- A group of researchers around Philip Humphrey and David Buote from the University of Irvine in California have determined the mass of a supermassive black hole from the peak temperature of its gas emissions, as a press release from UC Irvine reported on Wednesday. The results obtained with their method match quite well with the results obtained by studying the motion of surrounding visible matter. You find their paper that was just accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal on the arxiv at 0801.3461 [astro-ph] "Weighing the Quiescent Central Black Hole in an Elliptical Galaxy with X-ray Emitting Gas"
- Most sentimental story of the week: Olive Riley, allegedly the world's oldest blogger, died at age 108 in Australia. As the Globe and Mail reports, her great-grandson Darren Stone said she loved being able to stay in touch with correspondents all over the world and said she believed it kept her mind active. “It was mind-blowing to her,” Mr. Stone said. “She had people communicating with her from as far away as Russia and America on a continual basis, not just once in a while.” I find this just a lovely example for the global village.
- Most absurd story of the week: Man in New York finds knife in a Subway sandwich. Enjoy.
- Curiosity didn't kill the cat: Cat got accidentally sent over several hundred miles in a package. When it was opened, that cat was alive and well and got re-entangled with her happy owner in Bavaria.
- Completely forgot to mention: I am going Sci-Foo-ing next month! The invitation was a pleasant surprise, I am really excited about it. A certain senior PI faculty member reported that allegedly last year he was the youngest physicist at this unconference, so I guess I'm supposed to bring the average physicists age down. I have like a dozen topics that I'd be interested in discussing and can't quite make up my mind. I hope California stops burning by then.
- Backreaction proudly reports: I wrote a paper! 0807.2838 [gr-qc] "A Bi-Metric Theory with Exchange Symmetry".
Friday 18 July 2008
This and That
This and That
In the absence of quality blogging time here's some unordered bits of information:
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