Category: Writing for Other Sites
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Halo star haze helps hidden galaxies look huge
(Not fully alliterative, but it’s the best I can do after driving 6 hours today.) The halos of galaxies are best known for harboring dark matter, but they also contain stars. Only a tiny fraction of the total stars in a galaxy are in the halo, so usually they’re hard to spot, but astronomers are…
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Twisted light on a silicon chip
(In honor of Terry Pratchett, I almost wrote that “Twisted light? Onna chip?”, but that would probably confuse 90% of my readers.) Light is used to carry data, but mostly we don’t use the properties of the photons themselves to convey information. Quantum communication, among other applications, could use the state of the photon to…
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Radioactive titanium powers a supernova afterglow
(Yes, I’m inundating you all with writing. It’s a busy week, and I still have a few more things forthcoming to share with you.) Supernova 1987a was the death of a massive blue star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the satellite galaxies of our Milky Way. Because of its relative proximity and occurrence…
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Not quite ready for the Diamond Age
In his science fiction novel The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson describes a world filled with electronic paper, tiny flexible computers, and transparent displays. Graphene—a crystal comprised of a single layer of carbon atoms—is perhaps the most promising material to make that world real (though hopefully without the universal surveillance state and environmental collapse that are…
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Alpha Centauri harbors an Earth-mass planet
Every exoplanet discovery seems to bring us closer to understanding the variety of planetary systems out there in our galaxy. The latest find is particularly exciting: an Earth-mass planet orbiting around Alpha Centauri B, one of three stars in the closest system to the Solar System. The planet isn’t very Earthlike in most respects, but…
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Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
For Ada Lovelace Day, I compiled a list of many of the best science writers I know: Last year, I celebrated Emmy Noether, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the 20th century. This year (largely because I’m swamped with other work), I’m stealing a great idea from Ed Yong, and celebrating living writers who are my…
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Quantum communication without entanglement
Information in quantum physics is carried in a system’s quantum state, which is basically a list of all the important properties. An atom’s state, for example, contains the relative orientation of the nucleus and electrons, the energy levels the electrons occupy, and the like. Quantum computing manipulates these states in prescribed ways for calculation purposes,…
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Jumping from the “edge of space”…whatever that means
Yesterday, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner (best known for jumping off skyscrapers) successfully completed a 39 kilometer dive from a balloon. Many media outlets described his jump as beginning “at the edge of space”, but the story is a little more complex than that. One thing bothered me, though, about a lot of the coverage: many…
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The beautiful spiral of a dying star
Though it may seem sad on the surface, the death of a star is a beautiful thing—and an important precursor to the birth of new stars and planets. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile has provided a breathtaking view of a star nearing the end of its life. One unexpected feature was a…
Bowler Hat Science 