Asides
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Some planet-like Kuiper belt objects don’t play “Nice”
When we talk about big advances in planetary science, we often are thinking about Mars rovers or the discovery of exoplanets. However, one area where we’ve learned a lot over the last few decades is the Kuiper belt: a region beyond the orbit of Neptune inhabited by small bodies of ice and rock. Before 1992,…
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Madame Wu and the backward Universe
(Since my weekly round-up experiment seems to have failed horribly, I’m going to try to go back to linking and summarizing individual articles I’ve written around the web on this blog. We’ll see if I keep it up!) Chien-Shiung Wu is one of those physicists that everyone should know about, but not enough do. 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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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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Did Einstein ever write his most famous equation?
Albert Einstein is many people’s archetype of the genius scientist, and his most famous equation is E = mc2. Or is it? When you look at Einstein’s published scientific papers over decades of work, he didn’t (usually) write the equation in that form. In fact, he pointed out that was an inaccurate form, since it’s…
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What goes up, must come down…except maybe antimatter
Gravity is a universally attractive force, at least as far as we can tell. However, some physicists have posited that antimatter behaves the opposite way, as though they have negative mass. Testing that hypothesis is remarkably hard, though: antimatter particles annihilate with their regular matter partners if they encounter each other (at low speeds at…
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I went to a rocket test launch, and all I got was this stupid name tag
Most major American rocket launches have been from Florida, which means I’ve never had a real opportunity to see one. However, NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility is beginning to host orbital rocket launches, in collaboration with the private company Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS). (Historically, Wallops has launched suborbital rockets and balloons.) So, I trekked over to…
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Who names the exoplanets? Who gets to decide?
The New Yorker recently started “Elements”, a science and technology blog. Their most recent contributor is…me! I covered a strange little controversy begun when the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a professional society with over 10 thousand members, decided to pick a fight with a company offering a contest to name exoplanets. That company, Uwingu, decided…
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Yvonne Brill and the technology keeping satellites in orbit
In a certain sense, it’s easy to keep things in orbit around Earth. However, it’s hard to keep satellites in a specific orbit, which is what matters most for communicating with them and they with us, whatever task they’re designed to perform. Thanks to the work of rocket engineer Yvonne Brill in the early 1970s,…
Bowler Hat Science 