Well, the subject line was the whole announcement: draft #2 of The Disordered Cosmos is off to my editor.
I promised that “The Disordered Cosmos” would be a mechanism for getting updates to my writing, so let me start by sharing that I’ve had a few things come out in the first two months of 2020:
For my January New Scientist column, I wrote about whether dark energy and dark matter are related. (paywall)
I reviewed Anthony Aguirre’s wonderful popular science book Cosmological Koans for Physics World. (no paywall)
I led the writing of a white paper that hopefully will influence the Astro2020 Decadal. You can read Reframing astronomical research through an anticolonial lens -- for TMT and beyond at the arXiv. (no paywall)
For my February New Scientist column, I wrote about how the atmosphere shapes the practice of astronomy. (paywall)
Anyway, here’s a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope of the Sombrero Galaxy and its environment. This new data provides insight into the galaxy’s formation history, which apparently involves a lot of mergers and acquisitions. More details here.
Something I won’t be publishing ever but did involve a lot of writing over the last two months is my application for the Department of Energy Early Career Grant, which is due in just over a week. It’s a beast to work on, like tens of hours. And it talks about trying to explain the relationship between spiral(ish) galaxies like the Sombrero and their dark matter halo (not pictured because we can’t see dark matter, stay tuned for my book to learn more).
credit: NASA, Digital Sky Survey, P. Goudfrooij (STScI) and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)