esiegel | June 23, 2016"Black holes can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song." -Janna Levin
If you had told an astrophysicist five years ago that binary black holes were common, that would’ve been news, but not surprising. If you had told them that ~30 solar masses was a good estimate for each one of their masses, though, you might have had to pick their jaws up off the floor. Yet LIGO’s very first detection showed us exactly that, much to the surprise of many.
The inspiral and merger of the first pair of black holes ever directly observed. Image credit: B. P. Abbott et…
esiegel | June 22, 2016"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -T.S. Eliot
Now that not just one but two gravitational wave events have been directly detected, we're officially in the era of true gravitational wave astronomy. LIGO has taught us something unique about stellar mass black holes, and will continue to teach us about these objects, their population statistics, and their merger rates as time goes on.
Image credit: Bohn et al 2015, SXS team, of two merging black holes and how they alter the appearance…
esiegel | June 21, 2016"There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery." -Enrico Fermi
Given the huge number of stars, planets, and chances at life that the galaxy and the Universe has given us, it seems paradoxical that we haven't yet encountered any form of alien intelligence or even life. The discoveries make in the field of exoplanet studies, particularly by the Kepler mission, make this an even bigger problem than we anticipated: more than 10^22 planets with Earth-like condition…
esiegel | June 20, 2016"Mozart's music is like an X-ray of your soul - it shows what is there, and what isn't." -Isaac Stern
When supermassive black holes have a large amount of matter fall onto them, they accelerate a large amount of the ionized material -- particularly electrons -- into high-velocity, bi-directional jets. In many cases, those jets of material collide with previously blown-off gaseous material and create high-energy X-rays.
A black hole more than a billion times the mass of the Sun powers this X-ray jet that's many thousands of light years long. Image credit: NASA / Hubble / STScI / Wikisky tool…
esiegel | June 19, 2016“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.” -Muhammad Ali
It may have been another fun week here at Starts With A Bang, where I've just learned something fun: I have an Erdös-Bacon number of nine! On the academic side, I published with Jim Fry, who published with Jim Peebles, who published with Bob Dicke, who published with Albert Einstein, who published with Ernst Straus, who published with Paul Erdös, giving me an Erdös number of six. But on the TV side, I was on Good Day Sacramento with Cody Stark, who appeared with Dolly Parton on Good Day…
esiegel | June 18, 2016"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power." -Alexander Hamilton
Seen poking through a cloud, trees or other opaque materials, sunbeams are one of the most surprising natural phenomena, when you think about it. There’s always scattered, ambient sunlight in all directions, and the bright sunshine is never visible as a ray when there aren’t clouds.
Public domain photo from Pixabay…
esiegel | June 17, 2016“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” –Joseph Campbell
Making up some 85% of the mass in our Universe, dark matter is necessary to explain the motions of individual galaxies, the grouping and clustering of assemblies of galaxies, the large-scale structure of the Universe and more. But on a much closer-to-home level, dark matter may be absolutely essential to the origin of life, too!
Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada, of the illustration of the dark matter halo surrounding the luminous disk of our galaxy.
Without dark matter, supernova explosions and starburst events would still…
esiegel | June 16, 2016"If you've seen one gamma-ray burst, you've seen one gamma-ray burst!" -Common quote among gamma-ray burst astronomers, emphasizing how little we know about them.
When the first gravitational wave signal ever, GW150914, was directly detected, NASA’s Fermi GBM team shocked the world by announcing the detection of a high-energy burst of electromagnetic radiation. This was a huge surprise, because merging black holes shouldn’t have a bright gamma ray or X-ray flash associated with them!
Image credit: NASA, of an inspiral and merger of two massive, compact objects; illustration only.
A…
esiegel | June 15, 2016"It turned out that nature was very kind, and there appear to be many of these black holes in the Universe and we were lucky enough to see one." -Dave Reitze, executive director of LIGO
On September 14th, 2015, just days after turning on, the twin Advanced LIGO detectors detected the first gravitational wave signature: a merger between two black holes, of 36 and 29 solar masses. They inspiraled, they merged, and they lost 5% of their rest mass to gravitational radiation, sending ripples through the fabric of space due to Einstein’s E = mc^2. It raised a whole slew of questions: were these…
esiegel | June 14, 2016"In order for the light to shine so brightly the darkness must be present." -Francis Bacon
Recently, a team of international researchers has assembled the most comprehensive, up to date study on light pollution on Earth ever, including a full-Earth map of dark sky conditions or lack thereof. Its findings were disheartening but unsurprising, including the fact that 80% of Americans and 60% of Europeans cannot see the Milky Way.
The night sky from a rural (top) vs. urban (bottom) location. These are not extreme examples of pristine skies or of heavily polluted skies. Image credit: flickr user…
esiegel | June 13, 2016“It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. It’s a crazy world out there. Be curious.” –Stephen Hawking
In the beginning, before even the Big Bang, all that we had was space and time, expanding rapidly according to the rules of cosmological inflation. Today, we've got an observable Universe full of stars and galaxies, tens of billions of light years across, with at least one instance of intelligent life: on Earth.
The Earth and Sun, not so different from how they might have…
esiegel | June 13, 2016“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.” -Muhammad Ali
It's been a very busy week here at Starts With A Bang — as most full weeks after vacation often are — but there's a whole lot to look forward to and look back on this past week. Not only did we have a new podcast come out for The Mac Observer, but we also had an overflowing week of stories to cover, including:
Is the Universe expanding faster than expected? (for Ask Ethan),
No one, not even Newton or Einstein, was the Muhammad Ali of physics,
Fly over NASA's greatest-ever view of Pluto (for…
esiegel | June 11, 2016"The new claim now is [a] boson with a mass of 16.7 MeV. But they don’t say anything about what went wrong in their previous claims and why we should not take those claims seriously." -Oscar Naviliat Cuncic
Everyone knows that the Standard Model of particle physics cannot be all there is. It does a fantastic job of describing the known particles and interactions, but many mysteries remain, including the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry, the existence of dark matter and dark energy, the origin of the interaction strengths of the particles, and why they have the mass values that they…
esiegel | June 10, 2016“If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.” -Mario Andretti
One of the toughest things to wrap your mind around in the natural world is the idea of special relativity: the faster you move, the closer you get to the speed of light, the more difficult it becomes to increase your speed at all. While you might approach the speed of light arbitrarily and asymptotically, you’ll never reach it.
Public domain timelapse photo by flickr user comedynose (Pete), illustrating fast, relativistic motion. Image retrieved via https://www.flickr.com/photos/comedynose/23696582553.
And…
esiegel | June 9, 2016"That what wrong with the media today. All they have is questions, questions, questions. They never have cookies." -Cookie Monster
There are lots of things to worry about in this Universe, including falling into a black hole. But unless you happen to fall directly into the event horizon, an incredibly small region of space for most black holes, you very likely won't be swallowed at all!
This artist’s rendering shows a galaxy being cleared of interstellar gas, the building blocks of new stars. Image credit: ESA/ATG Medialab.
Sure, you might be torn apart, accelerated, ionized, and spit back…
esiegel | June 8, 2016"The Universe is made mostly of dark matter and dark energy, and we don't know what either of them is." -Saul Perlmutter
When we look out at the Solar System, the Sun dominates in terms of both light and mass. Responsible for nearly 100% of the light and for 99.8% of the mass, it stands to reason that stars would account for the vast majority of mass in the Universe. Yet when we apply what we observe of light and stars to structures like galaxies, clusters, and the large-scale structure of the Universe, not only do stars not get us there, but all the known forms of matter, including gas, dust…
esiegel | June 7, 2016"Not only does God play dice, but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen." -Stephen Hawking
The New York Times ran an article on Stephen Hawking promising there was a possible escape route from a black hole, after all. In the text, Hawking asserts,
"They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. If you feel you are trapped in a black hole, don’t give up. There is a way out."
While it might appear that matter escapes a black hole, this is only from matter well outside of the event horizon at all times. Image credit: ESO/MPE/Marc Schartmann.
But what the actual…
esiegel | June 6, 2016"The cosmic game changed forever in 1992. Before then, logic told us that there had to be other planets besides the nine (if you still count poor Pluto) in our solar system, but until that year, when two astronomers detected faint, telltale radio signals in the constellation Virgo, we had no hard evidence of their existence." -Thomas Mallon
For generations, if you wanted to know what the surface of the outermost known object in our Solar System -- Pluto -- looked like, you had to rely solely on your imagination. Sure, it was probably covered in ice, and large enough to pull itself into a…
esiegel | June 5, 2016"The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life." -Muhammad Ali
You might not think that boxing, the sweet science, and physics, the most fundamental of all the sciences, have much in common on the surface. But look a little deeper and you'll find parallels between developing a unique skill set, solving problems, dissecting opponents and drawing the greatness out of the most difficult problems you can to increase your own glory.
Ali taunting a fallen Sonny Liston in the first round of their second fight. Image credit: AP, via http://interactives.ap…
esiegel | June 5, 2016“It isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe.” -Muhammad Ali
After a week of travel here at Starts With A Bang -- where we appeared at Balticon 50 and had a fantastic time -- it's time to catch up on all the news that the Universe had to offer. That includes a whole lot, including a fun podcast for Ikonoclast, now live, Saturn just having reached opposition and Mercury, today, at its greatest elongation from the Sun. (Look for it in the pre-dawn sky!) The only Balticon disappointment: the session I had with Larry Niven didn't have audio setup in it,…