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.
The youngest millisecond pulsar yet?
Title: Fermi Detectiqon of a Luminous γ–ray Pulsar in a Globular Cluster Authors: The Fermi LAT Collaboration Principle Investigator: Dr. Peter Michelson, Stanford UniversityThe Fermi Large Area Telescope, which was launched in 2008, is a gamma ray space telescope which can observe high-energy photons with energies ranging between 20 MeV and 300 GeV. These photons are emitted by particles nearing the speed of light! The Large Area Telescope (LAT) is true to its name, and can observe around 20% of the sky at a time. It scans the sky continuously, observing the entire sky every 3 hours. This all sky gamma-ray survey has already had many exciting results. It observed the GRB 080916C, the most energetic outburst ever seen (see Susanna’s post to learn more about gamma-ray bursts), discovered a link between supernovae remnants and cosmic rays, found out that most of the gamma-ray background does not arise from active galactic nuclei as was previously suspected, and it discovered Fermi bubbles, completely new (or at least previously unseen) substructures emerging from the Galactic center. In addition to all of this, Fermi LAT has proven fantastic tool for the discovery of pulsars.Pulsars form during some type II supernovae events, and are spun up to high rotation speeds by some “kick” due to collapse or explosion asymmetries. They are also highly magnetized, and thus emit periodic synchrotron radiation in two beams. For a more in depth discussion of the observables of pulsars, see this astrobite. The first pulsar discovered, at the heart of the Crab Nebula, was initially observed in radio wavelengths. This was quite a discovery, so much so that...
Evidence for Two Kinds of Pulsars
This paper presents the first evidence of two distinct populations of pulsars, which the authors speculate stem from a difference in how they are formed.
Studying a nearby galaxy merger with multiwavelength observations
Modica et al. and the GOALS team use multiwavelength observations to investigate star formation and nuclear activity in a nearby luminous infrared galaxy.