astro
catdynamics | January 12, 2007Prof Don Osterbrock, of the University of California at Santa Cruz former director of the Lick Observatory had a heart attack and passed away yesterday, Jan 11th 2007.
There will be a shot remembrance at lunch today at UCSC, with a more formal celebration of his life to be scheduled at a later date.
A View of the Future As Seen From the Past
UC Bio
I just saw him in Santa Cruz three months ago, had a nice chat with him about spectroscopic variability of double AGNs and prospects for doing a broad search for close black hole binaries, he was really fired up about the new observing techniques…
catdynamics | January 10, 2007
Jason Kalirai et al see stars within stars:
a globular cluster system around a distant elliptical galaxy is seen in a Hubble image through the nearby globular cluster NGC 6397
Very cool.
catdynamics | January 10, 2007Chandra data suggests Kepler's Supernova was actually a type Ia supernova
Type Ib, Ic and II supernovae occur during the gravitational collapse of a massive star, the core forms a neutron star or in some cases black hole and the associated energy release blows off the outer layers.
In contrast type Ia comes from older binary stars, when a white dwarf acquires additional mass and exceeds the critical Chandrasekhar mass limit and blows up completely in a nuclear detonation.
catdynamics | January 10, 2007
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls. Lord Tennyson
Spitzer data suggests a supernova shockwave is about to destroy the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula...
catdynamics | January 9, 2007Life at the American Astronomical Society meeting, in Seattle, is interesting.
In addition to the science and jobs and collaboration meetings, there is socialization and politicking.
At some level, a fraction of the guiding input into multibillion dollar multiyear national policies happen here. In particular to get support for mission concepts and science priorities, there is a lot of schmoozing and minor feelgooding - for example Northrop Grumman are building the JWST the multibillion dollar "successor" to the Hubble.
It is over budget and late, of course, and the fallout from that is…
catdynamics | January 9, 2007Interesting American Astronomical Society meeting here in Seattle.
The "big" result is undoubtedly the COSMOS collabortion release, although there were several other significant "big" results announced.
Nothing earth shattering, so to speak, but that happens only every 2-3 years, can't have it every single meeting.
This year was interesting for me, because I got the press releases in advance, still have 25 to go, from todays late releases and wednesday's releases.
It is always interesting to see what the press picks up on: the really big results are obvious, but only a few percent of the…
catdynamics | January 9, 2007LISA had a booth at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Seattle, handing out some very popular laser pointers - far superior to the competing Beyond Einstein mission concept team swag...
In an idle moment, we built a GigaHertz gravitational radiation detector (ok, we didn't mode lock or heterodyne, but the aligment was damn good).
Fortunately Scott from MIT was there to record it for posterity
The noise at the facility was mostly in the milliHertz through kiloHertz bands and would not affect GigaHertz performance, we seriously expect new physics at these frequencies.
It is not know…
catdynamics | January 9, 2007Ok, new Mac PhotoBooth works...
This is the JWST full size mockup that Northrop brought to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.
If things work out as promised I may get "JWST covered in snow" later today. Or not.
The person in the foreground is the current JWST crew on guard, friendly guy.
Disclaimer: Northrop served us Sushi last night, but we had to buy our own drinks, so no bias...
catdynamics | January 9, 2007From American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle:
Keck has found three quasars near each other
Normally we'd expect that this is the lensed image of a single quasar, but they have not been able to fit a lens model to the data.
It is possible that these are three physically associated quasars; which is not that surprising in some way.
We'll see.
Read all about it.
catdynamics | January 9, 2007Here at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seatthle, the very well organised Villanova crowd (who apparently just gave Sean a medal or something), have an intriguing paper on quiescence in α Cen A
To cut a long story short, x-ray flux from α Cen has plummeted by almost a factor of 100, suggesting the star has entered a unspotted quiet state, possibly analogous to the Sun's Maunder Minimum, since as a first approximation x-ray activity in solar like main sequence stars correlates with the number of star spots, which anti-correlate with the stellar luminosity (fewer spots, less light…
catdynamics | January 8, 2007From American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle:
Wheee... we have Hubble Press Release number 2 for 2007
ACS imaging of AU Microscopii showing 50-100 AU edge on debris disk.
The full story, as they say
Nifty stuff.
catdynamics | January 8, 2007Unexpectedly bright and visible in the west just after sunset, for a brief time.
catdynamics | January 8, 2007Raja has discovered so many stars in Andromeda's halo, extending so far (half million light years, dood) that they had to give him an entire session.
Yes, every talk in session 177 on tuesday has Raja Guhathakutra from UCSC as a co-author.
Dood.
To be fair, Vicky Kalogera acheived the same in session 155 - but that was a poster session with only four slots compared to eight in the oral session. Not bad.
And Engelbracht is co-author on 14 of the posters in session 160, but sadly the organisers snuck in an interloper, 160.04 is on silicates in AGB stars in LMC, no Engelbracht.
Cruel - that'd…
catdynamics | January 8, 2007Robert Nemiroff of apod fame, has a funky poster at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.
He points out that in principle you could have energy fields with equations of state with W > 1/3
ie "stiffer than light" and that this would have interesting and amusing consequences in the early universe. In particular W = 2/3 is a special solution...
Ok, Sean, you wanna take this one...?
I actually kinda like it, in much the same way I liked the Big Rip which happens if W
Doesn't mean I think it is right, but it is fun to ponder briefly.
catdynamics | January 8, 2007NASA Advisory Council met with AAS members in Seattle this morning.
It was an interesting meeting; some harsh things said, some nice things said and some things unsaid.
This is my personal interpretation of what I heard...
Some very harsh things were implicitly said about recent NASA management, some deserved, but lets see some actual grown up action from the current crowd before we get all superior, because to be honest the administration of NASA right now is not exactly smooth runnings.
The advisory council structure has now nominally been restored, and there are meetings and reports, but…
catdynamics | January 8, 2007From American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle:
Prof Schulze-Makuch from Washington State has a conjecture that reconciles the Viking experiments - which were generally inconsistent with life on Mars but showed some residual puzzles - with the current thinking that there might be persistent life.
He suggests the surface life uses a H2O2/H2O mixture to adapt to low temperatures and oxidised surface this, they claim, would facilitiate a water based oxygen metabolism.
here is the paper and the press release from WSU
Grrl Scientist is not amused
Hm.
Well, it is a testable hypothesis,…
catdynamics | January 8, 2007First Hubble press release of the year
The COSMOS project is a multi-wavelength survey of a 2 degree field, using, well, basically everything we got.
They have cool results.
Click through for zoomable image
catdynamics | January 8, 2007Most all galaxies seem to contain central supermassive black holes.
All too often, galaxies collide (the universe is surprisingly crowded on these scales).
The central black holes may then become bound and merge, which is interesting, or they may hang up in orbit for long enough that another galaxy, and central black hole come crashing the party.
When this happen, things get interesting
The NWU crowd have fun simulating outcomes, this is a topic that has been touched upon before but is seriously under-explored.
PS: the images above is one my own, I didn't like their press release figure...…
catdynamics | January 7, 2007National Optical Astronomy Observatory shows off some of its photography skills
The Bubble Nebula - NGC7635