esiegel | September 2, 2017"Comrades, this man has a nice smile, but he's got iron teeth." -Andrei A. Gromyko
When you have a star, perhaps its most defining characteristic is that it fuses lighter elements into heavier ones, releasing energy. While all stars fuse hydrogen into helium, the more massive ones will undergo helium fusion, with the most massive also fusing carbon, oxygen, and eventually silicon, producing iron in the end. By time you get to iron, the most stable element of all, you would lose energy if you fused anything further, so iron’s the end-of-the-road, with a supernova as the next inevitable step.…
esiegel | September 1, 2017"For although it is certainly true that quantitative measurements are of great importance, it is a grave error to suppose that the whole of experimental physics can be brought under this heading." -Hendrik Casimir
Ever since we first discovered that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, scientists have puzzles as to what’s causing it. Although we’ve measured it precisely and concluded that it’s uniform, static in time, and equivalent in its form to a cosmological constant, we still don’t know why it exists. Moreover, any attempts to calculate what its magnitude should be give…
esiegel | August 31, 2017"It’s becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics." -Martin Rees
Two years ago, advanced LIGO turned on, and in that brief time, it’s already revealed a number of gravitational wave events. All of them, to no one’s surprise, have been merging black…
esiegel | August 29, 2017"I go to the Natural History Museum and look at the cage of stuffed starlings there. But my favourite thing is the big blue whale. The scale of it is unbelievable, and makes you feel how insignificant you are as a human being." -Arthur Darvill
How good is your sense of scale? Humans are notoriously bad at this, and yet understanding the magnitude of an event like Hurricane Harvey is much more difficult (and important) than simply using a slew of superlatives. If someone tells you how large the flood in Houston is, and tells you it's "100,000 times the area of the Capitol Mall in Washington, D…
esiegel | August 29, 2017"Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not." -Neil deGrasse Tyson
Last week, millions of people across the United States got to experience the awe and wonder of a total solar eclipse, many for the very first time. But in a puzzling event, astrophysicist and one of the world’s most famous science communicators, Neil deGrasse Tyson, decided to use his fame to put down a great many people who were excited about this rare cosmic event. And sadly, when someone explained to him why they would (correctly) say that eclipses are rare…
esiegel | August 28, 2017"The hurricane flooded me out of a lot of memorabilia, but it can't flood out the memories." -Tom Dempsey
As I write this, the gulf coast is currently being battered by Hurricane Harvey, with a few locations already having accumulated more than three feet of rainfall. This storm shows no signs of letting up anytime soon, as it's forecast to remain roughly where it is for days to come. This is being billed as a 500-year-storm, but the truth is far scarier and more sobering: this should be exactly what you'd expect for a city located where Houston is.
The new rainfall scale created by the…
esiegel | August 28, 2017"The origin and evolution of life are connected in the most intimate way with the origin and evolution of the stars." -Carl Sagan
When it comes to dying stars, supernovae get all the press. They may be the largest and most massive stars to die, but hundreds of times more common are the planetary nebulae of the Universe, formed by dying Sun-like stars. These astronomical wonders blow off their outer layers -- not just hydrogen but also heavier elements -- to return them to the interstellar medium.
In this contrast-enhanced view, the structure of the evaporating gas globules at the interior…
esiegel | August 27, 2017“It will shine still brighter when night is about you. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.” ―Galadriel, LOTR, J.R.R. Tolkien
Well, we've been anticipating it for months (or years), but this is our very first time meeting up since the total solar eclipse here at Starts With A Bang! Did you get to see it? Was it as spectacular for you as it was for me? I'm already looking forward to 2024, but you can look forward to a podcast coming this next week from me on just how spectacular it was! (With a judicious dose of physics and astrophysics, of course.) Patreon…
esiegel | August 26, 2017"Imagination makes us aware of limitless possibilities. How many of us haven't pondered the concept of infinity or imagined the possibility of time travel? In one of her poems, Emily Bronte likens imagination to a constant companion, but I prefer to think of it as a built-in entertainment system." -Alexandra Adornetto
The dream of futuristic technologies and what they might enable us to do -- travel back in time, create artificial gravity, traverse the stars, create unlimited energy -- are some of the best goals science can aspire to. While a great many of the technologies we’ve envisioned…
esiegel | August 25, 2017"North Korea has taught a great lesson to all the countries in the world, especially the rogue countries of dictatorships or whatever: if you don't want to be invaded by America, get some nuclear weapons." -Michael Moore
Last year, North Korea claimed to have obtained the technology to create a nuclear fusion bomb: the most destructive weapon humanity has ever engineered. This year, they’re threatening to use them, against either South Korea or the United States, depending on the moment in question. Yet these grandiose claims are questionable, and not merely because of the questionable source…
esiegel | August 24, 2017“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.” -Stanisław Lem
One of the questions that’s fascinated humanity since we first began looking up at the night sky is whether or not we’re alone in the Universe. Although we now know of other stars, other planets, and potentially inhabited worlds, we have yet to make contact with another intelligent species. Despite our curiosity, a great many people live in fear that if we did…
esiegel | August 23, 2017"Presently thought to be the most powerful explosions in nature... their sources have only recently been localized by observations of associated afterglows in X-rays, visible light, and radio waves, delayed in that order." -Richard Matzner, on the dictionary entry for Gamma Ray Burst
It seems like an eternity ago, but it’s been under two years since LIGO first began the science run that would first detect merging black holes. Their latest scientific data run is scheduled to end in just two days, and thus far, they’ve announced a total of three black hole-black hole merger discoveries, along…
esiegel | August 22, 2017"All that is now
All that is gone
All that's to come
and everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon." -Pink Floyd
No matter how well-prepared you were for your first total solar eclipse, no amount of reading or photograph-searching could do the experience justice. There were so many things to feel, see, and be overwhelmed by that you literally needed to be there to relate to. Yet it was remarkable how many things there were that surprised scientists and skywatchers alike.
There is no special filter necessary to bring out the pink coronal loops near the very edge…
esiegel | August 21, 2017"A candidate is not going to suddenly change once they get into office. Just the opposite, in fact. Because the minute that individual takes that oath, they are under the hottest, harshest light there is. And there is no way to hide who they really are." -Michelle Obama
The most massive stars in the Universe are true behemoths, rising to hundreds of times the mass of our Sun and burning at temperatures upwards of 30,000 K at their surface. But there are stars out there that are even hotter, despite only being 10% or less as massive: Wolf-Rayet stars. The key to their cosmic success? Blowing…
esiegel | August 19, 2017“It will shine still brighter when night is about you. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.” ―Galadriel, LOTR, J.R.R. Tolkien
The scientific stories we've covered this week have been out-of-this-world here at Starts With A Bang! But the greatest show is still to come. Right now, I'm on my way down to the path of totality in Oregon, along with millions of others hoping to catch a glimpse and enjoy the experience of a sight unlike any others on Earth. When the sunlight goes completely out, some truly wonderful things will be revealed, and I hope to see them all…
esiegel | August 19, 2017“Maybe that is our mistake: maybe there are no particle positions and velocities, but only waves. It is just that we try to fit the waves to our preconceived ideas of positions and velocities. The resulting mismatch is the cause of the apparent unpredictability.” -Stephen Hawking
So, you’ve got a black hole in the Universe, and you want to know what happens next. The space around it is curved due to the presence of the central mass, with greater curvature occurring closer to the center. There’s an event horizon, a location from which light cannot escape. And there’s the quantum nature of the…
esiegel | August 18, 2017"We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing." -R. D. Laing
This coming Monday, tens of millions of people will gather to watch the total solar eclipse that will go coast-to-coast across the continental United States. Total solar eclipses like this happen, on average, about once every 18 months, due to the frequency of alignment as well as the Moon’s apparent angular size. At present, about 40% of all solar eclipses are total eclipses, with annular eclipses making up 50% and hybrid eclipses the other 10%.…
esiegel | August 17, 2017“We [are] a species endowed with hope and perseverance, at least a little intelligence, substantial generosity and a palpable zest to make contact with the cosmos.” -Carl Sagan
When the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft were launched, they contained a message emblazoned on them: a map of 14 pulsars, showing the location of Earth relative to them. This was a brilliant idea: showcase bright, unique identifiers, complete with their observed periods and distances from our world, and people would be able to find Earth. If we wanted to be found, it was the best idea 1977 had to offer.
A colorized…
esiegel | August 16, 2017"Even though the reason for taking the photographs was science, the result shows the enormous beauty of nature." -Miloslav Druckmuller, eclipse photographer
During those moments of totality, the Sun is eclipsed by a new Moon, with the latter’s shadow falling onto Earth. From within that shadow, the Sun’s disk is blocked entirely, revealing a slew of fainter objects: stars, planets, and the Sun’s corona, all of which cannot normally be seen during the day. Yet one object even brighter than all the stars -- the new Moon -- will remain invisible throughout the eclipse.
The Sun's atmosphere is…
esiegel | August 14, 2017"An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a nucleotide." -Alexei A. Sharov & Richard Gordon
We talk about the origin of life on Earth with bated breath, wondering all the time how things occurred to make our planet unique. But within that big question lies an assumption that may not be true: that life on Earth originated on Earth itself. It’s entirely possible, based on what we’ve seen out there in the…