On Thursday (at 13:12 UT) Arianespace will send into orbit two scientific satellites for the European Space Agency: the Herschel space telescope and the Planck scientific observatory. The launch process which will take these amazing new instruments from the ground into space takes less than an hour! I will be watching the event live from [...]
BLAST will be on the BBC tonight. It has an interesting story behind it and luckily the brother of the head investigator is a film maker. He followed the international science team literally around the world as they tried to map star-forming regions and to find the origins of the galaxies.
Many products in the shops use scientific language to promote their products. At this time of year, following a period of festive excess, many detox products are popular. Detoxing herbal teas, shampoos, facial washes, foot pads and more can be purchased at a premium in Boots, Superdrug and miscellany other shops and pharmacies. Do they work? Well no, not really.
Using X-Ray images, and infrared data, a team of astronomers led by Dr Tracey DeLaney of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and including Dr. Gomez from Cardiff, created a 3D visualisation of the Cassiopeia A supernova to get a more complete understanding of how the explosion happened.
Sometimes the thrill of uncovering the true nature of the Universe doesn’t quite last all day. Today… well it’s really boring and slow. I tried to work - I really did. I stared at a paper I am writing for at least an hour but nothing came out of my head and into the document. Wait, I lied; there was a spelling correction I think.
What is the best time of day to submit to astro-ph? Do astro-ph and ADS harm publishers? I’ll be trying to answer these questions and others as I discuss the effect of the Internet on scientific papers.
The Cardiff HAlf metre Newise Telescope (CHaNT) officially opens today with a public event. The new, half-metre telescope is big enough to see Andromeda’s companion galaxies, to study the red spot on Jupiter and to see stars which, frankly, I never thought I’d see from Cardiff!
Finally my paper studying the Ophiuchus star-forming region is done and dusted and has been accepted for publication. Today it appeared on the online research paper service, astro-ph and it be published properly by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in (hopefully) the near future.
“Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe and Dr Janaki Wickramasinghe claim Venus’s clouds contain chemicals that are consistent with the presence of micro organisms.”
These two are from Cardiff’s centre for Astrobiology and the elder of the two has singlehandedly given the field a bad name over the past twenty years.
The whole concept of this idea is that life [...]
Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Simpson. Twitter @orbitingfrog
