On Monday an ANU press release went out and all hell broke loose. Well I did three radio interviews and made it onto PM, Radio National’s evening news which is quite an achievement aparrently.
My 15 minutes of fame is now over. There are a bunch of links to how my story got pasted over the internet on my PhD publications page.
It even made it into Nature’s research highlights!
Our team crashed back to earth with a fairly lame defeat on Saturday. It was a freezing day and we scored a paltry 170ish, of which I only contributed 19. I also broke my bat somewhat thanks to a series of excellent yorkers from the guy who eventually bolwed me, doh!
For the record:
Running stats:
batting total: 56
average: 28
catches dropped: 1
catches gloved: 0
byes: about 10
bruises: 3
times fainted: 0
This was the first game in many years…
It was a terribly windy day down at the Mint, about 30 degrees and a bit of a rough day for my re-introduction to the classic game that is cricket.
With our team batting first, I had to wait until the final ten overs to have a hit. I managed a thigh bruising 37 not out before we had to stop for a spot of lunch (which I neglected to bring)
Already tired and hungry, we went out to field, with me keeping wickets for the first time in about ten years. My aim was to let less than 12 byes past, that allowing for three lots of four byes. Instead I kept it to a measly four, though I think the umpires missed a few. I almost had a clean catching slate, but failed to glove a pretty simple chance keeping up to an offspinner.
Overall I was pretty happy with the game, I didn’t faint after approximately 240 crouches and could still walk the next day (though the stairs were a little difficult).
Running stats:
batting total: 37
average: 37
catches dropped: 1
catches gloved: 0
byes: 4
bruises: 2
times fainted: 0
The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have put out a press release relating to our recently accepted ’super-Earth’ paper (astro-ph/0609140, ApJL). It’s also on Universe today which is very cool.
This blog has rewritten what happens and makes some good points about what a super-Earth really is, and about disk masses which do have a wide range. Our model uses a disk that is reasonably massive, for this and dynamical reasons we don’t expect planets much larger than ~5 Earth masses to form in this manner.
There are even a few sites I’ve never heard of that have the release: Spaceflight Now, and Space Daily.
It seems a tad unfortunate that today a light plane crashed into an apartment building in Manhattan. It’s probably best when press releases go out on ‘no news’ days… (because this is obviously front page news)
In case you’re wondering, below is an artists image of a super-Earth, an icy planet several times further away from a dim ‘red dwarf’ star than the Earth is from the Sun.
This is the coolest whiteboard ever! The guy doesn’t seem all that excited about it unfortunately.
If you remember spending hours playing that old school game The Incredible Machine then you’ll love this…
and Trevor Mallard…
Hannah, Michelle and I marked the start of summer by spending as much time in my car as we did on the beach in the first trip to the coast of the season. A lazy two hour drive to Batemans Bay and several hours spent lying in the sun, followed by the two hour return was a great way to while away the public holiday that was Monday.
This time of year will always be dear to me, since it marks my birthday, the beginning of nice weather and the afl grand final. We spent a beautiful Saturday inside glued to a(nother) close run nail-biter between two teams from places other than Victoria, where the game originated.
In the end the West Coast won, by a single point, making something like a total of 12 points total difference scored between the two teams in their last several encounters.
We made it outside between quarters to kick around a small McDonalds footy and had a BBQ after.
Our first paper is about how the snow-line in a protoplanetary disk can move due to evolution of the central star, and how it helps the formation of super-Earth mass planets around M Dwarfs. Kennedy, Kenyon & Bromley (2006) uses a simple disk evolution model, with which we are starting to link formation of planets with that of their parent stars.
As a low-mass red dwarf is born it contracts to its main sequence size over hundreds of millions of years. This contraction limits the radiating area of the star, and so it becomes fainter, and the surrounding disk in which planets form becomes cooler.
The cooling of the star means that the distance where ices condense (known as the ’snow line’) moves inward. In the same way that it is easier to build a snowman above the snow line on a mountain, the presence of ices in the planet forming disk makes it easier to build planets. These planets can be several times larger than our Earth, and are largely made up of ice, roughly similar in structure to Neptune.
The paper had an associated press release, and subsequently generated a bunch of media attention
ANU Press release | CfA Press Release | Uni of Utah press release | Universe Today | Spaceflight Now | Space Daily | Centauri Dreams | PhysOrg | Unexplained Mysteries | Astrobiology Magazine | SciFi Source Book | AstroFind.net | Science Alert | ABC Radio National | ABC Canberra | Nature
The paper can be found through the NASA Astrophysics Data System. For more information on my PhD have a look at the main PhD page.
