astro
catdynamics | March 6, 2008Hubble proposal deadline tomorrow, lest you forget.
How many proposals do you think we will get?
I think I know. You wanna bet?
The Hubble Space Telescope is a fine telescope.
Currently it has very limited capabilities due to instrument failures, but it is, hopefully, getting one more servicing mission - during which a new Wide Field Camera (3) will be installed - with a moderately wide field, well sampled broadband performance (UV to near-IR - an interesting compromise).
The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph - a fixed single aperture medium resolution blue spectrograph.
In addition there are plans…
catdynamics | March 4, 2008UK astro staggers back to life...
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
STFC announces UK participation in Gemini is back on - from astrophycisist2b
Apparently someone in admistradialand can still do arithmetic and figured out that the cost penalty of walking away from Gemini was about the same as staying in, on the relevant cost cutting time scale.
New plan is to recover costs by selling UK time...ok.
To…
catdynamics | March 3, 2008GLAST has shipped
The Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope is NASA's next big mission.
The telescope has passed review and has been shipped to Florida where pieces of a Delta-II launcher are being assembled, for, er, launch, May 16th sometime later this year.
GLAST, if successfully launched and operational, will do some very interesting high energy astrophysics, including a large area telescope and a high energy burst monitor
NASA has announced an open competition to name GLAST, after a successful launch, I hope. Wouldn't want to jinx it, not that I'm superstitious or anything. Deadline…
catdynamics | March 3, 2008must.not.blog
HST proposal deadline on friday... argh.
Hey, how did my mailbox get to have over 5000 messages in it?
Again.
catdynamics | February 20, 2008possible meteor impact in northwest US
this is all over the news, but there was a prominent fireball in the northwest US tuesday morning with a possible ground strike, likely in eastern Washington State, possibly Adams County
prelim query on bablog
lots of video from local TV stations - expect someone will have triangulated it this morning and locals should have gone out by now to look for crater and debris fields
KLEW in Idaho has surveillance video footage above
More from Ritzville Journal Adams County including a PNNL video
KXLY has additional footage
either a low airburst or a ground…
catdynamics | February 18, 2008I give
I lose
I was wrong
and I will pay
I concede The Bet
There is a great, if sporadic, tradition of "bets" in astrophysics.
It is a particular tradition at Caltech, where Kip Thorne has made a series of famous public bets on science issues.
One of my great "bad moves" as a graduate student was to decline a bet with a Caltech faculty member - I had made a rash (but as it turned out intuitively correct!) scientific statement and he immediately offered to bet me on it, I felt the stakes were too high and didn't have the sense to ask for odds... so I chickened out. Silly me. Been…
catdynamics | February 16, 2008meeting is over, what did we learn
first: don't wear "city socks" in ski boots - first day out I forgot to switch to high wool socks and I have the most amazing line of blisters on my left calf...
totally awesome skiing though
good meeting also, I gather all the talks will be online soon, will post pointer when it does
two further things that interest me, and my apologies to all the talks and topics I didn't mention...
first, there is the issue of reionization - did it come early, starting at redshift 10-15, as some of us think it must, or did it come late with rapid reionization between…
catdynamics | February 15, 2008Will Harvard junior faculty publish first author Nature papers now?
I have to confess that with the experience of arXiv.org I am continually bemused by the fervour over open access in the rest of academia.
Now, I gather, Harvard has passed a faculty resolution mandating open access for all faculty scholarly publications - with faculty being asked to deposit PDF files with the library which will provide open access (I hope they are sensible and buy the arXiv archiving tools).
So what?
In astronomy, physics and math this is a non-issue, since essentially all journals that matter grant arxiv.org…
catdynamics | February 15, 2008a black hole conspiracy
it has been known for a number of years that there is a curious set of correlations between the central supermassive black holes in galaxies and the global properties of the galaxies
in particular, the inferred mass of the central black hole correlates quite well with the mass of the spheroidal component of the host galaxy (but not the disk mass, so the correlation with the galaxy mass as a whole is not there), and, there is an even better correlation with the "characteristic velocity" of the stars in the galaxy at some fairly large radius (how to define that…
catdynamics | February 14, 2008extremely high redshift galaxies found
Garth Illingworth gave a talk this morning, the first of two, on new extremely high redshift galaxies found in the Ultra Deep Field using combined ACS, NICMOS and Spitzer data.
Second talk tomorrow by Rychard Bouwens on unpublished candidates.
So... the press release claim of the week is that A1689-zD1 a lensed galaxy by the cluster Abel 1689 is at redshift greater than 7.
Estimated redshift is 7.6, which has the galaxy formed within 700 million years of the Big Bang. Galaxy was lensed by a factor of about 10 by the foreground cluster.
click for high…
catdynamics | February 13, 2008The first two billion years of galaxy formation: the reionization epoch and beyond.
The Aspen Center for Physics is a physics hostel of sorts, and a very nice one it is too.
The Aspen Center, which is located adjacent to the Aspen Institute on the edge of town, runs a series of (currently five) weekly workshop in january and february of each year, bringing in typically 50-100 physicists for intense workshops on a rotating series of "hot topics" in research.
In the summer there are four months of overlapping series of longer 3 week workshops where an effort is made to mingle the participants…
catdynamics | February 4, 2008Do you want to be an Astrobiologist?
Are you an undergrad in the US and you think you might want to, but you have no idea what you would be in for?
Then come to Penn State for our REU summer school on astrobiology
Do research, go on field trips and stuff, hang out and chat about life in the universe.
Work with extraordinary and helpful faculty! Mostly.
Living expenses and stipend incluced.
Application deadline is Feb 15th - it is competitive application - current undergraduates, US citizen or permanent residents only I am afraid.
We've done several of these already, they are now back after a…
catdynamics | January 31, 2008The domestic cat has a range of up to 10 km per day
this is significantly shorter than human which are excellent migrants, can sustain maybe 30 km per day.
At 10 km/day it would take a cat about 11 billion years to walk to alpha Centauri.
Which unfortunately would have burned out by then.
But since humans would have got there about 8 billion years earlier, we'd no doubt leave some crunchies and a bowl of fresh water around proxima Centauri
catdynamics | January 30, 2008A part of the typical graduate school application is the "essay" or personal statement
I also did this, when I were a wee lad.
I came from Europe, but for obscure historical reasons was mostly applying to universities in the US.
Upon reading the application forms, I found a small box which said something to the effect of "tell us why you want to go to grad school".
It was, typically, a very small box.
Because US application deadlines were, much to my surprise, much earlier than typical European deadlines, I was in a bit of a rush.
So I wrote, in #2 pencil of course: "I like physics. I have…
catdynamics | January 25, 2008Two unrelated threads came together in my mind on the issue of physics, careers issues and the world.
Did you know that there is an not half-bad science fiction story that as backplot notes that physicists take over the hard drug trade in the US and Europe in the early 21st century - only way to pay for the next generation particle accelerators, natch.
In the meantime, the Incoherent Ponderer has triggered a strong reaction with a post on the GREs and graduate admission - it is worth a read, including the comments. I can't really comment on the issue right now due to conflict of interest…
catdynamics | January 23, 2008Did I mention space is big
Really big...
Did you know that the typical separation between stars in the neighbourhood is many millions of time the typical size of a star and about ten thousand times larger than the typical size of the planetary systems.
catdynamics | January 23, 2008Keck gives Caltech $24 million to fund a new space studies institute.
$3 million per year for 8 years from Keck -
"...Caltech has received an eight-year, $24-million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to establish a space studies institute dedicated to developing a new generation of space missions and research.
The W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies will consider such sweeping questions as how the universe began, its ultimate fate and the likelihood that life exists elsewhere in the cosmos, Caltech said Tuesday.
Each year, the institute will adopt one or more of these themes and explore…