The time is approaching when Nobel prizes are awarded. This inevitably leads to a lot of speculation and chattering rumor. Last year one publication, I think it was Physics Today , went so far as to publish a list of things various people thought should be recognized. This aspirational list was led, of course, by dark matter.

This is an update to a post from a few years ago, which itself was an update to a webpage I wrote in 2008, with many updates in between. At that time, the goalposts for detecting WIMPs had already moved repeatedly. I felt some need then to write down a brief synopsis of the history of a beloved hypothesis (including by myself) that had obviously failed as the goalposts were in motion again. That was sixteen years ago.

And pretty much everywhere else First, a pretty picture: The sun is nearing the peak of its eleven year sunspot cycle. That means lots of sunspots and associated activity. Solar prominences, visible to the naked eye during the eclipse, are bands of plasma entrained in the magnetic field connecting pairs of sunspots. Once in a while, these break out in solar flares.

I have been spending a lot of time lately writing up a formal paper on high redshift galaxies, so haven’t had much time to write here. The paper is a lot more involved than I told you so, but yeah, I did. Repeatedly. I do have a start on a post on self-interacting dark matter that I hope eventually to get back to. Today, I want to give a quick note about the MHONGOOSE survey. But first, a non-commercial interruption.

We will return to our usual programming shortly. But first, a few words on the eclipse experience last Monday. It. Was. Awesome . That’s a few words, so Mission Accomplished. That’s really all I had planned to say. However, I find I am still giddy from this momentous event, so will share my experience of the day, such as words can humbly convey.

Perhaps the most compelling astronomical phenomenon accessible to a naked-eye observer is a total eclipse of the sun. These rare events have always fascinated us, and often terrified us. It is abnormal and disturbing for the sun to be blotted from the sky! A solar eclipse will occur on Monday, 8 April 2024. A partial eclipse will be visible from nearly every part of North America.

In 1986, I was a grad student at Princeton, working in the atomic physics lab of Will Happer. It was at a department colloquium that I first heard a science talk that raised serious concerns about our use of fossil fuels potentially impacting the climate. This was not received well. People asked all sorts of questions, with much of the discussion revolving around feedback effects.

Taking a break from galaxies and cosmology, I’d like to post a little praise of NASA for safely returning a piece of an asteroid to Earth. One of the amazing things to me about astronomy & astrophysics is that we have learned how to decipher the composition of distant stars and gas clouds by observing their spectra. I worked on this early in my career and retain an interest in the cosmic abundance of the elements.

Why does MOND get any predictions right? That’s the question of the year, and perhaps of the century. I’ve been asking it since before this century began, and I have yet to hear a satisfactory answer.

I would like to write something positive to close out the year. Apparently, it is not in my nature, as I am finding it difficult to do so. I try not to say anything if I can’t say anything nice, and as a consequence I have said little here for weeks at a time. Still, there are good things that happened this year. JWST launched a year ago. The predictions I made for it at that time have since been realized.