Doctor Who and the Silver Spiral
Friday, 29 January 2010 - Reported by Chuck Foster
Astronomer Dr Megan Argo has published a report on a major cosmic discovery in the form of a Doctor Who story!
The discovery relates to a powerful jet of energy seen from an exploding star in a distant galaxy observed when Dr Argo was working with an international team at Jodrell Bank. As well as the more scientific technical report on the event (to be published in Nature), the doctor, a keen science fiction and Doctor Who fan, decided to also write the discovery up in story form in order to introduce the discovery to the general public.
Megan, from Macclesfield, Cheshire, told Skymania News:
I've been a Doctor Who fan since I was a child. It was partially to blame for me becoming a scientist. I first came across an concept called entropy in a Doctor Who story called Logopolis and remember being fascinated, even though it was some ten years before it was ever mentioned in a physics lesson.
You can read the story of the discovery through the eyes of the Doctor and Martha in Doctor Who and the Silver Spiral from Megan's own blog; the official title of the paper in Nature will be: "A mildly relativistic radio jet from the normal Type Ic Supernova 2007gr".
Reported by Scientific American.
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