Tag: neutron stars
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Sizing up the weirdest objects in the universe
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] How big is a neutron star? Astrophysicists are combining multiple methods to reveal the secrets of some of the weirdest objects in the universe. For Symmetry Magazine: Neutron stars…
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Squeezing light to detect more gravitational waves
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] This article appeared in the fall print issue of Popular Science, but I missed that this article had also been published online. Something called ‘squeezed light’ is about to…
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Looking for the fifth dimension with wrinkles in spacetime
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Are We Closer to Finding a Fifth Dimension? For The Daily Beast: In Madeleine L’Engle’s classic novel A Wrinkle in Time, the characters travel from one place to another…
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Nuclear pasta and neutron stars
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] The Inside of a Neutron Star Looks Spookily Familiar Exotic ultra-compressed matter can look like pasta, among other things For Nautilus: Hot fluids of neutrons that flow without friction,…
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Be very very quiet, we’re hunting gravitational waves
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Gravitational waves and where to find them Advanced LIGO has just begun its search for gravitational waves For Symmetry Magazine: For thousands of years, astronomy was the province of…
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I Love Q, and now you can too!
I wrote a feature story for Physics World on an interesting little discovery about neutron stars, but unfortunately the article wasn’t in their free online edition. HOWEVER, the editors have kindly let me repost the article here in PDF format for free download! (Here’s the summary I wrote a few weeks ago.) Physics World is…
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The three little words every pulsar wants to hear
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! UPDATE: you can now download this article in PDF format! See the follow-up post or the update below.] I can’t help falling in Love with Q From Physics World: The…
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Listening to the sounds of the cosmos
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Last year, I went to a conference in Florida to hear — and in some cases meet — some of the leading thinkers in the study of gravitational waves.…
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Ionizing the Universe with black holes and neutron stars
About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the Universe cooled off enough for stable atoms to form out of the primordial plasma. However, sometime in the billion years or so after that, something happened to heat the gas up again, returning it to plasma form. Though we know reionization (as it is called) happened, that…
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Spinning pulsar, got to slow down
(This headline was my original choice for the article, which was understandably rejected by my editors. So, you get to read it here instead.) Pulsars are rapidly-spinning neutron stars, the very small dense remnants of stars at least 8 times more massive than the Sun. Their pulses are intense beams of light that sweep across…
Bowler Hat Science 