Astronomy
drorzel | November 15, 2006A bunch of links about recent happenings at everybody's favorite space agency:/p>
Steinn has links to dark energy proposals.
Science and Reason on the "Beyond Einstein" program.
Those little scamps are having another mysterious press conference tomorrow, to announce something about dark energy. Steinn suggests it has something to do with this guy's research, but only Sean knows for sure, and he's just going to taunt us.
Four more lab reports to grade, two exams to write (one at 9:00 tomorrow, one at 8:30 Friday morning), plus grading. And then I get to start reading 200 pages worth of NSF…
drorzel | November 11, 2006Matt McIrvin reminds me to look at the nifty Saturn pictures on the Cassini-Huygens Mission page. The hot image of the moment is the big storm at the south pole, but there's lots of good stuff, like this:
(Explanation of the ring shot here.)
drorzel | November 1, 2006NASA has scheduled a mission to service the Hubble. This should keep the space telescope flying and producing great science until 2013 or so.
Obviously, there are a lot of caveats in there-- the mission isn't scheduled until 2008, so the Hubble needs to last that long, and there can't be major delays or disasters with the Shuttle before then-- but this is genuinely good news. Congratulations to the scientists and politicians who lobbied hard for this.
drorzel | October 13, 2006The silliest graph I've ever seen presented in public looked something like this:
It was an after-dinner talk at a DAMOP meeting a few years back, and the speaker was somebody associated with the Hubble Space Telescope. I don't recall what was being plotted, but he talked for a while about ho proud they were of this data, and how well it fit the theory, and then he put up this plot. The blueish circle is the data point, and the dotted line is a theoretical fit to the data.
The physicists in the audience all guffawed. He asked "What's so funny?" and somebody near the front asked "What's the…
drorzel | October 4, 2006Another weird Nobel note: When we were talking about this yesterday at work, a colleague noted that this is one of several prizes awarded for observations based on radio astronomy (Penzias and Wilson, and a couple of things to do with pulsars), but we couldn't think of any given for optical astronomy. There's even the 2004 prize for neutrino and X-ray observations, but we couldn't think of any astronomers who won for work done using visible light.
This probably isn't significant, but it was sort of interesting. Or were we missing something really obvious?
drorzel | October 4, 2006The Paper of Record provides the Story of Record for yesterday's Nobel Prize in Physics for Mather and Smoot, including recent photographs of both. One of my favorite bits of the 1997 Nobel was seeing the media circus that went on around the Prize-- I'll put some amusing anecdotes into another post.
All the usual blogger suspects have weighed in with comments, including but not limited to Sean, Rob, Steinn, Clifford, and Jennifer Ouellette. Most of them took the time to find the appropriate COBE graphics to illustrate their posts, which I was too lazy to do.
Janet Stemwedel deserves special…
drorzel | October 3, 2006Hot off the presses: The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." This is recent enough that they don't even have much on the Nobel site, but happily for me, it's something I know a tiny bit about.
The prize here is for the COBE ("Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer") mission back in the early 1990's, which made extremely precise measurements of the radiation left over from the Big Bang (the discovery of which led to a previous Nobel for Penzias and Wilson). Mather…
drorzel | September 27, 2006The AIP news feed features a story about a paper suggesting that the universe is ellipsoidal. Or at least, that it was, back in the early days.
The work is based on the famous WMAP picture of the microwave background (and no, it's not because the picture is oblong):
As you know, Bob, the picture shows the distribution of temperature fluctuations in the early universe. These temperature correlations correspond to slight variations in the density of matter at that time, density fluctuations that eventually evolved into galaxies and galaxy clusters.
(Explanation after the cut.)
We can't…
drorzel | September 15, 2006The New York Times has a story about yet another weird extrasolar planet, this one a gigantic fluffy ball of gas bigger than Jupiter, but less dense than water:
While gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are made primarily of hydrogen and helium, they also possess rocky cores and crushing pressures within that squeeze the hydrogen and helium to higher densities. Jupiter's average density is 133 percent greater that of water, while Saturn's is 70 percent that of water. The density of HAT-1-P is one-quarter that of water.
Astrophysicists now have two problems to solve: how a planet that has…
drorzel | August 23, 2006This morning's Times bring a story saying that astronomers are still dithering about Pluto. The latest plan would create a new category of "dwarf planets," and presumably get the International Astronomical Union eaten by Cthullu.
My immediate response is: "Jesus, people, make up your frickin' minds!"
Look, the joke is over, ok? The Pluto story has officially worn out its welcome. Pick a definition, any definition, and go home. Make room for some real science news.
Honestly, this is why physicists sneer at astronomers. Not only do they use dumb units, and have the axes backwards on most of…
drorzel | August 21, 2006As hinted last week, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory has some new results conclusively showing that dark matter is a real, physical thing. This is big news, because the previous evidence for dark matter was all indirect, and based on inferring the mass distribution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies from looking at their motion. These results could indicate the presence of dark matter, or they could point to a flaw in our understanding of gravity at extremely long ranges.
The new observation shows fairly conclusively that dark matter and ordinary matter are different things, by combining two…
drorzel | August 15, 2006You might think that, being a sciene blogger and all, I would have sources of science news that aren't available to the average person on the street. You would be right, though they're not as useful as you might think... The source for today's news teaser is actually a thank-you email from a prospective student I talked to on Friday.
So, anyway, those little scamps at NASA are playing all coy with some sort of announcement regarding dark matter:
Astronomers who used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 21, to announce how dark and normal…
drorzel | August 9, 2006I had a bunch of students over for dinner last night, and while I was busy with that, stuff happened in the world. I hate that.
Of course, there's been a lot of energy expended on trivia like primary elections, but that's not what I'm talking about. The important news all has to do with physics.
First, via His Holiness, Peter Zoller has been awarded the Dirac Medal from the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics. It's not as big a deal as the Nobel Prize, or anything, but it's well-deserved recognition, both for Zoller and for the quantum computing sorts of topics he works…
drorzel | July 20, 2006Via James Nicoll, there's a new press release from the Cassini mission talking about new radar maps of a region on the surface of Titan that's been dubbed "Xanadu." The topography looks very Earth-like, with rivers and lakes and oceans of methane, providing Dr. Jonathan Lunine an opportunity to show off the benefits of a classical education:
"Although Titan gets far less sunlight and is much smaller and colder than Earth, Xanadu is no longer just a mere bright spot, but a land where rivers flow down to a sunless sea," Lunine said.
(Based on the other comments quoted, this is another case…
drorzel | June 27, 2006Via Cosmic Variance, news of the Shaw Prize in Astronomy for 2006:
Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt are awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2006 in recognition of their leadership roles on the two teams that made the remarkable discovery of an acceleration in the rate of the expansion of the universe. Such an effect had been known theoretically since shortly after Einstein applied his theory of general relativity to cosmology, but the general belief, including Einstein¡¦s own assessment, was that the cosmological constant had no basis in reality. Thus, the 1998 announcement of…
drorzel | June 10, 2006Large meteorite hits northern Norway:
A large meteorite struck in northern Norway this week, landing with an impact an astronomer compared to the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima.
The meteorite appeared as a ball of fire just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, visible across several hundred miles in the sunlit summer sky above the Arctic Circle, Aftenposten reported.
My favorite bit of the (very short) story is this living-in-the-future moment, though:
Peter Bruvold, a farmer, said he happened to be out in the fields with a camera because he was tending a foaling mare and he photographed the fireball.…
drorzel | May 2, 2006A couple of good science stories in today's New York Times:
First, an article on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The current news hook, weirdly, appears to be a recent calculation of the expected magnitude of the signal resulting from the collision and merger of two black holes. Why this merits a long article, I'm not sure-- I was under the impression that they already had a decent idea of the expected signal sizes-- but it's a decent article.
The other story will probably get more play, as it's about the deathless topic of problems with peer review. As others…
drorzel | April 21, 2006Over at the Seed editors blog, Maggie Wittlin asks who's the most overlooked scientist:
Which scientist (in your field or beyond) has been most seriously shafted? This could be taken two ways:
Who deserves to be more recognized, revered and renowned today than he or she is?
Who got passed over, ridiculed, etc. the most while he or she was alive?
It's a little ironic that I can point to a nice magazine profle of my nominee, but I would have to say Ralph Alpher. As a grad student, Alpher realized that the Big Bang should've left an echo in the form of an all-pervading radiation field, and even…
drorzel | April 12, 2006The Kuiper Belt Controversy continues, with the lastest round showing up in the Times today: Planet Discovered Last Year, Thought to Be Larger Than Pluto, Proves Roughly the Same Size:
The object -- still unnamed more than a year after its discovery but tagged with the temporary designation 2003 UB313 and nicknamed Xena by the discoverer -- covered an area only 1.5 pixels wide in the digital image, taken by the space telescope in December. But that was enough to extract the diameter: 1,490 miles, give or take 60 miles.
A previous estimate by a team of German researchers, based on measurements…
drorzel | March 16, 2006If you'd like some actual science from your ScienceBlogs, here's the big news in the physical sciences today: The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) team has released a bunch of new data on the latest observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is the relic radiation from the Big Bang whose temperature fluctuations tell scientists something about the distribution of matter in the universe several billion years ago, very shortly after the Big Bang.
Detailed analysis of these data provides some of the tightest constraints on our current models of the early universe…