esiegel | January 17, 2016"To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." -Nicolaus Copernicus
As we peel back the layers of information deeper and deeper into the Universe's history, we uncover progressively more knowledge about how everything we know today came to be. The discovery of distant galaxies and their redshifts led to expanding Universe, which led to the Big Bang and the discovery of very early phases like the cosmic microwave background and big bang nucleosynthesis.
After the Universe’s atoms become neutral, not only did the photons cease…
esiegel | January 16, 2016“Observing quasars is like observing the exhaust fumes of a car from a great distance and then trying to figure out what is going on under the hood.” -Carole Mundell
Enjoying what we're putting out at Starts With A Bang? There was a whole lot that we saw this past week, including a few tour-de-force pieces on some breaking news, including:
How can we know if North Korea is testing nuclear bombs? (for Ask Ethan),
The early Universe's most massive galaxy cluster revealed (for Mostly Mute Monday),
Should you play Powerball? Science solves the mystery,
The Universe’s Dark Ages May Hold The…
esiegel | January 16, 2016"Einstein's gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea." -Richard P. Feynman
When Einstein's theory was first proposed as an alternative to Newtonian gravity, there were a number of subtle but important theoretical differences noted between the two. Einstein's theory predicted gravitational redshift, time delays, bending of light and more. But what was perhaps most remarkable is that unlike Newton's gravity, Einstein's…
esiegel | January 15, 2016“Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.” -Naomi Wolf
Geoff Marcy. Tim Slater. Christian Ott. And a great many more who are just waiting to be publicly exposed for what they've done (and in many cases, are still doing). Does it mean that astronomy has a harassment problem? Of course it does, but that's not the real story.
U.S. Department of Education Program Legal Group (Title IX), from the United States Department of Agriculture. Image credit: USDA photo by Lance Cheung.
The real story is that, for the first time, an entire…
esiegel | January 14, 2016"When their eyes grew dim with looking at unrevealing dials and studying uneventful graphs, they could step outside their concrete cells and renew their dull spirits in communion with the giant mechanism they commanded, the silent, sensing instrument in which the smallest packets of energy, the smallest waves of matter, were detected in their headlong, eternal flight across the universe." -James Gunn, on Radio Astronomy
From the time that neutral atoms first formed in the Universe (the creation of the CMB) until the first stars formed, perhaps 100 million years passed. Yet these "dark ages"…
esiegel | January 13, 2016“I’ve done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.” -Fran Lebowitz
Later today, the richest lottery drawing in history -- the $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot -- will take place. While many outlets are encouraging people to purchase as many tickets as possible, it's important to run through the mathematics and find out what your expected value is for each ticket.
Image credit: E. Siegel, 2016.
While a naive analysis shows that a jackpot in excess of about $245 million would lead to a break-even-or-better result, when you factor in taxes…
esiegel | January 11, 2016"If you take a galaxy and try to make it bigger, it becomes a cluster of galaxies, not a galaxy. If you try to make it smaller than that, it seems to blow itself apart." -Jeremiah P. Ostriker
13.8 billion years ago, the Universe as we know it was born with no stars, no clusters and no galaxies. But over time, gravitation has built up all sorts of complex structures, with the largest galaxy cluster today, El Gordo, weighing in at 3 quadrillion Suns.
The El Gordo galaxy cluster, imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope and with the dark matter mapped out. Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Jee (…
esiegel | January 10, 2016"Observing quasars is like observing the exhaust fumes of a car from a great distance and then trying to figure out what is going on under the hood." -Carole Mundell
Have you been tunes in to Starts With A Bang during this past week? The first full week of January brings with it the annual American Astronomical Society's giant meeting, and some of the most important discoveries and developments of the year! If you missed anything, here's what we've covered:
Is interstellar travel possible? (for Ask Ethan),
A distant galaxy cluster reveals the power of Einstein's gravity (for Mostly Mute …
esiegel | January 9, 2016"In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show." -Wilfred Burchett
The news has been aflame with reports that North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb on January 6th, greatly expanding its nuclear capabilities with their fourth nuclear test and the potential to carry out a devastating strike against either South Korea or, if they're more ambitious, the United States.
Image credit: TV screenshot of CNN’s The…
esiegel | January 8, 2016"I happen to have discovered a direct relation between magnetism and light, also electricity and light, and the field it opens is so large and I think rich." -Michael Faraday
With the launch of the Fermi satellite in the late 2000s, we began observing the highest energy photons in the Universe -- gamma rays -- all over the sky, to unprecedented precision. Produced from cosmic ray showers in space when high energy protons run into other, stationary protons, these gamma rays locate point sources from supermassive black holes to supernova remnants to pulsars.
Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space…
esiegel | January 7, 2016“The paradigm of physics — with its interplay of data, theory and prediction — is the most powerful in science.” -Geoffrey West
Cosmic inflation, our earliest theory of the Universe and the phenomenon that sets up the Big Bang, didn't just explain a number of puzzles, but made a slew of new predictions for the Universe. In the subsequent 35 years, five of the six have been confirmed, with only primordial gravitational waves left to go.
Image credit: NASA / WMAP science team.
Inflation predicts that they could be large or small, but based on the simplest classes of models and the measured…
esiegel | January 6, 2016"Mars is much closer to the characteristics of Earth. It has a fall, winter, summer and spring. North Pole, South Pole, mountains and lots of ice. No one is going to live on Venus; no one is going to live on Jupiter." -Buzz Aldrin
When a planet passes in front of its star from our point of view, that transiting phenomenon can be detected as a dip in starlight. By surveying some 150,000 stars, the Kepler mission has detected close to 10,000 planetary candidates, many of which have been identified by the stellar wobble technique.
Image credit: NASA Ames.
But this "wobbling" also sometimes…
esiegel | January 5, 2016“Just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. The misfit becomes the average. The Pluto-like objects are more typical in our solar system than the nearby planets we first knew.” -Alan Stern
When New Horizons approached the Pluto system last year, it discovered two vastly different worlds in Pluto and Charon. While Pluto had mountains, plains, ridges, and surface regions with vastly different properties, Charon looked more like our Moon: cold, airless, mostly uniform and full of craters.
Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory…
esiegel | January 4, 2016“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.” -Samuel Beckett
In 2012, astronomers announced that the nearest star system to us, the Alpha Centauri system, possessed at least one exoplanet around it. A periodic signal that recurred just every 3.24 days was consistent with an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting and gravitationally tugging on the second largest member of the star system: Alpha Centauri B.
Image credit: PHL @ UPR Arecibo, via http://phl.upr.edu/press-releases/aplanetarysystemaroundourneareststari….
That planet, named Alpha Centauri Bb, turns out not to actually be there. A…
esiegel | January 4, 2016"Gravitational and electromagnetic interactions are long-range interactions, meaning they act on objects no matter how far they are separated from each other." -Francois Englert
One of the most spectacular predictions of Einstein's General Relativity was the existence of gravitational lensing, whereby a large foreground mass could act as a lens, magnifying and distorting the background light source behind it. Although this was first observed for quasars, large galaxy clusters act as the most powerful lenses.
Image credit: K. Sharon et al., 2014, via http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.2266.
Which is…
esiegel | January 2, 2016"The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you're willing to work." -Oprah
And 2016 is here! So begins another great year for Starts With A Bang, and I'm so pleased you're still here as well. Yes, I know there are some frustrations with Forbes' ad policies, but at least they appear to have stopped the "Welcome to Forbes" interstitial, which is something! (And if you missed it, Medium now knows that I'm over there, too.) In any case, here's what the last week has seen:
How big was the Universe when it was first born? (for Ask Ethan),…
esiegel | January 2, 2016"Oh, yes — I know you. There was a time you looked at the stars and dreamed of what might be." -Star Trek: Nemesis, spoken by Jean-Luc Picard
The stars call to us through the ages, with each and every one holding the promise of a future for humanity beyond Earth. For generations, this was a mere dream, as our technology allowed us to neither know what worlds might lie beyond our own Solar System or to reach beyond our planet. But time and development has changed both of those things significantly.
Image credit: NASA, 1981. A remote camera captures a close-up view of a Space Shuttle Main…
esiegel | January 1, 2016"Gamow was fantastic in his ideas. He was right, he was wrong. More often wrong than right. Always interesting; … and when his idea was not wrong it was not only right, it was new." -Edward Teller
Considering what we know about our Universe today, it's hard to believe that just a century ago, Einstein's General Relativity was very much untested and uncertain, and we hadn't even realized that anything at all lie outside our own Milky Way. But over the past ten decades, ten great discoveries have taken place to give us the Universe we understand today.
Image credit: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon…
esiegel | December 31, 2015“If you see an antimatter version of yourself running towards you, think twice before embracing.” –J. Richard Gott III
Everywhere we look in the Universe, we find that planets, stars, galaxies, and even the gas between them are all made of matter and not antimatter. Yet as far as we know, the laws of nature are symmetric between matter and antimatter: you can't create or destroy one without the other.
Image credit: Karen Teramura, UHIfA / NASA.
This question -- why the Universe is full of matter and not antimatter -- is one of the greatest unsolved problems in theoretical physics. Yet it's…
esiegel | December 30, 2015"You cannot rob me of free nature's grace,
You cannot shut the windows of the sky
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face." -James Thomson
When the Sun emits a flare or a mass ejection in the direction of Earth, these fast moving particles are when Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere are of the utmost importance for shielding us. The magnetic field bends these ions harmlessly away from our planet, only funneling a small fraction down into a ring surrounding the poles. The atmosphere absorbs the impact, shielding all living creatures below from this radiation, while simultaneously…