‘Latest News’ Archives
Minor setback as CERN cuts power to part of the LHC
theregistry.com reported on a failure at the LHC which occurred at 1:23 a.m. Geneva time at the Meyrin site and caused a power cut across the site, shutting down the main computer center among other things and causing an abrupt cessation of operations. The good news is that -1.8 degrees above absolute zero temperature of the magnets was [...]
13 reasons why Astronomy is so cool
Why is astronomy so cool? When you look at some of the concepts being wrestled with in cosmology and astronomy it is truly mind boggling. I decided to write this article after watching the video at the end of this article. I wanted to expand on the video with some additional facts and give pointers to sites that discuss the ideas further for [...]
LHC sets new world record
The Large Hadron Collider sets a new world record. The LHC is now the world's highest energy particle accelerator, having just accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV on Monday morning exceeding the 0.98 TeV world record held by the U.S. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's Tevatron collider since 2001. This is a mere [...]
Nova Eridani? Probably not…
Originally believed to be a possible Nova, a variable object was discovered by K. Itagaki and imaged by Joe Brimacombe . Below is the latest quote from the AAVSO. You can get more technical details from Universe Today. Possibly interesting observing for those in Photometry...I must admit I thought of Blackrock Observatory when I read this [...]
Cassini/IBEX redefines the shape of the Heliosphere
Only a short month ago I posted an article discussing our current understanding of the shape of the Heliosphere and how the Sun keeps up safe from cosmic rays. The Heliosphere is the area around the Sun that repels the majority of dangerous cosmic rays. It is actually a bubble produced by the Solar Winds emitted from our Sun. A slight aside, but [...]
Future concepts in robotic based explorers
With all of the trouble with stuck Martian rovers I was pleased to come across some articles discussing some possible future designs of interplanetary explorers. On Mars one of the primary issues is the lack of speed of a rover due to the difficulty in traversing quite a varied landscape. The rovers typically move a hundreds of meters per day, [...]
A quick look at the LHC
The Large Hedron Collider is perhaps the largest physics experiment ever run on the planet earth. In their own words "LHC - the aim of the exercise: To smash protons moving at 99.999999% of the speed of light into each other and so recreate conditions a fraction of a second after the big bang. The LHC experiments try and work out what [...]
What if the Earth had rings like Saturn? Lets take a look!
This animation was done by Roy Prol, and it shows not only how the rings would look from space, but also the view Earthlings would have of the rings. Its a really good video, and just makes you wish that somehow we could have the beautiful rings of Saturn over head. Of course we would potentially need a few ice moons replenishing it..... Well [...]
Leonids – video and image in case you missed it
If like me you missed the meteor shower due to late night viewing and bad weather, you might like to see what you missed. Apparently there was good viewing in Asia, and a few members of my facebook page said there was a good show in Australia and parts of the US. Here is a video posted to YouTube. Some comments suggest its fake, but I'll let you [...]
Leonids – 500 meteors per hour predicted on 17th November
Get ready for the Leonids to put on a great show this year. Last year there was a better meteor shower than in recent years with 100 meteors per hour noted by observers in Asia & Europe. A meteor storm is defined as 1000 meteors per hour or more. With predictions of 500 or more meteors an hour this year's shower should be a half [...]
Intersteller Travel – Story of the week
Each week I select a paper from my news feed which I liked the most. This one just caught my imagination! Thinking hard about interstellar travel using existing or feasible technology. I'd love to see a craft sent to another star within a lifetime. NASA may not have anything planned but the following article discusses the recent Icarus [...]
Exoplanet hunting – Narrowing the search using Lithium
There are many methods used to find exo-planets (planets in other solar systems). The direct imaging of a planet (this is rather hard given the distances), the transit method, which is where you wait for the light levels to change as a planet passes in front and behind the star, and the radial velocitymethod which is probably the most [...]