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.

Imagine being in our solar system, standing just where the Earth is now, roughly four and a half billion years ago. Around you would be the detritus of star formation, left over material forming a protoplanetary disk from which the planets are coalescing. Understanding just how this disk of dust and gas became the eight [...]

I caught up with Marc Seigar who was talking yesterday about a new way to measure the mass of black holes at the centre of spiral galaxies. You can watch the interview below :

Camera : Lance Walters
Sound : Preston Gibson
Editing : Lance Walters and Preston Gibson
Reporter : Chris Lintott

The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) : An Observational Legacy for Studying Galaxy Evolution
Prof Marc Dickinson
The following was written during the final plenary talk of the first day at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in St Louis. I was going to post as we went along, but the wireless connection in the meeting room [...]

I’m sitting at the back of the second press conference of the day, desperately swapping between laptops to run the Astronomy Cast Live feed, catch up with press releases from the speakers and to write this.
Currently, we’re listening to the announcement of the smallest extrasolar planet to date, a 3 Earth Mass planet orbiting a [...]

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One of the most intriguing of the morning press releases is now being described by Marc Seigar from the University of Arkansas, who has been trying to weigh the supermassive black holes that lurk at the centre of galaxies. Ideally, you’d do this by measuring the speed of the gas rotating around it, but that’s [...]

Distracted this morning by driving past the St Louis arch, I’ve made it into the convention centre for the first full day of the American Astronomical Society meeting. Currently, I’m sitting in the press room next to a rapidly diminishing plate of delicious local breakfast food trying to work out what on Earth we’re going [...]