Astronomy
tqa | February 18, 2009
"Children are our hope for the future."THERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE FUTURE, said Death."What does it contain, then?"ME."Besides you, I mean!"Death gave him a puzzled look. I'M SORRY?
Terry Pratchett"Sourcery"
Bad Astronomy Blogger Phil Plait has written one of the most fantastically, outrageously, manically, humorously depressing books I've ever read, and I'm almost certain I mean that as a compliment. Death From The Skies provides a veritable smorgasbord of potentially deadly astronomical delights, each more exotic than the last. It's like having every Discovery Channel "The Sky Is Falling"…
cmooney | February 18, 2009I've been thrilled at the comments I'm getting in response to my posts on Nicholaus Copernicus. See for example here. So I've thought of a plan to invite blog readers to join me throughout the next several months as I push through a large number of other texts like De revolutionibus.
For the remainder of this week, the primary reading will be Copernicus. (I still have a ways to go to finish.) Secondary readings will be Owen Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read and Thomas Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution.
After that, here's the schedule I'm working from, and will strive to keep to--with Amazon…
gregladen | February 17, 2009Just who does this comet think it is? The comet Lulin, discovered last year by a Chinese teenage amateur astronomer, has never been here before. This is its first pass around the sun. It will, owing to a number of different poorly explained by science journalists effects, fly at the sun backwards, spewing green gasses. Only first time comets spew the green gas. Then it will fly around the sun and back out into the far reaches of the solar system. The comet will actually capture enough energy from this one single trip around the sun to escape the gravitational space time warp of our…
cmooney | February 17, 2009
[Copernicus: Yet Another Pluto Hater?!?]
In my last post, I talked about the "radically strange" in Copernicus; today, let's go on to catalogue the "strangely modern" aspects of the work:
Strangely modern: The idea that the heavens are immense compared to the puny little Earth. Copernicus put it this way:
I also say that the sun remains forever immobile and that whatever apparent movement belongs to it can be verified of the mobility of the Earth; that the magnitude of the world is such that, although the distance from the sun to the Earth in relation to whatsoever planetary sphere you…
cmooney | February 16, 2009
In my last post I remarked on how "radically strange--and yet strangely modern" I expected the 1543 work that kicked off the "scientific revolution" to be. Now that I've read the first two books of De Revolutionibus, I can say, boy was I right.
This is the first of several posts about my experience of reading Nicholaus Copernicus in the original (er, translation). So first, let me point out the things I found "radically strange" about the work, with the "strangely modern" to come in the next post:
Radically strange: Instructions for how to build an astrolabe. Vast tables of star locations,…
cmooney | February 14, 2009
Sane people right now are celebrating Valentine's Day.
I am holed up trying to read Nicholas Copernicus's On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium). Having been an official student of the history of science for two weeks now, and not feeling particularly satisfied with my progress, I've decided it is far past time for me to cast aside Ptolemaic and Aristotelian things, and enter the modern world.
I'll have plenty more to say about the experience of reading Copernicus once I've gotten somewhere. And after Copernicus, it's Galileo. But for now, here's an…
rallain | January 30, 2009Buzz Out Loud is one of my favorite tech podcasts. Unfortunately, I am a little behind in the episodes. However, in the episode 900 there was an email from a listener regarding LHC and black holes. The emailer claims that a massive black hole would mess up Earth's orbit. This is not quite true.
I was getting ready to make a lengthy post about how black holes work, but did a way more awesomer job than I could do. Stefan and Bee describe some very important points:
First, black holes created in the Large Hadron Collider are based on a theory that has not really been verified. So, it might…
tqa | January 29, 2009
Over at the Bad Astronomy Blog, Phil highlights a picture of one of our neighboring galaxies. If you don't click on any other link today, you should go look at this one - it's absolutely gorgeous.
As part of the ongoing International Year of Astronomy celebration, the Hubble Telescope folks are letting people vote on a target. There are a bunch of choices, they all look good, and I can't wait to see the final result. Go vote.
rallain | January 22, 2009Question: When is the Sun directly overhead? (assume you are in the United States of America)
Common Answers:
Everyday at noon.
On the summer solstice (June 21ish)
Answer: For continental U.S. the answer is never. Since the Earth's rotation axis is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to its orbital motion around the Sun, one would have to be less than 23.5 degrees above or below the equator to have the Sun pass directly overhead (once per year).
Here is a video I made over the course of a day in Louisiana. Note that it rains and then the clay softens the pen falls. At the end, my dog hit the…
grrlscientist | January 1, 2009tags: life cycle of a star, astronomy, physics, education, streaming video
The average star 'lives' for roughly 12 billion years. This wonderful video provides us with a visual glimpse into the entire life cycle of a G-type star, like our sun, from birth to death [6:29]
rallain | November 22, 2008One of things I like to think about in science is "how do we know that?" It is interesting how one thing builds on another. This is a story of how the Greeks estimated the distance from the Earth to the Sun (an important idea in the development of the model of the solar system). I like this story because it is not too complicated. In fact, one could easily reproduce these measurements themselves. So, here is what I will talk about:
Measuring the size of the Earth.
Determining the distance from the Earth to the moon and the size of the moon.
Calculating the distance (and size) to the Sun.…
amillikan | November 13, 2008Using the Hubble Telescope, scientists have successfully viewed a planet revolving around a different star than our beloved Sun for the first time. The planet has been dubbed Fomalhaut b and revolves around the star Fomalhaut, the brightest star in the constellation Piscis calculated to reside about 25 light years away. ScienceBlogger Steinn Sigurðsson broke the news on Dynamics of Cats, and has posted multiple images of the planet.
pontiff | November 13, 2008Direct imaging of extra solar planets. The cat dynamicist has the details. (because, linking, I've heard, is good.) Fomalhaut b, a nice name.
When I was on the road to becoming an astrophysicist, as a young grad student, I remember thinking how cool it would be to join the planet hunters. I mean being able to say that in your research you "discovered a planet" well how cool would that be. Alas I caught the quantum bug and so all those days spent studying the interstellar tedium are now lost, like tears in the rain.
rallain | August 24, 2008I can't believe there is still all this talk about what to call Pluto. Can't we just move on? In an effort to help, I have summoned the Zombie Feynman to get his words on the subject. This is what he said:
"We (my father and I) used to go up to the Catskill Mountains for vacations. In New York, you go the Catskill Mountains for vacations. The poor husbands had to go to work during the week, but they would come rushing out for weekends and stay with their families. On the weekends, my father would take me for walks at night. He often took me for walks, and we learned all about the sky, and…
pontiff | July 29, 2008Someone at Caltech's PR office sure was having fun:
Caltech Astronomers Describe the Bar Scene at the Beginning of the Universe
PASADENA, Calif.--Bars abound in spiral galaxies today, but this was not always the case. A group of 16 astronomers, led by Kartik Sheth of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, has found that bars tripled in number over the past seven billion years, indicating that spiral galaxies evolve in shape.
Oh, I can tell you all about the bar scene near Caltech. Dive bar: The Colorado. Beer for graduate students: Lucky Baldwin's. Quantum…
grrlscientist | July 19, 2008tags: peeponaut, astropeep, marshmallow peeps, science, space travel, astronomy, Adler Planetarium
Astropeep strength training program, part of the selection process for identifying those marshmallow peeps who had "the right fluff". These special peeps would be recruited as peeponauts who would be sent into space on a weather balloon.
Image: Adler Planetarium [larger view].
Like most scientists, I am a big fan of marshmallow peeps, which are my favorite experimental animals. So I was thrilled when a friend sent me an absolutely adorable story about a peeponaut -- that special marshmallow…
ksharpe | July 5, 2008The ScienceBlogs.de team interviews Nobel Prize winner Riccardo Giacconi (Physics, 2002) at the Nobel Laureate Meetings in Lindau, Germany, held June 29 through July 4th. In it, Giacconi discusses the discovery of a new class of objects, X-ray stars.
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Onsite CoverageTHE 2008 MEETINGS OF NOBEL LAUREATES IN LINDAU
Courtesy of scienceblogs.de | More Coverage
The previous video in the series, an interview with Nobelist Douglas Osheroff, can be found here.
vhughes | May 26, 2008After a 10-month, 420-million-mile journey, NASA's Phoenix probe touched down on Mars' northern Arctic Circle at 4:53 p.m. Pacific Time Sunday, becoming the first to ever successfully reach a polar region of the Red Planet. And boy are the ScienceBloggers excited!
For the next three months, Phoenix will dig into the soil to find out if its composition is--or was ever--suitable for life.
Humans have wondered about finding life "out there" for millennia. What do you think--is it possible?
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esiegel | May 23, 2008We need one of those propaganda videos, like the Marines had when I was a kid:
Seriously, I remember watching that and actually thinking it would be awesome to be a Marine! (And for those of you who don't know me that well, I loathe armed conflict.)
Well, I'm a scientist. Can't we do anything cool to attract people to be interested in it, or help support it? Baby steps, folks, baby steps. And Duncan Forbes at Swinburne in Australia (where I almost moved when I was offered a position with them last February) has composed a how-to guide entitled:
So You Want To Be A Professional Astronomer!
It…
esiegel | May 20, 2008Some of you who've been following astronomy for awhile might remember this report, where a group of astronomers reported finding a giant "void" in the Universe.
What is a void? Well, galaxies are distributed pretty randomly, but because of gravity, they cluster together. A small example is our local group which looks like this,
and a larger example is the Virgo cluster, which is about 1,000 times as massive as our local group, and looks like this:
Well, a void is the opposite of a cluster, where you have a large volume of space that's simply empty of galaxies and matter. This press release…