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Galactic Interactions

Rob Knop's Blog -- ramblings and rants about astronomy, cosmology, science education, general nerdism, and anything else.

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Rob Knop earned a PhD in Physics from Caltech in 1997, and did a 5-year post-doc with the Supernova Cosmology Project, and contributed to the discovery of the accelerating Universe. He was an assistant professor of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt for 6 years before scattering out of academia. He now works for Linden Lab, the producers of Second LIfe. (Note: this is not an official site of Linden Lab! Although I work for Linden Lab, all content in this blog is posted without the review or approval of Linden Lab. All statements and opinions expressed here are my own.)

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The contents of each Galactic Interactions post are under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Astronomy & Physics:

"Foo!" to "Are we shortening the Universe's life by observing it?"

An article from New Scientist suggests that we are shortening the life of the Universe by looking at it. To which I say "foo"— primarily to the New Scientist article, not quite so much to the scientific paper behind it. (I do not leave it completely off the hook, however.)

Supernovae: the source of cosmic rays

Astronomers have long assumed that supernovae are the source of at least most of the cosmic rays that hit Earth. Woah, slow down... cosmic rays? Right, you hear the term all the time, but do you really know what they...

Answering Objections to the Big Bang

Every so often you will come across somebody who has a "killer" list of "problems" with the Big Bang. While there remain unknowns and questions about the Big Bang— just as there do with biological evolution— the basic picture of...

Why most of Astronomy isn't Cosmology

This is mostly just an MLP ("Mindless Link Post"), and it's nearly two weeks late, but there's a post by Julianne over at Cosmic Variance that I think is of crucial importance. People who are outside the field of science...

Second Life Q&A on the Accelerating Universe

Following the talk I gave in Second Life about the discovery of the accelerating Universe, we held a couple of Q&A sessions. The original plan was to have questions right after the talk, but the Second Life main grid crashed...

Accelerating Universe Talk Transcript & Followup

I managed to get through my 15-20 minute "talk," and just as I threw it open for questions Second Life had a database problem and everbody in-world had to be logged out.... We got back in 40 minutes or so...

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