Spider Star

The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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Praise for Star Dragon

"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin

"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine

"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review

"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly

"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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Personal Science-Related Starlinks

January 8th, 2009

There’s some new research being presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting going on this week in Long Beach, CA, suggesting that supermassive black holes grow first, and then the galaxies follow around them. This is directly related to my own research which addresses this issue of mutual black hole and galaxy evolution in different ways. A clearer write-up of the new results comes from Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy, and I recommend you check it out.

I’ll be attending a large international meeting this coming August in Rio de Janeiro, which will feature a session about this: Evolution of galaxies and central black holes: Feeding and Feedback. This meeting is going to keep me away from the World Science Fiction Convention this year, unfortunately. Anyway, the first part of the symposium description explains some of the basic science going on here:

Research over the last decade has revealed definitively (1) that the fundamental power source in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is gravitational accretion onto supermassive (greater than one million solar masses) black holes at the centers of galaxies, (2) that supermassive black holes lie at the centers of virtually all spheroidal systems, and (3) that there are strong empirical correlations between properties of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that nuclear activity must play an important role in the formation and evolution of galaxies: far from being unusual, exotic anomalies in a relatively quiescent universe, it is now widely recognized that nuclear activity is an important ingredient in the evolution of galaxies. Also over the last decade, the masses of black holes have become measurable through methods such as modeling of stellar and gas dynamics and reverberation mapping, and these anchor scaling relationships that permit estimates of black hole masses from quasar spectroscopic properties alone. With the advent of techniques for accurately estimating AGN black hole masses, even at large redshifts, and the availability of large numbers of quasars at all redshifts from deep surveys with Chandra, XMM-Newton, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the field has undergone transformational change. A major focus in extragalactic astronomy and cosmology has become observational and theoretical investigation of nuclear activity in the larger context of the galactic environment, which we can describe in terms of feeding and feedback.

Biology in Science Fiction starts to summarizes some results about the relationship between science fiction and science bloggers, including responses from me. She continues here. Almost Diamonds continues the summary from Monday from the science fiction blogging side. These are related to the ScienceOnline09 meeting and the session on science and science fiction that will be there.

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