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Sequestration Revelations
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on February 28, 2013 Sequestration begins on Friday, and this time for real… it is, ironically, Hubble Space Telescope Proposal Deadline Day, but then everyday is a Proposal Day. I’m guessing that this year the “Hubble Constant” will decrease. The Agencies are now revealing their plans to deal with sequester. As you recall the amount is $83 billion from…
Not one cent!
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on February 27, 2013 “Not one penny…”!!! My Precious vanished… and then… desperate times indeed. But the ass. made one critical mistake.. while they were distracted by some science bits, it being proposal season, you know, they left their lair unguarded, and our superbly NASA-trained team of astro ninjas carried out a successful extraction! They’ll now just have to…
MOND or Matter
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on February 27, 2013 Time magazine just ran an article “Cosmic Fuggedaboudit: Dark Matter May Not Exist At All” – a revisit of the MOND hypothesis. The story keys off the recent article by Ibata on the Andromeda dwarf galaxies (sub) arXiv pdf, and here is the full ApJ article on arXiv. Independent of these recent developments, it highlights…
Astrostatistics for Fun and Profit
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on February 23, 2013 A couple of astrostatistics related announcements: 1) The Astrostatistics & Astroinformatics Portal is open. “The ASAIP provides searchable abstracts to Recent Papers in the field, several discussion Forums, various resources for researchers, brief Articles by experts, and lists of Meetings. The site will be used for public outreach by four organizations: International Astrostatistics Association (IAA,…
Impacts
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on February 16, 2013 Earth Impact Calculator Ok, that was close, and I don’t mean the zip by of li’l old 2012 DA14 this evening. The Chelyabinsk meteor looks to have been on the high end of the range of quick and dirty estimates, with impact energy of maybe 300 kTon equivalent. This is a size impact we’d expect…
Bolide low altitude break up over Russia
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on February 15, 2013 A bolide hit the Earth over Russia, breaking up at low altitude, causing a strong shock that reached the ground causing damage. There are reports of some fragments hitting the ground. Good summary and videos at The Age video from Russia Today the fragments will be valuable and probably show up soon on ebay there…
Exoplanets in Multi-body Systems in the Kepler Era
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on February 13, 2013 The shadow of a shadow of a planet… and other fun Kepler discoveries Exoplanets in Multi-body Systems in the Kepler Era is a conference currently under way at the Aspen Center for Physics The meeting is very vibrant, with a mostly very young crowd of active researchers. There have been a number of very interesting…
id these sf stories…
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on February 6, 2013 Ok – I’m crowdsourcing the internet, because the google has failed: there are two science fiction short stories that I need titles and authors for, source in anthology or collection would be better still. 1) humans in slower-than-light spaceship set out to colonize planet identified around nearby star. When they finally get there, they find…
A Haiku for Science
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on January 27, 2013 Our future foretell Galaxies of stellar poems From space science spring Inspired by Jason Wright’s Thesis, Lucianne Walkowicz called out Astronomers on facebook to describe their current research as Haiku To the Occasion All Astronomers Sprung Forth Poetic Research There is a collection of some of the contributions at Rhymes Like Science Where my feeble…
Radio Physics
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on January 25, 2013 The Aspen Center for Physics does a number of public outreach and engagement activities. A new and quite interesting effort underway is Radio Physics, in collaboration with KDNK community radio. The project links (visiting) physicists with local AP physics classes, who do a 30 minute group interview, live, on the topic du jour. When available…