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we are all in the gutter
30 posts
Astronomy Journal Club
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- August 4, 2009
- 07:28 PM
- 1,199 views
Was there a comet impact in AD 536? Maybe.
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
In the year AD 536 something catastrophic happened which caused a drop in the global temperature lasting several years and led to widespread famine, and possibly plague outbreaks too. This is right in the middle of the Dark Ages – a time about which by definition we know very little – so how can we [...]... Read more »
Larsen, L., Vinther, B., Briffa, K., Melvin, T., Clausen, H., Jones, P., Siggaard-Andersen, M., Hammer, C., Eronen, M., Grudd, H.... (2008) New ice core evidence for a volcanic cause of the A.D. 536 dust veil. Geophysical Research Letters, 35(4). DOI: 10.1029/2007GL032450
- December 14, 2011
- 04:37 PM
- 1,140 views
A Christmas burst
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
Last Christmas something exploded in the constellation of Andromeda. Well, that’s not quite true. This gamma-ray burst (named GRB 101225A) went off a long, long time ago, but the resulting flash finally arrived last year and were picked up by the SWIFT satellite (which then probably interrupted several festive lunches with its Burst Alert alarm). [...]... Read more »
Thöne CC, de Ugarte Postigo A, Fryer CL, Page KL, Gorosabel J, Aloy MA, Perley DA, Kouveliotou C, Janka HT, Mimica P.... (2011) The unusual γ-ray burst GRB 101225A from a helium star/neutron star merger at redshift 0.33. Nature, 480(7375), 72-4. PMID: 22129726
Campana S, Lodato G, D'Avanzo P, Panagia N, Rossi EM, Della Valle M, Tagliaferri G, Antonelli LA, Covino S, Ghirlanda G.... (2011) The unusual gamma-ray burst GRB 101225A explained as a minor body falling onto a neutron star. Nature, 480(7375), 69-71. PMID: 22129725
- March 4, 2010
- 06:43 PM
- 1,080 views
Will the Moon mess up a moon-base?
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
If we want to build a permanent base on the Moon – and the question of whether we ever will (or even should) remains very open – we need to have some idea of the effect the lunar environmental conditions will have on our equipment. There’s no point going to all [...]... Read more »
T. W. Murphy, Jr., E. G. Adelberger, J. B. R. Battat, C. D. Hoyle, R. J. McMillan, E. L. Michelsen, R. Samad, C. W. Stubbs, & H. E. Swanson. (2010) Long-term degradation of optical devices on the moon. Icarus. arXiv: 1003.0713v1
- August 31, 2009
- 09:00 PM
- 1,001 views
Quasar light switches
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
Right, it’s about time this blog went extragalactic again. As Douglas Adams wrote, “Space…is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space”. With all that Universe available [...]... Read more »
Schoenmakers, A., de Bruyn, A., Rottgering, H., van der Laan, H., & Kaiser, C. (2000) Radio galaxies with a 'double-double morphology' - I. Analysis of the radio properties and evidence for interrupted activity in active galactic nuclei. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 315(2), 371-380. DOI: 10.1046/j.1365-8711.2000.03430.x
M. Jamrozy, D. J. Saikia, & C. Konar. (2009) 4C02.27: a quasar with episodic activity?. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. arXiv: 0908.1508v1
- September 17, 2009
- 05:56 PM
- 918 views
What motivates the Zooites?
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
Would you let the general public do your work for you? How about just the bits that are fundamentally important but would take you months of repetitive effort to get through on your own? In 2007, the GalaxyZoo team did exactly that and its been a massive success. They had images of a million galaxies [...]... Read more »
M. Jordan Raddick, Georgia Bracey, Pamela L. Gay, Chris J. Lintott, Phil Murray, Kevin Schawinski, Alexander S. Szalay, & Jan Vandenberg. (2009) Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the Motivations of Citizen Science Volunteers. to be published in Astronomy Education Review. arXiv: 0909.2925v1
- March 3, 2011
- 05:38 PM
- 909 views
Periodic impact
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
Engaging the public in science is something lots of us are passionate about but how do you measure its impact? This might seem like an unimportant question, but it’s something that funding agencies are increasingly interested in, as they understandably want to check their money isn’t being wasted. It’s also a question addressed by the [...]... Read more »
Haran B, & Poliakoff M. (2011) How to measure the impact of chemistry on the small screen. Nature chemistry, 3(3), 180-2. PMID: 21336314
- May 20, 2011
- 04:40 AM
- 891 views
Finding Fred & friends
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
“What’s your name?” Kit said. “I mean we can’t just call you ‘hey you’ all the time.” True, the white hole said. My name is Khairelikoblepharehglukumeilichephreidosd’enagouni – and at the same time he went flickering through a pattern of colours that was evidently the visual translation. “Ky-elik-” Nita began. “Fred”, Kit said quickly. “Well”, he [...]... Read more »
Alon Retter, & Shlomo Heller. (2011) The Revival of White Holes as Small Bangs. Submitted to ApJ. arXiv: 1105.2776v1
- October 30, 2009
- 05:43 PM
- 877 views
Lasers, telescopes & aeroplanes
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
So this post was supposed to be about the discovery of the most distant galaxy ever found, at a redshift of about 8.2 (13.1 billion light years from us, or, to put it another way, only about 630 million light years after the Big Bang), but I didn’t get round to it yesterday and I’ve [...]... Read more »
W. A. Coles, T. W. Murphy Jr., J. F. Melser, J. K. Tu, G. A. White, K. H. Kassabian, K. Bales, & B. B. Baumgartner. (2009) A Radio System for Avoiding Illuminating Aircraft with a Laser Beam. submitted to PASP. arXiv: 0910.5685v1
- July 16, 2010
- 07:39 PM
- 780 views
Acro-tastic! (with additional GADZOOKS!)
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
I’m in need of some cheering up today, as the fun observations I wanted to make with the Herschel Space Telescope have turned out to be impossible. Luckily, this observation planning also involved a lot of procrastination, which led me to this: the Dumb Or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronyms Site (DOOFAAS). On this site astronomer [...]... Read more »
John F. Beacom, & Mark R. Vagins. (2003) GADZOOKS! Antineutrino Spectroscopy with Large Water Cerenkov Detectors. Phys.Rev.Lett. 93 (2004) 171101. arXiv: hep-ph/0309300v1
- October 2, 2009
- 06:46 PM
- 748 views
Laugh. Then think.
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
This has turned out to be a busy day for posting on this blog! There’s one more thing that needs to be remarked on though – this years Ig Nobel prize winners were announced today by the Annals of Improbable Research. These awards, for those that don’t know, are counterparts to the official Nobel prizes; [...]... Read more »
Whitcome, K., Shapiro, L., & Lieberman, D. (2007) Fetal load and the evolution of lumbar lordosis in bipedal hominins. Nature, 450(7172), 1075-1078. DOI: 10.1038/nature06342
Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, & Victor M. Castaño. (2008) Growth of Diamond Films from Tequila. arXiv preprint. arXiv: 0806.1485v1
- September 2, 2010
- 06:20 PM
- 730 views
Probing the atmospheres of extrasolar planets
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
Ok, so you’re young, you’re surprisingly dusty, and you don’t match the models. No, not a picture of my geeky childhood, but the extrasolar planet HR 8799b. It orbits the star HR 8799 and, along with its two companions, is one of the two extrasolar planetary systems to be directly imaged, as shown above. Unsurprisingly [...]... Read more »
Brendan P. Bowler, Michael C. Liu, Trent J. Dupuy, Michael C. Cushing. (2010) Near-Infrared Spectroscopy of the Extrasolar Planet HR 8799 b. accepted by ApJ. info:/1008.4582
Knicole D. Colon, Eric B. Ford, Seth Redfield, Jonathan J. Fortney, Megan Shabram, Hans J. Deeg, & Suvrath Mahadevan. (2010) Probing potassium in the atmosphere of HD 80606b with tunable filter transit spectrophotometry from the Gran Telescopio Canarias. submitted to MNRAS. arXiv: 1008.4800v1
D. K. Sing, J.-M. Desert, J. J. Fortney, A. Lecavelier des Etangs, G. E. Ballester, J. Cepa, D. Ehrenreich, M. Lopez-Morales, F. Pont, M. Shabram, A. Vidal-Madjar. (2010) GTC OSIRIS Transiting Exoplanet Atmospheric Survey: Detection of potassium in XO-2b from spectrophotometry. submitted to A. info:/1008.4795
- August 19, 2010
- 06:46 PM
- 726 views
Nemesis meets its, uh, nemesis
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
Interesting fact of the day: examining the fossil record suggests that mass extinctions on Earth occur approximately once every 26 million years (Myr). One possible explanation for this is a companion dwarf star to the Sun on a 26 Myr orbit. Every time is passes by, the theory goes, it messes up the Oort cloud [...]... Read more »
Adrian L. Melott, & Richard K. Bambach. (2010) Nemesis Reconsidered. MNRAS. arXiv: 1007.0437v1
- April 4, 2011
- 04:49 PM
- 704 views
Investigating the unexpected
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
One of the most interesting things in science is finding something unexpected in your data, and this is exactly what happened to a group of astronomers when they looked at the objects present in their large radio sky survey. Before I get to what they found though, we’re going to need a little bit of [...]... Read more »
A. D. Cameron M. J. Keith, G. Hobbs, R. P. Norris, M. Y. Mao, & E. Middelberg. (2011) Are the infrared-faint radio sources pulsars?. accepted by MNRAS. arXiv: 1103.6062v1
- September 27, 2010
- 06:00 AM
- 687 views
Correcting Hubble images
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
I’m going to be upfront here: this post is about CCDs and readout electronics. Wait, come back, it’s going to be interesting I promise*. It involves the Hubble Space Telescope. Everyone likes that, don’t they? Many astronomical instruments, including the ones on Hubble, use Charge Coupled Devices or CCDs. These detectors are like containers for [...]... Read more »
Massey, R., Stoughton, C., Leauthaud, A., Rhodes, J., Koekemoer, A., Ellis, R., & Shaghoulian, E. (2010) Pixel-based correction for Charge Transfer Inefficiency in the Advanced Camera for Surveys . Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 401(1), 371-384. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.15638.x
Richard Massey. (2010) Charge Transfer Inefficiency in the Hubble Space Telescope since Servicing Mission 4. MNRAS. arXiv: 1009.4335v1
- July 24, 2011
- 11:59 AM
- 680 views
Seeing double in galaxy mergers
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
How do galaxies grow? One of the most common ways seems to be by merging with other nearby galaxies (a hot research topic that Rita’s talked about in more detail). Seems simple enough, but to really understand how this happens you need to look at a large number of them, at various stages of the [...]... Read more »
R.C. McGurk, C.E. Max, D.J. Rosario, G.A. Shields, K.L. Smith, S.A. Wright. (2011) Spatially-Resolved Spectroscopy of SDSS J0952 2552: a confirmed Dual AGN. Submitted to ApJL. DOI: arXiv:1107.2651
- December 22, 2010
- 01:19 PM
- 678 views
Astronomy bottlenecks…
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
Guess what’s the largest hurdle impeding scientific progress in astronomy? Lack of money? Governmental disinterest? Nope, according to a paper published yesterday it’s our bad programming skills. Modern astronomers are much more likely to be found in front of a computer these days than behind a telescope. We spend our time analysing our data and [...]... Read more »
Igor Chilingarian, & Ivan Zolotukhin. (2010) The True Bottleneck of Modern Scientific Computing in Astronomy. Astronomical Societ of the Pacific. arXiv: 1012.4119v1
- May 27, 2010
- 04:30 AM
- 655 views
Water, Mars & Herschel (everyone else can, why can’t we?)
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
The first set of results from the Herschel Space Telescope have been flooding out over the past couple of weeks*, so it’s about time they got a mention here. Rather than rehashing one of the many press releases, I thought I’d focus on an interesting result that I doubt will get much attention – the [...]... Read more »
B. M. Swinyard, P. Hartogh, S. Sidher, T. Fulton, E. Lellouch, C. Jarchow, M. J. Griffin, R. Moreno, H. Sagawa, G. Portyankina.... (2010) The Herschel-SPIRE submillimetre spectrum of Mars. to appear in the Herschel Special Issue of Astronomy . arXiv: 1005.4579v1
- August 11, 2010
- 12:56 PM
- 650 views
No rings round Rhea
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
This afternoon I set myself a challenge – take a paper published on the astronomy arXiv today and blog about it by the end of the day. Luckily for me an intriguing non-detection in our own Solar System popped up. Back in 2008 it was widely reported that the Cassini spacecraft had detected a ring [...]... Read more »
Matthew S. Tiscareno, Joseph A. Burns, Jeffrey N. Cuzzi, & Matthew M. Hedman. (2010) Cassini imaging search rules out rings around Rhea. Geophys. Res. Lett. 37, L14205 (2010). arXiv: 1008.1764v1
- November 17, 2010
- 04:00 AM
- 643 views
Lunar lost and found
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
Forty years ago today the Lunokhod-1 lunar rover landed on the Moon. This Soviet mission was the first remote controlled robot to operate outside Earth and it spent an impressive 11 months pottering around up there exploring the Mare Imbrium, even though, as you can see from the picture at the top of this post, [...]... Read more »
T. W. Murphy Jr, E. G. Adelberger, J. B. R. Battat, C. D. Hoyle, N. H. Johnson, R. J. McMillan, E. L. Michelsen, C. W. Stubbs, & H. E. Swanson. (2010) Laser Ranging to the Lost Lunokhod~1 Reflector. submitted to Icarus. arXiv: 1009.5720v2
- August 19, 2011
- 12:56 PM
- 643 views
Making an Eclipse Megamovie in 2017?
by Emma in we are all in the gutter
If you live in the continental US and you want to see a solar eclipse then Monday 21st August 2017 may be your lucky day. The path of totality will stretch narrowly across around 11 states from Oregon to South Carolina, and the rest of North America will see a partial eclipse instead. The combination [...]... Read more »
Hugh S. Hudson, Scott W. McIntosh, Shadia R. Habbal, Jay M. Pasachoff, & Laura Peticolas. (2011) The U.S. Eclipse Megamovie in 2017: a white paper on a unique outreach event. arXiv. arXiv: 1108.3486v1
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