Neutrinos are one of the most elusive particles around. For a long time, scientists didn’t think they had mass, traveled at the speed of light and really didn’t like interacting with anything else very much. Billions of the things pass through your body every second of every day without causing you to flinch. This has [...]
Archive for October, 2007
Tracking ghosts
October 28, 2007Galaxy spotting
October 15, 2007I have just spent an evening in the far reaches of the universe. I had my I-Spy Book of Galaxies to classify them as ellipticals, spirals or mergers. It is incredibly compulsive.
I haven’t lost my marbles or invented a fast-than-light drive but been looking at the Galaxy Zoo project. Researchers from Oxford University and Portsmouth University [...]
Two eyes are better than one
October 5, 2007Get the most powerful telescopes in the world and point them at the same thing – what do you get? Well, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck telescopes on the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii have been looking at an object called SDSS J0737+3216.
You can’t actually see it directly as there’s a massive [...]
The space race 50 years on
October 4, 2007It’s astonishing to realise we have only been in space for the past 50 years. The Universe has been around for 13.7 billion years, the Earth for 4.5 billion and homo sapiens for a few hundred thousand but it was only with the launch of Sputnik, 50 years ago today, that we finally made it [...]
The music of the spheres
October 1, 2007I just spotted this review of a new musical composition called Aleph, which attempts to recreate in music the first moments of the universe. There seems to be a real craze for this sort of thing at the moment. A couple of weeks ago, I read about some Cambridge astronomers who were trying to make music [...]
