by Elizabeth Lovegrove | Dec 11, 2011 | Guides
You’ve probably heard the old quote from Cosmos that “we are all made of stardust.” But that’s not the whole story. How that dust gets made is an intricate tale that spans a wide range of stellar processes and masses. This is the field of nucleosynthesis, the making of the chemical elements, and it is what allows us to make the simple statement: toothpaste comes from neutrinos.
by Adele Plunkett | Dec 9, 2011 | Daily Paper Summaries
Paper title: Verifying the no-hair property of massive compact objects with intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals in advanced gravitational-wave detectors Authors: Carl L. Rodriguez, Ilya Mandel, Jonathan R. Gair First Author’s Affiliation: Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) & Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern UniversityThese authors propose that advanced gravitational wave detectors will be able to directly detect the coalescence of compact objects, such as neutron stars (NS) and black holes (BH). The gravitational waves resulting when a neutron star or stellar-mass black hole inspirals into an intermediate-mass black hole give interesting information about gravitational physics (go here to watch cool videos of BHs colliding). The goal is to directly test general relativity (a review paper is found here).A significant advance in this field comes from the next generation of detectors and experiments. Two such observatories are Advanced LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, a project with two interferometers in Washington and one in Louisiana) and Virgo (near Pisa, Italy). Advanced LIGO should achieve sufficient sensitivity by 2015 to detect compact binaries as they interact and coalesce. This paper specifically develops the technique to detect high-mass systems with a total mass in the range of 25 to 100 solar masses, where one component is greater than one solar mass and the other less than 99 solar masses. The systems in this study are called Intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals (IMRIs) because the mass ratios between the two objects (the more massive object at the center and the object spiraling inward) are between 10:1 and 100:1.Do objects like this really exist? Observational and theoretical models suggest the presence of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs)...
by Courtney Dressing | Dec 8, 2011 | Current Events
The First Kepler Science Conference is occurring this week at NASA Ames. Check out this summary of the conference to learn about the exciting results from the Kepler mission.
by Caroline Morley | Dec 7, 2011 | Daily Paper Summaries
Venus transits the Sun, from the frame of the Earth, about twice every century, separated by eight years. The last one happened in 2004, and another is happening in June 2012. Observing the transmission spectrum during the 2012 transit—and comparing it to measured transmission spectra of the Earth, taken during lunar eclipses—will tell us how hard it will be to distinguish two planets that look identical in mass and radius, but have extremely different atmospheric properties.
by Kirit Karkare | Dec 6, 2011 | Daily Paper Summaries
MKIDs are an exciting new cryogenic detector technology that can be easily multiplexed into large arrays. The authors create a detector sensitive to UV, optical, and near-IR, and test it in the lab.
