Today as I was doing cosmology homework, I found myself wondering, as I often do, how people did anything before the internet. (And yes I know in theory there are libraries and phone books.)
How cool is it that when I type Silk Damping into Google I get several papers and a couple of websites explaining exactly what I wanted to know.
As I was doing my homework I noticed that I’d forgotten the most important textbook in my office and so was stuck without a place to look up some important equations. To the rescue came:
MathWorld
There are few mathy things that I can come up with at the top of my head that MathWorld doesn’t at least have some entry on. It’s a really very useful resource when you don’t have your Math or even Physics text handy. (Of course Google knowing popular constants such as the conversion between parsecs and cm is also awesome!)
If we are talking about cool things the internet gave us, Simbad really also has to be mentioned. (Simbad is an astronomical search engine, which lets you search the sky for known objects by position. It also provides references associated with the objects.) I feel that a lot of planning of observations must have been much more painful before Simbad existed.
Today a neighbor brought by her grandson, who is in middle school and was signed up for some science olympiad. For this he had to learn some ‘basic’ astronomy, such as the difference between Population I and Population II stars. That made me realize how difficult it was for me to explain many astronomical things in laymens terms. I should probably work on that before I ever try to TA or teach and especially before I ever have to persuade any governmental agency to give me funding.
On a completely different note, I had a meeting on friday which reiterated to me again how completely dependent Astrophysics is on a good treatment of statistics. Because most of us work with large data sets everything we do relies on the type and strength of statistical test we use. The thing is that stellar astronomers always seem to drag a little behind extragalalctic astronomers, who have been working with large galaxy sets for so long that none of them can get away without doing their statistics right.
I can’t think of a cool statistics link so instead a pretty picture:
Today, Spitzer Space Telescope announced the first direct detection of a planetary object. Go infrared astronomy :-)!
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2005-09/release.shtml
Here is an “image” of the planets:
This is cool for a couple of reasons (although not the huge breakthrough news media are making it out to be). Until now extrasolar planets have been primarily detected by two methods. The first is by measuring the radial velocity of the parent star’s orbit, due to the gravitational tug of the planet. The second is by measuring the dimming of the light of the star, due to the planet’s movement in front of the star.
The technique used in this case is to actually detect the dimming of the star as the planet moves behind it and so directly be able to infer the planet’s brightness.
I have the bad feeling however, (and reading the Slashdot comments on this story gave me confirmation), that many people still get confused what we mean by “detecting” the planets. I fear that in people’s heads there are pretty pictures floating around with planets orbiting stars. In reality we cannot actually resolve the orbits of the planets and will not be able to for quite some time. Oh and on a last note, Spitzer didn’t actually discover these planets, they were previously discovered by transits.
And now some really geeky links:
The Discovery Paper
An Encyclopedia of all extrasolar planets known to date
