Post SM4 data release images here

HST Servicing Mission 4 Early Release Objects Data Products

NASA held a press conference on Wednesday September 9 at 11:00 am EDT to highlight the results of the recent Hubble Servicing Mission. After the press conference, data from all non-proprietary programs that have executed since the servicing mission are available to the community. See a complete set of press-release materials at http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/25

Kepler First Light Images

Kepler first light images after the link.




NASA - Kepler Images

Weber bars might not be lame after all.

LIGO should take note: it could be that a supernova explosion that isn't quite spherically symmetric amplifies gravitational waves amplitude by a factor of 10,000; making it possible to detect them using a much less sophisticated (and less expensive) equipment.   Something to remember the next time you feel tempted laugh at a guy with a Weber bar.


the physics arXiv blog » Blog Archive » Were gravitational waves first detected in 1987?

But get this: the assymetry can enhance the waves by a factor of 10^4.

He also points out that SN1987A is aspherical in exactly the way that might create this enhancement. So if SN1987A generated gravitational waves, Weber would have been perfectly able to detect them.

Qadir concludes: “The claim of Weber to have observed gravitational waves from [SN1987A] needs to be re-assessed”.

By all accounts, Weber was a careful experimenter who got something of a rough deal for his efforts

How are a thermometer and a stopwatch alike?

Here is a good review article about the nature of time. 

Is time an illusion? - physics-math - 19 January 2008 - New Scientist

With quantum mechanics rewritten in time-free form, combining it with general relativity seems less daunting, and a universe in which time is fundamental seems less likely. But if time doesn't exist, why do we experience it so relentlessly? Is it all an illusion?

Yes, says Rovelli, but there is a physical explanation for it. For more than a decade, he has been working with mathematician Alain Connes at the College de France in Paris to understand how a time-free reality could give rise to the appearance of time. Their idea, called the thermal time hypothesis, suggests that time emerges as a statistical effect, in the same way that temperature emerges from averaging the behaviour of large groups of molecules