Below is an interview Dr. Daniel Savin was gracious enough to do concerning the very important or not-sufficiently-appreciated field of Laboratory Astrophysics:
Now that the series on Goddard Space Flight Center is coming to an end, it is time for me to start planning out the next series of interviews. I've posted a new poll asking what of a selection of subjects matter you'd prefer to listen to, so I can focus on getting people to talk about those issues. Thank you for voting, and please leave more detailed preferences (or subjects which I didn't include in the poll) below.
Thanks a lot.
Available here is the interview I conducted with Dr. Tod Strohmayer of Goddard Space Flight Center on what you can learn about neutron stars and black holes from precise timing of their X-ray emission using the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, currently the oldest working X-ray observatory. Dr. Strohmayer maintains a very nice webpage which discusses his research, which I encourage all of you to check out.
As always, please email or leave below and question, comments, or concerns you might have. Thank you very much for listening!
I know it is unconscionably late, but the 2008 March 12th show is finally online and available here. On this program, I discussed:
Gamma-ray Bursts (GRBs), as you can guess from their name, as short bursts of gamma-rays. Often time, after these explosions, one can detect a very faint afterglow at optical wavelengths that disappears fairly quickly...
.... until the night of 18 March 2008, where an all-sky monitor in Chile run by the "Pi of the Sky" group (based in Poland) saw a bright flash of light from a GRB two seconds before Swift, a satellite devoted to detecting GRBs, noticed a GRB had occurred. For more info, go here. This is a pretty exciting event!
Apparently, NASA does have a sense of humor after all. Some of these are actually pretty funny.
Enjoy.
On February 27th, Dr. Mark Clampin was more than kind enough to discuss the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). JWST is a major endeavor, to big for any country to do alone. Here is an article discussing the European Space Agency's contribution to this project. Hope you enjoy.
Dr. Kim Vy Tran was gracious enough to discuss how galaxies form, and how the formation of galaxies can change for different galaxy environments, etc.:
I apologize profusely for the lack of updates / post on this blog and the lack of a radio show last week, but last week was extremely busy for me because of the Chandra proposal deadline. Once a year, the major satellite observatories accept proposals where they ask astronomer which objects they should look at and for how long. Since they only accept proposals once a year, lots of ideas for proposals typically have piled-up before the deadline which needs to be written (e.g. this year I wrote two and was on two others, and there were two more I had hoped to write). As you might imagine, the number of proposals they receive is huge and they number they can accept much smaller - so it is a very difficult and time-consuming procedure.
Anyway, this is an excuse / explanation, and this week I'll be posting past interviews, shows, current interviews plus the usual Astronomy tidbits when I come across them.
Thank you for your patience -- Yosi
Last Wednesday (March 5th), astronomers at the University of Western Ontario captured a video of a meteor falling to Earth, which is available here. This meteor reached an altitute of ~24 km before breaking up, so there is a good chance that several pieces managed to reach the ground, which they are looking for now. Pretty cool! (and scary).
Hope you enjoy.
of Goddard Space Flight Center is now online and available here. Dr. Hinshaw was kind enough to discuss the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), an invaluable source of information on the nature of the universe <1 million years after the Big Bang. (In fact, the existence of the CMB is one of the major pieces of evidences which argues for the occurrence of the Big Bang). For more information on this subject, check out this interview I did with Dr. Daniel Babich (Cal Tech), as well as the following webpages:
is now online and available here. The guest this week was Dr. Gary Hinshaw of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who discussed the origin and importance of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in our current understanding of the universe. I also discussed on this episode
Today on astro-ph/, a wonderful,free repository of Astronomy journal articles, a review article on Dark Energy - this mysterious "thing" which Astronomers believe currently make up 70% of the energy of the universe and is responsible for accelerating the universe's expansion - was recently put online. This paper covers the observational evidence for the existence of dark energy, the leading theoretical ideas as to what dark energy is, and how some of these ideas can be tested in the future. This paper is intended for Astronomers, so it is probably pretty technical and contains a fair bit of jargon, but since it is intended for Astronomers who do not do cosmology-related research it is more accessible than most. As always, if you have any questions please email me or leave them below, and I'll do my best to answer them. If I get enough questions, I might devote a whole show to dark energy.
Hope you enjoy.
In honor of Halloween, Josh Schroeder discusses how pseudo-science - what it is, how it gets there, and how it spreads:
of Goddard Space Flight Center is available here. Dr. Clampin is the Observatory Project Scientist of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and discusses both the science behind this mission and technological challenges which must be overcome to achieve them. JWST will most likely play an extremely important role in Astronomy during the next 10-20 years, and is a very complex and large mission. To learn more about JWST, check out:
... is finally online and ready for downloading. The guest this week was Dr. Mark Clampin of Goddard Space Flight Center, the Observatory Project Scientist of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)- the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and he discusses the science goals of this telescope and some of the technological challenges which must be overcome so that it will achieve its mission. However, there was plenty of news and scientific results as well, and on this program I discussed:
Another previously-aired interview for your listening enjoyment. By far one of the most theoretical subject matters discussed on-ar to date, touching on if it is possible to ever understand the fundamental properties of gravity:
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