Here's a neat little tidbit: a video off NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) showing a comet crashing into the Sun (or at least approaching it very closely and probably disintegrating) and the coronal mass ejection that follows...
Now, these two events are likely unrelated because comets are so small compared to the sun that they shouldn't have any effect on solar activity, so it's likely just a coincidence that these events occurred together. As Phil Plait from Bad Astronomy explains, the Sun is fairly active right now, with these coronal mass ejections happening all the time. It's also fairly common to see this special class of comets called "sungrazers" go very close to the Sun, sometimes crashing into it. So, if you have two events that are fairly common, chances are that eventually they'll happen at the same time.
Oh, and in case you were thinking that maybe we've finally seen real evidence of alien life, that flying saucer thing in the background is actually the planet Mercury... so no need to worry. You can read more about this event on the SOHO (SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory) website or on the Sungrazing Comets blog.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
Playing with wire (or One Down, Three To Go)
This here is my newest toy:
And this here is my newest obsession, the result of which is the first completed project from my Pay-It-Forward venture:
That's right, I've picked up yet another craft: hammered wire jewelry. I've done a fair bit of jewelry-making in the past (see here for some examples), but most of it has simply involved putting different elements together into an interesting completed object, not necessarily creating the elements that go into the finished project. The above is my first attempt at doing a bit of the latter, by bending wire into cool shapes and hammering it flat so it holds the cool shapes. I must admit that I was greatly influenced by some of the amazing artists on Etsy, especially Nicholas and Felice, who make the best ever shawl pins.
I started off my adventure with some simple sketching. I had the idea for the earrings first, and then I went on to make the necklace.
I learned a lot during the process of bending and smashing the wire. One of these things was that you shouldn't bang a piece of wire with beads on it... more likely than not, your beads will get smashed. I also learned that beads break easily if you try to force them onto a piece of wire that isn't straight. I think the most important lesson, however, was to look before you cut. To show off all my mistakes, here's my pile of failure:
Anyway, for a first attempt, I'm very happy with how they turned out. My mom, at least, who was the lucky recipient of this jewelry, seemed to like it, and now I've payed her back for the pretty dress she made me:
Here are some more pretty pretty pictures:
And this here is my newest obsession, the result of which is the first completed project from my Pay-It-Forward venture:
That's right, I've picked up yet another craft: hammered wire jewelry. I've done a fair bit of jewelry-making in the past (see here for some examples), but most of it has simply involved putting different elements together into an interesting completed object, not necessarily creating the elements that go into the finished project. The above is my first attempt at doing a bit of the latter, by bending wire into cool shapes and hammering it flat so it holds the cool shapes. I must admit that I was greatly influenced by some of the amazing artists on Etsy, especially Nicholas and Felice, who make the best ever shawl pins.
I started off my adventure with some simple sketching. I had the idea for the earrings first, and then I went on to make the necklace.
I learned a lot during the process of bending and smashing the wire. One of these things was that you shouldn't bang a piece of wire with beads on it... more likely than not, your beads will get smashed. I also learned that beads break easily if you try to force them onto a piece of wire that isn't straight. I think the most important lesson, however, was to look before you cut. To show off all my mistakes, here's my pile of failure:
Anyway, for a first attempt, I'm very happy with how they turned out. My mom, at least, who was the lucky recipient of this jewelry, seemed to like it, and now I've payed her back for the pretty dress she made me:
Here are some more pretty pretty pictures:
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Astronomy Wednesday: Weather on failed stars
I'm constantly amazed by the awesome things my colleagues are doing. It just goes to show that even graduate students can make really neat cutting edge discoveries in Astrophysics. The most recent star (haha... no pun intended) in our department is Jackie Radigan, a 5th-year PhD student working with Ray Jayawardhana. She studies weather on brown dwarfs, which are essentially failed stars, and has recently made some interesting discoveries, which you can read about here and here.
Artist rendering by Jon Lomberg
Brown dwarfs are astronomical objects that bridge the gap between massive gas giants, such as Jupiter, and the smallest stars. They range from about 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, and though they form in the same way as regular stars, where big clouds of gas collapse under the force of gravity into spheres, they are too small to fuse hydrogen into helium. When they first form, they can be almost as bright as real stars, but as they age, the heat from their formation dissipates and they become fainter and fainter. Because brown dwarfs are so faint, they're extremely difficult to detect and so the first one was only discovered in 1988. If you want to learn more, you can look into basic or advanced online astronomy classes.
Several of these objects have been discovered since, using large all-sky surveys that explore light in the near-infrared such as 2MASS. Jackie herself has been using the DuPont 2.5-m telescope located at Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile (pictured above). I'm a little bit envious that she gets to travel to this gorgeous location (since the furthest I've ever been sent on the school's dime is to Milwaukee for a conference... I should write about that sometime). Turns out that that this observatory is also where University of Toronto prof. Ian Shelton made the discovery of the famous Supernova 1987A. That's an interesting connection.
Anyway, as she tells it, Jackie was sitting in the airport on her way to Chile when she got an email from one of her collaborators with a plot showing a 30% change in brightness over 8 hours of the brown dwarf 2MASS 2139, which is approximately 47 light-years away. This variation is about 10 times larger than one would expect from magnetic features such as sunspots. She and her collaborators think that this change is due to a huge storm on the surface of the brown dwarf that blocks out some of the light coming from the brown dwarf's surface, something like a supercharged version of Jupiter's Great Red Spot (pictured above). The change in brightness comes about as the brown dwarf rotates on its own axis. With more detailed observations, that is, with higher resolution and a broader frequency range, they'll be able to make sure that their model is correct.
It will be very interesting to see what sort of follow-up results Jackie and her collaborators come up with over the next several months. A paper about this research will be submitted to the Astrophysical Journal very soon, but you can read her preliminary article here.
Artist rendering by Jon Lomberg
Brown dwarfs are astronomical objects that bridge the gap between massive gas giants, such as Jupiter, and the smallest stars. They range from about 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, and though they form in the same way as regular stars, where big clouds of gas collapse under the force of gravity into spheres, they are too small to fuse hydrogen into helium. When they first form, they can be almost as bright as real stars, but as they age, the heat from their formation dissipates and they become fainter and fainter. Because brown dwarfs are so faint, they're extremely difficult to detect and so the first one was only discovered in 1988. If you want to learn more, you can look into basic or advanced online astronomy classes.
Several of these objects have been discovered since, using large all-sky surveys that explore light in the near-infrared such as 2MASS. Jackie herself has been using the DuPont 2.5-m telescope located at Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile (pictured above). I'm a little bit envious that she gets to travel to this gorgeous location (since the furthest I've ever been sent on the school's dime is to Milwaukee for a conference... I should write about that sometime). Turns out that that this observatory is also where University of Toronto prof. Ian Shelton made the discovery of the famous Supernova 1987A. That's an interesting connection.
Anyway, as she tells it, Jackie was sitting in the airport on her way to Chile when she got an email from one of her collaborators with a plot showing a 30% change in brightness over 8 hours of the brown dwarf 2MASS 2139, which is approximately 47 light-years away. This variation is about 10 times larger than one would expect from magnetic features such as sunspots. She and her collaborators think that this change is due to a huge storm on the surface of the brown dwarf that blocks out some of the light coming from the brown dwarf's surface, something like a supercharged version of Jupiter's Great Red Spot (pictured above). The change in brightness comes about as the brown dwarf rotates on its own axis. With more detailed observations, that is, with higher resolution and a broader frequency range, they'll be able to make sure that their model is correct.
It will be very interesting to see what sort of follow-up results Jackie and her collaborators come up with over the next several months. A paper about this research will be submitted to the Astrophysical Journal very soon, but you can read her preliminary article here.
Monday, October 3, 2011
The cutest octopus in the world
Joanna, over at the Happy Seamstress, has been extremely busy making extremely adorable knitting patterns purely for our enjoyment. One of these is Octie. Here is an army of the friendly cephalopods that Joanna knit up herself:
This pattern is for sale as a pdf on the Happy Seamstress website (only $1.49! cheap!), but Joanna was also selling Octie kits at Fan Expo. They came in five colours of this very soft DK-weight superwash merino with different eye colours and more than enough stuffing. She also included knitting needles and a darning needle, so you really didn't need anything else to get started. And the kits just looked so perfect all lined up on the table.
The Happy Seamstress will be selling these kits at future craft fairs in the Toronto area, so stay tuned if want to pick one up! She also has some other super cute patterns up her sleeve, so watch out for those too.
As for my own version, I decided to forgo the button eyes and instead try out my brand new toy: a needle felting tool!
It turned out quite well, if I say so myself.
And Octie is also quite fond of sitting on my head.
P.S. All photos by Joanna.
This pattern is for sale as a pdf on the Happy Seamstress website (only $1.49! cheap!), but Joanna was also selling Octie kits at Fan Expo. They came in five colours of this very soft DK-weight superwash merino with different eye colours and more than enough stuffing. She also included knitting needles and a darning needle, so you really didn't need anything else to get started. And the kits just looked so perfect all lined up on the table.
The Happy Seamstress will be selling these kits at future craft fairs in the Toronto area, so stay tuned if want to pick one up! She also has some other super cute patterns up her sleeve, so watch out for those too.
As for my own version, I decided to forgo the button eyes and instead try out my brand new toy: a needle felting tool!
It turned out quite well, if I say so myself.
And Octie is also quite fond of sitting on my head.
P.S. All photos by Joanna.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Astronomy Friday: Faster than Light Neutrinos?
The big thing in Physics news lately has been the results from the OPERA experiment which showed that these sub-atomic particles called neutrinos were travelling slightly faster than photons, the massless particles that light is made of, would have. This result is especially interesting because according to Einstein's theory of Relativity, nothing is supposed to be able to travel faster than the speed of light. You can read about these results all over the internet (here and here, for example), but the basic idea is that scientists at CERN shot some very high-energy neutrinos through the Alps and into a detector, which measures how long it took them to get there. What was found was that the neutrinos reached the detector 60 nanoseconds faster than they would have if they were traveling at the speed of light.
It might be useful to talk a bit about what neutrinos actually are. These weakly-interacting, neutral elementary particles were first proposed to exist by Wolfgang Pauli in the 1930s to help conserve energy and momentum in a process called beta decay, but weren't detected until 1956 in an experiment using beta-capture, where an anti-neutrino and proton combine to make a neutron and positron. Nowadays, we routinely detect neutrinos coming from the sun and from distant supernova explosions. This little particle was central to a scientific conundrum called the "Solar Neutrino Problem" where only about a third of the number of neutrinos expected to be coming from the sun were detected. This was solved by the discovery that neutrinos have mass (though a very small one), and come in three different types which they can oscillate between at random.
The layout of the OPERA experiment.
Since neutrinos are supposed to have mass, the results from the OPERA experiment are mildly disturbing. Relativity is founded on the principle that objects with mass cannot travel at the speed of light, much less faster than it, and if neutrinos can, in fact, travel faster than the speed of light, then we would have to seriously change all our ideas about spacetime and gravity. Fortunately, this is a very preliminary result, and there is a good chance that it's wrong. Not that the scientists performing the experiment were bad at their job or anything, but there are many sources of error that might pop up. As someone once said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." That means that physicists probably aren't going to take these results seriously until another experiment can verify them.
I'll certainly be keeping an eye on it... already there are a flurry of papers on the arXiv attempting to explain the OPERA results. If you want to read the original paper, check it out here.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
What a beardo...
Beards are the next big thing. Seriously, have you seen this shirt? The boyfriend actually has one so large he can hide small children in it (he was at "professorly" last time I checked). Believe me, I have serious beard envy. So, it only makes sense that The Happy Seamstress should design a pattern of one for those of us who aren't capable of growing our own. If you want to be a beardo, just like me, go check out The Happy Seamstress Beard Knitting Pattern.
It only made sense, of course, for me to take multiple silly pictures of myself wearing a beard. This one makes me look like Jesus:
And this one like a... well, I'm not quite sure, but aviators look pretty neat with a beard:
And here I look like a trucker with a, well, um, a fascinator? And cleavage?
If you want to see more pictures of weirdos in beardos, check out this blog post.
On a completely unrelated note, I think I'm gonna be a lumberjack for Halloween.
It only made sense, of course, for me to take multiple silly pictures of myself wearing a beard. This one makes me look like Jesus:
And this one like a... well, I'm not quite sure, but aviators look pretty neat with a beard:
And here I look like a trucker with a, well, um, a fascinator? And cleavage?
If you want to see more pictures of weirdos in beardos, check out this blog post.
On a completely unrelated note, I think I'm gonna be a lumberjack for Halloween.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Fun things from the INTERNET!
I love cake, and I love crafts, and when the two come together in a perfect sugary package, well, I just can't resist sharing the awesomeness with the rest of the world. If someone gave me this cake for my birthday, I think I'd probably fall in love with them instantly:
This one would be ok too:
To see more, check out Cake Wrecks.
As for other cool internetty things, one of my favourite all-time crafters, Debbie Stoller has posted some really cool and well-done knitting videos. The first one teaches the absolute beginner how to cast on and start knitting, and the other two talk about lace, one explaining the yarnover and the other how to do decreases.
If you want to get a detailed review, I wrote one over on the Happy Seamstress, and in the meantime, here's a screenshot to whet your appetite (I love that orange background!):
This one would be ok too:
To see more, check out Cake Wrecks.
As for other cool internetty things, one of my favourite all-time crafters, Debbie Stoller has posted some really cool and well-done knitting videos. The first one teaches the absolute beginner how to cast on and start knitting, and the other two talk about lace, one explaining the yarnover and the other how to do decreases.
If you want to get a detailed review, I wrote one over on the Happy Seamstress, and in the meantime, here's a screenshot to whet your appetite (I love that orange background!):
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)