A real fascinating story of how an 81-year-old former Air Force chap had come forward to announce he saw pulsars well before they were discovered but could not talk about it for half a century until the military instruments he observed them with were decommissioned and de-classified.
In a nutshell, he was using radar for a Ballistic Missile early warning system and noticed a pulsating signal showing up in his data, which was rising 4 mins earlier each day. He asked astronomers after writing down the location, and it was the Crab Pulsar!
The woman who discovered pulsars, Dame Prof. Jocelyn Bell Burnell - agreed with his discoveries.
Sent this to our team's slack channel overnight, and my supervisor told me he and another one of our team's astronomers were the folks that the Air Force chap got in touch with!
Here it is, several thousand years in the making: the protostellar jet HH212 as seen in the infrared by #JWST.
We discovered this jet in 1993, glowing in the light of shocked molecular hydrogen at 2.12 microns, as gas emerges symmetrically at about 100 km/s from the two poles of a young protostar not far from the Horsehead Nebula in Orion.
Our new JWST image spans six wavelengths & is ten times sharper than any previous infrared image.
1/ This is the longest exposure I've ever taken: 8 months long! It shows the Sun's path on the sky between Apr 17 - Dec 11 2018, as seen from ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile.
This is part of a collaboration with Diego López Calvín, an expert in solarigraphy: https://solarigrafia.com
Diego sent me some of his hand-made #pinhole cameras, which I placed all over Paranal. So what do we see here? See thread below 👇
Hello! I’m a professor of planetary science based at Harvard, interested in rocky planet evolution, #climate, habitability, and related topics.
Finally decided to get a social media account and Mastodon seemed like a logical choice right now. Looking forward to figuring out what this site (or sites??) is all about…
And our results (along with our international colleagues) have dropped!
Our team (and others) have started to see the strongest evidence as yet of the stochastic gravitational wave background - ripples in space-time cause by ALL the supermassive black holes in the history of the Universe colliding!
We use pulsars to study these riplles and we needed almost 20 years of data to even get the first hints! It's the long game!
I'm a co-author on the Aussie papers (as part of my work) but I also wrote about it here in my latest feature article on #SpaceAustralia
This is why I have been going on about pulsars for a few weeks now - this was coming!
Yet It took until 1956, 10 years before her retirement, for her to become full professor - because women were barred from becoming full professors at Harvard.
The Event Horizon Telescope has unveiled how Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, looks like in polarised light, which tells us a lot about the magnetic field around this monster.
The lines overlaid on the image below mark the orientation of the polarisation, from which astronomers can work out the structure of the magnetic field around the black hole.
Outstanding shot of the #Sun rising behind ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope, currently under construction in #Chile. The dome is about 80 m tall; look at the size of those cranes! The ELT will have a 39 m primary mirror — the largest optical-infrared telescope in the world.
🌀 And it's just so less than 100 years ago since Hubble, building on Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s period-luminosity relation for Cepheids, has shown that our own Milky Way is just one galaxy among many:
▶️ https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/111681549432325681
Want to become my colleague? #ESA is looking for a planetary scientist to fill the role of the archives scientist for the planetary science archive, initially assigned to #Mars missions:
(OK, almost my colleague, same agency, different location - you'd be based in Villanueva de la Cañada close to Madrid, Spain, while I'm in Noordwijk, NL).
Wow! 16 pro-amateur astrophotographers imaged the Whirlpool Galaxy, then combined their data to produce an image with 255 hours integration time. This is the result.
I absolutely love hearing about amateur and pro-am communities collaborating and working together to really highlight the contributions they can make to science.
These communities are pretty much self-funded but can deliver lots!
where I will be posting musings on my recently initiated research career transition from astrophysics to ecology. I would like this place to be a lively forum, especially for scientists involved in similar matters. First post is online 🎉 , boosts welcome ! 💚 🍂 🔭 #Astrodon#Ecology
You can register by following @lookingup.francois-rincon.org or using the rss feed link on the site.
Physics World has talked to me about my science and about all the things I do as a scientist that are not my science - climate activism and Astronomers for Planet Earth (@a4e), my art and outreach in general :)
If podcasts are your thing, you may like this one (also download able on all usual #podcast sources):
If you prefer to read things instead of listening (as do I myself; not an audio person ... 😅 ), Physics World has now turned the podcast with me into a written interview:
It's about my science, but also about all the things I do as a scientist that are not my science - climate crisis outreach and Astronomers for Planet Earth, my art and outreach in general.
JWST is a fancy telescope designed for science. So while it can produce very beautiful images, it's not quite a point-and-shoot camera.
Here is an image of the Pillars of Creation that I downloaded from the MAST archive. Notice how all of the stars have black centers? That's not what the stars actually look like — it's an artifact introduced by the NIRCam detector.
The first results from my #JWST time, in a project shared with Tom Ray et al. from the MIRI consortium, a study of the extremely young protostellar outflow, HH211, in Perseus, published in advance form in Nature today.