Where science and tech meet creativity.

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...

Lensing Lenses & Einstein’s Cross

While going through journal articles today, I came across a really neat paper on teh apparent variability of the different images of the famous lensed quasar, Einstein’s Cross (Q2237+0305, in science speak). The light from this distant quasar is blocked from...

Building Galaxies

I just finished watching the Universe series episode on “Alien Galaxies.” I have to admit that their constant use of the word “Alien” forced me to look up the word alien in the dictionary (or at least on dictionary.com). I have to admit that...

Finding Dark Galaxies

One of the great mysteries of our universe is whether there are dark matter galaxies, devoid of stars, haunting the universe. From the COSMOS survey, we know that dark matter and visible matter are not always located in the same place. This implies that there may be...

It’s raining stars!

It has long been known that there are stellar interlopers in the solar neighborhood. These stars just passing through as they orbit the galaxy on a path that originates in galactic halo. Unlike the stars like the sun that normally live in the galactic disk, these...