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Another accolade for CMB scientists

May 30, 2010 By

In another snippet of news, the Shaw Foundation that administers the annual Shaw Prize – the $1 million “Nobel Prize of the East”, on Thursday announced that the 2010 prize for astronomy has been awarded to Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins and Lyman Page and David Spergel of Princeton. The trio have received the award for “for their leadership of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) experiment, which has enabled precise determinations of the fundamental cosmological parameters, including the geometry, age and composition of the universe”.

Cosmic Microwave Background scientists have been real favourites on the prize circuit – take a look:

  • Penzias & Wilson, 1978 Nobel Prize, for their CMB detection
  • Peebles, 2004 Shaw Prize, predicted the CMB
  • Alpher, 2005 National Medal of Science, predicted the CMB
  • Smoot & Mather, 2006 Nobel Prize, for their work on the Cosmic microwave Background Explorer satellite (COBE)
  • Mather & COBE team, 2006 Gruber Prize
  • Bennett, Page & Spergel, 2010 Shaw Prize, for their work on WMAP.
    (… and I’m sure I’ve missed some…)

And quite right too – CMB studies of the last couple of decades have been massively influential in our understanding of the Big Bang, the earliest epochs of the Universe, and the origin of structure. I wonder if the Planck team will be just as successful?

Incidentally, nice to see that the 2010 Shaw Prize for mathematics was awarded to Belgian mathematician Jean Bourgain, who’s at Princeton. I don’t know him or his work, but as I haven’t seen it mentioned in any of the Belgian media I thought I’d flag it up here. Congrats!

Image: NASA / WMAP Science Team

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3 Quarks Daily Science Blogging Awards

May 30, 2010 By

The excellent multi-disciplinary 3 Quarks Daily blog has announced that following the success of last year’s prizes, it’s starting its second cycle of blogging awards. First up are the science prizes, judged by none other than Richard Dawkins. Other categories to be awarded later this year are politics, philosophy and arts & literature. All the info is on 3QD, here, and nominations can be made by just posting a link in the post’s comments section. The nominations will be closed at the end of the day in EDT on 31 May.

Do you have a favourite sciency blog post – your own or someone else’s? Go nominate it quickly!

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Meet The Elements

May 30, 2010 By

A friend pointed me towards this fab little video of the song “Meet the Elements” by They Might Be Giants. Very cute!

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South Africa, Astronomy and Development

May 28, 2010 By

SALT

SALT

South Africa’s rising star in astronomy is continuing its ascendancy after the announcement that the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) is to host for the brand new International Astronomical Union‘ Development Office. The decision was announced at an IAU meeting in Baltimore earlier this month.

At  last year’s General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro, the International Astronomical Union  approved a decadal strategic plan for Astronomy and the Developing World (pdf), to up the profile of astronomy in countries with few ongoing amateur and/or professional astronomy acivities. While unlocking the mysteries of the Universe in its most literal sense may not (should not?) be  a top priority in the world’s poorest countries, investing in astronomy education is a valuable initiative.

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Dear Fuzzies, Why So Green?

May 21, 2010 By

Green fuzzies (Cyganowski et al, 2008 & De Buizer & Vacca, 2010)

ResearchBlogging.orgAmongst 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 hampered by atmospheric absorption. With its 85-cm diameter primary mirror, it’s easy to dismiss Spitzer as belonging to a former era. But new science is coming out of Spitzer data every day, and vast quantities of data remain unpublished in the archives. The big legacy surveys in particular, such as c2d (Cores to Disks) and the galactic plane surveys GLIMPSE and MIPSGAL, have released a wealth of data into the public domain, throwing light on old problems and unveiling new mysteries to solve.

One interesting phenomenon witnessed on the images from the GLIMPSE survey was a curious population on extended green objects (EGOs). Catalogued by Cyganowski et al in 2008, these “green fuzzies” appear to be associated with regions of massive star formation – many of them lie in or very near to infrared dark clouds, known to harbour the earliest forms of massive star birth, or are associated with methanol masers, strong radio emission caused by excitation of methanol molecules by infrared radiation from dust. Their green colour is in a sense incidental, arising from the way we construct 3-colour images from the Spitzer camera IRAC. IRAC takes images in 4 channels, at 3.6, 4.5, 5.8 and 8 microns, and typically an red-green-blue image uses the 8, 4.5 and 3.6 micron data, respectively. In this picture, “green” indicates that the object has an unusually high flux in the 4.5 micron band.

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