A bunch of links about recent happenings at everybody’s favorite space agency:/p> Steinn has links to dark energy proposals. Science and Reason on the “Beyond Einstein” program. Those little scamps are having another mysterious press conference tomorrow, to announce something about dark energy. Steinn suggests it has something to do with this guy’s research, but… Continue reading NASA Updates
Category: Astronomy
Pretty Pictures from Outer Space
Matt McIrvin reminds me to look at the nifty Saturn pictures on the Cassini-Huygens Mission page. The hot image of the moment is the big storm at the south pole, but there’s lots of good stuff, like this: (Explanation of the ring shot here.)
Good News from Outer Space
NASA has scheduled a mission to service the Hubble. This should keep the space telescope flying and producing great science until 2013 or so. Obviously, there are a lot of caveats in there– the mission isn’t scheduled until 2008, so the Hubble needs to last that long, and there can’t be major delays or disasters… Continue reading Good News from Outer Space
Bad Graphs
The silliest graph I’ve ever seen presented in public looked something like this: It was an after-dinner talk at a DAMOP meeting a few years back, and the speaker was somebody associated with the Hubble Space Telescope. I don’t recall what was being plotted, but he talked for a while about ho proud they were… Continue reading Bad Graphs
No Love for Observers?
Another weird Nobel note: When we were talking about this yesterday at work, a colleague noted that this is one of several prizes awarded for observations based on radio astronomy (Penzias and Wilson, and a couple of things to do with pulsars), but we couldn’t think of any given for optical astronomy. There’s even the… Continue reading No Love for Observers?
COBE Nobel Follow-Up
The Paper of Record provides the Story of Record for yesterday’s Nobel Prize in Physics for Mather and Smoot, including recent photographs of both. One of my favorite bits of the 1997 Nobel was seeing the media circus that went on around the Prize– I’ll put some amusing anecdotes into another post. All the usual… Continue reading COBE Nobel Follow-Up
Dynamite Money for COBE
Hot off the presses: The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George Smoot “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.” This is recent enough that they don’t even have much on the Nobel site, but happily for me, it’s something I know a… Continue reading Dynamite Money for COBE
That, My Liege, Is How We Know the Earth to Be Banana Shaped
The AIP news feed features a story about a paper suggesting that the universe is ellipsoidal. Or at least, that it was, back in the early days. The work is based on the famous WMAP picture of the microwave background (and no, it’s not because the picture is oblong): As you know, Bob, the picture… Continue reading That, My Liege, Is How We Know the Earth to Be Banana Shaped
Stupid Infinite Universe!
The New York Times has a story about yet another weird extrasolar planet, this one a gigantic fluffy ball of gas bigger than Jupiter, but less dense than water: While gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are made primarily of hydrogen and helium, they also possess rocky cores and crushing pressures within that squeeze the… Continue reading Stupid Infinite Universe!
Pick a Definition, Already!
This morning’s Times bring a story saying that astronomers are still dithering about Pluto. The latest plan would create a new category of “dwarf planets,” and presumably get the International Astronomical Union eaten by Cthullu. My immediate response is: “Jesus, people, make up your frickin’ minds!” Look, the joke is over, ok? The Pluto story… Continue reading Pick a Definition, Already!