After living in Japan for about four months, we left in mid-December. We miss it already. One of the pleasures we discovered is the onsen, or hot spring. Originally referring to the natural volcanic springs themselves, and the villages around them, there are now onsens all over Japan. Many hotels have an onsen, and most ..read more

My old friend Marc Weidenbaum, curator and writer of disquiet.com, reminded me, in his latest post, of the value of blogging. So, here I am (again). Since September, I have been on sabbatical in Japan, working mostly at QUP (International Center for Quantum-field Measurement Systems for Studies of the Universe and Particles) at the KEK ..read more

The first direct detection of gravitational waves was announced in February of 2015 by the LIGO team, after decades of planning, building and refining their beautiful experiment. Since that time, the US-based LIGO has been joined by the European Virgo gravitational wave telescope (and more are planned around the globe). The first four events that ..read more

If you’re reading this, then you might realise that I haven’t posted anything substantive here since 2018, commemorating the near-end of the Planck collaboration. In fact it took us well into the covid pandemic before the last of the official Planck papers were published, and further improved analyses of our data continues, alongside the use ..read more

It’s been a year since the last entry here. So I could blog about the end of Planck, the first observation of gravitational waves, fatherhood, or the horror (comedy?) of the US Presidential election. Instead, it’s going to be rock ’n’ roll, though I don’t know if that’s because it’s too important, or not important ..read more

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Another aspect of Planck’s legacy bears examining. A couple of months ago, the 2018 Gruber Prize in Cosmology was awarded to the Planck Satellite. This was (I think) a well-deserved honour for all of us who have worked on Planck during the more than 20 years since its conception, for a mission which confirmed a standard model of cosmology and measured the parameters which describe it to accuracies of a few percent. Planck is the latest in a series of telescopes and satellites dating back to the COBE Satellite in the early 90s, through the MAXIMA and Boomerang balloons (among many others) aroun ..read more

This week, we released (most of) the final set of papers from the Planck collaboration — the long-awaited Planck 2018 results (which were originally meant to be the “Planck 2016 results”, but everything takes longer than you hope…), available on the ESA website as well as the arXiv. More importantly for many astrophysicists and cosmologists, the final public release of Planck data is also available. Anyway, we aren’t quite finished: those of you up on your roman numerals will notice that there are only 9 papers but the last one is “XII” — the rest of the papers will come out over the coming mo ..read more

I have the unfortunate duty of using this blog to announce the death a couple of weeks ago of Professor Leon B Lucy, who had been a Visiting Professor working here at Imperial College from 1998. Leon got his PhD in the early 1960s at the University of Manchester, and after postdoctoral positions in Europe and the US, worked at Columbia University and the European Southern Observatory over the years, before coming to Imperial. He made significant contributions to the study of the evolution of stars, understanding in particular how they lose mass over the course of their evolution, and how very ..read more

It was announced this morning that the WMAP team has won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize. Unlike the Nobel Prize, which infamously is only awarded to three people each year, the Breakthrough Prize was awarded to the whole 27-member WMAP team, led by Chuck Bennett, Gary Hinshaw, Norm Jarosik, Lyman Page, and David Spergel, but including everyone through postdocs and grad students who worked on the project. This is great, and I am happy to send my hearty congratulations to all of them (many of whom I know well and am lucky to count as friends). I actually knew about the prize last week as I wa ..read more