Astronomy
Jill Tarter's talk at OSCON 2010 (her speaker bio)
The star HR8799 hit the news in 2008 when direct images of planets orbiting it (seen at right, labeled b,c and d) were published by Christian Marois and his team at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. Taking direct images of planets around other stars is extremely difficult, as the brightness of the star exceeds the reflections from its planets by many thousands of times and, up until now, required using the most sophisticated telescopes available (Hubble, Keck, etc...).
However, a counter intuitive relationship between resolution and primary mirror size can enable this sort of direct imaging of exoplanets on much smaller telescopes.
Gorgeous infrared imagery from the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA). An ESO Press Release goes deep:
Looking to the region above the centre of the picture, curious red features appear that are completely invisible except in the infrared. Many of these are very young stars that are still growing and are seen through the dusty clouds from which they form. These youthful stars eject streams of gas with typical speeds of 700 000 km/hour and many of the red features highlight the places where these gas streams collide with the surrounding gas, causing emission from excited molecules and atoms in the gas. There are also a few faint, red features below the Orion Nebula in the image, showing that stars form there too, but with much less vigour. These strange features are of great interest to astronomers studying the birth and youth of stars.
via: Science Daily:
Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing new 3D maps of the interstellar gas in the local area around our Sun. A French-American team of astronomers presents new absorption measurements towards more than 1800 stars. They were able to characterize the properties of the interstellar gas within each sight line.
Each year, the non-profit "Technology, Entertainment, Design" or TED Group, holds a conference with invited speakers from around the world, in a kind-of "Big Thinkers" hoedown.
In 2009, Jill Tarter, a director and co-founder of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA, won a TEDPrize, which comes with funding to help jump start a wish that the prize winner would like to see fulfilled. Jill's wish is being fleshed out by the work of Avinash Agrawal and the creation of http://www.setiquest.org
A major part of setiquest will be to take raw data from the Allen Telescope Array and load it into cloud computing services donated by Amazon. Those who sign up with setiquest will then help create algorithms to search for signals that might be hidden in the noise.
I've noticed two articles[1],[2] in the last few weeks that have a picture from the old millimeter-wave array at Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO), confused with the Allen Telescope Array[3],[4].
What you see in the Guardian and derStandard are 10+ year old images of an array that was used at HCRO until 2004. The telescopes were moved from HCRO in 2004 down near Bishop, CA (about 15 miles east of Big Pine, CA). These telescopes are now part of what is called the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter Astronomy (CARMA)[5],[6],[7]. Also, please der Standard, change your background color away from that vomit inducing cyanishness.
Depressingly, a Google image search for "Allen Telescope Array" turns up handsome examples of the ATA immediately...
Older news from the Orbital Debris Quarterly News, Volume 12, Issue 1, January 2008:
Early impact test results suggest that the particle size was approximately 1.5mm to 2.0mm in diameter, assuming that the particle was orbital debris.
An impactor, maybe 1.5-2.0mm wide, creating a whole ~1⁄3 in wide through thin layers of an aluminum honeycomb radiator and silver teflon tape.