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 […]

Getting It Wrong, Not Minding One Bit

As soon as I got over the fainting spell from looking at the Planck satellite’s map – and if you haven’t seen it, look now, faint, and then click – showing the Milky Way, I had a burning question. Okay, true, the Planck satellite wasn’t intended to map the Milky Way.  It was supposed to […]

Astronomy’s Ice Cream

The word, “data” – tables of numbers, incomprehensible graphs —  for most of us would make a good sleep aid.  For astronomers, though, “data” means a star-sized thing  that outshines a galaxy, or a galaxy just being born, or a star that spins in milliseconds.  Data for astronomers is a way to survive, a reason […]

Every Dot Is a Galaxy

This is the kind of image editors tell me is not interesting, but editors in this case are as wrong as wrong can be.  This is a picture by the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory.  It’s of the universe clear back, close to its beginning.  The Herschel looked in far infrared wavelengths at a […]