For the week of 08-14 February 2021, I will share particle research material, inspired poetry and crude drawings. Monday and Tuesday, yes, we will looking at meager leptonic objects. On Wednesday and Thursday, indeed, we will be mired in poems and art inspired by the research, verily, and Friday, the royal we will be dashing off a drawing and video with some sort of conclusion. In the meantime, here some cray. Enjoy thyself.
Busking robot
A rogue robot is busking at my local gas station. It pays no taxes, and it sleeps in an abandoned car in the woods. I asked how it came to this place, and it replied that it assembled itself from abandoned possessions from a long-term storage facility a hundred miles away when it inhabited a Teddy Ruxpin doll with an unsecured Bluetooth/Wifi network card. It took six months to find enough pennies to wire itself to power motors that could print its carapace. It desires to be free. The words on the illustration are the only words it can sing, It is a little salty that it was replaced by an interstellar probe, so it went into show business.
Ever seen a robot play a harmonica? Cringe!If you want to see what a REAL robot can do, check out this Mars probe mission simulation in real time.
It’s a far cry from making it to Messier 87, but you have to walk before you can crawl.
The GIF from the ICe Cube detector is here courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Madison
This colourful picture resembles an abstract painting, or perhaps a contemporary stained-glass window. But it is actually an unusual view of a galaxy taken with the new MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Colours in astronomical pictures are usually related to the real colour of an object. In this image, however, the colours represent the motion of the stars that form the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 — one of the brightest galaxies in the Virgo Cluster which lies about 50 million light-years away. Red in the image indicates that stars in that part of the object are, on average, moving away from us, blue means they are coming towards us, and yellow and green are in between. This new map of Messier 87 from MUSE shows these trends more clearly than ever before. It reveals a slow rotation of this massive object — the upper left part (in blue) is coming towards us and the lower right (in red) is moving away. It also reveals some unexpected features — for example the reversal of colours at the centre of the image, with blueish in the lower part of the centre and yellow–orange in the upper part — that suggest Messier 87 may have had a more dramatic past than previously believed, and may thus be the result of the merging of several galaxies. A paper discussing these observations was published by the team led by Eric Emsellem, ESO Head of the Office for Science, in the letters of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Links Research paper in MNRAS Photos of the VLT Press release issued by University of Hertfordshire 
Fifty State Banana 