abluegirl:

Beautiful photos of the assembly of the James Webb Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a large, infrared-optimized space telescope. JWST will find the first galaxies that formed in the early Universe, connecting the Big Bang to our own Milky Way Galaxy. JWST will peer through dusty clouds to see stars forming planetary systems, connecting the Milky Way to our own Solar System. JWST’s instruments will be designed to work primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range.

JWST will have a large mirror, 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) in diameter and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. Both the mirror and sunshade won’t fit onto the rocket fully open, so both will fold up and open once JWST is in outer space. JWST will reside in an orbit about 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from the Earth. (x)

View the full set on Flickr

(via astronomnomy)

Source: Flickr / gsfc

We are not simply stardust…

I’ve seen that Lawrence M. Krauss “… You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren’t created at the beginning of time…” quote being bandied about and I need to say a couple of things about why that’s not entirely true. Sorry.

Now, those elements (the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc) are necessarily the remnants of some star. The giveaway for the fact the star exploded is down to the fact we find radioactive material in the earth’s crust, where it simply decays. Going back in time, these radioactive elements must have formed somewhere, and the formation of the earth was probably not violent enough to spur nuclear reactions with enough energy to produce these elements. Radioactive materials must be formed by smashing heavier elements together, for which, in the vacuum of space, those conditions only really exist when a star goes supernova. Best guess is the rest of our elemental make up (the atomic weight of iron and smaller) came from the same supernova, but hey, where you find molecular clouds, made up of stuff like molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide, the conditions tend to be right for star formation too. Such elements could have been created in some other kind of star, not just an exploding one.

I digress… your body, by the number of atoms, is dominated by hydrogen; around ~67% by elemental abundance. Hydrogen is not created in stars - in stars, it is fused to allow the release of energy by nuclear fusion, in turn creating heavier elements. Maybe we get some hydrogen back when the star goes supernova? … putting all that explosive supernova energy back into the atoms the star has built, back into separating them into hydrogen atoms. Maybe, but not much. Basically, there has only ever been one source of hydrogen which was the creation of the universe: the Big Bang. Without a universe, there is no such entity as space-time and thus, no dimension as time. The Big Bang was itself the beginning of time.

Most of your hydrogen atoms have been around since the dawn of the universe. And sure, yes, evolution couldn’t continue without your oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron, etc. But the most basic building block of all life, and thus very necessary for evolution, was created some 13.7 billion years ago in the same instant that the very fabric of space-time came into being.

If you are counting how many hours a week you are working, you probably don’t like your job very much.

The thing you spend your life on shouldn’t feel like a transaction to you. I have no idea how many hours a week I worked in grad school, because I wasn’t thinking about it at the time. I could probably go back and estimate, but why? It varied week to week, just like the hours I work now. Some weeks are efficient and productive and require less time, and some are slow, arduous, and irritating. Just like now.

I know we’d all like to think that the only thing standing between us and awesomeness is a single number– a magical tipping point beyond which success is certain (I’m looking at you, Malcolm Gladwell). Unfortunately, that’s not true. You can spend a lot of time trying to do something better and only see incremental gains, even when other things come naturally and require little investment of time. That’s not to dismiss hard work, which I think often takes a back seat to the idea of “talent” in our common lore– talent is usually just hard work that went well. But ultimately, success is not a product that can be yours for a set purchase price.

The way you feel about your work is like the weather on a long hike– changing, fickle, with days you will always remember and days you will try to forget. The calculus of whether it’s worth it to go hiking at all is up to the individual.

Lucianne Walkowicz on distilling the advice from the now infamous e-mail to astronomy graduate students at Arizona State University. The quote above is near enough the advice I gave a bunch of starting PhD students, at the STFC PhD Intro to Astronomy Summer School in September, except in far more fluent prose. I’ve already been thinking about how far down the rabbit-hole I want to fall. The rest of the post is a good read for anyone considering, experiencing, or aiding the experience of, a career in research astronomy.

Source: tangledfields.com

The detection of interstellar boron sulfide: A Motivational Correspondance

astronomnomy:

Aimed at grad students/one-day grad students - this email encompasses a mentality in the field that you may have to deal with. Be warned.

jjcharfman:

Does everyone remember the famous letter from Caltech chemist Erick Carreira to his unruly, unmotivated, and apparently unprincipled laboratory assistant? Or subsequent discussion about the compulsory workaholic culture of academic chemistry which followed the letter’s publication in 2010?

…

Source: jjcharfman

astronomnomy:

“S*** Astronomers Say” by the “.astronomy 4 Hack Day” group. 
I know these kinds of videos are rather overdone, but for those interested in an career in Astronomy, you’d be wise to pay attention to what you’ll be hearing day in, day out!

Puzzled? 

  • IDL is a coding language used by astronomers (and climate scientists). More astronomers are moving onto another language called Python nowadays. FORTRAN 77 is an old version of the coding language FORTRAN; many people still know these old versions because they had to run and edit codes their supervisors edited that their supervisors edited written by their supervisors… and so on and so forth. 
  • Many (but by no means all!) astronomers use UNIX based operating systems like LINUX and Mac OS’s instead of Windows because they find them easier to code with, leading to distaste for Microsoft products. Apart from Powerpoint it seems. 
  • A common thing to hear is that ‘50% of all results in Nature [a top scientific journal] are sensationalist/wrong’. Is it true? I’m not sure yet, but usually whoever says it is trying to be witty so maybe they’re exaggerating to make themselves feel better about not getting their paper in the journal ;).
  • MCMC, or the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method, is a way to solve a system of equations to find the best solution. It’s a bit complicated but what this video is getting at is that it’s treated like a magic solution at times and is really popular to use at the moment. 
  • “What time is it in Chile?” Many astronomers have collaborators all around the world, so they will have teleconferences and email each other all the time. If you want and answer from someone today, you better find out what time it is in whatever country they are first! 
  • “Has anyone got a dongle?” A LOT of astronomers have macbooks (and other Apple products) and have to give presentations. With that comes the issue of needing a dongle to connect to a projector and no one ever brings their dongle to conferences!
  • “Hawai’i/Australia/Chile/South Africa again?” These are where all the big telescopes are, and astronomers get a lot of travelling done covering observing shifts. So much so the travelling can seem like a chore at times for some people!
  • “Rumormill” is where people post up information regarding jobs in astronomy and who got what offer. Postdocs and graduating PhDs especially are attached to the site.
  • Astronomers are astronomers, not business people, and are on the whole only okay at writing and performing presentations! Someone invariably falls asleep, and common and soul/research-destroying questions get asked at the end. 
  • “Segmentation faults” are computational errors that are notoriously difficult to debug. 
  • Bayesian/frequentist are two different ways of understanding statistics (you probably learnt frequentist stats in school).
  • Astro-ph is a site where all new papers in astronomy (and physics) are posted as a free alternative to journals. Usually people wait until their paper is accepted into a journal before posting to astro-ph.

I hope that helps people!

I love this :)

And following up from astronomnomy:

  • I wrote a bit about MCMC or Markov Chain Monte Carlo a while back for the keen.
  • “What time is it in Chile?” : Chile has a whole bunch of observing facilities and is the home of many new telescopes, such as the Very Large Telescope (VLT), Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), etc …[on a separate note: astronomers are fond of acronyms]. The subtext behind the lead up to the question is usually ‘I emailed X a question and they haven’t answered in the last couple of hours. If they’re not in the office, they’re probably observing, and if they’re observing, it’s probably at one of those fancy-pants telescopes in Chile…at night… so…’
  • On those after-talk questions.. the question on magnetic fields is a doozy. Unless you’re specifically studying magnetic fields in astronomy, chances are you won’t have considered them… they’re considered a known unknown.
  • I’m going to be fair about the statement on Nature… it is something you hear off astronomers, but it’s quite flippant so let me quickly reason it out. Nature deals with high impact, cutting edge, scientific research and results of that research. And with cutting edge research, you’re more likely to find things that have never been seen before, which might ruffle a few preconceptual feathers, but that sometimes turns out to just ruffle something else.
  • Finally, it really is usually Prof. Hans Walter-Rix who brutally cuts down your research after being asleep at the front through the whole of your talk.

Watch the transit of Venus live on the UQ website

smashtronomy:

parkysnewbrain:

Tomorrow Venus moves in front of sun (or ‘transits’), and Brisbane is perfectly placed to observe both the ingress and egress of the transit. If you miss it, the next transit is in 2117, so the chances are you won’t be alive to see it. However, if you don’t live in Australia, we have a telescope linked to a camera, and will be streaming the transit over the web.  Ingress starts at 08:16 AEST tomorrow morning, so those of you in the UK still awake at 11:16 tonight will also be able to see it.

Unless it’s cloudy of course…

Last chance you’ll get this lifetime!

Happening now! NASA link from Mauna Kea with commentary if you fancy :)

Source: parkysnewbrain