Category Archives: astronomy

The Universe On TV

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Something funny happened to me last night. I was reviewing some television programmes that my system had recorded earlier, by fast-forwarding through them. In particular, I was skimming (I’ll admit) through an episode of a series that I was wondering whether to do a quick blog post about, in order to remind you to watch it. It’s the History Channel’s venture into science programming called “The Universe”, which has been running for some time now. Well, I was zipping through the one about stellar evolution called something like “The Life and Death a Star”…. and someone familiar popped on and off the screen. It was me. Took me a few beats to register full recognition, which was amusing.

I’d forgotten that I was to appear in this episode. Or, better put, I was not aware I would be in this one. I thought the ones I contributed to would air later, like next month or something. I thought there was a separate episode on neutron stars, but I see now that they included it all in an episode about the whole life of a star, which makes sense. (I chatted a bit about the filming of it in an earlier post.)

Anyway, as I was going to say (whether or not I was in it) was that it’s a nice series so far, and so consider having a look at it. If you have not been watching it, I imagine […] Click to continue reading this post →

Water World, II

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spitzer telescope team artists renditionI’ve not had time to look at this closely, but there’s been some remarkable news about the possible detection of water in the atmosphere of an extra-solar planet. Wow!

Like I said, I’ve not a lot of time to look at this (Nature paper here), but thought you should know. I can point you to a press release by the Spitzer Space Telescope team, which starts: […] Click to continue reading this post →

There Will Be No Dawn

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Well, not until September at the earliest, that is. (Oh! That feels so good to have finally been able to use that as a post title!)

Dawn concept image: William K. Hartmann Courtesy of UCLAWhat am I talking about? NASA’s Dawn mission, of course. Dawn is a spacecraft that will go to the asteroid belt to study more closely the two largest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta. (Image right is an artist’s impression of the spacecraft. credit: William K. Hartmann, Courtesy of UCLA) In addition to the mission page linked above, there’s also a nice Wikipedia article about it here.

Last Thursday was to be the launch, but there were problems due to weather (mostly) – you don’t want to be fueling the tanks of the launch vehicle when there is high risk of lightning, as there was that day. There’s more about the matters on the NASA site, and also and Amara’s post on Scientific Blogging.

Actually, her post there is extremely informative about the goals of the mission, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Otherworldly Top Ten!

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extra solar planet GlieseAfter reading an article about how the “trickle of planet discoveries” as become a “flood” -referring to the many discoveries of extrasolar planets that are being announced these days, since they first started being discovered in 1995 1988/9 (there are more than 200 known now)- I looked at space.com’s “top ten most intriguing extrasolar planets”.


[Update: First detection of extrasolar planets is probably more accurately to be dated 1988/9. The first confirmed one was in 1995, but the planet Gamma_Cephei_Ab, detected in 1988(9) by two separate teams, took until 2002 to be confirmed. See e.g. here for more. Thanks commenter molliska!]

Have a look at that interesting article about the pace of discovery, and then when you’re done, peruse the top ten here. You’ll find:

  • 10: 51 Pegasi b, the first confirmed (see above update) one found, 1995;
  • 9: Epsilon Eridani b, the closest known one (only 10.5 light years away);
  • 8: the class of planemos, the extrasolar planets which are not orbiting any stars;
  • 7: SWEEPS-10, a “zippy” planet, that orbits its star every 10 hours as opposed to our sluggish 365.25 days;
  • 6: Upsilon Andromeda b, a planet which is tidally locked to its star so that it presents only one face to it all the time. So one side is always super hot, while the other is very cold;
  • 5: The youngest one known (it’s been in existence a bit less than a million years), orbiting the star Coku Tau 4;
  • 4: PSR B1620-26c, the oldest one known (12.7 billion years…wow!);
  • 3: The “shrinking one”, HD209458b, that orbits so close to its star that it’s

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Wave It Like You Just Don’t Care

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Although we care deeply. It’s just late, I’m a bit woozy as I write this, and so I’m stretching a bit for a good title. This post is about gravitational waves. More accurately, it is about a rather good BBC programme about gravitational waves: What they are, why they are important, why we care, and what we’re doing to detect them. It’s Melvin Bragg and some guests on the “In Our Time” prime time programme. I recommend it as a pleasant, unscripted chat which has quite a bit of good introductory information. Even if you’re a bit busy, you can listen to it while doing some other task. Go on. Also, even if you know this stuff, it’s always amusing to hear the host apparently getting terribly confused and hung up on some points while trying to get to grips with the material. I can never tell if he’s faking it because he has decided that he has to reinforce the cliché -it’s physics so it must be hard, especially at this time in the morning- or whether he’s for real at these points. Either way, it makes for a rough-and-tumble conversational feel to the programme which is not altogether disagreeable.

Anyway, the key thing is this (and you’ve probably not heard this here first): In the entire history of science, every time we’ve figured out a new way of looking up at the sky, we’ve revolutionized our understanding of the universe. We’ve every right to expect the same of gravitational waves, once the technology matures. It’s exciting just thinking about it!

ligo detector

I’ll end with some relevant things to look at. Above is part of the LIGO detector (photo from NASA’s website). Here’s a link to the LISA detector that everyone hopes will […] Click to continue reading this post →

Poor Pluto!

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Remember our discussions of Pluto’s demotion/reclassification? (Lots of link reminders at bottom of post.) Well, here’s a sad (and amusing) image* created by artist Mathias Pedersen:

poor pluto mathias pedersen


You can see a high resolution version of this image here. Don’t forget to look at more of of the graphic art of Mathias Pedersen**.

Poor Pluto indeed!

(Take some time to appreciate how good a job he’s done on colours and other features of the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Categorically Not! – Recycling

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The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 13th May – Mother’s Day! (USA). The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series – started and run by science writer K. C. Cole – of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See the links below for some recent descriptions (and even video) of previous events.

The theme this month is recycling. Here’s the description from the site:

Everything gets recycled: newspapers and banana peels, the air you breathe and the earth you walk on; some would even say our souls. Our bodies, we know, are made from materials recycled in generations of stars. The mix of genes that makes us who we are is a stew recycled by long lines ancestors—something nice to remember on Mother’s Day. Artists recycle everything from concrete objects to abstract ideas. New musical forms—like new scientific theories—are inevitably reconstructed from pieces of the past.

We’ll start with the ancestors of us all: the stars. An astrophysicist with the Carnegie Observatories, Alan Dressler uses both the Hubble Space Telescope […] Click to continue reading this post →

Corot Scores!

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corot's planetSo the planet hunter Corot has found its first extra-solar planet. It is a bit bigger than Jupiter, and orbiting awfully close to its sun-like star. Artist’s impression, from ESA, to the right. Click for larger.

From a BBC article by Rebecca Morelle:

The new body is called Corot-exo-1b and can be found 1,500 light-years away in the constellation of Monoceros.

also:

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Another Earth?

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Spotted on the BBC News website: A story about the discovery of an earth-like (or at least more Earth-like than Jupiter-like) planet in the “Goldilocks” zone of a star a mere 20 light years or so away!

another earthThe planet orbits the faint star Gliese 581, which is 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra.

Scientists made the discovery using the Eso 3.6m Telescope in Chile.

They say the benign temperatures on the planet mean any water there could exist in liquid form, and this raises the chances it could also harbour life.

“We have estimated that the mean temperature of this ‘super-Earth’ lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid,” explained Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory, lead author of the scientific paper reporting the result.

“Moreover, its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth’s radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky – like our Earth – or covered with oceans.”

Reading a bit further on: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Red Square

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Have a look at this lovely image of the Red Square nebula:

red square nebula

It’s been making the news recently because (in addition to being a rather strikingly beautiful image – the colours should not be taken too seriously, as it is actually an infrared image) it is an extremely symmetrical object. Surprisingly and unprecedentedly so, apparently. A nebula of this sort (with a dying star, MWC 922 […] Click to continue reading this post →

Through a Lens Darkly

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Richard Massey

Well, yesterday’s colloquium by Caltech’s Richard Massey was a lot of fun, and really excellent. When faculty, postdocs and students are all chatting about it afterwards, you know it went well. This is what a departmental colloquium is supposed to do, and it happens when subject, level of delivery and speaker all come together in just the right way.

When the news about that lovely dark matter result broke some months ago, I got in […] Click to continue reading this post →