Browsing all posts in November, 2007.

Carnival of Space #31

It’s Thursday, so there’s a carnival. This week the portable entertainment has set up shop over at Out of the Cradle. Check out all the fair and have some fun. (If only they had cotten candy…)

Galaxies in the Mist

[warning Will Robinson: the voices in my head that used to help write Slacker Astronomy are forcing me to write in the genre of a sensationalized nature special]
One of the most elusive creatures speculated to lurk within the sky are the mysterious very high-redshift Lyman alpha emission galaxies. These systems, without the metal found [...]

1 Void a 2nd Universe Makes?

Ok, so New Scientist is just not making my brain happy this week. I decided to forage around their website  to see what was there (one of their editors, Maggie McKee, is a friendly soul I worked with at Astronomy and I wanted to see what’s she’s up to now a days). While Maggie has [...]

I see you, now you must die

The title is a summary of how a New Scientist article seems to interpret the fate of the universe. Basically, the article states that because we view the universe, we may be causing the collapse of wave functions that would otherwise be happily balanced between not alive and not dead (the Schrondinger’s litter of supernovae, [...]

Carnival of Space

It’s a holiday extravaganza!  A Carnival of Space! All for your Thanksgiving weekend enjoyment!
Ok, maybe its just a regular Carnival of Space, but it’s still pretty cool, and you can find it over on Phil’s Bad Astronomy Blog.
Enjoy!

Happy Thanksgiving

This blog started to slowly blossom into existence (admittedly on another URL) about this time last year. It was a staggered start, and I didn’t really start to pay regular attention to it until January.
Still, a year into this personal experiment in public writing I find myself thankful that a group of you have found [...]

Another Close Binary, Another Big Planet

At this point we’ve found planets in a enough places that I shouldn’t still be surprised when a neat new world is found in a neat new place. Nevertheless, I found myself awed by a new discovery of a new planet with a 3.69 year period orbiting in a close binary.
This particular discovery caught my [...]

Psychiatry by Adjective?

Some areas of astronomy are way more competitive than others. Variable stars, the sub-field of astronomy I’m most comfortable in, is a very friendly group. There is amiable collaboration between professional and amateur astronomers, and I’ve never met a variable star astronomer who isn’t willing to talk, advise, and generally talk shop in a collegial [...]

Making Research

One of the joys, frustrations, most loved, and most hated parts of being a professor is attempting to do research. I say attempting because sometimes the data just doesn’t want to produce anything useful.
There are good times. For instance, in about three months this summer and fall Fraser Cain and I, with the help of [...]

Sunday evening muse seeking

I have to admit that I’ve been struggling to write for the past week. I had some family stuff come up with my extended family and it triggered a frustrating case of writer’s block. At the end of each day, I’ve looked at my computer, contemplated that I should write, and then found no words [...]