My friend, The Universe co-contributor, and colleague Amy Mainzer (JPL) is rubbing gloved hands together in the chilly night air up at Vandenberg. Well, ok, if not this very moment, she probably will be at various points this evening and into the wee hours of the morning. The launch pad for WISE (the mission on which Amy is deputy project scientist) is set, and everything is ready to go! See my earlier post about what […] Click to continue reading this post
The skies have cleared here in Los Angeles after a sequence of remarkably rainy days – really torrential downpours that have been very enjoyable. Happily, the clearing has taken place just in time to see the Geminid meteors, which I learned are likely to be quite striking this year*. After midnight or so ought to be good for viewing, and be sure to be looking at the right part of the sky (they originate from the direction of Gemini – see the NASA map on the right). There’s more about it on NASA’s site, and be sure to look at their tips for viewing.
Don’t forget: – don’t assume that being in a large city means you can’t see anything […] Click to continue reading this post
Once again I’m excited about a new piece of machinery. This time it is a space mission again. There have been several remarkable missions launched (many in very recent years), doing all sorts of excellent science, helping us discover all sorts of things about our universe, near and far, young and old. I’ve spoken about (and sometimes followed live) the launches of some of them here on the blog, or spoken about the science results they’ve helped produce. See the graphic on the right for some of them.
Well, very soon (possibly as early as December 9th), there will be the launch of WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer! I learned from my friend, colleague and fellow presenter on History Channel’s The Universe, JPL’s Amy Mainzer, who is a senior scientist and the deputy project scientist on the WISE mission, that they made a series of exciting videos about WISE for you to learn about the science that WISE will do and how it will go about […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, I’m simply exhausted. I gave my second two-hour lecture today and drained my energy resources quite a bit. This is after an early(ish) start to the morning (7:30am) and with going late to bed last night (1:30am). A good lunch afterward helped restore things to a balance a bit, but I need to rest some more.
I’ve been modifying my lectures during the process of giving them, making adjustments for time and the kind of questions I get. This means that I end up kicking some parts to later lectures, and then trying to spend some of the afternoon writing new material, as well as on the train back to my hotel, and in the evenings.
Well, briefly in the evenings so far. That is because last night was set aside for a tour of some of the tapas you can find in the old part of Madrid. I had the presence of mind to go back to my hotel and get a short nap first, and then met my gracious […] Click to continue reading this post
I had a lot of time to kill in Philadelphia’s International Airport on Sunday (I was changing planes), and I must say that is not a bad airport in which to be in such a situation. I like the city a lot, and so am not surprised that its main airport is to my liking. First of all, who can not like an airport that supplies you with… (you’re expecting free wireless, and they had that, sure, but no, I mean)… with… Rocking Chairs!!!
I saw some excellent art as well. And lots of displays of various types. I’ll share a couple more in a post or two, but look at some of the pieces I snapped pictures of for you. They are done with packing tape! Yes, packing tape. That brown thin stuff you know well… It was part of a series of scenes from noir films, rendered in this way. Very effective indeed, I felt. The series name is “Tape Noir”.
Another meteor shower is almost upon us. Next week it is the turn of the Leonids. Now, as the name implies, these have their apparent origin in the constellation Leo. So how visible it will be for you, if you live in an urban area, might depend upon Leo’s position in the sky relative to your local bright city lights at the time of viewing. But it is worth trying. Look for a public park, rooftop, or other open area of sky. Parks can be better for pulling you away from some of the immediate lights, and then sit still and look at one patch of sky steadily for a while (generally in the right direction!) To get guidance, have […] Click to continue reading this post
Aha! So you were thinking the mission last month was a bit of a failure, right? Because there was no big splash (literally) of a plume for the press to gush about? I’m talking about the October LCROSS mission on October 9th that smashed an impactor onto the moon’s surface (at the Cabeus crater) to create a cloud of dust for analysis. I remember people thinking, encouraged by various reports, that the event was rather a damp squib, since it did not produce a Hollywood-style flash and plume. See an NPR report on the mission here from back then.
Well, science is known for being able to carry on steadily even if there are no overt special effects and a catchy soundtrack. Today, NASA announced that their analysis of the data produced from measuring the dust cloud’s properties has shown very definite signs of water (confirming and strengthening the results accumulated by other missions (India’s Chandrayaan-1 and NASA’s Deep […] Click to continue reading this post
You may recall my mentioning a desert trip to shoot something for TV, some time back. One done at precisely the wrong time of year. And to Death Valley, one of the hottest places on earth, to boot. Well, I meant to mention that the episode of the History Channel’s The Universe that the shoot was for aired a week or two ago and it was really excellent. It was entitled “Liquid Universe” and it was a rather beautiful and thoroughly pleasant episode exploring the role of liquids in our universe, a matter not often raised in questions of astronomy except when it comes to matters of water from time to time. This was not about water per se, but rather the whole matter of material that flows and the role it plays in diverse areas of the solar system and perhaps the universe at large. I was using sand to demonstrate how sometimes there are surprising places where you can find fluid/liquid behaviour, and mentioned some of the new phases of matter found in the context, for example, of quarks and gluons at RHIC. (I’ve spoken about that here a number of times in the context of some of my research. See the archives.)
It was an excellent episode and another example of how one can take a topic under the “The Universe” heading and showcase lots of exciting science quite accessibly […] Click to continue reading this post
This is a photo I borrowed from Dara Norman’s blog post over on NSBP’s Vector. It is about the star party held over at hhe White House in October of this year. It looks like it was a lot of fun! Er, you may recognize one or two of those people at the telescope…
Here’s a fun thing to get involved with. You can ask John Mather (2006 Physics Nobel Prize) a question on YouTube! Go and submit yours!
What might you ask him? Something about physics, or something else? Religion, art, politics? His favourite colour? If you consider asking a question, and whether you go ahead and ask it or not, feel free to mention in the comments what you might ask.
This is how to proceed (from NASA education)*: […] Click to continue reading this post
The Orionids peak today. Well, actually, they peaked a few hours ago, but I imagine there’ll still be some excellent viewing of this meteor shower the next night or two. If you’re up late or very early and out for a walk (in the pre-dawn hours), look up, stay steady for a while, and see what you can see. 
You’re looking just above Orion’s shoulder (you know Orion since I am sure you are often struck by those three equidistant stars in his belt…see the diagram on right from NASA’s site) for the apparent source of these fragments of Halley’s comet’s tail that we happen to be passing through. It is these chunks of comet-tail that enter our atmosphere and produce what we see as meteors. […] Click to continue reading this post
Friday evening was very enjoyable indeed, with some arts and literature near the start, and live scientific research toward the end. It began with a nice trundle across town on the 920 bus, when it eventually arrived (why are there still so many long gaps in the 720 and 920 schedules at crucial times of the day?) heading over to Westwood to the UCLA campus. I listened to music, read Jonathan Gold’s column in the LA Weekly, and listened to conversations around me. I got to Westwood and Wilshire after half an hour or so and walked up to campus and to Royce Hall, getting coffee on the way and even stopping in to an AT&T store to check on something. The campus was surprisingly quiet at 7:30 or so and I made my way over to Royce Hall, sending a text to a friend about later.
Besides the environmental reason I like to try to take public transport, it is also nice to plan it out and then be 15 minutes early and nice and relaxed before an event, and not be arriving all stressed due to traffic and then worried about parking and so forth. The show started late (as everything does in LA because there is a tacit assumption that everyone will be late due to traffic and parking and so people mostly were late because, of course, they know this assumption is in place. (At the 8:00pm actual official start time only about 20% of the audience that would arrive in the next 15 minutes were actually seated.)
The event, you’ll recall, was all about Margaret Atwood’s new book Year of the Flood. The author and the actors and musicians came onto the nicely decorated set and started with one of the songs specially written for the event. There is a limited set of engagements in 16 or 20 (I’ve forgotten) cities performing this reading and this is one of them. Margaret Atwood was the narrator and there were three actors reading the parts of three characters from the book. A central cult/religion that appears in the book (and the previous book with […] Click to continue reading this post
I’m sitting on the sofa watching what has so far been a really excellent episode of The Universe on the History Channel. It is entitled “Cosmic Clusters” and it has been a lovely journey (15 minutes show time gone by so far) on an imaginary spaceship ride through the galaxy looking at formations of star clusters, and discussing the process of star formation in those clusters, their birth and the conditions involved, how those conditions change as things progress, the different kinds of stars that can result, the curious case of globular clusters (M13 is pictured below, by Yuugi Kitahara) and so forth. I think it is going to go on to discuss clusters of galaxies, and clusters of those…
I’ve learned quite a bit so far from watching it, actually. It is a really lovely discussion with excellent contributions from my friend and colleague Amy Mainzer, Alex […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, I’ve been somewhat neglectful of lots of space and astronomy type noticing (here on the blog) in the last couple of months or more, but it is not unusual for me to re-balance my foci a bit as my interests and available time permits. However, I’ve been meaning to point to the quite astonishing results that are being discussed in recent days… The confirmation of what appears to be a remarkable amount of water on the moon. It is an indirect set of measurements, using spectroscopy, (using results from three separate spacecraft) and is quite an interesting story. Happily, Phil over at Bad Astronomy has just put up a rather splendid summary of the story and I’m simply going to recommend that you pop over there and have a read. (There’s also a Space.com story by Andrea Thompson that is nice too.) Very interesting in the whole thing is the discussion of how the water got there, and why it is rather more mobile than you might expect (clue: the sun might be involved).
From a story by Ian Sample in the Guardian (which also discusses and speculates […] Click to continue reading this post
I’ve been wondering why over the last day or two I’ve been getting email about various apocalyptic scenarios. I’ve now figured out why, I think. On Tuesday, several scientists, myself included, played with the idea of how to destroy the earth! Well, it was on the History Channel in an episode of the show the Universe, (it was recorded back in June and July) entitled “Ten Ways to Destroy the Earth”. Of course, these are not scenarios we envision happening any time soon, but rather an excuse to talk about various kinds of science (from spontaneous symmetry breaking and the early universe, through planetary science, solar physics, and of course black holes and more). We list various favourite ways that were chosen to be discussed, and each physicist (although they called me an astrophysicist) picks a favourite. Fun stuff.
I chose putting a huge amount of antimatter at the core of the earth and letting it […] Click to continue reading this post
