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Plotting Astronomers

July 22, 2010 By

(click to enlarge)

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is one of the fundamental plots in astronomy. I remember it being one of the very first “sciencey” things I learnt about astronomy. It’s a very elegant plot, as it relates two very basic quantities about stars, their temperature and their brightness,  and presents a visually memorable picture. The main known classes of stars each, like white dwarfs or red giants, populate their own corner of the diagram.

And now Stuart has taken the HR diagram and made a human version of it: the Astronomer HR diagram! It’s very neat, and lots of astronomers have been figuring out where they would place on the plot. If I count my SPIE Proceedings papers, not strictly refereed but usually counted as such for intrumentalists, I’m at [17,4500], nicely along the Main Sequence. Counting just my very strictly peer-reviewed papers, I’m at [3,4500], in the new media section. Either’s fine by me!

Image: S. Lowe

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

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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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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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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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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