Other Articles

During the few weeks I've been between jobs in March-April 2010, I managed to be a freelance journalist for a couple of days and sold an article to Science NOW, the online news portal of the Science magazine!!

The article is, of course, about astronomy. In particular, it's about one of yours truly's good old acquaintances: gravitational lensing – or the bending of light rays due to gravity – and cosmology.

It reports on a study where the overall structure of galaxies and dark matter in the Universe was used as a "cosmic magnifying glass" to look at even more distant galaxies and to infer, in the process, all-important information about the expansion of the Universe and the mysterious dark energy that powers it.

Using Dark Matter to Sense Dark Energy (published 25 March 2010)It's a weird, weird, weird universe we live in. Cosmologists and astronomers know that only 5% of it consists of ordinary matter of the sort found in stars and planets. Another 23% consists of mysterious dark matter that (so far) manifests itself only through its gravity. And a whopping 72% of the universe consists of bizarre, space-stretching dark energy which is speeding up the expansion of the universe. Scientists don't know exactly what dark matter and dark energy are. But now they've pulled off a bit of black magic and used the subtle effects of one to study the other. And here's another article I wrote during my internship for the ESO Messenger, the quarterly print publication of ESO.

It's not about a scientific topic but about an event, the closing ceremony of the International Year of Astronomy:

• Beyond 2009: ESO at the Closing Ceremony of the International Year of Astronomy (published March 2010)