by Pamela | Jul 10, 2007 | Personal
In what is to me the most scientifically important paper of the year, astronomers today announced the discovery of 2 galaxies at redshifts > 10 and 4 galaxies with redshifts >7.7. The most distant of these galaxies was forming stars just 500,000,000 years after...
by Pamela | Jun 27, 2007 | Personal
Astronomers on Earth are limited in how they can look at the universe. We basically have three tools. We can detect light across a broad spectrum of colors. We can capture high energy particles – cosmic rays – that are flung at us from distant events. We...
by Pamela | Jun 25, 2007 | Personal
I just finished taking a tour through the latest papers posted on the astronomy preprint server. In general, few things do more to attract a my attention than a good title. One title in particular stopped my casual scrolling dead on its pixels: Redshifted formaldehyde...
by Pamela | Jun 20, 2007 | Personal
One of the concepts that confuses people most about the Universe is the Earth’s location relative to the Big Bang. People constantly ask, “Where is the center of the Universe?” and “Where was the Big Bang relative to us today?” and...
by Pamela | May 12, 2007 | Cosmology, Minor Planets
Fraser (my co-host over at Astronomy Cast) and I like to joke about how everything we know in astronomy we know because of the Cosmic Microwave Background. How do we know the universe formed during the Big Bang? The CMB. How do we know the cosmic geometry is flat? The...
