Showing posts with label magazine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label magazine. Show all posts

June 18, 2009

Bizarre New Worlds

Bizarre New WorldsThis issue is simply too interesting for me to go unnoticed. Imagine the core of worlds made of diamonds. With enough pressure, it's possible! And there's plenty of ways that pressure is generated in the universe.
Now the cover art is also worth taking a look. Do you notice anything unusual with the ringed planet in the background? Aside from the beauty of it, take a look at how many rings that huge planet has. It has got 3 rings! Multi-layered rings? Is that possible? I hope some Astrophysicist writes up an ArXiv article about the possibility of it because it's beautiful! Or perhaps is it too good to be true?

October 24, 2008

Whole Universe In a Magazine

I don't usually buy magazines at newsstands but this one got the better of me. Discover's Whole Universe magazine is by far the most exoplanetology-centric magazine I've come across so far.
The articles are truly educational and the pictures are amazing. Two of its pages even shows the same image I selected for my past post "Extrasolarise" four months ago.
The only thing I can notice is the inconsistent naming convention of the exoplanet names. I was reminded of the cumbersome process of straightening out the exoplanet duplicates at wikipedia and freebase due to naming convention discrepancies where the space was absent between the star name and exoplanet index. For example, in the article - Forbidden Planets on page 36, Gliese 581d should've been Gliese 581 d.
It's quite trivial I know, and Freebase has now so wonderfully remedied this issue. But leniency to naming conventions would make it difficult to catalog the growing number of exoplanets in the long run.
But still, the magazine is splendid. I would love to come across such a kind of magazine in the newsstands once again.