May 8, 2008 
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My Top 3 |
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Stefanie Komossa, whose work I pointed at yesterday concerning a black hole being ejected from a galaxy merger, has another cool result today: the light echo of a supermassive black hole swallowing a star in a distant galaxy. She’s done interesting work the last few years, and I think it’s been due to her actively looking for new and proposed phenomena. A lot of us astronomers are wrapped up in the minutia of current projects, studying objects we already know, and using techniques we already know. That brings success, but not a lot of breaking discoveries.
There’s a gallery of Hubble Space Telescope images of colliding galaxies. My press release next month is going to be on something similar, although my objects are more distant and won’t look as cool, even though they’ve got a lot more going on at the moment with their accreting black holes.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing an exhibit on superhero costumes: Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy. Armani is involved, even. The show covers Superman through the X-Men and Catwoman and runs through September 1. (Thanks for the pointer, Bob, AKA Quailman!)
Seth Shostak has a really interesting article on space.com about why SETI seems to be primarily an American enterprise these days. It goes into research done on cultural differences in American society vs. others, and there’s a suggestion that Americans as a people are more likely to take on ambiguous projects and to search for new truths, boiling down to a low score in “uncertainty avoidance.” Apparently China and India also score low here, so as their economies and expertise grows, perhaps we’ll see them taking on similarly ambitious and uncertain projects.
APOD shows us the “Dark Tower of Scorpius.”
Over on Scientific American, a call for more novels about real scientists. I can get behind this. My next novel should fall right in this window. The author, Mark Alpert, has his own science novel Final Theory coming out next month. It’s weird how a novel has to have speculative elements to be called “science fiction,” and that natural label can’t easily be applied to fiction about science/scientists.
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