Stories from the stores

This week in 1977, astronomers discovered faint rings around Uranus. Or did they? It’s just possible that William Herschel beat them to it by almost 200 years. Herschel’s notes for February 22, 1789 say ‘A ring was suspected’. It was assumed he was mistaken, but Dr Stuart Eves, inspired by one of our objects, has a theory that could explain Herschel’s observations.

Herschel in 1794. (Credit: Science Museum / Science & Society)

A few years ago, Stuart visited our Blythe House store to see this orrery, or planetary model – the only surviving one of this design.

Orrery made by John Fidler to a design by William Pearson, 1813-22 (Credit: Science Museum / Science & Society)

It shows Uranus with six moons. Herschel discovered the innermost two, Titania and Oberon, in 1787. By 1794 he had reported four additional satellites. However, no other astronomer managed to see them and observations in the 1850s showed Herschel was mistaken and may have been looking at background stars near the planet.

Wanting to know more about this, Stuart studied Herschel’s papers, which is where he found the 1789 reference to the ring, and also one from 1792 referring to ’a very faint ray, like a ring crossing the planet, over the centre’.

So if Herschel did see a ring, how come nobody else managed to until 1977? Well, Stuart’s theory is that if this ring behaves like Saturn’s rings then it might be getting darker and more diffuse, making it harder to see. Plus, the ring is only visible at certain alignments.

Herschel's 20ft telescope (Credit: Science Museum / Science & Society)

But could Herschel really have seen a ring using his 20ft telescope, a giant of the time but diminutive by today’s standards? Well, he built the best telescopes of his era, and was a meticulous observer. So maybe, just maybe… We’ll never know for sure, but it shows what a visit to our stores can trigger!

A 1998 Hubble Space Telescope image of the rings of Uranus (Credit: NASA / Science & Society)

While growing up, when I wasn’t busy playing with hammers, I was intrigued by the Moon and I would act out Lego explorations of the Lunarscape. Two interests that that I have in common with engineer James Hall Nasmyth – whose invention of the steam hammer I explored in an earlier post.

Astronomy was one of Nasmyth’s passions and when he retired in 1856, he had more time to devote to scientific investigation.

He used this 20-inch reflecting telescope for looking at the Moon and Sun.

Nasmyth's 20 inch reflecting telescope (Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library)

I first came across it on a visit to our Blythe House store, and I was drawn to the huge grey iron lump of a telescope amongst a display of slender wood and brass ones. You can really see his history in making industrial machinery.

Nasmyth used his chunky telescope to make detailed drawings and plaster models of his observations, and co-wrote a book with James Carpenter called The Moon, Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite.

It was impossible at the time to photograph all that he could see through his telescope, so instead he photographed his plaster models for use in the book.

Plaster relief model of a portion of the Moon by James Nasmyth (Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library)

So two of our museum objects – a massive hammer and a lumpy telescope – have led to me on a journey through the story of James Hall Nasmyth. I jumped for joy last year when I saw that that same lumpy telescope was taken from storage and put on display as the entrance piece of our new Cosmos & Culture exhibition.

Nasmyth's telescope at the entrance of Cosmos & Culture (Science Museum)

Eighty years ago today, a young American astronomer discovered tiny Pluto. Clyde Tombaugh was searching for a predicted ‘Planet X’ that might explain oddities in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus.

Tombaugh spent months painstakingly photographing the same sections of sky and studying the images with a blink comparator. On 18 Feburary 1930, he noticed that on photographs taken a few nights apart that January, one ’star’ had moved, indicating that it was actually a nearby object moving against the fixed background of distant stars. Further observations confirmed the discovery, which was announced to the world that March.

This Lowell Observatory photograph announcing the discovery shows Pluto marked with arrows. (Image: Science Museum)

Despite the fanfare, Pluto turned out not to be Planet X – Tombaugh had just been looking in the right place at the right time. Subsequent observations revealed that Pluto was too small to match the predictions. Eventually, revised calculations of Netpune and Uranus’s orbits removed the need for Planet X altogether.

Things got worse for Pluto by the 2000s, with astronomers discovering a slew of similarly-sized bodies beyond Neptune. Either our Solar System had a lot more planets than anyone had realised, or it was time to rethink what counts as a planet. On 24 August 2006 the International Astronomical Union voted on a new definition, demoting Pluto to ‘dwarf planet’.

‘Save Pluto’ campaigns were quick to follow. This bumper sticker was one of the first products to go on sale.

For ... (Image: Science Museum)

However, it didn’t take very long for someone to come up with a response:

... and against. (Image: Science Museum)

The IAU’s definition of ‘planet’ remains controversial, so there may be hope for Pluto yet. Because it’s so faraway and faint we still know very little about it, but a spacecraft called New Horizons is due to fly by in 2015. It’s carrying some of Tombaugh’s ashes.

You can see the bumper stickers and the photograph in Cosmos & Culture, while a detector for New Horizons is on display in Exploring Space.

With President Obama’s new NASA budget proposals to slash the Constellation programme, it might be a while longer before someone adds their footprints to the last left on the lunar surface by Gene Cernan in 1972. But in the meantime, here’s a virtual journey to the Moon, via our collections.

Galileo's maps of the Moon from Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger), 1610.

The 28 day lunar cycle, from Kircher's Ars Magna Lucis Et Umbrae (The Great Art of Light and Shadow), 1646

Pastel drawing of the Moon by John Russell, 1796

Plaster model of the lunar crater Archimedes, by James Nasmyth, 1850-1871

One of the reasons given for cancelling Constellation was lack of design innovation. Perhaps NASA’s engineers should take inspiration from this ingenious method of transport from 1648:

'The Man in the Moon', 1648

However and whenever they get there, the next visitors to the Moon are unlikely to encounter scenes like those in this lithograph, inspired by the Great Moon Hoax of 1835. In a series of increasingly outlandish articles, thought to have been written by reporter Richard Adams Locke in an attempt to boost circulation, The New York Sun reported that astronomer John Herschel had turned his powerful new telescope to the Moon and discovered lush vegetation, beavers walking on two legs, and bat-people. There was even a temple made of sapphire, which might have gone some way towards balancing NASA’s budget…

New discoveries on the Moon, c. 1838

With last week’s opening of 1001 Inventions, we’ve been celebrating cross-cultural collaboration, and astronomy has plenty of examples. At the entrance to the exhibition you can see a display of objects from our collections, including this astrolabe made by Jamal al-Din in Lahore in 1666. The astrolabe is a two-dimensional model of the universe that can be held in your hand. It is also a beautiful demonstration of the way knowledge is shared between cultures.

Astrolabe by Jamal al-Din, 1666 (Image: Science Museum)

The first astrolabes were probably developed by the Ancient Greeks. From the 8th century onwards, the instrument was improved by Islamic scholars who took it as far as India and China. The astrolabe was reintroduced to Europe via Moorish Spain. By the 17th century the craftsmen of the Low Countries were producing elaborate instruments like this one.

An astrolabe that can’t be held in your hand is the Yantra Raj, one of the instruments at the Jantar Mantar observatory in Jaipur, India. This giant stone observatory was built for accuracy rather than portability, to help improve the calendar. In 18th-century India people used a combination of the lunar-based Muslim and the solar-based Hindu systems. Both relied on observations made centuries earlier, so became increasingly unreliable. Jaipur’s ruler, Jai Singh II, commissioned the new observatory. This model, on display in Cosmos & Culture , shows one instrument called the Rashivalaya Yantra, with sundials to track the Sun through each zodiac sign.

Model of part of the Jaipur observatory (Image: Science Museum)

The observatory at Jaipur is just one of the examples that historian Simon Schaffer will be talking about during Space … a real frontier? at the Dana Centre next Thursday. He’ll be joined by Craig Underwood of Surrey Satellite Technology and our own Doug Millard as we explore celestial collaborations through the ages. There’s still time to book a ticket for the event, which also includes tours of 1001 Inventions and Cosmos & Culture – hope to see you there!

The International Year of Astronomy 2009 has now been officially ‘closed’ at a ceremony in Padova (timed to celebrate Galileo’s observations of Jupiter’s moons, which you can read about in a previous blog). It’s been a really successful global project, with 148 countries signing up and thousands of people around the world taking part in events ranging from backyard observing to major international collaborations.

Much of the material produced in 2009 carries the distinctive astronomy year logo (Credit: IYA2009)

The participants of IYA2009 produced a huge amount of promotional and outreach material – posters, stamps, coins, calendars, T-shirts, badges, books,  movies, and much more. And we’re teaming up with the International Astronomical Union to ensure that some of this is preserved.

Obviously it’s not feasible for us to collect everything, but we’d like the ‘Official IYA2009 Collection’ to be a representative sample of the fantastic activities carried out around the world last year, showing the different ways that the national nodes celebrated astronomy. (For example, in Italy the focus was unsurprisingly on Galileo, whereas here in the UK we made a point of mentioning that Thomas Harriot beat him to the first astronomical observation with a telescope).

The material will form part of the Museum’s permanent collections, providing a ’snapshot’ of how people viewed astronomy around the world in the early 21st century.

The lovely people at the IAU have volunteered to collect material on the Museum’s behalf. If you’ve got something that you think might be of interest, you can join in here before 28 February. Thanks!

Four hundred years ago today (well, tonight) Galileo Galilei trained his telescope on Jupiter and spotted what looked like three stars nearby. The next night he looked again, and the stars had changed position. Tracking their motion over the next week, he established that there were four of these ’stars’, and they were in fact moons orbiting the planet. In March 1610 he published his observations in Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger). It was a small book – if you get a chance, you can visit the Cosmos & Culture exhibition to see how little our library’s copy is – but it had a huge impact.

Pages from Sidereus Nuncius showing Jupiter (marked as the large star) with the satellites moving around it. (Image: Science Museum)

Since then, many more telescopes have turned towards the Solar System’s biggest planet – this beautiful lithograph by Etienne Leopold Trouvelot, part of a series he made at American observatories, shows how Jupiter appeared on 1 November 1880.

Jupiter and its cloud belts. Two of the moons appear as black spots. (Image: Science Museum)

Several spacecraft have also visited the Jovian system, including one named after Galileo. This close-up of the Great Red Spot was taken by Voyager 1 in 1979.

Voyager's view of Jupiter's great storm (Image: NASA / Science & Society)

Next year, NASA is heading back to Jupiter, with the Juno misson. But you’ll have to wait a while for the first images from the snappily-titled JunoCam, as the spacecraft won’t get there until 2016. In the meantime, why not take a look yourself? Jupiter is visible to the naked eye, and if you’ve got access to binoculars or a small telescope you’ll see the Galilean satellites. So if you want to follow in Galileo’s footsteps tonight, Jupiter is best seen shortly after sunset from the UK, although your observations might be scuppered by snow! If you’re reading this from the southern hemisphere (surely this blog has achieved global domination by now?!) you need to look shortly before sunset. At least you’ll be warm.

Or how about a gruesome Galileo fix? This spring, the wonderful Florence science museum will re-open after refurbishment. It’s going to be renamed the Museum Galileo, and one of the star exhibits will be the great man’s fingers and teeth.

Picture the scene. Two men are lurking at a London station, waiting for the Glasgow train. The train arrives and a third man disembarks, wheeling a suitcase. The three exchange some quick words of identification, the Londoners give the man from Glasgow an envelope of papers and he hands over the suitcase. The Londoners jump into a taxi with the suitcase … which contains a 23kg sapphire.

No, it’s not a scene from the latest Bond movie. The man on the Glasgow train was astronomer Martin Hendry and the others were my colleagues Doug and Chris. Martin’s department loaned us the sapphire for display, and rather than send our van the whole way to Glasgow and back we kept our carbon footprint down by arranging to  meet when Martin had to be in London anyway. Martin was back in London last weekend, and here he is with the sapphire in the Cosmos & Culture gallery.

Martin checks we're taking care of his sapphire

‘What sapphire?’ you might ask. If you were expecting something blue and multifaceted, look again. It’s the round clear object on the front shelf. It’s pure synthetic sapphire and it’s a test mass for an experiment called GEO600, which is using laser beams to try and detect gravitational waves, tiny ripples in space-time predicted by Einstein. To find out more about these types of experiment work, check out this video on our YouTube channel. 

Martin joined us to give a talk as part of our Cosmic Explorers Day event, which was supported by the Royal Astronomical Society as part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 celebrations.  The day looked at how we make sense of space (or try to) and the enduring influence of Albert Einstein. But Einstein’s influence has spread far beyond astronomy – here’s a fun example from our collections.

An unusual use of Einstein's image (Credit: Science Museum)

Why use an image of a German-Swiss-American theoretical physicist to sell an Australian shoe spray?  Well, Einstein did have sweaty feet (which, along with varicose veins, got him out of doing Swiss national service) and famously never wore socks, but the packaging makes no reference to this. The famous image of the white-haired scientist seems to have been used to reinforce the makers’ claim that the spray is ‘scientifically proven’ to eliminate shoe odours, showing how Einstein has become the face of science for many. Martin evidently approves – look at his Tshirt – although we are sure he has very fragrant feet!

It’s ten years this week since the XMM-Newton space observatory launched. The biggest scientific satellite ever built in Europe, it has studied black holes, tracked how chemical elements are scattered in supernova explosions, and revealed that Mars’s atmosphere is bigger than previously thought.

XMM stands for X-ray Multi Mirror (the Newton bit is in honour of a certain Sir Isaac). X-rays can pass right through ordinary mirrors, so each of XMM’s three telescopes contains 58 cylindrical gold-plated mirrors nested together. Incoming X-rays skim the inside of the mirrors, a bit like stones skimming off water, and come to a focus at the telescope’s detector. You can see what one of the mirrors looks like in our Cosmos & Culture exhibition.

XMM-Newton grazing mirror (Credit: Science Museum)

Cosmos & Culture also has a whole X-ray telescope on display. The Joint European X-Ray Telescope (JET-X) is the largest telescope ever constructed in Britain. Unfortunately for the project team at the University of Leicester, the Soviet-led mission it was part of was cancelled after the USSR collapsed. But it’s fortunate for us, as it means we get to display a rare example of a real space telescope. Most of the space hardware you see in museums is prototypes or spares (like the XMM mirror), as the real thing is either waaaaaaaay up there, or has burned up on re-entry.

A view of JET-X from the Making the Modern World gallery. The project engineer reckons this is the highest the telescope has ever got above sea level. (Credit: Science Museum)

An example of a real space telescope that actually made it into orbit is the Spacelab 2 XRT (it stands for X-ray telescope, funnily enough). It flew on the Shuttle in 1985 and imaged the centre of our galaxy. XRT was in a pretty sorry state when we acquired it in 2005, as it had been dismanted and stored in a university building for years. The building was due for demolition so we had to collect XRT quickly before it ended up in a skip. We reunited the four members of the original University of Birmingham team at our Wroughton store. Working with our conservation team over several weeks they painstakingly pieced it back together, with only a few missing parts having to be re-made.

Spacelab 2 XRT in Exploring Space gallery (Credit: Science Museum)

XRT now stands proudly in the centre of our Exploring Space gallery. It looks as it would sticking out of the Shuttle’s cargo bay, except that we haven’t put most of the white thermal blankets on so that you can see it better. The blankets also made it look a bit like a pair of giant space trousers…

After over a year of delays, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has smashed its first particles together. The accelerator is due to commence full operation in the next few weeks (assuming it doesn’t get sabotaged from the future … or baffled by a baguette).

Particles in the LHC travel at almost light speed, guided by superconducting magnets. They travel inside a beam screen, kept at a temperature of 5 degrees Kelvin (-268 Celsius), which shield the magnets from the intense particle beam.  Here’s our section cut from a spare beam screen.

Section of a beam screen from the Large Hadron Collider, 2001 (Credit: Science Museum)

Today’s particle physics poses a curatorial challenge, not least because Big Science is getting bigger. A few years ago we collected the Central Tracking Detector from ZEUS, a UK built-experiment which ran in Germany’s HERA electron-proton collider from 1992-2007. (As you can imagine from that last sentence, another challenge is remembering what all the acronyms stand for.) The photograph below shows the CTD being unloaded at Wroughton. It’s a pretty hefty beast but was only a small part of the whole ZEUS apparatus, which weighed in at 3600 tons.

Central Tracking Detector being unloaded at Science Museum Swindon, 2008

Techniques learned in building and operating ZEUS helped in the design and construction of the LHC’s ATLAS experiment, the biggest and most complex particle detector ever built. ATLAS is 45m long and weighs as much as the Eiffel Tower. In trying to preserve some record of it in our collections, we need to consider the implications of an experiment that dwarfs any of our galleries – how much of it would be enough to be meaningful in its own right? What do we do about the vast networks of cables and computers for sorting and analysing the data? And then there’s the small matter of getting large chunks of kit out of the LHC ring and back to the museum.

We don’t have all the answers, but it’s something I’ll be thinking about a lot over the next few months as we’re actively adding to our physics collections. Watch out for future blogs on the subject. And in the meantime, why not book yourself a seat at our Centenary Talk with Professor Brian Cox on 18 January, where you can find out more about what’s going on at the LHC.