I am often asked how gravity works. I usually answer and then they say ‘yes, but HOW does it work?’. Well here is another stab at answering a fairly complicated question via the internet (never a good idea).

Many animals have been put into space. Here I list my favourite space critters, including the Orbiting Frogs for which this very blog is named.

This short film, ‘Das Rad’ is shown from the point of view of two rocks, watching the world go by them in ultra fast-forward. It is interesting to try to view humanity on such a long time scale.

This is more art than science, but it is very pretty. Stereoscopic 3D images give full colour and allow each nebula to show another dimension of beauty.

The much anticipated SCUBA-2 instrument has been installed on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii. The question is how did they manage to get one very large and expensive piece of kit inside another? Here are some photos from the JAC website.

This is my second conference poster and it is going up at the UK National Astronomy meeting in a couple of weeks. It will found in the Star Formation section of the conference proceedings. I have taken data from the HARP instrument on the JCMT and processed it as 3D…

The Pioneer Anomaly is the effect seen in the paths of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft as they traveled out of the Solar System. An unknown force appears to be acting on them and causing them to deviate ever so slightly from their designed trajectories. This is not news, but…

We just had a great star formation talk from Professor Ralf Klessen from the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the Center for Astronomy at Heidelberg University. During that talk he put up a great slide showing the famous Pillars of Creation from the Eagle Nebula (M16) in both infrared and the…

Originally posted in August 2007.

There was a New Scientist feature last week on Boltzmann Brains. Now I hadn’t heard of these before, and so I thought it may be worth a blog post. A Blotzmann Brain is an intelligent, self-aware entity which arises as the result of a random fluctuation in…

I always wondered where they get all the antimatter to power the starships in Star Trek. Maybe they get it from the centre of the galaxy. New results from NASA’s INTEGRAL spacecraft, which tracks gamma ray emissions, may have explained the origin of the cloyd of antimatter that seems to be…

Over on the Cosmic Variance blog, there is a post covering the question of whether the Universe is a big computer, or as CV puts it, maybe its more like a computation. A very interesting read and the Quirks and Quarks show, which they mention, is also a podcast worth tuning into.…

Here is an interesting story from the Telegraph (of all places?!) about how time may be literally running out as the universe slows down. The theory “does away altogether with dark energy… instead the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock that needs winding.”…

Soon I will be off on an observing run in Hawaii. I will be using the 15m JCMT telescope on Mauna Kea to take spectral line data using an instrument called HARP.

Since this will be my first professional expedition I will be taking lots of pictures and notes as…

If you’ve ever wondered what it is that I do (this one’s for all you family and friend types), then worry no more. Today I’m giving a talk to the incoming PhD students as part of our Postgraduate Conference. All the 2nd years give talks to all the 1st years…

A very timely new paper to aide me in my research which states that Rho Oph is 135pc away. give or take a few parsecs.

read paper

I love NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, known to its friends as APOD. So to honour that Great website, which has been running for more than a decade, I here present my own personal top ten list of APODs. They may not be quite the same as anyone else…

I recently saw a Digg article which linked to a space.com page about the 10 Strangest Things in Space. All but 2 of the items were not pictures at all but computer simulations, or artists impressions. So here to correct this injustice to phenomena everywhere I present the REAL 10 Strangest…

Just the other day I was opining about how the internet needs to get in bed with science a bit more. Well lo and behold here is a fantastic example of just such a thing: Galaxy Zoo.

I saw the link on Chris Lintott’s blog and then later on Digg, but…

So my name is now on a (soon-to-be) published paper. How and why this happened is a little over my head, but I shall try to explain. One thing you should know however, is that I haven’t really done anything so far to help get this paper out. I haven’t…

If the tail was smarter, the tail would wag the dog.

Two things have just come back to me at the same time and collided wonderfully, thanks to an article over at Universe Today. The article is one about the liquid mirror telescope that a NASA researcher proposes could be built…