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GLAST Makes its First Light Public !!!
This just in: J.D. Harrington from NASA, and Rob Gutro from the Goddard Space Flight Center inform us that NASA will announce the first results from the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope today....
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Asteroid 2008 TC3 Hits Sudan
An asteroid with a size of a few meters in diameter hit the Earth a few hours ago. The news is reported by the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, circular 8990. Below is the expected trajectory...
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The moon occults Venus this evening!
A very nice conjunction between bright objects in the sky tonight: at 17.20 the crescent moon will occult Venus, while passing very close to Jupiter. Do not miss the event if you at all can, even a...
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Exceptional acqua alta foreseen in Venice again
Nine days ago Venice withstood the assault of an exceptional surge of sea water, the fourth highest in recent history. Water reached the level of +1.56 meters above average sea level at 11.15AM,...
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Selected holiday links
Being too lazy to generate content while relaxing after a day on the ski slopes in Padola, I am offering you a few selected links that are worth a visit. Not all about physics, and not all recent...
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Scientific wishes for 2009
I wish 2009 will bring an answer to a few important questions: Can LHC run ? Can LHC run at 14 TeV ? Will I get tenure ? Are multi-muons a background ? Are the Pamela/ATIC signals a prologue of a new...
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Watch the Quadrantid meteors tonight!
Tonight the Earth will cross the core of a filament of debris orbiting our Sun since the passage of a comet in the year 1490. This will give rise to a spectacular shower of meteors, the Quadrantids. I...
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Black holes, the winged seeds of our Universe
From Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1819), one of my favourite poems: [...]O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a...
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A naked-eye comet to brighten our nights next month!
Comet Lulin (C/2007 N3), discovered by a team of Chinese and Taiwanese astronomers, is approaching the inner solar system these days. It is currently shining at 8th magnitude and it shows both a tail...
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Black holes hype does not decay
While the creation of black holes in the high-energy proton-proton collisions that LHC will hopefully start providing this fall is not granted, and while the scientific establishment is basically...
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CMS and extensive air showers: ideas for an experiment
The paper by Thomas Gehrmann and collaborators I cited a few days ago has inspired me to have a closer look at the problem of understanding the features of extensive air showers – the phenomenon of a...
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What’s hot around
For lack of interesting topics to blog about, I refer you to a short list of bloggers who have produced readable material in the last few days: The always witty Resonaances has produced an informative...
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Guest post: Marco Vedovato, “Jupiter: a little analysis about the GRS-LRS...
Marco Vedovato, in his daily life, is a structural engineer. As an amateur astronomer, when his children allow him to do this, his main interest is the atmosphere of Jupiter, the giant planet of the...
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Comet Lulin is a naked-eye object!
Comet Lulin (C/2007 N3) is approaching the minimum distance from our planet – the conjunction will occur on February 24th at a distance of 61 million kilometers- and is already a naked-eye object in...
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Neutrino Telescopes XIII
The conference “Neutrino Telescopes” has arrived at its XIII edition. It is a very nicely organized workshop, held in Venice every year towards the end of the winter or the start of the spring. For me...
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Neutrino Telescopes day 2 notes
The second day of the “Neutrino Conference XIII” in Venice was dedicated to, well, neutrino telescopes. I have written down in stenographical fashion some of the things I heard, and I offer them to...
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Ten photons per hour
Every working day I walk for about a mile to my physics department in Padova from the train station in the morning. I find it is a healthy habit, but I sometimes fear it also in some sense is a waste...
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NeuTel 09: Oscar Blanch Bigas, update on Auger limits on the diffuse flux of...
With this post I continue the series of short reports on the talks I heard at the Neutrino Telescopes 2009 conference, held three weeks ago in Venice. The Pierre Auger Observatory is a huge (3000 km^2)...
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Post summary – April 2009
As the less distracted among you have already figured out, I have permanently moved my blogging activities to www.scientificblogging.com. The reasons for the move are explained here. Since I know that...
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ICHEP blog
Just one line here to mention that since May there is a new blog out there – a temporary blog that will cover the end of July event in Paris – the International Conference on High Energy Physics -, how...
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