of those long, hot summers where the grass began to turn yellow.

One night in Bournemouth, Charles got very drunk. Being drunk on tour is not unusual, but it was for Charles. We gently persuaded him out of one pub, and as we walked away, we realised he still had his pint glass with him. He tossed it into the road where it smashed, loudly. Come along Charles, before the police spot you.

The club cricket season tended to go on a little longer in those days, towards the end of September.  Then Charles went off to University. By all accounts, he did not settle, and was soon back home. He took his father’s shotgun, we were told, and went into the woods.

We heard the news at school. Most of us youngsters were in the same year at The Priory School in Hitchin. I went to the funeral at the small church in Preston, and to the reception afterwards at Princess Helena. The Gatehouse brothers came too, as did several of the senior players from the club. We didn’t really know what to say to each other, and we youngsters were soon back at school rehearsing the pantomime, throwing darts at Colesy’s terrible jacket in the 6th form common room, and spending our evenings playing match after match of indoor cricket at Bumpers in Stevenage. But Charles’ sudden death deeply affected at least one of my older friends at the club. It wasn’t an event so easily forgotten.

Could we have done anything? Today, we are all much more aware of the mental health issues faced by many young people, although some of our institutions still have a long way to go. As the years passed after his death, I always felt that the summer’s cricket with Preston helped Charles, and gave him some happiness. Perhaps that is why his family donated a memorial bench to the club (they moved away not long afterwards). Then I worry that it was season’s end, coupled with the stress of moving to University, that might have been part of whatever went wrong. But I can only speculate.

Charles is buried in the little graveyard at St Martin’s in the village. Sometimes, I stop by and say hello. I did so yesterday. And I will always enjoy sitting on Charles’ bench. Rest in peace, our cricketing friend from long ago.

 

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“An international team of astronomers, including space scientists from the University of Leicester, has found a system of seven Earth-sized planets just 40 light-years away.”

It’s a pretty exciting discovery: using ground and space telescopes, including NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the planets were all detected as they passed in front of their parent star, a small red dwarf star known as TRAPPIST-1, blocking some of the light coming from it. It’s an effect known as a planetary transit.

 

 

 

Three of the planets lie in the “habitable zone” of TRAPPIST-1 and could harbour oceans of water on their surfaces, increasing the possibility that the star system could play host to life. Note, that’s “could”. More later.

This system has both the largest number of Earth-sized planets yet found and the largest number of probably rocky worlds in the habitable zone.

 

 

 

The 1m telescope in Sutherland, South Africa

 

I’m a co-author on the Nature paper detailing this discovery. My small part? Working with one of our PhD students, Alex Chaushev, we observed TRAPPIST-1 in early July of last year using a telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory in Sutherland, South Africa.

 

 

 

At the time there were thought to be perhaps four planets orbiting the star, and our aim was to observe one of the planets transiting the star.

By measuring the dip in the star’s brightness during a transit, we can infer the size of the planet. By observing successive transits, we can also constrain the orbit of the planet, and that was the primary aim of our observations.

 

 

 

Puzzlingly, we didn’t see a transit at the expected time. This was actually a vital clue, since it indicated there was more going on in the TRAPPIST-1 solar system than we were previously aware.

Thanks to a whole programme of observations with different telescopes and the NASA Spitzer satellite over the last few months, we now know that there are at least seven planets in the system, all roughly the size of Earth. The reason we didn’t see our expected transit from South Africa, was because we were confusing different planets with each other, and getting their orbits all wrong.

 

 

 

 

You can learn more, and see some cool graphics, by watching this short video produced by the media people at ESO:

 

 

You can read the paper itself here.

ESO have produced loads of graphics, videos and information sheets here.

And TRAPPIST-1 has its own website too.

Back to the science:

This amused me on Monday evening, after those teasers at NASA announced they were to host a news conference on a discovery beyond the solar system, and whole hyping machine went into over-drive:

NASA have called an exoplanet announcement for Thursday. What do we think?

— Active Astronomy (@ActiveAstro) February 20, 2017

 

Of course, it’s not Earth 2.0. And neither is this Something Incredible like, say, the discovery of signs of life would be.

Professional astronomers have grown somewhat weary over the years of yet another announcement of the discovery of “Earth-like planets”, aka Earth 2.0. In many cases, it was pretty obvious immediately that the planet either wasn’t really like Earth at all, or there just wasn’t sufficient evidence to fully support the claim. I’ve criticised previous claims myself, and I’ve seen some pretty cynical tweets and posts in the last couple of days.

Planets which are likely made of rock have also been found before of course, including in their stars’ habitable zones, like the planet around our nearest star, Proxima Centauri b. The excitement with TRAPPIST-1 is the sheer number of rocky planets, with three in the habitable zone.

For TRAPPIST-1, we’ve been careful in the press releases to avoid the term “Earth-like”, because we don’t have enough evidence to claim that.

The main information a transit gives you is the radius (i.e. size) of the planet, and the length of its orbit.

We have been able to glean some information about the masses of the planets from an effect called Transit Timing Variations (TTVs). Each successive transit of a planet should happen at a specific, predictable moment. But because of the presence of the other planets in the system and their gravitational influence, the transits of these planets can happen slightly earlier or later than expected. The difference between the expected time of transit, and when it actually occurs, is related to the masses of the planets.

This infographic displays some artist’s illustrations of how the seven planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1 might appear — including the possible presence of water oceans — alongside some images of the rocky planets in our Solar System. Information about the size and orbital periods of all the planets is also provided for comparison; the TRAPPIST-1 planets are all approximately Earth-sized.

The graphic above doesn’t give the uncertainties on the masses of the TRAPPIST-1 planets, but if you read the paper you can see from Table 1 that they are quite large. In fact, modelling TTVs is a complex business. More than one set of solutions can fit the data, and we don’t yet have a unique solution for the masses of TRAPPIST-1’s planets. So, there are  still more observations to be made and work to be done. But we can be fairly confident that their masses and densities are in the right ballpark for them to be rocky worlds.

What we cannot say is whether these planets definitely have water on their surfaces, or show evidence for life, or that they harbour alien civilisations. Three of the planets exist in the habitable zone of TRAPPIST-1, where the surface temperature is right for water to exist as a liquid. So they might. But for all sorts of reasons they may be more like Venus, or Mars.

And planets in such close orbits to a red dwarf star like TRAPPIST-1 could suffer all sorts of nasty effects, like deadly flares of charged particles and x-rays from the parent star, that preclude any life developing. We just don’t know, and shouldn’t make outlandish claims without more evidence.

The European Extremely Large Telescope, due to begin operations in 2024

In the near future, it should become possible to try to see if some of these planets have atmospheres, using forthcoming telescopes like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope), due for launch in 2018, and the European Extremely Large Telescope, which has begun construction in Chile.

 

 

 

And so, in summary:

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Just a quick post to summarize my thoughts on the possibility of there being a large, almost Neptune-sized 9th planet in the outer reaches of our solar system. You can read the full story here, and if you are very interested or one of my students then I recommend Mike Brown’s blog. Mike is one of the co-authors of the paper proposing the existence of this planet. His twitter handle is @plutokiller because he’s the man who, in effect, was responsible for demoting Pluto from planet status by finding quite a few bodies around Pluto’s size also lurking in the outer solar system.

Also, if you can’t be bothered with the long read, I did an interview with an Austrian science radio show this morning which you can listen to half-way down this page.

To cut a long story short, this announcement is not a discovery, but a prediction based on the orbital properties of half a dozen small rocky bodies in a region of the outer solar system called the Kuiper Belt. Similarities and co-incidences between the orbits of these “dwarf planets” convinced Mike Brown and his colleague Konstantin Batygin that something large and as yet unseen is tugging at and influencing them. Extensive mathematical modelling suggests a planet about 10 times the mass of Earth could be responsible (so, getting on for the size of Neptune). But it has to be far away, and probably in an elliptical orbit that may only come as close as around 200 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun, and maybe as distant as a 1000 times or more.

Such a planet would be faint (18th-24th magnitude), although still bright enough that it probably would have been detected by one of the large sky surveys undertaken in recent years from ground and space based telescopes. The problem is that it won’t be moving very fast (not even a few arcseconds per year), and since no-one has been looking for it (until now) then it could be lost among millions of stars of similar brightness.

In his blog Mike Brown says that he has now searched for it in some surveys (specifically, for the astronomers reading this, Catalina and Pan-Starrs), but without success. However, the most likely direction that it lies in is co-incident with the plane of our galaxy, i.e. the Milky Way. As anyone who has seen the Milky Way realises, finding something faint and slow moving against a bright fuzzy background of billions of stars will not be easy. Indeed, most sky surveys routinely avoid the Milky Way precisely for that reason.

Of course, the race is now on to find Planet 9. I’m sure lots of astronomers will now pour  over old data and surveys, and be scheduling new observations for the most likely directions to search.

Will we find it? Well, astronomy has been here before. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, discrepancies in the orbits of the known planets convinced mathematicians and astronomers of the existence of more planets, and that’s how Uranus and Neptune were discovered. Later, perceived discrepancies in their orbits were used to predict the existence of a so-called Planet X. Pluto was found because astronomers were looking for Planet X. But Pluto was never massive enough to be that planet, and its discovery was just a remarkable coincidence.

More recently, a large infrared sky survey by NASA’s WISE satellite was used to look for a Jupiter or Saturn sized planet lurking way out at the edge of our solar system, that might be Planet X, but nothing was found. WISE wasn’t sensitive enough to detect this newly predicted Planet 9 though.

If Planet 9 is found, it would be a remarkable discovery and achievement. If it is smaller than Neptune but still several times the mass of Earth then it would be what’s called a “Super-Earth”. Such planets are being found around other stars and are of great interest because we don’t (currently) have anything in our own solar system between the Earth and Neptune in size. What is such a body made of? Is it rocky, or a gas giant?

And if Planet 9 really is wandering so far from the Sun, how did it form and how did it get there?

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Observations and data will confirm, or refute, this planet. Right now, astronomers are quite excited because the evidence and modelling seems quite compelling and Mike Brown is a highly respected authority on the outer solar system. But such predictions have been made before, and found wanting. Time will tell.

[For a more skeptical assessment, I like this blog: Not So Fast: Why There Likely Isn’t A Large Planet Beyond Pluto]

 

 

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Hussain, Vaughan, Strauss…. Amla…. 3-1 and counting…..

I reckon I’ve now seen more runs scored live by Hashim Amla than any other opposition Test player. So enough of him, because I can’t remember a single one of his runs. Instead, I’ll treasure Ben Stokes astonishing 250. Watching it was to be in a state of denial. So good, it can’t really be happening. Then there was Jonny Bairstow’s maiden 100 for Dad, Bavuma’s for millions of his countrymen, Faf’s for some young journalist’s forthcoming book of the most forgettable innings of all…… Wait, Faf got a ton?

What a Test. England, so England: the greatest score of over 600 and then shitting ourselves by nearly losing the match in history. But you can read about it elsewhere. Here are my random memories from the stands.

Tickets and seats: I suspect most of us would agree that Newlands is quite possibly the most beautiful international cricket ground in the world, especially now that Adelaide has been spoiled for Aussie Rules.

Tickets for Days 1 and 2 sold out online very quickly, and I could only get them for Days 3 and 4. Fortunately, my friend Diane (@Dewgirl99) managed to arrange some for me. Indeed, it turned out that lots of traveling Brits had spares. I ended up with two, and in the shade, thanks to @PaddyBriggs. And they were cheap, £6-£8 each. Also, once in the ground, the locals seem to be relatively relaxed where you actually end up sitting. It was so hot that people were migrating into the shade at the back of the stands, occupying empty seats. If their owners came back, no problem, just move somewhere else. Later, as people left and the shadows lengthened, we sometimes moved to the boundary edge and a great ground level view that you normally get in club cricket. By Days 4 and 5 the crowd had thinned a bit and I just sat where I wanted the whole day.

Beer: Forget the Castle rubbish. The Mitchell’s Brewery had a mobile bar round the back of the President’s Pavilion, and their Forester’s lager and Boson’s bitter went down very well with the visitors. There’s a strange system where you have to buy tokens first, and then pay with one of them, but I guess that gives someone a job.

The Guerillas: Guerilla cricket is an alternative commentary service that basically consists of some knowledgeable fans sitting in a house somewhere in London watching the cricket on TV and commentating over the internet. Often, the quality of the punditry, and the humour, is light years ahead of some of the “professional” stuff (Messrs. Atherton, Hussain, Lloyd and Holding excepted). Actually, thinking about it, could we please put Shane Warne and his Channel 9 mates in one of those 2D glass prison things in which General Zod and co were banished from Krypton in Superman……

Anyway. Guerilla Cricket has a loyal following of fans on Twitter who talk to each other and join in debates with the commentators during the match. Over the years I’ve met some of these fellow cricket tragics, and it was wonderful to see them in Cape Town and meet more for the first time. So thank you for making my trip so memorable, and looking forward to renewing friendships in far flung venues in the future, to Diane (@DewGirl99), Kate (@DutchBirdKate), Katy Scott (@ithilienorthend)), Hazel (@HackneyHaz), Ian (@Marriotti67), Jason (@jasonghiscox), and Paddy (@PaddyBriggs), and it was good to talk to Cricinfo’s George Dobell again, albeit too briefly!

And thank you to @guerillacricket for bringing us all together!

Sundowners! @Matt_Burleigh @jasonghiscox @Marriotti67 @DutchBirdKate @hackneyhaz @DewGirl99 pic.twitter.com/a4vRl84E4x

— Katy Scott (@ithilienorthend) January 4, 2016

The stadium “entertainer”: Every morning as I took my seat my ears were left bleeding by the inanity of the bloke paid to “entertain” us before the match started. Generally, this involved him going around the stands interviewing mainly clueless but eternally optimistic South African fans (“Ja, I think we’ll bowl them out for one-fifty and chase it down”). Fortunately, every Brit he engaged with ended up taking the piss in that very dry manner we have, the one which often leaves our colonial friends bemused as to what just happened. Some memorable examples:

Entertainer: “Who have you come here with?”

Brit: “These bastards.”

—–

Entertainer, to an England fan dressed as a dragon: “How do you think this will go today?”

England fan: “No idea mate. I’m a dragon.”

———–

Entertainer, to some Barmies taking part in a cooking competition for the local sponsor: “Do you think you’ll win?”

Barmy: “Doubt it. I’ve never cooked before.”

————–

The Hashim Amlas: Early on Day 2 a large platoon of Saffer fans dressed as Hashim Amla, complete with identical false beards, filled up a section of the North Stand. Almost immediately they tried out a few songs, admittedly not very good ones but slightly better than the 3 tunes the Aussies know. Their side was getting hammered to all parts by Stokes and Bairstow, so their stoical effort to support their team was appreciated by the England fans, who know all about that kind of experience.

Eventually they happened upon the Hashim Amla chant, to that 2 Unlimited melody. In the next section were some Barmies, who recognised the opportunity and joined in chanting Moeen Ali’s name. Soon, the Dueling Beards song was born. And we thought it was hilarious.

Later in the day, when England were fielding, Moeen Ali was stationed right in front of them and the Dueling Beards chant restarted and went on for ages. Some may have found it tedious, but as well as tickling the humour of the 12 year old boy in me, it was a great example of how the vast majority of cricket fans can just sit together, get along and have a laugh without any animosity.

The declaration: You are smashing it to all parts. A session or two more and you could beat 903, The Oval 1938. It’s 3 in the afternoon on the second day. So you declare. Noooooooooo. Get your runs while it’s easy. The Saffers were gone. Even the genius that is De Villiers was dropping catches. You never know what might transpire later in a Test match. And so it proved. That was a declaration by computer statistics. No one has ever lost after scoring 600 etc. But I suspect no-one had ever scored 600 by 3pm on Day 2 either. Still, at least none of the Saffer fans thought they had the remotest chance of winning. Oh, wait.

Flags: There was little problem with hanging the huge collection of flags brought along by England fans. Unlike our grounds, and some Aussie grounds, the fun police don’t seem to exist here. Indeed, the Saffers had a few of their own. Marvelously, their attitude seems to be, “Oh, you’ve got a flag and you support x football club. That’s nice.” I placed the Preston CC (Herts) union jack at square leg / cover point on Days 1 and 2, and you can see it in the TV shot of Jonny Bairstow celebrating his ton.

The PCC flag enjoying pride of place at square leg

Unfortunately, there was a problem for some flags at the end of the day. Stupidly, I forgot to take mine down before enjoying a post-match pint. When I returned, it was gone. I later learned I wasn’t the only fan whose flag had been pinched (although some seemed to be left up overnight without trouble). Incredibly, the Lost Property office proudly claimed they hadn’t had a single item turned in all match. I wonder why. I’ll comfort myself with the thought that some kid on the Cape Flats will be wrapped up warm in a Preston CC (Herts) flag this winter, but I’m peeved and angry at myself. That flag has been to a few famous matches (MCG & Sydney 98/99, Perth, MCG & Sydney 2010/11). My sincerest apologies to Greig and Fleckers.

Beards: My favourite flag in the ground was the Beard Liberation Front’s, proudly being looked after by @HackneyHaz and @Marriotti67. Of course, Hashim and Moeen take the honours for cricket beards, but Hazel nominated me for Small Beard of the Test, and Keith Flett mentioned it in dispatches…..

Grace, Marx, Burleigh…

 

 

Bavuma: To be honest, I was so bored and so hot by the time that young Bavuma got his innings going that I went for a futile “wicket walk” and missed most of it. The Saffers were of course ecstatic at his hundred, the first for them by a player from the communities labelled “black” under apartheid (as opposed to “coloured”). It was a very significant moment which I probably didn’t quite appreciate, having by that point decided that the next ton on this pitch would be scored by Sir Geoffrey’s mother with her stick of rhubarb. But as we exited the ground that evening, the black steward on the gate was chanting “Bavuma, Bavuma”. Clearly, it meant a great deal to him.

England fans and Test cricket around the world: Over 85,000 attended the Cape Town Test, the biggest combined crowd in Newlands’ history. There were thought to be about 12,000 from the UK, most of whom went each day (so about half the total attendance were visiting fans). Last January, I was in Cape Town visiting the Observatory when South Africa played the West Indies in the equivalent fixture. I went along to the ground to discover the proverbial 3 men and a dog watching. South African fans generally don’t turn up for Tests, apart from Cape Town when it isn’t a working day and when the opposition aren’t perpetually useless.

In the Springbok Bar after the 5th day of this match ended, a Saffer fan said to us: “That was great. Can we play you every year?” But the ECB don’t appear to like playing South Africa, presumably because there’s no money in it. In the 6 years between the last tour and this one we played just 4 Tests at home in 2012 against the great side of Smith, Kallis, Boucher, Amla, De Villiers, Steyn, Morkel and Philander. Absolutely criminal.

This New Year, across the Indian Ocean, Australia were wiping the floor with the West Indies in complete mismatches of Test fixtures. One evening, over 80,000 decided a Big Bash 20/20 at the MCG was more interesting.  Why they didn’t arrange 5 Tests against the Best New Zealand Side Ever is beyond me, but completely in keeping with the patronising attitude the convicts have always had to Kiwi  cricket (I’ve also seen it suggested that NZ, SA and Aus all want home Boxing Day Tests. If so, someone needs to compromise occasionally). Meanwhile, the Windies are a shambles, their board constantly unable to stem the rot, and the game’s global governing body utterly uninterested in properly aiding them, or indeed protecting, promoting and growing its sport  beyond the Big Three money grabbers (India, England and Oz).

Like many, I worry about Test cricket’s future. If you haven’t seen Death of a Gentleman, the film which exposes the whole charade, please do. You can buy it off Amazon.

But at least there’s the England fans, trooping around the world supporting their team, pumping money into the local economy and boosting Test cricket’s profile wherever they go, while generally contemptuous of their own Board’s role in the slow destruction / failure to promote this sport in some countries. And remember, there’s only 10 that play it at Test level.

“Can we play you every year?…….”

 

 

 

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When 80% of the national newspapers are owned by Tory supporters (Murdoch, the Barclay Brothers, Rothermere, etc),  actively pushing a Tory agenda, they can frame each day’s narrative in this General Election. The agenda of TV news, even the “left-wing biased” BBC (my quotes, since it’s a nonsense pushed by Murdoch and his ilk who hate everything about it, not least because it rivals their own business interests) tends to also be influenced by the morning’s newspaper headlines.

Labour did well to dominate a day’s electioneering earlier this week with their popular move to clamp down on tax-dodging non-doms, not that you’d know it was popular with the masses from the following days headlines in, errr, newspapers owned by wealthy Tories etc….. But this morning we were greeted to an extraordinary attack on Ed Miliband and Labour led by Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, which started in his interview on Radio 4 Today and has perpetuated through the day.

In case you missed it, Fallon’s (and Linton Crosby’s of course) attack is two-fold. First, he insists Labour will not be committed to renewing the Trident nuclear deterrent, despite the party’s clear and indisputable insistence that they will indeed do so, and that they will not compromise that position in order to accommodate the SNP in any coalition. Then Fallon argues that Labour cannot be trusted to keep their word because, you know, Ed committed fratricide on his brother to take the Labour leadership in the first place. Fallon might have left out the bit about the Labour party clearly being a hotbed of CND activists, communist sympathisers and bongo playing hippies, but you get the picture.

As the day wore on, we were entertained by David Cameron worrying that Labour haven’t committed to 3 submarines or 4, and therefore were clearly about to invite the Red Army over for tea. Sorry, were “playing fast and loose with our security”.

Which is an interesting angle to take.

Because it’s actually quite clear which political party has done more damage to the armed forces of this country than any other, and which has played fast and loose with our security:

The Tories.

(With their LibDem mates).

Shortly after coming to power in 2010 the ConDem coalition instigated a “Strategic Defence Review” or, as it’s more commonly known, a Complete Shambles.

Among other things, the 2010 SDR saw the scrapping of the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and the withdrawal and sale of the RAF and Fleet Air Arm’s Harrier jump jets. As a result, the UK has no active aircraft carriers until the Queen Elizabeth commissions around 2020. And that will have a pathetic number of F35s on board. Also scrapped were the remaining 1980s generation Type 42 destroyers and Type 22 frigates. The former were on borrowed time, but the latter may still have had a few more years use. Whatever, the point is that the Navy has a significantly reduced surface fleet, and struggles to meet its commitments.

No wonder the Argies are a bit noisier than they used to be, and haggling after some still decent old Russian strike aircraft, more than capable of hitting the Falklands….

And heard the stories of Russian subs and ships sniffing around our coast?

As well as the Harriers, the RAF has lost fast jet bases like Leuchars and Cottesmore, and is steadily reducing its Tornado bomber squadrons. Or was, until ISIS turned up and rather sheepishly and quietly number 12 Squadron has been re-formed only one year after disbanding, to cope with our (small) commitment to trying to keep those fanatics at bay.

The RAF also lost its fleet of Nimrod surveillance aircraft, whose primary role was….. hunting for Russian subs and ships. Now, admittedly the Nimrods were old and their replacement – a modernised version which involved a complete rebuild of each airframe – was so over-budget and behind schedule that the axe, while convenient for the defence budget, was probably the right thing to do. But where is the replacement maritime surveillance aircraft? We’ve had to call on our NATO allies to hunt and watch those subs….

So, “fast and loose with the nation’s security”…..

Of course, you may not have remembered any of this, been aware it ever happened, or certainly not reminded by your average Tory MP or newspaper today. The message is: Labour are bad for defence, while we, the Tory Party, are the Guardians of Britain’s National Security.

Which all the evidence says is complete bollox. It’s only a couple of weeks ago that Cameron and co were busy not committing to the NATO aim of spending 2% of GDP on defence. We all know that if Osborne wants to continue his shrinking of the state in the next few years, defence is the first thing in line for cuts. The Tories did it before, and they’ll do it again.

And yet, your average military type, and the average Tory voter, sincerely believes that the Tories are the Natural Party Of The Armed Forces. Which is extraordinary, given the history of certainly my lifetime.

Remember the Falklands War? Got the Blessed Margaret re-elected, according to legend. But do you remember what happened the year before? When Conservative Defence Secretary John Nott took a swinging axe to the armed forces, especially the Navy, and committed to selling the new aircraft carrier (and future Falklands heroine) HMS Invincible off to Australia? Nah, thought not. But it convinced Galtieri and his Argentine mafia that Britain would not and could not do anything if they invaded.

Fast and loose with our security? Take a bow, the Conservative Party.

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I can’t remember what time I woke up this morning, but after an early-ish (for me) bed yesterday I fully intended to catch at least the second half of England’s World Cup game against New Zealand. I was too late. England had achieved yet another embarrassing low, to pile on the multitude I’ve been forced to endure over nearly 40 years watching the game. As the morning wore on, this latest humiliation set me thinking: there’s a common thread to these lows. Bare with me, while I recall:

The Abject Lows Of English Cricket During My Lifeime…..

Where shall we start? Being smashed by Lillee and Thomson in ’74/5? Tony Greig’s goad-induced pulverising by the Windies in ’76, the first series I have any vague recollection watching? St Mike Brearly’s lot being thrashed down under by Oz and the Windies in 79/80, as their Packer-banned players returned to duty? No. We may have lost all those series rather humiliatingly, but the opposition were good. There wasn’t really a long-term pattern about it. After all, we won in India in 76/77, won back the Ashes in 77 and were probably the best Test side in the world during the Packer years (77-79).

Perhaps we first have to turn to the ten successive defeats across the two infamous “blackwashes” by the West Indies in 84 and 85/86. It’s true that England were increasing hopeless as defeat piled on defeat. But that Windies side was an outstanding candidate for the best Test team in history. Overall, England weren’t actually a bad side, with a fine collection of batsmen in particular who enjoyed long careers, although they could fairly be accused of a certain lack of professionalism compared to more modern sides. Their performances and alleged behaviour on the preceding 83/84 tour to New Zealand were, well, amateurish… but then again New Zealand had Hadlee at the peak of his powers (they also had the world’s dodgiest umpires, but they didn’t need them, we were that bad). Yet in between those “blackwashes” England went to India in 84/85 and won well, and then thrashed Australia at home in 85. But although I don’t include them on my list, perhaps the “blackwashes” were the start of a descent into the hell of the late ’80s. And so, for my first abject low, I choose:

1) The Parable of Botham’s Joint (summer of 1986)

Ian Botham was my hero. He was a superman who reduced the hardest Australians to gibbering wrecks. He was the darling of the tabloids and the most familiar sportsman in the land. No premier league back then of course, hooliganism was rife, the England football team were hopeless (hmm, poor argument, they still are), and cricket was live on the Beeb all summer. But by 1986 Botham had several problems. Put simply, he was getting fat (well, older), and wasn’t the bowler he was from 77-82. Like Flintoff and Pieterson after him, there was also an unreasonable expectation that he could turn on the heroic taps of 81 on a whim. He couldn’t, of course, and especially against the West Indies. Botham never performed at the same level against them, and given how good they were, that shouldn’t really be a significant black mark on his record. No one else did particularly well either. We hailed Alan Lamb’s hundreds, but they were always for the losing side.

None-the-less, English cricket needed a scapegoat for the “blackwashes”. Heavens, we’d lost 10-0 against a bunch of players who weren’t even allowed to captain their own team until the 1950s, and someone was damn well going to be made an example of. Botham would do fine. After all, the man was clearly getting too big for his boots. He had a flamboyant agent angling after Hollywood acting contracts. He had streaks dyed in his mullet haircut. He was rumoured to have had far too much extra-curricular fun on tour in the Caribbean. He was a tabloid celebrity, and they don’t take kindly to those in the MCC Committee Room, don’t you know. Every time he went out to bat he seemed more interested in slogging sixes into Richie’s confectionary stall, than getting his head down like a true Englishman. It was time to teach the man a lesson.

The opportunity came when he admitted smoking cannabis in a tabloid interview. On cue, the Establishment reacted in horror, closely followed by the English public in one of their periodic bouts of moral superiority. Botham got a two month ban. While he was otherwise engaged, England managed to lose a 3 Test series to India 2-0, in the process taking their losing streak to 7 successive matches, and go 1-0 down to New Zealand in their 8th defeat in 10 Tests.

Teaching Botham a lesson clearly worked, then. All it really did was deny cricket-mad youngsters like me a summer watching our hero, while England plumbed new depths, all to satisfy the snobbish blood-lust of the Establishment and the conservative reactionaries that sadly and disproportionately infest and control English cricket (a theme I shall return to).

Botham, of course, returned at The Oval with a wicket first ball and Lillee’s world record for most Test wickets a few balls later. In November, the second coming of the spirit of ’81 continued as he smashed Merv Hughes and co all over the Gabba for an Ashes-defining hundred. And then that was it, save for an Indian summer at the ’92 World Cup. Sky Sports are currently repeating on loop his one man demolition of Australia at Sydney in that tournament. I guffawed then and you too can still guffaw at his slow-medium half volleys laying waste to the petrified Aussie middle order.

You can see where I’m going with this. For Botham then, read KP now. There’s not much in sport to match English cricket cutting off its nose to spite its face, and then insisting until Hell freezes over that it was right all along, despite all evidence to the contrary.

[You’ll have to wait for my next candidates for Lowest Low Ever, I’ve got work to get back to. But it’s been fun….]

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The Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail websites (apologies for linking to the latter, I hate it too, but it’s a useful source today), and local newspapers all over the country, are reporting that many people, from the South West of England to Scotland, heard mysterious noises last night (that is, Saturday 29th Nov 2014). Indeed, a a lady in Croyden made a recording. Have a listen. Sounds like fireworks, or a lot of thunder, or gunfire amidst a battle? You may be vaguely disinterested, it’s being reported in the wretched DM after all. But I heard exactly the same sounds. As did several of us who happened to be standing outside the village pub, the Red Lion in Preston, Hertfordshire. I can’t say I noted the time, but most reports seem to suggest it was around 10.30pm, which would fit. I couldn’t say for certain how long it lasted, but at least tens of seconds, maybe longer. We thought it must be fireworks, but could see none. But we live in a hilly and wooded area, so have often heard but not seen fireworks. I wasn’t on twitter at the time, as my phone was out of juice, so wasn’t aware that the same sounds were being heard nationwide. At lunchtime friends from the next village, in the direction we heard the sounds coming from (basically, west), also reported hearing them. They too thought  someone’s having a loud fireworks party. But saw nothing. So what was it?

The Daily Mirror has made a number of suggestions, and there are more from punters on reddit, none of which are satisfactory to me. But as a professional astronomer and scientist, who heard those noises, I guess I ought to be trying to find out.

Clearly it wasn’t fireworks, despite the Met Police telling the good folk of Croyden that’s what it was. Some firework display to be heard by me 50 miles away, let alone the burgers of Aberdeen.

Sonic booms from aircraft? That’s a lot of aircraft. A sonic boom is exactly that. Boom. Not continuous for tens of seconds and longer. And the RAF said they scrambled no jets last night anyway. They have done occasionally recently so it’s not totally daft to expect to hear a sonic boom over England these days, but the Typhoons on Quick Reaction Alert launch alone or in pairs. The RAF doesn’t have dozens flying at once.

Russians? A small Russian naval flotilla passed through the Channel yesterday. But they were not taking potshots at the Surrey mansions of dissident ex-pats. The Mirror and Reddit both carried claims of “Russian airships”. Errr, WTF? No.

An explosion was reported at Catterick barracks in the early hours of the morning. But Catterick is in North Yorkshire. So, no.

Thunder? The Met Office dismisses a meteorological explanation. The weather was quiet last night. Yes, sound could have travelled a long way from a storm, especially if there were the right temperature inversions in the atmosphere. But the Met Office know their stuff. There were no storms around the British Isles last night.

Meteors? The sky was clear last night, although the transparency wasn’t great, so I probably wouldn’t have noticed all but the brightest meteors. The maximum of the only major meteor in November, the Leonids, was on the 17th/18th, and they are finished by the 20th. So, not them. The Geminids don’t start until Dec 6th. Of course, it’s possible for a random, unexpected meteor shower to occur. But meteors explode so high in the atmosphere (~100km) they produce no sound. If a large enough object got into the lower atmosphere before it exploded, someone would have seen it, and maybe heard something. But this noise went on for a long time, not the second or so that a meteor lasts. It would have had to have been a very intense, yet short, meteor shower of large enough objects all getting low enough in the atmosphere. So, no.

A rocket re-entering? Apparently a piece of Russian satellite Kosmos 2251 re-entered last night, but the expert the Mail contacted said the timing was not good for the event heard in the UK. The vast majority of orbiting debris is tracked and its re-entry time and place can be predicted, albeit sometimes with relatively large errors. So, possible I suppose.  But what we heard went on for at least tens of seconds. I don’t know what lots of pieces of re-entering rocket might sound like or how long it would last, but the sheer length of the sounds might make this explanation implausible??

Mass hysteria? Well, of course the trolls of twitter could go to work and convince everyone they’re hearing stuff all over the country when there’s nothing happening there, and I might even be prepared to believe that. Except I heard the sounds myself. And I wasn’t on twitter as my phone was dead. And I’m a profession skeptic – sorry – scientist. And I was with other witnesses. So, no.

UFOs (or at least, visiting aliens) don’t exist so it wasn’t one of them. There are reports going back years of exotic spyplanes developed by the US (see the Aurora project), which might be powered by ramjets. But now I’m getting into conspiracy theory territory.

I guess someone will quickly come up with a mundane explanation, especially on Monday when the journos are all back at work. If not, I’d love to see a proper analysis, if it can be done (using twitter?), of the times people first heard the noise around the country. Does it differ? Is there a pattern, or track which would indicate a moving object? I didn’t notice any fading of the sound or doppler effect, but definitely thought the sound was coming from the west. Unfortunately, I didn’t note the time. Since I thought it was an annoying firework party. Which it wasn’t.

Update 23:11 30/11/14

The Mail are now reporting that the sounds were heard “simultaneously” in New York (let’s go for contemporaneous, speed of sound etc). If true, that means it must have been an event high in the atmosphere. Which points to meteors or rocket re-entry. I contacted the best expert I know, Prof Alan Fitzsimmons at Queens Uni Belfast, to ask what he knew of meteors making audible sounds, here’s his response. I’ll read the paper he recommends in the morning. If a meteor breaking up – and it took tens of seconds at least – am now wondering if this event is actually quite rare and exciting….

Update 12:00 01/12/14

The Daily Fail has now decided it was indeed the Aurora spyplane. I should have added that the Aurora, should it exist, is reportedly powered by a ramjet that might sound like the rhythmic rumblings of saturday evening (& like V1 Doodlebug of WWII).

 

 

 

Dr Paul G Abel, Centre for Interdisciplinary Science, University of Leicester

Earlier this week, the University of Leicester website published an Opinion section piece that seemed to endorse the practice of “medical astrology”. This followed comments by Conservative MP David Tredinnick suggesting that astrology has a role in medicine. I was gobsmacked and dismayed, as were my colleagues in the Dept of Physics and Astronomy. Not only is “medical astrology” complete nonsense, with no credible evidence to support it, but it is embarrassing to me that my own University has been associated with it, albeit in an opinion piece. I received several tweets from astronomers and others outside Leicester expressing the verbal equivalent of raised eyebrows, and was aware of other critical comments made online.

I have been on holiday this week playing cricket in the West Country, but fortunately some of my colleagues (Dr Paul Abel, Dr Graham Wynn and Dr Mervyn Roy in particular) have swiftly put together a response which has also been published on the University website. I have co-signed this, along with other colleagues who were able to comment on the draft today. I also re-publish the full piece below.

One argument I would like to add, is to try and ward off the inevitable forthcoming accusation that scientists like myself “do not have open minds” and that science “cannot explain everything about the Universe”.  Firstly, the whole point of the scientific method is to be as open minded as possible about the results of any experiment undertaken. Astrology has been subjected to scientific experiment on numerous occasions, and always found wanting, despite the cherry-picked studies & arguments its advocates like to refer to. There is no mysterious energy associated with the movements of planets and the positions of stars that influences human lives and bodies in the manner advocated by astrology. If there was, astronomers would be very rich and powerful and probably employed by the military in order to weapon-ise it. OK so we were once paid by the Royal Navy (for reasons of navigation at sea), and yes there’s still a US Naval Observatory (still plotting star positions and more), and yes the Vatican funds an Observatory doing world-class research, but astrology is still bunkum. And yes some of the first recognizable scientist/astronomers were sometimes employed as Royal Court astrologers (eg Tycho Brahe) and Isaac Newton practiced alchemy, but they couldn’t be expected to get everything right at a time when maps marked half the world “Here be Dragons”. Astrology is still baloney.

As for science not being able to explain everything about the Universe, I’m not going to get deeply into that. It does a pretty good job, and I’m satisfied that it will continue to do so. We may not yet understand dark matter and dark energy, but science will get us there, and astrology is still completely bogus.

Finally,  to point out that astrology is utter bovine manure is not, as David Tredinnick claims of his critics, “bullying”. Neither is it slavishly conforming to some scientific establishment viewpoint, patriarchal, “Western”, or whatever other label you want to throw at it. Astrology doesn’t work. It is balderdash, poppycock, blarney, guff and twaddle. It has been discredited on numerous occasions. It doesn’t exist. It should be a dead pseudoscience, but sadly we have to keep pointing this out.

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Academics from the Department of Physics and Astronomy say “ideas behind astrology are fundamentally wrong”

Posted at http://www2.le.ac.uk/staff/community/staff-room/2014/august/academic-opinion-application-of-astrological-charts-to-nhs-is-2018bunkum2019   Aug 01, 2014 04:55 PM

We are dismayed to read views expressed by Dr Elizabeth Hurren that seem to endorse the practice of medical astrology.  It is disappointing to find an article supporting the use of astrological charts by the NHS expressed by an academic in an Opinion section of the University of Leicester, an institution with a long and successful history of research in astrophysics and space science.

While this article was presented as academic opinion, no evidence was presented in support of statements concerning the application of astrology. This is because the ideas behind astrology are fundamentally wrong. Many of the claims made in the article ignore and are falsified by a wealth of astronomical data, some of which was gathered by instruments designed, built and operated just a short distance across campus from the author’s office.

If we consider the opening sentence: ‘the history of the body has always been a star map.’ This is presented as a statement of fact, but makes no tangible sense. What does it mean? Is the author alluding to evolutionary history, the history of anatomy? In either case the association with star maps is spurious. A star map is a two dimensional projection of a three dimensional reality. It is simply the position of the stars as viewed from Earth at a given point in time. The only association with the history of the body can be the historical use of discredited superstitious medical practices. Vague and ill-defined statements pervade the article and, like a horoscope, we suspect the hope is the reader will find their own meaning in it.

Astrologers believe that the position of the sun, moon and planets as they pass through constellations have an influence on our lives. However, the constellations are just the pictures imagined by our hunter-gatherer ancestors among the crowded majesty of the night sky. While fascinating in their own right, these pictures have no scientific meaning. Stars are vast spheres of gas, nuclear furnaces burning hydrogen and enriching the Universe with heavier elements. They are arranged in galaxies, great structures containing hundreds of billions of stars, and in turn, there are many billions of galaxies.  Stars orbit within galaxies, continually moving through space, and so the constellations change over thousands of years: they are transient things. Astrology is ignorant of all of this.

Beneath the veneer of pseudo science the article suggests that medical practice would benefit from a more patient-centric approach. This point may well have merit, but this has nothing to do with astrology.  The suggestion that the personal circumstances of patients be taken into account is worthy, but it has nothing to do with astrology.  Of the points of note in the article, none have anything to do with astrology. Astrology has not cured any of the world’s diseases or led to any proven medical practices. The reason astrology is not taken seriously is clear and simple: there is absolutely no evidence to support any of its claims.

The article demonstrated a disregard for the scientific method and general scholarly practice.  We find it embarrassing to have to respond to such an article in the 21^st century. As scientists, we welcome and embrace scholarly debate and understand the context of such debate. We have no strong objection to the relatively harmless horoscope sections of many national newspapers, but when superstition and misinformation masquerade as science then we must object. We think that the suggestion that astrology has any place in modern medical practice is dangerous and without scientific merit. In our view, the publication of this article has done a disservice to our University’s name.

Dr Graham Wynn, Dr Mervyn Roy, Prof Ken Pounds, Prof Andrew King, Prof Steve Milan, Prof Paul O’Brien, Prof Nial Tanvir, Dr Jonathan Nichols, Dr Sarah Casewell, Dr. Matt Burleigh, Dr Mark Wilkinson, Dr Richard Alexander, Dr Steve Baker, Dr Simon Vaughan, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester.