One Astronomer's Noise

I’m just bubbling with writing, finally, just like the universe is bubbling with pretty things!

First, the wonderful, spinning, Carnival of Space #73 at Alice’s Astro Info.

The Bad Astronomer shows a really cool Spitzer image of the region around Cassiopeia A, a supernova remnant (and one of the first things our little radio telescope could see!), and the lit-up blobs of dust that make a cool light-echo! Other than the pretty image and cool science, I find light echoes to be pretty fascinating. You can see things happening that are related, but happened at different times, showing up in your telescope at the *same time* thanks to the finite speed of light and physics of the interactions. I knew very little about light echoes until I was studying for my PhD qualifying exam at UVa, to be honest. There were a bunch of questions on our old practice quals concerning light echoes, so we worked hard to solve them. One of my officemates actually did a great job of breaking the subject down for all of us to learn from, so not only were we prepared for the test, but we knew some cool astrophysics that was not covered in our classes! Needless to say, the light echo question did not pop up on our qual. Dems da breaks, kid…

Another article popped up about the Atheon, or “temple of science,” now with pictures. Wired interviews the artist, and although I still don’t agree with everything he says, it’s a pretty cool thing. And it gives another shout-out to a UVa astro prof and the sounds of the Big Bang…

… a descending scream, building into a deep rasping roar, and ending in a deafening hiss. As if this were not impressive enough, the entire acoustic show is itself the prelude to a wonderful transformation: the highest pitch sounds ultimately spawn the first generation of stars, while the deep bass notes slowly dissolve to become the tapestry of galaxies which now fills all of space.

Spooky.