The Real World: Astronomers' Edition April 30, 2009
Posted by sarah in: politics, science . 8commentsCompared with other branches of science, you could think there’s not much at stake in real world terms in astronomy research. The amounts of money involved are relatively small**, both in terms of investment and potential gain. Also, galaxies (fortunately!) don’t take us to court if we get their redshifts wrong, and young stars don’t die horrible deaths if they don’t get their shots. Both the community itself and the public see astronomers as this beautiful global brotherhood (a few sisters even these days) working together to unlock the secrets of the Universe. Unfortunately the days where our competition is purely intellectual are long gone, and the modern way of astronomy, as with most fields in science, is a bloody fight for resources, regconition and cash. And the battle grounds are the journals that publish our work. (more…)
Funding people, not projects April 23, 2009
Posted by sarah in: politics, science . 1 comment so farToday I attended a talk by Prof. Cornelis van Bochove, who was appointed as Professor of Science Policy Studies at Leiden University in February last year. Van Bochove has had an interesting career: after a number of years in econometrics research, he became Director of the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics for 5 years until 1999, after that Director of Research and Science Policy at the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science until 2007. In those years he apparently always showed a keen interest in astronomy and was a strong supporter of the Dutch astronomy community, which has a long history of international excellence. Rather than hang up his hat, van Bochove joined Leiden to go back to the bench. The focus of his research is “evidence-based science policy”. So he’s looking at the science behind funding science. A bit of a brain twister, I know. But the talk turned out to be very interesting, and a little bit surreal. (more…)
Lightest exoplanet discovered April 22, 2009
Posted by sarah in: new astronomy, science . Add a comment
ESO yesterday reported the discovery of the lightest exoplanet yet. Gliese 581e, the fourth in a family of exolanets around Gliese 581, is just twice as massive as the Earth, which means it could well be rocky rather than gassy like Jupiter or Saturn. The discovery was made by a team of Swiss an French astronomers led by Michel Mayor of Geneva Observatory, who discovered of the first ever exoplanet in 1995, using ESO’s 3.6m telescope at La Silla, Chile.
But Mayor and his team added a cherry to ESO’s cake. Further study of the orbit of Gliese 581d, one of the new planet’s known siblings, has shown that the planet lies well within the host star’s so-called Habitable Zone, where the existence of liquid water is thought to be possible (though that doesn’t mean that it does!).
Nice work!
Image credit: M. House, F. Kamphues (top)
Kepler sees the light April 20, 2009
Posted by sarah in: science, space . 2comments
First light images from NASA’s Kepler space telescope were released last week following the satellite’s sucecssful launch on March 7. The picture shown here shows an (inversted) image of the starfield Kepler will be studying over the course of its exoplanet-finding mission, in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Galaxy. It may not look like much, but for the Kepler team it’s pretty special to see that their satellite is alive and well, and performing as it should. Congrats!
Go here for the full set of first light images.
Image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
Look UP! April 16, 2009
Posted by sarah in: science . 3commentsEver wished you had a place on the web where you can find out everything about an astronomical object? Comrade astroblogger Stuart over in the UK has written just the thing. It’s called LookUp and you can access it for free, here. I’ve been playing with it for a few days and it’s a lovely little tool that will come in handy for both the desk-bound professionals and the stargazers out in the field. (more…)
