Two More Papers Brings the Total to 3.

It's been several months since my last post, but I assure you, my non-existent reader(s), that I am still alive and kicking. My girlfriend of several years is now my fiance. We've had the promise dinner thingy, and our families have met, and it all went very well. We are planning to get married after we get our respective degrees, sometime in summer '09. I'm still doing research at UCI steady as always. And in two weeks, I'm heading back to a family vacation in Yosemite which should be fun.

Speaking of research, in the past month or so, I've had two more papers come out onto astro-ph, the online journal cite that pretty much the entire astronomy community posts to.

Berrier et al 2008 (papers with > 3 authors are generally referred to by the first author's name "et al" and the year) can be found here. I'm the 2nd author on this paper, and it's been a long time coming. The 1-sentence summary is that galaxies residing today in big clusters of galaxies tend to fall in to the cluster alone, not in small groups of a few galaxies at a time.

Cooke et al 2008 can be found here. I'm 4th author on this one, because mostly I just provided some theoretical comparison that the first author used in 1-2 paragraphs of the paper. This paper has actually gotten a bit of more mainstream media attention, because the main result can be "packaged" in a layman-friendly way. In this paper, we discovered a cluster of galaxies in a very early part of its formation, roughly 11.4 billion light years away, which is the farthest away scientists have ever discovered a merging group of galaxies (instead of just a single bright galaxy. It's very hard to distinguish a source into components so far away.) A press release from sciencedaily.com can be found here.

Does it seem somewhat depressing that after 4 months of no posts, this is all the news I really have? I suppose some might consider my life boring, but I like it. It's not so much boring as it is... consistent. Now if I had a "McJob" that required me to stand around and do nothing all day, THAT would be boring, but my life involves a lot of brainpower. Unless I'm watching TV or something. Because sometimes you gotta give your brain a break now and then.