One Astronomer's Noise

Entries from January 2009

Carnival of Space #88

January 30, 2009 · 3 Comments

The SpaceWriter is this week’s host for a great Carnival of Space, with lots of features on manned space flight, past, present, and future. This topic is clearly on everyone’s minds, with a new President in the White House and the anniversaries of three of NASA’s greatest losses this week. Go and read the sobering tales, the stories of hope, and the plans for the future. Also, there’s a section on astronomy pseudo-science called “Woo Woo ‘Science’.” In addition to spreading knowledge and wonder about the universe, those in astronomy outreach much also battle the misconceptions and bad ideas that take hold in the public’s imagination.

I’m just slowly getting back into a writing groove myself, so I had nothing to contribute this week. Unless you all want to read my 6-page fellowship proposal (doubtful). After next Monday’s Journal Club, I’ll be wanting to revisit the SETI talks from the last URSI meeting! But I’ve actually been working myself hard in the lab, so unfortunately, astronomy is the last thing I want to think about when I chill out late at night, which is usually the time I’m feeling write-y! I’ll get back on a normal schedule one of these days… ;-)

Categories: astronomy
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Entertain Your Brain

January 28, 2009 · 3 Comments

This is so last minute, but the NRAO announced a few days back that the Very Large Array and several NRAO employees will be included in a Discovery Channel special airing tonight at 10pm ET/PT (9 CT, ?? MT). It’s called “Cosmic Collisions: Galaxies” and is sure to “edutain.” You can find out more about cosmic collisions from the awesome people at the Discovery Channel Space blog, even if you miss the episode! Dave Mosher leads you through all the great content on Space Disco. What I find most fascinating about galaxy collisions is that when two galaxies smash together, no stars ever collide! That’s right, even with 100 billion* stars each, the galaxies are so huge and the stars so far apart, that a stellar collision is almost impossible. However, stars interact gravitationally, which can be simulated such as in this example by Chris Mihos (shamelessly linking to old class notes!) Gas can collide, however, forming new stars in a brilliant light show.

*Oops! Thanks, Dave :-)


Galaxy Collision in action… The Antennae.

And, for something a bit more local, at least to those in NY/NJ, my buddy is in a stage production of “Doubt” in the next few months, and they have a Youtube trailer! It’s going to be great, and I wish I could find a weekend to make it up there to see him.

Categories: astronomy
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Bits…

January 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I’m a terrible blogger. Although, that means I’m actually getting massive amounts of work done. (But getting sick, that wasn’t fun!) And dance has started up again… crazy schedule!

We just had the 3rd Charlottesville Skeptics Meetup tonight, and it was awesome! So many of us, we rocked Court Square. A little while ago, our lovely organizer Amanda alerted us to an episode of CVille Podcasting that featured UVa astronomy’s very own Ed Murphy and the top space stories of 2008. I have yet to listen to it, but knowing Prof. Murphy, I’m sure it’ll be great!

Tomorrow night, I’m hanging out with some cool kids and watching Repo! The Genetic Opera. It looks like the stuff that cult classics are made of. It just came out on DVD, and it’s the first I’ve heard of it. One description was “a cross between Rocky Horror and Bladerunner.” Sweet! Check out the preview for it. It stars Anthony Stewart Head. Giles as a bad(ish?) guy, mwah hahahaha… And the lovely Sarah Brightman! Her voice is simply unmatched. It looks like it’ll be awesome!

That’s about all my work-logged brain can handle. I have great plans of writing more about the URSI meeting, my own research, and maybe even that “part II” of the exoplanet stuff soon!

Categories: skeptic
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Updates for Skeptics and ET Hopefuls

January 15, 2009 · Leave a Comment

There have been some really great sciencey updates over at the Charlottesville Skeptics blog, including a proposed book club and the upcoming Social Hour on January 22nd at Court Square (also advertised on the Skepchick events page!).

I also want to link to my good friend Nix and her own example of everyday skepticism, although she doesn’t use that word for it. The scientific way of thinking about an idea proves to be an excellent way of working in the business world, too.

Finally, if you haven’t heard by now, plumes of methane discovered on Mars point to recent geological, or even biological, causes. Thanks to Ian O’Neill over as AstroEngine for Twittering the NASA press conference. This was helpful to me since I couldn’t get the video! Check out his coverage and tweets. My take on this story can be found at CVille Skeptics.

Categories: science · skeptic
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Astronomy Everywhere

January 12, 2009 · Leave a Comment

So I’m back to the lab this week, and hitting work hard since I have a to-do list as long as… well… insert inappropriate comment here. But here are some astronomy-related happenings that have caught my attention.

Carnival of Space #86 is up and running at collectSPACE. If your head still hasn’t exploded from all the AAS news from last week, then go ahead and read more space-happenings there!

Discovery Channel had a story with the very lucrative title “Space is closer than you think” which reports on some new data from the ionosphere (my sworn enemy) which appears to be hanging a bit low at this point in the solar cycle. So low, in fact, that scientific satellites that are usually embedded near the top can study the whole thing from the outside!

Coinciding with the IYA2009 kickoff events in Paris is a great Very Long Baseline Interferometry experiment in which telescopes all around the globe will observe 3 quasars and correlate the data in real time, something which is not usually done, and certainly not world-wide. This e-VLBI project will be watched by many radio astronomers, I am sure!

Finally, check out these sweet and astronomically correct lyrics by Breaking Laces, with the song titled “Astronomy is my life, but I love you.” If you are or have dated an astronomer, or anyone who is obsessed with their work, this song is for you. The song can be purchased on iTunes!

Categories: astronomy
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The Bellydancing Astronomer

January 10, 2009 · 3 Comments

In case you were not yet convinced that I am completely out of my mind, check out the new bedlah* I bought this morning…

It’s purple. And it has STARS! My hobby and my profession, merged into one! The stars are probably too small to be seen on stage, but I know they are there. I didn’t necessarily need a new bedlah, but would soon, and it was my size and it was on sale and just caaaalling to me.

So yeah. I’m nuts.

*A bedlah is a type of costume used for bellydancing, typically a beaded bra and belt set that can be worn with skirts or harem pants.

Categories: fun
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Back in CVille!

January 9, 2009 · 1 Comment

In case you didn’t know, on a United flight back to Charlottesville from DC, the little prop plane can easily be overweight if too many passengers have reserved seats. And, if they don’t get volunteers to take the next flight 5 hours later, they will start choosing the lowest fare paying passengers to hold back in case the plane is overweight. Also, the NRAO seems to be very good at getting the lowest fares. So, in case you were wondering, astronomers don’t waste our precious funding (your tax-dollars) on such things, and save it for the science instead! Anyway, luckily my advisor was up for driving, so we rented a car to make the final leg instead. I imagine I’ll use my free round-trip ticket for United on a work-related flight, although my first thought was “Vegas, baby!”

So I’m just relaxing and decompressing my full brain a little bit. I imagine that tomorrow I’ll try and unpack, catch up on email, do some errands, and at least make an attempt to get back to work. Once those priorities are done, I have lots to write about, including my conference, the AAS stuff, CVille Skeptics, and whatever else I can’t think of at the moment. For now… pretty pictures!


Pretty picture of the Flatirons with just a bit of snow left.


The cool Mexican restaurant we hit one day, with the insanely bright chairs!


Paul, Chaitali (taking the picture), and I got to meet His Astronomical Badness, aka Phil Plait! It was really cool of him to take time out of his busy schedule to hang out with us and trade UVa astronomy department stories, chat about science and pseudoscience, and have a delicious pasta dinner. Oh, and geek out about Doctor Who. Just a little. Phil does great things for astronomy outreach, a topic that has been very important to me for some time now, and was probably the main inspiration for me to actually check out this whole skeptical movement and to keep the little blog of mine going. And he was such a cool guy to talk with! So that was totally awesome.

Since it’s now past 2am, I’m off to my own bed, in my own apartment, which I did miss quite a bit in these last few weeks…

Categories: general
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URSI Update #2

January 8, 2009 · 4 Comments

Categories: astronomy · science
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VLBA Sees a Beefier Milky Way

January 7, 2009 · Leave a Comment

If you’ve been paying attention to the great astronomy news coming out of the AAS meeting in Long Beach, you would know that astronomers have more accurately determined the speed of rotation and size of the Milky Way Galaxy. It seems that now, our spiral home is as massive as our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy! The NRAO put out a great press release to coincide with the press conference at the meeting where you can read all about. Of course you can read all about it at your favorite astronomy news site or blog (just to start, you have Space.com, Discovery, Bad Astronomy, Star Stryder, Universe Today, and Spacewriter.) We’ve had some excellent colloquia on this study in Charlottesville, so I’m glad to see it hitting the press.


Milky Way, as the VLBA maps it. CREDIT: Robert Hurt, IPAC; Mark Reid, CfA, NRAO/AUI/NSF

If you know me, you know I have a soft spot for Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). This is where I got my start in astronomy as an undergrad. It is the method by which you can link telescopes together over very large distances in order to effectively make one BIG telescope. How big? Well, try the size of the Earth. The NRAO’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) has 10 antennas, eight of which are scattered throughout the mainland US, one in Hawaii, and one in the Caribbean. These long baselines, or distances between telescopes, get you better angular resolution. That is, you can see much finer detail than you can with any other telescope. Something like a thousand times better! With such accurate images, it is possible to make direct distance measurements to astronomical objects using parallax or proper motions. And if there’s one thing that is a pain about astronomy, it is measuring the distance to a point of light that you observe on the sky. The VLBA is especially well suited to this task with 10 identical antennas and a knowledgeable user community.


Me, hanging out inside the dish of the VLBA Pietown Station in 2004. In my PJs.

However, the VLBA has been severely, in my humble opinion, underrated in it’s 15 or so years of operation. It has only been in the last few years that the VLBA has been getting press for mapping the galaxy and determining the distance to other galaxies with such fine precision, better than any method in the optical or other bands. The radio galaxy and quasar communities have been well aware of its potential for some time, however. I had previously done work on polarized quasars and baby radio galaxies, and that was fascinating (and for write-up another day, I suppose.) But the VLBA suffers from budgetary constraints and this wonderful instrument may be shut down soon to be sacrificed for other observatories! Those are the facts of life, I guess. There is only so much money to go around, and very little for astronomy in the grand scheme of things. However, I sincerely hope that the astronomical community recognizes the enormous impact that the VLBA is having and can continue to have if given an extra shot.

Categories: astronomy · science
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URSI Update #1

January 6, 2009 · 1 Comment

Greetings all! I’ve been having a busy, fun, and stimulating time here at the Nat’l Radio Sciences Meeting of URSI in Boulder, CO. The mountains are gorgeous, the skies are clear, and the radio astronomy is diverse and exciting!

I’ve been spending all my time in J commission, which is dedicated to the astronomy side of radio sciences. It’s often been complained about that this session is down in attendance since it always conflicts with the AAS meeting, but the talks are wonderful, nevertheless.

The Monday morning session was dedicated to ALMA science and technology. For those not in the know, ALMA is the Atacama Large Millimeter Array. This observatory, a joint effort among the NRAO in the US, the European Southern Observatory, Japan’s National Radio Observatory, and more, will explore the sky at wavelengths in the millimeter and sub-millimeter regime. That is, higher energy light than the Very Large Array explores, but lower energy than infrared. The NRAO’s Al Wooten gave the first talk, an overview of ALMA science and progress with the instrumentation. The observatory is being touted as an instrument with many uses for many people, but it has three main goals for the near term. The first is to detect molecules such as CO (carbon monoxide) in galaxies up to redshift (z) of 3 (that’s when the universe was just 2 billion years old!) in under 24 hours of observation. Molecular gas is a tracer of star formation, and the evolution of early galaxies depends on how that occurred. Next, ALMA will resolve proto-planetary disks around stars at a distance of up to 150 parsecs (almost 500 light-years!) away. Proto-planetary disks are the dust disks around younger stars from which planets may be forming. Some great simulations showed what the dust disk around the bright star Vega might look like. If the knots in that disk are shown to rotate over a period of years, then they may be harboring newly forming planets! (Ellie, can you hear that?) Finally, as a technical goal, ALMA will be able to do precise imaging with a resolution of 0.1 arcseconds (that’s 0.000028 degrees) with a dynamic range of 1000. This is a new regime for radio astronomy, with unprecedented sensitivities and resolutions at these wavelengths, which opens the door for truly groundbreaking science.

12 antennas are on site at the moment, being fully assembled and wired up.

Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI

They will stay at the “high site” which is at an altitude of 16,500 ft (5000 m)! This is crucial for astronomical work in this wavelength band, since the atmosphere is partially opaque here due to water vapor. To go to high altitude is to go above much of the water vapor. When completed, in at least one configuration, ALMA will look something like this:

CREDIT: ALMA/ESO/NRAO/NAOJ

The rest of Monday morning delved into many of the details of ALMA development. John Webber of the NRAO talked about the front end electronics, and how an international team built all of the parts and then integrated them together beautifully. One such integration center is where I work! Lucy Ziurys of the University of Arizona presented some of the science already being done with ALMA technology on other millimeter-wave telescopes in Arizona. This team discovered the first new molecule in space in 25 years and participated in the groundbreaking VLBI experiment to resolve the black hole at the center of our Milky Way (more to come on that later in the week.) Debra Shepherd of the NRAO gave a recap of the now closed ALMA Test Facility at the VLA site in New Mexico. I was stunned at their excellent and efficient project management, and how different teams worked together and treated it like a real observatory in order to work out the bugs.


My first visit to the test facility in summer 2004.

There were lots more talks throughout the day, focusing on the real-time control systems, phase corrections (oh yes, light has phase as well as amplitude, and that matters to an interferometer!), Walsh functions, data transmission, gain calibration, and the science that can be done if ALMA’s frequency range is expanded. But I think I have enough of a brain dump for now!

Learn more about ALMA when Richard Drumm’s 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is broadcast on February 4th! He’ll be interviewing Al Wooten of the NRAO Charlottesville. For now, do check out the main link above for more introductory material on ALMA science and progress. This observatory should begin operations in 2010 and be completed in 2013!

Categories: astronomy · science
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