esiegel | May 10, 2010"Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent." -Thoreau
A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went to the circus together. Someday, I vowed, I'll be strong, flexible, and stable enough to do the amazing hand-balancing tricks we saw.
And all the while, the six-year-old girl behind us screamed her piercing, high-pitched scream, cheering the performers on.
(This is totally appropriate behavior, IMO, and no children reading this should be discouraged from screaming at the circus.)
Now, one of us has better hearing than the other. And while one of us found the high pitched screaming…
esiegel | May 8, 2010
"I walked on your face!" -Buzz Aldrin, to the Moon
Do you watch my favorite show on television, 30 Rock? If you saw this last week's episode, you know that Tina Fey's character Liz Lemon got to meet Buzz Aldrin, who... randomly yells at the Moon.
(I'm sure this video will get taken down soon, so enjoy it while it lasts.)
Buzz is well-known for his sense of humor, good nature, and eloquence, in addition to his opinions on NASA and space exploration. But it's wonderful to see two of my favorite things in this world team up to make me laugh so hard!
Have a great weekend!
esiegel | May 7, 2010"What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?" -Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I don't mean to ask why the Milky Way is a spiral in an existential sort of way. You see, many galaxies, like our own, and also like Andromeda and the Triangulum Galaxy (below) -- our nearest galactic neighbors -- are spiral galaxies.
They're what I think of when I think of galaxies, and they're probably the first thing that pops into your head, too.…
esiegel | May 5, 2010It will shine still brighter when night is about you. May it be a light for you in dark places, when all other lights go out. -J.R.R. Tolkien
The night sky is no stranger to most of you. Once the Sun goes down in the west, the sky darkens, turning ever-deeper shades of blue until it approaches blackness, and stars and planets begin to come out against the fading backdrop.
Many things pollute the darkening sky, and can obscure your vision of the dimmest objects in the sky. Getting away from the city and light pollution is important, as is having clear skies without too many clouds in them.…
esiegel | May 3, 2010"An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life." -Unknown
Every now and again, people with all sorts of backgrounds -- from some graduate school all the way to having not finished high school -- ask me about getting involved in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Often, people's interest simply come from looking up at night.
I'm not going to lie, this is a huge question, with many different answers. First off, let's start off assuming that you have no background in math, no background in physics, and that you'…
esiegel | May 2, 2010Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. -Benjamin Franklin
Every weekend, I try to bring something light to you, but there's a lot of heavy stuff going on in the world right now. So instead of the usual, I'd like to tell you just a little bit about why putting even a little bit of oil in the oceans can be so disastrous.
And I can't think of a better modern voice to take us through that than Regina Spektor, whose voice reminds me of greats such as Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald. Take a listen to her song Apres Moi.
Apres Moi by Regina Spektor
Most of you know that…
esiegel | April 30, 2010When 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
One of the great things that the Hubble Space Telescope has given us is a whole slew of images of supernovae and remnant of past supernovae, from recent ones like SN 1987a
to supernovae that are hundreds of years old, like Tycho Brahe's supernova from 1572. In fact, Hubble is so powerful that it actually found the companion star that resulted in the Supernova exploding in the first place!…
esiegel | April 28, 2010Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
-Georg Lichtenberg
We've been going through the history of the Universe -- from inflation to the present day -- and you can read parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 here. The last thing that happened was we had a Universe filled with neutral atoms -- mostly hydrogen with some helium and a negligible amount of everything else -- that had begun to collapse under its own gravity.
When a few regions of space got dense enough, about 50 million years into the story, we made the first stars!
But there's a problem when…
esiegel | April 26, 2010
To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit. -Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking is in the news today, big time. Why? He says that intelligent aliens almost certainly exist, and that we should definitely not try to contact them. In fact, he argues, we should stay as quiet as possible and try to avoid detection. To quote him:
If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans.
We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we…
esiegel | April 25, 2010
Last night, I had the absolute pleasure to hear Midori, one of the top violinists in the world, play with the Oregon Symphony Orchestra.
(For those of you wondering, she was spectacular.)
What does Midori sound like? Here's her playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto fifteen years ago with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
While I recognize that classical music may not be to everyone's taste, I believe that much like a quality education and quality science, everyone should have access to a quality arts program, too.
But the philanthropic work that Midori is undertaking to those ends…
esiegel | April 23, 2010Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once. -Henry D. Thoreau
20 years ago tomorrow, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit.
It doesn't look that impressive, and maybe it shouldn't. After all, what is a space telescope? It's a couple of mirrors, a camera, some stabilizing gyroscopes, some electronics and an antenna, all wrapped in a reflective coating and powered by some solar panels. Doesn't sound so hard, does it?
But Hubble has vastly increased our understanding of the Universe, and I'd like to share with you some of the…
esiegel | April 22, 2010Note: This article first appeared here on Scienceblogs one year ago today.
There are many ways to celebrate Earth Day, from sustainability efforts to simply appreciating nature.
And while this is a beautiful shot of Forest Park right here in Portland, it doesn't compare -- in my eyes -- to the perfection of Earth as seen from so far away.
In October of 1946, a V-2 missile was launched from New Mexico, straight up into the air. And at its maximum height of 65 miles (just barely into what was then considered outer space), it snapped the first photographs of the Earth from Space. (And you can…
esiegel | April 21, 2010[The Big Bang] is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms ... [nor] challenged by an appeal to observation. -Fred Hoyle
Contrary to popular public opinion, the Big Bang is one of the most sound, well-tested and verified scientific models of all time. It's right up there with Evolution, General Relativity, and the Standard Model. In fact, it's sometimes known as the Standard Cosmological Model.
Image credit: grandunificationtheory.com, and as always, click for full-size where available.
Let's remember, however, that unlike Evolution and General Relativity, the Big…
esiegel | April 19, 2010If you are caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron.
-Lee Trevino, golfer who actually has been struck by lightning.
Today's astronomy picture of the day is absolutely gorgeous.
Of course, this is the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, erupting and spewing up volcanic ash. But, of course, the most interesting part of this picture is the lightning, which looks like it both originates and ends in the Volcanic ash itself!
Image credit for both images above: Marco Fulle, via helicopter.
First off, I'd like to be…
esiegel | April 18, 2010Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations...If you adopt their attitudes, then the possibility won't exist because you'll have already shut it out ... You can hear other people's wisdom, but you've got to re-evaluate the world for yourself.
-Mae Jemison, first African-American woman astronaut
It's always difficult to break down barriers, but those who've been brave enough to try and who've finally broken through deserve to be remembered! One of the barriers that America put into place was that of women being astronauts. Despite the USSR's Valentina Tereshkova's becoming the…
esiegel | April 16, 2010I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.
-John F. Kennedy, 1961
The entire human endeavor of spaceflight is -- without a doubt -- one of the greatest achievements in the history of humanity. Looking up into the heavens certainly provides some spectacular sights and a huge amount of insight into how space, stars, and galaxies work, among a myriad of other things. (And click the image below for an amazing high-resolution version.)
But my two biggest complaints about the…
esiegel | April 14, 2010People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within. -Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Welcome back to The Greatest Story Ever Told, where we're covering the natural history of the Universe from before the Big Bang to the present day. You can catch up on the first eight parts here, going forward from Inflation in part 1 to parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and reaching the formation of the first neutral atoms in part 8. But during all of this time, gravity has been working its magic.
In…
esiegel | April 12, 2010"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." -Groucho Marx
"While no one has proved that wormholes exist, that does not for a moment keep the more adventurous of thinkers from trying to figure how they might behave."
-Michael Lemonick, Time magazine
Wormholes. We've all heard the word before, and we're used to the concept (thanks to science fiction) that wormholes could be tunnels to either completely different locations in space or in time!
How so? You see, when you get enough mass (or other form of energy) in a small enough space, it becomes…
esiegel | April 11, 2010
"I created this project for fun. Initially, I had no business goals with it. I created this project recently. I was and still am a teenager myself, that is why I had a certain feeling of what other teenagers would want to see on the Internet. I myself enjoyed talking to friends with Skype using a microphone and webcam. But we got tired of talking to each other eventually. So I decided to create a little site for me and my friends where we could connect randomly with other people."
-Andrey Ternovskiy, 17-year-old founder of Chat Roulette
(You can read the entire NY Times report/interview here…
esiegel | April 9, 2010"Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt." -Lev Landau
I've been telling you about the Big Bang, the greatest story ever told, and the entire natural history of the Universe. Let's remind you -- historically -- of how our conception of the Universe changed as we learned more about our surroundings.
Maybe the first astronomical observation ever made was that the Sun rises in the East, passes overhead, and sets in the West. And it does this day after day, every day. It's no wonder that our first "cosmological model" of the Universe was that the Earth is stationary, and the Sun…