NASA Pi Day math, and a weird but lovely nebula

March 14, 2023 Issue #538

The edge-on disk galaxy NGC 5866. Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); W. Keel (University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa)

Number crunching

Because I think math is cool, and I think that because it is

Today is Pi Day — March 14, or 3/14 as it’s written in the US, and those numbers are the first three digits of π, the mathematical constant that pops up in so many places, including some truly weird ones. You may remember this from such newsletters as yesterday’s.

If you’re a teacher, this may interest you: NASA has compiled a bunch of math problems based on real missions and their goals, and the first four (or ceiling(π)) involve π one way or another. They’ll post the answers tomorrow (March 15). Just a bit of fun that might hopefully motivate students more than the usual word problems. And they’ll learn something about cool space missions, too.

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a description so you can grok it

It’s not often I’m completely baffled by an astronomical object. I don’t mean to say I can explain everything about every object in the sky — duh — but I have enough experience staring slack-jawed at enough cosmic beauties that in general I can usually venture a guess about what’s going on in one.

But then LBN 438 came into view.

The “bright” nebula LBN 438. Credit: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona

Cool, isn’t it? That was taken by perennial friend of all things BA Adam Block, using the 0.8-meter Schulman Telescope on Mt. Lemmon. It’s one of the best images of this object I’ve seen.

But then I’m not familiar with this object, so I poked around and found some other images, many of them quite lovely. And I can tell you something about it. For one thing, it’s a dusty nebula, composed mostly of interstellar dust — tiny grains of rocky and sooty material created when stars turn into red giants or supergiants and die. Supernovae make dust as well.

It’s elongated, so it’s what we call a cometary globule, because of its resemblance to a comet. It’s very roughly half a degree in length on the sky, about the size of the full Moon.

And here’s where things get weird.