Happy Thanksgiving, Early Universe, now can you please pass the metals?
Thank a massive star today for synthesizing your delicious turkey (or tofurkey) meal.
Of cosmic telescopes and high-z galaxies
Lensing occurs when the mass of a foreground object distorts and magnifies the light from a background galaxy or quasar, sometimes even creating multiple images. It probably isn’t a stretch to say that the neatest thing about lensing is that you can typically see two to four images of the same galaxy. But something else that’s cool is that these distant background objects are magnified, making it possible to study them in detail when otherwise they might not be seen at all: in this way, gravitational lenses act as natural cosmic telescopes.
Babies in the Solar Nursery
How massive was our Sun’s natal cluster? New simulations reconcile with observations.
Astrology Beliefs among Undergraduates
In an effort to quantify the common misconceptions about the relationship between astronomy and astrology, the authors of this study surveyed nearly 10,000 undergraduates at the University of Arizona over a 20-year period. Here’s what they found.
Approaching Lightspeed: New Tests On OPERA’s Superluminal Neutrinos
The OPERA experiment in the Gran Sasso tunnel in Italy recently shocked the physics world by announcing that they had clocked neutrinos violating that ultimate of speed limits – the speed of light. Most scientists, upon hearing the news, rightly reacted with skepticism, and the results were closely examined to unearth any unaccounted-for sources of error that could have resulted in an incorrect measurement. On November 17th, the OPERA collaboration responded by pushing a new paper to the arXiv that eliminated one of their systematics, the length of the neutrino pulses received from CERN, and found that their data still show a significant superluminal signal.