Month: May 2013
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Do newer stars in globular clusters die before they get old?
According to theories of star life cycles, when a typical star exhausts its hydrogen fuel, it goes through a set of end-life stages before expiring, expanding and contracting over time. However, a new analysis of a globular cluster orbiting the Milky Way found that the younger generation of stars didn’t seem to reach the later…
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Talking about dark matter in a bar
Next Tuesday (June 4, 2013) I will be speaking at SciencePub RVA, a monthly gathering at The Camel in Richmond, Virginia. The doors open at 6 PM, and my talk starts at 7 PM. The event is free, but we’d love it if you would register, so we have an idea of the crowd size.…
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New distance measurements solve one mystery – and create a new one
SS Cygni is a special kind of binary system, consisting of a red dwarf star and a white dwarf. According to theoretical models, the white dwarf strips gas from its companion, which leads to periodic outbursts of intense light: a recurrent nova. However, previous observations of the system placed it too far away for those…
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Early galaxies: live large, die big, burn bright
How did the biggest galaxies form? Based on the ages of stars inhabiting them, the largest elliptical galaxies — those kind of boring egg-shaped clouds of stars with no pretty spiral arms — formed fairly early in the history of the Universe. While smaller elliptical galaxies likely are the modern version of submillimeter bright galaxies…
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Did Einstein ever write his most famous equation?
Albert Einstein is many people’s archetype of the genius scientist, and his most famous equation is E = mc2. Or is it? When you look at Einstein’s published scientific papers over decades of work, he didn’t (usually) write the equation in that form. In fact, he pointed out that was an inaccurate form, since it’s…
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The real poop on human digestion
I won’t lie: I love Mary Roach‘s books. She is likely the funniest nonfiction writer working today; her beat is the weird side of science. I reviewed her most recent book, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, for Double X Science: Consider this question a 6-year-old might ask: Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? After…
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Was the Big Bang actually the beginning?
I usually avoid the kinds of sexy big questions that often make cosmology books by Paul Davies or Stephen Hawking or Roger Penrose popular. The main reason for that is because those big questions may not be answerable, because they are beyond the reach of our telescopes or experiments. One such question—what, if anything, came…