NASA scientists have found strong evidence that microbes once lived on Mars, and may still do so right now, British tabloid The Sun reports. The evidence consists of a haze of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Professor Colin Pillinger, a Mars expert from the UK, says NASA will announce this discovery later today. The methane is believed to be a waste product from microbes living—or having lived—in large underground water reservoirs. No other features on Mars are known that would produce methane in the observed quantities.

If this story is confirmed, it would be a huge find: the first strong evidence that we are not alone in the universe. Even if our neighbours are just a bunch of methane-burping microscopic lifeforms, it would be one of the biggest discoveries in history. So, keep an eye out for any news coming from NASA today…

Update: NASA did indeed report on the discovery of Martian methane, but (quite expectedly) they don’t go as far as to say that this is strong evidence for life on the Red Planet. The methane might well have a geological origin, rather than a biological one. Nevertheless, it’s an important step in our ongoing quest of finding signs of life outside the Earth.

I spent a few days in London earlier this week, attending the annual meeting of the Astrophysical Chemistry Group (APCG) of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Hosted by the University College London, the topic of the meeting was computational astrochemistry. That’s pretty much what I do on a daily basis, and indeed there were a number of talks very relevant to my own research. Unfortunately, the meeting ran a bit chaotically. It was shifted from Leeds to London at the last minute, giving the organizers too little time to get everything properly arranged. Also, it felt like some services at the university were still on a holiday break, a problem that previous APCG meetings also suffered from.

Anyway, despite some organizational problems (and a broken heating system on the first day, with temperatures outside around freezing), the meeting was certainly useful. I met some old friends from the UK and elsewhere and got to make a few new ones. On the second (and final) day I gave a 25-minute presentation of my own research, which was met with enthusiastic reactions from several people.

The meeting ended late Wednesday afternoon, so I had the rest of the day to do some sightseeing. It was over ten years since my last visit to London, and back then I only saw a small part of the city. I took the subway (a.k.a. tube or underground) to Trafelgar Square, where both fountains would have been frozen over if people hadn’t been breaking the ice all the time. Heading south, I passed by Downing Street (with the Prime Minister’s residence at No. 10) to arrive at Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. After a brief stop at Westminster Abbey, I crossed Westminster Bridge and had a quick bite at Waterloo Station. Refueled, I took a ride in the London Eye. This 135-metres tall ferris wheel (the largest in the world) takes about half an hour to complete a full circle. The view from the top across nightly London is truly magnificent.

Back on the ground, I took the tube towards London Bridge and walked along the Thames’ south embankment to the Tower Bridge. Crossing it, I followed the street past the Tower of London and carried on towards the Bank of England. I got back onto the underground for a quick ride to my final destination: St. Paul’s Cathedral. This one was a bit of a disappointment. Beautiful and large though it is, at night from the outside it doesn’t look all that spectactular. So, after a quick walk about, I headed back to the hotel. After all, I did have an early flight to catch the next day.

Pictures can be found here.

The second paper for my thesis just got accepted by the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics today. We submitted it last August and, following the referee report in October, resubmitted a corrected version in November. The referee asked for a few additional corrections just before Christmas. By sacrificing a day or two out of my Christmas and New Year’s break, I managed to get that done pretty quickly and resubmit again. This morning, the A&A editor emailed to relay the referee’s stamp of approval.

This paper deals with gas and ice during the formation of a low-mass star (like our Sun) and the surrounding disk of gas and dust (in which, at a later stage, the planets are formed). We constructed a fairly simple model to simulate the star and disk formation process, which we then used to analyse how carbon monoxide and water change between being a gas and an ice. This is an important point in understanding the chemical composition of the disk, which in turn determines the look and feel of the planets that are formed there. It also helps us understand our own solar system a little bit better. For all the details, have a look at the PDF preprint (3.9 MB).

Leiden’s Old Observatory houses a couple of antique telescopes. They can still be operated, although clearly they are not used for scientific work anymore. The oldest telescope at the Observatory is a wooden 6-inch refractor from 1838. Pictured above is the 10-inch refractor from 1883, with a focal length of nearly four metres. I was at the Observatory last Saturday and took a couple of pictures, playing around with a few different light sources. This one, with the sky overexposed, shows the light from the surrounding building and streets reflecting off of the clouds.

You can find the rest of the pictures here.

Nature has a profile on physics and astronomy in Leiden. The bottom line: despite being a small city (in a small country), we do excellent research. Our small size is also evident from the fact that the piece was written by Nature‘s Germany correspondent. Still, it’s well worth a read.

Leiden is one of the country’s centres for physical sciences. With a population of 117,000, it lies in the Holland region, a highly urbanized ring in the west of country and one of the most densely populated areas of the world. An old windmill, quiet canals, flocks of cyclists and the odd coffee shop remind one that this is the land of Vincent van Gogh, cyclist Joop Zoetemelk and pragmatic cannabis policies.

But just below Leiden’s tourist-pleasing surface is a rich and active tradition of science. The Leiden Bioscience Park is one of the oldest and largest in Europe. The university, where the seventeenth-century astronomer Christiaan Huygens studied law and mathematics, also hosts the country’s largest and best-equipped astronomy department. Most research takes place in international collaboration, thus affording privileged access to telescopes, data and computing facilities.

You can read the full article (PDF) here.

Part of the upcoming James Bond movie “Quantum of Solace” was filmed at Paranal Observatory in Chile, home of the Very Large Telescope (VLT). The European Southern Observatory, which operates the VLT and some other major telescopes, is making good use of the publicity this brings to astronomy. They set up a dedicated website, BondAtParanal.org, and made a very slick Bond-style video clip about the VLT. The Bond producers kindly gave permission for the 007 Theme to be used.

My thesis supervisor was at Paranal when the movie scenes were shot in late March. Her husband is ESO’s Director General, so he was there as well. They met director Marc Forster, some of the producers, and the lead actors: Daniel Craig (Bond), Olga Kurylenko (Bond girl Camille) and Mathieu Amalric (villain Dominic Greene). After the first day of shooting, they took most of the crew on a tour of the VLT. A few hours later, they took 007 himself (and his girlfriend, and three body guards) on a private tour. According to my supervisor’s enthusiastic stories, everyone was very excited to be at Paranal and very interested in the work going on there.

As a way of saying thanks, the producers invited my supervisor’s husband over to the Pinewood Studios in London in June. My supervisor of course freed up some of her schedule to go along. The Paranal Residencia had been rebuilt at full scale, except for some modifications to benefit the story. It will feature as the villain’s hideout and will be blown up at the end of the movie, which ESO didn’t want them to do with the real thing.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing QoS. It’ll be difficult for it to be better than “Casino Royale”, but the scenes at Paranal alone are going to make for an awesome movie.

It’s taken a while (a long while), but the moment finally arrived this morning that I could submit my second paper. It deals with the chemical history of the material that surrounds young stars. We constructed a model to simulate the formation of a star and its surrounding disk. (At a later stage, that disk is where planets are formed, but we didn’t include that part.) It proved to be quite a challenge to make something that is simple to work with and produces realistic results, but I think we did very well in the end. We used the density and temperature profiles from this model to calculate the gas and ice concentrations of carbon monoxide and water, two molecules of great importance in space.

The paper will now be sent to a referee, who will hopefully send us some constructive and favourable comments. If things move quickly, the paper will appear in Astronomy & Astrophysics towards the end of the year.

The dean of Denison University’s Physics & Astronomy department was so kind as to invite me to give a talk about my research. The audience was a mix of undergraduate students (Denison doesn’t have graduate programs) and faculty members, so I had to include quite a bit of simple introduction (for the undergrads) before diving in deeper (for the faculty). Also, my current project is very much a work in progress, so it was a challenge to make a coherent whole out of all the loose parts. Based on the reactions afterwards, I did quite well. No one fell asleep, there were a few good questions at the end, and I got several compliments on both my research and the talk itself. That’s one to put on my CV!

It’s 6:15am Eastern Standard Time as I start typing this. Yesterday, at 6:15am Central European Time, 30 hours ago, I had just left my apartment in Leiden to get a bus to the train station, a train to Amsterdam Schiphol airport, an air plane to New York JFK airport, and an air plane to Columbus International Airport, where someone would pick me up and bring me to my final destination: Granville, Ohio.

All of that worked out, sort of.

The bus was on time and I got to the train station at 6:25am. I wanted to get the 6:30 train, so I’d be at Schiphol at 6:50: two and a half hours before my 9:20 flight. The airline actually recommends coming three hours before departure, but you never need more than two, so I figured a half-hour buffer would be enough.

I bought the train ticket and walked to the platform, where the 6:30 train was announced to have a 20-minute delay. Not a brilliant start for a long day of travelling, but if things at Schiphol weren’t extremely slow, this delay would be no problem. Besides, it was only a 13-minute delay, because the regular 6:43 train was on time. (Leiden-Schiphol has a very frequent train connection.)

At 7:00am sharp, I entered Schiphol’s main hall and looked up my flight on the monitors to see where I had to check in. There came a bigger problem: my flight was delayed by over four hours to 1:25pm. That wasn’t good! I had an almost five-hour stopover at JFK, of which about 40 minutes were now left. That wouldn’t be enough to get off the plane, go through immigration, get my luggage, go through customs, recheck the luggage, and board the plane. So, off to the Delta information desk to see how they might solve this.

Me: “Good morning. I was supposed to fly to Columbus through New York JFK, but with this four-hour delay, I’m going to miss my connection at JFK.”

Delta lady: “Don’t worry, sir. We’ve already changed you to the 10:10am flight to Atlanta, where you’ll have a connecting flight to Columbus. You’ll now arrive at 6:54pm EST instead of 6:50pm.”

Now that’s what I call excellent service! It did seem to be a bit of an odd move, though, because I also heard about people being changed from the Atlanta flight to the New York flight because of bad weather in Atlanta. (As it turned out, the weather wasn’t so bad there at all.) For a man standing next to me at the check-in desk, this meant he wouldn’t get to his final destination until the next day, instead of that evening.

After a rather lengthy check-in procedure (the computer had some difficulty with my new itinerary), I got to the gate in plenty of time. From there on, the journey was about as good as can be for a 10-hour flight, a three-hour stopover and another one-hour flight. The security check at Schiphol was no more stringent than previously, despite the new rules regarding batteries. In fact, no one ever even asked if I had spare batteries in my checked luggage (which I didn’t) or if any spare batteries in my carry-on bag were protected against short-circuiting (which they were).

The air plane was a Boeing 767, with a two-three-two seating arrangement. I had an isle seat in the centre section, sacrificing some view (it was cloudy anyway) for the chance to stretch at least one leg. And… the seat to my right stayed empty, so I had plenty of room for my other leg as well. Ten hours is still a long time to spend in a big tin can, but the good amount of leg space made it tolerable.

Getting into the US went a fair bit faster than I had anticipated based on stories from others. Waiting included, I was through immigration in maybe 20 minutes. Rechecking my luggage and taking my carry-on bag through security didn’t pose any problems either. (Again, not a single question about spare batteries.) Of course, all of that left me with quite some time to kill at the gate. Fortunately, the chairs at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson are very comfortable.

The low clouds caused some delay in taking off, as the traffic tower had to wait each time until they could see the next incoming plane before outgoing planes were allowed to get on the runway. When it was our turn, there were still a dozen planes awaiting theirs behind us. I had an another isle seat on this Boeing 737, and again the chair next to me remained empty. In addition, I was at one of the emergency exits, so now I had more leg space than I could ever fill.

We landed at Columbus International at exactly 6:54pm. Steve Doty, the assistant professor I’m visiting at Denison University, and his son Matt were waiting for me exactly where Steve had said they would. They brought me to a lovely Bed & Breakfast in Granville, where I went to bed at 9pm EST (3am CET). What with the jetlag, I awoke at 5am and gave up trying to get more sleep at 5:30am. After a shower and a breakfast, I discovered that this place has a wireless connection, allowing me to type this. Steve will pick me up around 10:40 (he’s teaching until 10:30), so I’ll have a look around town until then. The weather looks nice, if a bit chilly.

I’ll be in Granville for the next two weeks and a bit. Steve has been a frequent visitor of Leiden Observatory, most recently for five months in 2006. We started collaborating on a few projects back then, and we’re at a point now where it was a good idea to get together again. I’m looking forward to doing that and to staying here for a while. If the first day is any indication, I’ll have a great time.

I just got back from a five-day trip to the town of Garching, north of Munich, in Germany, where I was visiting my thesis advisor. Couldn’t I have visited her in Leiden, where her office is two doors down the hall from mine? Yes and no. Her husband, who was also a professor of astronomy in Leiden, moved to Garching a few months ago to become the new director general of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). (ESO is the organization that develops and runs major telescopes such as the VLT [images or text] and ALMA [images or text].) In order to still spend some time together, my advisor took up a part-time professorship at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), literally across the street from the ESO headquarters. The reason for my visit was that she had much more time for me this week than in any other week when we’re both in Leiden. In Garching, there simply aren’t any other students or faculty to demand her attention. (Actually, there was one: I travelled to Garching with another student from Leiden.)

The visit was scientifically successful. We pretty much got around to doing everything that we wanted to. There was also plenty of time to enjoy being in a new place and meet new people. Garching itself isn’t much of a tourist attraction, but had enough to keep us going for five days. I went to Munich itself on Thursday with my fellow traveller, and spent a couple of nice hours there.

Some further random observations:

• Travelling to Garching took some more time than expected. We were scheduled to depart Amsterdam at 11:20am on Monday, but the airplane had a delay coming in from Brussels, so we had to wait until 1:00pm. From there on, the journey went fast and smoothly.
• Travelling back from Garching took even more time. The scheduled departure time was 8:45pm, but fog and cold weather caused delays on almost all flights from Munich airport. In fact, many flights were cancelled. We took off with another 90-minute delay and landed in Amsterdam at half past midnight. The luggage came slowly, so we missed the 1:00am train to Leiden and had to wait for the next one at 2:00am. Of course, when we got to Leiden at 2:20, there were no buses anymore, so I had to walk for another fifteen minutes to get home. In hindsight, we should have just taken a taxi from the airport and reclaimed the fare from the Observatory as travel expenses. Oh well… it was a lovely night for a walk.
• The VLT is located in Chili’s Atacama desert, a very dry and barren place all year around. In winter, the surroundings of the ESO headquarters are almost as barren. The difference is in colour: Atacama has red sand, Garching has brownish grey farmlands.
• The ticket machines for the Munich subway don’t accept credit cards or 50-euro notes. On Thursday, that made for some difficulty in getting from the MPE into Munich. I only had two 50-euro notes and some coins, but not enough to pay the 11.80 euro two-way, two-person fare. My fellow traveller was almost out of cash. Of course, there were no ATMs near the MPE, or anyone to change a 50-euro note into smaller units. We ended up walking back to Garching proper to get smaller change at a supermarket. Our advisor just happened to be there as well, and she was very surprised to still see us in Garching.
• It never got above freezing while we were in Garching, marking the longest period of sub-zero weather I’ve been in in quite a few years. It was nice to endure some real winter weather again.
• I’ve heard from a reliable source where the finale of the next James Bond film will be shot. It’s supposed to be a secret, though, so I’ll not divulge any details. Okay, just this one: it’s not Garching!
• A seagull just came swimming backwards through the canal in front of my appartment. It looked very odd, but I’m sure it had a good reason for doing it.