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Newly-Evolved Hybrid
Galaxy #1, cleanish On July 28, 2010, nearly 900,000 galaxies were put into a public database, and this is Galaxy #1, or SDSS J000000.41-102225.6, and don’t tell me astronomers don’t know how to name...
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Us, From Far Away
This is a photograph — meaning, it’s real — taken from 114 million miles away on the far side of the sun. The brightest little dot in the lower left is the earth. The less bright dot near it is our...
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Studying All the Things in Infinity
Today, I’m venturing backstage at Last Word on Nothing, a rather frantic place at the best of times. Ann has just published a very cool new book on a group of astronomers who created this beautiful...
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Without Learn’d Astronomers; Or, Walt, Shut Up
A book I just read said that while the sun once held a gloriously central place in the lives of men, it has now been sidelined and downgraded by science — which I disagree with, you can’t find a more...
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Biological Astronomy
I haven’t had anything to do with biology since I wrote an article years ago about sleeping pills. I found out that the drugs used by 60-gazillion insomniacs to put themselves to sleep are not the...
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Abstruse Goose, Stardust, & Entropy
Abstruse Goose added a mysterious little tag that says something like, “Now, how many pop culture references can you find?” None for me, not one, geezer that I apparently am. But I did get the...
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An Astronomer and a Theorist Walk Into a Bar
One of the campuses where I teach is haunted. Everybody says so. They hear noises in the night. They encounter cold spots. They come to work in the morning and find a seemingly immovable file cabinet...
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Science Metaphors (cont.): Standard Candle
Nothing is entirely trustworthy. Friends are inconstant; presidents and professors are making it up; your grandmother didn’t always know what she was talking about; your very senses can fool you; and...
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How to Beat a Closed System
Christie wrote a post about the suckiness of power-point presentations and of scientific conferences in general. Conferences are an occupational hazard for science writers: walk into a big-city...
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Paying No Attention to Bimodality
Galaxies are the universe’s basic units. (True, they’re made of stars, but all the stars are in galaxies.) So if you understood why galaxies look the way they do and how they’ve changed with time,...
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Is passion for science a heritable trait?
My dad and I share an obsession with endurance sports. We don’t just love to get outside and ride our bikes, we actually feel antsy and anxious if we go too many days without working up a sweat. As...
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Is That Guy Really, Really Smart?
A friend I run into regularly says, “Hey, Ann. Do you know that guy from around here who won that Nobel whatever?” He means Adam Riess, and yes, I know Riess. I’ve interviewed him, I say hello, he...
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Science Metaphors (cont.): Degeneracy
I was helping an astronomer write a sentence. It was about disentangling the color a supernova has intrinsically, from the reddening in its color caused by cosmic dust. He wrote he wanted to “break...
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Guest Post: Auditing Astronomy Class
I’m not sure exactly where this story begins, but maybe it’s here: Sometime this summer, my mom decided to take an astronomy class. She had taken drama and philosophy classes through the Osher Lifelong...
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The Woman Who Discovered the Key to Measuring the Universe
By the late 1800s, astronomy had moved on from simple human observation to the collection of images of the sky on photographic plates — pieces of glass coated with light-sensitive silver salts. At the...
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Trust no one, and other lessons I learned from physics reporters
As I’ve been thinking about the challenges facing science journalism, a little voice in my head has been murmuring, “Yes, but isn’t all this navel-gazing a bit biology-centric?” Number one on my list...
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Why the eclipse mattered.
I have been hearing about Sunday’s annular eclipse for weeks. Earlier this month, I visited my parents in Albuquerque, and the eclipse was all my dad could talk about. Dad, known to the rest of the...
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Chasing Transits
CELESTE: How long this time? LE GENTIL: How long will I be gone? Three years. I swear to you, Celeste, on everything that’s holy: three years, no more. CELESTE: What if you miss it? LE GENTIL: The...
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Union and Reunion
Splendid, isn’t it. It’s UGC 8335 — one name, so once it was apparently mistaken for one thing though obviously it’s two. They’re spiral galaxies in the process of running into and through each other....
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Reading Sci-Fi with Astrobioloigist David Grinspoon
David Grinspoon is a comparative planetologist and an astrobiologist. He’s also a big book nerd, and his love for both fiction and nonfiction are proudly on display in his own new book, Earth In Human...
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