A 2011 article for Physics Today about public engagement for science.

The BOSS project of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is exploiting the Lyman-α forest in distant quasars to make a 3D map of neutral hydrogen in the early universe.

The SMC is one of the best studied galaxies in the sky, but there is still plenty to learn from the stars far from its center.

Bulges are a familar feature of spiral galaxies, but bulges seem to come in many shapes and sizes. Studying bulges can provide clues for the role of galaxy mergers in the history of the universe.

If you see a bunch of galaxies together in a cluster, are their orientations and orbits random or do they align?

The SAO ds9 image viewer is one of the most widely used tools in astronomy. Read more to learn the basics of ds9 and check out some of the advanced features.

Compositional investigations of comets have suggested that they are "icy dirtballs," so would it be possible to detect traces of hydrogen and oxygen if they were flung from one stellar system into ...

Each galaxy in the sky will probably produce just one or two supernovae in our lifetimes, so you have to be lucky to spot one. But if you happen to be observing hundreds of thousands of galaxies a...

This morning I was delighted to receive an email from Avi Loeb, who's paper on the (far) future of astronomy [we discussed yesterday](https://astroph.

Update: you can read Avi Loeb and Freeman Dyson's discussion of this issue in [our latest post](https://astroph.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/avi-loeb-and-

Supernovae are vitally important in the chemical and dynamical evolution of galaxies, but we don't yet fully understand the physics that produce these explosions. This new work simulates the turbu...

Incorporating all the effects relevant to star formation into accurate simulations of the interstellar medium is a major frontier in astrophysics. These authors start to tackle the effects of chem...

Understanding the uncertainties involved in the techniques used to detect exoplanets is an important aspect of the search for life beyond the Earth. What role could phenomenon like sunspots play ...

Assuming every star in a cluster has the same age and metallicity is a powerful simplification, but it may not be true.

A new cluster of galaxies discovered in the early universe using the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (SZ) effect could have important consequences for studying galaxy evolution and cosmology.

The general picture of galaxy formation was hashed out in the 1960s and 70s. In the decades since, countless lines of theoretical and observational evidence have suggested additional mechanisms wh...

In my [last post](https://astroph.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/formation-of-cold-filamentary-structure-from-wind-blown-superbubbles/), I wrote about an interesting application of hydrodynamical simulat...

We often think of galaxies as collections of stars, but this simple picture omits (among other things) the fascinating interstellar medium (ISM)!

A September 2010 Linux Format Magazine article about Hugin, the tool for stitching panoramic photographs.

A 2008 ExtremeTech article about the open source Neuros OSD media player hardware.