Category: Writing for Other Sites
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The Solar System boundary and the week in review (September 8-14)
‘Twas a busy week! High-resolution observations show how black hole jets churn galactic gas (Ars Technica): One portion of my PhD thesis involved galactic feedback. That’s the process by which jets from black holes at the center of galaxies push material away, potentially affecting star formation and other activity. This article addressed the observation of…
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The week in review (September 1-7)
The last week was especially busy because I attended the launch of the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility. I will have a lot to say about that launch, LADEE, and related topics later on, but suffice to say it was a great experience — increased because it was…
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The week in review (August 25-31)
Welcome to the weekly round-up of stories I wrote this week, wherever they hide. A tour of physics, Angry Birds style (Double X Science): The odds are good that you’ve played Angry Birds, even if (like me) you don’t own a device that will run the game. My colleague Rhett Allain wrote a book for…
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The priors don’t lie: all the ladies love Bayesian statistics
Statistics is rarely sexy, sometimes satisfying, occasionally misused, but useful enough that more people should know how to use it than do. (Insert obvious condom joke here.) However, a particular method in statistics got additional attention last fall during the United States national elections: Bayesian inference. I wrote two pieces last week, drawing from a…
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A century of the Bohr atom
Many of us are familiar with the Bohr atom: a simple model with a nucleus and planet-like electrons orbiting in circular paths. It’s a useful picture, even though it’s not complete. Bohr proposed it in 1913, but it took about ten more years for physicists to work out why it worked — and to refine…
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On the multiverse, metaphysics, and meaning
I don’t spent a lot of time thinking about the multiverse: the possible existence of regions of the cosmos that have never been connected to ours at any time, and may never be in the future. That’s because those parallel pocket universes aren’t directly detectable, and may never be even indirectly detectable, putting them into…
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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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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…
Bowler Hat Science 