Signs of life?

Like the suggestions of surviving organisms that have been reported this past week as possibly living in the sulphuric acid-dominated clouds surrounding our solar system's most hell-like body - the scorching, far-more-barren-than-any-Earth-desert planet Venus - the BBC can still astonish us mere humans by showing itself to be occasionally breathing as far as Lord Reith's 'educate' brief goes.

In a remote corner of the BBC (still to be abolished next year?), The Sky at Night  (introduced even now, musically, by my favourite composer Sibelius's At the Castle Gate), continues to do what it first did over 60 years ago, and does it as brilliantly as ever.

I fear for its future, but I'm glad it's still being allowed to quietly go about its business and that it allows for the late Sir Patrick Moore's designated successor Chris Lintott, Professor of Astrophysics in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, to keep on broadcasting for the BBC alongside Maggie Aderin-Pocock. 

Maggie was a brilliant choice because she's uncannily like Sir Patrick in her so-fast-talking-as-to-be-hard-to-always-follow, enthusiastic delivery, so she appealed to Sky at Night fans. But she's also black and female, so that ticked the BBC's boxes beautifully - and, I suspect, remains the programme's key get-out-of-jail-free card, survival wise. 

Chris is a superb science communicator, and knows people, and I'm guessing got the BBC in - behind the scenes - on what could very well be one of the most transformative scientific discoveries of all time (if people forget Twitter and politics and BBC bias for a while). It was a wonderful coup for him:

Well, this is odd. You're watching this on Monday, September 14th, and a few hours ago, a team of astronomers here at Cardiff University announced to the world what could be the most significant astronomical find for decades. I'm filming this a few weeks before that announcement because The Sky At Night has been given exclusive access to the team behind the discovery. We're having to be incredibly secret. So, what is this top secret, ground-breaking discovery? Well, if you haven't heard, the team claim that they've found what could be the signs of life on Venus. I can't believe I get to say that to camera! The team think they've found what could be the signs of life on Venus. 

Here's what we know in a nutshell. The team used radio telescopes here on Earth to detect a gas called phosphine in the high atmosphere of Venus. On Earth that gas is only made in factories or by bacteria in certain conditions. Either way, it's made by life. The team asked whether natural chemical processes could account for what they've seen on Venus and the answer is "No." They could only make about a 10,000th of the amount of phosphine seen. If that's right, then this detection of gas is a sign of life high amongst the clouds of Venus.  

The scientists featured in this programme provided compelling evidence, with proper scientific caveats, for highly improbable extraterrestrial microbial life actually existing viably, right now, on our very own doorstep, floating in the clouds of Venus, armoured against its sulphuric acid and excreting proof of life as they go about their very limited lives. 

For decades Venus has been considered the least likely candidate for providing a haven for life in our solar system.  Not now though.

I seriously urge you to watch this programme.

I only wish the BBC had made more of it. The kind of BBC I want would have made it a half-hour special on primetime BBC One. 

A belated St. Patrick Moore's Day

The 4th March is my St. Patrick's Day. 

It marks the birthday of the late Sir Patrick Moore, patron saint of all of us amateur astronomers.

Patrick Moore was the Jeremy Clarkson of the BBC in the years before Jeremy Clarkson (minus the punching of minions, of course - unless Chris Lintott knows otherwise). He even, golly gosh, liked UKIP.

The blessed Sir Patrick, monocle-in-eye, would often warn us never to use our telescopes and binoculars to stare directly at the great sun god in the sky. And, as a result, I never did - and never will.

The BBC has been super-informative in the past few days about warning us not even to look at the Great Sun God (PBUH) with our naked eyes...and quite rightly so:

DON'T....LOOK....DIRECTLY....AT....THE....SUN......IT'S...BRIGHT...AND...HOT...

During the last solar eclipse however (whenever that was), I forgot myself and - in a moment of wild thoughtlessness - looked out and saw, for a good second or so, the sun in partial eclipse. 

And, idiot-that-I-am, I might have repeated my transgression today, sitting at work in almost exactly the same place, had it not been for all the grey clouds pretty much surrounding sunny Morecambe.

Obviously, it's never normally cloudy in Morecambe. 

Morecambe is, famously, Britain's sunniest seaside resort. That's why you must come here.

Our deckchairs are permanently out. Morecambe Bay sparkles in semi-eternal sunlight. The Eric Morecambe statue (restored to majesty after a local attack of vandalism) half-blinds spectators with its brilliance. (The giant statues of the two dead Kims in Pyongyang have nothing on it). Seagulls regularly faint in the heat. 

The Furness Peninsula crowd over the bay, with their crappy NHS hospital, daren't even take their sunglasses off when looking in our direction. The Marbella crowd move here en masse for the summer.

Plus, I always wear shorts and cool shades (like Horatio from CSI Miami), and all of Morecambe's wonderful womenfolk - even our wonderful would-be jihadi brides - wear bikinis all year round, even in the midst of winter. 

And, if proof were needed that today was unusual, the BBC's environmentalist analyst Roger Harrabin recently moved here in order to demonstrate global warming in action. He's tattooed the words, 'Phew, what a scorcher! Thank God for global warming!' on his left arm since arriving here. 

[Well, at least according to the Morecambe Tourist Board]. 

That said, hope you saw more of the sun and its lunar 'stopper' than we did.

And, returning to blog-related matters, the BBC has been great to watch vis a vis the eclipse. This is the sort of thing they do brilliantly. 

Chris Lintott on 'The Life Scientific'

The Sky at Night's Dr Chris Lintott was Jim Al Khalili's guest on The Life Scientific this morning.

I remember his first appearances on The Sky at Night. He struck me as being very young but highly knowledgeable. I've liked him ever since. 

He was very much in the right place at the right time as regards the school he was sent to - namely Torquay Boys' Grammar School. Two members of staff there had already "put themselves through the hell of running teenage discos in the school hall" to raise enough money to build an observatory at the school - a full-blown observatory with a rotating, opening dome and a 19.2-inch reflecting telescope which was "swung across the sky by a BBC micro-computer, which worked brilliantly," said Chris [bloody BBC!], "except for the number 4. So you couldn't go to anywhere with 4 in the coordinates". Then they gave 12 year-old Chris the keys. As a result he was "nocturnal for most of that summer holiday", practising being a scientific, learning that science is an ongoing pursuit.

The school, of course, had an astronomy club. And it gets even better...The school had an occasional visitor while Chris Lintott was a pupil there - one Patrick Moore. 

One of the things Sir Patrick told the astronomy club was that there was still much that wasn't known about the outer planets of our solar system and that, hopefully, ten years hence we might actually know more. That inspired Chris with the idea that there's a lot still to discover in astronomy. "I remember sitting there thinking very clearly, 'I want to do that'", he recalled. 

Chris, still aged 12, then began writing to Patrick Moore and Sir Patrick eventually replied to each and every one of them. Chris still has some of his postcards, including one addressed to "Chris Damn Can't Remember Your Surname Esq" and one that simply read "Chris. Yes. Haste. Patrick." (He couldn't remember what that was about!)

During his time in the sixth form he spend some time doing research (running computer programmes to study how light moves through the dust around young stars) and on the back of it won a competition to go to America, aged 17. He then went to Cambridge University to study Natural Science, working mainly in the area of theoretical physics, before doing his PhD in Astronomy at University College, London.

It was in his undergraduate days that he made his first appearance on The Sky at Night discussing the the basics of astronomy with Patrick Moore. He'd got to know Sir Patrick even better through the British Astronomical Association, sometimes going to his house to use his telescopes. Eventually, after "a gin or tonic or two", Patrick Moore suggested that he might appear on The Sky at Night. So appear on The Sky at Night he did - as did lots of other "confused-looking eighteen or nineteen year olds" over the years when Patrick Moore was in full charge of the show. Soon he became a regular feature, in time co-presenting the programme with Sir Patrick. They also wrote books today with Queen guitarist Brian May. 

In the meantime he's been working as a peer-reviewed astrochemist, and helped 'crowdsource' hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers to help curate a 'Galaxy zoo'. 

All of which provoked the thought: I wish I'd gone to Torquay Boys' Grammar School.