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 […]
LWON
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 […]
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 […]
A charming website called Who’s the Scientist? shows seventh graders’ images of scientists before and after actually meeting scientists.
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 […]
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 […]
