Monday, March 31, 2008

Past Interview: Dr. Daniel Savin (Columbia University)

Below is an interview Dr. Daniel Savin was gracious enough to do concerning the very important or not-sufficiently-appreciated field of Laboratory Astrophysics:

  • Dr. Daniel Savin - Columbia University: Laboratory Astrophysics (Air Date: 2007 December 12)
Please email me any questions or comments you might have or leave them below. Hope you enjoy, and thank you very much for listening!

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Future interviews poll

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.

Interview with Dr. Tod Strohmayer online

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!

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

March 12th show online

I know it is unconscionably late, but the 2008 March 12th show is finally online and available here. On this program, I discussed:

  • Calendar of upcoming Astronomy/science events in the greater New York and Poughkeepsie area
  • Interview with Dr. Tod Strohmayer of Goddard Space Flight Center on accreting neutron stars, and what you can learn by observing them with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer
  • News:Doritos plans to broadcast advertisement into space; astronomers at University of Western Ontario videotape a meteor falling to Earth - numerous on-going and future projects are trying to identify and track such Near-Earth Objects before they hit the Earth; with Spring beginning, so is peak Aurora Borealis season - likely the result of a favorable alignment between the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind; Cassini to dive into the water plume being ejected by Saturn's moon Enceladus
Thank you very much for your patience, and hope you enjoyed listening to it. As always, please email me any questions you might have or leave them below.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Optical movie of a Gamma-Ray Burst

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!

NASA's Sense of Humor

Apparently, NASA does have a sense of humor after all. Some of these are actually pretty funny.

Enjoy.

More information on the James Webb Space Telescope

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.

Past Interview: Dr. Kim Vy Tran (University of Zurich)

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.:

As always, please email or leave any questions or comments you might have below.

Thank you very much for listening.

Sorry...

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

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Meteor video

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.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Interview with Dr. Gary Hinshaw

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:

  • Universe 101: Big Bang Theory - A review of the Big Bang theory and why astronomers think it is correct
  • Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis - an archive of past and present measurements of the CMB
  • Cosmic Background Explorer - Information on the first satellite to measure temperature differences in the CMB between different regions on the sky
  • Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe - the most recent satellite to measure the temperature structure of the CMB, and is largely responsible for the era of "precision cosmology" - measuring the properties of the universe to better than a factor of 10 - which most Astronomers believe we have finally entered. In addition to information on this mission, there are a lot of good, general descriptions about cosmology on this website.
Hope you enjoy, and please email me or leave any questions below. Thank you for listening!

Monday, March 10, 2008

March 5th radio show...

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

  • Calendar of upcoming science events in the greater New York City/Poughkeepsie area
  • Interview with Dr. Gary Hinshaw on the importace of measurements of the CMB
  • News:GLAST arrives at Kennedy Space Center for final preparations before May 16th launch; NASA and ESA maneuver spacecraft orbitting Mars to prepare for landing of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander on May 25th
  • Cosmology, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy:Changes in the distortion in 3D (space and distance) distribution of galaxies resulting from galaxies falling into galaxy clusters as the universe evolves could provide a very sensitive measurement on the properties of dark energy; computer simulations suggest small-scale structure in the CMB can also help determine the properties of the dark energy; CDMS experiments - which looks for dark matter particles passing through the Earth - releases latest results, no detections yet but future, larger detector should see something; professor theorizes that dark energy and dark matter have the same origin, details to come later; measurements of absorption of light by neutral hydrogen at high redshifts (very far away when the universe was young) might be able to test string theory; possible evidence for "cosmic strings" - 2D structures with infinite density - in the latest map of the CMB taken by WMAP; computer simulations of gravitational wave emission underway - detecting gravitational waves important test of General Relativity, the theory upon which the existence of dark matter and dark energy rests.
Hope you enjoy and, as always, please email me or leave any questions/comments you might have below. Thanks a lot for listening!

Interested in Dark Energy?

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.

Friday, March 7, 2008

Past Interview: Josh Schroeder (Columbia University)

In honor of Halloween, Josh Schroeder discusses how pseudo-science - what it is, how it gets there, and how it spreads:

  • Josh Schroeder - Columbia University: Pseudo-science on the Internet (Air Date: 2007 October 31)
Hope you enjoy and, as always, please email me or leave any questions or comments below. Thanks a lot for listening.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Interview with Dr. Mark Clampin

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:

As always, please leave any questions or comments you might have below, or email them to me. Thank you very much for listening.

February 27th radio show...

... 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:

  • Calendar of upcoming science events in the greater Poughkeepsie / New York city area
  • Interview with Dr. Mark Clampin (NASA/GSFC) on the science and technology behind JWST - NASA's next major optical / near-infrared observatory
  • News: SIDECAR instrument for JWST is completed; ALMA - a large radio interferometer (similar to the VLA) which will operate at radio frequencies not observable at most other radio telescopes - reaches the halfway point in its construction; SCUBA-2 camera - which operates at the same wavelength at ALMA but uses a different technology and not as sensitive or as high angular resolution, but much more sensitive that currently available instruments - installed at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii; the upgrade of the VLA is now halfway completed as well - when finished, will increase sensitivity of this instrument by >10x without building new radio dishes; NASA and ESA announce the end of the Ulysses mission, which has been studying the Sun and its solar wind for the last 17 years.
  • Extragalactic Astronomy / Cosmology: Spitzer and Hubble discovers a galaxy forming a very large number of stars just ~1 billion years after the Big Bang, sooner than previously predicted; using gravitational lensing, astronomers discover a dark matter structure >270 million light-years across - significantly larger than previously detected; COSMOS survey detects 67 galaxies gravitational lensed by a single foreground galaxy, many more than previously identified; initial results from using a new method of detecting dark matter particles on Earth by observing bubbles created when the dark matter particles interact with liquid are released, comparable to that of other methods.
As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please leave them below. Hope you enjoy, and thank you very much for listening!

Monday, March 3, 2008

Past Interview: Prof. Rothman (Princeton University)

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:

As always, please leave any questions or comments you might have below.