Using the panorama software Hugin I made another balloon picture. It’s rather more detailed than the last…
Monthly Archive for April, 2008
So I thought it was pretty bad when I got junk email about global warming being caused by sunspots. However, that pales in comparison when I hear that someone managed to get an article in the Melbourne Age. The sun is at the end of one of it’s 11 year sunspot cycles, true, but the effect of changes in the insolation due to changes in this cycle are miniscule, about 0.07% according to these guys. At least this guy has a sense of humour… and sums things up pretty well.
Anyway, if the sunspot cycle is 11 years, why haven’t I had an ice age in my lifetime?
Right now there is a hot air balloon festival here in Canberra. I had a nice view of it from afar on my way to school this morning.
Here’s a clever intro to a snowboard video. Well I think so since the site is in French…
Here is a neat piece of art that uses the sun’s movement to display a poem over the course of a day. The idea could be extended to make a timekeeping device, one that even tells you the time of year with a bit of thought!
We have received the excellent news that my third paper has been accepted to ApJ. The paper is about possible mechanisms by which Earth-Neptune (low-)mass planets can reach very close orbits. Using standard models we find trends that might be found by future discoveries, and think about what we can learn from them.
Discovery of low-mass planets (which don’t have large Juipter-like atmospheres) will be particularly interesting, because they may be habitable due to (maybe) having solid surfaces. Unfortunately planets are much easier to find when they’re orbiting very close to their parent stars, and too hot to be habitable. Therefore, if they exist, the first decent sample of low mass planets will be discovered in short-period, close-in orbits.
It’s unlikely that planets in these orbits would form there, because it’s hard to form anything at all close to the star. Therefore, from a formation point of view, there are two main ways these planets
could get to close-in orbits after forming further out: by scattering off other planets, or by migrating through the disk out of which they form. In our paper, we show that planets that scatter will be hard to detect, and that migration is a better mechanism.
At present, very little is known about migration of planets in the “super-Earth” mass range, so discovery of these planets should tell us something about how migration works. Alternatively, we might not find any low-mass planets in short-period orbits, which would tell us that migration doesn’t work how current wisdom says. So either way we learn something!
The paper is posted on astro-ph for now, until the journal publishes it.
Check this cool environmental video out, very cute
Over the weekend Michelle and I took a drive up to my uncle’s place for a visit. He lives near Kew which is about 7 hours drive north. We were treated to great food and wine, and had a good ol’ family time.
On the way up we stopped where the road crosses the Hawkesbury River, and saw lots of big spiders.
We went for a walk on the beach out from Laurieton, very nice in the evening…
and as we watched the sun set a few dolphins came into the bay as an added bonus!
The rest of the photos are here.
Thanks to a nice referees report, and some simulations finally finishing, I submitted a revised version of our “Hot super-Earths” paper this morning. Hopefully all will be well and that will be number three!
