Showing posts with label Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Interstellar

Simulated gravitational lensing (black hole go...
Simulated gravitational lensing (black hole going past a background galaxy). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


I don't see this kind of interstellar human travel in my lifetime. But a thousand years from now, all bets will be off. Maybe even sooner.

Wrinkles In Spacetime: The Warped Astrophysics Of Interstellar
black holes, as the name suggests, are murder on light ..... Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, the computation overtaxed by the bendy bits of distortion caused by an Einsteinian effect called gravitational lensing. In the end the movie brushed up against 800 terabytes of data. “I thought we might cross the petabyte threshold on this one,” von Tunzelmann says. ..... “Chris really wanted us to sell the idea that the black hole is spherical,” Franklin says. “I said, ‘You know, it's going to look like a disk.’ The only thing you can see is the way it warps starlight.” Then Franklin started reading about accretion disks, agglomerations of matter that orbit some black holes. Franklin figured that he could use this ring of orbiting detritus to define the sphere. ...... “We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” Franklin says. “So rather than looking like Saturn's rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.” ..... Light, temporarily trapped around the black hole, produced an unexpectedly complex fingerprint pattern near the black hole's shadow. And the glowing accretion disk appeared above the black hole, below the black hole, and in front of it. “I never expected that,” Thorne says. ...... Thorne got a movie that teaches a mass audience some real, accurate science. But he also got something he didn't expect: a scientific discovery. ..... Thorne says he can get at least two published articles out of it. ...... haloed, spinning black hole and galaxy-spanning wormhole are not just metaphors

Monday, August 06, 2012

Lethargic Academia, Fast Media

Image representing Mendeley as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
Doctors are stereotypically smart people. But health care sucks when it comes to use of IT. How do you explain that? That also applies to academia. Academics are even more stereotypically smart than doctors. But they lag behind when it comes to use of IT. That is a disservice. Because service is affected.

Mendeley injects some pace into academia with fast, big data
managing documents online is a pretty busy space right now ... Mendeley .... the site has become a big hit with academics and researchers, signing up nearly 2 million members from universities and institutions all over the world, because it allows them to keep tabs on all the research papers, documents and files ..... “The biggest problem in academia is the long waiting time: it can take three to five years from the time you have done research to get it published — all the decisions you make in an academic career are based around that time lag” ....... Between them, the site’s members have uploaded some 260 million documents, representing around 65 million unique research papers and studies — around 50 percent larger than any of the existing commercial databases. By mining those documents and watching activity around them, Mendeley’s able to help institutions understand the trends as they emerge… not years afterwards. ...... get to life-changing discoveries faster .... ResearchGate ... Digital Science
Enhanced by Zemanta