Voivod "Astronomy Domine" Oakland, CA. 02/20/2015
Voivod "Astronomy Domine" (Pink Floyd Cover) live at the Oakland Metro Opera House.Oakland, CA. 02/20/2015.

By: Raul Varela

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Voivod "Astronomy Domine" Oakland, CA. 02/20/2015 - Video

April 2015: The Hubble Space Telescope #39;s 25th anniversary
This month #39;s issue of Astronomy magazine celebrates 25 years of great imagery and science from the Hubble Space Telescope with a package of stories highlight...

By: Astronomy magazine

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April 2015: The Hubble Space Telescope's 25th anniversary - Video

Astronomy documentary: The Death of Stars in Astronomy
He NASA/ESA Hubble Space flying Telescope is famous for looking deep into the past of the Universe. But it can also predict the future. This episode of the Hubblecast takes us on a journey...

By: Astronomy Documentary

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Astronomy documentary: The Death of Stars in Astronomy - Video

Rocket geeks should be astronomy geeks too - 8.08
TMRO is a crowd funded show. If you like this episode consider contributing to help us to continue to improve. Head over to http://www.patreon.com/tmro for i...

By: TMRO

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Rocket geeks should be astronomy geeks too - 8.08 - Video

Modern scientific discovery is driven by one thing, without which breakthroughs like gene sequencing, the search for the Higgs boson and dark matter and huge telescope arrays wouldnt be possible High Performance Computing (HPC).

With the computational might to blitz through millions of bytes of data, calculations and statistical possibilities, scientists were able to posit the existence of particles like the Higgs boson and campaign for expensive projects like the Large Hadron Collider because they could show what they were looking for.

The same kind of processing power is whats allowing the UKs version of the Genome Project, attempting to sequence whole genomes rather than just excerpts known as exons, to go ahead.

Cambridge University has had HPC in one form or another for 18 years, from the old 80s supercomputer sitting in the middle of a room, to its modern new server facility, which is based on a large Dell Dell server cluster made up of 9.600 cores and four petabytes of storage running on a Hadoop platform and is currently getting its finishing touches after a 20m investment.

Cambridge Universitys new HPC system, used for particle physics, radio astronomy, gene sequencing and other big data, big science projects. (Credit: Cambridge University)

The university has one of the largest research and development budgets in the UK education sector, devoting 40 per cent of its 1438m annual revenue to funding advances in the fields of astronomy, genomics, medicine, physics and many more.

But its HPC time is also hired out to businesses in the nearby science and technology park, helping the university to pay for top IT support, while providing a valuable niche service to firms.

Just a few years ago, that kind of commoditisation of HPC wouldnt have been possible, Dr Paul Calleja, director of HPC Service at Cambridge, told visitors in a talk attended by Forbes.

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What Do Gene Sequencing, Radio Astronomy And Particle Physics Have In Common?

For decades, the root cause of our Milky Way galaxys bulk flow in the direction of the Centaurus and Hydra constellations has retained an air of mystery. Our own stars motion through the Milky Way is relatively well understood. But a full understanding of the exact forces driving our Local Group of galaxies peculiar velocities at rates of 631 kilometers-per-second remains elusive.

Quite apart from our universes long-documented inflationary expansion (known as the Hubble Expansion), the local cosmos which surrounds us over millions of light years has its own peculiar trajectory and velocity.

What is known is that we are moving in bulk towards the Great Attractor (a region of half a dozen galaxy clusters some 150 million light years away), and the Shapley Concentration (a supercluster of galaxies some three times farther distant).

Hubble Space Telescope view towards the Great Attractor. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Is this just the result of gravity towards more massive and much more distant galaxy superclusters, or

A paper just submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) details cosmological distance measurements from some 8000 objects, most of which were from within our own Laniakea supercluster. As reported last September by Brent Tully, a cosmologist at the University of Hawaii in Manoa and colleagues in the journal Nature, the Milky Way is actually an outlier of this newly-named supercluster whose estimated 100,000 galaxies span some 500 million light years.

Yehuda Hoffmann, an astronomer at Israels Hebrew University, and colleagues used the Cosmicflows-2 catalogue (CF-2), the largest and most accurate ever catalog of galaxy peculiar velocities to reconstruct a large segment of our local cosmos large scale structure.

We [used] the CF-2 database to uncover the distribution of matter out to distances of hundreds of million of light years, Hoffmann, the papers lead author, told Forbes. Our main result is that the bulk velocity estimated from the CF-2 data is fully consistent with the standard model of cosmology. As Tully told Forbes, from our perspective, both downtown Laniakea and the Shapley supercluster lie in the same direction. Its the combination of these two things lined up like a spring tide that is pulling us. but we dont yet have a full accounting for whats causing our motion, said Tully. Until we can actually add up all the vectors and [still] come up with this number of 600 kilometers per second, theres still an incomplete story.

How do researchers actually use such data?

The team used 8000 separate distance measurements for their MNRAS paper; including 300 distances derived from Type 1a supernovae.

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Chasing The Mystery Of Spacetime's Local 'Bulk Flow'