Space and astronomy news
[/caption] A remarkable finding of the early 21st century, that kind of sits alongside the Nobel prize winning discovery of the universe’s accelerating expansion, is the finding that the universe is geometrically flat. This is a remarkable and unexpected feature of a universe that is expanding – let alone one that is expanding at an …
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[/caption] The recent news of neutrinos moving faster than light might have got everyone thinking about warp drive and all that, but really there is no need to imagine something that can move faster than 300,000 kilometres a second. Light speed, or 300,000 kilometres a second, might seem like a speed limit, but this is …
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[/caption] The recent news from the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) neutrino experiment, that neutrinos have been clocked travelling faster than light, made the headlines over the last week – and rightly so. There are some very robust infrastructure and measurement devices involved that give the data a certain gravitas. The researchers had appropriate …
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[/caption] Take a cloud of molecular hydrogen add some turbulence and you get star formation – that’s the law. The efficiency of star formation (how big and how populous they get) is largely a function of the density of the initial cloud. At a galactic or star cluster level, a low gas density will deliver …
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[/caption] Some recent work on Type 1a supernovae velocities suggests that the universe may not be as isotropic as our current standard model (LambdaCDM) requires it to be. The standard model requires the universe to be isotropic and homogeneous – meaning it can be assumed to have the same underlying structure and principles operating throughout …
Continue reading “Astronomy Without A Telescope – The Edge Of Significance”
[/caption] Radioactive decay – a random process right? Well, according to some – maybe not. For several years now a team of physicists from Purdue and Stanford have reviewed isotope decay data across a range of different isotopes and detectors – seeing a non-random pattern and searching for a reason. And now, after eliminating all …
Continue reading “Astronomy Without A Telescope – New Physics?”
[/caption] Cosmologists tend not to get all that excited about the universe being 74% dark energy and 26% conventional energy and matter (albeit most of the matter is dark and mysterious as well). Instead they get excited about the fact that the density of dark energy is of the same order of magnitude as that …
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[/caption] Surprisingly, rumors still persist in some corners of the Internet that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is going to destroy the Earth – even though nearly three years have passed since it was first turned on. This may be because it is yet to be ramped up to full power in 2014 – although …
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[/caption] The nature of the highly compressed matter that makes up neutron stars has been the subject of much speculation. For example, it’s been suggested that under extreme gravitational compression the neutrons may collapse into quark matter composed of just strange quarks – which suggests that you should start calling a particularly massive neutron star, a strange …
Continue reading “Astronomy Without A Telescope – Cubic Neutrons”
[/caption] The save-the-Earth rehearsal mission Don Quijote, commissioned by the European Space Agency, is planned to test the potential of a real life-or-death mission to deflect a mass-extinction-inducing asteroid from a collision course with Earth. Currently at ‘concept’ stage, the Don Quijote Near Earth Asteroid Impact Mitigation Mission – has been modelled on a proposed flight …
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