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“There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.” -Jorge Luis Borges
Have you ever been so mad at someone that you needed revenge? That you needed to take something delightful and use it for the most nefarious of purposes? Even something sparkly and sweet, as Tower of Power would sing you,
Sparkling In The Sand,
can turn into vengeance in the right (or wrong) hands.
Image credit: via http://shipyourenemiesglitter.com/.
Well, that's exactly what young Australian…
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"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
We're really hitting our stride for 2015 here at Starts With A Bang, and I'm so pleased you shared this past week with me. If you missed anything, here's what we've been through:
Does the Universe have a center? (for Ask Ethan),
Fall into a bigger galaxy (for our Weekend Diversion),
Genesis episode 5, our galaxy's gravity (for Mini-Movie Monday),
Everything you ever wanted to know about nothing, (from Sabine…
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“The single most powerful element of youth is our inability to know what’s impossible.” -Adam Braun
"I'm going to be a star," says every clump of matter in a molecular cloud, as it prepares to collapse under the tremendous pull of gravitation. But try as they might, only a small fraction of that gas and of those clumps -- the largest and earliest, preferentially -- will ever get there.
Image credit: Tom O’Donoghue, via http://www.flickr.com/photos/28192200@N02/8528939580/in/photostream.
This week's Ask Ethan question is one of the shortest and sweetest out there, and comes from Greg Rogers…
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“And you may find yourself in another part of the world.
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife.
And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’” -Talking Heads
Well, imagine it's happened: an apocalypse, at least for you. You awaken without knowing where you are, how you got there, or even what year it is.
Image credit: ©2010–2015 SamuraiSunshine; photography from deviantART.
And for some reason, what you need to figure out is exactly where you are on Earth: your latitude and longitude…
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“The discrepancy between what was expected and what has been observed has grown over the years, and we’re straining harder and harder to fill the gap.” -Jeremiah Ostriker
If you look at the stars in a galaxy -- and then at all the different wavelengths of light that there are -- you'd think you can do a good job of reconstructing its mass, and where it's located.
Image credit: Multiwavelength images of M31, via the Planck mission team; ESA / NASA.
Makes sense, right? Only then, if you take those observations and compare them to how the stars within the galaxy actually move, you'd be…
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When we talk about dimensions, we're used to thinking of three: something like length, width and depth, or x, y and z. But there's a fourth dimension as well that's of paramount importance for our Universe, otherwise everything would simply be static: time.
Image credit: Fair Use image obtained by Wikimedia Commons user DASHBot.
Our motion through time as well as space is what allows things to be different from one moment to the next. Although relativity (and Einstein) are what we commonly associate with these ideas, they predate him in both fiction (above) and science (below), such…
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Have you ever thought about what "nothing" truly is? We used to think about it in terms of simply removing all the particles from a given region of space, which is a pretty intuitive definition of nothing. But quantum physics is notorious for defying our intuition.
Public domain image.
When we take a look at this "empty" space, we find it's not so empty at all. Not in terms of energy, and not -- if we consider that particles are not just real but also virtual -- in terms of what's physically inside.
Image credit: Derek Leinweber.
If you've ever wondered about "nothing," take a…
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“I think if I had to choose, I would rather have gravity instead of zero gravity. It’s fun for a while, but I’d rather live on Earth.” -Kevin A. Ford
By now, you've probably had a lot of opportunities to think about what holds our Universe together: the incredible force of gravitation. Although it's the weakest known force in the Universe, there seems to be no limit to how much mass you can collect in one place. And so on the largest scales -- like solar systems, stars and galaxies -- it seems to be the only force that matters.
Image credit: © 1998–2015 Lynette R. Cook.
Yet the matter that…
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“He who would search for pearls must dive below.” -John Dryden
Sometimes falling can be a painful thing, as Ween might sing you in their ominous composition,
Falling Out,
but sometimes it can be absolutely wonderful, like when the Hubble space telescope allows you to "fall in" to the closest large galaxy to us: Andromeda.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and L.C. Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler.
Thanks to the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT), we can now give you high-resolution glimpses into our nearest…
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“Do you know where to find marble conference tables? I'm looking to have a conference... not until I get the table though” -@kanyewest on Twitter
If you noticed we had a busier week than normal here at Starts With A Bang, you weren't alone. But there's a good reason: the first week in January marks/highlights the annual American Astronomical Society big meeting, and yours truly was not only in attendance, but I did my best to bring you the scoop on the biggest stories at the start of 2015! In addition to our regularly scheduled programming, we had a host of special…
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“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” -Kurt Vonnegut
The Universe is expanding and cooling, with all but a few of the closest galaxies receding from our view. In fact, the farther away an object is, the faster it appears to recede.
Image credit: E. Siegel.
This may sound an awful lot like an explosion to you, and the name "the Big Bang" sure gives that same implication, doesn't it? Yet despite these facts, it turns out that the idea that the Universe has a center is completely…
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“Never waste your time trying to explain who you are to people who are committed to misunderstanding you.” -Dream Hampton
As any scientist knows, it's true that no scientific theory, no matter how well-tested, how validated, or how universally applicable it is, can ever be 100% proven.
Image credit: Leonard Eisenberg, 2008, via http://www.evogeneao.com/.
But is this a flaw, or is it a feature of science? As it turns out, being able to revise, refine, and learn as we move forward leads to something even better than scientific "proof."
Image credit: Rensselaer Polytechnic…
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“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” -James A. Baldwin
We've come a long way since we first started watching the night skies. Even just a century ago, we thought our Universe was governed by Newtonian gravity and consisted only of our Milky Way and the stars inside.
Image credit: SDSS.
In the past 100 years, we've come to understand that our Universe is a vast, expanding-and-cooling space that formed planets, stars, galaxies and clusters from a past that was so hot and dense we didn't even have atoms, nuclei, or stable protons! There are a myriad of…
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“I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here.” -Arthur C. Clarke
For the past three years, Kepler has been looking at 150,000 stars, searching for planetary transits.
Image credit: NASA.
The science haul has been huge, but mostly larger planets close in to their parent stars. Nevertheless, a few rocky, habitable-zone planets have been discovered. Whether we take optimistic or pessimistic estimates, what do we expect for the rest of the galaxy?
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Wikimedia Commons user Henrykus.
At minimum, some 6 billion…
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“With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.” -William Wordsworth
You've seen the amazing photos of spiral galaxies, with the vast, sweeping arms, the massive, central bulges and the great underdense regions in between the arms. As you move farther and farther towards the outskirts, the stellar density drops away to practically nothing.
Image credit: Vicent Peris (OAUV), José Luis Lamadrid (CEFCA), Jack Harvey (SSRO), Steve Mazlin (SSRO), Ivette Rodríguez (PTeam), Oriol Lehmkuhl (PTeam), Juan Conejero (PixInsight), via http://…
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“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.” -Charles Dickens
Just... go. I can't even do it justice in a synopsis, or with 600 pixel image widths.
This was the original.
Image credit: NASA, Jeff Hester, and Paul Scowen (Arizona State University).
Go see the new, full-resolution story of wonderment. GO!
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“This Administration has never really faced up to where we are going in space… As a result, NASA is both drifting and lobbying for bigger things — without being able to focus realistically on what it should be doing.”
-White House staff assistant Clay Thomas Whitehead, February 1971
What should we be doing with respect to our space program? At its peak -- the mid-1960s -- the US government spent somewhere around 20% of its non-military discretionary spending on NASA and space science/exploration. Today?
Image credit: OMB Historical Budget Tables.
That number is down to 3%, the lowest it's…
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“A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.” -Niels Bohr
There's a wonderful story that the Universe tells us about itself: the story of where everything in it came from, and how it came to be this way. From the perspective of a human being, there's possibly no component of that as important to our existence as the humblest of all building blocks: the atoms.
Image credit: (c) Theodore W. Gray, from http://periodictable.com/.
Yet when the Universe first cooled from the Big Bang, over 99.999999% of what existed was nothing more than hydrogen and helium. So where did the atoms…
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“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.” -Oscar Wilde
While the AAS meeting is about to start, I couldn't resist sharing a song and a wonderful project with you this weekend. Have a listen to a song that talks about what it means to care by Walter the Orange Ocean,
Someone Who Loves You,
while you look over what happens when a teacher (in Thailand) makes a simple promise to their students: "If you draw something, I will add to it."
Image credit: Squeezymo, via tumblr and imgur.
It also features the best appearance of a little…
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“Where are you going now, my love?
Where will you be tomorrow?
Will you bring me happiness?
Will you bring me sorrow?” -Stephen Stills / Crosby, Stills & Nash
We've made it! It's the first Comments of the Week of the new year here at Starts With A Bang, and we're doing our best to start it off right, with some of the most interesting and compelling stories about life, the Universe and everything that there are. This past week has seen the following articles that you should catch up on if you missed anything:
Choosing your (professional) life (for Ask Ethan),
The…