astro
catdynamics | December 17, 2009JoAnne and Risa are liveblogging the CDMS seminar at Stanford
bottom line, they see two events when they unblind, compared to expected 0.5
net confidence is a bit over 2σ (nailed it, yeah!).
interesting bounds on cross-section for WIMPs with mass under 70 GeV/c2
good stuff
catdynamics | December 14, 2009WISE launched successfully this morning, spacecraft is in orbit and responsive.
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer launched successfully from Vandenburg this morning.
click to embiggen
Spacecraft is separated, oriented, and started cooling. Oh, and, obviously, communicating...
Dratt. Wish I'd been out at the coast still, that'd have been a launch worth getting up to watch, even from a distance.
WISE is a small explorer class mission, doing an all sky mid-infrared survey.
The spatial resolution is modest, as is the depth, but it is still better than anything before, and much needed as…
catdynamics | December 10, 2009The Case for Pluto is not settled yet, whatever the IAU may wish.
Now, just in time for the holidays, there is a very nice little book summarizing what happened in Prague that fateful summer.
I am decidedly "pro-Pluto".
Now Alan Boyle of the cosmic log blog, has taken up the baton, and written a very nice book to complement David Weintraub's Is Pluto a Planet.
"The Case for Pluto" is a very nice compact little book that is eminently readable.
Alan reviews the history of planet discovery and puts the Pluto controversy in context, with some interestingly frank interviews with many of the…
catdynamics | December 9, 2009Vote for John Grunsfeld in the National Geographic "Choice Adventurer of the Year" Competition
He is number 3 on the list.
Vote.
catdynamics | December 9, 2009Quick!
Its the Santa Signal!
Get the Sled, and Rudolph, fast!
Or, a spontaneous study of how many people have cell phones with video capability and fast reflexes!
Nice pictures and videos!
From altaposten.no - click to embiggen
altaposten.no story - in Norwegian, natch
From NRK.no - with video - good video
Daily Mail in the UK has a good photo and video collection
This brought out the UFOfans and conspiracy theorists, what with Obama heading for Scandinavia for the Nobel festivities.
Youtube video summarizing story, with several views and videos.
Youtube summary of pictures and videos…
catdynamics | December 8, 2009there is an amusing rumour on the resonaances blog about cold dark matter
The CDMS experiment is a Cold Dark Matter Search experiment, looking for nuclear recoil in lab detectors, due to scattering of weakly interacting massive particles with normal matter.
[hmm, link is to UC site for CDMS - the Stanford CDMS website is password protected, don't know if that is usual - I have some recollection of linking to CDMS at Stanford in the
past with no problems.]
CDMSI ran for several years, and reported upper bounds on WIMP masses and cross-sections, and CDMSII has been running for a while now with…
catdynamics | December 3, 2009A Hubble Advent Calendar?
Cool.
So Boston.com has a Hubble Advent Calendar.
Damn, I wish I had thought of that.
STSCI, as before, has Hubble Seasonal Greeting Cards, free, for you to print out old style, or to send electronically.
and, for the classically minded, there is the BBC's A Bach Christmas Advent Calendar
catdynamics | November 22, 2009It appears to be a MOND autumn in the science glossies, as Science publishes a review on our favourite alternative physics theory and the status of MOND like extensions to general relativity
Earlier we we had a nice little discussion about a paper bu Gentile et al in Nature on galaxy surface densities, with but an oblique hint at MOdified Newtonian Dynamics.
Now Ferreira and Starkman have a Review in Science (326 p812 [sub]), also as "Einstein's Theory of Gravity and the Problem of Missing Mass" Ferreira and Starkman, arXiv.0911.1212.
It is a nice sensible review, discussing both why MOND…
catdynamics | November 18, 2009Hubble multicycle large proposals were due today...
Julianne tests the conjecture of proposal number invariance under simple scaling.
Looks to be annoyingly close to correct with about 40 proposals in by the deadline.
I still think we need to check the proposal success probability as a function of proposal rank number.
catdynamics | November 16, 2009NASA's planet hunter mission ought to be announcing something at the American Astronomical Society in january, 2010.
But what?
Ah, well, I don't know, and if I knew I wouldn't be telling.
We have some idea of what Kepler could do, based on the cleanliness of the early release result photometry.
But, we don't know what they actually found, or how fast and thorough the followup confirmations might have been.
There is a definite buzz in the air though, a sense of anticipation that the Kepler team will deliver big at the AAS.
So, shamelessly stealing a good idea from a good graduate student,…
catdynamics | November 13, 2009Yup, the LCROSS crash did kick up some water.
NASA shows proof.
Splash
UV-spectroscopy shows H2O vapour.
About 0.1 m3 from a ~ 10m radius crater.
Not much, but definitely there.
I must day, the LCROSS "bombing" of the Moon is one of the worst handled NASA events in a long time, from a press perspective - very poor explanation of why NASA did this when it did, the likely scale of the event or indeed the analysis.
Lunar orbits are generally unstable - chunks of metal going around the Moon will generally end up crashing into the Moon - this is partly due to the Earth's gravity perturbing…
catdynamics | November 12, 2009A couple of years ago, a group of California theorists came up with a whacky theory for a new kind of thermonuclear supernova.
It would be just like regular type Ia supernovae, but fainter and faster, and a bit more mixed up, as evidenced by its new label: the 0.Ia supernova, a perfect mallogos of a neologism.
So now someone had to go and find one, with plenty more to come.
As you know, Bob, there are two types of Supernovae, type I and II.
Supernovae are stars blowing up, big time, and:
type I supernovae do not have hydrogen emission lines,
while type II supernovae do have hydrogen…
catdynamics | November 11, 2009Awesome combined image from Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra, showing deep view of the centre of the Milky Way, in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy.
From Hubblesite.org
Annotated image (click for larger version)
Full image collection at Hubblesite.org
Tricolore (click for larger version):
the images combines near-infrared imaging from the Wide Field Camera (3) Ye Olde Near-Infrared Camera (really, NIC mosaic - ouch - see comments) on Hubble, mid/near-infrared images from Spitzer, and soft x-ray images from Chandra, mosaic'd into a gorgeous false colour close up of the inner…
catdynamics | November 6, 2009LHC started overheating when a cooling unit cut out
The cause was quickly established - a bird apparently dropped a piece of baguette on a high voltage cooling unit - conjectures that it was thrown out of a passing airplane are clearly false: you can't get actual edible french bread on airplanes.
how freakishly unlikely is that...?
ok, so there are thousands of people working on a huge installation covering an area of hundreds of square kilometers, and a perimeter of tens of kilometers, with hundreds of points of vulnerability with thens of thousands of independent failure modes...
But,…
catdynamics | November 5, 2009A long time ago, a massive star about 10,000 light years from Earth went kaboom.
329 years ago, we think, in 1680, the light from the supernova explosion reached Earth and was recorded as a new star by the Flamsteed, then the Astronomer Royal, looking relatively dim as nearby supernove go, due to the layers of dust in the galaxy between us and the site of the explosion.
Now, digging into archival x-ray data, a couple of astronomers may finally have figured out what is going on in Cass A.
It is a ball of ultradense degenerate neutronium, plated with a thin layer of diamond.
A Neutron Star…
catdynamics | November 3, 2009Whee!
Cassini does a bit more zipping about the Saturn system.
Pretty pictures and conceptions abound.
Cute artist concept animation of the flyby - quite good
Map of Enceladus (click to embiggen - warning BIG - click to ZOOM)
Bonus:
Today's Pretty Picture of Rhea.
From last weekend (click to embiggen)
catdynamics | October 28, 2009In case you missed it, the Ares 1-X launch this morning was successful.
Ares is the new NASA expendable launcher, developed under the Constellation program, designed too provide medium and heavy (Ares V) lift after Shuttle and to provide man-rated launchers for future maneuverable crewed capsule launches - the Orions.
Think Saturn 1 and Saturn V type launchers, with Apollo type capsules - but modernised and hopefully safer, and cheaper.
Ares 1-X is the prototype experimental test vehicle for Ares 1
It finally launched this morning.
All went well, apparently.
Cool launch video though.
catdynamics | October 23, 200930 new planets reported at "Towards Other Earths" Porto conference.
Some of them are rather interesting.
The Extrasolar Planet Encyclopaedia reported 30 new planets reported by 7 different teams at the Towards Other Earths conference in Porto - wish I could have been there, too many meetings going on, too little time.
This is going to be the trend for a while - most planet discoveries will be announced in batches, unless there is something startling, unexpected or record breaking found.
With about 400 extrasolar planets now known, finding just one is not news, unless it is different.
One of…