Science
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Google Sky
Google has just released a new version of its Google Earth software — one that lets you look up to the sky instead of down to the ground. It’s essentially a consumer-grade Virtual Observatory, like the UK AstroGrid, the US National Virtual Observatory and the Euro-VO project. It’s not so obvious when you fire it…
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Chicagoland: black holes and buffalo
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Greetings from Batavia, Illinois, USA, home of Fermilab, where I’m visiting the Theoretical Astrophysics Center (and where I spent a lot of time as a graduate student back in the early 1990s). Since I got here late last week, I’ve cycled 50 miles up and down the Lake Michigan Lakefront, given a talk on Gravitational…
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More rock-star astrophysics
Combining as it does my vocation with my avocation, it’s impossible to resist an easy post about our favorite rock-star PhD student, especially when he’s made the Guardian’s Leader (aka Editorial) page and the front of the BBC News site (complete with a spiffy pic of the rock star with our new head of group).…
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Mapping the Galaxy from Portugal
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I spent the week before last in Portugal working with the team designing and building the GEM telescope: The Polarized Galactic Emission Mapping Project in Portugal. GEM (aka GEM-P or even P-GEM-P) aims to measure the emission of our Milky Way galaxy using light at a wavelength of 6 cm. Those frequencies are dominated by…
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Gruber Prize 2007
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This year’s Gruber Prize in Cosmology has been awarded to the two teams that used distant supernovae — exploding stars that are nearly “standard candles” — to be the first to conclusively determine that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, likely due to something very much like Einstein’s “Cosmological Constant”. (Or, at least, among…
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MRR
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Congratulations to Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson, former head of our Astrophysics Group at Imperial and president of the Royal Astronomical Society. This week, Imperial hosted a meeting in Michael’s honor on the occasion of his 65th birthday, From IRAS to Herschel/Planck: Cosmology with infrared and submillimetre surveys. Astrophysicists came from all over the UK, Europe and…
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Crowdsourcing Astronomy
One of the tenets of the so-called Web 2.0 is that it’s about an “architecture of participation”, allowing users (i.e., everyone) to contribute their knowledge and expertise — or just enthusiasm — to harness our “collective intelligence”. That’s why Wikipedia is about as good as the Britannica — and why you can look up photos…
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Scientific Illiteracy
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The Observer featured a lengthy article by Tim Adams bemoaning the generic scientific illiteracy of society today, tracing a line from CP Snow’s “Two Cultures” through Natalie Angier’s new book, The Canon:A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. It concentrates a bit too heavily on uber-agent John Brockman’s somewhat pretentious “Third Culture, a…
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Hard Rock in the Solar System
The Zodiacal Light is a fuzzy glow visible in the morning and evening sky, stretching along the line along which the constellations of the zodiac appear — the ecliptic that we now know to be the plane made up of the sun and the orbits of the planets. Observations of the zodiacal light show it…
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Brown Dwarf located in London
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Congratulations to my Imperial College Astrophysics colleagues Steve Warren and Dan Mortlock who have been in the news lately for their discovery of the coldest brown dwarf yet found. A brown dwarf is not quite a star, but a ball of gas just too light to force its hydrogen gas into nuclear fusion reactions. Instead…
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