FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 2, 2002      File #256
Contact: Jean Wasp, Media Relations, (707) 664-2057

Hoax-busting is Serious Business for This Bad Astronomer

When a New Hampshire couple claimed a meteor crashed in their back yard and started a fire, Phil Plait was immediately on the case. He called the couple and asked them what they saw. They described it as falling in an arc right before it hit, and then igniting two small blazes a yard apart, which they quickly extinguished.

As soon as he heard the story, Plait knew they hadn?t been visited by a piece of cosmic debris. "Meteors don?t curve as they fall," he says, "and they don?t start fires. As a matter of fact, small meteorites are cold when they hit. Some have even been found covered in frost!"

Such is a day in the life of the Bad Astronomer.

Plait is an astronomer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Sonoma State University. He works with Professor Lynn Cominsky managing a team of staff and students who use NASA satellites to teach the public about astronomy.

"A few years back, NASA mandated that a small fraction of the money used to build a new satellite had to go to education and public outreach," explains Plait. "It?s usually 1-2%, but when a satellite costs 300 million dollars, that adds up to a lot of opportunity to teach people about astronomy and space science."

Cominsky, Plait and their team create classroom materials based on three separate NASA missions, which include the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), Swift, and XMM-Newton. GLAST (due for launch in 2006) and XMM-Newton (launched in 1999) are designed to look for high energy light coming from exotic objects like black holes and exploding stars.

Swift, which launches in 2003, will look for gamma ray bursts, huge explosions coming from halfway across the Universe and more. No one knows what causes these enigmatic events, but Swift and, later, GLAST will help determine what phenomenon generates them.

Plait fairly glows himself when he talks about his work. "These weird objects capture peoples? imaginations, especially kids. They?re a great way to catch their attention." Ironically, since most people think of astronomers working at night, Plait calls his career at SSU his "day job". His night job is when he becomes the Bad Astronomer.

"My mom hates that name," he frets. "But she understands what I mean." What he means is not that he is a bad astronomer, but that he finds and corrects myths, misconceptions and misuses of astronomy. Hence the name.

And Bad Astronomy is everywhere, according to him. Movies are a prime example. "Armageddon", the box office hit of 1998, is his arch nemesis. It had so much wrong science in it that he couldn?t keep track of it all. He tried though, in a movie review on his website "Bad Astronomy" (http://www.badastronomy.com).
"It?s been years, and I still get email all the time about ?Armageddon?. Still, it?s nice to know a lot of people agreed with me about how awful that movie was!" he says.

The website started small, in 1993. He wrote the first page after watching a local news reporter filming schoolchildren standing eggs on end on the vernal equinox. The reporter claimed it could only be done on the first day of spring, due to an alignment of the gravity of the Earth and Sun. In truth, it has nothing to do with that.

"Think of it this way: the idea of being able to stand an egg on end only on the vernal equinox, around March 20th, is like a theory, and can be tested. The easiest way to test it is to simply try to stand an egg up on any other day," Plait explains.

He?s done this himself, and the proof is in the pictures: he has several images of eggs standing on his website. None was taken anywhere near March 20th. "Some people still refuse to believe me," he sighs. "I get hate mail?vicious, angry hate mail?about this topic. People want to believe in myths!"

Still, some people enjoy myth busting. Enough people did to make his book, titled, of course, "Bad Astronomy", a briskly-selling discourse on the weird cosmic tidbits people believe. Published by Wiley and Sons in March 2002, it has already sold through two printings and is in the third.

In the book, Plait dispels notions such as that toilets flush the other direction in the southern hemisphere, and that you can see stars in the daytime from the bottom of a well. He even takes on such pseudoscience topics as astrology, UFOs, and people who think the Apollo Moon landings were faked by NASA.

"Yeah, that?s a particularly silly one. Fox TV aired a program in 2001 claiming NASA faked the Moon missions. I wrote a web page debunking it point by point, and the next thing I know I?m getting calls and emails from all over the world." In fact, NASA itself linked to Plait?s web page. He gives public talks about it at conventions, astronomy meetings and museums.

"I hate the fact that Fox aired that show and did all the damage it did," he says, "but it gives me the opportunity to tell people about the Apollo missions, and maybe rekindle some enthusiasm in the public for space travel."
And he doesn?t stop there. By using misconceptions as a hook, his book and website teach different aspects of astronomy to the public, including, of course, how meteors fall to the ground.

"They fall straight down, not in an arc," he explains, referring to the New Hampshire couple?s nocturnal visitor. "Also, as bizarre as it sounds, they?re cold when they hit. They start off in space, remember. They?re only heated for a few seconds in our atmosphere. They lose most of their speed pretty quickly, and stop glowing. Then they fall the rest of the way to the ground, blowing off the melted outer layers. Since it?s cold in the upper atmosphere, they can be pretty chilly when they hit the ground."

The couple who thought their property had been hit by a meteorite didn?t want to believe him, of course, when he said it almost certainly wasn?t one. As he told them, meteorites can be quite valuable. "They said they?d keep looking for it on the ground, but that was over a year ago and I never heard any more about it. I suspect that they were victims of kids shooting off fireworks."

And victims of Bad Astronomy, apparently, as well.