by Pamela | Oct 10, 2007 | Astronomy, Personal, Politics
This year I’m traveling more than I think I have ever traveled before. Thursday I’m flying down to Texas to attend AstroFest, which is being hosted by the Swinburne University of Technology and their program Swinburne Astronomy Online. Friday morning...
by Pamela | Oct 3, 2007 | Astronomy, Cosmology, Stars
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...
by Pamela | Oct 2, 2007 | Astronomy, Galaxies
This morning I was flipping digitally through the preprints on arXiv, and I stumbled on a rich paper on the evolution of Seyfert’s Sextet. In the paper, they discuss Seyfert’s Sextet as a more evolved version of Stephan’s Quintet. Now, these two...
by Pamela | Sep 26, 2007 | Astronomy, Observing
Yesterday a fascinating press release from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory crossed my inbox. In a re-analysis of 480 hours of data from taken with the 210-foot Parkes radio telescope in Australia, astronomers found a single 5 millisecond burst that resembled...
by Pamela | Sep 23, 2007 | Astronomy, Planets
I’ve decided Mars is the taunting red planet. She hangs up there, red and provocative, reveling here poles and captivating us with her canyons. She plays a careful game of peek-a-boo with her here-today, gone-tomorrow sand storms. She spikes our curiosity with...
by Pamela | Sep 21, 2007 | Astronomy, Astrophysics
It is possible to map a room using sound, the sea using sonar, and to generally just get at the shape of things based on how the absorb and emit waves. This is true both in our Earthly locations (caves, canyons) and also in the centers of galaxies. In the past several...
