astro
catdynamics | August 18, 2006Just when you thought it was safe to come up with a new pneumonic for the new 812 planets, the Astronomers strike again...
No, not content with the deliberations of the ad hoc sub-subcommittee of the subcomittee for Naming Names, people are now abusing the power of the Web and coming up with their own criteria.
Let me just note, everyone agrees that hydrostatic equlibrium is necessary for planethood, question is whether it is sufficient.
Stenve Soter has a 22(!) page preprint on astro-ph explaing why the Rose Planetarium position was right all along, and Pluto Should Be Right Out, and no-…
catdynamics | August 18, 2006CNN story on NAC
Wes Huntress, Charles Kennel and Eugene Levy are off the NASA Advisory Council science committee.
Kennel resigned, Griffin fires Huntress and Levy.
NASAwatch has little more.
Huntress
Kennel
Levy
This is interesting and bad. The NASA advisory committee structure is already in tatters, and these people had clout in the scientific community.
Something bad is going on.
catdynamics | August 18, 2006James asks: Astronomy: What is it good for?
Seriously: getting a multi-minute lead story in a to-die-for demographic television show, and multiple prime time television news stories, front page headlines etc with eye-catching candy graphics, visceral messages that hit home, and light controversy people can argue and care about without it becoming violent.
Oh, and furthering our understanding of the universe, including conceptually revolutinising our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe, several times; driving technological developments such as optics, spectroscopy,…
catdynamics | August 17, 2006Oo, yeah.
Stephen Colbert brings back Neil deGrasse Tyson and does an IAU smackdown.
Charon, Ceres and Xena get it.
Wait for the YouTube, someone will have it for us by morning I'm sure.
He was very good. Stephen was pretty good also.
Here is original Neil Tyson appearance on YouTube while we wait for someone to get last nights clip up...
And here it is
Thanks to Robert at Rev. BigDumbChimp
Awesome. Absolutely f'ing awesome.
catdynamics | August 16, 2006So... the ad hoc sub-subcommittee of the standing subcommittee for the Naming of Names has reported out: the Federation of People Who Believe No Really Important Discoveries are Made West of the Mississippi are reeling in defeat, while the Alliance of the Crusade for Consistency is handed a token superficial victory.
Millions of elementary school teachers, and their pupils, are in tears.
A Good Day for Science, indeed.
Phil has the lowdonw and here is the official word
Various ScienceBloggers chime in, here and here and here
Well, it is all over but the voting, which comes later this week.…
catdynamics | August 14, 2006So... is Pluto really a Planet?
IAU Press Release 01/99
February 3, 1999
Recent news reports have given much attention to what was believed to be an initiative by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to change the status of Pluto as the ninth planet in the solar system. Unfortunately, some of these reports have been based on incomplete or misleading information regarding the subject of the discussion and the decision making procedures of the Union...
... 'course they can always change their minds, it is not like Congressional elections, you can do "do-overs" in science.
As I said…
catdynamics | August 10, 2006The Perseid meteor shower in mid August is one of the more reliable and bright meteor showers seen in the northern hemisphere.
This year they'll be back this weekend, viewing will be mediocre, especially from North America...
radiant map - from 2002, but they'll come from same location - look for the "W" of Cassiopea low to the northeast after sunset, try to catch the time after sunset but before Moon rise (not very long right now...);
for best viewing use averted vision - ie focus on Cassiopea and look down to the right, then scan the sky around this - sweep your eyes in a 30-45 degree…
catdynamics | August 8, 2006So, for various obscure reasons I was browsing the NASA select schedule, and I noticed there are no scheduled SSUs - Space Science Updates from NASA HQ.
Thinking about it, I didn't recall any recent SSUs on anything I had noticed...
I don't see any on the Hubblesite, Chandra or JPL Mars website and I don't see an SSU tag on the Cassini press releases.
Have there been any SSUs this year? On what topics and when? Because I can't find any by googling and I don't recall seeing any.
catdynamics | August 7, 2006From NASAwatch:
"How do we motivate students to study astrobiology if this science is not favored in the budget?" asked a teacher. "If they want to work for government money, they must look at what the government wants - not what they think it should want. If they want to work with something the government doesn't want, they'll have to find other money to fund it," Griffin stated."
Fair enough.
But, how do you motivate students to study astrobiology, or any particular subfield, if the government changes its mind about what it wants on a shorter time scale than it takes to graduate students,…
catdynamics | August 1, 2006
RS Ophiuchi is a famous recurrent nova.
Recently it had an outburst, brightening from magnitude 11 (hundred times fainter than faintest star visible to the naked eye) to fifth magnitude - faint but visible to the naked eye.
Recent analysis of the outburst (and here) suggest that RS Ophi is high mass and the mass grows with each outburst. If so, it will soon explode as a supernova.
Novae have been known for centuries. They are a "new stars", appearing in the sky where no star was before. We now know that they are sudden brightening of a faint pre-existing star. Brightness increase is…
catdynamics | July 28, 2006Bora wants some scientist rock stars
Astronomy obliges!
Brian May of Queen
The lad gave up a serious astronomy career as a PhD student in astronomy at Imperial College, London.
This is the career dilemma most astronomers face on a regular basis - do you continue writing Nature papers on MgI emission and take a SERC postdoc or two, or, do you go write "We Will Rock You" and jam with Freddie Mercury...
Decisions, decisions.
On the other hand, he might have rated three jalapenos on ratemyprofessor.com if he'd stayed on the academic career track!
We Will Rock You!
Aah
Buddy you're a boy make a…
catdynamics | July 26, 2006Doug Hamilton has a nifty Astronomy Workshop web page, with lots of fun little tools.
I had used some of these for my "Stars for Poets" course, but was reminded of them when looking at Bad Astronomy this morning.
Doug has a Generic central force integrator, an issue which came up recently of CosmicVariance (its an orbit-in-a-static-potential integrator, not an N-body tool, but it is a start, you'll get the general idea of the instabilities that occur for non-Newtonian forces).
You can smash a star through the Solar System, or just hit the Earth with your favourite asteroidal or comet impactor…
catdynamics | July 24, 2006From CosmicVariance and Baez
Fun, high symmetry, exact solutions of the N-body Coulomb problem. From Cris Moore's web page at the Santa Fe Institute
Pretty. Everybody is doing it, might as well Google it on.
catdynamics | July 21, 2006
A lot of brain power has been devoted to establishing Biosignatures, as a means for remotely detecting alien life.
But, what if alien cows don't fart? Can we still conceive of robust generic biosignatures that are not just slavish restatements of what we think we know about the Earth?
One of my hats is as a co-PI of the Penn State Astrobiology Research Center
We used to run, in loose association, a National Science Foundation REU (Research Experience for Undergrads) program - bring in 10-12 undergrads from other unis for the summer and give them some lab experience.
As part of that, we had…
catdynamics | July 21, 2006Two astronomy papers are up on the Nature website for open critique, the new experiment with open peer review that Nature is conducting.
A new type of massive stellar death: no supernovae from two nearby long gamma ray bursts - Fynbo et al
Baryonic sweeping as the origin of the darkest galaxies in the Universe - Mayer et al
Fire at will.
I think comments are open to everyone, not just subscribers. Someone tell me if non-subscribers are blocked.
Comments and commenter IDs are public I believe.
Only comment I saw on quick browsing was on one of the squicky bio papers on sex... [sic]
catdynamics | July 21, 2006Keith Cowing ofNASAwatch now has a potentially interesting and useful Astrobiology.net site.
catdynamics | July 17, 2006
ACS first light images after the switch to the spare (side 2) electronics, after the failure of the side 1 power controller.
Found a redshift =1.4 supernova (~ 9 billion light years away), as part of Perlmutter's (LBL) high redshift supernova search, which is looking for additional date on the accelerating expansion of the universe and hence further confirmation of and testing of Dark Energy
catdynamics | July 17, 2006Mark at CosmiVariance passes on a rumour that there is a new Astro Job Rumour Wiki
This potentially supercedes the legendary New Astro Rumour Mill which of course used to be here, which in turn superceded the legendary orginal Astro Rumour Mill started by Pat Hall.
Mark has some interesting discussion on the utility of the Rumour Mills.
His essential point is of course correct, the information is there, and it wants to be free...
Having also been on both sides of the rumours, I note that the public info is occasionally gamed, by both sides. Candidates may "leak" their status to the Mill to…