General

Julianne from Cosmic Variance has a hilarious comment about nomenclature in astronomy. I agree that there is some strange slang around that even other physicists might not get. An all-time favourite is of course calling all atoms except Hydrogen and Helium for “metals”.

I guess oneself gets used to almost everything, but I also have experienced strange looks from students while explaining things with some of those “special” words.

In the northern Swedish town of Övertorneå, a dispute between the local council and its electricity distributor has meant that the town has had no streetlighting for many months now (TV programme in Swedish about the controversy here). Today Swedish television and other media report that since the streetlights were switched off, thefts and burglaries have halved. ‘Maybe the thieves are afraid of the dark’, says council boss Arne Honkamaa. On the other hand, maybe it’s being able to see the night sky that’s reducing crime.

Cross-posted (more or less) on popast.nu

It took them half a year, but I just got an e-mail that the video recordings of all the talks from the IAU General Assembly and the accompanying symposia in Prague last August are online now.

I did some live-blogging from there, mainly writing about the talks from Symp. 235 on “Galaxy evolution across the Hubble time”. Although it was under a different address at that time, you can find all that in the archive of this website. This is also true for Ulrike’s and Jens’ texts, which cover different areas from the meeting.

With the videos online, however, this may have become totally obsolete. On the other hand, I could go through the texts and put a link to each correspondig video.

I think this is immensely important: Open Access to publicly funded research. Read more and sign the petition.

Oh the irony! One day after the deadline to submit proposals to the Hubble Space Telescope last friday, the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) broke. Two thirds of all the applications submitted seem to be affected and that’s why they prolonged the deadline to Feb. 9, to allow people to swith to an other instrument, if possible. More here or here.

Expect the retrospectives to come thick and fast over the next few weeks – supernova 1987A is about to celebrate its 20th birthday. But when a 130-strong Stockholm public last night voted for the best supernova of all time, 87A didn’t stand a chance.

This was a public lecture which I got saddled with, but once I’d decided on the title ‘The 10 most amazing (sv: häftigaste) supernovae of all time’, it took on a life of its own. My examples of cool supernova physics became the nominated stars in an unexpected awards gala. Question time was upstaged by a show-of-hands vote – which of the ten exploding stars was the most wow-inducing? There was no doubt about the winner anyway: SN 1054, the supernova that gave us the Crab nebula with its amazing pulsar. Runner-up Geminga, the gamma-ray pulsar that must have given our ancestors a fright 300,000 years ago, made a good showing too.

I’d tipped the universe’s last ever supernova, but it’s a remote prospect, to put it mildly. But most of all it was really enjoyable. Next up: the universe’s 10 coolest galaxies? The 10 scariest black holes? The most fascinating exoplanets? I think we may have stumbled on something fun.

History’s best supernovae, according to 130 astronomy fans in Stockholm.

Two very cool videos I found in the internets the other day.

Putting various round celestial bodies besides each other, going from small to big. Even though working with things on big scales, I thought it would end several zooming steps too early. Stars can be BIG:

And a virtual flight through the enormous amount of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: