Astronomy in Culture

After the Great Debate, I had a chat with Pavel Kroupa. Here follow some quotes from one of his emails: "The Event was interesting, but it is clear that rational argumentation will not bring L-CDM followers into thinking otherwise. It is like with the searches for DM: if you do not find it then it obviously has other properties. And so our Local Volume (8 Mpc) and Local Group (about 2Mpc) cannot be used to test LCDM.   Well, if you subscribe to this, then we can just as well stop arguing and do more sensible things.... read more ❯

The Great Debate is over. In the next days you will be able to see it here. Although I had plenty of urgent things to do, I could not resist to follow the live blog by Marcel Pawlowski and Andreas Küpper, who kept reporting and answering questions for the whole duration of the debate. It was an interesting experience. From what I can judge, the presentation by Simon White was very relaxed, and did not touch upon possible alternative scenarios. After a general introduction on Dark Matter, White went through all evidences, including the famous Bullet Cluster. One of the... read more ❯

Today is THE day. Marcel Pawlowski just informed me that there will be a live blog, reporting on the White/Kroupa debate in Bonn. You can have a look, for instance, at what they already wrote here. The debate will be filmed by a local TV, and later on the footage will be made available online. Check the Dark-Matter-Crisis site after the debate. read more ❯

Tomorrow Pavel Kroupa and Simon White will publicly debate on Dark Matter. The Colloquium is going to be held at the University of Bonn, in the context of the Bethe Lectures. As far as I understand from Pavel, it will be videotaped, but there will be no live broadcast. For your convenience, here is a summary of the event: The subject of this months Bethe Colloquium concerns a question at the interface of cosmology, astrophysics and elementary particle physics: the possible existence of Dark Matter. The existence of Dark Matter is the most prominent proposal to account for the discrepancy between measurements... read more ❯

Sitting in Stockholm’s Airport I try to rap up these last three days. I must say everything went much above expectations. I met a few remarkable people, Tor Nørretranders and Abraham Haim in the first place. But also a group of young lighting designers with an open minded approach. I was surprised by the number of times natural light was mentioned while talking about night environment. And the need for making a step backwards, the need of getting back in touch with darkness. Although I had made my point very clear on the first day, I had one more occasion yesterday,... read more ❯

I am just back from a very nice dinner with Tor Norretranders in Stockholm. Impressive personality, vast culture. And, most surprising of all, with a deep knowledge of Astronomy. Ok, now you might ask who this guy is, what on earth I am doing in Stockholm, and why you should be interested in knowing this. Ok, let me give a bit of background. As a consequence of my talk on light pollution and Astronomy in the CIE conference in Vienna, last March, I got invited to give a one hour lecture to the Light Symposium 2010, here in Stockholm. The most... read more ❯

Before I start getting done with the re-submission of a paper on the atmospheric transparency above Cerro Paranal, let me share with you the following, which you might find interesting. You certainly know that one of the key constituents in current cosmology is dark matter, first postulated in 1934 by one of the most prominent astronomers of last century, Fritz Zwicky (this reminds me that my master thesis advisor, prof. Roberto Barbon, was a post-doc of Zwicky, at Caltec). As the name says, this material is, well, dark. So that it cant' be seen directly. What you can see is its... read more ❯

Back from a fast dinner. I have seen a few of the workshop participants. But this short post is about something else, still connected to astronomy (or should I write astrology?), though. I am reading "The Lost Symbol", by Dan Brown. Interesting, although it shares many of the features already seen in Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code. In the initial part of the book, one reads "Caput Draconis in Virgo". Does anybody know what this means? I have surfed the net, but there seems to be some confusion about it. Most likely Caput Draconis does not refer... read more ❯

A view of the desert from Paranal's residencia This is now the 8th night of this run at the Very Large Telescope. I have been observing at Kueyen, the second 8.2m unit telescope (UT2 for friends). At the moment it is equipped with three spectrographs, UVES, FLAMES, and X-Shooter. All nights where good, very stable and quiet. But tonight the wind is blowing strong, from the north. So strong that we had to close down after some hours of operations. The unit telescopes are huge, 400 tons,  earthquake-proof metallic structures, but still you can move them... read more ❯