Archive of Writings
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Galaxies: Born Blue, Red when Dead, Fat Die First
I just had the strangest realization. Stepping into the Galaxy Evolution session of oral presentations I got to listen to the AstroPixie present her research. Like me, she is a UT person (I got my PhD, she is getting her PhD). I knew that. What I didn't know is we...
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...
Beautiful in Death
Megan Gray of the University of Nottingham (UK) is blowing away my mind with an elegant and articulate press conference on the link between galaxies and their environment. She is using beautiful analogies and I just want to say that if you want a speaker on galaxy...
NASA, I think we need to talk
Yesterday’s Michael Griffin talk left me feeling just plain disgruntled. This morning, walking over from Starbucks, the gang of us ran into a NASA related person (whose name I didn’t ask permission to use, so I won’t), and had a really good talk...
Deep and Red
At 9am the the IKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) was released to the world. This survey was started in 2005 when the world’s largest and most sensitive IR instrument was commissioned on IKIRT. It is able to survey the sky faster and deeper than anything...
Group Meetup
It Rocked. I'm sleepy. Here's a photo. Thank you so much for coming. You guys were wonderful for to meet.
Astronomy Education in America
At least once a month (often more often), I get an email from someone saying they really wished they’d taken astronomy in high school. I more rarely get emails from students who “wish [their] school taught astronomy.” In today’s world of...
Making a Milky Way
According to research presented by Eric Gawiser of Rutgers University, ancestors of Milky Way (MW) like galaxies appear to be Lyman Alpha emitting galaxies. These progenitors were about 1/10th the size of the MW, 1/20th the mass of the MW, and 1/40th the stellar mass...
Blue Blobs – Splat on the sky
Duilia deMello of the Catholic University of America and NASA Goddard is presenting in the afternoon galaxies press conference. I'm in here reporting while Rebecca edits, and Phil and Fraser are listening to the NASA town hall meeting. In peering around the universe...
NASA, Where are you going? And are you taking the shuttle?
All of us are in here at the same time listening to Michael Griffin give an address. He had mostly been glossing over the histories of NASA. Now he is digging into where things are going. The Shuttle? Done when ISS is built and Hubble is launched. Period. It's just...