so the galaxy zoo 2 project has launched - ahead of schedule!!!?? does that ever happen with anything? nice job folks!
anyway, i'm completely mesmerized by the collection of preliminary classifications of galaxy data put together by steven bamford! just take a look at the amazing variety of galaxies that exist in our universe!
below, i show a small sample of galaxies categorized by the public as having five spiral arms...
awesome! to summarize my research in a sentence.... why do all those different types of galaxies have the different colors, shapes, features, and sizes that they do? fantastic.
if you have some extra time, go have fun with the galaxy zoo!
i'm in oxford today! i gave a seminar a few hours ago and now i'm thinking about the comments people made about the research. one of the most interesting parts of doing research is presenting the results to people who havent spent so much time thinking about the same details. oftentimes, they look at the situation from fresh perspectives and ignite new ideas with simple comments!
i also talked a bit with chris lintott who was bounding with excitement about the lift off of galaxy zoo 2!! later tonight, you can check out galaxy zoo 2 and sift thru gorgeous images of thousands and thousands of galaxies! by classifying their properties, you are helping us to classify more galaxies than we could possibly do ourselves and ultimately, contributing to great new science results! so - give it a go!
ps. i had to walk past so many beautiful old buildings in oxford thats its unfortunate the oxford astrophysics group lives in a much more modern (read: more ugly) building :( oh well.
APOD featured the heart-shaped, star-forming region, W5, last year. viewed below is the infrared image captured by the spitzer space telescope. i cropped the image to show the heart portion of the "heart and soul nebula"!
this star-forming complex sits 6,500 light years away in the cassiopeia constellation. the processes of all the gas condensing down to give birth to new stars leads me (loosely) into the next valentine's day feature: jay grandin's inanimate love:
some lovely images and art:
and i'll end with a simple valentine... like the ones we used to sign and embarrassingly hand out to each other kid in our elementary classes on valentine's day:
"We placed a camera on a conveyor at a Tokyo/Asakasa sushi bar named Maguro-bito(near the Nakamise Shopping Arcade). It was about 9pm and the place was packed with great people. "
this cool photo of an in-focus moon and out-of-focus firework comes from the big picture feature on china's lantern festival (that suffered an unfortunate ending).
i'm shocked to have just realized that i've never formally encouraged readers to check out the wonderful book by kip s. thorne: black holes and time warps. i first read this book one summer as an undergraduate, soon after i switched my major to physics. my summer research project was to find the simplest solution to einsteins field equations!! wow, was i thrilled, and scared!
my first assignment was to read black holes and time warps all the way thru, stopping by the professors office every other day to ask any questions that arose. to my pleasant surprise, the entire first chapter is a fun science-fiction story that tracks what happens to space travelers as they approach black holes of bigger and bigger masses! it took me about a month to get thru the book, and the last few chapters regarding worm holes and potential time warps completely boggled my noggin - but i was intrigued, and it was a good thing, because i spent the rest of that summer learning to solve tensor equations!
the final solution that i acquired (with the help of mathematica) wasnt the memory that stuck with me of my summer project. it was the imagery from thorne's book that has sunk into my soul. a couple years ago i met thorne while he visited UT-austin. i attended a lunch with him where he discussed the potential for detecting gravitational waves with spaced-based instrumentation. he signed my copy of him book and seemed pleased to hear that it greatly influenced my early career.
anyway, all this is leading up to the fact that kip thorne wrote a guest post at cosmic variance about stephen hawking, who is giving a public lecture at the pasadena convention center on march 9, 2009. report back if you get to attend! enjoy!
now if only i could get a translation of all the acronyms my teenage cousins use on myspace, facebook, and in emails!
i feel moderately illiterate to the internet language of the youth, and i keep up with technology at a reasonable pace. i can't imagine the natural smoothness with which technology upgrades integrate into the lives of young people. will the steady rate at which older generations passed down practical knowledge to younger generations be unrecognizable to my children - considering their technologically modern world will require new and different skills every couple years?
i didnt use a computer in school until i was a teenager. teaching would be less fun if i couldnt prepare power point presentations with pretty pictures - but there's a lot to be said for the old "chalk and blackboard" method as well.
am i just getting crabby and old and tired of relearning old skills with new software?
carmina burana is a fantastically powerful piece of music for a full orchestra and chorus, composed by carl orff in 1935 and 1936. you hear the last movement often in dramatic cinematic scenes, as you might recognize from this video clip:
the video above shows that exact chorus and orchestra performing the memorable movement in 2000, just a few years after i left the group! the director, james conlon, was an intimidating man to a high school student. we were able to rehearse with the adult choir several times before we performed the piece on stage. i sat among the sopranos, continuously amazed by the powerful vibration of their collective voices. most of the rehearsals were directed by the adult choir conductor, but i distinctly remember the first rehearsal with mr. conlon.
during a quiet moment is the rehearsal, when mr. conlon was explaining an important point, my watch started beeping to tell the hour - completely mortifying my fragile young self after it took me a couple seconds to realize i was the cause of the terrible sounds!! oh NO! he stopped cold. he turned to me furiously, pointed directly at me with his director's wand, and declared that such a scene should never interrupt him again! *gasp* ... yes, sir. sorry, sir.
needless to say, i never wore that silly watch to rehearsal again, and still have nasty flashbacks sometimes when i hear cell phones ringing at inopportune times. in fact, seeing him in the above video reminded me of the incident (obviously) just after i remembered the thrill of actually performing carmina burana on stage!
anyway, the thing that reminded me of all these events, was this little video of alternative lyrics to carmina burana, that i just found on neat-o-rama. this made me cry from laughing! enjoy!
last week saw the 2009 session of the TED conference with the theme "the great unveiling." several videos of talks are available to view already on the website, but i'm intrigued by TED prize winner, jill tartar. she is the director of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute’s Center for SETI Research and as a TED prize winner, she can share her vision ("wish") to change the world. she states:
"I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company.”
her ideas gone much beyond the public flashing SETI related graphics on our screen savers hoping to receive signals from distant planets! read more about her ideas: here.
in other TED news, xkcd identifies a critical question facing participants of all modern social networks:
IC 1101 the biggest galaxy we've found in the universe! it lives 1 billion light years away (at z = 0.0767) in the massive abell 2029 galaxy cluster. the unromantic name comes from the index catalogue which was created at the end of the 19th century.
IC 1101 floats with a girth of 6 million light years, making it 60 times larger than our milky way with its mere 100,000 light year diameter. how many stars does the most massive elliptical galaxy contain? 100,000,000,000,000 = 100 trillion = 10^14 stars. how does the number of stars in the largest galaxy in the universe compare to the number of cells in the human body? see starts with a bang to find out!
the above right image shows the entire abell 2029 cluster in optical light from the digitized sky survey. IC 1101 is the big bright one living right at the center. the left image shows what the cluster looks like in x-ray light, as seen by the chandra telescope. the optical views shows lots of individual galaxies floating around the biggest concentration of mass that sits right at the center. the x-ray light is created by very very hot gas. the image shows a smooth distribution of multi-million degree gas, concentrated at the center of the cluster, but extending far out into the outer regions! here's another optical image...
one thing i wonder... why is this the most massive galaxy in the universe? why dont galaxies get bigger? there are several galaxies at the centers of different clusters that are close to this big, but what creates an upper limit on the mass of a galaxy? (and the dark matter halo that it lives in?) basically, the limits are set by the initial distribution of matter after the big bang, time, and the expansion of the universe, but... i still wonder.
and to commemorate the occasion, i will share one of my favorite quotes from the simpsons:
Homer: Are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon? Lisa: No. Homer: Ham? Lisa: No. Homer: Pork chops? Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal. Homer: Heh heh heh. Ooh, yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.
as soon as i learned the knuckle trick, it was all i ever needed to quickly remember how many days are in each month! as demonstrated in the photo below, start with two fists. the leftmost knuckle represents january, then the valley is february, the next knuckle is march, etc... all the months on knuckles have 31 days. the valley months have 30 (or how ever many february has in a particular year!). very useful!
