I hope you’ve enjoyed our coverage of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s birthday conference; one of the project’s founders, Jim Gunn, has just received a standing ovation from the gathered scientists which marked the end of his summary of the conference. If you’d like my interpretation of what he said, then click here to read […]

The penultimate talk of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey conference described the survey’s future. If you’d like to find out what this amazing and very successful telescope is up to next, then click here.

The discovery of new objects in the solar system has become almost routine; the discovery of new asteroids is important but routine. Just occasionally, though, an object is found which is in some way weird enough that it immediately garners attention.
The discovery of one of those objects was announced during the last day of the […]

suspect that that headline isn’t what you were expecting from my blog (I’ll buy you all a drink if I ever write an article entitled ‘Evidence for intergalactic war’, mind you), but it’s one of the conclusions from the talks at the conference I’m attending.
Let me back track a bit. It’s day three of […]

I’m liveblogging the first talk of the morning, by simulation king Simon White, over on my own personal blog.

While yesterday morning’s talks focused on the general population of stars in the Milky Way, the last two talks of the day told us a little of what can be learnt by looking at more unusual stars. David Lai of UC Santa Cruz took us through the results of his studies of some of the […]

My Galaxy Zoo colleague Steven Bamford (now at the University of Nottingham) is here in Chicago and gave an excellent talk yesterday unpicking some of our results. In particular, he’s been examining the question of how the colour of a galaxy relates to its shape. You only have to look at a few Hubble images […]

Much of the excitement at the SDSS conference this morning is about the detection of streams of stars in the outer reaches of the Milky Way. You can read more about how observations and theory are coming together over here.

I’m currently in Chicago at a conference to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, more about which later. However, Gerry Gilmore from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge is speaking on his work on the smallest and faintest galaxies. While last - at least by luminosity - these objects are […]

“A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.” Full story here.