The Science Library

This is mostly astronomy stuff

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This blog is now dormant. I started blogging about science stuff at https://sciencelibrary.org. 

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Betelgeuse is dimming for some strange reason. Thanks to the ESO for the CC-BY image. 

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Hey, it is now less than six years till the next total solar eclipse hits the United States. It will occur April 8, 2024. 

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This is what could be one of millions of stealth black holes in our galaxy. (Image credit from http://www.dailygalaxy.com.)  The black hole is located near M15 which is visible in binoculars.  It is a beautiful globular cluster.

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More about the Hubble 25th Anniversary. I am watching the live video now, but it should be archived so I can catch the first 20 minutes that I missed.

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One of my favorite images from the Hubble Space Telescope. It is a great example of gravitational lensing.  Happy Birthday Hubble!

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This gravitational lensing stuff is amazing.

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The concept of postbiological intelligence is interesting

"Alien Minds" (PDF) was written by Susan Schneider. It is Chapter 12 of a book that is forthcoming, but I am stilling looking to figure out what the title of the book is. The paper was presented at this conference - The NASA/Library of Congress Astrobiology Symposium.  Overview found via Slashdot - "The Dominant Life Form In the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots"

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The Rosetta #CometLanding webcast starts in a couple of hours. It will land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenkoin the next couple of days. Here is a timeline of the events.

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Partial solar eclipse this afternoon. Here are the times for Denver, 3:20-5:44pm.  Make sure you have official solar eclipse filters, or use indirect observation methods. NEVER DIRECTLY LOOK AT THE SUN WITH YOUR EYES WITHOUT APPROVED SOLAR FILTERS.  This includes using telescopes, spotting scopes, binoculars, or other devices without official solar filters. This is not a total eclipse, so the sun will always be visible.

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Bummer. We are on the outskirts of the suburbs of the Universe.

It will take us like forever to get to the center of the Universe.  Sheesh.

"Milky Way is on the outskirts of 'immeasurable heaven' supercluster. Astronomers discover that our galaxy is a suburb of a supercluster of 100,000 large galaxies they have called Laniakea"

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20 years since Comet Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter. This happened from July 16 through July 22, 1994.  It was amazing to see that with my own eyes.

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Good answers to some of my universe questions.

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Good piece on citizen science

"No Ph.D. Needed: 8 Impactful Citizen Science Projects" From Mashable. Huh, they didn't include any of the galaxy zoo projects.

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Hunt for Asteroids at the new Asteroid Zoo. "Scientists are scanning our solar system for asteroids with the Catalina Sky Survey. They need your help to find asteroids for the exploration of their mineral properties!"  The asteroid image is of Vesta from http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-277. 

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The physics of the new World Cup soccer balls

Here it is in the National Geographic Mag.

"Physicists Say New World Cup Soccer Ball Design Has Big Impact. With just six panels and a rough surface, the new Brazuca ball seems to move more predictably than previous World Cup balls."

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This is pretty cool--the most detailed simulation of our Universe. The creators note: "The Illustris simulation is the most ambitious computer simulation of our Universe yet performed. The calculation tracks the expansion of the universe, the gravitational pull of matter onto itself, the motion of cosmic gas, as well as the formation of stars and black holes. These physical components and processes are all modeled starting from initial conditions resembling the very young universe 300,000 years after the Big Bang and until the present day, spanning over 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution. The simulated volume contains tens of thousands of galaxies captured in high-detail, covering a wide range of masses, rates of star formation, shapes, sizes, and with properties that agree well with the galaxy population observed in the real universe. The simulations were run on supercomputers in France, Germany, and the US. The largest was run on 8,192 compute cores, and took 19 million CPU hours. A single state-of-the-art desktop computer would require more than 2000 years to perform this calculation."