Astronomy
drorzel | February 10, 2006The next experiment in the Top Eleven is a set of observations, not an experiment.
Who: Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), an American astronomer, and the guy the Hubble Space Telescope is named after.
When: He was nominated for two related but different discoveries which were announced in 1924 and 1929.
What: Hubble's most famous work concerns galaxies: first, he proved that they were, well, distant galaxies, and then he showed that they were receding from us with a velocity proportional to their distance, which is the first piece of evidence leading to the Big Bang model of the universe. (More after…
drorzel | February 7, 2006There was an article about physics blogs a little while back in Physics World, that didn't mention me by name, but did link to the Steelypips site. It mostly talks up the informal information exchange side of things.
In that spirit, here are some things I found via physics blog (mostly through Mixed States (after the cut):
If you were wondering when to expect your pony, Steinn Sigurdsson at Dynamics of Cats has an exhaustive analysis of the budget requests of various science agencies (start with that link, and work your way up through the more recent posts). Verdict: no pony for you!
Former…
drorzel | January 31, 2006Via Kieran Healy an example of the happy coexistence of science and religion: The Vatican Observatory. I particularly like Kieran's comment regarding the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope:
I think that's just fantastic--like something out of Phillip Pullman. Is it too much to hope for the Vatican Superconducting Supercollider, which would once and for all resolve the question of how many angels would be killed if a stream of particles were smashed into the head of a pin?
I was already aware of the Vatican Observatory, thanks to Brother Guy Consolmagno, planetary scientist, Jesuit, and…
drorzel | January 25, 2006Some interesting astrophysics news this week, from Nature: scientists have used "microlensing" to discover a extrasolar planet only five times Earth's mass:
Planet OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb looks much more like home. It lies about 390 million kilometres from its star: if it were inside our Solar System, the planet would sit between Mars and Jupiter.
It takes ten years for the planet to orbit its parent star, a common-or-garden red dwarf that lies about 28,000 light years from Earth, close to the centre of our Galaxy.
Of course, it's not quite time to start buying tickets for the colony ships: at…