You Can Win a What?

I'm a regular reader of Astronomy magazine, because I geek like that. A little argument I had with math back when it mixed together the letters and numbers kept me out of that line of work as a career, but I still love reading about what's way, way out there and how we go about looking at it.

And over the years I have seen some wild stuff in its pages, as telescopes and photographic software have improved to show fantastic images of nebulae, stars, quasars and other stellar phenomena. Some I haven't even believed when I've seen it.

But I have to say that I would not have even begun to dream about this particular item.

Brian May, guitarist for the band Queen, attended a university in England before deciding to hit the road on tour. His major -- astronomy. In fact, the only thing he lacked to earn a doctorate was a thesis. Over the years, he kept up with the discipline as a hobby and kept track of developments in the field. Recently, an old instructor suggested he complete his thesis and defend it, finishing the requirements for his degree. May at first demurred, but then learned that there hadn't been a lot published in the area he'd researched and that his topic would still merit a thesis today. So he finished it, published and earned the degree in 2008.

Well, Astronomy ran an interview with May and also started a contest. If you submit a short essay describing what astonomical area you'd explore if you had sudden chance to earn a doctorate in the field, then you're entered into the contest. The top two winners will receive a signed copy of May's thesis, A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud. 

That cloud, for the curious, has nothing to do with the horoscope. It's another name for the interplanetary dust cloud through which the planets of a solar system move as they rotate around their sun. May focused, obviously, on our own solar system. The dust is concentrated in different bands affected by the gravity of the different planets, and May studied their rotational speed.

Although it would be a nice fit, May didn't write Queen's 1980 hit "Another One Bites the Dust;" that was bassist John Deacon. May did address the earth's rotation (a.k.a. what "makes the rockin' world go 'round") in 1978, offering an alternative explanation to the accepted scientific consensus.