black holes
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Remembering Don Backer
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Today is the one-year anniversary of the death of Professor Don Backer, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. I was a friend, colleague and collaborator of Don, and I never had the chance to appropriately memorialize him on that sad day a year ago. Don was a great radio astronomer who understood both…
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Cosmic Rays
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A few weeks ago, the Auger Project published results (with a news story here) from searching for the properties of the very highest-energy Cosmic Rays, determining that they seem to have come from nearby “Active Galactic Nuclei”, which are believed to be Super-Massive Black Holes at the centers of galaxies, surrounded by discs of accreting…
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Update
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Too busy for much blogging for the next few weeks. In the meantime: First, my grad students: Goodbye to one just finishing, hello to my new one, congratulations to the one who just transferred to official PhD-student status, and, finally, to the one staying on as a postdoc! I’m excited that I’m able to still…
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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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Where I’m calling from
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I know that nobody cares about the peregrinations of astrophysicists but there’s not much else to blog about when you’re on the road. So a quick explanation of my absence from the blogosphere: Last week, I was in Taipei for the CoSPA meeting (at which website you can find a copy of my talk on…
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King of Some Media
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Print: I was interviewed yesterday by the Daily Express, about a recent Gamma-Ray Burst that occurred when the universe was under a billion years old (less than a tenth its present age). GRBs are thought to be from “Collapsars”, the explosions of massive, rapidly rotating stars. This observation, originally by the Swift Satellite, then followed…
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Pulsar Timing and Gravitational Waves
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Greetings en route from State College, Pennsylvania, home of Penn State University, the only University of which I am aware with a library named after its football coach, Joe Paterno. More relevant to me, Penn State is also the home of the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics, which has been hosting a workshop, “The Pulsar…
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