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Geek Wire
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Wire
William Shatner and Neil deGrasse Tyson banter about human follies and the final frontier
'Star Trek' captain William Shatner and astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson sit down for a photo op after their rollicking fireside chat in Seattle, titled 'The Universe Is Absurd.' (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) William Shatner set a record as the oldest human to go into space at the age of 90 — but at the age of 94, he's not that interested in taking a second space trip to break his own record. 'You know, I had such a meaningful experience,' he told GeekWire. 'Maybe I tend to think of it like a love affair. You want to go back to that love affair? Maybe not. It was such a great moment.' The original captain from 'Star Trek' revisited that emotional moment from his Blue Origin suborbital spaceflight on Wednesday night during a rollicking chat with celebrity astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson at McCaw Hall in Seattle. This week's performance grew out of a meetup that the astronomer and the actor had last year during a space-themed Antarctic cruise. The two had such a good time that they worked with producers to organize an onstage follow-up. Tyson said Seattle was chosen as a promising venue for what was billed as a 'one night only' event. 'I knew I have a very loyal, large fan base here in the Pacific Northwest, centered on Seattle,' he said during a pre-show press availability. 'I think Bill does, too. Is that right?' 'I don't follow that as closely,' Shatner deadpanned. The banter went full-tilt during the evening's onstage chat. Shatner recalled his origins as a struggling actor in Canada, 'moving from city to city, and fetid bed from fetid bed.' 'Am I the only one who doesn't know what 'fetid' means?' Tyson joked. 'That means it didn't smell good, and it wasn't me,' Shatner replied. Then Tyson took his turn, recounting his rise from a dog-walker to astrophysicist to cultural icon. 'Do you know I have six cameo appearances in feature-length movies?' Tyson asked Shatner. He proceeded to reel off his credits, including a cameo in 'The Last Sharknado: It's About Time' and a role as as 'astrofishicist' Neil DeBass Tyson alongside SpongeBob SquarePants. 'Can you believe that this highly educated Ph.D. has spent 15 minutes telling you about his bit parts in these incredibly bad movies,' Shatner shot back. The two continued to thrust and parry over topics ranging from quantum physics to penguin poop. But Shatner took center stage with the recollection of his real-life space trip in 2021, aboard a New Shepard suborbital rocket ship built by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space venture. Shatner said the space odyssey had its origins in a conversation that he had with Bezos years previously. 'I want to Blue Origin, met with Jeff Bezos and suggested, because he hadn't flown his rocket yet, maybe I should go,' he recalled. 'So we left the building … he's got a model of the Starship Enterprise under a dome in his lobby … I went home under the impression that might work, and COVID hit.' That put the topic on hold for a year. When Blue Origin scheduled the first crewed New Shepard flight, the crew list included Bezos — but not Shatner. 'So he went up first, and was noted, and then came back and he sent me a message: 'Would you like to go up second?'' Shatner said. 'I'm not gonna go up second. That's the vice president. For God's sake, I want the president.' Then Shatner thought about it again. 'You know, the feeling of space, the final frontier. Why not go, out of a sense of curiosity, what it's like? So, I said yes,' he said. Shatner recalled that he was brought to the launch site a day before the rest of the crew, and taken on a tour that involved a climb up 11 flights of stairs to get to the top of the launch tower. 'And then we walked back down and went back to the headquarters,' he said. 'I thought, they must have brought me here to see if I could walk up 11 flights of stairs.' 'It would be embarrassing if you died halfway up,' Tyson said with a smile. Shatner has often remarked that his trip reminded him of the fragility of life on Earth, and he returned to that theme on Wednesday night. 'I see how vulnerable the Earth looks,' he said. 'It's a moat of dust in the sky. It's got 12,500 feet of oxygen, and then you're dead. … It's a vulnerable, precious piece of rock that supplies us with life, and we have destroyed it.' When he touched down and left the spaceship, Shatner began to weep. 'I couldn't understand why I was crying,' he said. 'I went someplace to sit down and try and understand what had happened to me. And I realized I was in grief for our Earth.' During the pre-show interview, Shatner said that feeling has stayed with him over the past four years. 'In that time, the United States has canceled its position in global warming. It's outlandish. It's like, with a knife at your chest, saying, 'Well, you're not going to kill me,'' he said. ' And what's sad is, we have the ability. I mean, there are companies now that are working on the teetering edge of reality to fix what we've got, and we're not financing and going at it like the Manhattan Project.'
New York Times
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Traveling the Cosmos With Carter Emmart, One Last Time
The starship on West 81st Street and Central Park West is losing its captain. For nearly three decades, Carter Emmart, 64, has been director of astro-visualization at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium, curating the ultimate diorama: a digital universe of data and images culled from space probes and telescopes the world over. Mr. Emmart and his crew have created a series of mesmerizing planetarium shows over the years that take audiences forward and backward in time and space to understand the origin and potential fate of the cosmos. With shoulder-length hair, beads, bracelets and a propensity to show up for big events in a blue astronaut jumpsuit, Mr. Emmart himself seems to have been beamed in from somewhere Out There. His Manhattan office is festooned with a collection of Barbies, dolls he has used in design models, which he has lugged to all corners of the world, having dressed them in regional costumes. To date, millions of planetarium visitors have watched and heard stars explode; galaxies collide; clouds of interstellar space dust glow, swirl and melt. They have zoomed over alien landscapes and pierced the mysterious dark matter that permeates space. The shows have been narrated by celebrities such as Tom Hanks, Robert Redford, Whoopi Goldberg and the museum's own impresario of the sky, Neil deGrasse Tyson. The shows have been distributed to 60 different institutions in 40 countries. A very lucky viewer could lie on the floor of the planetarium on a recent slow afternoon as Mr. Emmart led a personal tour of his digital universe, pausing to appreciate craters on the moon and the dunes of Mars. Mr. Emmart's final show, 'Encounters in the Milky Way,' which opened on June 9, traces the history and future of our own galaxy. At the end of the summer, Mr. Emmart plans to retire to Thailand. 'I'm looking forward to being in nature with the peace and quiet,' he said recently. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
In space, no one can hear you scream — But it still gets incredibly noisy
You've probably heard astronauts talking to mission control while they perform operations in space. In these recordings, you can hear the back-and-forth chatter, along with the astronaut's breathing and the background noise of their spacesuit pumping oxygen into their helmet to keep them alive. Yet, if they removed that helmet and broke the barrier of the suit shielding them from outer space, that conversation would be cut — and all sound would go radio silent. As astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson once explained on the podcast StarTalk, astronauts would be able to hear things from within the body itself — like their own heartbeat. 'The sound of silence is the sound of things that were always making noise that you never noticed before,' he said on the podcast. Sound waves are a vibration carried through some sort of medium, like air or water or in the case of the heartbeat, the body. When those vibrations reach our ears, they send a vibration through our eardrums, which is recognized in the brain as sound. Because sound needs something to travel through, it can't make its way through the vast majority of space, which is a vacuum containing essentially no particles. Interplanetary space contains just a few dozen particles in each cubic centimeter — in comparison, the air we breathe has tens of quintillions of molecules per cubic centimeter. (For scale, 10 quintillion seconds is longer than the age of the universe.) 'In the universe, an absolute vacuum is rare, and most of the universe is very low-density high-temperature plasma,' said Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona. 'In principle, sound could travel through that, but it would have very different properties to what we are used to.' Gas clouds, dust clouds and solar winds for example, could all have sound waves pass through them, even if they are relatively low-density, said Phil Plait, an astronomer who runs The Bad Astronomy blog. The structures of many gas clouds, for example, can be formed by sound waves, or shock waves in the case that the material moves faster than the speed of sound, he explained. 'We see the effects of sound in these objects all the time,' Plait told Salon in an email. This would be nothing like the sound we are used to on Earth and wouldn't be detectable by the human ear, which can only hear a very narrow range of frequencies. You may remember the black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster about 250 million light-years away, from which NASA detected emanating pressure waves in 2003. Although this was not a sound recording like you would hear from a microphone, NASA did convert these pressure waves into sound, albeit one that is far too low of a frequency for the human ear to detect. For what it's worth, though, they did find that the waves corresponded to the note of B-flat, about 57 octaves below the middle C note on a piano. Then, in 2022, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory sonified this wave data into a couple of sounds the human ear could hear at frequencies 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than the original. (To get a sense of just how astronomical this figure is, one study estimated that there are 20 quadrillion total ants on Earth.)"What's going on is that matter is surrounding the black hole, and when some stuff falls in it can create a powerful wind that compresses the material around it, making a sound wave,' Plait said. 'We don't detect the sound itself, but we can see the ripples in the gas and they can be converted into sound we hear.' There are entire projects dedicated to sonifying data from astronomical objects. In the Cassini mission, for example, NASA detected radio waves emitted from charged particles in magnetic fields, which were converted to sound. Still, these were plasma waves, and not sound waves. However, sound has been detected within our own solar system. During NASA's Perseverance mission on Mars in 2021, the rover's microphones detected the whir of the mission's helicopter and noises created by the rover. It also detected naturally occurring sounds on the planet itself — including Martian wind. Back in 1981, Russia also reported sounds on Venus during the Soviet Venera 13 mission, which sounds like waves hissing on a beach. Yet sounds on other planets sound different than they do on Earth because other planets have different atmospheres. On Earth, the unique combination of oxygen, nitrogen and other gases, combined with the effects of gravity and solar heating, create a certain density of molecules that carries sound as we know it. In contrast, the atmosphere on Mars is roughly 2% as dense as Earth's, and its composition is dominated by carbon dioxide. Overall, sounds would be quieter and slightly muffled, and it would also take longer to reach you than it would on Earth. Some higher pitched sounds would be inaudible entirely. Interestingly, if you played a church organ on Mars, the set of flue pipes that create sound in a way similar to a flute would go up in pitch, but the reed pipes, which produce sound in a way similar to a saxophone, would go down in pitch, said Tim Leighton, an acoustics professor at University of Southampton, who created models to predict sound on other planets. Saturn's moon, Titan, is probably acoustically the closest to Earth. However, the pressure and density are a bit higher at ground level, and the speed at which sound travels through the atmosphere is lower than Earth. As a result, many sounds such as voices, flutes and organ pipes would play at a lower pitch, Leighton said. On Venus, sounds that are caused by solid objects vibrating, like harmonicas or reed organ pipes, would be pitched down because the atmosphere is dense and soupy. However, sounds from things like flue organ pipes or flutes, which are propagated through air, would be pitched higher than Earth. That's because the extremely hot temperatures on Venus make sound travel faster than on Earth. Additionally, if we theoretically heard a sound like a vocalization on Venus, our perception of the size of the creature it was coming from would be a little distorted. That's because humans evolutionarily developed a way of hearing vocalizations in which sound travels to the top of the nose of the speaker and back again in a form of echo, which we subconsciously use to estimate how large a creature is based on the tone they emit, Leighton said. On Venus, "this pulse quickly travels up to the top of the nose and back again much sooner than it would on Earth,' Leighton told Salon in a video call. 'Your brain hears that and imagines the person is about three feet tall.' As we continue exploring more distant planets, recording sound could help scientists better understand them. For example, measuring the sounds of wind on Mars could provide clues on how the planet's surface forms, Leighton explained. 'It can tell us a lot about the atmosphere and how it changes as the sun goes up and down, and how that, in turn generates winds to shape the surface of Mars,' Leighton said. 'That indicates the power of these microphones.' Sound could also help us explore planets like Jupiter and Saturn, which likely have plenty of sound to hear but have thick clouds and inhospitable conditions that make it difficult to access visually, Impey said. 'In fact, since the atmosphere is sort of opaque and you can't really see through it, it might be a way to sense what's happening better and more efficiently than you could with any sort of a camera, which wouldn't really work very well at all,' he told Salon in a phone interview. When looking for sound in the universe, astronomers have also looked back in time. Back in the early years of the universe, it was a hot plasma soup that was far more dense. That plasma carried acoustic oscillations, although still not at an audible range. However, in one research project, astronomer Mark Whittle compressed the first million years of the universe into 10 seconds, shifted up by 50 octaves so that the human ear could hear. It sounds like "a descending scream, a deep roar and a final growing hiss," he reported. About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, sound waves called Baryon acoustic oscillations rippled through the cosmos to influence how galaxies were distributed. As such, one could say that life on Earth as we know it in some way originated from a sound wave. It's not called the Big Bang for nothing, after all. 'Within that sea of brilliance, the seeds for all that we now know were already present, latent, waiting to unfold,' Whittle wrote in his report. 'Most remarkable of all, perhaps, these seeds were sounds – pressure waves coursing through the fluid.'
ABC News
30-05-2025
- Climate
- ABC News
Crowds spill onto New York streets and block traffic to catch glimpse of 'Manhattanhenge' sunset
Crowds have spilled onto the streets of New York to catch a glimpse of a beloved phenomenon that bathes Manhattan streets in orange twice a year. "Manhattanhenge" occurs when the Sun perfectly aligns with the borough's street grid and sinks below the horizon, framed by a canyon of skyscrapers. Sidewalks and parks were packed to watch the unique sunset on Thursday, local time, which occurs on a handful of spring and summer evenings. The first Manhattanhenge of the year took place on Wednesday evening, but was repeated again on Thursday. Thursday's sunset was briefly visible, but mostly blocked by clouds. It will occur again on July 11 and 12. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson coined the term in an article published in the National History magazine in 1997. The future television host was part of an expedition led by Gerald Hawkins, the scientist who first theorised that Stonehenge was constructed as an ancient astronomical observatory. It struck Dr Tyson, who is a New York local, that the biannual sunset alignment that occurs in Manhattan could be compared to the Sun's rays striking the centre of the Stonehenge circle on the summer solstice. The summer solstice is an annual event that refers to when a hemisphere experiences its longest stretch of daylight over a 24-hour period. Manhattanhenge doesn't take place on the summer solstice itself, though. The two events are separated by about three weeks before and after the solstice. AP
Fast Company
29-05-2025
- General
- Fast Company
Manhattanhenge 2025: Here's how to see the city skyline frame the sun
Twice a year, New Yorkers and visitors are treated to a phenomenon known as Manhattanhenge, when the setting sun aligns with the Manhattan street grid and sinks below the horizon framed in a canyon of skyscrapers. The event is a favorite of photographers and often brings people out onto sidewalks on spring and summer evenings to watch this unique sunset. The first Manhattanhenge of the year takes place Wednesday at 8:13 p.m., with a slight variation happening again Thursday at 8:12 p.m. It will occur again on July 11 and 12. Where does the name Manhattanhenge come from? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson coined the term in a 1997 article in the magazine Natural History. Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York's American Museum of Natural History, said he was inspired by a visit to Stonehenge as a teenager. The future host of TV shows such as PBS's Nova ScienceNow was part of an expedition led by Gerald Hawkins, the scientist who first theorized that Stonehenge's mysterious megaliths were an ancient astronomical observatory. It struck Tyson, a native New Yorker, that the setting sun framed by Manhattan's high-rises could be compared to the sun's rays striking the center of the Stonehenge circle on the solstice. Unlike the Neolithic Stonehenge builders, the planners who laid out Manhattan did not mean to channel the sun. It just worked out that way. When is Manhattanhenge? Manhattanhenge does not take place on the summer solstice itself, which is June 20 this year. Instead, it happens about three weeks before and after the solstice. That's when the sun aligns itself perfectly with the Manhattan grid's east-west streets. Viewers get two different versions of the phenomenon to choose from. On May 28 and July 12, half the sun will be above the horizon and half below it at the moment of alignment with Manhattan's streets, according to the Hayden Planetarium. On May 29 and July 11, the whole sun will appear to hover between buildings just before sinking into the New Jersey horizon across the Hudson River. Where can you see Manhattanhenge? The traditional viewing spots are along the city's broad east-west thoroughfares: 14th Street, 23rd Street, 34th Street, 42nd Street, and 57th Street. The farther east you go, the more dramatic the vista as the sun's rays hit building facades on either side. It is also possible to see Manhattanhenge across the East River in the Long Island City section of Queens. Is Manhattanhenge an organized event? Manhattanhenge viewing parties are not unknown, but it is mostly a DIY affair. People gather on east-west streets a half-hour or so before sunset and snap photo after photo as dusk approaches. That's if the weather is fine. There's no visible Manhattanhenge on rainy or cloudy days, and both are unfortunately in the forecast this week. Do other cities have 'henges'? Similar effects occur in other cities with uniform street grids. Chicagohenge and Baltimorehenge happen when the setting sun lines up with the grid systems in those cities in March and September, around the spring and fall equinoxes. Torontohenge occurs in February and October.
