Category: Ars Technica
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Baby boom-ers could be a new type of white dwarf supernova
White dwarf supernovas—more officially known as type Ia supernovas—are important to cosmologists because they all explode in very similar ways. That means they can be used to measure distances to faraway galaxies. However, a peculiar type of supernova, first identified in 2002, has a lot in common with type Ia explosions, but with a lot…
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Supernovas and Marvin the Martian
Supernovas are some of the most violent phenomena in the cosmos, but we’re in no immediate danger from one. However, astronomers would really really really like one to go off relatively nearby during our lifetimes, since we would learn a lot from observing one. My latest piece at Ars Technica is a gallery showing some…
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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…
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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:…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Living planets in a stellar graveyard
When our Sun runs out of nuclear fuel, it will shed its outer layers, while what’s left of the core will remain as a white dwarf: an object the size of Earth, but far more massive. During the final stages of the Sun’s life, Earth is likely to perish as a habitable world, but that’s…
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Measuring the spin of a black hole using X-rays
The region near a black hole is one of the most extreme environments in the Universe, but historically it’s been hard to study directly. Using the XMM-Newton and NuSTAR telescopes, astronomers have measured the rotation of gas near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy. They found that this…
Bowler Hat Science 