Scientists

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 ❯

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 ❯

I am now sitting in the control room of the Very Large Telescope. The night is quiet. The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) is currently in use, and our unit telescope (UT2, Kueyen, the Moon) is busy. This gives me some time to write a few lines. The site is wonderful, as usual. Soon I am going to take my small Zeiss binocular up to the telescopes platform, and have a look to the Milky Way. Always astonishing. While recalling what happened during the past weeks, something I had almost forgotten resurfaced. In fact, before leaving... read more ❯