When I was born, we still didn't have evidence that there were planets around other suns. Now you can observe them in your backyard. That's pretty amazing, if you ask me!
Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity is tested by Arthur Eddington and Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin.
The Eddington experiment was organised by the astronomers Frank Watson Dyson & Arthur Stanley Eddington in 1919. The observations were of the total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 and were carried out by two expeditions which aim was to measure the gravitational deflection of starlight passing near the Sun.
In 1919 Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin went to Sobral, in Brazil, and measured the amount of deflection of light caused by the gravitational field of the Sun. The results from these observations were crucial in providing confirmation of the General Theory of Relativity, which Albert Einstein had proposed in 1916.
This year the continent of #Africa is hosting the #IAU General Assembly that takes place every 3 years, for the first time in the IAU's history. It seems only right that an African astronomer should attend this historic event, and #astronomy needs more African astronomers. If you feel the same, please consider contributing to the IAU African Astronomer Travel Fund: https://lsstdiscoveryalliance.org/donate/iau-african-travel-fund/
Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle, 2024
Acclaimed journalist Rebecca Boyle takes readers on a dazzling tour to reveal the intimate role that our 4.51-billion-year-old companion has played in our biological and cultural evolution.
This image shows the regions surrounding the Corona star cluster, better known by its English name, Coronet Cluster. Also cataloged as R CrA for its brightest star, it is located at a distance of about 400 light years from the Solar System and is located in the direction of the Corona Australis Constellation, isolated on the edge of the Gould Belt. The Corona Cluster is..... #astronomy#space#astrophysics#astrophotography
Call for abstracts: "The impact of large satellite constellations on astronomy: five years on" at this year's @royalastrosoc U.K. National Astronomy Meeting. The session will be held from 3-5pm on Tuesday, 16th July, at the E.A. Milne Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Hull.
#Astronomy has another case of "#Bullshit circles the planet before the truth gets its shoes on" - A recent paper looked for #DysonSpheres by finding red stars which coincided with radio emission. The hype resulted in a thousand news articles... except a new paper shows they failed to check whether normal red M-dwarf stars might happen to be close to normal radio sources (radio-loud AGN) 🤦♂️ https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14921
Now we'll be lucky if this good science gets 10% the press that the original did.
Beautiful (at least to me!) last rendering of the gas temperature in an evolving simulated volume - where the frequent bubble like explosion are the combination of AGN feedback or star formation - combined with the Faraday Rotation Measure by the injected magnetic fields in the same volume.
"A bit of me feels that the horse has bolted and we're in catch-up mode at this point."
But: "There's a social good element to what the satellite operators are doing and you've got to balance that against possible impacts to things like radio astronomy."
Cool to have the same colleagues arguing about a question they already debated a year ago (conference I organised back then) , getting to the same standstill, as if they had no chance of exchanging mails in a year 🙄 #astrodon#astronomy
A solar eclipse occurs, as predicted by the Greek philosopher & scientist Thales, while Alyattes is battling Cyaxares in the Battle of the Eclipse, leading to a truce.
How exactly Thales predicted the eclipse remains uncertain; some scholars assert the eclipse was never predicted at all. Others have argued for different dates, but only the eclipse of May 585 BC matches the conditions of visibility necessary to explain the historical event.
My Harvard Horizons video is now on YouTube! I worked hard on this with some talented animators, really excited to share it with ya'll :)
This is a short, public talk of my research: exploring connections between galaxies and cosmology with @desisurvey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIB0F_oNxdM
#WhatAboutMagneticFields ?
some people gathered this week (actually, also in the past few weeks, but that's the only one I am attending) at the Bernoulli Centre in Lausanne to know more... #astrodon#astronomy
French astronomer Benjamin Valz was born #OTD in 1787.
He had a particular interest in comets, his observations including that of Biela’s Comet made in 1846 in which he noted that the comet had split into two parts. He is also remembered for his suggestion that observed irregularities in the orbit of Halley’s Comet may have been due to the gravitational effects of an as-yet unknown planet orbiting the Sun beyond Uranus which was at a time prior to the discovery of Neptune.
Colourised animation processing data from: https://psa.esa.int
ESA Mars Express HRSC
Orbit: 14388
2015-05-05 T16:01:18 > T16:01:35.424Z
IDs: 5 Frames
HE388_0003_SR3 >>>> HE388_0007_SR3
1 frame added to make it smoother
Credits:
Raw Data:
ESA/DLR/G.Neukum-FUBerlin
Processing: AndreaLuck CC BY
In this villa near Florence, Italy, Galileo Galilei spent the last decade or so of his life under house arrest. I was there this weekend on the panel of a science outreach event, here's the video recording in Italian:
English amateur astronomer Richard Christopher Carrington was born #OTD in 1826.
In 1859 his astronomical observations demonstrated the existence of solar flares as well as suggesting their electrical influence upon the Earth & its aurorae; and whose 1863 records of sunspot observations revealed the differential rotation of the Sun. His publications include Results of Astronomical Observations Made at the Observatory of the University, Durham; & Observations of the Spots on the Sun.