esiegel | October 13, 2015“There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.” -Denis Diderot
Last week, news broke that UC Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy -- perhaps the most famous single person in the field of exoplanet discoveries and study -- was found guilty by a University panel of sexually harassing at least four students over a period of 2001-2010, with allegations and further accusations extending far beyond that. I wish I could tell you it's a one-off, a rarity, or a thing that will end with the dismissal of Geoff Marcy from his position.
Image credit…
esiegel | October 12, 2015“If I want water, I’ll have to make it from scratch. Fortunately, I know the recipe: Take hydrogen. Add oxygen. Burn.” -Andy Weir
It wasn't merely one discovery that led to the announcement of liquid water on Mars, but a slew of pieces of evidence of a watery past, including dried-up riverbeds, sedimentary rock formations, martian spherules, frozen lakes and subsurface ice.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/USGS, Mars Opportunity Rover.
Couple that with the recurring slope lineae -- and the discovery that they grow and leave salt deposits behind -- and you've got a planet with not only liquid…
esiegel | October 11, 2015“I can look in their eyes and see it. That’s the best feeling I can have. … I know I didn’t affect their lives just today, but it carries on for years and years to come.” -Warrick Dunn
When most people think about the NFL, they think of a sport they either enjoy watching or couldn't care less about. But when they think of the players, words that come to mind are violent, thug and criminal, which doesn't paint a flattering picture. Maybe you'll get a song running through your head when you think of it, like Uncle Tupelo's
Criminals.
You may have heard of any number of crimes committed by its…
esiegel | October 10, 2015“In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world...all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.” -John Gribbin
No matter how much you've experienced in this world, there are some properties of the Universe that will still never be intuitive. Here at Starts With A Bang, we don't shy away from any of it; we embrace it all! This past week, here's…
esiegel | October 9, 2015“Everyone has his dream; I would like to live till dawn, but I know I have less than three hours left. It will be night, but no matter. Dying is simple. It does not take daylight. So be it: I will die by starlight.” -Victor Hugo
Whether you're at rest or in motion, you can be confident that -- from your point of view -- the laws of physics will behave exactly the same no matter how quickly you're moving. You can move slowly, quickly or not at all, up to the limits that the Universe imposes on you: the speed of light.
Image credit: Noreen of http://thecampgal.com/2014/06/17/flashlight-…
esiegel | October 8, 2015“It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.” -Enrico Fermi
At 13 TeV of proton-proton energy collisions, CERN's Large Hadron Collider gives us the greatest number of the most powerful particle collisions ever seen on Earth, far more than any cosmic source from the Universe and far more energetic than any other terrestrial accelerator. It's already found us the Higgs boson and has helped better measure other Standard Model particles' properties, but has yet to turn up anything beyond the Standard Model.
Image credit: Gordon Kane,…
esiegel | October 7, 2015We live in a Universe full of galaxies, supermassive black holes, and violence. The violence is particularly relevant here, because every so often, these galaxies merge, and if they each contain a supermassive black hole, the gravitational wave "ripples" that get sent through space will literally shake and affect everything that's in them.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University), K. Noll (STScI), and J. Westphal (Caltech).
If you had a perfect clock --…
esiegel | October 6, 2015“My main interest is the problem of the singularity. If we can’t understand what happened at the singularity we came out of, then we don’t seem to have any understanding of the laws of particle physics.” -Neil Turok
The birth of space and time is perhaps the most fundamental question in all of physics, and may be the ultimate key to understanding where "all of this" comes from, including matter, radiation, the laws of nature, the forces, and all of reality. Of course, it might not even have the answer we expect, as space and time themselves may turn out to be eternal, or dynamical, changing…
esiegel | October 6, 2015"Indeed some of the users were advised by their older colleagues to “abandon all hope, ye who enter here!” I fear that I bear the responsibility for this fiasco." -Robert R. Wilson
Back in 1967, the National Accelerator Laboratory was first commissioned, which would later become Fermilab, making such discoveries as the bottom and top quarks, the tau neutrino, and the discovery of CP-violation. In short, this was the machine, the laboratory and the home of the people who confirmed for us the validity of the Standard Model in a way never before achieved.
Image credit: University of Glasgow.…
esiegel | October 5, 2015“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” -Rabindranath Tagore
When stars like the Sun reach the end of their lives, they all follow fairly predictable patterns:
Their cores contract, heat up, and start fusing helium into carbon.
Their outer layers expand into a luminous red giant.
When nuclear fusion ceases, they blow off their outer layers into a planetary nebula.
And the core contracts down to a hot, compact, degenerate and low-luminosity white dwarf.
Image credit: Robert Gendler, Jan-Erik Ovaldsen, Allan Hornstrup, IDA, via http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/…
esiegel | October 4, 2015“Suddenly, from behind the rim of the Moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth . . . home.” -Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14
It's arguable that we never came closer to leaving Earth than we did in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the only humans in history ventured beyond low Earth orbit as part of the Apollo program. Have a listen…
esiegel | October 3, 2015“Today we have touched Mars. There is life on Mars, and it is us—extensions of our eyes in all directions, extensions of our mind, extensions of our heart and soul have touched Mars today. That's the message to look for there: We are on Mars. We are the Martians!” -Ray Bradbury
It was a busy week, from science to politics to the simple question of Earth’s color here at Starts With A Bang. As always, you didn’t disappoint, with plenty to say about it all, and I’m stoked to continue the conversation. Just in case you missed anything:
Are inflation and dark energy connected? (for Ask Ethan),…
esiegel | October 2, 2015“Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?” -Rose Kennedy
It's a good thing that sunlight doesn't reach us simply from its moment of creation in the core of stars, otherwise we'd be bombarded with lethal gamma rays, rather than the life-giving UV, visible and infrared light we actually experience.
Image credit: Don Dixon of http://cosmographica.com/.
But that doesn't mean it isn't possible that the ultimate form of direct sunlight -- light from a nuclear reaction in the Sun -- to reach us, does it? Today's Ask Ethan focuses…
esiegel | October 1, 2015“This is evidently a discovery of a new particle. If anybody claims otherwise you can tell them they have lost connection with reality.” –Tommaso Dorigo
Three years ago, we announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered fundamental particle predicted by the standard model. In addition to the quarks, leptons, gluons, photon and W-and-Z particles, this was the last piece of the puzzle.
Image credit: Fermilab / E. Siegel.
But the Higgs boson meant something else: that the Higgs field was real, and was the thing responsible for giving mass to the Universe. That's not a very…
esiegel | October 1, 2015“The reports of the eclipse parties not only described the scientific observations in great detail, but also the travels and experiences, and were sometimes marked by a piquancy not common in official documents.” -Simon Newcomb
By far, one of the highlights of astronomy this year took place earlier this week: a total lunar eclipse featuring a perigee Moon. The sight of watching the Earth's shadow consume the Moon, eventually swallowing it whole and revealing a faint, red lunar disk, and then the process reversing itself, is unlike any other visible to the naked eye.
Image credit: Jose…
esiegel | September 29, 2015When young galaxies are first formed, they're accompanied by tremendous bursts of star formation, giving rise to billions of new stars within just a few million years. Yet how these galaxies first form in the initial stages is very much an open question. In addition, pretty much every large galaxy we find -- even in the extremely young Universe -- has a supermassive black hole at its center.
Image credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).
Is it conceivable that these black holes are the engines of newly formed galaxies? Is it even possible that these black holes preceded the…
esiegel | September 28, 2015“Bringing an asteroid back to Earth? What’s that have to do with space exploration? If we were moving outward from there, and an asteroid is a good stopping point, then fine. But now it’s turned into a whole planetary defense exercise at the cost of our outward exploration.” -Buzz Aldrin
What causes those mysterious bright spots on the Solar System's largest asteroid? Although those bright, highly-reflective features at the bottom of Occator crater on Ceres were what first jumped out at us, subsequent imaging has revealed that these features are present in many other (but not all!) locations…
esiegel | September 27, 2015“Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.” -Banksy
Not everyone who's a street artist engages in vandalism, nor are all acts of vandalism negative or unwanted in any way. Consider all the different ways one can contribute to the vibrancy of a city as you listen to The Mammals' song,
City Never Sleeps,
and while you consider the "yarn bombings" of the yarnstorming group known as the Souter Stormers in Scotland.
Image credit: Penelope Textiles Limited.
Earlier this month, they yarn-bombed 46 landmarks in Selkirk, Scotland, but what you might not…
esiegel | September 25, 2015“Making a wrong decision is understandable. Refusing to search continually for learning is not.” -Phil Crosby
It was a busy week, from science to politics to the simple question of Earth's color here at Starts With A Bang. As always, you didn't disappoint, with plenty to say about it all, and I'm stoked to continue the conversation. Just in case you missed anything:
How, exactly, did Newton fail? (for Ask Ethan),
Mockery gets you nowhere (for our Weekend Diversion),
50,000 evolving galaxies (for Mostly Mute Monday),
Why is Earth blue?,
Dear Ben Carson: an open letter,
and Logic is no match…
esiegel | September 25, 2015“What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents.” -Jay Griffiths
When you think about the frontiers of scientific knowledge -- on the border between what's known and what's unknown -- you have the phenomena that we know exist, yet that we can't fully explain. This includes the matter-antimatter asymmetry, the inflationary origin of our Universe, dark matter and dark energy, among others. Yet two of these, inflation and dark…