esiegel | July 7, 2015"Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us a uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy-since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star." -Edgar Allan Poe
The master of the macabre, little known to most, was actually a very curious and astute armchair scholar of the cosmos. And when he looked out at the physical Universe, one of the most puzzling facts about it was the darkness of the night sky itself. Back in the 1820s, Heinrich Olbers put forth his famous paradox: that if the night sky…
esiegel | July 1, 2015“Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.” -Alan Greenspan
If there's one thing you can be certain of when it comes to the fundamental, scientific truths of our Universe, it's this: someday, in the not too distant future, those truths will be superseded by more fundamental ones. And even those, quite likely, won't be the final truths, but just one step further along the line towards our understanding of reality.
Image credit: Philosophy of Cosmology / University of Oxford, via http://philosophy-of-cosmology.ox.ac.uk/cosmos.html.
Does this mean that we've necessarily got it all…
esiegel | July 1, 2015“Celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it.” -Summer of 4 ft. 2; The Simpsons
There are few things as closely associated with American independence as our willingness and eagerness to celebrate with fiery explosions. I refer, of course, to the unique spectacle of fireworks, first developed nearly a millennium ago halfway across the world.
Image credit: © Copyright 2005–2015 Capital Concerts, Inc.
But these displays don't happen by themselves; there's an intricate art and science required to deliver the shows we all expect. So what's the science behind…
esiegel | June 30, 2015“I remember as a kid having a balloon and accidentally letting the string go and watching it just float off and into the sky until it disappeared. And there’s something about that, even, that feels very much like what life is, you know, that it’s fleeting, and it’s temporal.” -Pete Docter
So, you want to colonize another world, do you? Want to send humans to go live somewhere new, on a habitable planet beyond Earth? Well you're not alone. But which planet will you choose? Will it be Mars, a smaller, colder, farther-out world than our own? Where perhaps you add a magnetic field, a thicker…
esiegel | June 30, 2015There's something puzzling about black holes, if you stop to consider it. On the one hand, they're objects so massive and dense -- compacted into such a small region of space -- that nothing can escape from it, not even light. That's the definition of a black hole, and why "black" is in the name.
Image credit: James Provost, sciencenews.org.
But gravity also moves at the speed of light, and yet the gravitational influence of a black hole has absolutely no problem extending not only beyond the event horizon, but infinite distances out into the abyss of space.
Image credit: Henze, NASA.…
esiegel | June 29, 2015“Now, Venus is an extremely hostile environment, and as such presents a lot of challenges for a science fiction author who wants to create life there. However, as I began to research it more thoroughly, I found myself intrigued by the possibilities the world offers.” -Sarah Zettel
Of all the worlds in our Solar System, Venus is perhaps the most like Earth. It's the closest to us in size, in mass, in orbit, and in elemental content. The biggest difference, of course, is Venus' atmosphere.
Image credit: ESA/MPS, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany / Venus Express.
Over 90 times as thick as Earth's…
esiegel | June 27, 2015“Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one’s potential.” -Bruce Lee
One of the greatest tricks that filmmakers use to enhance what can be shown in apparent real-time is that of stop-motion. Frame-by-frame, objects or people are carefully posed, enabling you to create an animated wonderland of feats otherwise unattainable by the people in question.
Image credit: Mortal Kombat 3.
But as far as epic karate fights go, Collider Digital has taken this to an…
esiegel | June 27, 2015“We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.” -Jack Gilbert
This past week at Starts With A Bang saw five new stories about the Universe, from our own home planet to topics about the birth of the Universe (and how we know it broke down that way), as well as our limits. Check out what we’ve covered:
Newton's random apple (for Ask Ethan),
Velociprincesses (for our Weekend Diversion),
The first bone of the Milky Way's skeleton (for Mostly Mute Monday),
Exoplanets & the search for…
esiegel | June 26, 2015“I soon became convinced… that all the theorizing would be empty brain exercise and therefore a waste of time unless one first ascertained what the population of the universe really consists of.” -Fritz Zwicky
When we look out at the galaxies in the Universe, watching how they rotate, we find that the starlight we see is woefully insufficient to explain why the galaxies move as they do. In fact, even if we add in the gas, dust, and all the known matter, it doesn't add up.
Image credit: Stefania.deluca of Wikimedia Commons.
Normally, we talk about dark matter as the only viable solution,…
esiegel | June 25, 2015“Electricity can be dangerous. My nephew tried to stick a penny into a plug. Whoever said a penny doesn’t go far didn’t see him shoot across that floor. I told him he was grounded.” -Tim Allen
Static electricity is often the first exposure to physics beyond gravity that we encounter in our lives. Simply rub a balloon against a piece of fabric, and you can stick it to almost anything (or anyone) you like, possibly to their chagrin.
No idea where this image came from. But it’s maybe the best one I’ve ever seen.
But the way you probably learned that it happens -- rub two materials together,…
esiegel | June 24, 2015“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” -Vincent Van Gogh
When we look out into the Universe, farther back to greater distances, we're also looking back in time, farther and farther into the past. If we could look back far enough, close enough to the Big Bang, we'd be able to see the very first stars ever formed in the Universe: stars formed from the Big Bang's leftover material itself.
Image credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO).
We'd never been able to find these before, but by looking at a starburst galaxy at extremely high…
esiegel | June 22, 2015“Hundreds or thousands of years from now, when people look back at our generation, they will remember us for being the first people who found the Earth-like worlds.” -Sara Seager
Just a scant 25 years ago, we had never yet found and confirmed another planet orbiting a star other than our own. Fast forward to the present, and we've not only got thousands, we've found a significant number of rocky planets at the right distance from stars even longer-lived than our Sun for liquid water to suggest that there are literally billions of potentially habitable worlds in our own galaxy.
Image credit:…
esiegel | June 21, 2015“The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.” -Arthur Koestler
For every galaxy out there, what we typically see -- the stars -- is only representative of a tiny fraction, maybe 2%, of all the mass that's present within. For everything else, there's dark matter, planets, gas, dust, molecular clouds and more.
Image credit: Dobbs et al. (simulation snapshot) of the Milky Way’s “bones,” via http://milkywaybones.org/media-gallery/detail/13836/54371.
But while other galaxies tended…
esiegel | June 21, 2015“A princess is many things, and a raptor is one of them.” -Laura Cooper
For those of us who love the movies, there are two things that are indelibly etched into our memories -- not necessarily together -- as Galactic, featuring Chali 2na, sing to us, if we
Think Back.
I'm referring, of course, to Disney princesses and the terrifying velociraptors of Jurassic Park.
Image credit: Laura Cooper, via http://xpwebcomic.com/gallery/.
But this weekend, I'm proud to highlight the work of Laura Cooper, who decided to combine these two together in brilliant form, creating velociprincesses for many…
esiegel | June 20, 2015“We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.” -Jack Gilbert
Although you had lots to say, it came almost exclusively on two of our posts, so let's jump right in and see if we can expand what we've been talking about on your Comments of the Week!
Image credit: Ethan Shipulski, via http://mindblowingphysics.pbworks.com/w/page/52081285/Graviton%202012.
From Denier on temperature limits and singularities: "If at “some high temperature, you will restore the potential that caused our…
esiegel | June 19, 2015“Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.” -Bernard Baruch
Take a common, macroscopic object -- like an apple -- and imagine what's going on inside at the level of individual particles. At a small, fundamental scale, they're just bouncing off of one another, rapidly in motion due to the nature of kinetic theory. Each particle has a certain amount of energy, collides with other particles, and on average moves at a specific speed.
Image credit: Wikimedia commons user Greg L.
If you aligned all these motions -- somehow -- how fast could you get your apple to go? And…
esiegel | June 18, 2015“Soon the earth will tilt on its axis and begin to dance to the reggae beat to the accompaniment of earthquake. And who can resist the dance of the earthquake, mon?” –Peter Tosh
But it isn't true that the Earth's axial tilt will change, is it? Or rather, if it did, how would you know? Believe it or not, measuring the tilt of the Earth about its axis is one of the easiest things to do, and all you need to know is your latitude, which you can either measure during the equinox or look up absolutely anywhere...
Image credit: http://timeanddate.com/.
and then to perform one of the simplest…
esiegel | June 17, 2015“Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.” -Paul Steinhardt, 2014
Cosmic inflation is alternately talked about by serious scientists as either the definitive beginning to our Universe, the thing that happened before and set up the Big Bang with absolute certainty, or a speculative fiction that can never be falsified, leading to nothing but untestable predictions and things that only mattered after-the-fact of their discovery.
Image credit: Bock et al. (2006, astro-ph/0604101);…
esiegel | June 14, 2015“People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter insignificance of Earth on a celestial scale.” -Nathan Myhrvold
When new stars form from a collapsing molecular cloud, the hottest, bluest, brightest stars emit high-energy ultraviolet radiation. This evaporates, ionizes and pushes the gas outwards, creating a bubble effect.
Image credit: Copyright 2006 Brad Moore and Southern Astro, via http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/34/image/e/.
Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope and its ability to hone in…
esiegel | June 14, 2015“Laughs don’t come in barrels. They come from inside you as your body’s response to delight.” -Pinkie Pie
Every once in a while, a constraint is placed on an artist, musician or creator that results in something more powerful than you would have ever found otherwise. Have a listen to Keller Williams' wonderful song,
Slo Mo Balloon,
while you consider the constraint inherent to... balloon animals?
Image credit: Masayoshi Matsumoto, via his tumblr at http://isopresso.tumblr.com/.
Artist Masayoshi Matsumoto has begun creating balloon creatures -- animals, plants, even humans and fantasy…