Asteroids!

A widget to watch out for wayward asteroids:

JPL’s Asteroid Watch Widget tracks asteroids and comets that will make relatively close approaches to Earth. The Widget displays the date of closest approach, approximate object diameter, relative size and distance from Earth for each encounter. The object’s name is displayed by hovering over its encounter date. Clicking on the encounter date will display a Web page with details about that object.
The Widget displays the next five Earth approaches to within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers or 19.5 times the distance to the moon); an object larger than about 150 meters that can approach the Earth to within this distance is termed a potentially hazardous object.
Available for Mac OS X Dashboard and Yahoo! Widgets.

Also you can follow along in the near eath encounters via twitter by following @AsteroidWatch.

Various and Sundry

Two notes from Caltech of interest:

  • Michael L. Roukes’ group at Caltech has produced a NEMS (nanoelectromechanical system) device which can (almost) measure the mass of a single molecule (as opposed to the many tens of thousands (is this the correct amount?) needed in mass spectrometry.) Build a 2 micrometer by 100 nanometer NEMS resonator. Drop a molecule on it. The frequency of vibration of the NEMS resonator changes. Detect this frequency change. Of course vibration frequency also depends on where the molecule lands. So run the experiment about 500 times to get good estimate of the mass. Future (all ready prototyped) work should alleviate the problem of where the molecule lands causing a need for repeated experiments. From the press release:

    Eventually, Roukes and colleagues hope to create arrays of perhaps hundreds of thousands of the NEMS mass spectrometers, working in parallel, which could determine the masses of hundreds of thousands of molecules “in an instant,” Naik says.
    As Roukes points out, “the next generation of instrumentation for the life sciences-especially those for systems biology, which allows us to reverse-engineer biological systems-must enable proteomic analysis with very high throughput. The potential power of our approach is that it is based on semiconductor microelectronics fabrication, which has allowed creation of perhaps mankind’s most complex technology.”

  • Hawaii beats Chile as site of new Thirty meter telescope.

For the past few months I’ve been getting back into shape by running my rear end off. On these jaunts, when I’m not in the mood for KEXP (they stream check them out!) I try to fill my head with something that isn’t mind numbingly dumb (read most radio stations.) Good podcasts include EconTalk where you get to hear about the dismal science. The interviewer, Russ Roberts, has a very strong libertarian (Austrian school) bent, but even when he disagrees he does ask the questions. I think we get to call it the dismal science because a recent interview was on “The Rational Market.” Apparently economists believe that the economy can pass the Turing test! Anyone else have good recommendations for non brain dead podcasts?
Speaking of finance, the Information Processor has two posts up that are worth looking at: Against Finance and Goldman apologia. The lesson of this financial crisis (and LTCM and…) is that when Goldman comes knocking at your door with a deal, run, don’t walk screaming for the door!
Nate Silver has gotten sick of climate skepticism and the daily weather report, and so lays down some money for those who want to bet against average weather statistics. Time to see if I can find a hometown where the weather instruments have been recently changed.

Moonquakes

As someone who was born on a lunar eclipse (explains a lot, no?) the 40th anniversary of man walking on the moon has a special place in my heart. Okay, that sentence makes no sense (I was born on a lunar eclipse however), but anyway everyone is all abuzz about the anniversary of the moon landing so it’s as good as any sentence to let me talk about booming sand dunes.
Booming whah?
Continue reading “Moonquakes”

Astrometry Finds Planet

It seems that astrometry has finally succeeded at detecting a planet. A star and its planets perform a complex dance as they move through space. In astrometry planet hunting one looks for a planet by looking for the “wobble” of a star as it moves across the sky. This is contrast with the two other methods used to detect planets around stars, which use radial velocity or transits to detect the planets. Now it seems that a team from JPL has used a series of measurements over 12 years to detect a Jupiter sized planet tugging on its star, VB 10. The wobble in this case is a movement of about one sixth of an arcsecond per year. Very cool.

See Planets!

Direct imaging of extra solar planets. The cat dynamicist has the details. (because, linking, I’ve heard, is good.) Fomalhaut b, a nice name.
When I was on the road to becoming an astrophysicist, as a young grad student, I remember thinking how cool it would be to join the planet hunters. I mean being able to say that in your research you “discovered a planet” well how cool would that be. Alas I caught the quantum bug and so all those days spent studying the interstellar tedium are now lost, like tears in the rain.

The Bar Scene

Someone at Caltech’s PR office sure was having fun:

Caltech Astronomers Describe the Bar Scene at the Beginning of the Universe
PASADENA, Calif.–Bars abound in spiral galaxies today, but this was not always the case. A group of 16 astronomers, led by Kartik Sheth of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, has found that bars tripled in number over the past seven billion years, indicating that spiral galaxies evolve in shape.

Oh, I can tell you all about the bar scene near Caltech. Dive bar: The Colorado. Beer for graduate students: Lucky Baldwin’s. Quantum margarita night: Amigos. Quantum beer night: drive five hours north to Albatross in Berkeley, CA.

Google Sky

A favorite quote of mine from Vincent van Gogh: “For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” Especially when I can access them through my web browser. Here in Seattle this is greatly needed, since there are vast portions of the winter when the night sky is hidden behind puffy clouds. I mean I need to be reminded every once in a while that I’m a little little speck in a big big universe.
First one to spot a Dyson sphere wins.