Take the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 and make them equal 100 by placing any mathematical symbols you like between them. Any symbols are fine – I have yet to attempt using any of the numbers as indices, but that’s fine too. You must keep the numbers in the same order but you can combine them into larger numbers (e.g. 12, 56, 789) or chop them up using decimal points (e.g. 2.3, 7.8). As examples here are three possible solutions to show you how it works:

123 – 45 – 67 + 89 = 100
1 x 23 x 4 – (56/7) / 8 + 9 = 100
1 + 2.3 – 4 + 5 + 6.7 + 89 = 100

There are well over 100 solutions to this which means it is a game filled with multiple victories. Enjoy!

Whilst I have been trapped in the thesiverse, I have been diligently attempting to ignore all my other projects – but they keep moving along. Whilst Avalon sits behind me in a playpen saying “ba ba” to several bears – and offering the dog a squeeky toy – I thought I would try and write a quick update on some of the projects I intend to resume with whatever free time I find myself with after submission.

.Astronomy

Earlier this week, we had a meeting of the .Astronomy team to discuss the third .Astronomy workshop. It was very exciting with lots of possibilities for locations and dates discussed. We also caught up on some of the projects created and advanced at the Leiden meeting.

A big question that came up – and one I am still mulling over – is that of the nature of .Astronomy. What exactly is it, and how do I know it when i see it? I tend to use it as a descriptive term now (e.g. “ah yes, that is very .astronomy”) but I think it is time to figure out why. This question being raised, and serious discussions of sponsors and venues for a 2010/2011 event leave me feeling very proud. .Astronomy has clearly demonstrated that it is worthy of continuation and expansion.

I can’t wait to get back into a more fully-engaged mode with the whole project. I am extremely glad to have the whole team working with me, and letting me focus on my thesis in recent months. Thanks guys and gals!

365 Days of Astronomy

365 (as people seem to call it) is expanding into 2010 and the days are filling up fast. More sponsorships are needed and I fully intend to dive headlong into comment moderation and posting when I finish the thesis. Another thing that I want to do – and any of you could also do this – is create some backup podcast episodes for 365. When scheduled contributors don’t appear or cancel it is useful to have a bank of backup episodes ready to go.

Chromoscope

Exploring the universe in multiple wavelengths is a lot of fun but I’ve had so litle time to offer this project recently, I’m starting to feel very guilty. We’ve recently added Gamma Ray to the site, from Fermi, and I am slowly compiling a massive UV map, using GALEX. Stuart has been chipping away at new Chromoscope features (such as language support, and making Chromoscope embeddable) and there is talk of an iPhone app in the near future.

Everything Else

There are also my Tweprints and OverTwitter projects which both have potential, large-scale alterations to be made. I shan’t go into details here but maybe these are things I could work on at the next .Astronomy meeting. There is also a cool new project that came out of .Astronomy (I’m currently calling it Zombie) which I really want to get my hands dirty with. Like all the others though, it will have to wait.

The Thesiverse is a large and expanding, multi-dimensional reality. Time is quite variable there too. Next week I am relieved of childcare duties to make a final push at finishing the beast, so wish me luck. Hopefully I shall find my way to a singularity and pop out into your realm once more. Oh dear, Avalon is now trying to get the dog into the playpen so I must go. See you on the other side!

The Belt (called Gould’s Belt in North America, and named for Benjamin Gould, who identified it in 1879.) is actually a fragmented ring of of star-forming clouds, young stars and nebulae that comes in at around 3000 light years in diameter. Containing lots of bright, young O- and B-type stars, in sits neatly inside the local spiral arm of our own galaxy the Milky Way. The Sun appears to be situated roughly in the middle of it – but it is not know where it came from or what it really is. To study the star-forming regions does not necessitate any understanding of the belt itself, but it is curious to wonder how it came to be.

The image below (from galaxymap.org) shows approximately where in our Milky Way galaxy the Gould Belt lies. You have to image the entire Solar System as an invisible speck near the middle of the white ring, denoting the Gould Belt.

One common theory is that there was some ancient supernova that exploded and sent radiation and material outward. Like a ripple from a stone dropped in a pond, this caused an ever-growing ring of activity in the surrounding interstellar medium. This model works fairly well, since the local bubble – a region of low density in which the Sun and a few other stars sit – fits reasonably well inside the Gould Belt. Perhaps both of these structural features could have resulted from an ancient explosion.

It is also possible that some much larger scale interaction has taken place. A recent paper on arXiv suggests that the belt originated 30 million years ago when a giant dark matter clump collided with a giant molecular cloud in the Milky Way’s spiral arm.

Maybe there is no Gould Belt! It could be that we only think we can see a ring-shaped pattern in the layout of our local region. After all when it comes to detailed structure in the galaxy, we cannot see much further out than our own spiral arm. Maybe these kinds of shapes are merely coincidental from our viewpoint.

The image at the top of this post was created by my office-mate Jason Kirk and it shows the star-forming clouds within the Gould Belt. The belt itself is marked as a blue ring and the local bubble is shown as a shaded area. The size of the star-forming regions is proportional to their mass, assuming a uniform density. This image was created for the Spitzer Gould Belt Survey and I have always found it handy when thinking about the Gould Belt.

UPDATE: Max Alexander’s Explorers of the Universe exhibition is now on display at Royal Albert Hall until 2nd November http://bit.ly/UZbOg

[Max Alexander's astronomer's portraits collection]

I am running a conference in September and I’m inviting astronomers and astronomy bloggers from anywhere! If you’re interested in how astronomy and the internet can combine to produce new and interesting tools for research and communication then this conference is for you.

Astronomy is facing a paradigm shift. The huge quantities of data that are being created by a new generation of surveys and instruments will require new ways of thinking. At the same time, an ever-more connected world is bringing astronomy to the masses via a new media, made up of blogs, podcasts, social networks and more.

Google Sky and Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope have taken astronomy into the home with stunning elegance. Data mining, robotic telescopes and virtual observatories will soon take petabytes of data to a global audience of professionals and amateurs.

Communication and networking technologies are changing science, for both researchers and the public alike. The .astronomy conference will discuss the ideas and methods emerging in this new era and the way in which they present interesting and novel opportunities for both conducting and communicating astronomy.

We have invited several notable people to speak at the conference (including fellow bloggers Chris, Stuart, Pamela, Phil and Emily) and I’m pleased to say that the confirmations have begun coming in. I will be blogging once in a while via Orbiting Frog, but mainly the news and updates will be posted on the conference webpage (RSS).

The conference will run from Monday 22nd to Wednesday 24th September 2008. It will take place at Cardiff University. To read more or to pre-register please visit our website or follow the .astronomy Twitter feed.

You can see the debris in this screenshot. Each little Chinese flag is a piece of the satellite that remains in orbit.

If you want to track this debris yourself, you can do so in Google Earth using this handy KMZ file that I’ve created. It uses the same code as my previous efforts for tracking the ISS on Google Earth and tracking satellites on Google Earth in general.

Also, if you’re interested in the talk I gave, you can download the PDF of ‘Space Debris‘.

I wonder if this post will be visible through the Great Firewall of China?

UPDATE: The data used for this Google Earth feed comes directly from NORAD, who provide tracking data for most satellites and other orbiting bodies. I should stress that this only shows the trackable debris. This is only  a percentage of what is up there. Some objects are too small to be tracked by radar and so do not appear.

No words, no figures, and definitely no PowerPoint is allowed in what may well become a new annual event in the academic calendar.

You can view videos of all of the contenders over at the Science Mag website from the AAAS.

Look out particularly for the two astrophysicists, Ruth Gruetzbauch and Jesús Varela, who present a thesis titled “The eventful life of galaxies in low density environments.” to the tune of an old Tango. There are three categories; students, postdocs and professors. If you’re studying, I recommend thinking about your entry in advance. some of these people really go for it!

Christoph Campregher started the event. In his day job as a molecular biology post-graduate student in Vienna, he studies the colorectal cancer. In the evenings he is an experimental DJ called Trockenmoos. The dance contest was actually the warm-up events for something called ‘Molecular Code’, a work he was staging that used only the sounds sampled in a molecular biology lab.

You can already sign up for the 2009 contest online.

All you have to do is install the latest version of Google Earth and then download this KML file.

Once initialized for the first time, the file will make a download of a 9MB catalogue. This takes a minute or two and once complete you can roam the sky, viewing any regions of it covered by SCUBA in submillimetre wavelengths.

As well as the data points (which appear in green) you can also view images taken by the SCUBA camera. These will only load when you are close enough on the sky to see them, to save on time and disk space.

The best thing about this Google Sky layer is that it will enable you to place side-by-side things which you can’t see with things that you can. The image below of the Horsehead Nebula is a perfect example.

In the top, in purple you can see the optical light. This is the outline of the classic Horsehead, which is located in Orion. In orange below it, you can see the dusty, SCUBA-mapped material. It slots almost perfectly into the dark region of the Horse’s head. That’s because the reason the Horse’s head exists is that the dust obscures he light and creates the shape.

If you look carefully you’ll see the ‘lozenge’ of dust in the horse’s throat. This is a clump of cold material, with a submillimetre source at the centre (the green hexagon). This is thought to be a pre-stellar core – an object which may go on to form a star.

This ‘dust’, as it is called by astronomers has the consistency of smoke and accounts for huge amount of the material in our galaxy. Many of the shapes of the nebula you will have seen arise from dark, dusty material in between the light and your point of view.

You will possibly be familiar with dust from images such as he Pillars of Creation from the Eagle Nebula. This shown below with the SCUBA map layered on top, semi-transparently.

Included with the SCUBA Google Sky layer is a set of interesting features, which will take you to certain objects or regions of the sky, to get you started. All the green hexagons come with a popup of scientific data from the CADC catalogue.

For more screenshots, see my Flickr photo set about this project.

SCUBA was a camera on the James Clark Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii. It was a submillimetre continuum array receiver, with a field of view 2.3 arcmin in diameter. It had two hexagonal arrays of detectors, which mapped a fair chunk of the sky in 850 microns and 450 microns.

The device was made to study regions of the universe normally dark in optical frequencies. The things you’ll see in the SCUBA data are dusty areas of our galaxy and of more distant galaxies. These are the areas where stars are born and they are being studied all the time by researchers like myself and my colleagues.

This layer adds to a growing collection of ways to look at Google Sky. there are already layers for

• XMM-Newton [Link]
• SDSS [Link]
• IRAS [Link]

Download the SCUBA Google Sky KML file here (approx 1.0kB) This will officially launch later in the week, so if you have trouble try forcing Google Earth to refresh the KML file by right-clicking and selecting ‘Revert’ or ‘Refresh’.

Let’s say I have a telescope with a computer attached to it. This telescope always knows exactly where it is pointing in the sky and exactly what time it is. Finally this telescope knows where it is on the Earth in terms of latitude and longitude. Now let’s connect this telescope to the internet and constantly feed the images it produces to a server.

To anyone working in astronomy, this is already true for professional telescopes. In fact Stuart over at Astronomy Blog created his telescope RSS feeds using just this data not too long ago.

Now finally let us do something that isn’t normally the case: let’s connect every telescope to just one server. This central server can use the data to construct an image of any object in all four dimensions using the positions both on the sky and on the Earth from each scope. All you have to do is have enough telescopes looking at the same things.

In the case of Comet Holmes there were a great many telescopes pointed at the object as it flew by, creating a lovely glowing ball that later faded away. The various stages of its evolution were imaged and these images could all be compiled into a kind of virtual space. You ought to be able to fly around inside a computer generated model which is constructed from the images. The projections of those images into virtual space just come from the telescopes own properties and position.

I am trying this technique with another, less exciting dataset. If it works then I may try it with some images from telescopes. However this data is sparse and spread out over the world. I do not have enough of it myself to make a good start. Maybe next time a big event is occuring we, the internet (if there is such a thing) could get organised and try to create a 4D record of an event? Astronomy has eyes everywhere and if these eyes can work together, via Google Earth, AstroGrid or other more novel collaborations, then 21st Century astronomy will be a turning point, and we can all be a part of it.

Since this will be my first professional expedition I will be taking lots of pictures and notes as I try to get to grips with using a real telescope to doing real science.

As much as possible I will blog here, though at this stage I really don’t know what will be possible.
So in case you suddenly notice an absence of blog posts in the next while, fear not – it is just me being all busy and such.

If you have any questions about my trip drop me a line via the comments thread here and I will get back to you.

Fun! So my talk, as a flash animation, is shown over at this link if you’re interested.

Any questions? Send them my way.

There is something special about the Sun. At least that’s how we all think here on Earth. Truthfully though, the Sun represents just one type of star – a common one in fact – in a catalogue of stars that is seen to be fairly consistent all over the universe. Understanding where that consistency comes from, and where the trillions of stars and their planets come from, are two of the goals of an area of astrophysics called star formation.

How the Sun came to be in this neck of the galactic woods with its family of planets, dwarf-planets and other miscellany – including us – is certainly worth knowing. It is fortunate then that star formation is about to boom.

ESA’s Herschel space observatory (launching 2008) and the upcoming SCUBA-2 camera (that will be fitted to the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, in 2008) are two examples of a handful of eagerly anticipated instruments set to produce more data than star-formation researchers have ever had. They will enable astronomers to see deeper than ever before into the murky depths of the dustiest regions of the galaxy, where stars are born. Many of these sites are the beautiful nebulae now so familiar thanks to images like those from Hubble. Others are huge, dark clouds that are too cold and dense to see, but give away their location by obscuring background light.

It is hoped that these new facilities with help answer several of the big questions facing astronomy. For example, why do stars form in clusters of hundreds or thousands? Why do they have the same catalogue of masses that is seen everywhere we look? What are the initial conditions of planet formation?

The physics involved crosses huge orders of scale. A good demonstration is this: imagine the Sun were a metre across. At this scale the nebula from which it formed would be the size of France! Incidentally that makes the Earth a mere pea. To compress all that material down by a factor of a million in size involves complex physics. In order to understand where we came from, you need to understand that physics.

As a discipline, star formation slots into almost all areas of astrophysics. For instance, in order to study galaxies you need to know what they’re made of. Even cosmology, often seen by its champions as being less ‘astro’ and more ‘physics’ has recently encountered a star-formation problem. In order to account for observations of stars that appear to be as old the universe itself, they need to explain how a population of stars could have formed so rapidly and so soon after the Big Bang. Whichever angle you look at it from, star formation is vital to modern astronomy.

Star formation is also important to you, personally. This isn’t just because the various stages of stars give you pretty objects like the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades (above) to look at with your telescope. Star formation tells us something very fundamental: we are all made of stardust. The Sun, planets and everything else around us were formed from the same giant cloud of material – most likely a cloud left over from an even older star when it died. Yet that same process creates a whole array of stellar classes and different planetary characteristics. Only star formation can tell us how all of this works.

NASA’s planned Darwin mission and ESA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder will both be able to resolve Earth-like planets around other stars. These, along with Herschel and SCUBA-2 will enable us to look at whole stellar systems from the outside, a perspective we have never had before. Observers will look at systems like our own at various stages of existence, from barely formed blobs about to start collapsing under gravity through to ancient star systems; we will even see planets in formation.

As a subject, star formation is set to explode. It will allow us to see ourselves better than ever before and to understand the origins of our existence. This is inspirational science, and definitely worth keeping an eye out for in the years to come.

Star formation is a science at a turning point. It will not be long now before astronomers have the choice of several world-leading instruments capable of observing at millimetre and sub-millimetre wavelengths. NASA’s Spitzer telescope is already orbiting above our heads taking new and exciting images with an array of instruments. Herschel, an eagerly anticipated multiple-instrument space observatory akin to Hubble will be launched by ESA within a year or so. SCUBA-2 is a high-technology camera that will be fitted to the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea and allow rapid surveys of star forming regions to be made at speeds many tens of times faster than has been done previously.

Within the next decade it is hoped that several of the big questions of star formation may be answered. Why do stars form in clusters of hundreds or thousands of stars? Why do stars have the signature spread of masses that is observed? What are the initial conditions of planet formation? There are many more but these give a good example of the kind of thing that star formation theorists and observers are out to explain.

Whilst returning to the Moon and Mars will hold the public eye for decades to come, the nitty gritty of the origins of our creation are mostly hidden in understanding star and planet formation. To understand how the Sun and it’s ever-growing family of planets, dwarf-planets and other miscellany – including us – came to be here in this neck of the galactic woods is a vital part of the much larger puzzle that is star formation itself.

As a discipline, star formation slots neatly in almost all areas of astronomy and astrophysics. If you want to understand galaxies you’ll need to know what they’re made of and if you want to get to grips with nebulae then you’d better know where they’re headed. Even cosmology, so often seen by my own colleagues as putting the physics in astrophysics, has recently been bitten by the star formation question. Namely, they need to explain how stars formed so early in the universe after the big bang. If they can’t, then there is some explaining to do since we have observed stars at ages very close to that of the universe itself.

Those three examples are very overarching but they get the point across: star formation is vital to modern astronomy. Part of the mystery of the subject is that it often crosses huge orders of scale in the same physical process. A good example told to me recently is that if the Sun were a metre across then the nebula from which it formed would be the size of France. The Earth on this scale is only the size of a marble! To compress all that material down through a million orders of magnitude in size obviously involves complex physics, yet if you want to understand where we all ultimately came from, then you need to know. So to save you the trouble of having to figure it all out, the astronomers are willing to do it for you.

So as well as fitting nicely into most areas of astronomy, star formation actually fits into your life – it’ll change the way you think of things. This isn’t just because the various stages of stars give you pretty objects like the Orion Nebula (Above) and the Pleiades (Top) to look at with your telescope. Star formation tells us something very fundamental: we are all made of stardust. The Sun, the planets and everything else you know were formed from the same giant cloud of material – most likely a cloud left over from an even older star when it died. Anything that wasn’t there to begin with was made inside the Sun and it is the Sun that protects from anything outside our Solar System with its enormous gravitational and magnetic fields. Only star formation can tell us how all of this works and how the cogs in the great celestial machine got turning in the first place.

Soon we will be in the position to look at other solar systems from the outside, a perspective we have never had before. If the current theories are correct then star formation is about to turn a corner. Astronomers will look at whole systems like our own at various stages of existence, from barely formed blobs about to start collapsing through multiple stars with their many shapes and sizes to single suns with rocky bodies in orbit and who knows what else. This will in turn allow us to see ourselves even more clearly then we ever have before and to figure out how we got here and why it happened.

This is inspirational science, and worth keeping an eye out for in the years to come. I welcome views on what I have written here from astronomers and non-astronomers alike – what do you think?

The image above shows the Bullet Cluster. Also known as 1E 0657-56, this is a pair of clusters of galaxies some 3.4 billion light years away. As Jon Davies told us in yesterday’s Astrolunch meeting however: you should be careful about believing everything you see. This image is not a regular photograph by any means. You can see the galaxies scattered about with an orange glow. This much is familiar. Layered onto this optical data is the pink, X-Ray picture from the Chandra telescope. This pink light is actually the high energy X-Ray radiation from a hot gas that permeates the cluster. Again though it is not unusual to see two different wavelength regimes seen in the same photograph.

What is unusual is that the blue ‘light’ seen here is not photographic in nature at all. It is the location of the mass in this region deduced by weak gravitational lensing – it is not a real effect but rather a mathematical interpretation of where the mass should be. As you can see it does not line up with the visual traces of the mass that we see as light and X-Ray material.

This is because it is believed that the Bullet Cluster shows us quite nicely where the dark matter can be found in this cluster. The interpretation of this image by the researchers who have studied it is that the hot, pink gas is the energy released by ordinary matter in this pair of clusters as they have collided with one another. The energy of the collision has excited the gas to emit in the X-Ray.

However not all the mass in the region is ordinary (something believed to be true about most of the universe). Dark matter is material that has mas but doesn’t interact with other, ordinary matter by the usual routes. It does not feel magnetism, or electrical forces or emit light. But is stays tethered to the ordinary matter by gravity alone.

As these two clusters collided the dark matter passed through like an ordinary pair of gaseous objects would, where as the regular, every day material became heated and disturbed and distorted in shape.

There is a wonderful video of a simulation of this hypothetical collision which you can find here.

This lovely picture adds to the already heated debate among the astrophysical community as to the existence of dark matter.

After arriving via the train (changing at Crewe – why is it always Crewe?) I registered at the UK National Astronomy Meeting held in Preston by the Royal Astronomical Society at around 11.30am. This put me an hour early for lunch and two and half hours early for any actual talks. I was, incidentally, also only four hours early for the first tea break. For the mathematicians among you, yes, this means the first session was only an hour long. Wimps!

The keynote speech of the conference was given by Tim de Zeeuw, a very nice chap from the Netherlands, I think. He spoke on the galactic ‘fossil’ record. It was an odd choice for the keynote I thought. His talk was in a way applicable to everyone yet no one. Well anyway, it was interesting enough and I enjoyed it mostly.

For the afternoon’s parallel sessions (much of the conference is split up into simultaneous topics) I had the choice of AGN & Black Holes, Exoplanets, Magnetic Reconnection, Extremely Large Telescopes and Wide and Deep Surveys. I really couldn’t chose between the Exoplanets and the telescopes so in the end I chose the one that was closer to me. How lazy, I know. (Although I did find another NAM blogger who did go to the telescopes talks).

It was a good selection of talks. I didn’t very much enjoy Dr. Oglivie’s talk on tidally in-falling hot Jupiters – partially because I did not understand it. However he seemed to be talking about gravitational waves inside stars and this threw me, since no one has ever detected a gravity wave!

My favourite talk was the one given by Dr. Aigrain on the CoRoT mission. This was an excellent overview of a great mission concept for a planet hunter. I look forward to hearing results from it in the next few years. If you want to know more, click here.

All in all its off to a reasonable start. Coming up is a blog post on the ‘Astronomy Question Time’ event with the BBC and of course days 2 through to 5.

Greenbank Building

Originally uploaded by ttfnrob.

Obviously not vietNAM but the UK’s National Astronomy Meeting. This is my first NAM and so far it’s so-so. There have been interesting talks and I have met some interesting people. However so far I would call it fun or jolly.
Basically every year the UK’s astronomy community gathers together an holds a week of talks discussing and presenting and displaying the things that they do.
My particular topic, Star Formation, gets full coverage on Friday so until then I am hitting all the aspects that I find useful or intresting that are being held elsewhere. I went this morning to the Education and Public Outreach talks and found them really interesting. Did you know that 2007 is the International Heliospheric Year? (Link) Also 2009 will be the UN’s International Year of Asrtonomy (Link).
I have seen some very cool videos of the Sun, which I will blog about later too.
The photo above is of the main building in which this is being held, the Greenbank Building in the University of Central Lancashire in Preston.
Finally I’d just like to say that as I write this I have become one of those annoying people who sits on their laptop during a conference – yay for free WiFi!

Magnet Levitates

Originally uploaded by ttfnrob.

In last week’s lab we had some more fun with liquid nitrogen. This time we used it to cool a ceramic superconductor (i.e. not a metal one) and then floated a magnet on top of it. The result in shown in the image above.

What your seeing is a magnet inducing a magnetic filed on the superconductor which itself does now allow the free flow of the electrons to occur since it has been cooled. The two magnetic fields sit equal and opposite to each other and so the small magnet just floats.
The same principal is in use in high speed trains in Japan, only on a much larger scale.

I am current on chapter 17 (of 44 in this volume) and have bee making notes. In the spirit of sharing and of consolodation for my own sake, here some things I now know.

On Atoms

An atom is about 1 or 2 Angstroms across in size. An angstrom is 0.000000000 1 metres and this makes atoms comparable in size to one hundredth of the wavelength of light.

If you made an atom the size of a room then the nucleus, containing the protons and neutrons would be a mere speck of dust barely visible in the centre.

If an apple were magnified to the size of the Earth then the atoms in the apple would now be the size of the original apple!

You can burn a diamond in air.

CO (Carbon Monoxide) is essentially a picture of itself.

On the Fundamentals

Think of a game of chess. you can watch the game and you might grasp a few of the rules. You might see that Bishops move diagonally or that pawns move only one step. You will however not necessarily be able to play just by watching. Why one player makes a move or another responds will seem a mystery. This is akin to the laws of nature, i.e. physics. We can know the rules (gravity, kinematics etc) but not therefore how to play.

Some of greatest moment sin science have been when two or more seemingly unrealted topics are shown to be related and intertwined. some examples are quantum mechanics and chesmistry; electricity, magnetism and light; heat, temperature and mechanics.

Helium was discovered on the Sun before it was found on Earth. This is why is got its name; Helois was the Roman god of the Sun.

6 fundamental things are always conserved. That is to say that these things are never created or destoyed spontaneously but simply moved around the universe. These conservation laws tell us a lot about how nature works. The six conserved quanities are energy, linear momentum, angular momentum, baryons, leptons and electric charge.

There is enough energy is 1000 litres of running water to power the entire of the United States. It is up to physicists to figure out how to liberate it so that the world can be freed of its need for energy. It can be done!

On Time and Distance

Does time exist on an ever shorter scale? A day contains 24 hours, which in turn contains 60 minutes of 60 seconds a piece. How far down can we go and does it make sense to speak of times which cannot sensibly be thought about?

We can use carbon dating to pin something down to being more than 100,000 years old, ut not much further. Uranium on the other hand can reliably date things back for billions of years, so long as there is rock there that has remained unchanged for as long. The oldest rock on the Earth is over 4 billion years old!

Atomic clocks will soon be accurate to within one second in the age of the entire universe.

On Gravity

If you fire a bullet it falls at the same rate as anything else but obviously moves a very long way across the surface of the Earth in the same time. If you could fire a bullet at 5,000 miles per second then it would never hit the floor as the Earthb would curve away benath it as fast as it could move. The bullet would be in orbit.

The tide come sin 50 minutes earlier each day.

Due to the width of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, the light travel time from planets like, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn etc varies by almost half an hour. This fairly long period of time has astronomers very confused in the 17th century when their predictions for the orbiting periods of Jupiter’s moons kept appearing to be wrong by anything up to half an hour. Eventually this led them to thi k that light may have a finite speed and so the first estimates for the speed of light, c, were made in 1656.

Thats all for now…

For the past few weeks in my role as a demonstrator in the first year undergraduates lab, I have been supervising the experiment titled Large Scale Structure of the Universe. The experiment itself is a slightly painful exercise involving a series of simulated optical telescopes on an odd piece of software installed on the lab computers. The students have to find the galaxies, which I give to them on a piece of paper, and then take a fake spectrograph reading for each one. This enables them to dot-by-dot create a small, 3D slice of the universe where they can see how far away each galaxy is from Earth and the structure the galaxies take on the largest scales.
They are, understandably, not too thrilled at this. Lab takes four hours and the preamble to this experiment takes a good hour on its own. When it is complete, and they have say, an hour remaining of lab, in which they must answer a series of questions based upon the data they have taken and the completed set of many more galaxies printed in their lab book already.

Now ignoring the fact that they seem to have taken the data for no reason at all and that this is a sure-fire way of ensuring they learn to loathe astronomy as a boring, long-winded science, what they end up with is quite interesting. Naturally none of them see it as interesting as they have been steadily bored by it for a whole afternoon, which is a great shame.

The reason it is so interesting is that on the very largest scales, the Universe has a structure. When one looks into the sky and sees the myriad of stars, nebula and galaxies one could be forgiven for thinking that the universe was pretty randomly distributed. Yet given a little thought this doesn’t seem obvious at all because eveything we have yet discovered seems to have an order.

The Earth goes around the Sun, the Sun around the centre of the galaxy. The galaxy itself is part of a larger collection of gravitationall bound galaxies called the Local Group. The Local Group is part of a larger collection known as a cluster. The clusters collect into super-clusters. There is structure at all levels. Yet at its highest order of size, the Universe still shows form and shape.

Taking every galaxy as simply a dot and then assembling all the dots together into a picture containing millions upon millions of galaxies we see the Universe looks a bit like foam. The matter (i.e. all the galaxies) mostly exisitng on the surface of bubbles, within which lies great voids of space. These regions are unimaginable large and if you were to sit at the centre of them it would be incredibly dark as there would be no stars to light things up.

There are many people studying the structure of the universe at this level. There is a survey, as a good example, called the Two degrees of freedom galaxy redshift survey, or the 2DF Survey which you can read more about at this link

What I wanted to post here though was deatils of the Millennium Simulation. In the words of the Virgo Consortium that carried out the simulation, it is

“…the largest [computer] Simulation ever carried out, containign over 10 billion particles. The simulation was carried out by the Virgo Consortium using the a cluster of 512 processors located at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. The simulations took a total of 28 days (~600 hours) of wall clock time, and thus consumed around 343000 hours worth of cpu-time.”

What the simulation produced, amongst other things, was a series of movies and images from a simulated Universe. In these animations the camera flies around the universe, showing in rich detail the current best model for what the universe looks like at such large scales. It is quite beautiful to watch and I suggest you do. There are two versions of it: a 60 MB version called the Fast Flythru and then a 120 MB version which is the same journey but done more slowly so you can take more in. Both are DivX files.

A whole host of video and images are available on this website, which outlines what you’re looking at as well. You can look at the Universe as it is now or watch it evolve from its early stages to the present day.

Obviously even at 10 billion particles, the Millennium Simulation doesn’t even start to approach the actual resolution of the Universe but this is worth a look and certainly gives you an idea of exactly how teeny tiny we are here on Earth and how remarkable it is that we are able to discover such enormous ideas.

What is nice is that I still have the benefits of beinh ‘home’. I know where everything is and how far home and town and othe ruseful locations are situated. There at least a couple of people around that I studied with and although they are in their third and final PhD years, it has been nice to chat about the place and the dos and don’ts of life here.

As for what I’ve been doing with my time, well thats a bit odder and unfamiliar to me. I have been reducing data. Translated this means I have been turning streams of bits into images for analysis. As I understand it – and I really don’t very well at all – I have ben given the simplest kind of dataset to reduce at the moment. They are called Jiggle Maps and I am able to downbload them from the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre, which seems to house a lot of the SCUBA camera data. SCUBA, located at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, is the predecessor to the instrument I shall hopefully be using in the coming few years to observe the sky at sub-mm wavelengths. (To read more about SCUBA check out this short publication from the JCMT).
So today I made my first proper image of a sub-mm source. Taken from the SCUBA archives from 11th April 2000, I reduced this image from one set of observations that night. The object in question is located at RA 19h 03m 59.81s Dec -37d 15′ 30.7″ and is mostly like a chunk of a nebula.

Above we can see it in a simple one-colour spectrum showing intensity of the sources. Below I have put in a false-colour image of the same source which enables you to pick out a little more detail.

What you’re seeing are actually five disctinct objects. The two outer objects, that are not as bright are thought to be t-tauri stars (young, new stars) whilst the central blobs represent three, even younger objects. The left-hand central object is thought to be two protostars only slightly distinguishable here but more resolved in other data. The right-hand central object is supposed to be a pre-stellar core. That is to say that it has not yet become a star and may well in the near future.

All this data is properly collected and detailed in a paper by Nutter, Ward-Thompson and Andre that was published in 2005 title ‘The pre-stellar and protostellar population of R Coronae Australis’.

I have been enjoying the talks for the most part so far, several have not only innately interesting topics but also have been delivered with enthusiasm and humour. There are of course always those people than manage to produced endless black and white slides, showing dull graph after graph but on the whole so far, the former is outweighing the latter.

With six talks each day this week, the going has been a bit tough. We seem to get back to our rooms only after around 8pm which makes it a very long day. I have been relaxing late at night to the odd rhythms of BBC News 24, trying to digest the days eclectic mix of lecture topics.

So far we have been given the cutting edge brief on

Robotic Telescopes
Gamma Ray Bursts
Cosmic Microwave Background
Magnetars and Quasars
Astrophysical Jets
Galaxy Formation
Large Scale Structure of the Universe

There is plenty more still to come and I shall be outlining some of the above topics in the coming fortnight. I’m looking forward to Friday’s exoplanets talks and tomorrow’s astrochemistry. Can it be that this kind of enthusiasm and edgy research is a good taste of things to come? I hope so. This week is really getting me excited about getting back into physics again in a couple of weeks time.

It has now been a while since I got my PhD and I have begun to read material on the subject this past couple of weeks. Now this very blog is intended, in part, to aid me in chronicling (sp?) my adventures in PhD land. I thought it would be intetresting to blog my experiences for my own posterity and for the possible interest of others, suhc as my family. Obviously it doesn’t start for a while (September 25th actually) but one of the things I was asked to do by a couple off olks awas explain what my PhD is on and what I will be doing for the next three or four years.

Hmmm… tricky.

Spaceman and Astrologer are two common terms attriubted to me regarding my PhD. The first is a forgivable, jokey pop-culture reference. The second is a much darker and worrying misnomer. I will most likely never go into space and nor will I be studying ’spaceships’, as much as that would be fun. No, I will be doing my PhD in Astrophysics where the emphasis mostly lies sqaurely on the physics part. My chosen area of study is star formation with my own keen interest also extending into planetary formation as well.

I am studying the processes by which large, interstellar clouds of gas and dust become the bright and shiny stars that fill our mostly empty universe. The Eagle Nebula, is shown above and is an example of a place where stars are being born in a vast stellar nursery.

The conditions in these star forming regions are somehow taking all the gas and dust and causing it to spark into life as protostars. Why and how they do this is only partially known. The Star Formation Group in Cardiff University are one of the teams around the world that work in this field and they are the team I am joining in September.

Until recently it was not possible to look inside these huge clouds to see what was happening. The very gas and dust being studied also prevents light from getting in and out in any kind of orderly fashion, like smoke in an astronomical cinema. You may have heard of radio astronomy however, where it is not light that is studied but radio waves. Places such as Cambridge and Jodrell Bank use these longer wavelengths to observe the sky as no human eye ever could.

Alas radio frequencies do not help to observe these regions either. The chemical and physical processes involved simply don’t emit or absorb in those frequency ranges. For star formation the answer lies in the submillimetre wavelength range. This is the region of the electromagnetic spectrum that lies between microwaves and infrared.

To observe these wavelengths with any real success we need to get somewhere high and dry. This minimizes the effect of the Earth’s atmosphere on the observations. You the atosphere absorbs all sorts of waves from the sky. We all know about how the ozone layer protects us from UV rays, well the atmosphere also protects from a plethora of other wavelengths. This is one very good reason to put telescopes into space.

Luckily for astronomers, there are places on the Earth that are high enough and dry enough that if one was to build a large telescope there, they can save a lot of rocket fuel. Even luckier for astronomers, one of those places is Hawaii!

Mauna Kea is a dormat volcano on the large island of the Hawaiian chain. Atop it sit some of the world’s most advanced telescopes including the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) which was designed and built in the 1970s and 80s specifically to observe in the sub-mm range. It is this telescope that I will hopefully see data from, or even visit during my PhD.

The camera that is mounted on this telescope is due for a upgrade in the coming year. Called SCUBA, it will be upgraded to the new SCUBA-2 and will begin pouring out data on star forming regions like never before. I hope to be a part of that as I begin my PhD. For my first year I will learn the ropes of observational astronomy and then hopefully find my niche in this ever-growing area of research.

I’m really psyched about doing this. After a couple of years away from education I am geared up to return full force. I’m sure there will be complaints and grumblings along the way but it will be good to look back and remember why i was so excited when times get like that.

In the meantime I intend to add a webcam feed to this blog from the JCMT on Mauna Kea. That should keep me going for a little bit. Anyway I better get back to work now… for a while anyway.

So I got my PhD in Cardiff and formally accepted it today. good news, yay etc. I am very excited and have made myself a little something to get me more excited still about one day being an astronomer man.

In the end I received offers from both Cardiff and Exeter and deciding between them was tricky but in the end it had to be Cardiff for so many reasons that i shan’t bore this blog with. It was win win though in reality since both departments seem to be fantastic and filled with very nice people.

So I may end up gazing to the stars for a living one day, maybe even a proper astronomer. In the meantime though I’m looking forward to doing a good PhD and learning lots about the world above me.