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A week in space: Mining asteroids, boats on Titan, bubbles inside bubbles...
Artists impression of asteroid mining. Credit: NASA The big story this week was the launch of Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company backed by the likes of James Cameron, Larry Page and Eric...
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What I missed: Juice, supernova origins, Vesta’s secrets and an invisible...
Cosmic dust close to Orion's belt. Credit: ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/T. Stanke et al./Igor Chekalin/Digitized Sky Survey 2 I took a couple of weeks off blogging while I had my exams at the start of the...
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Zooming in on an intergalactic collision
Point a camera at a particular patch of sky for more than 50 hours and what do you get? This image of Centaurus A, a galaxy 12 million light years away: New image of Centaurus A. See bottom of post for...
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A week in space: Dragon docks, dark matter doesn’t not exist (maybe), and the...
The ISS grabs Dragon. Credit: NASA The Dragon spacecraft finally set off to the International Space Station on Tuesday morning. On Friday, Dragon docked with the ISS and NASA streamed it live. If you...
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Missed opportunities: cloudy transits, not-so-fast neutrinos and a spare...
The International Space Station had no cloud issues. Credit: NASA I woke up early on Wednesday morning, half feeling like a kid on Christmas morning, half feeling like I’d rather just stay in bed....
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Looking forward to Lindau
Ariel view of Lindau Island. Credit: Edda Praefcke In less than two weeks time I’ll be boarding a plane from London to Zurich and then zipping across the Swiss-German border to Lindau by train. I’m...
View ArticleResearcher profile: Heather Gray on life at Cern #lnlm12
Heather Gray, originally from South Africa and currently working at CERN, is one of the attendees producing a video diary to document her time at the Lindau meeting this year. I caught up with her over...
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Master class with Albert Fert: the future of electronics #lnlm12
Skyrmion crystal observed by Lorentz transmission electron microscopy. Credit: Nature “From a dream with atoms and spins and electrons dancing around, to a device that we use in our daily life” is how...
View ArticleTricking nature to give up its secrets #lnlm12
By their very nature, those discoveries that most change the way we think about nature cannot be anticipated This was Douglas Osheroff’s claim at the start of his lecture on Wednesday morning, where he...
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Who are you? Basic Space anniversary edition
A few too many candles, but who's counting. Credit: Vikas Bhardwaj It’s the Scientific American blog network’s first birthday today! Taking a leaf out of Ed Yong’s book, or rather blog, to celebrate...
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Sir Harold Kroto: Science is “lost in translation” #lnlm12
Harry Kroto at Lindau. Credit: Juan Garcia-Bellido If you don’t know English, you can still understand Shakespeare’s stories, Sir Harold Kroto told me after his lecture at Lindau on Thursday. But,...
View ArticleHeather Gray: chaotic starts and Higgs excitement #lnlm12
Heather Gray, a researcher working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN, was at this year’s Lindau meeting. I spoke to her over email before it started to find out about her expectations, and afterwards she...
View ArticleNight in space
Cancel your plans for the next three minutes and forty nine seconds and watch this video instead. I never normally post time lapse videos on their own, but this video of views from the International...
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Twinkle twinkle globular star cluster
Messier 107, taken by Hubble. Credit: NASA/ESA The Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 took this picture of a cluster of ancient stars in the Milky Way, known as Messier 107. It is a globular...
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How most of the universe was lost
Brian Schmidt at Lindau. Credit: Markus Pössel When Brian Schmidt got his PhD in astrophysics in 1993, he was one of less than a handful of people that year that graduated with a thesis on supernovae....
View ArticleAll 2299 Kepler exoplanet candidates orbiting one star
If you think this star system looks a little crowded, that’s because it contains all of the possible alien worlds found by the Kepler planet-hunting mission so far. This animation made by Alex Parker,...
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Could life arise around a dying star?
White dwarf star Sirius B is roughly the same size as Earth (but has a mass 98% that of the sun) and is just over 8 light years away from us. Maybe we should pay it a visit... Credit: ESA and NASA In...
View ArticleThe Sun’s Bright Idea
Here’s an eruption from the sun that happened just a few days ago. It is a coronal mass ejection that loops out from the sun, looking slightly like a lightbulb that has just switched on. But it’s a...
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Voyager: a binary love story
Earth, as seen by aliens in millions of years, hopefully. This photograph is one of many on the Golden Record carried by both Voyager spacecraft. Credit: NASA On its 35th birthday, the Voyager 1...
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Supernova 1006 lived fast and left no companion behind
A supernova that lit up the skies in the year 1006 lived and died fast, leaving no companion star behind, astronomers have found. The result is the latest clue in a puzzle that has been troubling...
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