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Toothpaste Comes From Neutrinos: The Origin of Stuff
The movie Thor came out a few months ago, featuring some killer CGI, really nice nebula art, and one line that bothered every right-thinking astrophysicist: that Thor’s mystical hammer Mjolnir was...
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Blasts from the Past: How Astronomers Measure Echoes in Space
Figure 1: Ellipsoid of possible scatterings locations for a light echo from Eta Carinae to Earth (A. Rest et al. 2011) Last week Zachary wrote a great article about a recent spectra taken of Eta...
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Kepler on Trial
An artist's depiction of the Kepler Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/Kepler Mission. Three hundred seventy-nine years ago, the famed astronomer Galileo Galilei went on trial. Today, it’s Kepler’s turn....
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6 Real Planets That Put Science Fiction (And Cracked) To Shame
I like Cracked. You probably do too. But like that old adage that every newspaper story is true except for the ones for which you happen to have firsthand knowledge, I found their recent article on 6...
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The WISE way to deal with 2.7 million images: a public data release
An all sky image at infrared wavelengths as taken by WISE. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA WISE, or the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, was designed to survey the entire sky in infrared light...
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Let’s Lasso Us Some Space Rocks: Asteroid Mining And You
Last Tuesday, the future finally sounded like the future. A coalition of willing billionaires, spaceflight professionals, and scientific advisors under the banner of Planetary Resources announced their...
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The verbal GRE: dirty secrets on its role in grad school admission
For many of you, this September may be a time when, in addition to enjoying the autumnal crunch of leaves underfoot, you begin seriously to consider graduate school in astronomy. Most application...
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Stuff Hitting Jupiter: A Retrospective
Swirliest planet. (Image: NASA/JPL/Caltech) Fact: Jupiter is the best planet. What’s not to like? Big, beautifully stripey, four exciting moons, hurricane three times the size of the Earth, lots of...
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Gravitational Lensing in the Canary Islands
The 10.4m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) on La Palma--the largest optical telescope in the world! Every November the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) hosts a winter school on a particular...
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2012: My Favorite Doomsday Scenarios
The days are counting down till grave disaster befalls us all. No, not finals week. I’m talking about THE END OF THE WORLD (exclamation point, exclamation point), which as everyone knows will happen...
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The Problem of Exascale Computing
The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It only takes a quick peek at the TOP500 – the ever-updating list of the world’s top (public) supercomputers – to make you feel pretty good...
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A classic paper: how did the largest scale structure in the Universe form?
•Title: Small Scale Cosmological Perturbations: An Analytic Approach •Authors: Wayne Hu & Naoshi Sugiyama •First Author’s Institution: University of Chicago (now; IAS/Princeton at time of paper’s...
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The Strange Naming Conventions of Astronomy
If you’ve spent time around the astronomical literature, you’ve probably heard at least one term that made you wonder “why did astronomers do that?” G-type stars, early/late type galaxies, magnitudes,...
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Beyond Chi-Squared: An Introduction to Correlated Noise
One of the coolest parts of doing research is that your work is right on the cutting edge of what’s known. At the same time, this can be one of the toughest parts, as some of the most interesting...
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The Radial Velocity Method: Current and Future Prospects
Title: Radial Velocity Prospects Current and Future: A White Paper Report prepared by the Study Analysis Group 8 for the Exoplanet Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG) Authors: Peter Plavchan et al. First...
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More than astronomy & astrophysics
Dear beloved Astrobite reader! I’ve been writing for Astrobites for about a year now and all my contributions so far have been summaries of important results in astronomical & astrophysical...
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Chury – a rubber duck with animal like characteristics
Title: Abundant molecular oxygen in the coma of comet 67P/Churymov-Gerasimenko Authors: A. Bieler et al. First author’s affiliation: Department of Climate and Space Science and Engineering, University...
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Classifying Civilisations: An Introduction to the Kardashev Scale
Nikolai Semenovich Kardashev in the 1960s Theorising about extraterrestrials is hard. Since we only have one data point, our own little civilisation on our own little Earth, trying to pin down what...
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