Astronomy
drorzel | March 12, 2009There's a really good article from Martin Rees in the latest issue of Seed, on the scientific challenges that won't be affected by the LHC:
The LHC hasn't yet provided its first results, the much-anticipated answers to questions we've been asking for so long. But they should surely come in 2009, bringing us closer to understanding the bedrock nature of particles, space, and timeâ--âtoward a unified theory of the basic forces. This would push forward a program that started with Newton (who showed that the force that made the apple fall was same one holding the planets in orbit), and continued…
drorzel | March 3, 2009Having complained about the lack of recognition for good physical science writing recently, it would be bad form for me not to note Dennis Overbye's story about the Kepler spacecraft in today's New York Times:
Presently perched on a Delta 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral is a one-ton spacecraft called Kepler. If all goes well, the rocket will lift off about 10:50 Friday evening on a journey that will eventually propel Kepler into orbit around the Sun. There the spacecraft's mission will be to discover Earth-like planets in Earth-like places -- that is to say, in the not-too-cold, not-too-hot,…
drorzel | February 17, 2009I no longer remember the context, but the Gravity Probe B experiment came up in discussion around the department last week, and nobody could really remember what the status of it was. It came up again during the "Physics: What We Don't Understand" panel Saturday morning, where Geoff Landis was able to supply a few details from inside NASA. It came up again during a later panel on the year in physics and astronomy, and again, Geoff was able to supply some details.
I'm not sure what the deal is, but there's evidently something in the air at the moment making people think about Gravity Probe B,…
drorzel | February 6, 2009There's a new paper from the PAMELA dark matter search out that's written up in Physics, including a link to a free version of the PDF. This paper is considerably less dramatic than one that appeared last year, leading Physics World to suggest that they're backing off the earlier claim.
What's the deal? Sean Carroll has you covered, with a detailed explanation of what's in both papers, and why the findings have been published and reported the way they have:
What happened is that the PAMELA collaboration submitted their second paper (anomalous positrons) to Nature, and their first paper (well-…
drorzel | February 3, 2009The Arxiv blog highlights a post on John Scalzi's favorite science question: the Fermi Paradox:
We have little to guide us on the question of the existence intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But the physicist Enrico Fermi came up with the most obvious question: if the universe is teeming with advanced civilizations, where are they?
The so-called Fermi Paradox has haunted SETI researchers ever since. Not least because the famous Drake equation, which attempts put a figure on the number intelligent civilisations out there now, implies that if the number of intelligent civilisations…
drorzel | January 18, 2009Looking for a way to kill some time on a Sunday morning? You could do worse than yesterday's bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation between Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer:
It's a wide-ranging conversation, covering what to expect from the Obama administration, artifical life, the possibility of life on Mars, Sanjay Gupta, and the future of science in the media. It's like a Sunday-morning talk show, only with smart people.
drorzel | January 7, 2009In response to the call for uncomfortable questions, Jason Failes asks:
What's the best evidence for the Big Bang theory?
The more I read about it (25 years ago to present), the more contrived, ad hoc, and retro-dictive it seems.
At this point, what would falsify the Big Bang theory?
What would falsify the Big Bang? Jesus Christ his own self turning up at the American Astronomical Society meeting, turning water to wine, and giving a talk titled "What Big Bang? How I Hoaxed You All."
OK, that's pretty flippant, but my understanding of the matter is that the evidence supporting the current…
drorzel | November 19, 2008A little while back, when I complained about the treatment of the multiverse in Anathem, a number of people commented to say that it wasn't all that bad. And, indeed, they were right. Compared to last night's History Channel program on "Parallel Universes," Stephenson's book is a miracle of subtle nuance, teasing out the crucial distinctions between different theories, and making them clear to the reader.
Yeesh. That was so actively irritating that I don't know where to start. So I won't-- you can read what I wrote in the earlier post, and apply it to the History Channel, ten times over.…
drorzel | November 14, 2008I got a great "Living in the future" kick out of the headline on the New York Times story about Thursday's big astronomical announcement: First Pictures Taken of Extrasolar Planets. The phrasing of the headline conjures images of pictures of clouds swirling on distant gas giants; alas, the reality is a little more mundane:
In scratchy telescope pictures released to the world Thursday in Science Express, the online version of the journal Science, the new planets appear as fuzzy dots that move slightly around their star from exposure to exposure. Astronomers who have seen the new images agreed…
drorzel | October 29, 2008Steinn asks a provocative question:
has science blogging done any good?
I can think of science policy issues where blogging has made a contribution, and the general spread of information and communication done by blogs has probably had some impact, but has any actual science been directly impacted by blogs, or discussion on blogs? I am hard pressed to think of concrete examples.
I think this is a badly framed question. That is, I think it's a mistake to define "good" for science to exclude science policy questions and the general spread of information. It's a very common mistake, mind, and…
drorzel | October 24, 2008Claims of the non-existence of dark matter are a staple of astro-kookery, but Physics World today has a news story with the provocative title "Galaxy survey casts doubts on cold dark matter," which makes it sound like people from reputable collaborations are questioning the existence of dark matter.
So what's the deal? Well, here's the explanation of the results, which come from a survey of 200-odd galaxies identified by both radio and visible telescopes:
Using data from both telescopes, the team classified the galaxies in terms of six independent properties. These were two optical radii (…
drorzel | October 12, 2008Some time back, I saw Brother Guy Consolmagno talk at Boskone, and said "You know, I should invite him to campus." For those who don't recognize the name, he's an SF fan and an astronomer (well, planetary scientist) who also happens to be a Jesuit brother. He works at the Vatican Observatory, where he is the curator of the Vatican's meteorite collection.
After we were on a panel together last year, I asked him if he'd be interested in giving us a colloquium talk sometime, and he said yes. We exchanged a few emails, and settled on October 9, namely, this past Thursday, when he was going to be…
drorzel | October 5, 2008Jennifer Ouellette's pop-science book project post and the discussionaround it reminded me that I'm really shockingly ill-read in this area. If I'm going to be writing pop-science books, I ought to have read more of them, so I've been trying to correct that.
Hence, Longitude, which I actually read a few weeks ago at the Science21 meeting, but am just getting around to blogging. Longitude is Dava Sobel's bestselling book about English clockmaker John Harrison and his forty-year sturggle to win 20,000 pounds for making a clock capable of keeping time at sea well enough to allow navigation.
This…
drorzel | September 16, 2008Everybody's all abuzz about this picture:
This may be the first image of a planet around a sun-like star. May be, mind-- it looks likely, but there are still a lot of caveats. If it is a planet, and not a dim background star, it's got about eight times the mass of Jupiter, and is orbiting at eleven times the radius of Neptune's orbit. Those are a little hard to explain.
Still, isn't it cool to be living in the future?
Phil Plait has all the details.
drorzel | August 22, 2008Over at Tor.com, David Levine describes a really cool event he went to just before Worldcon: a crash course in modern astronomy for SF writers:
The idea behind Launch Pad is Gernsbackian: getting good science into popular fiction as a form of public education and outreach for NASA. SF writer and University of Wyoming astronomy professor Mike Brotherton managed to get a NASA grant to fund this workshop for five years, of which this was the second. All the attendees' expenses were paid, including transportation to and from Laramie, housing in college dorms, and most meals--though we had to pay…
drorzel | August 1, 2008Well, OK, that's a stretch, but there is water, according to the latest Phoenix results:
"We've now finally touched it and tasted it," William V. Boynton, a professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona and the lead scientist for the instrument that detected the water, said at a news conference on Thursday. "And I'd like to say, from my standpoint, it tastes very fine."
No word yet on whether they've managed to figure out how to turn on the alien atmosphere-generating machine. That'll probably have to wait for the next mission.
Update: Here's a bonus link to…
drorzel | May 26, 2008So, the Martians go and helpfully draw a box on the ground as a target for the Phoenix landing, and what do they do? They land next to it, not in it. Way to go, NASA.
I bet if they hadn't screwed up the unit conversions, they would've hit it...
(The square pattern on the ground is really something to do with the water ice that the mission is there to look for-- it's a natural phenomenon, and a good sign for the mission.
(It just looks like a landing zone drawn by space aliens.)
drorzel | April 7, 2008When I was talking to my parents on the phone last night, my father told me about a guest op-ed in the Press and Sun-Bulletin that might be of interest to some ScienceBlogs readers and bloggers:
As if there aren't enough problems in the world, we are now on the verge of a phenomenon that will dwarf the projected scenarios of global warming. The cause is the alarming and accelerating loss of Earth's weight and mass by the burning of fossil fuels.
Every year that goes by, millions of tons of coal and millions of barrels of oil are burned. Nothing is left but ashes, soot, and gases, and there is…
drorzel | April 2, 2008One of the nice things about being a semi-pro blogger is that people send me tips about things that might be blogworthy. Most of these go into the daily links dump posts, but every now and then one hits at a time when I'm short of material, and looking for something to write about.
Such as the email that came in last night from KQED in San Francisco, plugging a video about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, and the new Allen Telescope Array that's expected to speed the search up by a few orders of magnitude.
There's a lot to like, here. It's a well-made video, with…
drorzel | March 20, 2008The coolest-sounding science news of the moment is undoubtedly "Hubble Finds First Organic Molecule on an Exoplanet""
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has made the first detection ever of an organic molecule in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting another star. This breakthrough is an important step in eventually identifying signs of life on a planet outside our solar system.
Of course, that sounds a little more dramatic and impressive than the reality: they used absorption spectroscopy of the plent's atmosphere to detect the presence of methane in its atmosphere. Now,…