Astronomy
Space images can often be breathtaking and the night sky has often inspired artists to produce incredible masterpieces. Sometimes even the way astronomers represent data can be both scientifically and artistically stunning. Case in point is the polarization map released by the Planck Collaboratio...
Journal Club
Interstellar travel is about to go from a Sci-fi idea to physical reality, but the jump comes with a series of considerations that fiction writers don’t have to consider. This could work as an introduction for the apparent lack of toilets in Star Trek, but it’s actually something else. You see, s...
Journal Club
There are two big problems with astrophysics, and they are called dark energy and dark matter. Dark energy is responsible for the accelerated expansion of the Universe. Dark matter keeps the galaxies together, and we think it’s made of particles which don’t emit any light. We don’t know exactly w...
How About That?
If you wonder where we came from and how we got here, there’s a step we are quite confident on. About 5 billions of years ago, before the Sun shone a single ray all the atoms you are made of were part of a large gas cloud like the one in the picture. The object […]
Cepheid Variables
According to a new study, a major revision of the Milky Way is necessary. A team of Japanese, South African and Italian astronomers has discovered a large region of our galaxy which lacks any young stars. In a research, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the resea...
Spiral Galaxy
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope photograph is one of my favourite images of interacting galaxies, but it’s actually a bit of a cheat. The galaxies are not interacting at all. The galaxies are simply in a chance alignment from our vantage point, and that’s how Hubble was able to produce such ...
Galaxy Merger
There has been a surprising affinity between astronomy and music. Both needed the inspiration of the muses to be performed in Ancient Greece, and expressions like the Music of the Spheres just shows the profound link between these two realms of human genius. In space, nobody can hear you scream, ...
Star
A new-born star cloaked in a golden veil stands starkly against the black filament of the Circinus cloud. While it might sound like the beginning of a fantasy novel, this is simply the description of this spectacular Hubble Image The Space Telescope caught a phenomenal view of a young star, IRAS ...
Supermassive Black Holes
Is the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way going to eat the Earth? Ross, UK No, the Earth is not in any danger from the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the centre of the Milky Way. The SMBH, known as Sagittarius A*, is not going to suck us in.
Rainbows
In this episode of The Astroholic LIVE we talk about open science, rainbows, cosmic inflation, and our special guest Dr. Miho Janvier takes us to the spectacular world of solar physics.
Gravitational Waves
In a previous post, we discussed the groundbreaking discovery of gravitational waves and it’s importance for science as a whole. Now LIGO has observed another detection, and it has the incredible feature of being the first direct observation of a spinning black hole. The merging objects are also ...
Propulsion
Do you think the stars are too far away for your liking? Then this is perfect for you! In this talk, I cover very briefly all the potential solutions to take humanity from home to Alpha Centauri and beyond.