GALEX

Chris Martin (Caltech) completed his week at NYU with an astro seminar on GALEX, which has been amazingly successful and productive (especially per dollar). When GALEX came to its end of life, Caltech convinced NASA to transfer it, so Martin is not just the PI, he is the (effective) owner. He spent most of the time talking about the star-formation history of the Universe, but he also showed some nebulae that are fluorescent: They emit essentially only in the far-UV! That's cool: they are, in some sense, hotter than infinitely hot blackbodies. That's not really true, of course, but there aren't that many circumstances in which one can arrange such exceedingly non-thermal emission. As both my loyal readers know, Schiminovich and I are trying to extract the full photon stream from GALEX and calibrate it for time-domain science. If we succeed, we may end up making GALEX even more productive posthumously.

ps. Martin told us in the seminar that for about a million USD, you can buy the next year-ish of GALEX operations!