Beautiful Stars

BBC Stargazing at the Spinnaker Tower

2012-01-18T04:14:00.000-08:00

It's been a hectic couple of weeks since I got back from the Christmas break, planning our department's involvement in the major BBC Stargazing Event at the Spinnaker Tower (a flagship event for the BBC South region). But it all went well last night and despite the clouds we're all left with a buzz about stargazing in Portsmouth.

I made a Storify collection of tweets about the event.

My favourite (free) Astronomy Aps

2012-01-10T06:28:00.000-08:00

I suspect with all the excitement of Stargazing LIVE happening next week in the UK, there's going to be a lot of questions/advice floating around about astronomy smart phone Aps. I'm not going to claim this is a comprehensive review or anything like that, but I thought it might be helpful for me to give my list of my favourite free iPhone/iPad Aps for astronomy. I have no commercial interests here (they're all free anyway) and only in the case of the Galaxy Zoo and LookUP Aps do I have any other link to the developers.

1. Daylight
This simple Ap is probably the one I use the most. It just tells you when sunrise and sunset will happen at your location.

2. Planets
This is an Ap to impress your non astronomy friends with. "Sky 3D" works impressively well to show you what's up in the sky in the direction you point your screen. You can also explore 3D globes of all the planets (including ours with the current sunlight/darkness displayed), look at a traditional 2D map of what's in the sky above you, and see the current rise/set times of the Sun, all the planets and the Moon. I am aware there are other free Aps which do some/all of these (and possibly others things as well) but this is the one I have on my iPhone.

3. Exoplanet
A database of all known exoplanets with information about how they were found, what we know about them and in which direction on the sky they are.

4. Galaxy Zoo
Of course I have to give a shout-out to the Galaxy Zoo Ap. You can classify galaxies in any moment of free time on your iPhone. :)

5. APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day)
A simple Ap which displays the image from the Astronomy Picture of the Day website along with its explanation.

6. Moon globe
Displays a map of the phase of the Moon with terrain names, spacecraft sites overlayed.

5. LookUP
A nice simple Ap from some of my dotastronomy friends. Searches a host of astronomical databases/recent blogs for information on the object of your choice.

So those are my (current) favourites, and a final disclaimer that I am not claiming to have tried all of the Astronomy Aps out there, these are just ones I like.

Why do People Draw Stars with Five Points (in English and Romanian)

2012-01-06T01:14:00.000-08:00

A beautiful 5 pointed star made from fractals.

Another question I answered during my time with Curious? Ask an Astronomer at Cornell: Why do People Draw Stars with Five Points? has recently been translated into Romanian. (Also see Wikipedia entry on 5 pointed stars, which I don't think existed when I wrote the post).

Galaxy Zoo on the "Curious" Podcast

2011-12-14T12:09:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to put up a quick post to point out that the latest podcast from the people who run Ask an Astronomer @ Cornell discusses citizen science, and I'm interviewed on it about Galaxy Zoo stuff.

Link to the podcasts in iTunes.

Merry Christmas! Karen.

A Frenk Discussion about Cosmology

2011-12-05T04:37:00.000-08:00

Last week Prof. Carlos Frenk visited us in Portsmouth to give a research seminar. As part of my new role as Outreach Officer for ICG I suggested we ask him to also give a public lecture. Which he did:

My favourite picture - Carlos Frenk sharing a snap of him showing Sir Patrick Moore around a dark matter detection experiment.

The university coverage about the lecture is here: Carlos Frenk Draws a Big Crowd

And I made a Storify Story out of tweets which went out during the lecture.

As you can see the lecture was very popular, and I got a great warm fuzzy feeling for helping to educate almost 300 people about cosmology that night. :)

PS. Thanks is due to my office mate Chris D'Andrea for the blog title idea - it's a classic!

Ten Most Amazing Databases in the World

2011-11-07T01:54:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure who got to decide, but the Sloan Digital Sky Survey made this list of the Ten Most Amazing Databases in the World. This is the database the whole of Galaxy Zoo and Galaxy Zoo 2 was based on, and which has formed the basis of quite a substantial amount of the astronomical research I've been involved in, so I have to say for me it's probably number 1! Visit the SDSS Website for more information.

Galaxy Zoo Bars are (partially) triggered by environment

2011-11-07T01:29:00.000-08:00

Over on the Galaxy Zoo blog this morning I explain our work on how the chance of a disc galaxy hosting a bar or a bulge depends on the environment it lives in (direct link to blog post). A paper about the work, led by Ramin Skibba, has just been submitted to MNRAS and appears on astroph this morning.

What is a Galaxy (QI style)?

2011-11-02T14:17:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of QI, so it was fun when Brian Cox was on it recently and the whole show was peppered with astronomy.

I was amused to find them mention the interesting paper by Duncan Forbes and Pavel Kroupa in which they consider what the definition of a galaxy is. Luckily someone posted the segment on You Tube:

Earlier this year when they posted the discussion on the arxiv, Duncan and Pavel opened it up for a vote - in good "citizen science" style. Of course this caught my "Galaxy Zoo" eye so I blogged about it last Feb (2011).

It's on my mind tonight as I prepare to talk about "What is a Galaxy?" tomorrow night as part of the Intech Science Centre Adult Only Evening.

Twitter Link Roundup for Oct 10-14th 2011

2011-10-14T08:50:00.000-07:00

I don't like how Twitter forgets what I've said eventually. So I plan to try a semi-frequent round-up of my favourite Twitter links/Tweets from the week.

Here goes

Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Puzzle Claimed Solved by Special Relativity http://techre.vu/oAzeWr (via @TechReview)

Mathematician and mother - October 2011 - GetSET Women Blog - The UKRC: http://bit.ly/oz3odx

@telescoper: The Astronomy Career Problem - it starts with the PhDhttp://wp.me/pko9D-3i6

(and related to this check out the astrojc for this week - on the problems with Scientific Careers)

@NtlSTEMCentre: Talking to pupils about #STEM careers? Have you seen our collection of #TeachersTV videos which may help?http://ow.ly/6W3Wd

@cosmicpinot (which is Brian Schmidt): Adam Riess - on NPR playing a game after the Nobel Prize Announcement - http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=141167268&m=141167610http://twitter.com/#

What a great idea: http://www.speakers4schools.org/ (via@alomshaha andhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/oct/10/star-speakers-schools)

And alarmingly: @NatureNews: Physicist languishes in French prison http://bit.ly/oHrBCM

Ada Lovelace Day Links from Twitter

2011-10-07T08:57:00.000-07:00

A great idea by @alicebell and @allinthegutter to make lists of women scientists to follow (as part of Ada Lovelace Day).

Alice Bell's Ada list

Emma's List

Other great Ada Lovelace Themed links from Twitter

Emm y Noether and Symmetry

Free iPad Application "Lovelace and Babbage"

Ada Lovelace Day - Martha Haynes

2011-10-07T08:49:00.000-07:00

Today is Ada Lovelace Day - a day named after a women who is widely believed to have been the worlds first computer programmer. You can read more about it at "Finding Ada" a website which is soliciting stories about inspirational women in science.

Coincidentally (I think) my former PhD thesis advisor, Martha Haynes, posted the below picture on Facebook today in response to a post by another of her former students about how male dominated Physics colloquia (and the business lounge of Lufthansa Airlines) both are. This is a picture of ALL of the 1989 winners of ALL awards from the (US) National Academy of Sciences. This was the year that Martha and her collaborator (and husband) Riccardo Giovanelli won the Henry Draper Medal "For the first three-dimensional view of some of the remarkable large-scale filamentary structures of our visible universe."

The 1989 Winners of ALL Awards from the (US) National Academy of Sciences

Martha is easy to spot - the only winner not wearing a tie (2nd row, 2nd from the left). Riccardo is standing next to her on the extreme left. So in 1989 1/24 prize recipients were women.

In fact in the 125 years the Henry Draper Medal has been awarded (although note it's not awarded every year), the only female recipients have been Annie Jump Cannon and Martha Haynes.

Sadly I suspect the situation among such high profile award winners is not much different today, but it is trailblazers like Martha (the first women astronomy professor at Cornell; and the only one for 20 years) who make life easier for us now.

Martha's stories of "Haynes and his wife Giovanelli" (among many others) remind me of the pre-conceptions about male scientists, and also make me laugh!

So today for Ada Lovelace Day Martha is the person I want to mention as an inspirational woman in science.

Milky Way Twin and the Violin Clef

2011-09-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

I wanted to point out two new (ish) posts over on the Galaxy Zoo blog:

1. A Summer Spent Finding Our Galactic Twin, which is an account of looking for the Galaxy Zoo galaxy which looks most like what we think the Milky Way looks like, by my recent Nuffield Summer Student, Mr. Tim Buckman.

Milky Way's Twin?

2. The Violin Clef Merger, which is an account (by Kevin Schawinski) of a very interesting merger recently found by Galaxy Zoo volunteer and active forum member (Bruce) in the new SDSS images which were released this past January (and which haven't yet been used in Galaxy Zoo).

Violin Clef Merger

I expect you'll be hearing a lot more about both of these objects as we do some follow up observations.

Galaxy Zoo Bars Work featured by The Leverhulme Trust

2011-08-26T04:30:00.000-07:00

I just blogged over at Galaxy Zoo about an article of mine about my work on bars which has been published by The Leverhulme Trust: "Do Bars Kill Galaxies?".

Do we need a Physics Barbie?

2011-08-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

Last week we learnt that the numbers of students sitting A-level physics has increased but that the gender divide is getting worse,

This week we discover that at GCSE level, both the numbers taking science and the percent have girls have increased - with 46% of double science entrants this year being girls. The girls continue to outperform the boys, both overall, and in science (which seems to me should put pay to any ideas about intrinsic lack of science ability in girls) but yet this doesn't translate to girls taking Physics at A-level.

Imram Khan comments in the CASE reaction to the GCSE results (which he wrote, causing me to wonder what the rules are on quoting your self in an article).

"We need to encourage more girls to take the top grades they get at GCSE and translate those into science and maths A-levels."

In related news, this week, the September 2011 Issue of Nature Chemistry celebrates women chemists in its cover - a photo mosaic of Marie Curie made up of the images of 200 women chemists (reproduced below).

ORIGINAL IMAGE OF MARIE CURIE © PHOTOS.COM/THINKSTOCK.
A portrait of Marie Curie's face created from the photographs of around 200 women scientists.

In this volume, Michelle Francl (a Chemistry professor from Bryn Mawr College in the USA) writes a wonderful commentary: "Sex and the Citadel of Science" in which she wonders why 100 years after Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry so few other women have followed her to Stockholm.

She puts forward a new and intriguing (at least to me) idea, that subtle messages from our working environment could be putting off women in science. As an example she talks about ergonomics - still general calibrated to the average size of men, for example:

"Chairs — in meeting rooms and conference venues are built to accommodate the majority of men, and the minority of women (less than 5% in fact). Most women will look — and perhaps feel — just a bit out of place, faintly childlike in an outsized chair."

Although I would argue that is true of all office spaces, many of which do not have the same gender imbalance as science.

I was also interested to read her ideas on the use of colour as a subtle message about who belongs in science:

"It makes me wonder if one reason the science and engineering pipeline begins to leak girls at middle school is not due to some innate sex-linked lack of interest, but because that's often when 'real' lab equipment starts to be used regularly, the colours of which are drawn largely from the male-associated palette."

This led to a silly Twitter conversation between myself, @sarahkendrew and @allinthegutter (all female astronomers) about how we only like red galaxies not blue ones, but actually I do wonder if all the beautiful images in astronomy could be responsible for a slightly higher female proportion in (some subfields) of astronomy than in physics as a whole (for which statement I should look up a reference).

Just look at all these pink galaxies from Google Images! I wonder how many female astronomers can be traced by to Halpha being commonly displayed as pink in images....?

Being serious again though I do wonder if she has a point, Dr. Francl explains that obviously a single trivial detail like chair height, or the colour of lab equipment is not enough to put a girl off science, but she wonders about the cumulative effect of all these subtle messages, comparing it to the method of chemically separating substances by performing a procedure which slightly separates them multiple times.

To cap all this off (and inspiring the title of my post) Athene Donald is also writing about the impacts of gender in science in THE: "Where is Physics Barbie?". The increase in Physics A-levels has been attributed by the BBC to a rise in "Geek Chic", but Dr. Donald (along with Alice Bell in her blog post "Unravelling the Politics of Geek Chic") laments that our idea of a geek is still very male (and middle class), and that we are forcing these stereotypes on our kids from a young age - partially by the choice of toys. As a mother to two young children I will gladly admit to the disquiet I feel at the very pink "girls" toys, and the very green and brown "boys" toys. I will even admit to my dismay that my 4 1/2 year old daughter is really keen to get a Princess Barbie.

Computer Scientist Barbie exists (and even blogs for UKRC), and in the 1960s apparently there was a Rocket Scientist/Astronaut Barbie, but I can say from personal experience that most of the Barbie aisle is pink, and very stereotypically girly.

Rocket Scientist Barbie

I'm currently knitting my daughters only Barbie a dress (she has a Disney Ariel Barbie which just came with a mermaid tails and bikini) which I am sorry to admit panders to her wishes and so will be very pink and twirly..... All this makes me wonder if my next project should be a Physicist outfit for the doll - and if it was how would it look. I would argue that she could in fact wear a pink frilly summer dress! Perhaps I'll just add a computer!

Anyway I'm not sure why all of this is making the online news this week, but I'm glad it is. Any discussion of the issues in my opinion is a good thing. As an MIT study showed - things only seem to improve when we're paying attention.

And I am happy to report I have an adjustable chair set at just the right height for me. A standard desk though (just too high?) and a very brown and green mens club looking coffee room to sit in. Perhaps I'll ask the department to put up some pictures of pink galaxies soon!

A Supernova in Beautiful Galaxy M101

2011-08-25T02:04:00.000-07:00

After starting my series of beautiful galaxies with Messier 100 I was amused to discover this morning that M101 (The Pinwheel Galaxy) is in the astronomical news after a possible Type 1a Supernova was discovered in it yesterday. So following M100 I obviously have to do M101 this morning!

M101 as seen in a mosaic of Hubble Space Telescope images added to some ground based data. Credit: NASA and Robert Gendler. For more info see APOD.

M101 was classified in the Hubble Atlas as an Sc galaxies with a weak bar and a partial ring around the bar before the arms emerge (SAB(rs)c). It's illustrated twice in the atlas, with the largest illustration accompanied by text which describes it as the prototype of multiple armed Sc galaxies, what we might today call a "flocculent" spiral.

According to the "Atlas of the Messier Objects", M101 is the third largest galaxy (in angular size) in the Messier list, and is visible as an extended object even through 10x50 binoculars (presumably only from a very dark site though). It definitely seems to be a popular deep sky object for amateurs, and following the SN1a discovery the AAVSO have put out a call for their members to get observing. Some predictions suggest the supernova is still brightening and could reach 10th magnitude - only 2 magnitudes fainter than Neptune (at its brightest).

M101 has already been an important calibrating object for the extragalactic distance ladder having had its distance measured using many of the well known methods (e.g. the Leavitt Law (Cepheids), Tip of the Red Giant Branch, the Tully-Fisher relation). The most reliable distances have ranged from 6-8 Mpc (18-24 million light years or so) making the galaxy almost twice as large as our own Milky Way.

The addition of a Type 1a Supernova in M101 would obviously be extremely exciting as a way to further link commonly used distance indicators. SNIa are an important type of object in astronomy - they are extremely bright, and therefore observable at very large distances. Much of the evidence for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe (which indicates the need for "dark energy") comes from measurements of SN1a at very large distances which suggest that in the past the universe was expanding more slowly than it is today!

It will be interesting to see the result of the many follow-up observations of the SN in M101 - and exciting to think they are happening (on the other side of the world of course) as I write this.

Multi-wavelength views of stuff

2011-08-24T01:59:00.000-07:00

I just know I'm going to want to find this again to use in a public talk, and it's fantastic so I want to share. "The Earth and Friends in Multiple Wavelengths", by Rob Simpson (@orbitingfrog). Of course galaxies are my favourite, so I'm reproducing the image of M31 (the Andromeda galaxy) in here (from top left to bottom right, radio, microwave, infrared, optical, UV, Xray).

And I like flowers too - so here's a geranium in optical (left) and UV.

Thanks for the excellent post Rob.

Career Progression in Academic Science from the Royal Society

2011-08-18T08:39:00.000-07:00

I can't actually remember where I first came across the below diagram, but I keep wanting to refer to it and as finding it on the Royal Society website is not trivial (it's in a report called "The Scientific Century" from March 2010) I thought I would write a quick blog post so I could always find it.

Diagram from "The Scientific Century" by the Royal Society. Their caption reads "This diagram illustrates the transition points in typical academic scientific careers following a PhD and shows the flow of scientifically-trained people into other sectors. It is a simplified snapshot based on recent data from HEFCE, the Research Base Funders Forum and for the Higher Education Statistics Agency's annual Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey. It also draws on Vitae's analysis of the DLHE survey. It does not show career breaks or moves back into academic science from other sectors."

I think all incoming graduate students, and graduate students thinking about getting a first postdoc should be made to spend at least 10 minutes staring at this diagram. It probably wouldn't make a difference, because I think all of us start out our PhDs thinking we'll make the 3.5% with permanent jobs (probably also the 0.45% making Professor). And actually I think that's natural. Almost every single person starting a PhD will have been used to coming top of the class through school, and probably also has done very well at University, so is just not used to thinking of themselves as anything but the top 3.5% of a population.

I think this diagram illustrates the numbers I already technically knew all about much better than anything else I've seen. I'd only like to add in some little people making comments about what they think of it. For example I could add a politician looking at the 79.5% of people with science PhD ending up in "Careers outside science" and say how fantastic this is that they are contributing to other sectors of the economy. I could add a Professor saying "It obviously works to select the best scientists out of the incoming pool". And I could add the postdoc approaching the transition to "permanent research staff", after having already devoted around 10 years to building up an academic career (PhD +postdoc time) and by now having realised that everyone of the other postdocs around them is equally dedicated and excellent at science as they are wondering how on Earth they persuade anyone they should be part of that 3.5% who get to make a life-long career out of it....

Curious? What if the Earth were a cube?

2011-08-18T01:38:00.000-07:00

As I have mentioned before, as a graduate student and young postdoc I was a member of a group of Cornell affiliated astronomers who revamped the "Curious? Ask an Astronomer" site at Cornell into a sort of "proto-blog". On that site there are many answers I wrote to questions sent in to the site (154 in total over a period of about 5 years). Most of the "trouble" I get into about that period of my public engagement, centres around my answer to "What's going to happen on December 21st 2012?" which I first wrote in January 2006 and which to date has been read over 650,000 times. But I also posted lots of other answers.

Thanks to Twitter I discovered last night that one of my old answers got picked up this week and linked into an article on the Discovery News: What if Earth were a cube? (My article: "How would the weather on Earth be different if it were a cube?" posted in December 2002). I'm always a bit worried when this happens that my previous self (9 years ago in this case) would have made some big mistake. In this case I'll say I'm still reasonably happy with what I wrote. I like the discussion of how the ocean and the atmosphere would have to be spherical even if the Earth could somehow be a cube. I think what is missing is a discussion of the fact that the Earth is so massive that it just couldn't be a cube, although I did link to another answer explaining "Why are stars and planets round?", by the wonderful educator and Saturn expert Britt Scharringhausen (now a professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin).

It was also fun to be reminded of the diagram I drew to illustrate my post:

Cubical Earth by me in 2002.

Somewhat more impressive illustrations exist online now if you Google Image search "Cube Earth"!

What is Hoag's Object?

2011-08-17T04:56:00.000-07:00

Perhaps one of the most striking looking galaxies I know of is "Hoag's Object" (seen below by the Hubble Space Telescope; NED information, Wikipedia article, lookUP information). The wikipedia article talks of it as an object which fascinates both amateur and professional astronomers.

I am really curious to know how it might look through an amateur telescope, and I'd love to see it for myself some day (RA=15 17 14, Dec=+21 35 08 in the Serpens constellation), Astrometry.net can help give an idea - see Hoag's Object images on Flickr found by the service.

HST Image of Hoag's Object. Credit: NASA.

Through HST as you can see the object appears to be made up of a red spheroidal core, surrounded by a blue ring of star formation (with a gap between the two). The ring shows some spiral structure. In my opinion, one of the most fun things about the object is the more distance ring galaxy which can be seen through the gap (just to the right of 12 o'clock). This to me demonstrates the sheer size of the universe. To find such a rare object behind such a rare object seems quite extraordinary.

So why am writing about Hoag's Object today, well appearing on the arXiV this morning is a paper addressing the formation scenarios for Hoag's Object (Finkelman et al. 2011, MNRAS in press), which struck my interest so I thought I'd write about it. It puts forward a new scenario for the formation of this unusual object as well as talking about the two previously suggested models. In addition they present some new data for our consideration.

The three models discussed are:

1. Ring formed as a collisional ring.

In this model another galaxy would have passed through the centre of Hoag's object, and what is observed is the merger remnant. The Cartwheel Galaxy is perhaps the most famous of this class of objects. It's shown below in a HST image, and illustrates the most obvious problem with interpreting Hoag's Object in this way.

Cartwheel Galaxy. Credit: HST, NASA

You can see quite clearly in the above image the culprits in the galactic collision. No such neighbours exist for Hoag's Object. In addition the ring appears to be at rest with respect to the central spheroid - which would be unlikely if the ring were collisional.

2. Ring formed through a bar instability which has since dissolved.

In this model at an earlier time there would have been a strong bar, and material would have flowed out along it to form the ring. The main objection to this theory appears to be the lack of evidence for any residual bar in the central spheroid. I should perhaps point out that this was a theory previously put forward by one of the co-authors of today's paper (Noah Brosch), so presumably his co-authorship on this new paper is an indication that he no longer believes this to be the best model.

3. Gas Accretion.

This is the new theory put forward (although I should say it seems rather similar to me to one discussed by Schwiezer et al. 1987). In this model the object has a very low density HI disk which accreted at early times onto the spheroid and is only dense enough to form stars in the ring.

In fact the kinematic data does seem to suggest that Hoag's object (other than having its only visible disk light in a ring of course) is a normal disk galaxy, with the spheroidal component playing the role of a central classical bulge. At the risk of getting too technical in a blog, check out the Halpha velocity map and HI line profile below.

Ignoring the gap in the Halpha velocity map these two observations look to me basically identical to what you would expect from a normal nearly face-on disk galaxy. The classic "double horned" HI profile is usual interpreted as a coming from a rotating disk of HI with a central gap. HI (atomic hydrogen in its ground state) emits (due to hyperfine spitting of the ground state) at a single frequency of 1420 Mz (21cm) - the broadening of the line is caused by Doppler shifting of the emission (indicated along the x-axis is the velocity of the Doppler shifter HI line) and the peaks at the maximum velocity are interpreted as a pile up of HI in the flat part of a galaxy rotation curve (see global HI profiles, or galaxy rotation curves for more information on this).

HI in Hoag's Object from Schwiezer et al. 1987

The Halpha velocity map is showing a similar thing. Halpha is a spectral line emitted by excited hydrogen. Again this emits at a single frequency (656.28 nm), which is shifted due to the Doppler effect. The map shows the velocity of this line colour coded such that red indicates a greater velocity than the mean for the galaxy and blue a smaller. This is again interpreted as a rotating disk of hydrogen with the upper left moving away from use and the lower right towards us. The velocities are very consistent with what's seen in the HI profile, suggesting the HI is indeed coming from the ring.

Halpha velocity field in Hoag's Object from Finkelman et al. 2011

What is needed to complete this picture is a HI map of Hoag's Object. I think this could be fairly easilly done with the EVLA, and I will be interested to see it when it is.

Solar Observing in Eastney

2011-08-17T03:50:00.000-07:00

On Sunday I took one of the ICG Gallieoscopes to the Arts Cafe at Eastney Community Centre who are currently hosting a Space Themed Exhibit: "Journey to the Edge Of Space". As part of this they organized a Family Space Day on Sunday, and I agrred to go along to provide some public solar observing.

Picture of the Galileoscope set up for Solar Observing

It was a fairly quiet event in the end, and a day with patchy cloud, but I was able to show a few 10s of people the Sun through the telescope. Not helping the educational content from this was the quiet Sun. Absolutely no sun spots were visible, making the Sun appear as smooth white circle through the solar filter (I knew this in advance because I had looked it up on spaceweather.com - still disappointing). It was almost more interesting when the patchy clouds went across the disk.

ICG news article.

Zui Wanzheng 3D Yuzhou Tu

2011-08-15T02:29:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Chinese side of my family I found out that the story about the release of the 2MASS Redshift Survey ("The Most Complete Map of the 3D Universe") even appeared in the Chinese newspaper "World Journal".

The headline in black reads "Zuì wánzhěng 3D yǔzhòu tú" which is literally translated to "Most complete 3D universe map".

Leverhulme Trust Article about Galaxy Zoo Bars

2011-08-12T05:28:00.000-07:00

Over on the Leverhulme Trust Awards in Focus section this month is an article I wrote for them about the progress I've made on the research project they fund me for - which is to study the impact of bars on disk galaxies using Galaxy Zoo.

What Types of Galaxies are in BOSS?

2011-08-11T07:41:00.000-07:00

Over on the SDSS3 blog is a post about my recently accepted paper looking at the types of galaxies which are being observed in BOSS.

Copied below:

A critical question for the SDSS-III BOSS is what kinds of galaxies are they observing. In a recent paper by Masters et al., SDSS-III scientists used additional, higher resolution data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to answer this questions.

In SDSS images, BOSS galaxies, which are on average about 6 billion light years away, just looks like fuzzy red blobs. The goal of BOSS is to observe 1.5 million of them over 30% of the sky in order to map the large scale structure in great detail. For this study, they took a look at a tiny subset of 230 of them which have deeper HST images (which were taken as part of the COSMOS project – the largest area HST survey every yet done).

The study found that 75% of BOSS galaxies are massive ellipticals, but that a surprisingly high fraction (20%) of these are split into multiple components in the HST images. The remaining 25% of BOSS galaxies are massive spirals.

The image below shows an example of one of the spirals and one of the ellipticals shown in both the SDSS and HST image.

As well as the paper, you can look at a poster about this work which was presented both at the AAS in Boston in May, and also at the recent Galaxy Formation conference in Durham

Finally if you want to browse all the images yourself they are available at www.icg.port.ac.uk/~mastersk/BOSSmorphologies/

Talking about the Universe on Radio New Zealand

2011-08-11T02:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I talked with Bryan Crump from Radio New Zealand Nights about the 2MASS Redshift Survey. You can listen to the segment online, or download MP3.

Screenshot of 2MRS on the Radio New Zealand Website.

Lucas also submitted the scientific paper to the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series and released it to the arXiV last week.

Galaxy Zoo at the Durham Conference

2011-08-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

I just posted over on the Galaxy Zoo blog about my recent trip to Durham for "Galaxy Formation, an International Conference".

Beautiful Galaxy M100

2011-07-13T02:21:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across a picture of the galaxy Messier 100 (NGC 4321) this morning, and just felt inspired to share it's beauty. I might share more of these as a way for me to learn the NGC numbers of some classic galaxy examples!

So here it is - as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

M100 as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

The central region has been observed by HST, which is also worth a look.

The central region of M100 seen by the Hubble Space Telescope.

And I encourage you to do a Google Image Search on Messier 100 to see the vast array of beautiful images of this galaxy (PS. avoid searching on M100 if you're squeamish. Yuck!).

M100 is a classic example of a grand design spiral, meaning it has clear well defined spiral arms. And look how far round they wind - it's lovely. Its classic classification (from the RC3 as listed in NED) is as an Sbc galaxy with a weak bar and an inner ring (SAB(s)bc). Apparently it's a similar size galaxy to our own Milky Way, and has played an important role in the history of extragalactic astronomy. This object is a member of our nearest large cluster of galaxies - the Virgo Cluster, and in 1994 was the first galaxy in the Virgo Cluster to have a distance measured to it using Cepheid Variables (via the Leavitt Law, see Freedman et al. 1994) which was an important step towards a reliable measurement of the Hubble constant.

Oh, and I should put in a plug for the excellent LookUP website, by @astronomyblog (Stuart Lowe). Check out the LookUP entry for M100 - turns out it also has a very interesting black hole - possibly the youngest known, and born in the same year as me. Cool!

A Zooniverse of Galaxies

2011-07-12T03:40:00.000-07:00

A busy day today - an article on my research I was asked to write for the L'Oreal For Women in Science Blog, Agora appears today.

A Zooniverse of Galaxies.

Practical Tips for Scientists Interacting with the Media (from Will Gater at NAM)

2011-07-12T02:20:00.000-07:00

In my opinion one of the best sessions at the UK National Astronomy Meeting held in Llandudno this April was a "Meet the Press" session aimed at giving scientists information on how the press works, what will help them.

In that session Will Gater presented a list of practical tips for scientists who want to/have to interact with the media. I thought it might be useful to reproduce them here (based on the notes I took in April, so my apologies to Will if I'm misrepresenting what he actually said!).

1. Have a person webpage (my comment about this is that it always surprises me when scientists don't have this as it's so easy to do in a university setting). Will's advice for the website was that it should (a) be kept fresh; (b) list your specialisms/research interests; (c) give clear contact details; (d) have a list of your recent papers; (e) contain information about your career path/biography.

2. Have a head shot ready (should be high resolution).

3. Understand the lead times on publications when thinking about making press releases. For example magazines plan issues 4-5 weeks in advance, while newspapers work on much shorter timescales.

4. Understand how the media find information about science stories. Will listed (a) press releases; (b) tip offs; (c) reading papers on the arXiV; (d) twitter (and he said that this last one was really useful to see the whole process of science, and get a sense of what researchers are talking about).

Will then went on to give some advice on the contents of a good press release. Which from my notes were:

1. Give clear contact details.

2. List the names of people involved in the research.

3. Put the main result in the first paragraph along with who has done it.

4. Have a clear headline (try to write it like an article - since, rightly or wrongly, many online articles will be a verbatim copy of the press release).

5. Clearly list the wider implications.

6. Provide a high resolution image (300 dpi).

For interviewing, he advised that you think about in advance what the questions might be (what do you worry about the most). He suggested that if you talk about how it felt to do the research that will add a lot.

You can follow Will on Twitter.

Remembering John Huchra at the Boston AAS

2011-07-12T01:37:00.000-07:00

One of the things I participated in at the recent American Astronomical Society Meeting in Boston (held in May) was a session on Remembering John Huchra. The slides from the speakers at that session have recently been made public on the AAS Website: Remembering John Slides (available to non-members).

This reminded me that I took some photos during the session which I wanted to share.

Greg Bothun starts things off talking about John's thesis work on little blue galaxies.

Jeremy Mould talks about John's work on the Hubble Constant.

Pauline Barmby (one of John's relatively few former PhD students) talks about the great diversity of science topics he was interested in.

Pauline Barmby also talked about John's love of observing.

Debra Elmegreen (current AAS President) talks about John's work for the 2010 Decadal Survey where he Chaired the sub-committee on the state of the profession.

Debra talks about how John was quite concerned about the state of the profession especially the large numbers of soft money positions (basically short term contract workers).

Debra also talked about meeting the Pope with John.

Things got quite emotional at this point, as Debra talked about how John so enjoyed their trip to Vatican City.

Craig Wheeler talked about John's contributions to the AAS as the President in 2010.

At this point I gave my talk about John's work on the 2MASS Redshift Survey, and our plans to finish and publish the data - which I have previously blogged about.

After my talk I moved further back in the hall, here's my final shot was of Marc Postman talking about John's influence on his students (official and unofficial) and others he mentored.

End of the World in 2012? An Infographic

2011-07-06T05:43:00.000-07:00

Stumbled across the below infographic from InformationisBeautiful today (with the help of @astrojenny on Twitter). A nice visual summary of the points made by so-called "Mayan Doomsday" prophets clearly set against the actual facts. Looks like a useful resource for astronomers in the next 18 months.

As I have previously stumbled into 2012 debunking (see Karen and 2012, also you can listen to me debate it on The Montel Williams show last year) a lot of this was familiar, but this is a wonderfully clear way to lay it all out.

Guest Scientist at the Royal Greenwich Observatory

2011-06-17T01:32:00.000-07:00

I had a great day yesterday, traveling to London to participate in the Royal Observatory, Greenwich's "Meet a Scientist" program.

I spoke about my work with the Galaxy Zoo project to two groups of around 25 gifted year 9 students (13 and 14 year olds who are already taking their GCSE in science).

I also (finally) got to see the "We are Astronomers" planetarium show (which is as good as I had heard!), as well as get a tour of the night sky presented by my fellow AstroTweeter "skyponderer".

And I got to take the boat along the Thames from Waterloo to Greenwich.

All in all a fun day in the life of an Astronomer. :)

Talking about LOFAR on the Astronomy Now YouTube Channel

2011-06-09T12:48:00.001-07:00

At NAM in Llandudno I talked with Nick Howes from Astronomy Now about the LOFAR project. The video was posted on the Astronomy Now YouTube Channel this week.

Asking questions at NAM

2011-06-08T01:29:00.000-07:00

In this month's A&G (the magazine members of the Royal Astronomical Society get sent) there is a review of the hi-lights of the recent National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) held in Llandudno, which I attended (in part because of my work for LOFAR-UK).

Image 9 from "NAM in North Wales", June 2011 edition of Astronomy & Geophysics.

I was a bit surprised to see as part of that article a picture of myself waiting to ask a question at the end of Mark Thompson's plenary talk on "Einstein at Teatime - the popularisation of Astronomy" (I'm the one in pink!), particularly as there's actually no mention of the many excellent talks and discussion on science communication which happened at NAM2011 (spearheaded by this interesting plenary discussion). For me those sessions were one of the major hi-lights of NAM2011.

On a practical matter, I've been contacted by people at "The Observatory" (where reviews of the talks, and transcripts of the questions are published) who are looking to identify the other question asker (in blue above). If anyone can help let me know and I'll pass it on.

Talking on NPR Science Friday

2011-06-07T07:58:00.000-07:00

Last Friday I spoke on NPR's Science Friday about the 2MASS Redshift Survey. Archive page link. Link to MP3.

I think I was a little too technical, but it was an interesting experience. Lots of my American friends seem to have randomly heard it. It was nice to hear John's voice, although it made me go more cosmological than I would have liked. Also I wish I got to finish the story about why 2MRS took so long (and mention Lucas).

I'm curious to know how many people listen to this show...... must put that on my to do list to figure out!

Galaxy Zoo Session at the Boston AAS

2011-06-03T02:02:00.000-07:00

I just posted an article on the Galaxy Zoo blog about the Galaxy Zoo session I organized at the Boston AAS. Check it out here.

I put the slides from my talk online here.

The Most Complete 3D Map of the Local Universe

2011-05-26T08:03:00.000-07:00

I've been at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston this week, and there's been a lot going on here, including a great session on the Science from Galaxy Zoo, which I plan to write about soon, but I wanted today to mention the release of the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS) which has been getting some press today.

The 2MRS shown in an all-sky projection with galaxies colour coded by their distance from us (from purple to red as the distance increases). The projection puts the plane of our Galaxy along the middle - and we can't see through that, so there's no galaxies there. Credit: Tom Jarrett (IPAC).

This was a project I worked on during my first postdoctoral position (2005-2008) working with John Huchra. This is really John's survey, and Lucas Macri (another former mentee of John's) and myself have been really delighted to be able to finish it off and release it to the public in memory of John. You can now download the data from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and the paper, Huchra et al. (2011) will be submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Supplements (which publishes catalogues) very soon.

Also check out Tom Jarrett's page of different maps from 2MRS.

Here in Boston there was a session on remembering the scientific legacy of John Huchra, during which I presented the 2MRS, and also watched for the first time the whole of "John Huchra's Universe" (a world wide telescope tour made by his colleagues at Harvard). A YouTube version of it is below, and I think it really explains why John was so keen to do the 2MRS.

Links to coverage (via Google News search of "2MASS Redshift Survey").

CfA press release.

Portsmouth University coverage.

Interview on the Jodcast

2011-05-17T13:27:00.000-07:00

I'm interviewed on the May 2011 Extra edition of the Jodcast. I talk both about the LOFAR project and Galaxy Zoo. Enjoy. :)

LOFAR-UK blog about it.
Galaxy Zoo blog about it.

(this post makes me think I have too many blogs, and talked to too many people at NAM! Still one more NAM interview about LOFAR to come out!).

John Huchra Measuring Redshifts at the Whipple Observatory

2011-05-11T08:03:00.000-07:00

One of the things I've been working on recently is the final publication of the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS). This is the largest complete map of the local universe (ie. it looks at as much of the sky as is possible - about 95% when you consider our Galaxy blocks some of it), and represents the culmination of decades of work on redshift surveys by John Huchra (1948-2010). I worked with John on the 2MRS as a postdoc for 3 years (2005-2008) and myself and Lucas Macri (a former student of John's) have been working on finalizing the 2MRS and publishing it in John's name (based largely on text he wrote in various unpublished descriptions of the survey). We plan to release the data very soon.

As part of this whole effort I'm going to be speaking in a special session at the upcoming American Astronomical Society meeting (#AAS218) in Boston, MA about "John and the 2MRS". For my presentation I've been looking for pictures of John observing to get redshifts, and with some help (particularly from Dan Brocious at the Whipple Observatory, and Boyd Estus at Heliotrope Studies, Ltd) I managed to get my hands on the below clip of John Huchra observing redshifts at FLWO in the 1980s, presumably as part of his famous CfA redshift survey (it's a segment from "So Many Galaxies, So Little Time", narrated by Margaret Geller).

By definition this was exactly what I was looking for!

By the way you can read an article I wrote about John (shortly after his death in October 2010) on the Galaxy Zoo blog.

Some recent Galaxy Zoo work

2011-05-11T07:53:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit behind, but I wanted to point out two papers I was involved in from the Galaxy Zoo project which have recently come out on the arXiV.

Both were blogged about on the Galaxy Zoo blog (in both cases by the first author, and in both cases I was the second author).

Ben Hoyle: GZoo2 Bar Paper Accepted in MNRAS

Lucy Fortson: Galaxy Zoo and Zooinverse Review Article posted today on arXiv

This last ones use the above Hubble Tuning Fork I made using Galaxy Zoo style SDSS images of galaxies.

A LOFAR Pencast

2011-05-09T09:19:00.000-07:00

Today over on the LOFAR-UK blog I posted the below pencast in which I describe the LOFAR low band antennas.

LOFAR LBA Pencast

brought to you by Livescribe

This is using the new pencast pen I bought after trying one out at dotastro. Now having gone through the whole process I'm still impressed. Watch out for more pencasts. :)

Talking about LOFAR with the Naked Scientists

2011-05-03T13:31:00.000-07:00

I discussed LOFAR and LOFAR-UK with Andrew Pontzen on the special National Astronomy Meeting edition of the Astronomy podcast for the Naked Scientists.

MP3 of just my LOFAR segment.

Link to the whole podcast (including a transcript).

LOFAR-UK at the UK National Astronomy Meeting

2011-04-20T14:36:00.000-07:00

This week I've been in Llandudno, Wales for the UK National Astronomy Meeting. One of the things I've been doing here is representing LOFAR-UK with an exhibit stand (and giving several interviews). I blogged about it earlier on the LOFAR-UK blog - link.

I also gave a talk about my recent work with SDSS3. More on that soon I hope when the paper is in press.

It's been a great meeting, with just tomorrow morning left. Lots of really interesting talks and discussions.

Pluto the Previous Planet

2011-04-12T08:07:00.000-07:00

One of the outputs from dotAstronomy this year was the below music video by Amanda Bauer (@astropixie). Pluto the Previous Planet.

Pluto, the previous planet from carolune on Vimeo.

Amanda describes where she got the idea for this song in her blog post about it: Pluto, the Previous Planet: A Song. She's very clear, that she saw this song as a bit of fun, and has no interest in changing the IAU definition of what a planet is. I got involved as one of the "Trans Neptunian Objectors" (looking a bit lost in the chorus line), and expressed my concern over the interpretation of the second to last verse by refusing to "boo" (I really don't care if Pluto is defined as a planet or not). :)

Actually I think Amanda and Carolina did a very nice job anyway, making a website: "Pluto the Previous Planet" to go along with the video. It gives Pluto a voice (summary - we don't need to worry, he's happy enough as a dwarf planet) and includes some educational material about the redefinition. A well deserved Hack Day Best Artistic Project Prize!

I have yet to meet an actual astronomer who cares about this issue, but obviously some people do. The comments to Amanda's blog post have gotten a little heated and Stuart Lowe has already talked about that in his blog post: Plurality of Planets. Universe Today covered the story: "New Hit Single: “Pluto the Previous Planet”, and to date it's had just over 4000 views. Hmmm.

Perhaps Markus (the director) was right, and we should have spent a bit more time practicing! All I can say is I can't wait to get the tune out of my head. I've been humming it all week:

Pluto the previous planet, had a very shiny nose.......

no wait that's not right..... aargh!

Just noticed that one of the Pencasts was done by Amanda on the Pluto song. Check it out:

Pluto

brought to you by Livescribe

(Link to it on the Livescribe website)

(dot)Astronomers like Apples

2011-04-10T01:50:00.000-07:00

Another quick snippet from the dotAstronomy conference. On the first day we all had a lot of trouble with the wifi network at New College. Very frustrating for a group of people who came to a conference about using the internet to learn about, do, and communicate astronomy!

Anyway on hack day (Tuesday afternoon when we were all working on various projects), Boris Haeussler went around photographing us with all our internet connected devices, and produced the below video. His final census - 40 astronomers, 86 internet devices! Comprising 38 Macbooks, 6 other laptops, 5 iPads, 2 other tablets, 22 iPhones, 9 smart phones, and 4 other phones. That's a lot of Apple products!

And I was about average - with a Macbook and an iPhone. So why do I like Apple so much..... well I find they just work, and because the OS is based on Unix I can run a lot of the astronomy related programmes I started using on a Unix desktop when I was a new graduate student natively on my laptop. No dual booting (which is what I see those with other laptops doing). I don't have a lot of time for fussing around, so I like how easy it all is. I've actually moved to using only my laptop in recent years - connected to a screen on my desk, and also connecting remotely to the big computers at work for certain things.

This site on Using OSX for Professional Astronomers, by Dr. Jane Rigby is the most useful resource I've found for Mac users who are astronomers. Jane is now writing for AstroBetter (tips and tricks for professional astronomers) which is also a great resource.

Pencasting Galaxy Zoo Science at dotastro

2011-04-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

As any of you who are on Twitter (or elsewhere on the web) may have noticed, for most of this week I was at the dotAstronomy conference in Oxford. If you're not on Twitter yet see #dotastro and you might as well get started on Twitter by following everyone who was at the conference. That would really be a great starting point if you're interested in astronomy! (I was actually quite alarmed given the company there to be the 4th most often Tweeter at the conference.)

Anyway, dotAstronomy was an amazing conference, full of amazing people, and I've returned to Portsmouth on an awesome high, but a bit overwhelmed over where to start blogging about it. So I decided rather than try to review the whole conference, I would instead just review snippets which I thought were interesting. I started this on the Galaxy Zoo blog, by writing (a version) of this post about pencasting.

Pencasting was a totally new idea for me, and I have to say I immediately loved it and wanted to join in. So I spent a small amount of my time on the "hack day" making a "pencast" describing our most recent Galaxy Zoo science result (the observation that bars are more common in redder spiral galaxies). A pencast is a drawing that you make while describing what you're doing. The special pen and paper you use record both the drawing an audio which you can then put online for others to watch. Check it out and see what you think.

My Galaxy Zoo pencast:

(Link to this on the Livescribe website)

You can also see it along with more astronomy related pencasts see the dotAstronomy Pencast Gallery. And stay tuned. I really liked this technology, so you may be seeing more of it.

Astronomers on Twitter (who happen to be women)

2011-03-29T01:37:00.000-07:00

On Friday I was honoured to discover that Ken Hudson, who blogs at Share Astronomy included me in a list of women astronomers (who he follows on Twitter) that he thinks are excellent role models for girls (in his post "Girls Speak Out on Physics Education").

He was motivated to make the list after watching a video on teachers.tv in which girls at a school in London are interviewed (by young women working in Physics related fields) about what they think about physics: Physics Girls Speak Out (teachers.tv)

It's an excellent and interesting video, and I encourage anyone working with young women in science to watch it. Ken's conclusion was that the girls needed more role models - hence his list of women astronomers.

The Beauty of xkcd

2011-03-28T02:53:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start this post by saying I'm not a regular reader of the xkcd comic strip (a humorous stick figure comic strip about science, technology and maths).

But I have friends who love it, and post some of the hi-lights on their Facebook/Twitter streams. It was in that way that last week I stumbled across the below. Which obviously had to be posted here (click on the image to visit it on the xkcd website).

SDSS Telescope Getting Ready to Observe (on YouTube)

2011-03-28T02:32:00.000-07:00

In most of my research, I use data taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In the last few months I have been particularly focussed on looking at the morphologies of galaxies which are being observed as part of the ongoing Baryon Oscillation Sky Survey (or BOSS). This survey is in the process of taking spectra (to measure redshifts) of 1.5 million distant galaxies. I've just been looking at a small fraction of them which have high resolution images taken by the Hubble Space Telecope. I promise a post about that work once I submit the paper. :)

Anyway, the BOSS collaboration had a science meeting in New Mexico last week. Unfortunately I couldn't go. I phoned in to give a talk about my work, which was great, but I was still disappointed to not be physically present because the meeting included a trip to visit the actual telescope used to take all the SDSS data (both the images and spectra).

I love telescope, particularly as the sun sets and they prepare to observe. Usually they are so peaceful and full of hope at that time of night. Who knows what they'll discover as they work hard during the darkness.

So you can imagine, I was delighted to learn that a video had been taken of the visit, and put up on YouTube. You can see lots of scientists getting in the way of the telescope operators as they prepare the telescope for a night's observing (so not as peaceful as normal!). It's all set to nice classical music, and ending with a beautiful sunset.

Watch out for the "BOSS plates" going in. These are big metal plates (a couple of metres across) which have holes drilled in them. Fibres are connected to each hole, and the plate carefully lined, so the light from a single galaxy goes down each hole. That's how SDSS can take so many spectra - hundreds are taken at once using this method.

Also watch out for the building moving off the telescope. Instead of a classic dome with an opening, or even a building with a removable roof, the SDSS telescope is covered during the day by a building which is rolled completely off the telescope at night.

To learn more about SDSS3 and BOSS you can follow the SDSS3 Blog.

Science Busking for Science Week

2011-03-22T03:47:00.000-07:00

Rita Tojeiro from ICG.

As part of Science Week festitivites at Portsmouth, I helped with Science Busking in the main local shopping street (Commercial Road) last Wednesday.

It was written about in the local paper: "Scientists Busk It". Rita hates the picture they took (right), so I hope she'll forgive me for including it. I think she looks very nice, and it shows off the lovely electric motor she made for the event. Also in the linked article I want to point out that they got the science slightly wrong -- as the person in the comments correctly says, we were pumping air out of the wine bottle to make the marshmallows expand. My job was sticking the skewer into balloons, which I then gave out to kids.

The Portsmouth University Creative and Cultural Industries Department feaured the event in their weekly news bulletin, avalailable on Vimeo:

06. CCi Live_18-03-11 from CCi Live on Vimeo.

Testing Gravity with Galaxies

2011-03-22T03:27:00.000-07:00

A gas rich galaxy. Credit: THINGS

A few weeks ago a bunch of news articles came out suggesting that there was some new evidence that ruled out dark matter. It was all based on a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters (PRL) by Stacy McGaugh: "A Novel Test of Modified Newtonian Dynamics with Gas Rich Galaxies", which had appeared as a preprint on the arXiV, and was the subject of a press release: "Gas rich galaxies confirm prediction of modified gravity theory".

The press went a bit crazy about the paper, as was well discussed by Sean Carroll (@seanmcarroll) over at Cosmic Variance: "Dark Matter: Just Fine Thanks". He held this up as an example of the problems of communication between scientists and the science media. I think he has a point. He also presents a nice list of problems with the "alternate theory" held up in the paper: MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics).

Ethan Siegel has also written about the problems with the press coverage on his blog: "Good ideas, Bad ideas, MOND, and Dark Matter" illustrated very nicely with lots of pictures.

At about the same time as all this press (it was even on BBC online: Dark Matter Theory Challenged by Gassy Galaxies Result) a request to write a PRL Viewpoint on the article came across my desk.

PRL publishes Viewpoints (articles written by and for scientists) on papers they think are of note. The audience is supposed to be non-specialist physicists, so this was a fun article to write - equations allowed, but not obscure astronomical terms! I roped in my good friend Kristine Spekkens (an Assistant Professor at the Royal Military College in Canada) and we got to work.

The result appeared in PRL yesterday: "Testing Gravity in Gas Rich Galaxies", by Karen Masters and Kristine Spekkens. I was going to write a version for non-scientists for this blog, but having found the two articles by Sean Carroll ("Dark Matter: Just Fine Thanks") and Ethan Siegel ("Good ideas, Bad ideas, MOND, and Dark Matter") while looking for links to the press articles (just to be clear I only read those this morning, after writing the viewpoint) I find they've already done the job for me.

Just like them, our main conclusion is that MOND cannot compete with the standard cosmological model. It is a way of explaining the rotation curves of galaxies without dark matter, and it does that impressively well but it's not a theory of gravity, and it fails at a lot of tests that our standard gravity + dark matter + dark energy model (clunky as it is) passes with flying colours.

I think the most interesting result from McGaugh's paper is the finding that the baryon fraction scales with the rotation velocity of the galaxies (ie. is smaller for lower mass galaxies). This is presented as being an obscure fine tuning for the standard model, but actually it has the right qualitative sense (ie. there are known processes which produce something a bit like that), and can now provide a constraint to the models we have. So let me explain what it means a bit more......

Baryons are the scientific term for normal matter - atoms, electrons, protons etc. that people, stars, planets are made of. We actually have a really good measurement of what the baryon fraction averaged over the whole universe must be (compared to the radiation content). In the standard cosmological model, that fraction is set by our understanding of nuclear physics and the fractions of different light elements which are made right after the Big Bang (known as Big Bang Nucleosynthesis: wikipedia article). The baryon fraction can also be measured in CMB experiments like WMAP.

However it is well known that the baryon fraction in galaxies is lower than the cosmic average. And it makes sense that this would be so. Once the dark matter gets into a galaxy it can only be thrown out by gravity. But baryons do things. They form stars which have stellar winds, and blow up in immensly energetic supernovae. Baryons both flow into and out of dark matter halos, and the balance between those two processes depends on the mass of the halo. Massive halos have stronger gravity and so may be able to hold onto their baryons better - so they should have a higher baryon fraction, just as McGaugh's result shows.

We end our viewpoint by talking about how the next generation of radio telescopes (like SKA) will be able to make a much bigger (and more complete) sample to repeat the test McGaugh proposes. And if the result still holds, we'll have to explain it with our models of how galaxies form. But I seriously doubt it means MOND is the answer.

In fact as part of the research for this paper I also came across the following Physics World article (thanks Chaz!) which presents the best rebuttal for MOND I've seen yet: "New lower limit set for Newton's Law". At it's heart, MOND is a modification of Newton's 2nd law at low acceleration scales (not really a modification of gravity). This article presents the results of a test of Newton's 2nd Law at low acceleration scales well below where MOND proposes a change. The only problem is that in this experiment the attractive force is the electromagnetic force rather than gravity. But that means that MOND only modifies Newton's 2nd Law for gravity, not for other forces - so that makes it an even stranger theory than it already is!

Brian Cox on Richard Feynman

2011-03-21T02:50:00.000-07:00

I watched Brian Cox's show Wonders of the Universe last night, and following it was an advert for a BBC Radio 4 programme this afternoon with Brian Cox talking about Richard Feynman.

Given the title of my blog I hought I should link it here. It's on at 3pm today, but then also looks like it'll be on iPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ts5mm.

365 Days of Astronomy Podcast - Do Bars Kill Spirals?

2011-03-21T02:30:00.000-07:00

The podcast today over at 365 Days of Astronomy is "Galaxy Zoo 2 - Do Bars Kill Spirals?" by Chris Lintott and me. We had great fun talking about the first result from Galaxy Zoo 2 - that bars are more common in redder (deader?) spirals. Hope you enjoy listening to it (should be available later today).

You can read more about that project in my Galaxy Zoo blog posts about it.

I will also be interviewd about this by Darren Gamblen of Express FM 93.7 (local Portsmouth radio) this morning at 11.30am. You can listen to the segement at this link.

Beautiful Saturn

2011-03-17T06:09:00.000-07:00

Just had to put this here. It's so beautiful:

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

Taken from one of my favourite Astronomy websites - APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day). This is their explanation:

What would it look like to approach Saturn in a spaceship? One doesn't have to just imagine -- the Cassini spacecraft did just this in 2004, recording thousands of images along the way, and thousands more since entering orbit. Recently, some of these images have been digitally tweaked, cropped, and compiled into the above inspiring video which is part of a larger developing IMAX movie project named Outside In. In the last sequence, Saturn looms increasingly large on approach as cloudy Titan swoops below. With Saturn whirling around in the background, Cassini is next depicted flying over Mimas, with large Herschel Crater clearly visible. Saturn's majestic rings then take over the show as Cassini crosses Saturn's thin ring plane. Dark shadows of the ring appear on Saturn itself. Finally, the enigmatic ice-geyser moon Enceladus appears in the distance and then is approached just as the video clip ends.

Credit & Copyright: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA, S. Van Vuuren et al.;
Music: Adagio for Strings (NY Philharmonic)

Beautiful Galaxies on the BBC Big Screen

2011-03-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

As part of National Science and Engineering Week, 11-20th March 2011 in the UK I was involved in the production of a series of 5 short videos called “From the Earth to the Edge of the Universe” which were made as a collaboration between Creative Technologies and the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth. They are going on the BBC Big Screens, apparently right across the UK and continuing up until the 2012 Olympics.

Karen - From Earth To The Edge Of The Universe from CCi Live on Vimeo.

My segment is all about galaxy morphologies. I talk (briefly) about Galaxy Zoo and show the HST image of Hanny’s Voorwerp. I also describe some of the main morphological features of galaxies, and what I like about them.

You can watch all 5 videos here

I also blogged about this for Galaxy Zoo.

Do Bars Kill Galaxies at the Royal Astronomical Society

2011-03-14T08:33:00.000-07:00

On Friday I went up to London and spoke at the Royal Astronomical Society "Ordinary Meeting". The title of my talk was "Do Bars Kill Galaxies" - it was based on my recent Galaxy Zoo paper on the dependence of the fraction of bars on other properties of galaxies (described on the Galaxy Zoo blog in these articles).

After the meeting I met two of the Galaxy Zoo volunteers who had contributed classifications ("John F", and "Geoff"). They were very nice, and John wrote a review of the event (my talk and the other two which were given) on the Galaxy Zoo Forum.

It was a fun day out in London.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell wins award

2011-03-10T04:03:00.000-08:00

Jocelyn Bell Burnell at the LOFAR-UK station in Chilbolton in September 2010. Credit: James West, SEPnet.

I just posted over a the LOFAR-UK blog a story from NRAO about Jocelyn Bell Burnell winning the 2011 Grote Reber Award for lifetime contributions to radio astronomy.

Jocelyn Bell with the antennas she built and used to discover pulsars in the 1960s. Not sure of the credit for this image.

When I first learned the story of Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovering pulsars, as a young woman interested in astronomy she immediately became a scientific role model for me. Finally someone who looked a bit like me was in the history of astronomy. That was a really powerful moment.

Now that I've met her on several occasions I'm happy to say I still think of her as a role model for professional science. Especially on how to act with humility and treat people with respect - and also on how to be excited about science of course. (That particularly came through I thought when I interviewed her about LOFAR in September - YouTube clip, embedded below.)

I'm delighted every time I hear she's won another award. And I was really delighted when I learned she would be opening the LOFAR-UK station in Chilbolton. I loved the comparison we could make between the LBAs and the antennas she built in the 1960s. In some ways it looks like not much has changed in radio astronomy! Of course in other ways things are significantly different. Jocelyn Bell Burnell had to meticulously search for the signal in reams of traces made with a pen on paper. LOFAR used a massive supercomputer to combine the signal, and is only possible thanks the enormous advances in high speed internet connections and computing which have happened in the last 10 years or so.

Astronomy for young children - colour the solar system model.

2011-03-09T09:03:00.000-08:00

As a mother of two young children, and an astronomer I am interested in how to present astronomy to very young children. I have some small amount of experience in this area. As a graduate student I collaborated with a 2nd grade school teacher (that's year 2, or 7 year olds) to develop a 6 week mini-course on "Understanding the Sky". The material we developed can be found here (MS Word Documentation). This experience was very educational for me in terms of what concepts young children can grasp.

A couple of weeks ago I put some of this back into practice when I visited Meon Junior School in Portsmouth (UK), and talked with two groups of 35 Year 5 students (10 year olds). They had recently been learning about the Sun and the Moon, so I decided to talk about the solar system as a way of introducing the idea of the scale of the universe.

I developed a solar system model for this visit. This was inspired by the model described here. And made heavy use of this Solar System Scale Model Calculator.

Here's the version I coloured in and cut out to use to demonstrate in the class. Just to be clear this is an accurate scale model - you can fit the Sun and all the planets on a single sheet of A4 then, cut them out and space them over a bit more than half a mile for the proper orbits. We could only fit the Sun, Mercury, Venus and (with some squeezing) the Earth in the classroom. I think that really impressed the kids.

Here's the version you can colour in yourself.

And here are the instructions for placing the planets.

The kids were really impressed that the nearest star would be all the way in California.

All in all though I think the most important moment was when I was being introduced to one of the groups and a little boy said "You're not really a scientist are you?". I said "Yes, I am a scientist." It was also lovely to meet one little girl who in her free time writes reports on astronomy. She showed me her black hole report which was really impressive.

This activity could have been done while I was there, but in the end the kids had so many great questions that I just talked to them for the whole hour (honest!). I couldn't even answer all their questions before having to leave.

My daughter (who's 4) coloured in the planets and cut them out for herself. She demanded to have her own colouring sheet when I showed her what I was doing. We haven't yet placed the planets to scale around our house/neighbourhood, but once the weather warms up we may do that. I may report on how well that goes. I think she's too young to understand the concept.... but we'll see.

LOFAR - the Largest Telescope in the World....?

2011-02-28T02:05:00.000-08:00

My favourite post over at the LOFAR-UK blog is the one I wrote earlier this month in response to the press about the first light image including our Chilbolton station.

LOFAR-the Largest Telescope in the World?

In the press for that LOFAR was described as the largest telescope in the world, but there has been a lot of critique of that claim. In the post I explain why LOFAR can claim that title, at least for the time being.

Also I love this picture of the LOFAR super-terp in the Netherlands. This shows several of the core stations of LOFAR.

The LOFAR Superterp (part of the core) in the Netherlands. Credit: ASTRON

The Hubble Tuning Fork at Galaxy Zoo

2011-02-25T08:50:00.000-08:00

Over at the Galaxy Zoo Blog this week I posted an article about the Hubble Tuning Fork after I made the below example using images like the one used by Galaxy Zoo.

Curious? Ask an Astronomer: a proto-blog?

2011-02-25T05:44:00.000-08:00

Way back in 2001 (10 years ago!) when blogging was not a household term, I was a member of a group of astronomy graduate students at Cornell University who answered questions sent to curious@astro.cornell.edu. We decided a revamp of the website was needed, and set it up as a searchable MySQL database accessed by php. I was reminded of an old post of mine today, and realised that we in fact set up a proto-blog. If we were doing this today it could just be a blog with a series of posts answering common astronomical questions.

Anyway you can read some of the answers I wrote as a graduate student/young postdoc which are posted at Curious? Ask an Astronomer. This link goes to all 154 questions answered by me which I posted on the website!

Turns out I have 3 of the 10 most read questions on the site. They are

What's going to happen on December 21st 2012? (viewed 577263 times)
What is the largest star? (viewed 191353 times)
What is a white hole? (viewed 184946 times)

More than half a million people have read that top one. Yikes! That's some impact, and no wonder Google searches for my name return lots of hits. I also make the 2012 people really angry.......

Beautiful Stars

2011-02-25T05:20:00.000-08:00

I thought for a while about what to name this blog, and finally decided to pick something from my favourite quote by Richard Feynman.

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

(which is a Footnote in one of his Volumes of Physics Lectures).

I was originally thinking to call the blog "The Beauty of the Stars", but then it occured to me that that might be misinterpreted as me being a little immodest about my personal appearance. So I decided "Beautiful Stars" was a better choice. Hope you like it.

Welcome to my new blog

2011-02-25T05:17:00.000-08:00

This is going to be a collection of blog posts I do in other places as well as other posts not appropriate for those venues.

I blog about galaxies and other stuff for Galaxy Zoo, and run theLOFAR-UK blog. I also have an annoymous blog about issues with being a mother in science - but still undecided if I should link to that from here.

You can also visit my website.