Undine
Just to show that life is full of unexpected turns, on June 18, 1178, a group of medieval English monks threw a fine puzzle in the laps of astronomers that lingers to this day.On that day, shortly after sunset, five monks at the abbey of the Christ Church of Canterbury (on the site of Canterbury...
Susan Stepney
The latest batch. (I'm trying to do these posts before the batches get too big, which means they are more frequent.)
4gravitons
I recently finished reading The Orphan Master’s Son, a (Pulitzer-winning, apparently) novel set in 2000’s-era North Korea. In one plot point, Kim Jong Il has agents steal a Japanese telescope designed to measure the cosmic microwave background radiation, under the mistaken impression that it will...
StenBlog
Dr. Sten Odenwald NASA/HEAT Artistic rendering of the Parker encounter. (Credit: ASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben) Here is a handy table that summarizes the circumstances for the Parker Solar Probe perihelia since 2018. Nothing fancy – just a one-stop-shop for those of you who want...
StenBlog
The Early Universe is Running out of Supermassive Black holes. As the Webb Space Telescope continues to find supermassive blackholes (SMBH) in the time after the Dark Ages, there has been a significant down turn in their masses. Now the most common SMBHs earlier than one billion years ABB are...
StenBlog
The Proxigean Tide, also called a King Tide, occurs when the Moon is at its closest point in its orbit to the Earth (perigee) and in its New or Full Moon phase as shown in this NOAA SciJinks figure. They also coincide with ‘supermoon’ full moons. At this time, which happens about once every 18...
Adeel Ahmad
From Wikipedia: In geometry, a coordinate system is a system which uses one or more numbers, or coordinates, to uniquely determine the position of the points or other geometric elements on a manifold such as Euclidean space. The following text briefly explains the coordinate systems being used...
1ucasvb's lab
In Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, space and time are unified in a single entity called spacetime. This is the “stage” in which the laws of physics operate. In Einstein’s theory, the presence of mass and energy warps spacetime, and it is this curvature that affects objects in the way we...