Archives for March, 2008
Water on Mars, Part II: Holden Crater
Posted by Ethan on March 10, 2008 So in a recent column I told you all the problems with having water on Mars in recent history — namely that the atmosphere is too thin to have supported it. But many of you have (rightly) pointed out to me that there is some evidence that there could have been water on Mars a…
Weekend Diversion: Video Editing = Musical Talent?
Posted by Ethan on March 8, 2008 Sometimes I wonder if I’m going to need to learn video editing to make this outreach thing work. I might do well to follow the lead of this guy, who’s a Norwegian named Lasse Gjertsen, and who’s posted a video of him “playing drums and piano.” Well, playing drums and piano kinda. But damn, I…
WMAP results: Cosmology from the CMB
Posted by Ethan on March 6, 2008 The cosmic microwave background is the radiation left over from the big bang. It’s very uniform, 2.725 Kelvin everywhere. We’re moving with respect to it, so there’s a doppler shift, and we see that as a dipole moment in the Temperature. When we subtract that out, we see variations on the order of 30 microKelvins!…
Q & A: Where does Matter Come From?
Posted by Ethan on March 4, 2008 I love The Straight Dope. For 35 years, people have written in and asked some of the most difficult-to-answer questions on any topic you can think of; the staffers, writing under the pseudonym Cecil Adams, do their best to get to the bottom of their questions. Well, they also have a message board, and I…
Was there Ever Liquid Water on Mars?
Posted by Ethan on March 3, 2008 People love to speculate that Mars was once a great place for life to form, and claim that there is plenty of evidence that there used to be oceans and rivers there. But this isn’t true. People used to claim there were big Canal-like features on Mars, and used this as evidence that Mars was…
Mark your calendars: April 8th
Posted by Ethan on March 2, 2008 Well, it’s not technically a weekend diversion, but something awesome happened in the wake of my recent Awards-show posting of the Carnival of Space. David Livingston, a blogger over at Space Cynics and a radio host of The Space Show, has invited me to be his guest on his April 8th broadcast of his show!…
