Supernova Condensate

2012: The apocalypse for UK optical astronomy

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:10:28 GMT

Well, the STFC announced their delightful set of reprioritisations today. The outlook? Not good. Especially not for those of us who're still early in our scientific careers.

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A brief respite

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:22:20 GMT

Just as an FYI, I am actually still alive (in case you were wondering). I'm just incredibly busy at the moment. I dream about a time, someday, when December won't be an incredibly busy month. Unfortunately, I live in the great bubble of academia. A busy December is as inevitable as entropy making a mess of my kitchen.

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Papers!

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:10:37 GMT

So I have a nice little shortlist of papers which I might present at next week's journal club. In fairness, it's still not a very short shortlist, so I should probably dismiss a couple of these before I offer them up to the masses tomorrow...

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Portraits of Scientists

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:04:41 GMT

New Zealand born photographer Max Alexander has taken a truly fantastic set of portraits of a number of astronomers. These are just two of them -- go to his website and have a look at the rest!

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Tiny Twins

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:05:52 GMT

It's been known for a while now that there's no clear boundary between a very large planet and a very small star. 1995 saw the discovery of the curious brown dwarf stars. Stellar inbetweeners, too small to be true stars but too massive to be true planets. This caused much contention amongst star formation theorists, because no one could say for certain whether brown dwarfs form like stars or planets.

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Some bookmarks...

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 16:08:03 GMT

I bookmark a lot of things, some of which prove to be more useful than others. In particular, I've been looking recently at resources pertaining to stellar spectra and exoplanets. Here are a few of the more interesting links I've found...

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Introduction to Nuclear Astrophysics

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:05:05 GMT

All written up and cunningly disguised as a paper, this appeared on arXiv a few days ago. It's a write-up of a lecture given at a recent summer school in Italy, by Dr. Christian Iliadis (Uni. North Carolina), covering some astrophysics essentials.

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Looking for planets? It's all about the lithium!

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:13:15 GMT

I have a lot of respect for planet hunters. It's not an easy job. Discovering and confirming the existence of a planet requires a lot of patience, and I'd imagine it must be frustrating at times. So I'm sure a few planet hunters are rejoicing at the news that knowing which stars to look at just became a lot easier. All you have to do is look for lithium.

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Allergic to the Sun?

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:58:17 GMT

I am one of 18-35% of the human population with a photic sneeze reflex! If I step out of a dark building into full bright sunlight, it makes me sneeze. It always has. When I was a kid, I used to think I was just weird somehow, but seemingly, it isn't so rare.

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A Universe of Marshmallows

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:28:52 GMT

I fear that even contemplating writing the tirade of geekery that's about to ensue might forever concrete my reputation as a mad scientist. Although I don't really have a reputation as a mad scientist. Yet. This started out as a slightly bizarre twitter conversation with @Stellar190 and @PenguinGalaxy. About marshmallows. And the Universe. It all got a bit silly and ended up in a rather bizarre piece of recreational mathematics... After all of that, someone had to write a blog entry about it -- so here it is! (By the way, if you're not impressed by geekery for geekery's sake, you may want to stop reading now.)

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Poisonous gas bubble!

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:15:31 GMT

Stars like blowing bubbles. Especially when they get old. TT Cygni here, is no exception. Except that bubbles like this one are rather a lot more lethal than the kind you'd blow with soapy water.

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A chill stellar wind...

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:56:37 GMT

Thermodynamics may be very good at putting freshers to sleep during Monday morning lectures, but it really is a fundamental piece of modern physics. Bluntly, you don't argue with thermodynamics. Originally developed to increase the efficiency of steam engines, the laws of how energy is transferred between work and heat underpin the entire physical Universe. Even stars.

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Singularly beautiful

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:54:55 GMT

Everything in the Universe likes to go in circles. Moons orbit planets, planets orbit stars, stars orbit other stars -- and in each case all parts of the system are interrelated. The speed at which one star orbits another, for instance, depends intimately on the masses of both stars and the distance separating them. Simply, increasing mass and decreasing separation will both cause faster orbits. This is why planets like hot jupiters, which hug their parent stars, orbit at blistering speeds. The more massive the star, the more furious the orbit. The same is true of anything orbiting a black hole... Although as usual, a black hole has a habit of taking gravity and turning the volume up to 11.

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Water on the Sun

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:47:56 GMT

Water is all the rage. It gets mentioned in every single high profile space mission of late. Searching for water on Mars, water inside Europa, water in the atmospheres of exoplanets. Going to the Moon? Don't forget to check for water! All with good reason, of course. Being made of 72.8% water, it's rather important that wherever we might go in the Universe, we have a ready supply of it. But water's been found in some surprising places.

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On science, beauty and demystification...

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:12:41 GMT

"Science takes the romance out of things." This was an offhand comment made to me in conversation at the pub the other night. Is that really what people believe? Apparently, it is. It's regrettable, but I suppose the old stereotype of scientists being unable to appreciate the beauty in things is still going strong. While it's a sad fact that there are a number of scientists I've met who fit this image, it's certainly not true of all of us (indeed, the same is true of many non-scientists too). It may be the case that some scientists might scoff at the concept of beauty and dismissively explain away the natural phenomena which cause aesthetics. In my opinion, these scientists are doing it wrong.

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Carl Sagan Day

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:27:12 GMT

Ladies and gentlemen, have a Happy Carl Sagan Day!

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More Physics Funding Shenanigans

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:49:58 GMT

Those who hold the purse strings for science funding in the UK aren't doing any favours to anyone recently. Not to themselves and certainly not to researchers early in their careers like me. The minutes from a recent meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) made their way to my desk this morning. Their contents? Most troubling.

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"A Glorious Dawn"

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:49:28 GMT

This has been stuck in my head all day long. How strange! It's on my current ipod playlist. I even feel compelled to pick up my ukulele and learn how to play a cover of it -- which is rare occurence for something that came from the depths of YouTube.

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Travelling Without Moving

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:44:15 GMT

IBEX's image yesterday reminded me a bit of the now famous WMAP image of the cosmic microwave background, which in turn reminded me of a conversation I was having the other day. That conversation may or may not have been spurred by a seminar we had midweek about the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile. Less of a train of thought, more of a perambulation. But I digress...

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Stellar Communications

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:00:21 GMT

Now this looks exciting! An IAU conference all about public outreach. I'm really liking the sound of this!

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Ribbon in the Sky

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:42:22 GMT

Remember IBEX? NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer has been mapping the outer limits of the solar system from a highly eccentric Earth orbit for almost a year now. It was designed to observe the Sun's heliosphere -- the bubble blown in the interstellar medium by the solar wind. What it found was such a surprise that it's left theoreticians and solar physicists a bit bewildered.

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Moon Watch

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:50:41 GMT

So I've been officially berated for not blogging enough (if you can call a conversation over beer the other night "official" in any capacity). I should make more of an effort though, it's true. I haven't been writing much lately for a number of reasons, but I should make time. Actually, one reason why I should make time has to do with this...

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A pinch of SALT?

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:07:43 GMT

So I'm looking forward to going observing at some point in the near future. There was a trip to La Palma in the pipeline, but unfortunately that fell through. The upside to that is that I'll likely be going to South Africa instead. Which is rather exciting for a multitude of reasons. For a start, there are some very interesting things in the skies of the southern hemisphere. For another, apparently the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) are rather keen on outreach lately. I seem to be building something of a track record myself, in that respect. This could be rather convenient. If there's the potential for me to get involved while I'm there, giving an outreach talk while in South Africa would likely be an amazing experience!

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A Wolf at the Door

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:22:00 GMT

My post on multiple star systems a while back somehow managed to miss one of the most interesting in the sky. Gamma Velorum (γ Vel), at a magnitude of +1.7, is amongst the brightest visible stars -- it's actually a huge star system containing at least 6 stars. Currently drifting as part of the Vela OB2 Associtaion, the main star in the group is a sizeable one.

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Lab Demographics

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:28:45 GMT

Well this is atypical. Me being in for 9am? Most people don't seem to even be here yet. Another reminder that no matter how much we all grumbled about early morning starts as undergrads, the lecturers were doubtless equally disenamoured with the whole affair.

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