Sunday, February 3, 2008

January 30th radio show...

is now online and ready for download (you need something to listen to during the halftime show of the Super Bowl, right?). This was the third all-news show in a row, and I discussed:

  • News: Telescope Array, a new high energy cosmic-ray observatory in Utah, starts taking data; asteroid 2007 TU24 flew within 300,000 miles of the Earth on January 29th.
  • General Relativity: Hubble Space Telescope detects a double Einstein ring - the result of two galaxies being directly behind a very massive object which distorts their image into a circle - an example of "strong lensing" predicted by general relativity; flaring from the super-massive black hole OJ287 in the center of a distant galaxy result of another black hole orbiting it, timing of flaring consistent with what expected from general relativity; small distortions in the shape of galaxies ("weak lensing", also predicted by general relativity) behind massive galaxy clusters Abell 901 and 902 used to map out the distribution of dark matter in this cluster.
  • Galaxy Cluster / Large Scale Structure: High energy X-ray detected from Ophiuchus galaxy cluster by Integral the result of electrons being accelerated to very high energies (higher than that in the most powerful particle accelerators on Earth) in the gas between galaxies; galaxies detected by Spitzer in filaments of gas leading to galaxy cluster Abell 1763.
  • Black Holes: Super-massive black holes in the center of galaxies which produce narrow flows of relativistic gas called "jets" believed to be spinning very rapidly; several super-massive black holes found in galaxies without bulges - previously believed to not be possible, or at least very rare.
  • Calendar of upcoming events in the greater New York / Hudson Valley area
  • Neutron Stars: XMM-Newton measures mass, radius of neutron stars, which implies that they are made of "normal", but extremely dense, matter.
Hope you enjoy listening, and please leave any questions or comments below.

Yosi

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