The Nature of Reality
FREE LECTURE SERIES 2019-20 The Nature of Reality Roberto Trotta, Visiting Professor of Cosmology All lectures are free on a first-come first served basis, but we can book for schools/ colleges on enquiries@gresham.ac.uk Monday 4 November 2019, 1pm, Museum of London Weighing the Universe The cosmic microwave background is the luminous echo of the primordial […]
Reflections on the Invisible
It’s a real pleasure to be one of the members of the AHRC Network “Picturing the Invisible”. The project brings together leading academics from a wide range of disciplines including Art & Design, Curatorial Practice, Literature, Forensic Science, Fashion, Medical Science, Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, Philosophy, Astrophysics and Architecture with a shared interest in exploring how, […]
Multi-Sensory Cosmology
Multi-Sensory Cosmology (In collaboration with computer-human interaction expert Prof Marianna Obrist and her team at SCHI Lab at the University of Sussex) Much of our scientific knowledge is transmitted via intellectual means, based on abstract concepts and gained through reading and other mostly visual means. This modality of transmission can be hard to engage with […]
g-ASTRONOMY: The Universe, on the Tip of your Tongue
An exciting and innovative public engagement project, g-ASTRONOMY, will bring the wonders of the universe to people with sight loss through a multi-sensorial gastronomical experience on March 14th 2017. g-ASTRONOMY aims to break the assumption that astronomy and astrophysics can only be understood in terms of visual representation. By creating simple, elegant (and edible) metaphors […]
Today on the arXiv: Light echo gives insight into SNIa dust environment
I noticed this interesting paper using high resolution, multi-epoch images from Hubble to study the time evolution of the aftermath of the explosion of SNIa SN204J, which went off in 2014 in the nearby galaxy M82 (a mere 11 million light years away). The data show the presence of a radially expanding light echo, as well […]
Today on the arXiv: how to measure the intrinsic CMB dipole, and radio emission from DM in the Coma cluster
Elena Pierpaoli and her collaborator Slavash Yasini come up with a clever way of measuring the intrinsic CMB dipole, and disentangling it from the much bigger dipole induced by the Earth motion with respect to the CMB rest frame. The key idea is that leakage of the intrinsic dipole into the monopole and quadrupole induces […]
Today on the ArXiv: How to ride a light beam to the stars, and how not to analyse distance indicators
Today on the arXiv, a nice analysis of how to design a solar sail in such a way that the light beam powering it is prevented from rocking it side to side, and hence destabilising it. The key idea is to use a spherical sail (rather than conical designs as previously proposed) and a multi-modal laser […]
Today on the arXiv: Prospector-alpha opens the way to high-accuracy photometry-based estimation of galactic properties
There is a terrific paper on today’s arXiv: The Prospector-alpha code is an impressive new approach to estimating a large number of important physical parameters of galaxies, including indicators for the galaxy’s star formation history, its metallicity, its mass and dust content. The code contains a large number of free physical parameters (describing star formation […]
Today on the arXiv: from light bulbs to 2 trillion dark matter particles simulations in 75 years
Today, Martin White suggests using a density-dependent correlation function as a tool to help distinguish General Relativity from modified gravity theories. The N-body simulation Zurich group shows impressive results from a cosmological simulation involving 2 trillion (2 x 10^12) particles, which they run on the Swiss Supercomputer in Manno using GPU-accelerated nodes, and benchmarked with […]
Bad news for LISA and Dark Matter line emission from the Galactic Centre
Today on the arXiv (arXiv:1609.08093) Camille Bonvin and collaborators (whom I know well from my days in Geneva) rule out the possibility to use the distortion in the gravitational waves chirp signal to measure the acceleration of the universe. They find that the peculiar acceleration is much greater and therefore would (1) wash out the […]
