Ben Gilliland's blog

Put a little extra tick into your tock

Sun, 01/29/2012 - 15:42 — Ben Gilliland

As a chronometer, the Earth just isn’t up to scratch and every so often a 'leap second' is added to compensate. Image montage: Ben Gilliland

Those of you booking a holiday at the end of June are in for a treat. The world’s official time keepers have decided to add a ‘leap second’ to 2012. Like a ‘leap year’, a ‘leap second’ is added to bring our clocks back into sync with the rotation of the Earth and, thanks to that, your holiday will be one second longer.

The length of a day is determined by the Earth’s rotation and one full rotation equals one full day. But the speed of the Earth’s rotation isn’t constant – ocean tides pulled back and forth by the Moon’s gravity, churning molten materials deep in the Earth’s bowels, earthquakes and even friction from the wind all add up and force the planet to give up a tiny bit of its rotational energy. In other words, it slows down and our clocks need to compensate for this.

Astronomers aim to 'capture' a black hole

Sun, 01/22/2012 - 18:01 — Ben Gilliland

French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace predicted the existence of black holes way back in 1796, but we’ve yet to capture one on camera. The Event Horizon Telescope will bring together astronomy’s greatest radio telescopes in an attempt ‘photograph’ the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way

Where would science fiction be without black holes? As a plot device they are without equal. They can imperil our plucky hero as his spacecraft is sucked like a spider down a plughole to (almost) certain doom and they provide a handy shortcut to the past, or future, in the form of a wormhole. But despite their ubiquity in TV and film, astronomers have never actually seen one.

In fact, everything we know of black holes comes from theory and indirect observations of the effects they have on the space around them. But now scientists are getting ready to take their first picture of these enigmatic phenomena.

Astro-porn, in a 19th century pen and ink stylie

Tue, 01/17/2012 - 10:47 — Ben Gilliland

Today's telescopic behemoths have spoiled us with stunning their images of astronomical phenomena. But you don't need millions of quid's worth of kit to capture the awesome beauty of the sky at night.

In the 19th century, a French entomologist-turned-astronomer Etienne Leopold Trouvelot (1827-1895), created more than 7,000 astronomical illustrations while working for the Harvard College observatory. Now these ball-bouncingly beautiful images have been digitised by the New York Library and made available to the public.

Here are just a few of these pre-Hubble wonders:

The rehabilitation of Robert Hooke

Mon, 01/16/2012 - 08:20 — Ben Gilliland

History is a living, breathing creature – a fickle beast that is likely to forget even the greatest people unless it is constantly fed by its keepers. They say history is written by the conqueror but it also written by those that follow in its wake.

If history’s keepers don’t celebrate your achievements then history will look elsewhere for sustenance and you will be forgotten.

Time is littered with the corpses of the forgotten – great men and women who should be celebrated as pioneers, change-makers and revolutionaries but for one reason or another have been snubbed by the beast and are not remembered as they should be. One such victim is Robert Hooke.

Hooke was one of the greatest minds of the Renaissance – he was Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei rolled into one, a polymath who should be celebrated as an English Leonardo Da Vinci but who instead is barely remembered at all.

Space 2012: A big year for private space flight

Sun, 01/08/2012 - 16:18 — Ben Gilliland

Historically space has been a nationalistic pursuit – as much driven by pride and paranoia as by the spirit of exploration and curiousity. For 50 years, space was ‘owned’ by governments, but the sun is setting on the age of space nationalism and is rising anew to greet an age of space capitalism. Private companies powered by idealistic entrepreneurs seeking the democratisation of space and (of course) driven by profit are pushing aside big government’s grip on the final frontier. A revolution is coming and space is set to claimed by the people.

It could be that, when our space-faring descendants look back on the moment that space travel really took off, 2012 is the year that their history books will celebrate.

Meet the snow pilots

Mon, 12/19/2011 - 08:41 — Ben Gilliland

Are bacteria manipulating the weather?

Snow can be a powerful thing. It can bring a nation’s transport sys¬tem to its knees and bring out the inner child from within the most dour and life-weary soul. It is a virgin canvas wait¬ing for the imprint of an angel. It is a fluffy mound, pregnant with sculptural potential and is a fort – complete with artillery.

Most of us have seen at least a dusting of snow in the last couple of days but what caused it to fall in the first place?

You might think that snow is just what happens to rain when it gets a bit chilly but things are a lot more complicated than that.
For a start, it hasn’t been cold enough for ice to form spontaneously.

We all know that water freezes at 0C but you might not know that at temperatures above -40C or so, it actually needs a kick-start to get those ice crystals forming.