esiegel | April 3, 2015“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” -Vaclav Havel
When you take a look at the planets in our Solar System, one of the most striking features about them is that they all orbit in almost exactly the same plane.
Image credit: Joseph Boyle of quora, via http://www.quora.com/How-close-are-the-planets-of-our-solar-system-to-b….
It didn't have to be this way, of course; you could imagine a scenario where the planets swarmed in a great, random sphere around our central star. After all, gravity…
esiegel | April 2, 2015“Is no one inspired by our present picture of the Universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.” -Richard Feynman
There are many scientific facts that are simply remarkable when it comes to the Universe, including the stories of the stars, of galaxies, of matter, of life, of atoms and of subatomic particle. In short, every aspect of nature we can think of has its own unique, remarkable story.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, HEIC, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).
But…
esiegel | April 2, 2015Out there in the Universe, black holes are some of the most extreme examples of physics in the Universe. Space is curved tremendously, there's an incredible concentration of energy all in one, singular point, and everything that occurs, in theory, outside of the event horizon can be seen in our Universe.
Image Credits: Birmingham Libraries.
But what if one of those things that it can do is make the quantum vacuum in this incredibly curved space unstable? What if it can allow the vacuum to tunnel from its metastable state into one that's truly stable?
Image Credits: Gary Scott Watson.
In…
esiegel | April 1, 2015When it comes to the very nature of quantum mechanics -- about the inherent uncertainty and indeterminism to reality -- it's one of the most difficult things to accept. Perhaps, you imagine, there's some underlying cause, some hidden reality beneath what's visible that actually is deterministic.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
After all, a cat can't simultaneously be dead and alive until someone looks... can it? That's one of the problems that both Einstein and Schrödinger wrestled with during their lives, and an investigation of that story, their work on that front, and their…
esiegel | March 31, 2015“Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way.” -Tom Freston
Yes, the Universe can be considered the ultimate innovator, taking the fundamental particles and forces of the Universe, and assembling them into the entirety of what we know, interact with and observe today.
Illustration credit: NASA / CXC / M.Weiss.
But what is it all made out of, at a fundamental level? And how did we figure it all out? ATLAS physicist and University College London professor Jon Butterworth is all set to give a free public lecture (live-streamed, online) tomorrow,…
esiegel | March 31, 2015It's the simple formula we all know and recognize: inner, rocky worlds closest to the Sun, an asteroid belt farther out, and then gas giant worlds out beyond them. That's how our Solar System works, at any rate. But what about the other star systems in the Universe?
Confirmed planets as of September 2014. Credit: PHL @ UPR Arecibo.
We've finally got enough data to determine whether other planetary systems are like us or not, and if not, how common (or uncommon) our configuration actually is. But what's also interesting is that despite the tremendous computational power needed, simulations…
esiegel | March 30, 2015When you think about our world and our place in the Solar System, you very likely think about Earth, spinning on its axis, with the Moon orbiting around it, and with the entire Earth-Moon system orbiting the Sun.
But did you know that all of it -- the Earth spinning on its axis, the Moon revolving around Earth, the Earth revolving around the Sun, and even the Sun spinning on its own axis -- spins in the same direction? If you floated "above" the north pole of Earth, everything would rotate counterclockwise. It makes you wonder, as one of Jillian Scudder's questioners did:
Do all planets…
esiegel | March 30, 2015“If you are caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron.” -Lee Trevino
When it comes to lightning, you inevitably think of thunderstorms, rain, and the exchange of huge amounts of charge between the clouds above and the Earth. But there's another sight that's perhaps even more spectacular.
Image credit: Francisco Negroni / Associated Press, Agenci Uno / European Press Photo Agency.
During volcanic eruptions, the high temperatures, volatile atoms-and-molecules and disrupted airflow can create an incredible separation of…
esiegel | March 29, 2015“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” -Oscar Wilde
What do you like? No, I really mean it: don't think about the things that you're supposed to like, or the things you'll admit to the world that you like, but really ask yourself the question. Do you, as Golden Smog would sing,
Think About Yourself?
Because if you do, and you like something unconventional, there's a place for you.
Image credit: Weezle, of me giving a talk on the Universe in full Rainbow Dash costume.
I don't mean college; I don't mean…
esiegel | March 28, 2015“If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special.” -Jim Valvano
It's been a little too long since I rounded up the best of your comments and doled out the astrophysics knowledge to fill in the gaps of all the questions I raised. Here at Starts With A Bang, last weekend saw me headlining at a science fiction convention, and while it was a fabulous time for all involved,
Image credit: the inimitable attendees of MidSouthCon.
it meant that we didn't have a Weekend Diversion or a Comments of…
esiegel | March 27, 2015“Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.” -Alfred A. Montapert
You might not think of falling into a black hole as a choice, but in the case of this week's Ask Ethan, someone is choosing to explore exactly that!
Image credit: original unknown, retrieved from http://mondolithic.com/.
Imagine, if you will, taking a solid object that's completely outside of an event horizon, of choosing a very massive black hole with minuscule tidal forces at that location in space, and then just barely pushing a tiny piece of that object over to the other side of the horizon.…
esiegel | March 26, 2015“On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.” -Paul Ricoeur
What you see is what you get, except when it isn't. We're all familiar with Hubble's law, or the notion that the Universe is expanding, and that the farther away you look, the faster you'll see that distant galaxy moving away from you. This relation would be exact, if only the rest of the objects in the Universe didn't exert gravitational forces on one another.
Image credit: Cosmic Flows Project/University of Hawaii, via http://…
esiegel | March 25, 2015“But less intelligible still was the flood that was caused by forty days’ rain, and forty nights’. For here on the moors there were some years when it rained for two hundred days and two hundred nights, almost without fairing; but there was never any Flood.” -Halldór Laxness
Once every 18 years, a French Abbey -- Mount St.-Michel -- becomes inaccessible, as the English Channel rises to such levels that the causeway that normally reaches it becomes engulfed by the surrounding waters.
Image credit: Associated Press.
You might think this is due to the tides, where the Earth, Moon and Sun…
esiegel | March 24, 2015“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.”
“And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.”
“And yours… is wilfully to misunderstand them.” -Jane Austen
Every time we go to higher and higher energies in our particle accelerators, we've got a chance for new discoveries, a new understanding, and if we're lucky, some brand new (and unexpected) physics.
Image credit: CERN.
But -- on the downside -- the crazies all come out of the woodwork, and it's time to take on the most regularly-…
esiegel | March 23, 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 Curiosity landed on the martian surface in 2012, surviving "seven minutes of terror," it went straight to work, examining its surroundings and teaching us about the martian geology of its region.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems, via http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16453.html#.VQYFwmR….
But by…
esiegel | March 20, 2015“If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.” -Mario Andretti
One of the toughest things to wrap your mind around in the natural world is the idea of special relativity: the faster you move, the closer you get to the speed of light, the more difficult it becomes to increase your speed at all. While you might approach the speed of light arbitrarily and asymptotically, you'll never reach it.
Image credit: user Fx-1988 of deviantART.
And yet, we have the Universe, expanding all the time, where the expansion rate itself is even speeding up. You might wonder, then, if these…
esiegel | March 19, 2015“The sun is a miasma
Of incandescent plasma
The sun’s not simply made out of gas
No, no, no
The sun is a quagmire
It’s not made of fire
Forget what you’ve been told in the past” -They Might Be Giants
It's such a simple fact -- that the Sun is made out of hydrogen that fuses into helium, releasing energy by E=mc^2 -- that it's easy to forget that a century ago, we knew none of these things.
Image credit: ESA and NASA,Acknowledgment: E. Olszewski (University of Arizona).
Not that nuclear fusion was a thing, not that the Sun got its energy from E=mc^2, and not even that the Sun was made out…
esiegel | March 18, 2015“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” -Marcus Aurelius
Let there be light! You'd think that would be enough: that you form stars in the Universe, you see those stars in the Universe, and that tells you about what's out there.
If only it were that simple.
Image credit: ESO, via http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0102a/.
In order to truly see the first stars, you need a lot more that just starlight: you need that light to be able to freely travel through space. And -- as bad luck would have it -- visible light, the kind of light we've built our…
esiegel | March 17, 2015“‘You are a different kind of Irishman, Goll,’ was all she said.
‘Every Irishman is a different kind of Irishman,’ said Goll.” -Charles Brady
Sure, we're all a little bit Irish today. We celebrate in a plethora of different ways, the most common of which is to prominently display the color most associated with Ireland: green.
Image credit: 451 Marketing Heat, via http://451heat.com/2014/03/14/google-add-ons-apple-selfies-pocket-app-s….
But did you know that not only is the planet Earth on track to celebrate St. Paddy's day in style with a spectacular auroral display, but that even though…
esiegel | March 17, 2015Imagine that you've got that absolutely weightless feeling, the kind you get when you lose your balance and hurtle towards the ground. Are you on a roller coaster? Did you fall out of an airplane? Or are you in an accelerating elevator?
Image credit: Dutch Experiment Support Center, via http://www.descsite.nl/Gravity_us.htm.
According to Einstein's Equivalence Principle, there's really no way for you to tell, not unless you've got some view of the outside world. What you might not realize is that there's an assumption at play here: that the kind of mass you experience due to gravitation…