Category Archives: astronomy

I, For One, Welcome Our New Arsenic-Replacing-Phosphorus-In-DNA Overlords

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mono_lakeYeah! This is just the sort of thing I’d hoped that we (human beings) would find soon, in order to strengthen the idea that in looking for forms of life elsewhere, we be not just open to the idea that the basic chemistry for that life may be very different from what we are used to on earth (easier said than done), but that it is maybe even probable that this is what we could find first. Now, given the news today (announced by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her team in a NASA press conference today and reported on in a paper to appear in Science) we know that it is not just a theoretical construction, but already a reality right here on earth. The researchers have identified a life form with a striking difference. The bacterium (which lives in Mono Lake – see NASA image above right) has DNA (and some other important complex molecules) with a major difference from all other forms we know. phosphorus has been replaced by arsenic!

periodic_tableThis works, by the way, because arsenic is in the same chemical family as phosphorus, being directly below it in the periodic table. Note that this is exactly the sort of thing that has been speculated about a lot in the classic days of science/speculative fiction concerned with alien life, remember? :- Silicon based life forms instead of the Carbon based ones that we know and love on earth. Silicon is again in the same column as […] Click to continue reading this post →

Passing Star People

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John Williams in RehearsalYou might not know the name Maurice Murphy, but I am certain that you are likely to know – and maybe even be very familiar with – his work. His is the principal trumpet playing the lead themes in very many films with music by John Williams. I have for a long time been very impressed with how so many of those themes trip so easily off the tongue (physical or mental) and seem to fit together so well (just hum the Star Wars theme, and then follow it by the Superman theme, then the Indiana Jones theme, and so on). A lot of this is due to the fact that Williams (like most good composers) is a master at recycling and modifying, creating a cluster of much loved (deservedly) themes that accompany some of our favourite movie-going memories, but I now think that the other reason is that you’re hearing them all played by the same voice! That voice is the playing of Maurice Murphy, the truly wonderful trumpeter who Williams would specifically request to play the lead on recordings of his film music. Murphy died recently, and you can dig a bit more about him and explore what I’ve been telling you further by going to the London Symphony Orchestra’s site devoted to him […] Click to continue reading this post →

Perseids Galore!

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perseidmap_stripThe Perseid meteors are reported to be really good viewing this year.

As I said a few years ago in anticipation of a similar nice Perseid meteor shower:

Concerned that you don’t know enough astronomy? No idea in any amount of detail where these constellations are? Don’t worry! Basically, all you really have to do is find a place where the sky is reasonably dark, look [North] East, and wait. As your eyes acclimatise to the dark, and with a bit of luck, you’ll see some, and zero in on where to look.

There’s more at the NASA news site, from which I borrowed the image above. The peak is around these few nights (12th August or so) and there’s no moon, so if you’ve got some dark (ish) skies and a bit of patience, you should see some. Yes, this includes viewers in cities. Don’t be pessimistic. You might be able to find patches of dark enough sky, especially if you can go near to an edge of the city, or a park, and look away from the bulk of the lights. It does not have to be perfect viewing […] Click to continue reading this post →

National Academy

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As part of a report on a study (or several studies) I was writing last week (because evidently I can’t find enough things to keep me from making progress on the Project), I was including some data on the geographic distribution of members of the National Academy of Sciences within the US. The focus was on Physics, Astronomy, and Applied Physical Sciences. It was rather interesting, binned by state, especially if you grab the columns and tell Numbers to throw up a graph of it all. The concentrations are striking. I wondered whether the concentrations were simply following population, at least roughly, and so I went elsewhere and grabbed the population numbers for each state and ran that into a chart as well. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to the results. I find them interesting. Look at California, Texas, and Florida, for example. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Bad Universe

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Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy has announced what his super secret project has been. It’s a new science TV show for the Discovery Channel! It is called “Phil Plait’s Bad Universe”, and I imagine it’ll be a lot of fun and quite informative. There’s a trailer and some of his thoughts about the show here. I could not work out when it is going to air, so keep your eyes peeled*.

Enjoy!

-cvj

*Sorry. That’s such a dreadful image that phrase can sometimes project…
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Planck Matters

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You can read a bit about the work of my colleague Elena Pierpaoli and her postdocs and students in this article in one of USC’s in-house publications. It focuses on the Planck observatory (image right from NASA/ESA), which we’ve discussed here before. (Recall the launch?) There’s a lot of exciting physics about the very young universe to be discovered as more data from the mission get gathered and analyzed.

Enjoy the article!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Venus at Midday!

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[Update: That really hurt. Hard on the neck. And could not even find the moon… I think there’s left over moisture haze high up. 🙁 ]

I just learned from Phil’s Bad Astronomy blog that apparently there’s a great opportunity to see Venus right in the middle of the day, and today is rather optimum for it. I’m going to try and see if it works. At about 1:00pm (sorry those of you for whom the sun has already gone way past that), look for the sun and then the thin crescent moon will be about three fist-widths to the left of that (if in the Northern hemisphere – right otherwise). Venus will be visible just to the right of that crescent. Phil has a diagram up on his site, here. This is all supposed to be possible with the naked eye, and I imagine you can help things a lot by holding your palm up against the sun to stop the brightness from that direction, and then waiting a bit for your eyes to relax into the viewing of the area of the sky I mentioned. Phil also mentioned binoculars. I’d seriously suggest trying without them, if you can, since accidentally looking at the sun with them is something I want to strongly urge you to avoid. (If you must use them, put something like a building or a large tree trunk in front of the sun and don’t change your footing…)

Good luck! I’m going to try in a couple of hours. Let me know how it works out for you, if you like!

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Sun Spotting

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[caption id="attachment_6764" align="center" width="499" caption="(From NASA:) A full-disk multiwavelength extreme ultraviolet image of the sun taken by SDO on March 30, 2010. False colors trace different gas temperatures. Reds are relatively cool (about 60,000 Kelvin, or 107,540 F); blues and greens are hotter (greater than 1 million Kelvin, or 1,799,540 F). Credit: NASA"](From NASA:) A full-disk multiwavelength extreme ultraviolet image of the sun taken by SDO on March 30, 2010. False colors trace different gas temperatures. Reds are relatively cool (about 60,000 Kelvin, or 107,540 F); blues and greens are hotter (greater than 1 million Kelvin, or 1,799,540 F). Credit: NASA[/caption]

You may recall that recently NASA launched a new craft, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, to explore the science of the sun by making measurements of unprecedented resolution. Well, images have been released from it for the first time and they are truly spectacular! The one above is featured prominently in the extensive […] Click to continue reading this post →

Babies!

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hobys_rosette_05 This is a wonderful infrared image (please click on it for lovely larger view) of a region of star formation called the Rosette Nebula.

It comes from the Herschel space observatory, which was launched (along with the Planck observer) by the European Space Agency (ESA) almost a year ago, you may recall.

From the ESA website, here’s a bit more about what this is: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Mount Wilson Open For Business!

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Good News Everyone!

flames near mount wilson seen from atwaterYou may recall the terrible fires of last year in the San Gabriel mountains, and the scare about whether the Mount Wilson facility might have been overrun by flames. There were Tolkienesque scenes of flaming mountains, dramatic battles on mountaintops, and so forth. No Balrogs were involved (a far as I know), but it was nail-biting enough for many.

One of the fallouts (fallsout?) of this was that the public access to the Observatory needed to be suspended. This included the ability to reserve access to the famous 60 inch telescope for your own use for an evening, an activity that I have highly recommended (from first hand experience) here on the blog.

Well, I can happily announce (I heard this from my friend Shelley Bonus who works […] Click to continue reading this post →

Occult Activity Tonight!

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rws_zetaophocc1Oh yes. Occult. Exciting right? Those of us in LA and some other areas (apparently points in Nevada, Idaho, and Western Montana, and the cities of Calgary and Edmonton) will see have the chance to see something quite remarkable if we stay up until 03:34 Pacific time. I learned this from Phil’s blog. You can find out more from Sky and Telescope (that’s their figure on the right). The event is this. If you stare at the star ζ (Zeta) Ophiuchi, which is visible to the naked eye, it will go dim for about eight seconds. Why, because an asteroid (824 Anastasia) will pass directly in front of it. You can’t see the asteroid directly, since it is too small and too dim, but nevertheless its presence between you and the distant star will be enough to make it go dim for a bit. Isn’t that wonderful? Have a go!

This remarkable effect (called occultation – hence the sneaky blog post title: the key root meaning here is “hidden”), while it might seem rather mundane in some ways (although you’re seeing the effect of an asteroid with your own eyes!) is extremely powerful in astronomy. It is a great way, for example, of detecting planets orbiting other stars! You’re familiar with occultations already actually. When the moon moves […] Click to continue reading this post →

New LHC Physics Phase Begins!

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cern-first-physicsWell, here we go. It has been a little over 20 years since I’ve been actively working in this field and have been hearing about the promise of this machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and now it is really here, working, and colliding protons at an energy much higher than any previous experiment, promising us to a glimpse of new aspects of how the universe works. It is not guaranteed, of course, but there’s a great deal of hope, and so much of what we know strongly suggests that there’s going to be some exciting things to learn. See the list of related posts below for several bits of background on the LHC, or go to CERN’s website. [Image above right -click for larger view- is a CERN-supplied montage of data/images from the various experiments at the LHC. Caption: 7 TeV collision events seen today by the LHC’s four major experiments (clockwise from top-left: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb).]

Two of the things foremost in people’s minds are on one hand the Higgs (the particle or particles that ultimately give masses to the elementary particles that make up the […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Spring Flower

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wise2010-008-med It is Springtime, and it is not unheard of for me to have pictures of flowers, often from my garden, up on the blog (see here). This time, I have a picture of a flower from a different garden. It is the one you can see by looking up. If you look up with the right equipment, you can even see new growth (just like you can in Springtime gardens). In this case, the equipment is WISE (the spacecraft launched in December, recall) with its ability to survey the sky in the infrared part of the spectrum, and the new growth is a cluster of new stars, called the Berkeley 59 cluster. Looks a bit like a rosebud, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Meteorite Men!

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meteorite_men Did you watch Meteorite Men last week? If not, you can probably catch a repeat. It is a new series, airing 9pm ET/PT Wednesday nights, on the Science Channel about two guys who search for meteorites. Check your local listings for times. (Photo cheekily snapped from their site. Copyright aerolite meteorites.)

I learned about it from Bob Melisso, my producer/filmmaker friend (and occasional collaborator: see here, here and here) who made the pilot and is the supervising producer for the series. From […] Click to continue reading this post →