StarStuff

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About Me

Hi, I'm Stuart Gary, I'm a journalist and broadcaster with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I love science, especially the majesty and wonder of space, so I put together a weekly astronomy show for the ABC called StarStuff.

In my spare time I like to fly planes, practice karate and pistol target shooting and play around with my cars, a twin Turbocharged Falcon GT Interceptor and a DeTomaso Pantera GTS.

I’m vegan, a life member of the RSPCA and a supporter of several animal welfare organisations.

My other great passion is music which is understandable when you realise that I was a radio music jock long before I became a journalist. My record library contains tens of thousands of singles, albums, videos, CD’s and DVDs. These days that’s all stored in an 8 terabyte raid enclosure linked to a desk top PC at home. My tastes range from rock and grunge through to trance and new romantics. At the moment I’m listening to heaps of MGMT, William Control, Hawthorne Heights and Short Shack, but I have lots of time for the classics like Placebo and the early stuff from Silverchair, In fact Neon Ballroom is still my favourite album, and Emotion Sickness is still one of my two favourite songs (the other being William Control’s Death Club).

StarStuff is a great name for the show, but it works on more levels than just astronomy, it’s really cool for any science program because everything in the universe after the quark gluon plasma of the big bang is star stuff even the iron which makes your blood red was manufactured in the supernova explosions of stars. Carl Sagan said it best, we are all star stuff.


This blog is designed to allow me to publish all the things which can’t fit into StarStuff. There’s heaps of really interesting stuff out there and only a half hour window for the show, so each week becomes a battle to try and squeeze it all in. This blog lets me do that.

You can check out the show at the offical ABC StarStuff website:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/starstuff/

There's also an official ABC StarStuff Twitter feed: @abcstarstuff

And an official ABC Science website: http://www.abc.net.au/science/


The legal stuff: This is my personal blog. The views expressed in this blog are those of me only and not the Australian Broadcasting Corporation or its management. I do not claim ownership of any of the media in this blog. where possible credit and or source will always be given. If one of your photos or other media is submitted in this blog and you would like it removed please let me know.

Blogs I follow:

Theme by: Miguel
  1. BLACK HOLES TURN UP THE HEAT FOR THE UNIVERSE: HITS ASTROPHYSICISTS DISCOVER A NEW HEATING SOURCE IN COSMOLOGICAL STRUCTURE FORMATION So far, astrophysicists thought that super-massive black holes can only influence their immediate surroundings. A collaboration of scientists at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) and in Canada and the US now discovered that diffuse gas in the universe can absorb luminous gamma-ray emission from black holes, heating it up strongly. This surprising result has important implications for the formation of structures in the universe. The results have just been published in “The Astrophysical Journal” and “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society”. Every galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. Such black holes can emit high-energy gamma rays and are then called blazars. Whereas other radiation such as visible light and radio waves traverses the universe without problems, this is not the case for high-energy gamma rays. This particular radiation interacts with the optical light that is emitted by galaxies, transforming it into the elementary particles electrons and positrons. Initially, these elementary particles move almost at the speed of light. But as they are slowed down by the ambient diffuse gas, their energy is converted into heat, just like in other braking processes. As a result, the surrounding gas is heated efficiently. In fact, the temperature of the gas at mean density becomes ten times higher, and in underdense regions more than one hundred times higher than previously thought. A Journey into the Cosmic Youth “Blazars rewrite the thermal history of the universe”, emphasizes Dr. Christoph Pfrommer (HITS), one of the authors. But how can this idea be tested? In the optical spectra of quasars there is a plethora of lines, called the “line forest”. The forest originates from the absorption of ultraviolet light by neutral hydrogen in the young universe. If the gas becomes hotter, weak lines in the forest are broadened. This effect represents an excellent opportunity to measure temperatures in the early universe, while it was still growing up. The astrophysicists at HITS checked this newly postulated heating process for the first time with detailed supercomputer simulations of the cosmological growth of structures. Surprisingly, the lines were broadened just enough so that their properties perfectly matched those of the observed lines. “This allows us to elegantly solve a long-standing problem with the quasar data”, says Dr. Ewald Puchwein, who conducted the large simulations on the supercomputer at HITS. How Black Holes Influence the Formation of Galaxies What are the further consequences of this new heating process? The forest of lines in the quasar spectra originates from density fluctuations in the universe. In the course of cosmic evolution, the densest fluctuations collapse to form galaxies and galaxy clusters, as observed in the local universe. Diffuse gas that is too hot cannot collapse. Hence, the formation of dwarf galaxies is slowed or even entirely suppressed. This could be the key to the solution of another long-standing problem in the theory of galaxy formation: why do we observe fewer dwarf galaxies in the vicinity of the Milky Way and in the underdense regions than predicted by cosmological simulations? Prof. Volker Springel, scientific group leader at HITS, explains: “The process of blazar heating is especially exciting since this single effect is able to simultaneously solve several different puzzles in cosmological structure formation.” The group plans to further improve their simulation models for a still deeper understanding of the nature of blazar heating and its implications for today’s universe.

    BLACK HOLES TURN UP THE HEAT FOR THE UNIVERSE:
    HITS ASTROPHYSICISTS DISCOVER A NEW HEATING
    SOURCE IN COSMOLOGICAL STRUCTURE FORMATION

    So far, astrophysicists thought that super-massive black holes can only influence their immediate surroundings. A collaboration of scientists at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) and in Canada and the US now discovered that diffuse gas in the universe can absorb luminous gamma-ray emission from black holes, heating it up strongly. This surprising result has important implications for the formation of structures in the universe. The results have just been published in “The Astrophysical Journal” and “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society”.

    Every galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. Such black holes can emit high-energy gamma rays and are then called blazars. Whereas other radiation such as visible light and radio waves traverses the universe without problems, this is not the case for high-energy gamma rays. This particular radiation interacts with the optical light that is emitted by galaxies, transforming it into the elementary particles electrons and positrons. Initially, these elementary particles move almost at the speed of light. But as they are slowed down by the ambient diffuse gas, their energy is converted into heat, just like in other braking processes. As a result, the surrounding gas is heated efficiently. In fact, the temperature of the gas at mean density becomes ten times higher, and in underdense regions more than one hundred times higher than previously thought.

    A Journey into the Cosmic Youth

    “Blazars rewrite the thermal history of the universe”, emphasizes Dr. Christoph Pfrommer (HITS), one of the authors. But how can this idea be tested? In the optical spectra of quasars there is a plethora of lines, called the “line forest”. The forest originates from the absorption of ultraviolet light by neutral hydrogen in the young universe. If the gas becomes hotter, weak lines in the forest are broadened. This effect represents an excellent opportunity to measure temperatures in the early universe, while it was still growing up.

    The astrophysicists at HITS checked this newly postulated heating process for the first time with detailed supercomputer simulations of the cosmological growth of structures. Surprisingly, the lines were broadened just enough so that their properties perfectly matched those of the observed lines. “This allows us to elegantly solve a long-standing problem with the quasar data”, says Dr. Ewald Puchwein, who conducted the large simulations on the supercomputer at HITS.

    How Black Holes Influence the Formation of Galaxies

    What are the further consequences of this new heating process? The forest of lines in the quasar spectra originates from density fluctuations in the universe. In the course of cosmic evolution, the densest fluctuations collapse to form galaxies and galaxy clusters, as observed in the local universe. Diffuse gas that is too hot cannot collapse. Hence, the formation of dwarf galaxies is slowed or even entirely suppressed. This could be the key to the solution of another long-standing problem in the theory of galaxy formation: why do we observe fewer dwarf galaxies in the vicinity of the Milky Way and in the underdense regions than predicted by cosmological simulations?

    Prof. Volker Springel, scientific group leader at HITS, explains: “The process of blazar heating is especially exciting since this single effect is able to simultaneously solve several different puzzles in cosmological structure formation.” The group plans to further improve their simulation models for a still deeper understanding of the nature of blazar heating and its implications for today’s universe.