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02/22/2016: Fast Radio Bursts observed
The universe is a vast and mysterious space, filled with distant and puzzling objects, but UW-Madison physics professor Peter Timbie has played a huge role in helping to demystify it by giving us a deeper understanding of the incredibly rare cosmological phenomenon called Fast Radio Burst: a singular pulse of radio signal. Timbie and his…
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02/10/2016: Production company documents life in Green Bank
When New York production company Partisan Pictures was given the task to film and produce a three-part series about technology and the Internet, the crew searched for interesting stories to include and came across Green Bank – the small town at the center of the National Radio Quiet Zone. It didn’t take long for Partisan…
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02/03/2016: The Cosmic Gift Of Neutron Stars: A Live-Blog Event
If you take normal matter — something made of protons, neutrons and electrons — and compress it as far as it will go, something incredible happens. At high enough temperatures and densities, something requiring a tremendous amount of mass hundreds of thousands of times as great as planet Earth, nuclear fusion occurs, giving rise to…
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02/02/2016: Giant Cloud Came from the Milky Way
T The Milky Way enjoys a light drizzle throughout its galactic year. These cosmic raindrops are speedy clouds of mostly hydrogen gas that rain down onto our galaxy’s spiral disk. They fly through space at hundreds of kilometers per second (millions of miles per hour) and don’t rotate with the Milky Way. They’re appropriately named…
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01/28/2016: Monstrous cloud boomerangs back to our galaxy
Though hundreds of enormous high-velocity gas clouds whiz around the outskirts of our galaxy, this so-called “Smith Cloud” is unique because its trajectory is well known. Hubble Space Telescope astronomers are finding that the old adage, “What goes up, must come down” even applies to an immense cloud of hydrogen gas outside our Milky Way…
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01/28/2016: Colossal Cloud Ejected From Milky Way 70 Million Years Ago –Plummeting Back!
Since astronomers discovered the Smith Cloud, a giant gas cloud plummeting toward the Milky Way, they have been unable to determine its composition, which would hold clues as to its origin. Astronomers have now determined that the cloud contains elements similar to our sun, which means the cloud originated in the Milky Way’s outer edges…
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01/25/2016: Werner Herzog’s internet doc Lo and Behold is a must-see for anyone on social networks
A group of scientists at Carnegie Mellon believe that by the year 2050, robots designed to play soccer will surpass their professional human counterparts. This juicy nugget of techno-speculation materializes in the middle of Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, a new documentary broadly about the internet from Werner Herzog. Sporty robot prototypes,…
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01/11/2016: Tabby’s mystery – Something 20 times Jupiter’s size may be orbiting a nearby star
The graph made astronomer Tabetha “Tabby” Boyajian sit up at her desk at Yale University. Something was definitely strange — the line was mostly flat but had two sharp dips resembling stalactites hanging from the ceiling of a cave. The dips implied that light coming from the star KIC 8462852, more than 1,400 light years away,…