Duncan Steel • Jun 16, 2019 •
The name of Michael Faraday is well-known in science, for his pioneering work in both chemistry and physics (in particular electricity and magnetism; hence the name of the SI unit of capacitance, the farad). As a postgraduate student at the University of Canterbury I spent many hours working on experimental radio receivers sat inside a large metallic box … Read More
Duncan Steel • Jun 05, 2019 •
The Islamic fast of Ramadan has come to an end, marking the beginning of the tenth month of the religion’s twelve-lunation year and therefore Eid al-Fidr, the ‘Festival of Breaking the Fast’. How the decision is made when each of those months begins and ends depends upon the actual sighting of the crescent new moon in the sky, a highly-complicated … Read More
Duncan Steel • May 21, 2019 •
The scar on the lunar surface produced when the Israeli space probe ‘Beresheet’ slammed into the Moon on April 11 has just been spotted using an orbiting NASA satellite. Three nations have so far landed spacecraft on the Moon: the USA, the Soviet Union/Russia, and China. A fourth nation, Israel, has attempted to join this club, but its probe (named Beresheet) … Read More
Guest Author • Jan 18, 2018 •
Gary Li, University of California, Los Angeles; Danielle DeLatte, University of Tokyo; Jerome Gilleron, Georgia Institute of Technology; Samuel Wald, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Therese Jones, Pardee RAND Graduate School This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Forty-five years have passed since … Read More
Guest Author • Jul 27, 2017 •
Ian Crawford, UCL The search for life elsewhere in the universe is one of the most compelling aspects of modern science. Given its scientific importance, significant resources are devoted to this young science of astrobiology, ranging from rovers on Mars to telescopic observations of planets orbiting other stars. The holy grail of all this activity would be … Read More
Guest Author • Jun 07, 2016 •
By Professor Richard Easther This week, the University of Auckland (where I work) announced it is joining the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope collaboration. So what is the LSST, what will it do, and why are we so excited about it? Firstly, the LSST is, as the name suggests, a telescope. Currently under construction in the Chilean Andes, it is scheduled to see “first light” in … Read More
Guest Author • May 18, 2016 •
By Morgan Saletta, University of Melbourne Planetary Resources, a company hoping to make asteroid mining into a trillion dollar industry, earlier this year unveiled the world’s first 3D printed object made from bits of an asteroid. 3D printing, and additive manufacturing processes more generally, have made many advances in recent years. Just a few years … Read More
Guest Author • Jan 20, 2016 •
David Rothery, The Open University China’s space agency has announced plans to become the first to land on the far side of the moon, which is always hidden from us – a tricky task given that it is not possible to communicate directly with Earth from there. But if successful, the mission could shed light on … Read More
Mark Hanna • Feb 25, 2015 •
Phil Plait, who writes the wonderful Bad Astronomy blog over on Slate, noticed something interesting in a recent episode of The Simpsons: To the untrained eye, nothing about this cartoon image is likely to seem unusual. But if you spend a lot of time looking at the sky, and you have the additional context that […] … Read More
Ken Perrott • Feb 11, 2015 •
This video has been making the rounds lately. It is a view of the sun, the camera moving back at the speed of light – illustrating in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system – from a human perspective. … … Continue reading … Read More