Earlier this week we heard the announcement of a new project from the “Breakthrough Initiatives”. The group is led by Yuri Milner, a Russian entrepreneur apparently named after Yuri Gagarin, along with Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg, and with support of an advisory panel of astronomers, theoretical physicists, space scientists, engineers and business leaders. The new initiative, Breakthrough Starshot, has the goal of sending a fleet of tiny spacecraft to the nearest star system. It gathered a fair bit of attention, at least for 24 hours—BBC Radio Wales even asked me to chat to them about it on Good Evening Wales. Continue reading
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GW150914 – birth of a monster
It can be hard to have missed the news last week of the detection of gravitational waves – an event known as GW150914 [GW = Gravitational Wave, followed by the date of the event in the YYMMDD format]. There was, understandably, an awful lot of excitement – it hit pretty much every major news network, and was even mentioned at the BAFTA award ceremony (which is how we know we’ve made it…)!
In the weeks in the run-up to the detection there was a lot of talk about analogies and comparisons of the event, and the black holes involved. But how is that all calculated, and how does that compare to other things in the Universe? Continue reading
The header image
Just to make sure proper credit is given, the header image on my blog is one I made using original images from NASA and ESA.
The sunrise/set image is from NASA, available on the Marshall Spaceflight Center’s Flickr page (image ISS021E031766). The nebula is the Cocoon Nebula (aka IC5246), as seen by Herschel, specifically by the PACS camera as part of the Gould Belt Survey.
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