Category: Seein’ the light
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Questioning the Big Bang
The Big Bang dominates current thinking in cosmology. But the experimental evidence that backs it up is surprisingly thin. In fact there are only two pieces of evidence: the galactic redshift and the cosmic background radiation. The Big Bang explains these observations but only by introducing problems of their own. So are there any alternative…
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New type of pulsating star discovered
New types of stars aren’t found very often but last year, Patrick Dufour and pals discovered several white dwarfs with carbon atmospheres. Before then white dwarfs were thought to come in two flavours: with atmopsheres dominated by either hydrogen or helium. Astronomers suddenly had a new toy to play with. Dufour found nine examples of…
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Future brightens for quantum imaging
This is the idea behind quantum imaging: create an entangled pair of photons and send one towards the object you want to image and hang on to the other. But then what? For some time, physcists have been whisperin’ about the extraordinary potential of this technique. Some imagine that it might be possible to create…
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Dark matter: we’ve been staring at it all along
Astrobods have been searching for dark matter for a decade or so now. And despite it filling the known Universe, there’s been no sign of the stuff . But could it be that we’ve been staring at it all along without knowing what we’ve been looking at? That’s the claim of a couple of theorists…
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First 3D image of a streamer
Streamers are the whispy electronic filaments that feel their way towards the ground in the fraction of a second before a lightning strike. They differ from the main strike in that they do not significantly increase the gas temperature. They are also seen in nature as sprites, giant electronic discharges that sit 100 kilometres or…
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Saving Earth from the Sun’s expansion
About 7 billion years from now the Sun will have swelled into a red giant with a radius larger than Earth’s orbit. We’re doomed. Or so we thought. A ray of hope has been thrown our way by astronomers who say that as the Sun expands it will lose a significant portion of its mass…
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How to spot a wormhole
I know ya’ll heard of wormholes, tunnels in the fabric of the cosmos that connect one region of the universe to another. These ain’t just the fanciful dreams of impressionable young astrobods: wormholes represent real solutions of Einstein’s equation of general relativity. If general relativity is correct, wormholes ought to be out there somewhere. But…
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Black holes may convert dark matter into cosmic rays
Active galactic nuclei are the brightest objects in the universe and among the most puzzlin’. Astrobods think they are supermassive black holes that spew out huge amounts light over some or all of the electromagnetic spectrum. Now a coupla Ruskies are saying that active galactic nuclei are capable of converting dark matter into high energy…
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The puzzling presence of DIBs
For more than 80 years, astrobods have a-pondered and a-peered at strange sets of dark bands that appear in the spectra of distant stars. These bands are entirely different from the absorption sepctra of specific ions, atoms and molecules which absorb light at specific, sharp frequencies. Instead these bands are broad and diffuse. And there…
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Near-to-far field image magnification
There was a time when magnifying glasses were good for nothing but fryin’ ants and helping the over-60s with newsprint. Now everyone’s a-peekin’ and a-peerin’ at things that are even smaller than the wavelength of visible light. The conventional thinkin is that you can’t see nothing smaller than about a quarter of the wavelength of…