Category: Writing for Other Sites
-
A big black hole in a small galaxy
Most galaxies we know of have a supermassive black hole at their cores. These black holes may be millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun, but they are generally proportionate to the size of their host galaxies—or more properly, the central bulge of those galaxies. Up until recently, I wouldn’t have said…
-
Tracking dark energy using galaxy clusters
I write articles and posts on a lot of different topics, both for my own blog and at Ars Technica. Many of those subjects drift pretty far from my putative area of expertise, but occasionally I get to write about something I know pretty well. To wit: last week, a group of researchers using the…
-
Makemake has no atmosphere, possibly a partly frosted surface
The dwarf planet Makemake (pronounced MAHkayMAHkay) is about 2/3 the diameter of Pluto, and farther from the Sun. That makes it hard to observe. Astronomers using a set of telescopes in South America tracked it during an occultation: a brief interval when it passed in front of a faint star. By measuring the light curve—the…
-
Camus imagine it? Sisyphus cooling brings molecules to millikelvin temperatures
Successful techniques exist for bringing atoms down to really cold temperatures, into the regimes where the most exotic collective quantum phenomena appear. However, those same techniques don’t work for polyatomic molecules—those consisting of three or more atoms. This is a bit frustrating for physicists, since molecules have the potential to exhibit some truly wild quantum…
-
On single-parent planethood and those hot, hot Jupiters
Many star systems seem to resemble our own Solar System: the planets orbit their host star in the same direction that the star spins. Admittedly, the data is still sparse: it’s not always possible to get that measurement. The brief version: you need the planet to transit or briefly eclipse its host star, and you…
-
Happy birthday, Carl Sagan!
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. – Carl Sagan, born November 9, 1934 Like many science writers, I count Carl Sagan as one of my inspirations and influences. However, I think there’s a tendency to mourn his absence (he died relatively young) in the wrong way: by negatively contrasting current science communicators with…
-
Early stars stole gamma rays from blazars
We have a lot of reasons to be interested in the earliest stars that formed in our Universe. Particularly, these stars were the first to fuse hydrogen and helium into (nearly) all the heavier elements that exist today, including the carbon, oxygen, iron, calcium, and the like that make up life as we know it.…
-
Quantum entanglement, locality, and a cute kitten
(Admittedly, the cute kitten was added by my editor.) Albert Einstein described quantum entanglement in 1935, along with colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, and used it as an argument against quantum mechanics. Entanglement is the phenomenon by which two widely separated systems act as a single system, due to interactions in the past; a…
-
Pulsar eats companion star, burps gamma rays
Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars—the dense remnants of stars much more massive than the Sun. Some pulsars are in binary systems, and when they feed off their companion star, their rotation rate can increase until they’re spinning hundreds of times per second. Known as millisecond pulsars, these are often also strong emitters of gamma…
Bowler Hat Science 