It seems yesterday night and tonight are fairly special as far as astronomy goes. The two brightest planets Jupiter and Venus will be incredibly close together, and will be easily visible during the night, providing those clouds manage to stay out of our way. Check out the article for some more information.
Monthly Archives: March 2012
Line of Sight from Earth to Mars
Here is a cool animation showing the line of sight from Earth to Mars in the Ptolemaic and Copernican models. It’s a pretty cool little animation, so check it out if your interested.
Report from “Circumstellar Dynamics at High Resolution” conference.
Carol Jones and PhD candidate Robbie Halonen attended the “Circumstellar Dynamics at High Resolution” conference in Fox do Iguacu, Brazil, from Feb. 27 to Mar. 2, 2012.
Carol gave a presentation titled “Circumstellar Disk Models: unraveling the mysteries of Be star disks“, while Robbie’s presentation was titled “Probing the Circumstellar Disk Structure of Classical Be Stars with Polarimetry“.
Jan Cami ‘Space Buckyballs’ video from the SETI INSTITUTE, Feb. 24, 2012
Jan Cami visited the SETI INSTITUTE on Feb. 24th and gave a presentation titled ‘Space Buckyballs‘.
A conveniently split screen Youtube video of this talk will be available at the Seti Weekly Lecture page shortly, and is available immediately on the Western Physics and Astronomy media archives page.
NEW – “Science Here and Now” SERIES – First presentation by Dr. Paul Wiegert
The London Public Library and the Faculty of Science at Western are excited to bring you a new series of talks on all things Science. The first presentation will be by Prof. Paul Wiegert from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Western Ontario. Join us as he takes us on a tour of the Solar System, with detours through 2012 doomsday scenarios and why Pluto is no longer a planet, in an evening of exploration of the smallest members of our Solar System: the asteroids!
Free!
2 hours free validated parking in
Citi Plaza during Library hours.
Jokes from the desk of a grad student: Vol 4 #westernu
One day, all of the world’s famous physicists decided to get together for a tea luncheon. Fortunately, the doorman was a grad student, and able to observe some of the guests…
* Everyone gravitated toward Newton, but he just kept moving around at a constant velocity and showed no reaction.
* Einstein thought it was a relatively good time.
* Coulomb got a real charge out of the whole thing.
* Cavendish wasn’t invited, but he had the balls to show up anyway.
* Cauchy, being the only mathematician there, still managed to integrate well with everyone.
* Thompson enjoyed the plum pudding.
* Pauli came late, but was mostly excluded from things, so he split.
* Pascal was under too much pressure to enjoy himself.
* Ohm spent most of the time resisting Ampere’s opinions on current events.
* Hamilton went to the buffet tables exactly once.
* Volt thought the social had a lot of potential.
* Hilbert was pretty spaced out for most of it.
* Heisenberg may or may not have been there.
* The Curies were there and just glowed the whole time.
* van der Waals forced himeself to mingle.
* Wien radiated a colourful personality.
* Millikan dropped his Italian oil dressing.
* de Broglie mostly just stood in the corner and waved.
* Hollerith liked the hole idea.
* Stefan and Boltzman got into some hot debates.
* Everyone was attracted to Tesla’s magnetic personality.
* Compton was a little scatter-brained at times.
* Bohr ate too much and got atomic ache.
* Watt turned out to be a powerful speaker.
* Hertz went back to the buffet table several times a minute.
* Faraday had quite a capacity for food.
* Oppenheimer got bombed.
Supernova 1987A Brightening! #westernu
The most famous supernova ever, 1987A, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
The link below shows the brightening of material (knots) in the ring surrounding the remnant over time.
This occurs as an outward-moving blast wave collides with the ring material and shock-heats it.
See the time-lapse by clicking on the image at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120227.html
Animation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfiwDXv6g0Q
3D-Graphics [INTERACTIVE!] in a PDF File? #westernu
Have you ever wanted to embed a 3-dimensional graphic into your report that can be rotated, zoomed, and manipulated in almost any way imaginable?
Now you can! Using the movie15 package, its as simple as adding a normal Latex figure [almost].
[See http://www.astrobetter.com/ post on March 7th]
Physics & Astronomy Annual CAP Lecture – THURS. 22nd March – DR. JAN KYCIA, U Waterloo
NOTE unusual time and location.
Western University
DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY
2012 Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) LECTURE TOUR
Date: THURSDAY, 22nd March 2012
Time: 3:30 p.m.
Location: Biological & Geological Sciences Room 0153
Dr. Jan Kycia
Department of Physics & Astronomy
University of Waterloo
“Magnetic Monopoles in Spin Ice”
ABSTRACT
It has recently been found that magnetic monopoles may exist at low temperatures (temperature less than 1 Kelvin) in an unusual type of magnetic material—spin Ice. Spin ice in itself is interesting since the magnetic moments behave in a somewhat similar way to the ions in water ice. At low temperatures, it is proposed that defects in the spin orientation can be seen as magnetic monopoles. In this talk I will introduce the physics connected with this spin ice and monopoles and describe experiments, including those done in my lab, on this system.
educational milk
Here is a photo of a carton of “Perfect Formula” milk, which is produced by some physics-friendly cows in Hong Kong.
My favorite is the inverse-power force law. The other formulae are fairly “standard”, but seeing the inverse power law on this carton suggests to me that the designer might actually have taken a physics course at some time. And the milk is good, too!