esiegel | February 24, 2015No one science can stand wholly on its own. For inquiry about the Universe to give a correct, complete picture, it requires that we bring in a whole slew of evidence, often from tangentially related fields.
Image credit: Professor Kenneth R. Lang, Tufts University.
The interplay between three fields in particular -- astronomy, physics, and math (not a science, but the tool used to help understand the relationships arising in the first two) -- have given rise to the most successful picture of the Universe of all-time.
But how did this come to be?
Image credit: Scott Dodelson.
Brian…
esiegel | February 24, 2015One of the great, catastrophic truths of the Universe is that everything has an expiration date. And this includes every single point of light in the entire sky.
Image credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo of Deep Sky Colors, via http://deepskycolors.com/astro/JPEG/RBA_Orion_HeadToToes.jpg.
The most massive stars -- like Betelgeuse (at the upper left) -- will die in a spectacular supernova explosion when their final stage of core fuel runs out. At only an estimated 600 light years distant, Betelgeuse is one (along with Antares) of the closest red supergiants to us, and it's estimated to have only…
esiegel | February 23, 2015“These spots have never been observed by anyone before me; and from my observations of them, often repeated, I have been led to the opinion which I have expressed, namely, that I feel sure that the surface of the Moon is not perfectly smooth, free from inequalities and exactly spherical… but that, on the contrary, it is full of inequalities, uneven, full of hollows and protuberances, just like the surface of the Earth itself, which is varied everywhere by lofty mountains and deep valleys.” -Galileo Galilei, of his observations of the Moon, 1610
When it comes to the Moon, there are no shortage…
esiegel | February 22, 2015“The only frozen heart around here is yours.” -Anna, to Hans, from Frozen
When something's difficult, it's easy to lose sight of what's beautiful. Have a listen to Eilen Jewell's haunting and memorable song,
Fourth Degree.
Next, before you curse the bitter cold yet again, particularly those of you suffering from far below average temperatures, consider the following beautiful sights.
Image credit: Cheryl Johnson, via https://www.facebook.com/cheryljohnsonnh/media_set?set=a.10203684200845….
These frozen baubles aren't leftover Christmas decorations that were left out in the snow, but are…
esiegel | February 21, 2015“In this land of ours, there are many great pits. But none more bottomless than the bottomless pit. Which, as you can see here, is bottomless.” -Grunkle Stan, Gravity Falls
After another week of fun-filled stories about the Universe here at Starts With A Bang, it's time to take a look back at everything we've said, as well as everything you've said in response. If you missed anything (or simply want a second look), here's what we've covered over the past week:
How can we still see the Big Bang? (for Ask Ethan),
The math of Powerball (for our Weekend Diversion),
A comet comes alive! (for…
esiegel | February 20, 2015“It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing — a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind.” -Albert Einstein
In physics, we're always on that quest for the next frontier: the next order of magnitude higher in energy, the next order of magnitude closer to absolute zero, the next extra decimal place in our quest towards the speed of light. As far as we've come in terms of pushing the frontiers, we're always striving to go a little bit farther.
Image credit: RHIC collaboration, Brookhaven, viahttp://…
esiegel | February 19, 2015“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.” -Edna St. Vincent Millay
It's the ultimate dream of many children with time on their hands and their first leisurely attempt at digging: to go clear through the Earth to the other side, creating a bottomless pit.
Image credit: original source unknown.
Most of us don't get very far in practice, but in theory, it should be possible to construct one, and consider what would happen to a very clever test subject who took all the proper precautions, and…
esiegel | February 18, 2015“What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.” -Theodore Roethke
In math, if you prove a theorem, that theorem is as good as gold. But in physics, a theorem may or may not be 100% valid.
Image credit: Steven Weinberg for Cern Courier, via http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/32522.
It depends, for example, on whether your "proof" describes all the relevant phenomena at play in your system. For example, Goldstone's theorem predicts that any broken symmetry will lead to the creation of massless particles. Yet when we actually break, say, the electroweak symmetry, the…
esiegel | February 17, 2015“For my confirmation, I didn’t get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.” -Wernher von Braun
A telescope is only as good, mind you, as the amount of time you spend looking through it. And for most people, perhaps unfortunately, that isn't very often.
Image credit: Mike Hankey, via http://www.mikesastrophotos.com/planets/amateur-astronomer-strikes-agai….
Which is why, if we want people to experience the joys of what's actually out there in the night sky -- firsthand -- it's up to us to bring it to…
esiegel | February 16, 2015“In the year 1456 … a Comet was seen passing Retrograde between the Earth and the sun… Hence I dare venture to foretell, that it will return again in the year 1758.” -Edmond Halley
When ESA's Rosetta mission "caught" its target, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August, 2014, one of its main science goals was to watch the comet become active from up close.
Image credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM — CC BY-SA IGO 3.0, via http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2015/02/Comet_on_31_January_201….
Half a year later, the flux of particles being emitted by the comet has intensified tremendously, and so…
esiegel | February 15, 2015“I’ve done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.” -Fran Lebowitz
It's a thought that's occurred to almost everyone at some point or another: what each of us would do if we happened to hit the lottery Jackpot. Have a listen to Camper Van Beethoven sing about it in the band's interesting song,
When I Win The Lottery,
while you consider the following.
Image credit: me. The (very small) differences in these odds and the Powerball official odds are due to rounding.
This past week, the Powerball Jackpot crested past $500 million, one of…
esiegel | February 14, 2015“Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.” -Joan Jett
We've reached the end of yet another week here at Starts With A Bang, which means it's time to take a look back at everything we've covered. It also means it's time for you to catch up on any of the (amazing) articles you missed, which includes:
Gravitational waves (for Ask Ethan),
The Moon as no one's seen it (for our Weekend Diversion),
The edge of the Sun (for Mostly Mute Monday),
The tragic fate of physicist Paul…
esiegel | February 13, 2015“We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards.” -Dejan Stojanovic
When we look back to greater and greater distances in the Universe, we're looking back to earlier and earlier times as well. At some point, we can see far enough back that we reach the location at which the Universe cooled enough to first form stable, neutral atoms.
Image credit: NASA / CXC / M.Weiss.
But this is no nearby location: it's presently located some 45.3 billion light-years away! All the stars, galaxies, clusters and gas clouds that…
esiegel | February 12, 2015“According to the special theory of relativity nothing can travel faster than light, so that if light cannot escape, nothing else can either. The result would be a black hole: a region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape to infinity.” -Stephen Hawking
The idea of a black hole, of a region of space where there's so much matter-and-energy that not even light can escape from it, has been around for hundreds of years.
Image credit: A BBC documentary, retrieved via http://encyclopedia.com/.
Yet despite this constraint, the fact that any form of energy entering it is forbidden…
esiegel | February 10, 2015“These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past.” -Fred Hoyle
It's making headlines everywhere we go: the recent paper stating that quantum equations prove that there is no Big Bang.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA;Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt.
Is that even possible? Honestly, it depends on which definition of the Big Bang you're using. As it turns out, there are two of them, and there's a good (historical) reason for that. But in the context of what we know today, one of them isn't a…
esiegel | February 10, 2015When you think of thermodynamics, and how energy, temperature, heat and entropy are all related in a system full of particles so numerous you could never hope to count them all in a thousand lifetimes, there are only a few names that stand out as titans in the field.
Paul Ehrenfest, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Boltzmann and Ehrenfest are perhaps two of the best-known, and while Boltzmann's tragedy is well known, Ehrenfest's story is perhaps even more heartbreaking, and has an even sadder ending.
Paul Ehrenfest, his son Paul Jr. and Albert Einstein, Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Paul…
esiegel | February 9, 2015“Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, and flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who’s sorry for a gnat or girl?” -Elizabeth Barrett Browning
As viewed from Earth, total eclipses of the Sun are relatively rare things, happening less than once a year on average and even then, rarely occurring over heavily populated areas. Nevertheless, thousands or even millions of people flock to catch these spectacular, inimitable sights.
Image…
esiegel | February 7, 2015“When I look at the moon I do not see a hostile, empty world. I see the radiant body where man has taken his first steps into a frontier that will never end.” -David Scott, Commander, Apollo 15
The Moon is perhaps the oldest sight known to humans and our animal ancestors here on Earth, with its features mostly unchanged for billions of years. Have a listen to Camera Obscura sing their soothing song,
Lunar Sea,
while you consider that for nearly all of human history, we were only able to see just barely over 50% of the Moon.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Tomruen, viahttp://en.…
esiegel | February 7, 2015“And there is the headlight, shining far down the track, glinting off the steel rails that, like all parallel lines, will meet in infinity, which is after all where this train is going.” -Bruce Catton
At the end of each week here at Starts With A Bang, it's important to take a look back at all we've gone through, and give some time and energy to all your thoughts on it. This week, there have been a lot of them, as we've covered the following:
The multiverse and you (for Ask Ethan),
Revenge, it's what's for lunch (for our Weekend Diversion),
The galactic plane (for Mostly Mute Monday),
Dark…
esiegel | February 6, 2015“Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” -Hermann Minkowski
When you think of waves, chances are you think of some type of pressure wave moving through a medium, like sound or water waves, or you think of light, which is an electromagnetic wave that requires no medium to move through. But there's another type of wave that exists, that no one expected before Einstein came along: gravitational waves.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user MOBle.
It's very…