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Le Grand Jacques

February 6, 2009 By

The Guardian today has a nice article about a new Jacques Brel album recently released with the Belgian legend’s earlier songs from the 1950s – aptly named Jacques Brel in the 50s: The Birth of a Genius. The article has some great quotes from other musical legends like David Bowie about Brel.

Brel is one of my favourite musicians – one of many that I will sadly never get to see. But I never get tired of his music, and here is one of my favourites, Amsterdam. And did I mention he’s from Belgium?

[dailymotion id=k4k3WYxTeBrLX84e6T]

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APOD: Some very fluffy-looking clouds

February 5, 2009 By

This picture fits into my Venn diagram of “cool weather phenomena” and “the fluffy theme I’ve got going on today”. Stacked lenticular clouds these are called, acoording to APOD, and they occure near mountain tops where moist air is forced to flow upwards instead of spread horizontally. The mountain in question here is Mt Rainier in Washington, USA. More very cool pictures of lenticular clouds here.

Image credit: Tim Thompson

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A very fluffy-looking galaxy

February 5, 2009 By

A stunner from the Hubble Space Telescope pretty picture machine, aka the Advanced Camera for Surveys. The galaxy is NGC4921, a spiral in the Coma cluster, one of the closest major clusters of galaxies. You can read more background about the Coma cluster and the galaxy itself in the press release here – but for now just leave it on your screen and  stare at it for a while. Don’t forget to explore the myriad of galaxies in the background, all with their own amazing shapes, colours and structures.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, K. Cook (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA)

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Super-earth confirmed, first of many?

February 3, 2009 By

Today with much to-do and under heavy embargoes, scientists have announced the discovery of an extrasolar planet with a mass diameter of just 1.7 times that of the Earth. That’s very very small. With a mass of It whizzes around its host star, Exo-7, in around 20 hours and with a temperature of over 1,000 degrees, is incredibly hot. Using data from the satellite CoRoT (Convection Rotation and planetray Transits), the German-led French-led team of scientists detected the minute dip in the light coming from the host star from the planet passing in front of it. The discovery was confirmed with observations at a number of ground-based observatories, including VLT, the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, McDonald Observatory.

In case you hadn’t noticed: exoplanet news is coming hard and fast. Every year since 1995, when Mayor & Queloz reported the discovery of 51 Peg b, has seen a number of “major breakthroughs” (see here, here, and many more) in the detection and characterisation of planets around other stars in our Galaxy.  Scientists have pushed the boundaries of our knowledge to a massive extent, and the rapid progress is just fantastic. But brace yourself for more.

[Read more...]

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Unsung hero(in)es of astronomy

February 2, 2009 By

I spotted an interesting paper today in the optics journal Optics Express by astronomers Bland-Hawthorn and Kern, on astro-photonics. In the introductory paragraphs they write the following:

The unsung heroes of the inexorable march of astronomy are the instrument builders that place instruments at the telescope focus. The manipulation of faint light  requires a great deal of ingenuity if the instrument (e.g. spectrograph) is to achieve its theoretical limits within the hostile environment of a mountain-top observatory. The design and construction of the next generation of astronomical instruments presents us with an even bigger challenge. Simply scaling up existing technology leads to highly ineffective and costly instruments that are rarely optimized for the job at hand. The astronomical community must embrace new technological avenues.

It brought a tear, albeit proverbial, I was in the office, to my eye. Read the rest of the paper here.

Reference: Bland-Hawthorn & Kern, Astrophotonics: A new era for astronomical instrumentation, Optics Express vol. 17 no. 3, 1880-1884 (2009)

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