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In the past week I've fielded several questions about the gas cloud, G2, which is possibly on course to be accreted by the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Galaxy. So I decided I would update my knowledge (and the wikipedia page about Sag A* ) on this object with the below: Discovery of G2 Gas Cloud on an Accretion Course with Sag A* An artists impressive of G2 approaching Sag A* (orange). The blue lines indicate orbits of known stars about the black hole. Credit:  ESO/MPE/Marc Schartmann First noticed as something unusual in images of the centre of our Galaxy in 2002 ( https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2012/Oct/NR-12-10-07.html ), the gas cloud, G2, which has has mass about 3 times that of the Earth was confirmed to be likely on a course taking it into the accretion zone of Sag A* in a paper published by Nature in 2012 (Gillessen et al. 2012). Predictions of its orbit suggest it will have a closest approach to the black hole (a perinigricon) in mid to late 2013. A...

On Friday I participated via Twitter in the Wiki-a-thon hosted by the Royal Society to improve/create articles about women scientists in wikipedia. Ever since I heard about this I thought it was a fantastic idea, and while I couldn't make it to London on Friday I was happy to participate online via the Twitter hashtag #WomenSciWP During the event I improved the article about Martha Haynes (my former thesis advisor), notable especially as a Henry Draper Medal Winner, and made a new article for Lisa Kaltenegger , a young astronomer (with a dual posting at Harvard and MPIA) who works on exoplanets, and is already notable - she has an asteroid named after her, and was named "America's Young Innovator in Science and Technology in 2007 - and will I'm sure become more notable in the future. What I missed on the day was the page with the list of scientists the Royal Society suggested needed pages . This is an excellent resource to keep plugging away at improving this area of ...

Today I participated in "Ten Tweets to a Portsmouth Peep". You can read about it on the Portsmouth Local Website.

This post is for Ada Lovelace Day, and will appear on Finding Ada  as a book reveiw. Celebrated annually on 16th October, Ada Lovelace day is a day for sharing online inspiring stories of women scientists, engineers or mathematicians. The Guardian covered it yesterday ( article ). And if you don't know who Ada Lovelace is, well then she's just one of the amazing women you need to read about on this day. I've been asked to write a book review about "Nobel Prize Women in Science", by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne . It's a book in which you can read chapter long biographies of 15 women who have  won (or significantly contributed to the science of) a Nobel Prize in one of the science fields. Certainly a good theme for a day about celebrating inspirational women scientists.  When I first read this book several years ago, the thing which struck me most about it, was that it could exist in a (then) complete form. In fact it remained a complete listing of all women who had ...

I just posted the below over on the LOFAR-UK blog , but is also fits into my series of Messier Object posts - this one M87, which has a beauty in the eye of the beholder perhaps as a "boring" elliptical, but check out that jet from it's actively accreting supermassive black hole. Amazing! **************** A paper appears on the arxiv today with new images of the centre of nearby elliptical galaxy M87, taken with the Dutch LOFAR stations. M87 at Metre Wavelenghts: the LOFAR Picture , by de Gasperin et al. (A&A in press). M87 (also known at Virgo-A) is one of the two massive elliptical galaxies found at the centre of our nearest cluster of galaxies (the Virgo cluster). In the centre of M87 is a well know actively accreting supermassive black hole, which is emitting jets of energetic particles which emit significant amounts of radio. These jets are even (just) visible in optical images of M87 (the blue line below). Optical image of M87 taken with Hubble Space Telescope. ...

Last night I was invited to talk about girls in physics on the BBC News Channel. It was an interesting experience - driving to Southampton for just a couple of minutes on screen, but I felt well worth it to help highlight this important issue. Thanks to @billkeck2 for tweeting this screen shot of me mid flow! A report ( It's Different for Girls ) was published yesterday by the Institute of Physics which showed that almost half of all state schools in England do not send any girls to study physics A-level. This has been picked up very widely in the UK, following an excellent article by Pallab Ghosh:  "State Schools Failing Girls in Physics" . It was also covered by the childrens news show "Newsbeat": A-level physics turns off girls from studying subject.  I was interviewed as a "talking head" by Joanna Gosling  about the subject. She started by asking me if I was surprised by the findings (not really, although it's disappointing it's not getting...