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!

A very quick post tonight. I was interviewed to comment on the discovery of a very massive  black hole , much more massive than we would expect from the galaxy in which it is found. This is a big black hole. Say it slowly... 17 billion times more massive than the Sun. That is a lot of mass in a very small volume. The article is presented in  The Conversation . You can read it  here , and, as ever, I am happy to address any questions in the comments spot below. Black holes. You have to love them!

Very quick post today, but an article on our warp drive paper has been published in The Conversation . It's called " Warp drives and reality: new hope for a Galactic Empire? " Here's a taster: Fans of science fiction must be disheartened when introduced to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity . Dreams of galactic empires , criss-crossed by roguish princesses and beautiful smugglers, go out the window with one simple rule: “thou shalt not travel faster than the speed of light”. Even a rocket ship travelling just under the speed of light (roughly 1 billion km/h) would take more than 100,000 years to get from one side of the Milky Way to the other. That’s slightly longer than the fraction of a second required to traverse galaxies in science fiction staples such as Star Wars.

A quick post this morning as I have spent a few hours plumbing in a new dishwasher (the previous one decided it would like to be like the Nile, and so flooded every so often), and have a children's party this afternoon. But, I've had a new article published on The Conversation titled Scary monsters (and supermassive black holes) . It's a review of the discovery of the  most massive supermassive black holes yet . As I note in the article, the discovery itself is not such a surprise as we know that there is a well known relation, the  M-sigma relation which shows that larger galaxies have larger black holes (the astronomers in the article weren't just blindly looking for black holes - they knew where to look). Also, in the article, I touch on another article in The Conversation called Black holes might exist, but let’s stay sceptical , which was in response to a previous article I published on black holes. This article seemed to suggest that astronomers believe ...

I didn't write the title, and had to check the dictionary on what a nom is (and was surprised that it was actually a word), but I wrote a brief article for The Conversation It summarizes a paper by Kastytis Zubovas of the University of Leicester on the continual burps of energy from the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. You can read the original paper here Sgr A* flares: tidal disruption of asteroids and planets? Kastytis Zubovas , Sergei Nayakshin , Sera Markoff (Submitted on 31 Oct 2011) It is theoretically expected that a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the centre of a typical nearby galaxy disrupts a Solar-type star every ~ 10^5 years, resulting in a bright flare lasting for months. Sgr A*, the resident SMBH of the Milky Way, produces (by comparison) tiny flares that last only hours but occur daily. Here we explore the possibility that these flares could be produced by disruption of smaller bodies - asteroids. We show that asteroids passing within ...

My article, Long way to the chemist’s: a rough guide to distances in the universe , was published in The Conversation (in fact, it's lead article :). Following on from my article on stars, I was asked to think about distances in the Universe. My guiding idea is the marvelous quote by Douglas Adams from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ; "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." I've spend quite a bit of time thinking about scale in the Universe, and remember animated discussions as a young PhD student with a good colleague on the question of "If the Milky Way was a 1p coin, how far away would the edge of the [Observable] Universe be?", and the distance (of order a couple of km) always struck me as being exceedingly close! Also, in these articles, while you can convey the r...

A busy day, zipping down to Melbourne for a meeting on computer infrastructure. In the meantime, I got another article published in The Conversation titled If I had a blank cheque I’d … trace the history of the Milky Way . The article is part of a series on what would happen if you give scientists a blank cheque. I was very restrained (I'd get rid of my mortgage first), and I focused on things that are actually achievable with a reasonable (rather than infinite) pot of money. Not to steal the thunder of the article, I said I would use $100 million to build WFMOS, a project which I was very involved with. Here's a random image WFMOS was to be the next generation multi-fibre spectrograph, built as part of a consortium between Gemini and Subaru, and to be placed at the top-end of the mighty Subaru Telescope . This project was a long time in development,  a history which I won't recount here now. But there were a number of meetings to discuss the science, the focus of ...

Another article of mine has been published on The Conversation . Titled God, the Big Bang … next please … , I discuss whether the Big Bang was the birth of the Universe. The reason for writing this is the catch call from those wanting to undermine modern cosmology, declaring its birth from nothing is illogical . While we have no theory of everything, with no single picture encompassing gravity and the other forces (and be careful of what you hear from the hype known as superstrings), we cannot see "through" the Big Bang, and don't know what was before it. But that does not mean we think there was nothing, literally nothing, no time and no space, before the Big Bang, and plenty of ideas are out there on what possible came before. We could be a daughter universe, born during the formation of a black hole in a universe before, or just one of a continuation of cycling universes, or something even weirder we haven't even thought of yet. As I say in the article; I don...