esiegel | January 24, 2011"The distance is nothing; it is only the first step that is difficult." -Madame Marie du Deffand
If you've got some solidly dark skies, you might notice -- in addition to the great field of thousands of stars -- a few faint, fuzzy objects.
Visible with the naked eye (and captured with only a digital camera), this is the Andromeda Galaxy, as seen from Earth.
At a "mere" 2.4 million light years from us, it is the closest large galaxy to us, by far. As far as our best telescopes can show us, Andromeda looks like this.
Image credit: Mosaic by astropix.nl.
And you don't want to use something…
esiegel | January 23, 2011"There was an old man with a beard,
Who said: 'It is just as I feared!
Two owls and a hen,
Four larks and a wren
Have all built their nests in my beard!" -Edward Lear
No better song for this week than an early, live version of Jeff Tweedy's
Bob Dylan's 49th Beard.Some of you have weighed in on my face after reading my interview in the Portland Tribune and seeing a recent picture.
The beard -- inspired by my 2009 astronomy class -- has been growing ever since, and it's time to head on out and show it off.
What's the occasion?
The 2011 West Coast Beard and Mustache Championships, happening…
esiegel | January 21, 2011"You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him to think." -Elbert Hubbard
If you listened to some of the headlines accompanying a recent news story, you might conclude that College is a waste of time, money, and resources for practically everyone involved. The three links above have, as their headlines:
$80,000 For Beer Pong? Report Shows College Students Learn Little During First Two Years (Besides Party Skills),
Report: First two years of college show small gains, and
One in Three College Students Is Coasting. This Is News?
Over the past 15 years, I've lived and worked at…
esiegel | January 20, 2011"What do we mean by setting a man free? You cannot free a man who dwells in a desert and is an unfeeling brute. There is no liberty except the liberty of some one making his way towards something. Such a man can be set free if you will teach him the meaning of thirst, and how to trace a path to a well. Only then will he embark upon a course of action that will not be without significance. You could not liberate a stone if there were no law of gravity -- for where will the stone go, once it is quarried?" -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Gravity, on the largest scales, rules everything in the Universe…
esiegel | January 18, 2011"There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach." -J.R.R. Tolkien
But over at XKCD, that quote provides little comfort. After all, "for ever" isn't exactly quite right.
Even the stars must all exhaust their fuel and die.
Right?
Let's head on…
esiegel | January 16, 2011"Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree." -Terry Pratchett
With a high unemployment rate and many people having stopped looking for work, it's pretty hard to live in the United States and not be aware of the struggles many people are facing. Here's a song by Loudon Wainwright III to set the tone,
The Home Stretch.Although many people have their theories, it's worth asking just what the income disparity is in America. Thankfully, Catherine Rampell's NY Times article earlier this week came loaded with data from Rachel Johnson of the Tax Policy Center. Specifically, they…
esiegel | January 14, 2011"This is the first time in my work that I've really gone out on a limb and made a very specific prediction - I didn't give myself any elbow room... If we're right, then it's a huge success and you can find very dim or effectively dark galaxies simply by analysing disturbances in the gas disk." -Sukanya Chakrabarti
There's a long-standing problem in the field of dark matter research, which is so distressing that it has led a few people to abandon dark matter altogether.
What am I talking about?
Image credit: The Millenium Simulation.
This -- roughly -- is what the matter in our Universe…
esiegel | January 13, 2011"Einstein was wrong when he said, 'God does not play dice.' Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen." -Stephen Hawking
Welcome back to Starts With A Bang after a brief vacation! Apparently, I go away for a few days, and the world tries to turn all we know about supermassive black holes on its head!
Think about any galaxy like ours. Tens of thousands of light years across with great spiral arms, they house anywhere upwards of a hundred billion stars. If you take a good look at any…
esiegel | January 5, 2011"If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days." -Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Everyone needs to take a vacation, even your favorite science bloggers. I'm always telling you to get out there and enjoy the world, and while I'm not going to Antarctica like some people (yet), I should have a great adventure ahead of me. Starting today, we're headed up to Vancouver, BC and Whistler, where for…
esiegel | January 5, 2011"The size of the universe is no more depressing than the size of a cow." -David Deutsch
But it is bizarre, I'll give you that. The most common scientific question I get asked is how, if the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the speed limit of the Universe is the speed of light, why do I say the observable Universe is 93 billion light years across?
In other words, why is this picture of the Universe wrong?
I've tried to answer this before, and so have others, but perhaps it's time for another -- more conceptual -- attempt. This is one of the most mind-boggling things about relativity.…
esiegel | January 3, 2011"Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right." -Oprah Winfrey
We've just completed another trip around the Sun, both in terms of the calendar year, and also the way astronomers measure it, by returning once again to perihelion, the closest point in our orbit to the Sun.
If you look up at the sky, and you watch the Sun, the Moon, and the planets all move through it, you'll notice something spectacular.
Image credit: Larry Landolfi.
To within a very small separation in the sky, the Sun, the Moon, and each of the planets (Venus and Saturn in this picture) all follow the…
esiegel | January 1, 2011"They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?" -Jeanette Winterson
Here in Portland, it's just cold for now. But much of the world has been blanketed in those familiar white flakes, and recently. Snow is one of those simple things that nature just does, but it's still as wonderful for most of us as it was when we were little kids.
Image credit: Fillies Wo/UNEP/Still Pictures.
Rather than liquid freezing, snow comes from water vapor -- the gaseous form of…
esiegel | December 30, 2010"There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." -Aldous Huxley
Earlier this week, I told you the story of how we went from a Universe that was -- at one time -- almost perfectly smooth, full of tiny, random fluctuations in density,
to the Universe we have today, full of stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies all clumped together in a beautiful cosmic web of structure.
But there was one picture I showed that generated a lot of questions. I put up an image showing what the Universe was made out of today (when we have this great cosmic…
esiegel | December 28, 2010You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
You may find yourself in another part of the world
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
You may ask yourself: well... how did I get here? -Talking Heads
Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day was this beautiful shot of the nearest 1.5 million (or so) galaxies, as mapped by the 2-Micron All-Sky Survey, with our galaxy shaded in blue.
Now, if you're an astrophysicist, you might ask yourself how these nearby galaxies are distributed. Are they regularly…
esiegel | December 25, 2010"Appreciation is a wonderful thing: it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well." -Voltaire
All over the world, there are celebrations going on today. Yes, it's Christmas, but there's a much older reason to celebrate. I'm not talking about Roman festivals, Ancient Greek celebrations, or even old Hebrew traditions, although I will give you the David Grisman Quintet's classic,
Shalom Aleichem.I'm talking about the sky. And not the night sky, either. If you want to see what the Sun does, day-from-day, all you need to do is construct a pinhole camera with a photographic plate on the…
esiegel | December 23, 2010"When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes." -Tycho Brahe
Supernovae are the most spectacular death-knells of the largest stars in our Universe. Nearly all stars burn light elements into heavier ones, releasing energy through the incredible process of nuclear fusion.
But all stars eventually run out of this fuel. For our Sun, we've got about another 6 billion years left. But the more massive your star, the faster it burns through its fuel.…
esiegel | December 21, 2010"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the Universe around him and calls the adventure Science." -Edwin Hubble
I promised you, this week, we'd be taking a look at the power of the Hubble Space Telescope. Yesterday, we looked at Eta Carinae, but today, I decided to look a little farther. Have a listen to a little classic Pink Floyd as a treat today, and their hit,
Have a Cigar.
Sketch credit: Patrick Van Beeck.
Yes, I know Hubble was a pipe man, but I'm talking about the Cigar Galaxy, otherwise known as M82. Visible with a small telescope or even good binoculars, M82 has been studied…
esiegel | December 20, 2010"We find them smaller and fainter, in constantly increasing numbers, and we know that we are reaching into space, farther and farther, until, with the faintest nebulae that can be detected with the greatest telescopes, we arrive at the frontier of the known Universe." -Edwin Hubble
There's really only one way to appreciate just how far we've come in our quest to learn about the Universe thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope.
That is, to take a look at something before the Hubble Space Telescope came along, and then to look at it with Hubble. Preferably, we can look at it multiple times, as…
esiegel | December 18, 2010"You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back."
-Steve Prefontaine
But there are lots of amazing ways to propel yourself forward, indeed. Listen to one of the greatest musical groups of our times, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, as they perform Victor Wooten's song,
Sex In A Pan,off their album UFO Tofu.
Last week, I told you about a runaway galaxy, speeding through the Universe and leaving a tail behind it.
Image credit: GALEX.
Of course, this is a composite image in visible and ultra-violet light. We saw here that the galaxy looks normal in visible light; only in the…
esiegel | December 17, 2010"The moon is eclipsed through the interposition of the earth... Anaxagoras was the first to set out distinctly the facts about eclipses and illuminations."
-Euripides, in Hippolytus, 431 B.C.
As we all know, the Earth revolves around the Sun while it rotates on its axis. The rotation causes day-and-night every 24 hours, while the revolution causes our seasons and our calendar year.
You'll notice, in the image above, that the Summer Solstice -- June 21st -- is when the North Pole of the Earth is tilted most directly towards the Sun, and that the Winter Solstice -- December 21st -- is when it'…