Cepheid + Light Echo = Accurate Distances

I am so so frustrated that I can’t get the full journal article associated with this press release. I’m going to have to do some emailing tomorrow to see if someone can get it to me. Here is what has me excited. In a new paper in Astronomy and Astrophysics (which my Uni doesn’t get) with...

4 stars within 6 AU

The universe keeps throwing neat stuff up for our telescopes to look at. A team lead by Evgenya Shkolnik (University of Hawaii), has observed a tight system of 4 stars crammed within 6 AU of one another – If located in our solar system, all four stars would fit within the orbit of Jupiter! The system...

Type 1a Supernoave: A Non-Standard Candle

One of the most exciting discoveries of astronomy in recent years was the measurement of an acceleration term in the universe’s rate of expansion. Announced by both the Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the High-z Supernova Search Team, these results at once...

Giants and Dwarfs with Barium

I’m beginning to think that a large fraction of the astronomical community is in pre-semester stars chaos. The number of press releases has radically slowed, and the journal articles just don’t seem to be flying as fast and furious as normal. Admittedly, this is a personal impression, and while I...

The Sun and its Danger Zone: The Chromosphere

One of the deeply confusing aspects of our Sun (and other stars) is their temperature structure. Starting in the core, the Sun is millions of degrees kelvin and supports nuclear burning. As you leave the nuclear burning core and climb first into the radiative zone and then the convective zone, the...

A Brown Dwarf, A Black Hole, and 4 Jets …

Opening my press release email folder this morning, I found what could have been the beginning of a good joke if I were actually a skilled humorist. So a black hole and a brown dwarf both start to form. As the black hole consumes his parent star, he shots powerful gamma ray jets off to announce his arrival....