Astronomy

The Sustainability Solution states: the absence of ETI observation can be explained by the possibility that exponential or other faster-growth is not a sustainable development pattern for intelligent civilizations.

On the International Dark Sky Association starting to lobby Washington D.C.

Will 2009 be the year the federal government finally takes light pollution seriously?

Astro2010, the current astronomy and astrophysics decadal survey, is the latest in a series of surveys that are produced every 10 years by the National Research Council (NRC) of The National Academy of Sciences.

February 20, 2009: The first gamma-ray burst to be seen in high-resolution from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is one for the record books. The blast had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions and the highest-energy initial emissions ever seen.

"At the heart of the problem is the fascinating question: why are all the planets different? The ones in our solar system ought to have formed out of the same stuff at more or less the same time and yet no two are alike. And now the extrasolar planets seem to be demonstrating a similar variety."

In the wake of Shepard Fairey's debacle with the AP over the rights to the image he used as reference/inspiration for his wildy popular Obama poster, I wanted to share a list of Public Domain Licensed images, in this case, astronomy. Fairey's situation should hit home with all pixel junkies out there and remind us that we have to pay close attention to the licenses associated with the images we use in our design work. I've compiled a list of beautiful, inspiring astronomy images that all have a Public Domain License.

a joint Fermilab/SLAC publication

The classic simulation

We review properties of theories for the variation of the gravitation and fine structure 'constants'. We highlight some general features of the cosmological models that exist in these theories with reference to recent quasar data that are consistent with time-variation in the fine structure 'constant' since a redshift of 3.5. The behaviour of a simple class of varying-alpha cosmologies is outlined in the light of all the observational constraints.