The Universe as seen from the perspective of an astronomical researcher, presenter and writer.
My first note from the SDSS conference in Chicago is up over on my Discovery blog, reporting on the discovery of a new companion to the Milky Way. There will be more posts there (and possibly) here later today and tomorrow.
Update : Second report is now up too.
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At any conference there’s one talk that changes the way you think about something, or crystalizes thoughts that you’ve had anyway. In the last few months I’d been thinking carefully about the answer to the question ‘but what happened before the Big Bang’, and a talk by Cosmic Variance blogger Sean Carroll crystalized some of [...]
Read More...I’ve spent most of the day running around having meetings so there’s been little blogging from me. I will write about the talk I’ve just come out of by Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance, but it’s going to take me a while to digest my thoughts. In the meantime, I should remind you all you [...]
Read More...Imagine being in our solar system, standing just where the Earth is now, roughly four and a half billion years ago. Around you would be the detritus of star formation, left over material forming a protoplanetary disk from which the planets are coalescing. Understanding just how this disk of dust and gas became the eight [...]
Read More...I wrote yesterday about the somewhat surprising link that’s been discovered between the tightness of a galaxy’s spiral arms (the angle at which they uncurl) and the size of the black hole that lurks in their centre. I managed to catch up with Marc Seigar, and the interview is now up on Youtube
You need to [...]
The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) : An Observational Legacy for Studying Galaxy Evolution
Prof Marc Dickinson
The following was written during the final plenary talk of the first day at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in St Louis. I was going to post as we went along, but the wireless connection in the meeting room [...]
I’m sitting at the back of the second press conference of the day, desperately swapping between laptops to run the Astronomy Cast Live feed, catch up with press releases from the speakers and to write this.
Currently, we’re listening to the announcement of the smallest extrasolar planet to date, a 3 Earth Mass planet orbiting a [...]
One of the most intriguing of the morning press releases is now being described by Marc Seigar from the University of Arkansas, who has been trying to weigh the supermassive black holes that lurk at the centre of galaxies. Ideally, you’d do this by measuring the speed of the gas rotating around it, but that’s [...]
Read More...Welcome to St Louis! Streaming from Astronomy Cast Live.
Webcast by Ustream.TV
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