esiegel | December 27, 2009I discerned huge Orion, driving wild beasts together over the field of asphodel, the very ones that he once had killed on lonely mountains, he grasped in his hands a mace of bronze, never to be broken.
-Odysseus, in the Underworld, The Odyssey
With a reputation as the greatest hunter ever and as one of the largest, tallest men ever, it's no wonder that Orion lives on in both song,
and in our imaginations in the sky as well.
Orion is one of the most easily identifiable constellations in the sky; it was the second one I ever learned how to find, right after the Big Dipper. The three stars on…
esiegel | December 25, 2009I have come not to make war on the Italians, but to aid the Italians against Rome.
-Hannibal of Carthage
Today is Christmas Day, but did you know that this holiday, in addition to being a solstice celebration, has its origins in the second Punic War? Beginning in 218 B.C., the Romans suffered a number of, well, fairly crushing defeats at the hands of Hannibal of Carthage. You've probably heard the story of Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants (although, according to some sources, only one survived), and invading Italy, making it all the way to the city walls of Rome.
Roman morale was…
esiegel | December 23, 2009089:32:50 Mattingly: Apollo 8, Houston. [No answer.]
089:33:38 Mattingly: Apollo 8, Houston.
089:34:16 Lovell: Houston, Apollo 8, over.
089:34:19 Mattingly: Hello, Apollo 8. Loud and clear.
089:34:25 Lovell: Roger. Please be informed there is a Santa Claus.
089:34:31 Mattingly: That's affirmative. You're the best ones to know. -NASA
The world is an awfully big place now. Santa's job has to be tougher than its ever been before. And yet, across the world, every year without fail at this time, children delight with joy at the presents brought to them by Santa Claus. So, how does he do it?
Santa…
esiegel | December 21, 2009Thanks to NASA's Terra satellite for providing this image:
That tiny little white bar on the lower left, by the way? That's the scale of this image: 50 km (31 miles).
You know, as opposed to how it normally looks, when it isn't covered in snow:
Happy Holidays again! And a special thanks to Universe Today for showing this off, too!
esiegel | December 21, 2009Kenneth: These are my all inclusive holiday decorations. Here's a little Christmas tree.
Tracy: Ok.
Kenneth: A menorah.
Tracy: Dig.
Kenneth: A picture of President Obama for the Muslims.
Tracy: I'm gonna let that one slide.
Kenneth: And a bowl of meat cubes with a picture of Jimmy Connors sticking out in the tradition of Verdukianism. -30 Rock
It's the Winter Solstice today. This is one of my favorite holidays, and arguably, is the first holiday in all of human history. (Pardon the Northern-Hemisphere bias of this post.) How so, you ask?
Typically, the Sun rises in the East, travels higher…
esiegel | December 20, 2009One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating. -Luciano Pavarotti
I'm not going to lie to you; I think Pavarotti's totally got it right. It's not only a necessity for living, it's one of the greatest pleasures that we get to indulge in, and we get to do it every single day.
But I'm not 18 anymore, and I not only care about the taste of the food I eat, but also its nutritional value and where it comes from. I'm not an expert on this by any means (although Sharon is), but I've started to become more…
esiegel | December 18, 2009One of the reasons I write here on ScienceBlogs is because of our associations with the New York Times, a journalistic news source that I'm proud of on most days.
Today is not one of those days.
It isn't just the Times, either, the BBC is busy botching this story, so is the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and pretty much everyone else, except for TG Daily, which got it right.
If you go down to the bottom of Soudan Mine in Minnesota, you'll see an usual site for a mine: a group of giant physics experiments! Why? At the bottom of mineshafts, you have up to hundreds of feet of Earth protecting you…
esiegel | December 16, 2009Before you were conceived I wanted you
Before you were born I loved you
Before you were here an hour I would die for you
This is the miracle of love. -Maureen Hawkins
But I'm not talking about human children, I'm talking about the children of the stars. Stars burn their fuel until they no longer can, and then die in one of two impressive ways, depending on how massive they are. If a star is up to around four times as massive as our Sun, it dies by collapsing down to a white dwarf and blowing off its outer layers into a planetary nebula.
On the other hand, if your star is very massive -- like…
esiegel | December 14, 2009Trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell. -Shana Alexander
Around the internet, blogs are all abuzz that an experiment searching for dark matter, CDMS, has cancelled all of their upcoming announcements and will be holding a special press conference on the 18th (this Friday!) to release their latest findings.
Here's what you can expect. First off, here's how it works. They take a bunch of hockey-puck shaped detectors,
shield them at the bottom of a mine shaft deep beneath the Earth (in Soudan, MN),
and try to measure these very rare events of dark matter particles (which can…
esiegel | December 13, 2009And you,
of tender years,
can't know the fears
that your elders grew by... -Graham Nash, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young
Here's CSNY's version of Teach Your Children from their third album (their second with Neil Young), 4 Way Street, although it was always the lyrics of the song that got to me.
Like many people involved in college life, my semester is winding down, and finals week is upon us. My astronomy class just ended yesterday; little did I know that one of my students had made up a comic strip about me! (Click for full-size.)
For the first time since High School when Rory McEvoy…
esiegel | December 11, 2009Earlier this week, I showcased the newly-released Hubble Ultra Deep Field in the infrared, and compared it with the older image of the same region taken in visible light.
As many astute readers noticed, the newer image looks blurrier than the old one! This is true, and there's a good reason for this. Here's one of the old images from the Ultra Deep Field (in visible light):
and here's that same region in infrared light.
Yes, the latter image is blurrier. Why is it blurrier? One of the biggest differences between infrared light and visible light is their wavelengths; visible light goes from…
esiegel | December 9, 2009They will see us waving from such great heights
"Come down now," they'll say.
But everything looks perfect from far away
"Come down now," but we'll stay. -Postal Service
We've been over this twice before, but here's a refresher on how you image the farthest galaxies in the Universe. Pick a spot in the sky that's empty. What does empty mean? When you look with your eyes, with binoculars, and even with a reasonable telescope, you find no bright stars, no bright galaxies, no nebulae, no clusters -- in short nothing -- except for the absolute faintest of objects.
You know, something like this…
esiegel | December 8, 2009Have you been keeping up with The Boston Globe's Hubble Advent Calendar? Today's picture is totally worth talking about, and gives me a chance to tell you about these little guys that just hang-on to our galaxy: globular clusters. When you look out at a galaxy -- pretty much any galaxy -- you'll find these tiny clumps of light surrounding it.
These clumps are actually amazing, dense collections of stars! If you look out at the nearest star to us, it's Proxima Centauri, located just over four light years away. That means if you drew a sphere centered on the Earth four light years in radius,…
esiegel | December 7, 2009You don't understand. You can't just come to the Sea of Galilee and start walking on water. If you could, everybody would be doing it. You need to prepare yourself. -Walk on Water
As some of you may have noticed from looking at the site over the past few days, Scienceblogs has partnered with National Geographic. To celebrate this, I want to show you one of my favorite National Geographic clips of all time, showcasing the Central American Basilisk. (Its nickname? "The Jesus Lizard.") Why? You'll see...
This lizard weighs little enough, has feet with a big enough surface area, and can move…
esiegel | December 6, 2009Earlier this week, I was reading one of Ed's posts, and I followed the link to the original post, where I found this gem of a comment (and I would link to it, but the blog owner has reconsidered what he wants to make public):
'Freedom of speech' does not mean 'freedom from mockery.'
Well, mockery has all sorts of uses, from a Tom Lehrer song...
...to making a political statement. As many of you know, a bill to legalize gay marriage in New York was defeated last week, which is a disappointing setback for anyone interested in equal rights. But there was a stroke of brilliance in all of this…
esiegel | December 3, 2009You're making me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. -Bruce Banner
Hey, LHC, what did those protons ever do to you? You take them, accelerate them to the fastest speeds we've ever accelerated protons to on Earth, and then smash them into one another with more energy than ever before!
The Large Hadron Collider takes bunches of protons, accelerates them in opposite directions inside its giant ring, and smashes them together -- ideally -- at the centers of these giant detectors.
At Fermilab, each proton would come in with an energy up to about 1.0 TeV, for a total collision energy of 2…
esiegel | December 1, 2009At the last dim horizon, we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be oppressed. -Edwin Hubble
Hubble didn't need a thousand words to describe how beautiful and wondrous the Universe is, and the Hubble Space Telescope can -- perhaps -- say even more in just a simple picture.
Well, the Boston Globe, starting today, has a full 25-day advent calendar of Hubble pictures, which it reveals one of per day. Today's? (And click to enlarge.)
Planetary…
esiegel | November 30, 2009Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. -T.H. Huxley
We've spent a little bit of time talking about dark energy, including what we think of it, how we first discovered it, and how we knew that there wasn't just something out there blocking the light. It seems to be the latest abyss that Nature is leading us, so we needed to look beyond the type Ia supernova data and see what else the Universe was telling us.
Image credit: Don Dixon.
So what do we do? First off, we can try to measure how much matter is in the Universe independent of anything…
esiegel | November 29, 2009Saying thanks is one of the best things we can do to appreciate the good things in our lives. This goes for our partners, friends, families, coworkers, acquaintances, and for some of us, our dear readers. (Thank you all!) There are many musicians who've said thanks over the years, too, and so here's Led Zeppelin's version of Thank You from the BBC sessions.
This past Thursday was Thanksgiving in the United States, and I had a great time with some wonderful people and some outstanding food! As is "tradition," I suppose, I've been eating leftover Thanksgiving food every day since, and that…
esiegel | November 27, 2009If you've never been to the Galaxy Zoo website, you have been missing out. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a pretty impressive telescope, but the wide-field camera system on it is what's truly amazing. Have you ever seen a telescope that looks like this before?
This telescope surveys a huge area of the sky, taking the highest resolution pictures of tremendous regions of space. We not only get to take a census of a very large region of space, we also get unique views on -- literally -- hundreds of thousands of galaxies. This gives us both the forest and the trees. Sure, I may write more about…