tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90947427880066442202020-12-21T00:21:44.052-08:00Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger102125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-12444313524821924402017-08-29T12:51:00.000-07:002017-08-29T13:10:11.991-07:00

Update from Samantha on her paper that just came out today (see: https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.07922) --------------------- In the months since I first posted about the potential hotspot on Europa associated with a potential plume on Europa, I’ve been refining our computer model and digging deeper into trying to understand what is going on. As you’ll remember from the last post, a potential

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-53613973252023266382017-04-13T11:52:00.005-07:002017-04-13T13:03:12.767-07:00

Europa is hot right now. With the planning for the Europa Clipper mission underway and talk even of a lander, scientists are paying more attention to the little icy satellite than ever. Much of the recent excitement has been a discussion of the now-you-see-them-now-you-don't plumes that might be jetting material from the interior ocean. Such a possibility would be quite exciting indeed, as it

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-55408876201702956632015-10-27T10:00:00.000-07:002015-10-27T10:33:21.689-07:00

I know, I know.  We have all been instructed by Arthur C. Clarke to attempt no landings on Europa. But if you did land on Europa, wouldn’t you like to know where to go? If you do, my graduate student, Patrick Fischer, has a paper coming out that you probably want to read. First, perhaps, it might be best to understand why anyone would want to land on Europa at all. Europa – the second of

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-86938239686697395872015-01-05T15:24:00.000-08:002015-01-05T15:29:45.946-08:00

Ten years ago today I came in to the same office I’m in at this moment, sat down in the same chair I am sitting in now, probably stared out the window at the clear blue sky much like I’m doing right now. It’s even likely that I drank coffee out of the very cup I’m drinking out of. Other than that, though, nothing was the same. Just a week earlier, on Dec 28th 2004, I had discovered the second

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com60tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-8649315220759453302014-03-17T02:31:00.001-07:002014-03-17T02:37:06.907-07:00

I first published this five years ago today. It's all still true. -- MEB My father was a rocket scientist. Well, OK, not precisely. More specifically he was a rocket engineer. Or, more precisely still, he was an engineer who worked on the computers that went into space and navigated the rockets. He worked on the Saturn V that lifted Apollo astronauts toward the moon, he worked on the Lunar

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-16455236972206794252013-11-04T10:35:00.000-08:002013-11-04T13:35:35.946-08:00

It didn’t snow much in northern Alabama where I grew up, so, when I went to college further north, I was at a serious disadvantage when the first blizzard came through and everyone streamed out of the dorms to engage in an all night snowball fight. After my first rounds of fusillades ended up splintering to little wispy bits in midair I quickly got the hang of compaction, looking for wetter

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-30936193318442641882013-06-15T15:24:00.001-07:002013-11-04T10:39:26.079-08:00

When we moved into our house more than 7 years ago now the old owners left their Dish Network satellite TV dish attached to the roof. A few months later we got a sternly worded letter from the Disk Network demanding that we send them the dish back. With my detailed knowledge of the intricacies of the American legal system my obvious response was: come and get it. Which would have been fine with

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com57tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-61638310333963566492013-04-03T18:01:00.000-07:002013-04-09T08:00:00.414-07:00

Quick: name the three largest known objects in the Kuiper belt. If you’ve been paying close attention you will instantly get Eris and Pluto, and, if pressed, you will admit that no one knows which one is bigger. And the third? An unscientific poll of people who should know the answer (my daughter, my wife, my nephew) reveals that not a single one does. The answer, of course, is Makemake (you

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-35016288406462449552013-03-12T21:56:00.005-07:002013-11-04T10:39:45.472-08:00

Sometimes I like to write about things in the sky that I've been studying. Sometimes I like to write about scientific discoveries in the outer solar system. Sometimes I even write about wild speculations I have about the solar system. But, every once in a while, I get to just sit back and watch the sky go by. I love comets. When I first started graduate school to get my Ph.D. in astronomy, I

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-24856063944806997702013-03-05T11:09:00.000-08:002013-03-05T13:46:27.381-08:00

[You should probably start with Part 1] The first thing that you notice when you look at a spectrum of Europa -- from the Earth, from a spacecraft, it doesn’t really matter – is the ice. Ice is everywhere. The spectrum of ice is a very distinctive looking thing, with a quickly recognizable pattern of regions where the sunlight reflects strongly from the surface and regions where there is

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-13346187671040263342013-03-04T21:36:00.000-08:002013-12-16T11:56:51.628-08:00

[don’t miss part 1]  One of the biggest problems with trying to figure out what is on the surface of Europa was that the spectrograph on the Galileo spacecraft didn’t have a very fine view of the reflected light coming off the surface. The analogy I used in Part 1 was that Galileo was looking at fingerprints where you could only discern the rough pattern and not the individual ridges. You

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-46709466380588014652013-03-01T05:17:00.000-08:002013-03-05T11:19:34.656-08:00

Ever wonder what it would taste like if you could lick the icy surface of Jupiter’s Europa? The answer may be that it would taste a lot like that last mouthful of water that you accidentally drank when you were swimming at the beach on your last vacation. Just don’t take too long of a taste. At nearly 300 degrees (F) below zero your tongue will stick fast. The composition of the surface of

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-80142310280054217402013-02-26T17:25:00.000-08:002013-02-26T17:30:05.336-08:00

Some years back, when I first started writing this blog, I went strong for a year, and then felt a need for a rest. I was writing a book, doing science, raising an infant, all things that took time. So I declared that that was the end of Season 1. After a hiatus I was back. As I remember it, Season 2 was written mostly on weekend afternoons during the times that Lilah napped. But naps don’t

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-57311904789688438622011-10-26T22:12:00.000-07:002011-10-27T08:53:29.905-07:00

Almost a year ago, Eris – the, uh, most massive known dwarf planet -- passed directly in front of an otherwise anonymous star, momentarily causing the star to disappear, as seen from the earth. By carefully measuring the length of time that the star disappeared, astronomers made a very precise measurement of the size of Eris. I care about the size of Eris for many different reasons, but the most

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com33tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-89129848994671260662011-09-10T15:08:00.000-07:002011-09-11T13:23:48.525-07:00

I have a new scientific paper coming out in the Astrophysical Journal that I am quite proud of having written. Even better, there is a chance that it might not even be wrong. Back in something like seventh grade, I learned how science works. Scientists formulate a hypothesis and then they do experiments, and if enough experiments support the hypothesis, eventually the hypothesis becomes a

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-84044522392365544972011-08-24T07:17:00.000-07:002011-08-24T10:51:26.409-07:00

A remembrance of 5 years ago, today, excerpted from How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming As an astronomer, I have long had a professional aversion to waking up before dawn, preferring instead to see sunrises not as an early morning treat, but as the signal that the end of a long night of work has come, and it is finally time for overdue sleep. But in the pre-dawn of August 25th, 2005, I

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-42404031207554392682011-08-23T11:05:00.000-07:002011-08-23T11:05:23.406-07:00

 Most people will probably think of tomorrow as the 5 year anniversary of the demotion of former-planet Pluto. That seems fair; the Pluto demotion got all of the news, caused all of the fights, and promoted all of the discussion. But now that tempers have cooled and the world has come to terms with a new more scientific eight-planet solar system, it is time to remember the other important thing

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com48tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-36464967522598751672011-08-20T16:06:00.000-07:002011-08-20T16:12:43.625-07:00

(don't forget to read Part 1 and Part 2) Snow White’s chance for redemption finally came last year.  I got an email from Adam Burgasser, an astronomer at UC San Diego, best known for his studies of brown dwarfs in the local universe (less well known, but perhaps more relevant in this case, is that I was his Ph.D. advisor a decade ago). Adam had just moved from MIT where he had helped design a

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-27748365649462250842011-08-11T16:21:00.000-07:002011-08-22T12:27:25.323-07:00

(read Part 1) One of the nicest things about science is that, usually, when you’re wrong  you’re just wrong.  There is no use sitting around arguing about it or trying to persuade someone to change his mind, you’re just plain wrong and the universe has explained it to you. Game over. Thanks for playing. Try again later. Next? Only there really was no “next.” Red? For the most part, colors of

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-38709328723999263182011-08-09T11:55:00.000-07:002011-08-11T16:22:23.508-07:00

Nearly four years ago, during the Ph.D. thesis research of my former graduate student Meg Schwamb, we discovered a distant bright Kuiper belt object. Our hope had been that something so distant would be like Sedna – far away, but part of an even more distant population. But it wasn’t. The object was more like Eris – far away, but on its way back in. The object got an official license plate

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-33346314784671380992010-12-10T12:59:00.000-08:002010-12-10T12:59:51.070-08:00

[another guest post, this time at boingboing.net ] Back in the good old days everyone knew how many planets there were, then scientists came along and screwed everything up. How could something that was always a planet suddenly not be one? It made no sense. Chaos ensued, people protested, and scientists were thrown in prison. I'm not making up that prison part, either. It was dangerous

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-51759661897362311832010-12-07T08:56:00.000-08:002010-12-08T18:52:16.946-08:00

One of the fun things about having a book coming out [TODAY, IN FACT] is that you get invited to do guest posts here and there around the web. You can, for example, watch for me from now until the solstice over at BoingBoing. One of the most fun so far was a chance to write at Babel Clash, about my take on life on other planets. Here is what I had to say: I grew up in a universe teeming with

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-18932689825250264692010-11-29T15:05:00.000-08:002010-11-29T15:34:17.053-08:00

In part 1 of this story I told about the discovery of Sedna, the first – and still only – body found far beyond the edge of the Kuiper belt. Part 2 described some of our early theories on how Sedna had gotten there and what it was telling us about the early history of the solar system. Here I’ll begin talking about the most recent searches for more things like Sedna and how we’re doing so far.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-57253571262975373952010-11-22T20:19:00.000-08:002011-10-14T10:50:51.210-07:00

These days, a question like that is easy to answer: type it in to Google, click on the Wikipeadia entry, and read the answer: 2306 +/- 20 km. The  +/- (to be read “plus or minus”) is important here: every measurement has limitations and an often critical  part of science is correctly quantifying those limit. The correct interpretation of 2306 +/- 20 km is that 2306 km is the most likely value,

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9094742788006644220.post-88490584675203378922010-11-18T15:23:00.000-08:002010-11-24T11:40:16.959-08:00

Brian Marsden, long time director of the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center died today. While it is easy to say “he was the nicest guy…” in this case it was simply true. Everyone who came across him has stories about Brian. My book, coming out in out a few more weeks has a few too. Just last week I autographed a copy for Brian and bookmarked the spots where he appeared. I say

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com10