Author: Matthew R. Francis
-
Gravitational waves: the froth of spacetime
My second piece for BBC Future is up! I ask—and partly answer—the question, “Will we ever detect gravitational waves directly?” (And don’t worry if you don’t know what a gravitational wave is: I answer that one too!) A major part of the problem is that gravity is weak: even the strongest gravitational wave will only…
-
Planck: news from the infant Universe
For cosmology-lovers like me, yesterday was a full, busy day. The Planck telescope released its first full set of data, refining the estimates of the age of the Universe and its contents. I wrote two big pieces, one for Ars Technica and one for Galileo’s Pendulum. First Planck results: the Universe is still weird and…
-
Analysis of atmosphere reveals: weird exoplanet is weird
Imagine a planet 7 times the mass of Jupiter, hot enough to glow slightly, and containing dusty clouds of carbon monoxide and water. That planet is HR 8799c, one of the few worlds outside our Solar System which astronomers have been able to image directly. Part of the reason for its weirdness is its youth:…
-
In which I get a little fanboyish about ALMA
I’m a theoretical physicist by training and inclination, but I’m not immune to awesome experiments or observatories. (Ahem.) Case in point: the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. This array of 66 telescopes in the high Atacama Desert is particularly well suited to hunt for the earliest galaxies and stars in the Universe.…
-
Dinosaurs belong to all of us
My review of Brian Switek’s forthcoming book, My Beloved Brontosaurus, is up at Double X Science! Suffice to say, these are not the dinosaurs I learned about as a young kid—and in my opinion, they’re much more interesting. Over the last few decades, the basic realization that modern birds are living dinosaurs has grown, and…
-
Two BIG THINGS coming up!
April will be a busy month for the Bowler Hat: I begin my new gig as Director of CosmoAcademy in earnest, and I will be traveling to New York City to participate in the ScienceOnline Teen conference. Here’s the scoop: The Universe we inhabit inspires some of the biggest questions about meaning, purpose, origins, and…
-
A Manly conversation
Writer/editor David Manly posed a series of questions to scientists and writers, soliciting short responses on topics of broad interest. Those interviewed were shark researcher David Schiffman, paleontology writer/sauropod snogger Brian Switek, and me. If you want to know who would win an arm-wrestling contest between a human and a Tyrannosaurus, or how we know…
-
Disentangling environmental influences in photon-atom interactions
Often in physics, we can separate the object from the environment and the experimental apparatus from what’s being measured, but that separation is approximate. In quantum systems, those distinctions break down, to the point where the environment “measures” the system, in ways we don’t fully understand even after nearly a century of study. (A lot…
-
Aging binaries provide new calibration for cosmic distances
Cosmology—the study of the Universe as a whole—requires accurate measurements of the distances to galaxies and other objects billions of light-years away. However, the reliability of those estimates depends on how accurately we know the distance to closer objects, such as the Milky Way’s satellite galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). A new…
-
The case of the missing black holes
No question: supermassive black holes get a lot of the glory, thanks to their obvious presence at the centers of many galaxies. However, stars more than 20 times the mass of our Sun leave behind smaller, stellar-mass black holes after their violent supernova deaths. Despite this model’s wide acceptance, astronomers have only identified about 50…
Bowler Hat Science 