esiegel | August 22, 2016“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'” -Edgar Mitchell
Can you believe it’s been 70 years since humanity first began exploring our own planet from space? It’s the best way to view clouds, weather patterns, sea ice, deforestation and all sorts of other…
esiegel | August 21, 2016 “Failure I can live with. Not trying is what I can’t handle!” -Sanya Richards-Ross
It’s been another big week here at Starts With A Bang, with stories covering the Universe near and far. I myself was on vacation, but thanks to our generous Patreon supporters, I was able to put in the resources to get a week ahead and have a whole slew of stories to publish from afar. If you missed anything this week, go back and check it all out now (especially since I know some of you don't read the full stories) so that you don't miss out:
How small can a piece of the Universe be and still expand? (for…
esiegel | August 20, 2016"I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull!" -Ronald D. Moore, Battlestar Galactica
When we look out at the night sky, we aren’t seeing the Universe everywhere as it is exactly at this moment, but rather as it was some time ago. Because the speed of light is finite and the stars are many light…
esiegel | August 19, 2016"Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do." -Golda Meir
It’s been 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang for us, and when we look out at a distant object in the Universe, we’re seeing it as it was in the past. Its age — as it appears — is determined only by how long the light took for it to travel from that object to our eyes, but to someone living there, it will also appear that the Universe is 13.8 billion years old.
Looking back a variety of distances corresponds to a variety of times since the Big Bang. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and A.…
esiegel | August 18, 2016"And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium,
And chlorine, cobalt, carbon, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium.
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discarvard." -Tom Lehrer
Stars fuse hydrogen into helium, then helium into carbon and then it’s up the periodic table to higher and heavier ones via other fusion and neutron-capture mechanisms. But there are three elements in between helium and carbon: lithium, beryllium, and boron. Those three elements can’t be made by conventional fusion, and in fact, aren’…
esiegel | August 17, 2016"Reality is what kicks back when you kick it. This is just what physicists do with their particle accelerators. We kick reality and feel it kick back. From the intensity and duration of thousands of those kicks over many years, we have formed a coherent theory of matter and forces, called the standard model, that currently agrees with all observations." -Victor J. Stenger
Over the past month, four big experiments looking for new physics have announced their latest results, and all four have come up empty. At the LHC, ATLAS and CMS failed to confirm the existence of a new particle, leaving us…
esiegel | August 16, 2016"For something to collapse, not all systems have to shut down. In most cases, just one system is enough." -Robert Kiyosaki
Do supermassive black holes form from the merger and growth of many smaller black holes, falling towards a cluster/galactic center where they find one another and grow into a behemoth? Or is there a direct-collapse mechanism at play, where a black hole thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of times the mass of our Sun forms spontaneously?
The X-ray and optical images of a small galaxy containing a black hole many tens of thousands of times the mass…
esiegel | August 15, 2016"All the atoms of our bodies will be blown into space in the disintegration of the solar system, to live on forever as mass or energy." -Carolyn Porco
Launched in 1997, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has shed unprecedented views on our Solar System’s majestic, ringed world. From the discovery of new, outer rings to infrared hazes beneath its clouds to surprising storms, the nature of its rings and structure atop Saturn’s north pole, Cassini has delivered beyond any reasonable expectations.
A false-color image highlighting Saturn’s hurricane over its north pole, inside the much larger hexagon-…
esiegel | August 14, 2016 “Failure I can live with. Not trying is what I can’t handle!” -Sanya Richards-Ross
It’s been a crazy week here at Starts With A Bang, including a pretty good meteor shower and some other rather remarkable stories. I just recorded a radio show with Dr. David Livingston of The Space Show this past Tuesday, and it's downloadable or available for streaming right here!
Screenshot from my 2016 episode of The Space Show, via http://www.thespaceshow.com/show/09-aug-2016/broadcast-2754-dr.-ethan-s….
I've confirmed with Forbes that yes, they swear they no longer block ad-blockers, and so if you're…
esiegel | August 13, 2016"We now have the best picture of how galaxies like our own formed their stars." -Casey Papovich
The expanding Universe is counterintuitive in a lot of ways: on the largest scales, the distances between galaxies are increasing at an alarming rate, yet the distances between the stars in our own galaxies or the atoms in our bodies don’t appear to change. It makes one wonder whether there’s a size limit to how small a piece of the Universe can be and still expand?
If everything expanded as the Universe did, then the coins would need to be replaced by paint. Image credit: "Fun with Astronomy" by…
esiegel | August 12, 2016"A lot of legends, a lot of people, have come before me. But this is my time." -Usain Bolt
The Olympics is an incredible time for athletes in all sports, and a time to celebrate the fastest, strongest, most agile, and all the other superlative achievements the human body is capable of. Yet for those of you hoping for a new record-breaking performance in the men’s 100 meters, I’ve got bad news: it’s extraordinarily unlikely.
Usain Bolt with his official world record time in 2009. Image credit: American Foreign Press.
Usain Bolt is an athlete whose prowess and performances shouldn’t be…
esiegel | August 11, 2016“Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'what kind of tea?” -Neil Gaiman
Enjoying the Perseid meteor shower this year, as perhaps you do every August? As you look up, the great cosmic show might have a lot more to offer than mere streaks of light, due to cometary debris brightly burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. This year, Jupiter has slightly disturbed the debris stream, resulting in an increase in the number of meteors-per-hour, as the stream passes quite centrally through Earth’s location.
The orbital path of Comet Swift-Tuttle, which passes…
esiegel | August 10, 2016"For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return." -Leonardo da Vinci
The Universe is an awfully big place, but how certain are we that we couldn’t travel in a straight line for a very long time and simply return to our starting position? Just because we can travel through the Universe for an arbitrarily, perhaps infinitely long distance-or-time, doesn’t mean the Universe itself is infinite. It’s quite possible that it closes in on itself, and that any straight-line path will eventually return…
esiegel | August 9, 2016“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” -Richard Feynman
Like many suggestive signals in the past, the 750 GeV bump in the diphoton channel has turned out to be a mere phantasm: an unlikely statistical fluctuation that simply disappeared as more data was collected. While almost the entire particle physics community was hoping for a different outcome, this is apparently the Universe we were dealt.
The ATLAS and CMS diphoton bumps, displayed together, clearly correlating at ~750 GeV. Image credit: CERN, CMS/ATLAS collaborations, image…
esiegel | August 8, 2016"Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening." -Oliver Wendell Holmes
When isolated stars like our Sun reach the end of their lives, they're expected to blow off their outer layers in a roughly spherical configuration: a planetary nebula. But the most spectacular bubbles don't come from gas-and-plasma getting expelled into otherwise empty space, but from young, hot stars whose radiation pushes against the gaseous nebulae in which they were born.
The star powering the bubble itself,…
esiegel | August 7, 2016"...even if we don't understand each other, that's not a reason to reject each other. There are two sides to any argument. Is there one point of view that has all the answers? Give it some thought." -Alder, from Pokémon
It’s been a fantastic week here at Starts With A Bang, with stories ranging from the beginning of the Universe to how we do business here on Earth in 2016. We've got a topic picked out for our next podcast on SoundCloud, on the Big Bang and what it does (and doesn't) mean, plus I'll be recording a radio show with Dr. David Livingston of The Space Show this Tuesday night!…
esiegel | August 6, 2016"They say the universe is expanding. That should help with the traffic." -Steven Wright
Look out at a nearby object in our Universe, and you'll find that the amount of time you look back (in years) is pretty much exactly equal to the object's distance (in light years). But look far away, and these two numbers start to diverge. In our 13.8 billion year old Universe, in fact, we can see back up to 46 billion light years in any direction. If you think this number seems absurd, you're not alone.
The GOODS-N field, with galaxy GN-z11 highlighted: the presently most-distant galaxy ever discovered…
esiegel | August 5, 2016"I'm not a natural leader. I'm too intellectual; I'm too abstract; I think too much." -Newt Gingrich
When an issue comes up, and it can be decided based on facts -- on data, on evidence, on things you can measure and quantify -- is it ever okay to decide that issue based on your feelings rather than what the facts indicate? It isn't just Newt Gingrich's comments about violent crime, meant to incite fear even as crime rates continue to drop nationwide, but a symptom of a larger epidemic in the world.
Public perception of whether crime rates are up as compared to one year ago (top line) vs.…
esiegel | August 4, 2016"My dad took me out to see a meteor shower when I was a little kid, and it was scary for me because he woke me up in the middle of the night. My heart was beating; I didn't know what he wanted to do. He wouldn't tell me, and he put me in the car and we went off, and I saw all these people lying on blankets, looking up at the sky." -Steven Spielberg
This year’s Perseid meteor shower is already underway, and will peak on the night of August 11/morning of August 12. Consistently one of the year’s best, with approximately two meteors per minute and brighter than average meteors to boot, this year…
esiegel | August 3, 2016"Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself." -Carl Jung
If you divide the matter we know into progressively smaller and smaller components, you’d find that atomic nuclei, made of protons and neutrons, compose the overwhelming majority of the mass we understand. But if you look inside each nucleon, you find that its constituents -- quarks and gluons -- account for less than 0.2% of their total mass.
The particles of the standard model, with masses (in MeV) in the upper right. A proton, made up of two up…