Gas Cloud meets Black Hole: Nature most definitely wants to eat you

December 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Gas cloud timelapse: watch the cloud (yellow arrow) move towards the black hole (white +) (Gillessen et al, 2011)

ResearchBlogging.orgEd Yong recently started a fun new Tumblr blog called Nature Wants To Eat You, showing pictures of scary-looking animal mouths that may or may not be out to gobble us up. But the scariest and most inescapable example of Nature Wanting To Eat Us is the stuff of astrophysics – in the way that astrophysics tends to kill all the sciences, really: black holes. This week, a team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching posted their Nature paper to astro-ph, describing their observations of a cloud of gas speeding towards the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.

Like with many of these results, the coolest thing isn’t that this is happening. Imagine the size of the Universe: everything you can possibly think of is probably happening right now, somewhere. The mindblowing thing is that we can see it, 27,000 lightyears away, just like you’re probably now watching Strictly Come Dancing or Match of the Day – and believe me, this gas blob is far more exciting.

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Size Matters (in a Word Cloud)

December 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Astronomer Jim Geach at McGill in Canada put his coding skills to excellent use to create word clouds from the author lists of the top 500 astronomy papers (by citation counts) from ADS. He created clouds for each 15-year interval since 1905, I’ve shown the most recent 2 below. See his webpage for more info on how the images were created, and please complain to him if the size of your name looks smaller than your ego academic prowess.

The cloud for the last 15 years shows how the subject, or rather the citation counts, are dominated by extragalactic science. Also, not surprisingly, by men – high fives to the Drs. Kauffmann, Dunkley, Freedman, Faber, Ferrarese et al for heading up the women in the field in the last 15 years.

Author cloud, 1995-2011

 

Author cloud, 1980-1995

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How To Be Greener

December 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Spotted on a recent visit to ESA's ESTEC base in Noordwijk

To what extent should climate scientists, who arguably have the best understanding of the calamitous effects of global warming on the planet and its inhabitants, be setting an example in reducing their personal carbon footprint? That was the question raised some time ago in a Notes & Theories Blog article by Jens Rolff, evolutionary biologist at the University of Sheffield. Scientists’ privileged position on the highest echelons of education in society, he argues, gives them a responsibility to set an example to the rest of society in reducing their personal burden on the environment.

Phil Marshall at the University of Oxford raised similar questions some months ago in an interesting opinion piece in Physics World. A study he carried out for the Astro2010 Decadal Survey in the US showed that:

in astronomy it is not the big facilities that are the most polluting, but the astronomers themselves, as they fly all over the world to observatories, conferences and meetings. We estimated that astronomers were averaging some 23,000 air miles per year during the course of their work, which at 1.8 kWh per mile added up (in our simple model) to about 85% of the professional energy consumption of astrophysics. For comparison, the average US citizen uses about 250 kWh per day on transport, heating, lighting, food, consumer goods and so on; US astronomers use an additional 130 kWh per day doing astronomy.

There you go: being a professional astronomer may increase your carbon footprint by half.

There are of course many provisos to this stark figure. The number of astronomers, or even scientists, in the world is tiny compared with the overall population – so the overall contribution to the world’s carbon emissions is very small. I think scientists are not particularly worse, possibly even significantly better, than those in other professions: many people travel a huge amount for their jobs, and you could argue that the question of personal responsibility should be expanded to all of those.

Leaving existential questions aside, if we assume that changing our personal behaviour as astronomers is a valuable thing to do, for whatever reason, how would we do it?

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Filed Under: Sci & Soc, Sci 2.0 Tagged With: , ,

RB Editor’s Selections: Fat Rectangles, Big Halos, and Estimating Time and Numbers

December 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Sarah Kendrew Sarah Kendrew selects interesting and notable ResearchBlogging.org posts in the physical sciences, chemistry, engineering, computer science, geosciences and mathematics. She blogs about astronomy at One Small Step.

[Cross-posted from ResearchBlogging News.]

On NanoExplanations, Aaron Sterling talks at length about the problem of rectangulation of orthogonal polygons, or: calculating fat rectangles, and why we should care. I’m pleased to report that I learnt something new today – thanks Aaron.

Galaxies that are actively forming stars, report astrophysicists, are surrounded by more substantial and oxygen-rich halos. Charles Daney gives a nice discussion of this work on Today’s Science.

Our level of maths wizardry is apparently linked to how good we are at estimating times. On Inkfish, Elizabeth describes a very interesting study that shows a correlation between the two skills.

Thanks for the great writing this week, and I’ll be back next Monday with more selections!

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Feeling Stupid Doesn’t Have To Hurt

December 3, 2011 By 8 Comments

Many young scientists complain about feeling stupid compared with their peers, and even more suffer in silence. This phenomenon, called Impostor Syndrome, can be quite crippling and even cause people to quit their research careers. It’s frequently discussed these days, particularly in the context of gender balance in science, as women appear to be affected by it more than men. Perhaps it’s yet another reason why women disproportionately opt out of a career in science? I’m not sure I sign up to that idea, but it’s an interesting question nonetheless.

I was reminded of Impostor Syndrome today by an honest post by fellow astronomy postdoc Rita about her own feelings of inadequacy, and I’ve had similar discussions with many friends over the years. In my first few years as a postdoc I suffered massively from Impostor Syndrome in the same way that is described by so many others: fear, anxiety, insecurity, frustration.

Clearly, no one wants to live like this, and the associated anxiety that Rita talks about is common and completely understandable. In the last year or two I’ve thought a lot about these feelings, and I’ve figured out ways of dealing with them.

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Filed Under: Me, Snippets Tagged With: ,
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