31 posts · 32,445 views
Postdoc in astronomy at the University of Leiden
One Small Step
31 posts
Sort by Latest Post, Most Popular
View by Condensed, Full
- June 12, 2010
- 01:16 PM
- 1,650 views
The Big Bang Debate
by sarah in One Small Step
A few days ago, I posted this poll about the show The Big Bang Theory, asking the question if it was bad for science (and women). I closed the poll last night, the votes are in, you people have spoken. Here’s the final results from 58 votes – and thanks for voting, polls are fun!
Most [...]... Read more »
Ford, T., Boxer, C., Armstrong, J., & Edel, J. (2007) More Than "Just a Joke": The Prejudice-Releasing Function of Sexist Humor. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(2), 159-170. DOI: 10.1177/0146167207310022
- February 4, 2010
- 03:36 AM
- 1,392 views
The end of gravity as we know it?
by sarah in One Small Step
When a physicist is on the front page of a newspaper, you know the story is either really bad, or really good. Just before Christmas, the Dutch paper De Volkskrant ran a big story on theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde, who has been making waves with his new theory for the origin of gravity. Since the [...]... Read more »
Erik P. Verlinde. (2010) On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton. arxiv. arXiv: 1001.0785v1
- October 3, 2009
- 03:52 PM
- 1,363 views
Puffing up elliptical galaxies
by sarah in One Small Step
Elliptical galaxies are the boring uncles of the galaxy family: they’re amorphous blobby things, ubiquitous in the Universe, that contain a fairly uniform population of old, red stars. Without the interstellar gas and dust that is needed to harbour pretty sites of star formation, they are supremely unphotogenic. But they have far more going on [...]... Read more »
Damjanov, I., & et al. (2009) Red nuggets at z~1.5: Compact passive galaxies and the formation of the Kormendy relation. The Astrophysical Journal, 695(1), 101-115. DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/695/1/101
Bezanson, R., van Dokkum, P., Tal, T., Marchesini, D., Kriek, M., Franx, M., & Coppi, P. (2009) The relation between compact, quiescent high-redshift galaxies and massive nearby elliptical galaxies: Evidence for hierarchical, inside-out growth. The Astrophysical Journal, 697(2), 1290-1298. DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/697/2/1290
Fan, L., Lapi, A., De Zotti, G., & Danese, L. (2008) The Dramatic Size Evolution of Elliptical Galaxies and the Quasar Feedback. The Astrophysical Journal, 689(2). DOI: 10.1086/595784
Glazebrook, K. (2009) Galaxy formation: Too small to ignore. Nature, 460(7256), 694-695. DOI: 10.1038/460694a
Tomonori Totani. (2009) Size Evolution of Early-Type Galaxies and Massive Compact Objects as the Dark Matter. PASJ. arXiv: 0908.3295v1
- January 16, 2010
- 11:45 AM
- 1,293 views
First steps in direct exoplanet spectroscopy
by sarah in One Small Step
Astronomers collaborating from both sides of the Atlantic have obtained the first direct spectrum of an exoplanet. The news here is mainly that they managed to record the spectrum and separate it reliably from that of the host star. Their short letter in ApJ, posted to astro-ph yesterday, doesn’t delve deeply into the implications of [...]... Read more »
M. Janson, C. Bergfors, M. Goto, W. Brandner, & D. Lafreniere. (2010) Spatially resolved spectroscopy of the exoplanet HR 8799 c. accepted by A. arXiv: 1001.2017v1
- May 21, 2010
- 02:30 PM
- 1,285 views
Dear Fuzzies, Why So Green?
by sarah in One Small Step
Amongst all the excitement over the first results from Herschel, it’s easy to forget about its comparatively tiny American cousin Spitzer. Launched in 2003 with its 3 instruments IRAC, IRS and MIPS, Spitzer covers the infrared wavelengths from around 3 to 150 microns – a region that from Earth is either totally inaccessible or severely [...]... Read more »
James M. De Buizer, & William D. Vacca. (2010) Direct Spectroscopic Identification of the Origin of 'Green Fuzzy' Emission in Star Forming Regions. accepted in ApJ. arXiv: 1005.2209v1
C. J. Cyganowski, B. A. Whitney, E. Holden, E. Braden, C. L. Brogan, E. Churchwell, R. Indebetouw, D. F. Watson, B. L. Babler, R. Benjamin.... (2008) A Catalog of Extended Green Objects (EGOs) in the GLIMPSE Survey: A new sample of massive young stellar object outflow candidates. Astronomical Journal, 136(6), 2391-2412. arXiv: 0810.0530v1
- December 25, 2009
- 07:40 AM
- 1,276 views
Laser guide stars as magnetometers
by sarah in One Small Step
In a nice piece of cross-pollination between disciplines, scientists have proposed a new method for measuring the Earth’s magnetic field strength using technology developed for ground-based observational astronomy. As it turns out, the laser guide stars astronomers use to sense the turbulence high up in the atmosphere can be used as cheap and efficient magnetometers.
To [...]... Read more »
J. M. Higbie, S. M. Rochester, B. Patton, R. Holzlöhner, D. Bonaccini Calia, & D. Budker. (2009) Magnetometry with Mesospheric Sodium. arXiv:0912.4310v1 [physics.atom-ph]. arXiv: 0912.4310v1
- May 2, 2010
- 02:15 PM
- 1,263 views
A blast from a black hole’s past
by sarah in One Small Step
For over a decade, through the ingenious tracking of stellar orbits in the galactic centre, we’ve known that a supermassive black hole weighing the equivalent of several million solar masses is lurking at the centre of our galaxy. But this discovery, while offering us the tantalising opportunity to study these enigmatic objects in our own [...]... Read more »
Gabriele Ponti, Regis Terrier, Andrea Goldwurm, Guillaume Belanger, & Guillaume Trap. (2010) Discovery of a superluminal Fe K echo at the Galactic Center: The glorious past of Sgr A* preserved by molecular clouds. ApJ . arXiv: 1003.2001v1
Sunyaev, R., & Churazov, E. (1998) Equivalent width, shape and proper motion of the iron fluorescent line emission from molecular clouds as an indicator of the illuminating source X-ray flux history. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 297(4), 1279-1291. DOI: 10.1046/j.1365-8711.1998.01684.x
- January 31, 2010
- 07:25 AM
- 1,198 views
Shape matters in black hole growth
by sarah in One Small Step
Active galaxies have gone by many names: active galactic nuclei, quasars, QSOs, Seyfert galaxies, radio galaxies. Astronomers used to think these were all distinct types of objects, unified by the observation of large amounts of energy emerging from a compact region at the centre of the galaxy. These days, despite a great variety in observational [...]... Read more »
Kevin Schawinski, C. Megan Urry, Shanil Virani, Paolo Coppi, Steven P. Bamford, Ezequiel Treister, Chris J. Lintott, Marc Sarzi, William C. Keel, Sugata Kaviraj.... (2010) Galaxy Zoo: The fundamentally different co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their early- and late-type host galaxies. accepted to ApJ. arXiv: 1001.3141v1
- September 7, 2010
- 08:26 AM
- 1,169 views
Exoplanets at a discount
by sarah in One Small Step
Astronomers have many ways of spotting exoplanets round far away stars – but getting a direct look at them, especially with ground-based telescopes, remains a difficult job. With a planet emitting very little light of its own, and appearing to us essentially on top of the host star, its radiation is completely drowned in the [...]... Read more »
Sascha P. Quanz, Michael R. Meyer, Matthew Kenworthy, Julien H. V. Girard, Markus Kasper, Anne-Marie Lagrange, Daniel Apai, Anthony Boccaletti, Mickael Bonnefoy, Gael Chauvin.... (2010) First Results From VLT NACO Apodizing Phase Plate: 4-micron Images of the Exoplanet beta Pictoris b. ApJ Letters. arXiv: 1009.0538v1
A.-M. Lagrange, M. Bonnefoy, G. Chauvin, D. Apai, D. Ehrenreich, A. Boccaletti, D. Gratadour, D. Rouan, D. Mouillet, S. Lacour.... (2010) A giant planet imaged in the disk of the young star Beta Pictoris. Science, 329(5987), 57-59. arXiv: 1006.3314v1
Matthew A. Kenworthy, Sascha P. Quanz, Michael R. Meyer, Markus E. Kasper, Rainer Lenzen, Johanan L. Codona, Julien H. V. Girard, & Philip M. Hinz. (2010) An apodizing phase plate coronagraph for VLT/NACO. Proc. SPIE. arXiv: 1007.3448v1
- September 13, 2010
- 04:04 PM
- 1,163 views
Scientific hubris, or: Everything you thought you knew about straight line fits is wrong
by sarah in One Small Step
Think you’ve got your least squares down to a tee? Think again. In a paper posted to the Arxiv in late August, David Hogg of NYU and his collaborators take us to task on our sloppy data fitting habits. And he’s not in the mood to mince his words. It is conventional to begin any [...]... Read more »
David W. Hogg, Jo Bovy, & Dustin Lang. (2010) Data analysis recipes: Fitting a model to data. Arxiv . arXiv: 1008.4686v1
- April 11, 2010
- 04:17 PM
- 1,137 views
Spreading Galaxies Gospel on Facebook
by sarah in One Small Step
Paolo Salucci has a bone to pick with the community. The Trieste-based astronomer is fed up with his colleagues’ misconceptions about galaxy rotation curves and has decided to Do Something About It. In his short paper posted to astro-ph last Friday, he describes the experiment he’s set up to convince the world that galaxy rotation [...]... Read more »
Paolo Salucci. (2010) Can Social Networks help the progress of Astrophysics and Cosmology? An experiment in the field of Galaxy Kinematics. Arxiv. arXiv: 1004.1190v1
- August 2, 2010
- 06:02 AM
- 1,134 views
Massive star formation not so different after all?
by sarah in One Small Step
In my previous post on the Zooniverse Project IX I’m involved in, I talked about the importance of star formation in the Universe and some of the difficulties we face in studying it. Some big unanswered question particularly remain in our understanding of how massive stars form. Fittingly, the latest edition of Nature has a [...]... Read more »
Kraus S, Hofmann KH, Menten KM, Schertl D, Weigelt G, Wyrowski F, Meilland A, Perraut K, Petrov R, Robbe-Dubois S.... (2010) A hot compact dust disk around a massive young stellar object. Nature, 466(7304), 339-42. PMID: 20631793
- June 28, 2010
- 02:42 AM
- 1,127 views
AstroInformatics II: From public outreach to public engagement
by sarah in One Small Step
Outreach and education are two areas that stand to gain from developments in semantic astronomy and an increased scientific presence on the web. Big changes have already taken place, driven by a community eager to connect and communicate about the research we do every day. As part of a panel at the AstroInformatics 2010 conference [...]... Read more »
Victoria Stodden. (2010) Open science: policy implications for the evolving phenomenon of user-led scientific innovation. JCOM, 9(1). info:/
- March 4, 2010
- 04:20 PM
- 1,100 views
With a little help from our friends: Finding a home for E-ELT
by sarah in One Small Step
ESO announced today that their Council have recommended Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Andes as the preferred site for their next generation optical/IR observatory, the 42-m European Extremely Large Telescope. The decision came in response to the delivery of a technical report by the organisation’s E-ELT Site Selection Advisory Committee, from which Armazones emerged as [...]... Read more »
M. Schoeck, S. Els, R. Riddle, W. Skidmore, T. Travouillon, R. Blum, E. Bustos, G. Chanan, S. G. Djorgovski, P. Gillett.... (2009) Thirty Meter Telescope Site Testing I: Overview. PASP. arXiv: 0904.1183v1
Skidmore, Warren, Els, Sebastian, Travouillon, Tony, Riddle, Reed, Schöck, Matthias, Bustos, Edison, Seguel, Juan, & Walker, David. (2009) Thirty Meter Telescope Site Testing V: Seeing and Isoplanatic Angle. PASP, 121(884), 1151-1166. info:/10.1086/644758
- March 13, 2011
- 06:35 PM
- 1,041 views
Bubbles under the microscope
by sarah in One Small Step
As the data from the Milky Way Project are starting to come in, and Rob is making progress with the data reduction of many clicks and drawings, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to these gorgeous bubbles we’re seeing. How were they created, why do they appear the way they do, and what [...]... Read more »
James E. Dale, & Ian Bonnell. (2011) Ionizing feedback from massive stars in massive clusters: Fake bubbles and untriggered star formation. Arxiv. arXiv: 1103.1532v1
- April 8, 2010
- 04:21 PM
- 1,030 views
Eps Aurigae’s dark secret (interferometry rules!)
by sarah in One Small Step
Since a few weeks some PhD students and postdocs have been organising astro-ph coffee meetings three times a week, where the youngsters in the department can sit together and chat about recent papers. The advantage of having these meetings for only students and postdocs is that we can admit to our utter ignorance about stuff [...]... Read more »
Kloppenborg, B., Stencel, R., Monnier, J., Schaefer, G., Zhao, M., Baron, F., McAlister, H., ten Brummelaar, T., Che, X., Farrington, C.... (2010) Infrared images of the transiting disk in the ε Aurigae system. Nature, 464(7290), 870-872. DOI: 10.1038/nature08968
D. W. Hoard, S. B. Howell, & R. E. Stencel. (2010) Taming the Invisible Monster: System Parameter Constraints for Epsilon Aurigae from the Far-Ultraviolet to the Mid-Infrared. ApJ accepted. arXiv: 1003.3694v1
- February 10, 2011
- 10:00 PM
- 1,022 views
The Galactic Centre black hole in close-up
by sarah in One Small Step
he research into the nature and properties of the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy is one of the highlights of astronomical discovery of the last two decades. Using the biggest telescopes on the planet and state of the art observing technology, we’ve been able to track the young massive stars that are whizzing around the black hole in a dense cluster, and shown with a high level of certainty that the galaxy’s central object really is a supermassive black hole, referred to as Sagittarius A*. Using these stellar orbits, we’ve also determined its mass – 4 million solar masses.... Read more »
F. H. Vincent, T. Paumard, G. Perrin, L. Mugnier, F. Eisenhauer, & S. Gillessen. (2011) Performance of astrometric detection of a hotspot orbiting on the innermost stable circular orbit of the galactic centre black hole. MNRAS. arXiv: 1011.5439v1
- March 1, 2010
- 12:50 PM
- 1,013 views
On Software in Astronomy
by sarah in One Small Step
I’ve been giving some thought to software development in astronomy, which is a difficult topic. All astronomers agree that good data processing, and hence good software, is crucial to doing rigorous science. To interpret observational data, to translate electrons on a detector to scientific knowledge, requires a solid understanding of the instrument, the observing conditions, [...]... Read more »
C. Sandin, T. Becker, M. M. Roth, J. Gerssen, A. Monreal-Ibero, P. Böhm, & P. Weilbacher. (2010) p3d: a general data-reduction tool for fiber-fed integral-field spectrographs. accepted by A. arXiv: 1002.4406v1
- November 21, 2010
- 09:00 PM
- 992 views
Dark Matter Fisticuffs I: The Backdrop
by sarah in One Small Step
On Thursday, two giants of astronomy met in the sleepy German city of Bonn to debate one of the basic tenets of our current cosmological vision: the existence of dark matter. In the blue corner was Simon White aka. the Reigning Champion, Director at the Max Planck Insitute for Astrophysics (MPA) in Garching, and figurehead of the concordance cosmology model we all know and live by. In the red corner, Pavel Kroupa aka. the Challenger, Professor at the Argelander Institute in Bonn and well-known expert on stellar populations and dynamics.... Read more »
P. Kroupa, B. Famaey, K. S. de Boer, J. Dabringhausen, M. S. Pawlowski, C. M. Boily, H. Jerjen, D. Forbes, G. Hensler, & M. Metz. (2010) Local-Group tests of dark-matter Concordance Cosmology: Towards a new paradigm for structure formation. Astronomy . arXiv: 1006.1647v3
Peter V. Pikhitsa. (2010) MOND reveals the thermodynamics of gravity. Arxiv. arXiv: 1010.0318v3
- September 13, 2009
- 02:44 PM
- 967 views
Revamped Hubble breaks new ground
by sarah in One Small Step
Quick on the heels of NASA’s showcasing of the first images taken by a reborn Hubble Space Telescope come a pair of papers posted to astro-ph showing a glimpse of Hubble potential new power. These papers, by a collaboration of US, Swiss and Dutch astronomers, report the detection of galaxies using Hubble’s new optical/infrared camera [...]... Read more »
R. J. Bouwens, G. D. Illingworth, P. A. Oesch, M. Stiavelli, P. van Dokkum, M. Trenti, D. Magee, I. Labbe, M. Franx, & M. Carollo. (2009) z~8 galaxies from ultra-deep WFC3/IR Observations over the HUDF. ApJL. arXiv: 0909.1803v1
P. A. Oesch, R. J. Bouwens, G. D. Illingworth, C. M. Carollo, M. Franx, I. Labbe, D. Magee, M. Stiavelli, M. Trenti, & P. G. van Dokkum. (2009) z~7 Galaxies in the HUDF: First Epoch WFC3/IR Results. ApJL (submitted). arXiv: 0909.1806v1
topics
join us!
Do you write about peer-reviewed research in your blog? Use ResearchBlogging.org to make it easy for your readers — and others from around the world — to find your serious posts about academic research.
If you don't have a blog, you can still use our site to learn about fascinating developments in cutting-edge research from around the world.
