Artist’s conception of WISE. Credit: JPL One of my favourite space observatories was the Wide-field Infra-red Survey Explorer (WISE), both for the scale of its mission and the shortness of its planned life.  Built to survey the entire visible universe in infrared, it took ten months to image every single part of the sky in detail using its exquisitely sensitive infra-red cameras.  Two operate properly, the most sensitive cameras had to operate at temperatures close to absolute zero, and were … Continue reading →

This eleventh week of 2012 sees Tapani Isomäki of Links Through Space presenting the 240th Carnival of Space.  Links Through Space is the official web presence of the Toutatis astronomy clubin Finland, and the Carnival is a way to present the best and most interesting writing of the past week.

About five months ago, physicists at CERN released astonishing news:  An experiment which involved firing a beam of neutrinos from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland at a neutrino detector in Italy found that the neutrino’s had travelled very slightly faster than the speed of light.  This was absolutely huge news, since one of the central tenets of Einstein’s theory of special relativity is that the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant, and represents the absolute maximum … Continue reading →