esiegel | August 16, 2015“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.” -R. Buckminster Fuller
If you want to improve yourself in any area of life, it's going to take hard work to get you there. Have a listen to The Avett Brothers as they sing about it in their song,
Hard Worker.
But in some arenas, pushing yourself to your limits can wind up getting you catastrophically injured!
Image credit: YouTube / Andreas Knudsen.
If you've ever tried to max out your weight or do just one extra rep past your…
esiegel | August 15, 2015“I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.” -Jack London
When you think about the Universe all the time, from the smallest scales and the most fundamental particles to the largest cosmic structures and everything in between, the hard part isn't choosing a topic to discuss; it…
esiegel | August 14, 2015“First, you should check out my house. It’s, like, kinda lame, but way less lame than, like, your house.” -Lumpy Space Princess, Adventure Time
When you visualize our Universe today, you probably think about the great clumps of matter -- planets, stars, galaxies and clusters -- separated by huge distances. But on the largest of all scales, tens of billions of light years in diameter, any given region of the Universe is virtually indistinguishable from any other.
Image credit: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/HerMEs, of the Lockman Hole.
But this structured Universe only came about because our Universe…
esiegel | August 13, 2015“Aristotle taught that stars are made of a different matter than the four earthly elements — a quintessence — that also happens to be what the human psyche is made of. Which is why man’s spirit corresponds to the stars. Perhaps that’s not a very scientific view, but I do like the idea that there’s a little starlight in each of us.” -Lisa Kleypas
We like to think of the stars as fixed, as their position doesn't perceptibly change from night-to-night or even year-to-year. Not only that, but their brightness and color doesn't appear to change, either. But is that actually true, or is that only…
esiegel | August 12, 2015“Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
And yet, not all meteors nor all meteor showers are created equal. Some showers are duds, with the meteors being infrequent, inconsistent, short-lived and dim. Hardly worth mentioning. On the other hand, meteor showers can be spectacular, with frequent events, consistent displays year-to-year, lasting many consecutive nights and with bright, luminous fireballs.
Image credit: David Kingham 2013 | The National Maritime Museum.
The Perseids,…
esiegel | August 9, 2015“Studying whether there’s life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there’s something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That’s something that is almost part of being human, and I’m certain that will continue.” -Sally Ride
When you travel some hundred-million kilometers through space to land, softly, on another world, you deserve a little bit of credit. The Mars Curiosity Rover has lived up to its hype and its expectations since its 2012 landing, and has responded with not only some remarkable science, but perhaps the best images of the Red Planet's surface ever…
esiegel | August 9, 2015“I’d rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.” -Mohsin Hamid
Life is big and intimidating in a lot of ways, but sometimes it's the small things that make us feel the most vulnerable, powerful, fragile or alive. Have a listen to KT Tunstall as she sings her song,
Miniature Disasters,
while you consider the "life-in-miniature" art of Tatsuya Tanaka.
Image credit: Tatsuya Tanaka of Miniature Calendar; original via http://miniature-calendar.com/.
By taking everyday, familiar-sized objects and recasting them as props in a creative scene, he manages to express a certain…
esiegel | August 8, 2015"The specific moral is that within the standard model the [cosmic microwave background] temperature is a key parameter in fixing the thermal and dynamical history of the Universe. The measurement of this parameter made physical cosmology much more definite, and the detection of the radiation made the Big Bang cosmology a good deal more credible." -P.J.E. Peebles
The Universe is never going to run out of wonders for us to discover and explore at a deep level, from fundamental truths to how the Universe assembles all its structures. Here at Starts With A Bang, we covered just a slice of it:…
esiegel | August 7, 2015“All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.” -Tacitus
If you want to form a structure like a planet, star or black hole, you need a large amount of mass together in one place. The way to bring that mass together, of course, is through the force of gravity, which attracts everything with mass towards one another in this Universe.
Image credit: ESO/VPHAS+ team, via http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1403a/.
So why, then, would the greatest source of mass in the Universe -- dark matter -- be…
esiegel | August 6, 2015“The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to -271.3°C, not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it.” –Stephen Hawking
Imagine you traveled out into empty space. Away from any and all planets, stars, galaxies, and matter in general: normal or dark. Would you simply find yourself immersed in an empty, energy-free abyss? Not so! You'd still be bathed in radiation: not just from distant starlight, but from the afterglow of the Big Bang itself.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck…
esiegel | August 5, 2015“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.” -W. Somerset Maugham
This past Monday (thanks, PJ), I celebrated the completion of my 37th orbit around the Sun. This is something we all have the opportunity to do once a year, and we can choose to reflect on how we've changed and what we'd like to change further in the year ahead. On the grandest scales, though, the Universe might seem like it hardly cares at all about another years that's passed.
Image credit: J. NASA and Jeff Hester (Arizona…
esiegel | August 4, 2015When it comes to the definition of "genius," everything is relative, right? When a particularly bright young person performs an amazing feat of intellect or scores incredibly well on a standardized test like an IQ exam or the SAT, we often herald them with excessive praise, calling them "the next Einstein" or even "smarter than Einstein," as though scoring well on a test were justification for such treatment.
Image credit: Screenshot from Latinoshealth.com.
Yet not only did Einstein never take an IQ test, he loathed standardized testing, having very public feuds with Thomas Edison and Carl…
esiegel | August 3, 2015“That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.
Being but men, we walked into the trees.” -Dylan Thomas
Yet when you look at the night sky, it isn't watching the stars that reveals all of the Universe's secrets, nor by looking with what you can see with your eyes. Looking beyond what visible light can teach us often reveals a whole Universe of wonder that we'd never see otherwise.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team.
Looking in infrared light, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) reveals the intricate structure behind…
esiegel | August 2, 2015“Your problem is to bridge the gap which exists between where you are now and the goal you intend to reach.” -Earl Nightingale
When you think about the obstacles facing us in the world today, it's easy to look to advances in technology as the panacea. If there are waterways that need crossing, you'll build what architects have been telling us to build for generations -- as Lucy Wainwright Roche would sing -- a
Bridge.
But not all bridges are built the same.
Image credit: Flickr User Pratham Books.
In the state of Meghalaya, India, one of the wettest, rainiest places on Earth, the rivers…
esiegel | August 1, 2015“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” -Neil Armstrong
This past week saw a whole lot of interesting things happen, including tonight's second full moon of the month: a rare blue moon. In my life, I saw the International Space Station for the first time, but here at Starts With A Bang, there was so much to learn about and share, including:
When will the stars go dark? (for Ask Ethan),
Advertising vs. art (for our Weekend…
esiegel | July 31, 2015“Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.” -Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
You've heard it said many times here: the Universe, since the Big Bang, is 13.8 billion years old. But how do we know this to be true?
Image credit: Bock et al. (2006, astro-ph/0604101); modifications by me.
Moreover, how many different lines of evidence do we have that leads us to this conclusion? Is it like it is for dark matter, where we have a whole slew of them? Or are there only one or two different things we can look at in order to know?
Image credit: Joel D. Hartman, Princeton University, viahttp://www.…
esiegel | July 30, 2015“To be is to be the value of a variable.” –Willard Van Orman Quine
Those constant, fixed points of light in the night sky -- the stars -- turn out not to be so constant if you looked with great precision at them. A star like our Sun varies in brightness, periodically, by about 0.1% over the span of a few years, but many stars vary by 99% or more from brightest to dimmest.
Image credit: British Astronomical Association Variable Star Section, via http://www.britastro.org/vss/.
For centuries, we knew of only a handful of these objects, yet now they're known to be commonplace. What causes this…
esiegel | July 29, 2015“A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux… is that the vast majority of mass of the universe seems to be missing.” -William J. Broad
When we look out at the Universe, the other things we see -- stars, galaxies, and as we're learning, planets -- look an awful lot like the ones right here in our own backyard. Sure, there are subtle differences, but at a macro scale, the Universe appears to look very much like the Universe near and dear to us.
Image credit: ESO / VLT…
esiegel | July 28, 2015When it comes to dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up the vast majority of the mass in the Universe, there's a whole lot we don't understand or know about it. You might think that there are so many unknowns that are so huge that -- quite reasonably -- perhaps it doesn't exist at all, and there's some other explanation for the behavior of masses on galactic scales and up?
Image credit: NASA/ESA/Richard Massey (California Institute of Technology).
And yet, you can't make that leap unless you've honestly (and scientifically) considered the full suite of evidence and facts that…
esiegel | July 28, 2015When you close your eyes and picture a galaxy, what pops into your mind? For most people, it's a beautiful, spiral shape, where a bright central region fans out with arms that wind around and around, over and over, littered with brilliant, glittering stars. And in almost all the pictures you see, there are two main arms making this up, with perhaps additional "spurs" shooting off of the primary arms.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESO/R. Hurt.
But is this really representative of what galaxies look like? Or is it just that these are the images of galaxies that stand out most for us?…