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Summer conferencing

May 20, 2010 By

Summer is a busy season for conferencing, and some really interesting and fun meetings in the area of Open Science/Science Online/Science and Society are coming up in the next few months.

From 16 to 19 June, the California Institute of Technology will be hosting the 2010 edition of AstroInformatics, which looks excellent. The meeting has three days of “proper” conferencing, covering many topics – conceptual (changing paradigms in astronomy research, developments in other sciences) , technical (what are the newest tools for exploring, visualising and sharing data?) , people-based (astronomy education, citizen science). The 4th day is a workshop on astro-semantics. I’m really excited about the conference itself and about the trip as a whole – I’m well overdue a trip to the astronomy beehive/wasp’s nest (?) that is Pasadena, home to friends, colleagues and fellow bloggers. A tweetup may be in order – be warned.

Inconveniently clashing with AstroInformatics is the very cool-looking Science Hack Day in London on 19-20 June, hosted at the offices of the Guardian newspaper and sponsored by a bunch of great organisations. It’s a typical weekend of geekery with no real programme, just a bunch of coding-aficionados – and more than a few DotAstronomers, I couldn’t help but notice – getting together to Do Cool Stuff With Computers. I’m sorry to miss it, although I’m a little too technically incompetent to really contribute much. I always had the impression that biomedical scientists were much more active in participating in such events and it’s great to see that astronomers are getting seriously involved too – I spotted that LCOGT are even sponsoring the Hack Day.


I was also very happy to see the announcement of the 2010 instalment of Science Online London on 3-4 September. After last year’s fun and stimulating event at the Royal Institution in London, this year’s SOLo will take place in the British Library, who are cohosting the conference with Mendeley and Nature Publishing Group.There’s not much info yet on programme or fringe events, but if last year was anything to go by, it should be well worth attending.

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Global Poetry System

May 19, 2010 By

Thanks to my good friend Mary in London, I’m taking part in an arts project organised by the South Bank Centre in London called Global Poetry System. Global Poetry System, or GPS, aims “to explore and map the poetry of the world”. On the project’s website you can upload poetry, and tag the location where you found it on a world map. This month, the project launched a new initiative called Analogue Adventures. The project organisers have sent out digital cameras to all corners of the world, asking recipients to snap a picture of whatever inspires them as “poetry” – graffiti, art, signs – and pass the camera on to another volunteer within 48 hours. By the 23rd of June, the camera should make their ways back to London, where the pictures can be developed, uploaded and mapped.

So the little camera made it across the Channel to the Netherlands.

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Why so few girl engineers?

May 17, 2010 By

All quiet on the blogging front at the moment while I’m busy preparing for big upcoming meetings. But here’s some food for thought for the week…

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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Herschel looks into the Heart of Darkness

May 10, 2010 By

Star formation in Gould's Belt

Last week a big conference took place at the European Space Agency hub ESTEC, down the road in Noordwijk. The town was inundated with the lucky scientists who got to play with the first data from the new infrared space observatory Herschel and were finally allowed to talk about it to the rest of the world. And now that the conference is over, as expected, science from Herschel is everywhere!

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A blast from a black hole’s past

May 2, 2010 By

A superluminal X-ray echo travelling through the Galactic Centre molecular clouds (Ponti et al, 2010)

This post was chosen as an Editor's Selection for ResearchBlogging.org

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 back yard, raises many more questions.

One persisting puzzle has been the low luminosity of the black hole. The balance of inward and outward forces around an accreting object place a limit on its luminosity (the Eddington luminosity). As the SgrA* black hole is located in a densely populated part of our galaxy, we’d expect it to be accreting actively and therefore pretty bright. Instead, its luminosity  is just 0.000001% of the Eddington limit – a factor of 10^8 lower. Yusef-Zadeh & Wardle give a good discussion of this phenomenon in this recent paper.

This has led astronomers to wonder: has our black hole always been this dim, or are we just seeing it in an unusually quiet phase, or are we missing something more fundamental? With some very cool X-ray observations stretching over almost a decade, Gabriele Ponti and colleagues have been able to uncover evidence of a very strong flare in SgrA*’s past, several hundred years ago.

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