May 11
12:08:00.463 ▶▶ Permalink
“ Crine di Leone
Foglia recisa
Parole di fuoco
Ma senti un po’
Ti volevo dire
Alla fine l’hai presa la laurea in fisica?
— A Gabriella Carlucci « Bondologia
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Jun 17
19:12:06.758 ▶▶ Permalink

Oltre a questi due video di lui [Richard Feynman] che suona i bonghi, consiglio di guardare anche qualche lecture del buon Dick, capace di dare ritmo anche agli argomenti più indigesti della Fisica… (via Marcoscan, phonkmeister - che chissà se s’accorge del minimadattamento?)

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Jun 24
15:28:07.602 ▶▶ Permalink
“ A at most on the side introspective essential that blazar excretion permits for nose around concerns non-unspectacular physics. Virtue-tagtail approach conditions are presaged in conformity with some models in relation with Measure Formality […]
— Someone (I couldn’t understand who, exactly) via Junekendrazds’s Weblog
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Jul 04
14:27:01.560 ▶▶ Permalink
“ It has been known for a long time that blazars are variable, both on short (minutes to days) and long (weeks to years) timescales. Various models exist to explain the mechanisms causing variability, and disentangling them has also been particularly hard. A wide variety of tools are used to define and characterize variability, with varying limitations depending on the analysis method and observation uniformity.
— Workshop on Blazar Variability across the Electromagnetic Spectrum, April 2008
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Jul 10
17:49:25.700 ▶▶ Permalink
“ VHE gamma radiation is not an exceptional phenomenon: […] measurements in the VHE gamma radiation region provide astronomers with a unique opportunity to verify the laws of astronomy in new areas of energy. Thus the publication in “Science” was able to disprove the “Blazar Sequence” model, which says that the most energetic objects are also the brightest.
— Universe Is More Transparent To High-energy Radiation Than Previously Assumed
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Jul 19
12:09:42.465 ▶▶ Permalink
“ The team [of Boston University astronomer Alan Marscher] studied a galaxy called BL Lacertae […] about 950 million light years from Earth, with a central black hole containing 200 million times the mass of our Sun. Since this supermassive black hole’s jets are pointing nearly straight at us, it is called a blazar: a quasar is often thought to be the same as a blazar, except its jets are pointed away from us.
— Austin Garrett Ward (slightly adapted)
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Jul 22
16:24:01.641 ▶▶ Permalink
“ The GLAST-AGILE Support Program (GASP) of the Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT) reports on the recent observation of a very bright optical flare from the blazar 3C 454.3. After a moderate flare in June 2008, the source rebrightened from R ~ 15 to ~ 13.4 between the end of June and mid July. Noticeable activity has been also observed in the near-IR (Campo Imperatore), at mm wavelengths (SMA), at 43 GHz (Noto) and 14.5 GHz (UMRAO). [Nevvero?!?]
— The Astronomer’s Telegram
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Jul 23
0:56:17.997 ▶▶ Permalink
“ [Researchers] believe that large galaxies such as the Milky Way contain supermassive black holes in their cores that drag dust and gas toward them in a disk and fling it back out via jets of ionised gas or plasma moving at up to 99.9 per cent the speed of light. If that jet points toward Earth, researchers call it a blazar, and it is “one of the most impressive high-energy natural laboratories” in the universe […]
— The Statesman
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Aug 04
15:37:43.609 ▶▶ Permalink
“ The resulting contemporaneous broadband spectral energy distributions of both TeV blazars are discussed in view of implications for intrinsic blazar parameter values, taking into account the gamma-ray absorption in the EBL.
— A Hard X-Ray View of Two Distant VHE Blazars
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Aug 06
12:27:11.477 ▶▶ Permalink
“ Utraviolet Telescope for Blazar Emission Lines? UV emission line detection for blazars? Hence able to obtain redshift. Blazars don’t have optical emission lines basically; thus there redshifts might be quite off, if based on associated galaxies.
— zankaon
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Aug 13
12:44:00.488 ▶▶ Permalink
Above: Quasar 1317+520; false color: X-ray image from Chandra X-ray Observatory; contours: 5 GHz radio image from the Very Large Array. Click here for more details. (via Blazar Research at Boston University)

Above: Quasar 1317+520; false color: X-ray image from Chandra X-ray Observatory;
contours: 5 GHz radio image from the Very Large Array. Click here for more details. (via Blazar Research at Boston University)

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Aug 15
12:45:00.489 ▶▶ Permalink

Under the stage name Cosmos II, Alan Marscher, a CAS professor of astronomy, is a well-known troubadour of cosmic phenomena. He’s written and performed about a dozen songs to entertain and enlighten his students. Click here to listen to Marscher’s homage to black holes and blazars, “Superluminal Lover.” (via BU Rocks: A Cosmic Mystery, with Music | BU Today)

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Aug 30
16:46:26.657 ▶▶ Permalink
First light from FERMI. Credit: NASA / FERMI (via Tom’s Astronomy Blog » GLAST is Now FERMI) From the NASA press release: […] A fourth bright spot in the LAT image lies some 7.1 billion light-years away, far beyond our galaxy. This is 3C 454.3 in Pegasus, a type of active galaxy called a blazar. It’s now undergoing a flaring episode that makes it especially bright. […]

First light from FERMI. Credit: NASA / FERMI (via Tom’s Astronomy Blog » GLAST is Now FERMI)

From the NASA press release:

[…] A fourth bright spot in the LAT image lies some 7.1 billion light-years away, far beyond our galaxy. This is 3C 454.3 in Pegasus, a type of active galaxy called a blazar. It’s now undergoing a flaring episode that makes it especially bright. […]
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Sep 06
0:24:37.975 ▶▶ Permalink
“ You’ve got these subatomic particles accelerated at great speeds for the sole purpose of being destroyed. No one thinks of the ethical implications of this. There’s a limited supply of hadrons in the universe. Do we just want to go around destroying them? What if we run out? What if the hadrons can feel pain? Will we look back at this hundreds of years from now and regret it? Kinda like we do with the killing of bacteria with antibiotics now. [That the idea is “patently ridiculous” is also] what they said about the other group I founded, Mothers Against unDead Drivers, which warns people of driving while a zombie, but they’ll see.
— Tia Aumiller, founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Hadrons (PETH) via BBspot
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Sep 29
20:03:00.793 ▶▶ Permalink
As you might expect, there are also two types of blazars: BL Lacs and Radio Quasars. A lot of work has been done to see which type of radio galaxies produce these blazars. The emerging picture is that BL Lacs are FRI jets pointing at us, and Radio Quasars are FRII jets pointing at us. Furthermore, there are some good reasons that come from physics that this should be the case. (via When do you reject a theory? « Life, the Universe, and Everything.)

As you might expect, there are also two types of blazars: BL Lacs and Radio Quasars. A lot of work has been done to see which type of radio galaxies produce these blazars. The emerging picture is that BL Lacs are FRI jets pointing at us, and Radio Quasars are FRII jets pointing at us. Furthermore, there are some good reasons that come from physics that this should be the case. (via When do you reject a theory? « Life, the Universe, and Everything.)

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