Newly-Evolved Hybrid

On July 28, 2010, nearly 900,000 galaxies were put into a public database, and this is Galaxy #1, or SDSS J000000.41-102225.6, and don’t tell me astronomers don’t know how to name things.   Galaxy #1 is probably an elliptical; the rest of the 900,000 are either ellipticals or spirals or something else, and were identified as […]

Abstruse Goose: Creation

Probably not God’s fault, but very few people understand that business of hidden dimensions in string theory. http://abstrusegoose.com/235

Alien Planets & Astronomers Behaving Like the Rest of Us

Remember a month or so ago, when astronomers running NASA’s Kepler satellite announced they’d release the data on 300 possibly earth-like planets but keep the 400 best possibilities proprietary to NASA and announce it all next February?  And non-Kepler astronomers, the media, and the internet fussed at the Kepler astronomers for being dogs-in-the-manger?  And then […]

Heather’s earthquakes vs. Ann’s: choose Heather’s

At 5:04 on the morning of July 16, 2010, I woke up because the bed was vibrating, as was the floor.  A small rumbling noise moved through the room and on out, and I thought, “earthquake,” and went back to sleep.  It turned out to have been a magnitude 3.6 – pretty big for these […]