esiegel | April 4, 2016"This job is a great scientific adventure. But it's also a great human adventure. Mankind has made giant steps forward. However, what we know is really very, very little compared to what we still have to know." -Fabiola Gianotti
On Earth, star trails inevitably appear in any long-exposure image unless you account for the rotation of the Earth, requiring specialized mounts, advanced pointing software, or both. But from space, those same familiar motions appear, albeit for very different reasons.
Image credit: Chris Luckhardt at flickr, of a long-exposure photograph of the stars from Earth.…
esiegel | April 4, 2016"When I was in high school, I was certain that being an astronaut was my goal. It was a very important time -- Sally Ride was making her first flight into space and she had a real impact on me. Those 'firsts' kind of stick in your head and really become inspirations for you." Karen Nyberg, astronaut
On September 14th, less than 72 hours after being activated at its highest sensitivity ever, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) detected its first unambiguous signal in both detectors, a signal that corresponded to the merger of two massive black holes: 36 and 29 solar…
esiegel | April 3, 2016"All the evidence, experimental and even a little theoretical, seems to indicate that it is the energy content which is involved in gravitation, and therefore, since matter and antimatter both represent positive energies, gravitation makes no distinction." -Richard Feynman
It was a big last week at Starts With A Bang, and you might not realize it but next week is shaping up to be even bigger! If you missed anything, here's what we took a look at:
How do black hole jets carve out bubbles in space? (for Ask Ethan),
Beyond human vision, distant galaxy clusters emit spectacular fireworks (for…
esiegel | April 2, 2016"You've got to learn to let go." -Matt Kowalski, Gravity
Objects in motion remain in constant motion unless acted upon by an outside force. That's Newton's 1st law of motion, and that's why you'd expect an orbiting satellite and two astronauts orbiting with it to have absolutely no relative forces.
Image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures / Alfonso Cuarón, of the poster for the movie Gravity.
Yet if you watched the movie Gravity, you saw that the two astronauts, Stone and Kowalski, definitely experienced forces relative to the International Space Station when they were hanging onto it by a…
esiegel | April 1, 2016“The slow philosophy is not about doing everything in tortoise mode. It’s less about the speed and more about investing the right amount of time and attention in the problem so you solve it.” -Carl Honore
Einstein's theories of special and general relativity tell us that there's no Universal, preferred frame of reference. But that doesn't necessarily mean that our physical Universe doesn't have an average frame of reference, one which minimizes the relative speeds of all the galaxies to one another.
Image credit: Cosmography of the Local Universe/Cosmic Flows Project — Courtois, Helene M. et…
esiegel | March 31, 2016"TW Hydrae is quite special. It is the nearest known protoplanetary disc to Earth and it may closely resemble the Solar System when it was only 10 million years old." -David Wilner
For hundreds of years since the realization that Earth and the other planets orbited the Sun, humanity had only hypotheses about how planets formed around stars. The consensus was that gas clouds collapsed along one direction first, forming a disk, which then rotated and formed instabilities, leading to the development of planetary systems.
Image credit: Mark McCughrean (Max-Planck–Inst. Astron.); C. Robert O’Dell…
esiegel | March 30, 2016“When a star goes supernova, the explosion emits enough light to overshadow an entire solar system, even a galaxy. Such explosions can set off the creation of new stars. In its own way, it was not unlike being born.” -Todd Nelson
In 1604, Kepler's supernova went off, the last Milky Way supernova visible to naked-eye skywatchers here on Earth. Yet since the development of radio and X-ray astronomy, other, more recent supernova remnants in our galaxy have been found. They've only been invisible to the naked eye because of the galactic gas and dust that blocks their visible light. In 1984/5, the…
esiegel | March 29, 2016"Nobility, without virtue, is a fine setting without a gem." -Jane Porter
Since ancient times, gems were believed to bestow various traits and good fortunes upon those two whom they were gifted. In more recent times, we've associated gems with the time of the year someone was born, assigning each individual month a birthstone associated with it.
Image credit: Rob Lavinsky, iRocks.com – CC-BY-SA-3.0.
Yet scientifically, the individual gemstones themselves hold an impressive tale, with a variety of structures, stories and histories behind them all. What we think of as the magnificence or…
esiegel | March 28, 2016"Every single time you make a merger, somebody is losing his identity. And saying something different is just rubbish." -Carlos Ghosn
A galaxy cluster is the largest individual bound structure in the Universe, containing anywhere from dozens to thousands of times the mass of our Milky Way. Yet as the cosmic web grows and evolves, many such clusters merge together, creating the largest cosmic trainwrecks in the Universe.
Image credit: NASA / STScI, of cluster MACS J0717.5+3745 in the optical, courtesy of Hubble Frontier Fields.
While very little evidence of a catastrophe is visible in the…
esiegel | March 27, 2016“Public discourse has been polluted now for decades by corporate-funded disinformation - not just with climate change but with a host of health, environmental and societal threats. The implications for the planet are grim.” -Michael E. Mann
What a couple of weeks it's been, both at Starts With A Bang and beyond, as I had a trip to MidSouthCon spin my head around last weekend. And even though we were a little short on articles and on time, you certainly let me (and each other) have it with your comments, both last week and this past one. If you missed anything, we hit on:
Could our Universe…
esiegel | March 26, 2016"When a person starts to talk about their dreams, it's as if something bubbles up from within. Their eyes brighten, their face glows, and you can feel the excitement in their words." -John C. Maxwell
One of the most remarkable features of a great number of giant, active galaxies are the presence of jets of hyper-accelerated matter, spanning thousands of light years. Correlated with feeding, supermassive black holes are these huge structures of light-emitting matter, identifiable from many millions of light years away.
The giant elliptical galaxy, M87, and its 5,000+ light year-long jet,…
esiegel | March 25, 2016“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” -Winston Churchill
When we look out at the Universe on the largest scales, from large-scale structure to the fluctuations in the CMB to lensed clusters of galaxies and to giant spirals and ellipticals, we find the same thing everywhere we look: dark matter outmasses normal matter by a 5-to-1 ratio. It's a finding that's independent of direction, scale or distance.
Images credit: X-ray: NASA/ CXC/UVic./A.Mahdavi et al. Optical/Lensing: CFHT/UVic./A.Mahdavi et al. (top left…
esiegel | March 24, 2016“For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere).” -Bill Bryson
The Sun makes up 99.8% the mass of our Solar System, yet stars account for only about 10-20% of the matter that protons, neutrons and electrons make up. Protons, neutrons and electrons -- along with all the other particles known to exist, represented by the Standard Model and what it builds -- make up only about 15% of the observed matter. The remainder must be something different that doesn't interact with electromagnetism or light: dark matter.
Image credit:…
esiegel | March 23, 2016"Although impact processes dominate the surface geology on Ceres, we have identified specific color variations on the surface indicating material alterations that are due to a complex interaction of the impact process and the subsurface composition." -Ralf Jaumann, Dawn scientist
NASA's Dawn mission has just revealed a huge suite of data about Ceres, our Solar System's closest dwarf planet. No longer merely taking pictures, at its orbital altitude of just 240 miles (385 km), it's now gathering information from many instruments, measuring the chemical composition and neutron/gamma ray fluxes…
esiegel | March 22, 2016"I'm a fan of supersymmetry, largely because it seems to be the only route by which gravity can be brought into the scheme. It's probably not even enough, but it's a way forward to get gravity involved. If you have supersymmetry, then there are more of these particles. That would be my favourite outcome." -Peter Higgs
The Standard Model, in its final form, came into being in the 1960s and 1970s. From the time it was proposed in 1964, it took approximately 50 years for all of the particles within to be discovered, culminating with the discovery of the Higgs Boson a few years ago. Yet a number…
esiegel | March 21, 2016"The night has a thousand eyes, and the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies with the dying sun." -Francis William Bourdillon
When we look for the brightest, bluest, most massive individual stars, we're restricted to looking nearby, since it's impossible to resolve individual stars at distances that extend much beyond our own galaxy. So how surprising is it, then, when the most massive stars we've ever found aren't in our own galaxy, nor in any of the monster galaxies we've found nearby, but in a small, satellite dwarf of our own: the Large Magellanic Cloud?
A combination of…
esiegel | March 18, 2016"Quintessence is a dynamic, time-evolving, and spatially dependent form of energy with negative pressure sufficient to drive the accelerating expansion [...] Whereas the cosmological constant is a very specific form of energy." -Robert Caldwell, inventor of the Big Rip scenario
Our Universe began with a period of cosmic inflation: where energy intrinsic to space itself caused an extremely rapid, exponential expansion. This stretched the Universe flat, gave it the same properties, temperature and spectrum of fluctuations everywhere, and then gave rise to the hot Big Bang. And our Universe is…
esiegel | March 17, 2016“The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is, you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing. Trust me on this.” -Chuck Palahniuk
The planets we know of -- in our own Solar System and beyond -- all have something in common that we routinely take for granted: the fact that they all orbit stars. But not only isn't this necessarily true of all planets, it might not be true for most planets.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
When we run simulations of planetary formation around stars, we find that a great many…
esiegel | March 16, 2016"...as a scientist I was trained you always have to show the negative data, the data that disagrees with you, and then make the case that your case is stronger." -Richard Muller
Global temperatures have been on the rise not just for decades, but for as long as we've been measuring temperatures around the globe: for more than a century. Recently, however, the temperature has spiked to an unprecedented high, similar to what we saw in 1998.
Image credit: Japan Meteorological Association (JMA), of the monthly average temperatures in February, going back as far as temperature records do. Via the…
esiegel | March 15, 2016“In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.” -Terry Pratchett
Quantum mechanics has been described as the spookiest of all the sciences, since it’s by far the most divorced from our intuitive reality and everyday experiences. Even though we’ve been studying it for 100 years, there are still mysteries lurking in quantum phenomena still being uncovered.
Image credit: the LEP collaboration and various sub-collaborations, 2005, via http://…