This is how astronomers think giant galaxies form super-massive black holes (the adjectives are the astronomers’). Way back at the beginning, maybe a billion years after the birth of a 14 billion year old universe, enormous galaxies a hundred times bigger than the Milky Way were born, pulling themselves together out of clouds of stars […]
Ann
The Perseids are reliable, regular shooting stars, a meteor shower that shows up nights in late July every year. I didn’t see the Perseids this year myself because Baltimore’s skies are a rich carnelian haze that hold nothing much and certainly not meteorites. And Heather didn’t see them because, she thinks, of light pollution. To […]
This is a photograph — meaning, it’s real — taken from 114 million miles away on the far side of the sun. The brightest little dot in the lower left is the earth. The less bright dot near it is our moon. Click on it: it almost makes you cry.
I thought I’d made the case against parasitic wasps with evidence and eloquence. I thought that would be the end of it. But no: counter-arguments were made (even if insects did evolve first, Josie, I can still feel superior), gauntlets thrown down, aspersions cast (you think I didn’t notice “delicate flower,” Heather?), and lines drawn […]
I was going about life one day, visiting my step-daughter the entomologist who showed me, in a microscope, a pale green little aphid which was eating a leaf. Inside the aphid was a tiny parasitic wasp which was eating the aphid. Through the aphid’s transparent body, I could see the wasp’s buggy little eyes. I […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
