20 Years of Hubble April 24, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, pics, space . Add a comment
Source: Hubblesite.org. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)
Today we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. Hurrah! Although it’s clearly impossible, as I haven’t aged more than, oh, 10 years since then.
The folks at NASA and ESA have released a set of gorgeous new images and videos of the Carina Nebula, a region of active star formation in our Galaxy.
The European Hubble team have also taken the occasion to launch a rather nice looking new website, check it out here.
The same team are organising a competition to find the most artistic, funniest, weirdest, largest and smallest manifestations of Hubble and its images in popular culture – that’s a fun idea. Anyone can join the Flickr group and submit images, and the category winners get some cool prizes. Read more here.
Google joined in the celebration with a lovely doodle for the day:
Eps Aurigae’s dark secret (interferometry rules!) April 8, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, new astronomy . 3comments
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 we should really know about – like gamma ray burst light curves or cosmic strings – without fearing the judgment of our supervisors. An additional benefit for me is that I now have a small army of minions scoping out interesting new research for me to blog about here. Ha!
Anyway, this morning we talked about a letter in Nature by Kloppenborg et al, published today, showing some fabulous new observations of the space oddity that is ε Aurigae. This star forms part of a binary system and is unusually eclipsed by its invisible companion every 27 years for a lengthy 18-month period. Astronomers have known about this for almost 200 years, and had hoped that the current eclipse, which began last August, would finally provide some definitive answers. The AAVSO has even enlisted citizen scientists worldwide to gather data for the star’s light curve with its Citizen Sky project, and I spotted today that ε Aurigae also has a twitter feed.
The essence of the paper is shown in the above video. These images look like a clever simulation – but these are actually real images (well, apart from the white lines, obviously). They are resolved images of the stellar disk of ε Aurigae! They were taken last November and December, in the early phases of the eclipse, and they clearly show that something dark is moving in front of the star. I’m an instrumentalist, I’m supposed to know this stuff, what we can and can’t observe, but I really didn’t.
Making my software open April 6, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, me . 4comments
After thinking about software development in astronomy and talking about it with friends at work and on this blog, I thought it was about time I put my money where my mouth is. I too write software – in fact, the bulk of my work here in Leiden has been based around code I’ve written over the past 2 years for the METIS project (in IDL). The code basically calculates the sensitivity of METIS on the E-ELT, or the minimum flux it will be able to detect at a particular signal to noise (S/N) in a given exposure time over its wavelength range, in various modes of observation. You can find the full package with background info on my brand-new github page, and a paper is in preparation (to be presented at SPIE 2010) for your referencing pleasure.
The World is f*&^ing Beautiful March 30, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy . Add a commentBBC2 are currently screening a series of programmes called Wonders of the Solar System, presented by Brian Cox (twitter), Physics Professor at Manchester University. From what I’ve seen (not all of them as iPlayer is not accessible here – grrr), the basic premise is that Brian travels to beautiful and remote parts of the world and tells us something about the amazing stuff that goes on in our Solar System, including right here on Earth. Definitely worth a watch.
Anyway, that aside, here’s an alternative take on it. Headphones advised if you’re in a public place!
APOD: Cold dust, Hot image March 22, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, pics . 1 comment so far
Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is this stunning image of a section of the Galaxy as seen at far-infrared wavelengths. The high-resolution parts come from the recently launched Planck satellite, the rest from the older infrared satellite IRAS. The bright material shown in the image is very cold gas and dust, whose radiation peaks at these long infrared wavelengths.
Image: ESA, Planck HFI Consortium, IRAS
