Category: Astronomy

Finding Extrasolar Planets with Lasers

Cartoon representation of a frequency comb, from one of my papers.

On Twitter Sunday morning, the National Society of Black Physicsts account retweeted this: Using Lasers to Lock Down #Exoplanet Hunting #Space http://t.co/0TN4DDo7LF — ✨The Solar System✨ (@The_SolarSystem) September 28, 2014 I recognized the title as a likely reference to the use of optical frequency combs as calibration sources for spectrometry, which is awesome stuff. Unfortunately,… Continue reading Finding Extrasolar Planets with Lasers

The Edge of the Sky by Roberto Trotta

I get a fair number of books to review, but I’m often pretty bad about writing them up in a timely manner. Of course, most of them are well over 70 pages long, which is why I’ve managed to turn around Roberto Trotta’s The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the… Continue reading The Edge of the Sky by Roberto Trotta

Throwback Thursday

Me by the entrance stone to the Newgrange passage tomb. Photo by Kate Nepveu.

OK, the photo above is a recent picture of me– yesterday, in fact. But the spiral-carved rock I’m standing next to was carved that way a bit more than five thousand years ago, so that ought to count as a throwback… We’ve been in Dublin the last few days, and on Thursday we took a… Continue reading Throwback Thursday

What Scientists Should Learn From Economists

Right around the time I shut things down for the long holiday weekend, the Washington Post ran this Joel Achenbach piece on mistakes in science. Achenbach’s article was prompted in part by the ongoing discussion of the significance (or lack thereof) of the BICEP2 results, which included probably the most re-shared pieces of last week… Continue reading What Scientists Should Learn From Economists

Son of Interstellar Laser Communications

I didn’t plan to do a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the optics of sending messages with lasers, but then I starting idly thinking about detection, prompted in part by a bunch of conversations with my summer students about single-photon detectors. which led to scribbling on the back of an envelope, which led to Googling,… Continue reading Son of Interstellar Laser Communications

Interstellar Laser Communications

Lunar laser ranging beams launched from telescopes at the Goddard Space Flight Center (image from NASA http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/lsso2.html )

In the comments to yesterday’s grumpy post about the Fermi paradox, makeinu raises the idea that advanced aliens would be using more targeted communications than we do: On the point about electromagnetic communications: even we are now using lasers to target communications with space, because it’s simply more efficient and reliable. It’s also basically impossible… Continue reading Interstellar Laser Communications

Fermi Fallacies

I’ve seen a bunch of people linking approvingly to this piece about the “Fermi paradox,” (the question of why we haven’t seen any evidence of other advanced civilizations) and I can’t quite understand why. The author expends a good deal of snark taking astronomers and physicists to task for constructing elaborate solutions to Fermi paradox… Continue reading Fermi Fallacies

A Rock the Size of Jupiter?

Cassini-Huygens image of Jupiter, from Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jupiter_by_Cassini-Huygens.jpg

For some reason, the topic of really big rocks came up at dinner the other night, and SteelyKid declared that she wanted to find “A rock as big as the solar system.” We pointed out that that was pretty much impossible, more or less by definition, rocks being sub-parts of the solar system. “OK, how… Continue reading A Rock the Size of Jupiter?