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"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
Want a recipe for seeing as far into the distant Universe as you can? Because of how distance and brightness are inversely related, you need to make the most of every photon, build as large a telescope as possible and observe for long periods of time in order to collect the most light.
Image credit: XMM-Newton, ESA, NASA.
But there's an extra bit of magnification that Einstein's General Relativity gives to us for…
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“I have signs in my kitchen to remind me not to eat breakfast and that my job is always. Most cops work only at night or at day. I am a lucky cop because I work both. Tomorrow we do it all again, because my job is not day shift or night shift. It’s always shift.” -Axe Cop
One day, at the scene of the fire, the cop found the perfect axe. That was the day he became AXE COP! Axe Cop began as a comic, expanded into an "Ask Axe Cop" series...
Image credit: Ethan & Malachai Nicolle, Ask Axe Cop #54.
...and most prominently, became a TV show on Fox, having just finished its second season. One…
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"As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d stay away." -Hughes Mearns
Although every week at Starts With A Bang is special, there's something extra special brewing here. Sure, we've got the "normal stuff" of the articles we've written:
Do galaxies die? (for Ask Ethan),
Spook-tacular science pumpkins (for our Weekend Diversion),
Lifting the cosmic veil (for Mostly Mute Monday),
Was Earth born with life on it?,
and How stable is matter? (for Throwback Thursday).
Including two bonus…
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“End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.” -J.R.R. Tolkien
There's a realization we all face at some point in our lives: that not only are we going to someday have our lives come to an end, but that everything that exists in the Universe will cease to be in its current form. All life will wither away, the last stars will burn out, the galaxies themselves will be driven apart from one another, the individual stars and planets will be…
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“I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time.” –Robert Browning
You've heard it said often that one thing remains true no matter what we discuss: that this, too, shall pass. The stars will eventually burn out, the galaxies will be driven apart, gravitational interactions will unbind everything, and even collapsed entities like black holes will decay away. But at a fundamental level, is that actually the case for matter itself?
Image credit: Super Kamiokande.
We've observed plenty of particle interactions and…
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“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” -Marcus Aurelius
How old is life on Earth? If all you had to go on was the fossil record, you'd run into severe trouble once you went back more than one or two billion years, as all your rock would have metamorphosed, making examination and identification of fossils impossible. But recently, we've discovered another method: to measure the isotopic content of carbon deposits in ancient rock formations.
Image credit: E A Bell et al, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA,…
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“No matter how ‘normal’ people look, living ‘ordinary’ lives, everyone has a story to tell. And may be, just like you, everyone else is a misfit too.” -Sanhita Baruah
Every century or so, possibly even more frequently, a supernova goes off somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy. While the explosion itself is only visible for a few months, the remnant sticks around for many thousands of years. Although it isn't always visible in the portion of the spectrum our eyes are sensitive to, X-rays, Ultraviolet light, infrared and radio observations bring them to life.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech,…
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“It’s said that All Hallows’ Eve is one of the nights when the veil between the worlds is thin — and whether you believe in such things or not, those roaming spirits probably believe in you, or at least acknowledge your existence, considering that it used to be their own.” -Erin Morgenstern
Alas, Halloween comes but once a year, giving all of us the opportunity to express ourselves in an unusual fashion. You're free to dress up, decorate, or otherwise meddle in the fictional, occult or fearsome however you desire. Have a listen to Laura Marling's bone-rattling song,
Night Terror,
while you…
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“It says here that a bolt of lightning is going to strike the clock tower at precisely 10:04 p.m. next Saturday night! If... If we could somehow harness this lightning... channel it into the flux capacitor... it just might work. Next Saturday night, we're sending you back to the future! ” –Doc Brown, Back to the Future
What a week it's been here at Starts With A Bang, and little do you know it, but I've got something special cooked up for the end of the month! In the meantime, here's what we've covered this past, fun-filled week:
What did the sky look like when Earth first formed?…
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“Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.” -Jean Dubuffet
The Universe is in its heyday right now: hundreds of billions of galaxies are visible from any point, clustered together in a glorious cosmic web, with millions, billions or even trillions of stars burning inside of each one. Yet none of this will last forever.
Image credit: the small star forming region NGC 346, from A. Nota (ESA/STScI) et al., ESA, NASA.
If we peer into the far future, any…
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“The discrepancy between what was expected and what has been observed has grown over the years, and we’re straining harder and harder to fill the gap.” -Jeremiah P. Ostriker
When it comes to the structure of the Universe -- forming the galaxies, clusters, and Universe as we see it -- the normal matter we know of simply isn't enough. Given our best-understood laws of physics, including Einstein's general relativity, what we see of galaxies and the Universe in general simply doesn't match up to our predictions.
Image credit: NASA, ESA and the HST Frontier Fields team (STScI).
The…
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Mr. Strickland: “I noticed your band is on the roster for the dance auditions after school today. Why even bother, McFly? You don’t have a chance. You’re too much like your old man. No McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley!”
Marty McFly: “Yeah, well, history is gonna change.” -Back To The Future
If you've ever wished you could go back in time and undo that mistake you made, to have a second chance to get it right the first time, you're certainly not alone. Indeed, for as long as the concept of time has been around, humans have dreamed about this possibility, as some of…
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When we look at the vast expanse of stars in the night sky, we can't help but wonder what else is out there. Not just at the gas giants, rocky worlds, comets, asteroids, moons, and homeless planets strewn throughout our galaxy and all the galaxies beyond our own, but about what life -- what possibilities -- exist beyond our home world.
Illustration credit: NASA.
Very recently, a most unusual star -- KIC 8462852 -- had its light-curve data released by Kepler team, containing a series of unusually large, and inconsistent, drops in brightness around the star, fueling speculation that…
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When you take a large amount of mass and put it all together in a small volume of space, you fully expect gravity to do its thing, and eventually collapse things down as far as they'll go. You can imagine that for compact masses with large distances between them -- like planets in the solar system or stars in the galaxy -- this will take a very long time: longer than the age of the Universe.
Image credit: NASA/ESA and A. Feild, of the known globular clusters around the Milky Way.
But what about globular clusters: hundreds of thousands of stars collected in a spherical region of space…
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“My Lord, the fleet has moved out of lightspeed. Com Scan has detected an energy field protecting an area of the sixth planet of the Hoth System. The field is strong enough to deflect any bombardment.” -General Veers, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Out beyond Saturn’s main rings lie a number of prominent moons: Titan, Dione, Rhea, and the subject of today’s post, Enceladus, the whitest, most reflective moon of all.
Image credit: NASA / Cassini-Huygens mission / Imaging Science Subsystem.
Unlike all the other moons in our Solar System, Enceladus’ most unique features is its active…
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“Life is life’s greatest gift. Guard the life of another creature as you would your own because it is your own. On life’s scale of values, the smallest is no less precious to the creature who owns it than the largest.” -Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
And yet it's certainly something to consider how little attention we pay to the place which houses the vast majority of Earth's life: the oceans. Covering the majority of the planet's surface and containing the majority of our planet's biomass, the undersea realm is often forgotten in our day-to-day lives. Have a listen to Bill Evans as his trio plays their…
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"The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too." -Stephen Covey
It's been a really eventful week, with topics from the fundamental to the cosmic all under scrutiny here at Starts With A Bang, plus an extremely controversial (and response-producing) story on the topic of Geoff Marcy, harassment and his eventual resignation. In case you missed anything:
How do photons experience time? (for Ask Ethan),
The NFL story you…
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“In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe.” -Victor Hugo
The night sky is a memorable, inimitable sight. With the exception of the planets, the stars that shine so brightly and…
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“I have announced this star as a comet, but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet. But I have been careful not to advance this supposition to the public.” –Giuseppe Piazzi, discoverer of Ceres, the first Asteroid
While it's always fascinating to look far, far out into the cosmos, it's important to remember that there are plenty of questions close to home -- about our own Solar System, for instance -- that we still don't know the answer to.…
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“If I had to describe myself to an alien I’d say I was bigger than the average human, enjoy a drink or two with a good meal and have a bigger head than most. I’d also say I’m really handsome — especially if they were a female alien.” -Dwayne Johnson
The fact that Earth has not only life on it, but had the potential for life just from the raw ingredients that the Universe birthed us with should give us tremendous hope for the future. Not only might we find life like us around other stars on a planet not too different from our own, but our own backyard might offer some possibilities -- either…