For those of you willing to stay up late, there will be a total eclipse of the moon on August 28 visible to various extents over most of the western hemisphere and some of east Asia. The show is a little late for me (some might call it early) as I’m on the east coast… Continue reading Turn Around
Category: Astronomy
Ralph Asher Alpher, 1921-2007
I am sorry to report the passing of Ralph Alpher, of the famous “Alpher-Bethe-Gamow” paper. I don’t know many details, but he’s been in poor health for some time, so this is sad but not surprising news. Ralph Alpher was an astrophysicist and cosmologist whose thesis work with George Gamow on the origin of the… Continue reading Ralph Asher Alpher, 1921-2007
Water, Water, Everywhere
There’s a new paper in Nature announcing the detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of a “hot Jupiter” orbiting a distant star. There’s also a story on Physics Web and a press release from the Spitzer Telescope group, if you’d like some stuff you can read without a subscription to Nature. The idea here… Continue reading Water, Water, Everywhere
Serious News from Outer Space
There have been a number of true and non-silly stories about astronomy and cosmology recently, which I’ll collect here as penance for the earlier silly post: Some theorists at Penn State have constructed a Loop Quantum Gravity model that they claim allows for an oscillating universe with no singularities. In one of those psychology-of-the-press moments,… Continue reading Serious News from Outer Space
Bush Commutes Pluto’s Sentence
WASHINGTON, DC (UP News Service)– In a move that supporters say shows sensitivity and compassion, President Bush today commuted the sentence of the planet Pluto, which was demoted to a “dwarf planet” by the International Astronomical Union in August of 2006. Under the President’s new order, Pluto will once more be regarded as a full-fledged… Continue reading Bush Commutes Pluto’s Sentence
Good News From Outer Space
Steinn checks in from his Mediterranean vacation with not one, not two, but three reports from the conference on Extreme Solar Systems, and a hint of maybe more to come. The big news here, as far as I can see, is that they’re starting to find more low mass planets, and more planets with long… Continue reading Good News From Outer Space
Frequency Combs and Astrophysics
Clifford Johnson is pointing to a pair of stories about extrasolar planets. One is a news piece about the “flood” of new discoveries, and the other is a Top 10 list from space.com (warning: irritating web design). This provides a good excuse to roll out a blog suggestion from Ron Walsworth, who pointed out a… Continue reading Frequency Combs and Astrophysics
Cheery Friday Thought
Courtesy of EurekAlert: physicists Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer from Vanderbilt University predict that trillions of years into the future, the information that currently allows us to understand how the universe expands will have disappeared over the visible horizon. What remains will be “an island universe” made from the… Continue reading Cheery Friday Thought
Life Cycle of Science PR
One of the fun things about EurekAlert is that it allows you to trace the full life cycle of the publicization of science in a way that used to be impossible for a regular person. For example, take the recent “Ring of Dark Matter” story. First, there’s a rumor of a result. This first stage… Continue reading Life Cycle of Science PR
Thrilling Tales of Astrophysics
Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll is pining for the good old days: I’m going through one of my “I would kill for some new SF” phases, SF in this case being defined in a narrow and idiosyncratic way. In particular, I want the modern version of those old SF stories where SF writers, having… Continue reading Thrilling Tales of Astrophysics