Every ten years or so, the US astronomy community, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, produces a road map for the next decade’s research in astronomy. The 2010 version, chaired by Roger Blandford, was just released, and astronomer/bloggers have already weighed in: Steinn Sigurðsson and Julianne Dalcanton (in two separate posts on the ground- and space-based recommendations), along with the UK’s Andy Lawrence and Peter Coles have already dissected the report, but I’ll repeat the headlines: the Large-Scale Synoptic Telescope (LSST) is the top ground-based project, and WFIRST is the top-rated satellite — essentially the JDEM mission,...
Posted by Andrew on August 15, 2010 11:05 PM
No time for a full blog post, but I wanted to point out the results of the STFC Consultation, now available. Some of my favorite projects like AstroGrid seem to have not fared too well (the consultation panel rated it highly, but PPAN, responsible for the final ranks, disagreed). Nonetheless, Imperial Astrophysics projects like Planck, Herschel, Scuba II, UKIDSS, LISA Pathfinder and XMM Newton appear to have survived the cut. However, It is important to stress that these reports are not the final conclusions of the Programmatic Review. These conclusions will be reached by STFC Council using these reports to...
Posted by Andrew on June 17, 2008 2:21 PM
Congratulations to David Dawe, who passed his thesis exam today for his work on “The Dynamics of and Gravitational Radiation from Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei”. His research starts from the premise that most galaxies harbor very massive black holes (each millions or billions times the mass of the sun). We also know that the galaxies we see in the Universe today were formed by the merging of smaller galaxies over the many billions of years since the big bang — hence, we expect their individual “parent” black holes to fall to the center of the “daughter” galaxy and,...
Posted by Andrew on January 29, 2007 10:09 PM
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