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I just blogged over at Galaxy Zoo about an article of mine about my work on bars which has been published by The Leverhulme Trust: " Do Bars Kill Galaxies? ".

Last week we learnt that the numbers of students sitting A-level physics has increased but that  the gender divide is getting worse , This week we discover that at GCSE level, both the numbers taking science and the percent have girls have increased - with 46% of double science entrants this year being girls. The girls continue to outperform the boys, both overall, and in science (which seems to me should put pay to any ideas about intrinsic lack of science ability in girls) but yet this doesn't translate to girls taking Physics at A-level. Imram Khan comments in the CASE reaction to the GCSE results  (which he wrote, causing me to wonder what the rules are on quoting your self in an article). " We need to encourage more girls to take the top grades they get at GCSE and translate those into science and maths A-levels. "  In related news, this week, the  September 2011 Issue of Nature Chemistry  celebrates women chemists in its cover - a photo mosaic of Marie Cu...

After starting my series of beautiful galaxies with Messier 100 I was amused to discover this morning that M101 (The Pinwheel Galaxy) is in the astronomical news after a possible Type 1a Supernova was discovered in it yesterday . So following M100 I obviously have to do M101 this morning! M101 as seen in a mosaic of Hubble Space Telescope images added to some ground based data. Credit: NASA and Robert Gendler. For more info see APOD .  M101 was classified in the Hubble Atlas as an Sc galaxies with a weak bar and a partial ring around the bar before the arms emerge (SAB(rs)c). It's illustrated twice in the atlas, with the largest illustration accompanied by text which describes it as the prototype of multiple armed Sc galaxies, what we might today call a "flocculent" spiral.  According to the "Atlas of the Messier Objects", M101 is the third largest galaxy (in angular size) in the Messier list, and is visible as an extended object even through 10x50 binocular...

I just know I'm going to want to find this again to use in a public talk, and it's fantastic so I want to share. " The Earth and Friends in Multiple Wavelengths ", by Rob Simpson ( @orbitingfrog ). Of course galaxies are my favourite, so I'm reproducing the image of M31 (the Andromeda galaxy) in here (from top left to bottom right, radio, microwave, infrared, optical, UV, Xray). And I like flowers too - so here's a geranium in optical (left) and UV. Thanks for the excellent post Rob.

I can't actually remember where I first came across the below diagram, but I keep wanting to refer to it and as finding it on the Royal Society website is not trivial (it's in a report called " The Scientific Century " from March 2010) I thought I would write a quick blog post so I could always find it. Diagram from "The Scientific Century" by the Royal Society. Their caption reads "This diagram illustrates the transition points in typical academic scientific careers following a PhD and shows the flow of scientifically-trained people into other sectors. It is a simplified snapshot based on recent data from HEFCE, the Research Base Funders Forum  and for the Higher Education Statistics Agency's annual Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey. It also draws on Vitae's analysis of the DLHE survey. It does not show career breaks or moves back into academic science from other sectors." I think all incoming graduate students...

As I have mentioned before , as a graduate student and young postdoc I was a member of a group of Cornell affiliated astronomers who revamped the " Curious? Ask an Astronomer " site at Cornell into a sort of "proto-blog". On that site there are many answers I wrote to questions sent in to the site (154 in total over a period of about 5 years). Most of the "trouble" I get into about that period of my public engagement, centres around my answer to " What's going to happen on December 21st 2012? "  which I first wrote in January 2006 and which to date has been read over 650,000 times. But I also posted lots of other answers. Thanks to Twitter I discovered last night that one of my old answers got picked up this week and linked into an article on the Discovery News: What if Earth were a cube? (My article: " How would the weather on Earth be different if it were a cube? " posted in December 2002). I'm always a bit worried when this...

Perhaps one of the most striking looking galaxies I know of is "Hoag's Object" (seen below by the Hubble Space Telescope;  NED information , Wikipedia article ,  lookUP information ). The wikipedia article talks of it as an object which fascinates both amateur and professional astronomers.  I am really curious to know how it might look through an amateur telescope, and I'd love to see it for myself some day (RA=15 17 14, Dec=+21 35 08 in the Serpens constellation), Astrometry.net can help give an idea - see Hoag's Object images on Flickr  found by the service. HST Image of Hoag's Object. Credit: NASA. Through HST as you can see the object appears to be made up of a red spheroidal core, surrounded by a blue ring of star formation (with a gap between the two). The ring shows some spiral structure. In my opinion, one of the most fun things about the object is the more distance ring galaxy which can be seen through the gap (just to the right of 12 o'clock)...

On Sunday I took one of the ICG Gallieoscopes to the Arts Cafe at Eastney Community Centre who are currently hosting a Space Themed Exhibit: " Journey to the Edge Of Space ". As part of this they organized a Family Space Day on Sunday, and I agrred to go along to provide some public solar observing. Picture of the Galileoscope set up for Solar Observing It was a fairly quiet event in the end, and a day with patchy cloud, but I was able to show a few 10s of people the Sun through the telescope. Not helping the educational content from this was the quiet Sun. Absolutely no sun spots were visible, making the Sun appear as smooth white circle through the solar filter (I knew this in advance because I had looked it up on spaceweather.com - still disappointing). It was almost more interesting when the patchy clouds went across the disk. ICG news article. 

Thanks to the Chinese side of my family I found out that the story about the release of the 2MASS Redshift Survey ("The Most Complete Map of the 3D Universe") even appeared in the Chinese newspaper  "World Journal". The headline in black reads " Zuì wánzhěng 3D yǔzhòu tú " which is literally translated to "Most complete 3D universe map" .

Over on the Leverhulme Trust Awards in Focus section this month is an article I wrote for them about the progress I've made on the research project they fund me for - which is to study the impact of bars on disk galaxies using Galaxy Zoo.

Over on the SDSS3 blog is a post about my recently accepted paper looking at the types of galaxies which are being observed in BOSS. Copied below: A critical question for the SDSS-III BOSS is what kinds of galaxies are they observing. In a recent paper by  Masters et al . , SDSS-III scientists used additional, higher resolution data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to answer this questions. In SDSS images, BOSS galaxies, which are on average about 6 billion light years away, just looks like fuzzy red blobs. The goal of BOSS is to observe 1.5 million of them over 30% of the sky in order to map the large scale structure in great detail. For this study, they took a look at a tiny subset of 230 of them which have deeper HST images (which were taken as part of the  COSMOS project  – the largest area HST survey every yet done). The study found that 75% of BOSS galaxies are massive ellipticals, but that a surprisingly high fraction (20%) of these are split into multiple c...

Yesterday I talked with Bryan Crump from Radio New Zealand Nights about the 2MASS Redshift Survey. You can listen to the segment online , or download MP3 . Screenshot of 2MRS on the Radio New Zealand Website.  Lucas also submitted the scientific paper to the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series and released it to the arXiV last week.

I just posted over on the Galaxy Zoo blog about my recent trip to Durham for "Galaxy Formation, an International Conference".