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 my Imperial College Astrophysics colleagues Steve Warren and Dan Mortlock who have been in the news lately for their discovery of the coldest brown dwarf yet found. A brown dwarf is not quite a star, but a ball of gas just too light to force its hydrogen gas into nuclear fusion reactions. Instead it glows weakly as the gas slowly condenses, releasing gravitational potential energy in the form of heat. Brown dwarfs have a mass between roughly ten times the mass of Jupiter, below which they can form a rocky core and are classed as a planet, and...
Posted by Andrew on June 6, 2007 11:00 PM
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