In this video, Paul talks about his favourite unsolved mysteries and the weirdest question asked.
This video is provided by ANU Public Lecture @ YouTube.
Archive for the 'Astronomy' Category
“At the end of this talk, you won’t know anything new than you knew in the beginning” Dr Paul Francis said. “Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of The Universe” is the title of his first public lecture in 2010. I hope you will enjoy this.
This public lecture was co-organized by ANU Black Hole Society and Australian Institute of Physics. The video is provided by Australian National University Channel at YouTube.
Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has captured a vast region of space containing the Heart nebula and Soul nebula.The infrared picture above is composed of 1,147 frames totaling exposure time of three and a half hours.
On the left, it is the Heart nebula designated IC 1805, named after its resemblance to human heart. The Soul nebula on the right also known as Embryo nebula designated IC 1848 is named after its resemblance to symbolic heart with two lobes. In my opinion, I think the Soul nebula resemble our hearts better. Anyway, these two nebulae are massive star making factories lying about 6,000 light years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. They stretch out nearly 580 light-years across. For comparison, Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across.
Continue reading ‘WISE Has Heart and Soul?’
SkyMapper at Siding Spring Observatory, NSW, Australia
SkyMapper is designed to create the first comprehensive digital survey (map) of the whole southern sky with its 268-megapixel extraordinary wide field camera. It is one of the key projects managed by Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Australian National University.
The survey will consist of more than one billion stars and galaxies to a depth of one million times fainter that what naked eyes can see. By taking multi-colour and multi-epoch images covering the whole southern sky, it allows astronomers to map the dark matter, uncover first quasars and stars formed in the early universe, which are important to the understanding of our universe model. To probe the key aspects of stars, 6 filters (u, v, g, r, i, z) optimised for temperature, surface gravity and metallicity are installed.
After the survey is done, it will be open to public through the web like Galaxy Zoo. Not only public will be rejoiced by the magnificent images, amateur astronomers will also be fascinated that they can discover supernovae explosions, planet transits and even microlensing events through the survey.
Internship is also available for 2nd year++ ANU students. The application for 2010 has closed and the deadline for 2011 is 5pm 18 March 2011. According to my seniors, the interns are asked to design algorithms to process the humongous data of which rate is 0.8TB/s when SkyMapper goes online. As a 2010 intern, I will write more about what we do in the future. I can’t wait any longer for such thrilling experience.
And yes, SkyMapper is on Facebook.
NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has beamed back jaw-dropping images of the sun and they have been released on 21 Apr 2010. There is a video with the prominence above in high definition (HD) at First Light of the Solar Dynamics Observatory which you must not miss. Even experienced solar physicists said that they learned new things by just watching the videos.
There are also videos showing solar flare and magnetic field on the sun surface.
Offtopic: Talking about HD, the hype is almost everywhere. Sooner or later, there might be HD eyepieces, HD mounts, HD bla bla bla…
The ABB FlexPicker Robot arm can accelerate at 10Gs which allows it to reach 280mph from zero in one second. Isn’t this very terrific? Not only that the arm is fast enough, the precision of the system is also jaw-dropping. Watch the video and you will know how cool this robotic arm is.
Astronomically, I do not think that ground based observatories need such high speed system as the dominant factor lies in the imaging duration. However, space based observatories which are excelled at the gamma rays burst observing can benefit from such speed as the gamma rays burst usually do not last long. With such high speed system, more time can be spent on imaging rather than navigating.
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