esiegel | February 5, 2015“The joy of life consists in the exercise of one’s energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.” -Aleister Crowley
Our Universe is the way it is for two reasons: the initial conditions that it started off with, and the fundamental particles, interactions and laws that govern it.
Image credit: NASA / CXC / M.Weiss.
When it comes to the physical properties of everything that exists, we can ask ourselves how many fundamental, dimensionless constants or…
esiegel | February 4, 2015“The dance between darkness and light will always remain — the stars and the moon will always need the darkness to be seen, the darkness will just not be worth having without the moon and the stars.” -C. JoyBell C.
Yet what do you do when you discover a moon that itself straddles the border between light-and-dark? It might sound like something out of a fantasy novel, but it isn't: it's exactly what we get when it comes to the second of Saturn's moons ever discovered: Iapetus.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute / Cassini.
While some of its mysteries remain elusive,…
esiegel | February 3, 2015“Every generation of physicists solves some old puzzles and finds some new ones.” -Dr. Kendrick Smith
A century ago, no one could have envisioned the Universe we have today. From a Universe governed by Newton's and Maxwell's laws, consisting only of the Milky Way and the objects within, who could have imagined the new forces, interactions, particles and discoveries that the 20th century brought with it?
Image credit: NASA / GSFC, via http://cosmictimes.gsfc.nasa.gov/universemashup/archive/pages/expanding….
Yet not only are we here today, but there are a whole new set of unanswered…
esiegel | February 3, 2015When you think of dark matter, you very likely think of a halo of diffuse, unseen mass whose gravitational influence is felt by everything within our galaxy, and every galaxy or cluster out there.
Our Milky Way, like most galaxies, is surrounded by an approximately spherical halo of dark matter. Our sun moves through this halo.
But what you might not consider is that this dark matter is consistently passing through Earth and every atom-and-molecule on it. Every once in a while, a lucky (or unlucky) dark matter particle strikes, say, a DNA molecule in your body, breaking its bonds and…
esiegel | February 2, 2015“The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.” -Galileo Galilei
It is, in fact, almost exactly as Galileo said.
Image credit: ESO / S. Brunier, from the Gigagalaxyzoom project.
Galileo missed a few things, though, including a plethora of unclustered stars, dust, nebulae and star-forming regions as well.
Image credit: ESO / Stephane Guisard / S. Brunier, via http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0936b/.
Want to view it all at once? Check out today's Mostly Mute Monday!
esiegel | February 1, 2015“If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?” -William Shakespeare
They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, and yet, if your packing it in your lunchbox, how else would you do it? Have a listen to John Prine's (bitter)sweet song,
Sweet Revenge,
as you consider the surprise that must be in store when you open your lunch, expecting a delicious treat, and find something like this.
Image credit: Juju Kurihara of Iromegane, via http://www.iromegane.com/entertainment/foods/the-japanese-wives-…
esiegel | January 31, 2015“Time is the longest distance between two places.” -Tennessee Williams
I'm always stoked to give you weekly recaps at Starts With A Bang, just in case there's anything you missed. We saw some fantastic posts this week, including two amazing contributions from Brian Koberlein and Amanda Yoho! Here's what we saw:
The timeline of the Universe (for Ask Ethan),
Superman vs. Baseball (for our Weekend Diversion),
The Cat's-Eye Nebula (for Mostly Mute Monday),
From Heaven to Earth, (a Jovian treat by Brian Koberlein)
The Big Bang by Balloon, (a story of cosmic exploration by Amanda Yoho),
Impending…
esiegel | January 30, 2015“Go then, there are other worlds than these.” -Stephen King, The Dark Tower
Ever since quantum mechanics first came along, we've recognized how tenuous our perception of reality is, and how -- in many ways -- what we perceive is just a very small subset of what's going on at the quantum level in our Universe.
Image credit: Wikimedia commons user Christian Schirm.
Then, along came cosmic inflation, teaching us that our observable Universe is just a tiny, tiny fraction of the matter-and-radiation filled space out there, with possibilities including Universes with different fundamental laws…
esiegel | January 29, 2015“Even in hindsight, I would not change one whit of the Voyager experience. Dreams and sweat carried it off. But most of all, its legacy makes us all Earth travelers among the stars.” -Charley Kohlhase
It's a taxing enough task to launch something off the surface of the Earth, escaping our planet's gravity and finding our way into interplanetary space.
Image credit: Delta II rocket launch, public domain, via http://www.gps.gov/.
But to reach the outer Solar System? To go beyond the gas giants and even escape from our Sun's pull completely? We need a little help to do that. Thankfully, the…
esiegel | January 29, 2015“From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.” -Nikola Tesla
Stability: it's the hallmark of the Solar System. The motions of all the planetary bodies are regular and periodic. The paths of the various objects never cross, and everything that has continued for billions of years should continue, undisturbed, for billions more.
Image credit: Mark Garlick / Science Photo Library.
Unless, of course, something came along to mess that up! In our Solar System, the comets…
esiegel | January 28, 2015If you want to map the entire sky -- whether you're looking in the visible, ultraviolet, infrared or microwave, your best bet is to go to space. Only high above the Earth's atmosphere can you map out the entire sky, with your vision unobscured by anything terrestrial.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration.
But that costs hundreds of millions of dollars for the launch alone! What if you've got new technology you want to test? What if you still want to defeat most of the atmosphere? (Which you need to do, for most wavelengths of light.) And what if you want to make observations on…
esiegel | January 27, 2015If you want to know where you are on Earth, you use a GPS, you use other terrestrial landmarks to help determine your location, or you use some well-known objects in the sky.
Image credit: still by Fraser Gunn, additions by Ethan Siegel.
This will get you latitude easily, but how about longitude? While there are some tricky things you can do to help yourself out, one of the most commonly used techniques for centuries -- surprisingly -- was using the moons of another world: Jupiter!
Image credit: Robert J. Modic, over a mere 10-minute timespan! Image was processed down from 3.2 MB to a…
esiegel | January 26, 2015“I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.” -Margaret Atwood
We had a great run with Messier Monday, followed by a fun mini-series on Mini-Movie Monday, but now it's time to shake things up.
Image credit: Nordic Optical Telescope and Romano Corradi (Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, Spain), via http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0414b/.
Starting today, I present to you a new, ongoing series: Mostly Mute Monday. The rules are as follows:
I pick one…
esiegel | January 25, 2015“If I had to choose a superhero to be, I would pick Superman. He’s everything that I’m not.” -Stephen Hawking
But did you ever stop to imagine that one of those things that Superman would be is the greatest home run hitter of all time? Have a listen to Iron & Wine's song,
Waitin' For A Superman,
while you pause to consider what would happen if Superman played baseball?
Image credit: DC Comics.
Or rather, that he played baseball optimally, by the rules, using standard equipment, but was still constrained by the laws of physics. How far, then, could Superman hit a baseball, and how does…
esiegel | January 24, 2015“You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge.” -Eckhart Tolle
It's been an amazing week here at Starts With A Bang, and you've been given plenty to think about. In particular, here's what the past seven days have seen:
Heavy planets, light Sun? (for Ask Ethan),
Revenge of the sparkles (for our Weekend Diversion),
Genesis episode 6, the Moon (for Mini-Movie Monday),
The slow dance that made you,
Science by democracy doesn't work, and
The camera that changed the Universe (for Throwback Thursday).…
esiegel | January 23, 2015“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” -Albert Einstein
And yet, this is a very good reason! We need things to happen in stages: you can't form human beings before you form planets (that would be bad); you can't form stars before you form atoms (also bad); you can't form atomic nuclei before you get rid of antimatter (still bad).
Image credit: Addison Wesley.
But somehow, despite having very little direct evidence for what happened in the early Universe, we tend to give timelines of precisely when various events happened. For this week's Ask Ethan, we take…
esiegel | January 22, 2015“That I learned even as a three year-old that I see this world that is really a mess and I learned to say, ‘This is not me. I am not the one that is messed up. It is out there.’” -Story Musgrave
It was 25 years ago this year that the Hubble Space Telescope first opened its eyes on the Universe. It wasn't as you might've expected, all that impressive. For one, there were flaws in the optics of the primary mirror, and for another, the camera we installed on it was, I hate to say it, pretty lame.
Image credit: NASA, of the first Hubble servicing mission.
But in 1993, a servicing mission was…
esiegel | January 21, 2015“Even when Darwin’s teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology.” -Trofim Lysenko
We love having debates when there's a disagreement. When there are multiple competing explanations for an effect, multiple possible causes, and multiple ideas flying around, different people will inevitably be drawn towards different sides.
Image credit: Springer 2007 / Union of Concerned Scientists, via http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology…
esiegel | January 20, 2015“It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!” -George Gamow
But how was it that this happened? Sure, the Universe may have started off with hydrogen and helium alone, but when we look around at the world today -- at our world in particular -- there's so much more than that.
Image credit: Theodore Gray, via http://theodoregray.com/periodictable/Posters/index.posters.html.
Good thing, too, because without it, the molecular combinations essential to our existence wouldn't be possible! There are…
esiegel | January 19, 2015“But even when the moon looks like it’s waning…it’s actually never changing shape. Don’t ever forget that.” -Ai Yazawa
You've seen the iconic crescent, quarter, gibbous and full phases for yourself, and probably even an eclipse or two. For millennia, the Moon has fascinated, delighted and mystified observers of the skies. Less than 50 years ago, in fact, we walked on it for the first time.
Image credit: NASA / Apollo 11.
Yet even when we did so, we had no idea where our Moon actually came from! We're the only planet in the entire Solar System with a Moon that's such a large percentage of…