Category: astrophysics

So a neutrino runs into a tachyon in a bar….

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

So a neutrino runs into a tachyon in a bar…. HHere’s a collection of interesting twitter snippets from physicists I follow on twitter about today’s neutrino webcast announcing the surprising, and frankly unbelievable, results that the OPERA collaboration observed superluminal neutrinos. I haven’t watched the webcast myself, nor read the paper beyond the abstract yet so can only comment that I believe it must be systematics. That said it would be insanely interesting to be proven otherwise. Finally, the following highlighted tweets are in reverse chronology, because, well… I’ve been here since the day after tomorrow, said the tachyon. What took you so long? Read More …

Galaxy clothing

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

I splurged and bought two galaxy printed items of designer clothing the other week from the lovely http://www.blackmilkclothing.com/. Some colleagues and I couldn’t help but think about possibilities of extending this further: what about layers of astronomy themed clothing each featuring the same image taken in a different wavelength? Interested seamsters and seamstresses or people with an idea how to print high resolution images on fabric, please contact me! Read More …

The Intersection of Productivity and Joy (over the past months)

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

Since last we spoke a couple of months ago, I had a hell of a time personally: I moved house, went from one location to another too often, had a major and very stressful financial crisis and had some rough times with friends which rocked the emotional boat. Although there are many things which didn’t Read More …

Probing the dark matter issue in f(R)-gravity via gravitational lensing

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

A few days ago in gr-qc  journal club we discussed an interesting paper by a member of our own institute, Probing the dark matter issue in f(R)-gravity via gravitational lensing.1. Background Dark Matter We theoretically expect dark matter to exist based largely on  extensive observations of both dynamics (rotation curves and objects such as the Read More …

Halos gone MAD

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

I have previously blogged about Structure finding in cosmological simulations and the Haloes Going Mad conference in Madrid this past spring–there you will find the basic background if you are unfamiliar with the subject and I’ll skip that in this post. The result of this conference was a Halo-finder comparison project and its findings were recent posted on the physics arxiv in the paper Haloes gone MAD: The Halo-Finder Comparison Project. I’ll summarize them here.

The paper concentrates on comparing codes on given test data, not comparing the results of various codes to observations, provides a standard test suite and proposes a standard methodology of comparison, both on test, isolated, halos and on a simulation of cosmological volume. Read More …

Geometry and Dynamics of the Cosmic Web

Locally Cold Flows from Large-Scale Structure

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

Walls, filaments and voids: it is thought that the large scale distribution of matter is a complex network of galaxies and galaxy clusters connected by elongated filaments and sheetlike walls, outlining vast underdense regions known as voids and meeting at dense and compact regions known as haloes. Aragon-Calvo et. al. in [1] build upon the SpineWeb framework outlined in [2] , which has the capability of identifying these walls, filaments and clusters in cosmological simulations to examine the effect of environment (namely whether a galaxy is “living” in a wall or a void) on the dispersion of the Hubble flow around the Milky, which is significantly lower than theoretical expectations. They show that the measured dispersion could be a result of the fact that Milky Way resides inside a wall of radius around 10Mpc, which is supported by data. Read More …

Andromeda Galaxy

The Andromeda Galaxy's Globular Cluster System

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

Globular Clusters (GCs) Globular clusters are groups of roughly spherical, densely packed stars. They are thought to have formed at the same time as most galaxies and the stars which make them up are some of the oldest known–thus GCs are an excellent probe of galaxy formation and evolution. They have a high central stellar Read More …