Monthly Archives: October 2020

An Impey Trifecta: Dark matter, strange correlations, and observing time

The online astronomy office hours from the UofA continue apace.  Every week  Prof. Chris Impey answers  ex tempore a mix of questions from planetary science to the fate of the universe from a thirsty audience across the globe.  A large Indian contingent stays up until the wee small hours of their morning to join in.   Part of the fun is pausing the video and trying to figure out the answer  from basic considerations before resuming.  It is fun to be right but more  instructive to be wrong.  I’ve been moved to send in three questions over the past couple of sessions and all have been answered.

  1. When in relation to the Big Bang did dark matter originate?
  2. There is a surprising correlation between supermassive galactic black hole size and the population of old stars in a galaxy. Can telescopes now resolve individual stars in distant galaxies well enough to distinguish old from new to establish this connection?
  3. Observational results come from the successful.  How do astronomers get precious telescope time?

Youtube Channel: Astronomy State of the Art

 

Backyard history: Southern California’s impact on astronomy

Silicon Valley has reshaped the earth, Hollywood has driven our perceptions of it, and not always for the better.  Less well known is the outsized role California has played in understanding our universe.   Mt. Wilson, Mt. Palomar, and their astronomers have had a Copernican impact on where we stand in the grand scheme of things.  The word ‘vision’ gets bandied about a lot these days but George Ellery Hale had it in spades.  Here’s how the two observatories that housed Hubble, Humason, Shapley,  Zwicky, Baade, Rubin, and Schmidt came to be.

The third video from Corning’s Museum of Glass shows that the path to science is not always smooth and that learning from mistakes is the norm.  The original 200 inch pyrex disk for the Palomar primary did not go according to plan and had to be recast.  The second attempt succeeded and even so, it took ten years of painstaking grinding and polishing at Caltech before it was ready for use.

Youtube Channel: Palomar Observatory

Youtube Channel: Irish Astronomy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL0ZGjF6DrA

Youtube Channel: Corning Museum of Glass