WMAP
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WMAP Breaks Through
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It was announced this morning that the WMAP team has won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize. Unlike the Nobel Prize, which infamously is only awarded to three people each year, the Breakthrough Prize was awarded to the whole 27-member WMAP team, led by Chuck Bennett, Gary Hinshaw, Norm Jarosik, Lyman Page, and David Spergel, but…
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The Fermi Telescope
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NASA’s latest space-based telescope has, until now, been known as the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST). Today, they announced the very first results, and renamed it the Fermi Space Telescope, after physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi was one of the pioneers of modern particle physics, part of the Manhattan Project generation that created the fundamental…
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Planck scanning strategy
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OK, this is going to be very technical. In his comment to my last post, my colleague Ned Wright asks a couple of important questions about the way that the Planck Surveyor satellite is going to observe the sky. In the spirit of Mark Trodden’s question about the use of blogs in the research process,…
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NASA’s Nobel: small, medium and big science
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The New York Times opines on the physics Nobel: …The award is richly deserved, and the agency deserves great credit for making the work possible. Too bad the program that yielded these pioneering discoveries was reined in not long ago so that NASA could pour billions of dollars into resuming shuttle flights, finishing the international…
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WMAP
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As promised, the team behind the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) satellite have released their lovely new results. WMAP measures fluctuations in the CMB (which I’ve already written about a lot), and in 2003 they released high-resolution, high-sensitivity maps of the CMB over the whole sky. Today, they updated those maps, and also released new…
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WMAP results due soon!
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After a couple of years of waiting, the team behind the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) satellite seem ready to release some new results. WMAP measures fluctuations in the CMB (which I’ve already written about a lot), and in 2003 they released high-resolution, high-sensitivity maps of the CMB over the whole sky. (New results have…
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Science this week
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Start of a new term this past week, too busy to post much! So, a quick summary: A new collection of Science Blogs, sponsored by the revamped Science-as-lifestyle magazine Seed has gone live. In addition to PZ Myers’ wonderful and oft-cited evolution blog, Pharyngula, the site hosts blogs by cognitive scientists, physicists and science writers…
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The BBC, the Big Bang and WMAP
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For some reason, the BBC’s Today Program had a feature on the Big Bang and its purported problems confronting modern data. Apart from the woefully misguided Eric Lerner, the discussion was relatively nuanced and at least attempted to distinguish between a wrong theory and an incomplete one — the questions that the Big Bang, as…
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