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Until Thursday, when the sale ends, at least.

Hubble’s back on its game!

As I wrote recently, Hubble Space Telescope is now running on one gyroscope, due to a janky one that’s been acting erratically and giving the observatory a lot of trouble. It’s supposed to run on three, but over time they wear out, and it had been running on two for a while. The operations are affected, in that it will take longer to zero-in on a target in space, but overall the pointing should still be fine.

And NASA has now released the first image taken by Hubble in the new observing mode. It’s a beauty: NGC 1546, a spiral galaxy about 60 million light-years from Earth.

Cooool. I would classify this as a flocculent spiral, which means it has patchy arms (“flocculent” means like puffs of cotton). It’s not 100% understood why some spirals are like this, though it may be due to a massive and global chain of triggered star formation.

I love the thick dust in the bottom part, too. There’s a lot of it there, strewn out along the arms; clouds of countless tiny grains of rocky and sooty material ejected from red giant and supergiant stars as they die (Betelegeuse is known to have erupted out material like this, which is why it dimmed so drastically a few years ago).

You can also use this dust to determine the galaxy’s orientation; the upper part is the far side, and the lower half closer to us. Neat! 

NGC 1546 is surprisingly small. An annotated image shows it’s only about 25,000 light-years wide. Our Milky Way is 120,000! A similar show of our galaxy would show it filling the screen. Funny how galaxies come in such an array of sizes.

Speaking of which, I also love the edge-on disk galaxy on the left. I’d guess it’s much farther away (unless it’s just a really small galaxy, which is possible but unlikely). If you zoom in you can see the central bulge is redder and the outer part of the disk blue, which is pretty common in spiral galaxies. The central region is populated by older stars, while new ones are still being born in the disk. Blue stars tend to explode quickly, leaving behind redder ones.

It’s a lovely object and one I’m happy to see, because it means the venerable observatory is back on track and doing science once again. Hopefully that’ll be the case for a long, long time to come.

First, the bad news.

The University of Leeds second annual report called Indicators of Global Climate Change indicates that humans are heating that planet even faster now than we were before.

That sucks.

From 2013 to 2022, the global temperature went up by 1.19°C. But from 2014 to 2023 the temperature went up by 1.4°C. Clearly, the last year was a big jump in temperature. The report finds that we’re increasing the planet’s temperature by 0.26°C per decade. 

This is unacceptable. We’re seeing more devastation caused by warming all the time: unprecedented storms, weird weather in general, more frequent and longer heat waves, and more. 

As an aside, AI is ramping up power usage so rapidly that data centers are seeing massive upturns in electricity demands. So besides being plagiarism machines they’re also accelerating the disruption of our ecosphere. Great. 

But, second, the good news.

Wind and solar use in the US from 2019 through 2022 increased by more than 50%, which is a lot, and the combo provided about one-seventh of all electricity needs. Wow. This also resulted in a drop of air pollution from sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which are health hazards, thus saving something like 250 billion bucks in climate and health benefits, according to scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Of course, there are still lots of politicians who are fighting this needed change in how we make power, and a lot of fossil fuel companies more than happy to shovel money at them. 

Still, there’s a lot you can do to help — see my friend Katharine Heyhoe’s writing on this — but in my opinion the most important thing you can do is vote. The vast majority of these woes are due to Republican policies (the Democrats are not exactly innocent, but at a far, far smaller scale than the GOP’s corrupt and negligent attacks on science in general and the environment specifically).

We have a big election coming up in the US, the most important in our nation’s history. The GOP is already maneuvering to steal the election as they tried in 2020, and if they win they will make sure no fair election will ever be held again. If that happens there will be so many devastating assaults on our liberty, freedoms, and rights, but they will also enact legislation to make it impossible to wean ourselves off fossil fuel, dooming humanity in the process.

I wish that were hyperbole. Instead, it’s just a simple fact. 

Vote. And make it count. Do your due diligence — look up the candidates, find out what they’ve actually done (so many lie you cannot trust what they say, only how they vote) — and then vote. It’s not too late to stop global warming, but we have to act soon, and stop those who profit off it.

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!