Cosmic Horizons

We had a paper in  Nature  this week, and I think this paper is exciting and important. I've written an article for  The Conversation  which you can read it  here . Enjoy!

I am exhausted after a month of travel, but am now back in a sunny, but cool, Sydney. It's feels especially chilly as part of my trip included Death Valley, where the temperatures were pushing 50 degrees C. I face a couple of weeks of catch-up, especially with regards to some blog posts on my recent papers. Here, I am going to cheat and present two papers at once. Both papers are by soon-to-be-newly-minted Doctor,  Foivos Diakogiannis . I hope you won't mind, as these papers are Part I and II of the same piece of work. The fact that this work is spread over two papers tells you that it's a long and winding saga, but it's cool stuff as it does something that can really advance science - take an idea from one area and use it somewhere else. The question the paper looks at sounds, on the face of it, rather simple. Imagine you you have a ball of stars, something like this, a globular cluster: You can see where the stars are. Imagine that you can also measure the s

A quick post, as I am still on the road. One of my favourite movies of all time is  Logan's Run  (partly because of the wonderful  Jenny Agutter , who was also in another fav of mine,  An American Werewolf in London ). The premise of the movie is that in a futuristic society, to maintain populations, children are manufactured to order and when you get to thirty years of age, you go to carousel where you float up in to the air and explode.  Should academia be like this? Not killing everyone at 30, but how about requiring everyone to leave at 40? Now, before you start screaming about "academic freedom" and "tenure", hear me out. I quite like the idea. Let's start with what (I think) we can all agree on. Basically, there are not enough academic jobs, and academic pipe leaks at all stages, with talented people having to leave due to the lack of positions at the next level. Additionally, prising academics out of their jobs is notoriously hard, wit