A Final Plea for Education

As a student in central London, life can be expensive. This year I was able to get grants and bursary totalling £1000 ,as well as maintenance and tuition fee loans of approximately £9000. Even with this handsome sum of money however I still find myself perpetually poor and am currently reduced to a strict weekly budget of £45 in order to stretch my loans out over the year. I'm lucky in that I have my parents to help subsidise me for books and send emergency food parcels, as well as savings to dip into when I'm desperate. I will soon have to face up to the fact however that come the end of my 4 year Msci course I will owe the government £36,000. £36,000, at the tender age of 22! The prospect of owing so much is eye watering and yet I will most likely be considered one of the lucky ones by the next generation of university goers, when it comes to facing debt.

Tomorrow, parliament will vote on whether to increase the maximum tuition fee cap to £9000 and as much as I hate to admit it, I'm pretty certain that the vote will be a resounding yes in favour. The maddening consequence of this fee hike is that students who work hard enough to get places at the best universities must now have to expect a minimum of £36000 of debt, with loans for their living costs only piling on top of that figure. If I added my living costs to this fee I would be looking at a cool £72,000 of debt when I leave university. How then can the government try and fob this fee hike, which will leave this generation shadowed by massive debts, as a "progressive change" when so many of them were granted their university education for free?

I know what Clegg has been trying to say, albeit rather patronisingly, when he asked students to read the reports before they protest. It isn't all bad news: The very poorest students will have support with Universities who charge over £6000 being made to use a part of this extra income to support those from lowest income families. Graduates will also not have to repay their fees until they're earning over £21,000 (with the ConDems announcing ahead of the vote today that this threshold will now be raised yearly) and if the debt is not repaid in 30 years it is written off, regardless of the amount outstanding. 30 years however is a long time and I also fail to see how lending such a vast quantites that are not expected to be paid back within a period of several decades, is conducive to a more stable economy or system of funding. I don't pretend to be an economist however and therefore invite anyone who can explain to me why this is the case, to do so in the comments. I would love to hear from you.

The thing is that fees are not the only issue here. Huge cuts are being made to total university funding: As the government is given scope to remove funding for "non-priority" subjects, humanities students in particular will be losing out. The government is also cutting EMA (Educational Maintenance Allowance), a resource which many of my friends found a necessity throughout college to pay for books and travel to and from school.

For some the changes will be a small improvement, but for the majority this is not the case. We run the risk of a two tier education system, in particular losing students who don't quite fall into the brackets for low income support and can't stand the thought of obtaining that much debt. So with that in mind I say protest tomorrow if you want or attempt one last final lobby at your mp. And keep it peaceful in the spirit of the occupations which have happened in so many universities across the country, as well as the many marches and flashmobs. All I can say is that I hope I am wrong and that the inevitable decision tomorrow does not affect the chances of ordinary people receiving the educations they are entitled to.

Bands and Bacteria

Again it's been a long time since I last posted and I can only apologise. University seems to have had me in a metaphoric stranglehold for the past couple of months and I feel I haven't had enough time to breathe, let alone get in the flow to write. From now on the blog will be forcibly fitted into my schedule. Now onto a couple of bits of Astronomy news:

Exciting piece of news number one is that the Southern Equatorial Band on Jupiter finally appears to be returning, after an unexplained year long disappearance. Several dark plumes have suddenly burst through the upper atmosphere in the last couple of weeks and since such plumes have heralded the return of the belt after past disappearances, it seems likely the it will soon be back in all its former glory. If you have the means to view the belts it's most definitely worth keeping an eye on over the next few months.

Piece of news number two, whilst not strictly Astronomical may hold huge significance in the field in the coming years. Hiding at the bottom of Mono Lake in California, a lake considered particularly inhospitable due to its high concentrations of arsenic, scientists have found a strange bacteria. It may not sound particularly exciting, but this tiny bacteria is in fact a new type of life. It's not an alien as some websites and papers were quick to suggest and there isn't any evidence yet to suggest it evolved independently from normal life on the planet. It is however the only living thing discovered that is able to incorporate arsenic in its cells in the place of phosphorus. This discovery of such an extremophile considerably widens the conditions for life's existence elsewhere in the galaxy; after all large quantities of arsenic have been found on Saturn's moon Titan. If a bacteria can evolve to incorporate a substance that is so poisonous to life on our planet, then why shouldn't we find alien microbial life can exist on worlds much more hostile than our own?

Regarding observing, December is a particularly brilliant time for the northern hemisphere, whether you have lots of equipment or only your eyes on the skies. If you have binoculars or a telescope I recommend in particular the area of Orion (including the Orion, Horsehead and Flame nebulae) and the Pleides cluster in the Southern sky. I also think M13 or the Great Cluster in Hercules (picture on the left)is worth a look- visible early in the evening before it sets in the north west or early in the morning when it rises again in the north east it is quite stunning sight even through a small telescope. For those without equipment the Geminid Meteor shower should also be putting on a good show, peaking on the 14th of this month with an hourly rate of 100 meteors and radiating from the constellation of Gemini. The moon will also experience a total lunar eclipse at 06:30GMT on the 21st of this months. It will unfortunately be low in the west during the eclipse, making it difficult to view for many, but it should certainly still be worth a look!

Rally for Science

"No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer." ~Thomas Browne

Just thought I would drop by briefly to mention the Science is Vital protest this Saturday in London. If you're one of the many coming to support science then I'll see you there! Look out for a big sign and a bunch of physicists shouting geeky slogans -please feel free to say hi if you like. We're a very friendly bunch. If you don't know about it however, or have decided against coming, please (re)consider. Science is so important and we are in danger of falling behind the rest of the world if we don't start giving it the funding it needs. Also I need a job when I leave university. Will you do it for me??

At the moment the UK science budget is just over £3billion for everything. And I mean everything, from stem cells to astrophysics. Losing money from the budget means that many jobs in science will go, our economic return from science will decrease and that our research will simply not be able to compete with many foreign countries any more. Many of our best scientists have already gone abroad because foreign governments are setting more stock by their scientific research than the UK. I think it's time to show David Willetts, Vince Cable and little Georgy Osbourne (bless his cottons) that cutting the science budget is simply false economy. Science needs to be saved.

The rally will start outside the treasury on King Charles Street, London SW1A 2AH at 2pm. If you really can't come then I forgive you, but at least make sure you add your name to the petition or write to your mp asking them not to cut the budget. There's no reason we can't stop these cuts if we all get behind science in this country! I'm even giving up my Saturday lie-in for this cause and I'll have you know that for a student, that's really something.

Moon of the Month

So I haven't written for this blog in a while. I know- I'm an awful blogger and I'm very sorry. My record is truly poor considering that I have only just started this whole internet venture and I am now thoroughly ashamed of myself. To make up for this I thought I'd try and start a monthly feature on the many moons of our solar system because, to be honest, these little failed planets are often even more fascinating than their much larger spouses.

To begin then, I thought I'd kick things off with a doozy; Jupiter's moon Europa, first discovered by Galileo in 1610 and the smallest of the four Galilean moons, with an equatorial radius of 1,569km. Europa is undeniably a looker as moons go, shining with bizarre pink and blue hues and covered in enormous, artistic cracks in its outer icy layer. As it turns out it is also the smoothest object in the solar system, with an almost completely level surface and very few large craters. A useful fact for future pub quizzes if nothing else.

It's what lies beneath the harsh, icy crust of this moon however that is getting a lot of scientists, in particular astrobiologists who must normally spend a lot of time playing tetris and feeling depressed, rather excited. This is because it is believed that Europa harbours a gigantic moon-wide ocean of salt water, which may well also be rich in oxygen. Sound familiar? We all know that life can survive in our seas in temperatures well below freezing: Just take a look at the whales, seals, sea spiders and other amazing fauna that spend their whole lives in the Arctic Ocean despite winter temperatures of -30 degrees celsius. We also know from recent probing into the deepest depths of our oceans, that life can evolve in intense pressures and without sunlight  if thermal vents are present to provide vital warmth and nutrients. So surely it doesn't seem that far fetched to suppose that, just possibly, there may well be life (even if it is of the single-celled, slimy, microbial kind) lurking in the inhospitable cold of Europa's oceans?

Thermal vents are certainly likely to exist on the moon because of its eccentric orbit around its gargantuan gas giant. Europa experiences such strong tidal forces as it moves between perigee and apogee (its closest and furthest distances from Jupiter) that its surface has cracked and broken up, producing the crevices that run across the surface. All that squeezing also causes an intense amount of friction inside the moon and with that a whole lot of heat; it seems entirely likely therefore that hydrothermal vents may populate Europa's ocean floor pumping out water heated from deep within the moon by Jupiter's stranglehold. If that is the case, then life is in it's vast ocean is all the more likely.

It's particularly easy to see Europa at the moment as Jupiter is still putting on a show at almost its closest distance to the Earth for 60 years. Even small scopes should be able to pick out the bright dots of the galilean moons with ease, so you really don't have an excuse not to have a good look if you can. In March of this year NASA and the ESA announced their plans to launch a mission to Europa in 2020. They hope, not exactly to find life, but to evaluate the conditions for it and to improve our knowledge of Europa's icy crust and underlying ocean (of which we really know nothing at all). Who knows, they may well find little alien microbes blobbing around Europa within our lifetimes. Maybe I'll even be lucky enough to be working on the project? I look forward to the phone call...

Welcome to the Cosmos

The first post of a blog is always the hardest to write and generally the most embarrassingly self-centred, so I’ll do my best to keep my introduction short and sweet. Hello and welcome! I’m a second year Astronomy student at University College London and wanted a chance to share just why I think the Universe is so fascinating. I’ll be posting write-ups of any interesting astronomical news when I can and letting you know what you can look out for each month in the skies. Feel free to contact me if you have any particular questions- I’ll do my best to answer them for you or sneakily Wikipedia them if I can’t... And if there’s anything important I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll get on the case asap.

So to begin, for my first bit of Astronomy news I think I should briefly mention the Perseid meteor shower. Sadly my lack of forsight means I’ve started blogging a day too late to catch the shower’s peak between the 12th and the 13th of this month. That doesn’t mean that the shower is over however and if you still want a chance to catch a glimpse of a shooting star, grab a deckchair and head outside this evening. The Perseids are the result of Earth’s orbit passing through the debris of comet Swift-Tuttle, which passes close by to us every 130 years. These tiny fragments of dust and ice may only be 1 millimetre in diameter, but as they come into contact with the Earth’s atmosphere at very high impact velocities they burn up and streak across the sky as shooting stars.

As their name suggests, the Perseids appear to originate from a point in the constellation of Perseus, which will appear in the northeast just under the conspicuous ‘W’ shaped constellation, Cassiopeia. My top tip for seeing as many meteors as you can is to your eyes moving around the northern sky, making sure that you don't focus directly on the point of origin, but at the area around it. If nothing else, moving your head around will at least help to maximise the time you have before your neck inevitably starts to freeze into position. This is especially important given the universal decree that whenever you finally look downwards to stretch your spine, at least half a dozen of the brightest meteors ever seen will suddenly streak overhead. I call this the "Sod's Law of Astronomy" and it is best avoided as much as possible.This year with the moon out of the way for a change seeing has been good when the clouds have parted and from dark sky locations the peak of the shower normally allows observers to see up to 80 meteors per hour. I popped out into my very light polluted suburban garden last night for just 20 minutes and saw 4 meteors and an iridium satellite flair: Granted it was in the shower’s peak, but I have high hopes that the Perseids should continue to be pretty rewarding for at least a few days yet.

As a side note for those with equipment other than their eyes, Jupiter is making a reappearance in the skies- rising in the east at about 21:45 BST. I can normally get a view of the Galilean moons and even make out the main bands of Jupiter in good weather (just) with my 70mm children’s telescope, so anyone with even a good pair of binoculars should be in for a decent view. Recently the main southern cloud band on the planet disappeared and no one is entirely sure why. The most popular theory postulates that its disappearance is simply due to pale high-altitude clouds in the planet’s upper atmosphere, but even then I’m not convinced. Whatever the cause however, this strange phenomenon has happened before and it will definitely be worth watching to see when the cloud band finally reappears again. I also have it on good authority that the great red spot on the planet should also be in view for anyone with decent telescopes on the 31st of this month at 03:17BST. Take a look if you can! It’s times like this that I wish I had unlimited access to the University of London Observatory’s 8 inch refractor/ the money for my own observatory. Do they do student loans for those?