catdynamics

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Steinn Sigurðsson

Professor of Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University. Science Editor at Astrophysical Journal. Icelandic. Herder of Cats.

Posts by this author

February 27, 2013
"Not one penny..."!!! My Precious vanished... My Precious! and then... Kidnapped! Thieves! 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…
February 26, 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…
February 22, 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.…
February 15, 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 every…
February 14, 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…
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 Physicists hard at work The meeting is very vibrant, with a mostly very young crowd of active researchers…
February 5, 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…
January 26, 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…
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…
January 22, 2013
The "Physical Applications of Millisecond Pulsars" conference is under way at the Aspen Center for Physics, going through thursday when the X-Games take over. The meeting started with surveys of current observational and instrumentation projects, in particular the amazing serendipitous discoveries…
January 13, 2013
astropixie has running update on the Siding Spring Observatory Fire in Warrumbungle National Park in Australia. PS: Day After the Fire update from astropixie - telescopes mostly ok, astronomy facilities not so much #ClimateChange
January 10, 2013
Gemini AO LASER As we come to the end of the 221st annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, it is time to reflect upon the diverse science presented at the meeting. And what a lot of science it was. Fortunately, there were also a lot of people to make sense of it and press releases…
January 10, 2013
The AAS felt curiously light on major news this year. Not that there weren't a lot of developments and announcements of results, rather that there didn't seem to any major obvious breakthroughs. Of course, it is the little ones that get you... Critically there is, of course, the annual, informal…
January 10, 2013
The James Webb Space Telescope is large, overbudget and in a category of its own. Literally. And now stirring over some controversy as the reality of science funding starts smacking scientists in the face. Last year, as I'm, sure you remember, the JWST funding line was take out of the Astrophysics…
January 9, 2013
Space based infrared observations find double planetesimal belts around Vega. Vega Su et al. (ApJ in press) got Spitzer and Herschel observations of Vega, and find emission consistent with an inner warm asteroid belt and an outer cool planetesimal belt, with a gap between. Vega This is similar…
January 7, 2013
On the Blues and the Lifestyles and Fates of the Hottest Stars as they Cluster in the Heavens: or, why aging gracefully depends on your lifestyle and environment... The Stellar Dynamical Clock - is a Nature paper that came out in the Christmas double issue, always my favourite and very good value…
January 7, 2013
It was at the gathering, and all the astronomers were there, drinking coffee among the posters, hearing the NSF in despair... I am at my almost regular pilgrimage to the Annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, where I hope to do some semi-liveblogging of developments and science news…
December 21, 2012
Hubble's Constant: H0 = 42! 42 scots miles/sec/Mpc that is. Finally we know the natural units for cosmology.
December 20, 2012
The venerable Astrophysical Journal, Letters has a new editor: Prof. Fred Rasio. Fred is the 4th editor in the journal's 45 year existence. The Letters are for the publication of rapid, short papers, which are timely, and often somewhat speculative. Fred takes over from Chris Sneden, who did a…
December 19, 2012
More Phenomenal random links to random stuff: life, the Universe and Everything Phenomena - new blog group under National Geographic, including some long time scibloggers: The Loom, Not Exactly Rocket Science, Laelaps and Only Human, to begin with. On the Usefulness of Useless Knowledge - Bee…
December 12, 2012
Dr Brad Barlow was nominated by his Astro 001 students for a great honour - whichever class collected the most money for this year's THON would get to designate a lecture style of their choice, and Brad won... so he got to lecture as a character from a "classic christmas movie"[sic] As you can see…
December 10, 2012
Hey, Santa Baby! Psy does it Christmas Style for Obama wrapped up with Hark the Herald Angels sing with Diana Ross and Psy. video at Grauniad Power hath privilege indeed.
December 5, 2012
On the purity of science careers; the waste of civilization and other assorted snippets... and a happy Feast of St Nikolaus The Rise of the Science Politician - Matt B. continues provocative Conversations. There is an interesting thread on this on The Astronomers fb. On The Inevitability of…
November 27, 2012
MINERVA - clever idea for high cadence RV searches around nearby bright stars, now under way. Kardashev IV - from AstroWright. Or, why the best way to achieve immortality is to not die. how to make your bike sound like a horse - Brilliant! #ObMontyPython! From From Trotify.Physicists open mouth -…
November 16, 2012
In which we dunk and pie our professors... Much has been written about student morale and the problems of student-faculty relations and the implicit expectations faculty have of the students. Over the last couple of weeks I have had occasion to test some of the more radical proposals to improve the…
November 15, 2012
Visiting Astrobiology Chair in DC: research and engagement. Applications and nominations are open for the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology. "Established in the Fall of 2011, the Blumberg Astrobiology Chair is a distinguished senior position at the Library’s Kluge…
November 12, 2012
Blows against supersymmetry and facebook. Matthew Bailes continues ruminations at the Conversation - the general riff is on crowd sourcing and distributed computing, with a bit of bragging on The Beast they got down under. Ok, I'm, just jealous. I had not heard of Diaspora - be interesting to see…
November 11, 2012
November 2, 2012
113 Vælubíllinn The all time classic modern Icelandic punk anthem, for kids. Instant punk dance lesson just to complete the experience. Try it. It works.
November 1, 2012
New faculty positions in multiple science and engineering disciplines, including astronomy, emphasizing computational analysis and data mining. Penn State is embarking on a transformative cluster hiring initiative in cyberscience – computation- and data-enabled science and engineering – to lead…