esiegel | December 14, 2014Kid: "Mortal Kombat, on Sega Genesis, is the best video game ever."
Billy Madison: "I disagree, it's a very good game, but I think Donkey Kong is the best game ever."
Kid: "Donkey Kong sucks."
Billy Madison: "You know something? YOU SUCK!" -Billy Madison, 1995
Every week brings with it something new, but this is the first week since we've started doing a comments roundup here on Starts With A Bang that we've had an entirely new series to talk about, with the end of our Messier Monday and the start of something new! This all includes:
Magnetism from afar (for Ask Ethan),
Sleeping in the stars…
esiegel | December 12, 2014“Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness.” -Stephen King
This story seems to come up every few months. Someone detects a possibly unexpected signal somewhere in the sky -- normally correlated to the centers of galaxies or galaxy clusters -- and says: that's it, I found dark matter!
Image credit: European Space Agency, NASA and Jean-Paul Kneib (Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, France/Caltech, USA), via http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0309a/.
Did you, though? The evidence has panned out to be a …
esiegel | December 11, 2014“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.” -Robert Frost
Sure, it's getting colder and colder all over the northern hemisphere, as the cold season of winter approaches. But we can be fairly confident that this won't be the case forever: the Earth will tilt its northern hemisphere back towards the Sun, and warmer weather, after a few months, will ensue once again.
Image credit: Jean-Charles…
esiegel | December 10, 2014“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.” -Rabindranath Tagore
And you can't answer a hypothetical question for certain, at least in science, without doing the experiment for yourself. Here on Earth, liquid water is plentiful; our planet has the stable temperatures and pressures that water needs to exist in its liquid state.
Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli, Terra Satellite / MODIS instrument.
But what happens if you take that water to space? In the vacuum of space, the temperatures are much too low for liquid water;…
esiegel | December 9, 2014“Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sure, sure, and they're not even big, impressive stones. But like any real estate agent will tell you, location is everything.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / W. Reach (SSC/Caltech).
And when your tiny, pebble-sized stone originates from an asteroid that crosses Earth's orbit and leaves a debris trail behind, that "only a stone" can appear as so much more.
Image credit: Stéphane Guisard (Los Cielos de America), TWAN, via http://apod.nasa.…
esiegel | December 8, 2014“You may have heard the world is made up of atoms and molecules, but it’s really made up of stories. When you sit with an individual that’s been here, you can give quantitative data a qualitative overlay.” -William Turner
This blog has always been about the cosmic story common to us all: the story of where all this comes from. It's no coincidence I named it Starts With A Bang; perhaps the most remarkable thing in the entire Universe is that it can be scientifically understood!
Image credit: B. Fugate (FASORtronics) / ESO, via http://www.eso.org/public/usa/images/epod-cc-rf18284/.
And so I'…
esiegel | December 7, 2014“The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search the chance of success is zero.” -Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison
Although, for many various reasons, most of us may find the prospect of journeying into deep space beyond our physical grasp, that doesn't means we can't journey there in our imaginations. Have a listen to Catie Curtis sing her fanciful, escapist song,
Wallpaper Dreams,
while you consider some of the greatest images ever taken of deep space.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ.Potsdam/L.Oskinova et al; Optical: NASA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/JPL-…
esiegel | December 6, 2014“In that little party there was not one who would desert another; yet we were of different countries, different colours, different races, different religions--and one of us was of a different world.” -Edgar Rice Burroughs
It's the end of yet another week, and so it's time to look back on all we've written about and all you've discussed. There's been a lot, too! This past week has seen the telling of some terrific tales at Starts With A Bang, including:
What happens to matter as the Universe expands? (for Ask Ethan),
Top 5 Great Christmas Sweaters (for our Weekend Diversion),
The Ultimate…
esiegel | December 5, 2014“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.” -Michael Faraday
And yet, it's often incredibly difficult to use those laws of nature -- even if they're as simple as can be -- to actually measure and quantitatively understand the Universe around us. Perhaps one of the most glaring examples is magnetism.
Image credit: Alexander Wilmer Duff, 1916.
Sure, it's easy to visualize a magnetic field if you've got a set of iron filings and a laboratory to experiment in, but what about the distant stars? What of entire galaxies? They're thought to have magnetic…
esiegel | December 4, 2014“Mars once was wet and fertile. It’s now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson
No, what happened on Mars isn't in any danger of happening here on Earth, despite what your sci-fi horror films might have you believe. We're a long way from becoming a dry, cold, barren desert wasteland like our neighboring world.
Image credit: NASA / Viking Orbiter.
But just because we're not in danger of that doesn't mean that it isn't vitally important to understand what exactly happened on…
esiegel | December 3, 2014“I have announced this star as a comet, but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet.” -Giuseppe Piazzi
Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, and yet, what of Pluto? Is it just as sweet without the name of "planet" attached to it?
Image credit: Don Dixon of http://cosmographica.com/.
There's always room for nuance, but here are some words you may find useful:
The fact that there are other things out there that…
esiegel | December 2, 2014“The paradigm of physics — with its interplay of data, theory and prediction — is the most powerful in science.” -Geoffrey West
So earlier this year, the BICEP2 team shook up the world by announcing the discovery of primordial gravitational waves: a signal from the earliest stages of the Universe, going all the way back to before the Big Bang!
Image credit:the BICEP2 collaboration, viahttp://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2014-05.
By looking at the photon polarization data, they claimed to have surpassed the gold "5σ" standard for announcing a discovery in physics. But recently, that's been…
esiegel | December 1, 2014“If you keep your eyes open enough, oh, the stuff you will learn. Oh, the most wonderful stuff.” -Dr. Seuss
It's been more than two years in the making; we started Messier Monday way back in October of 2012, and after 110 consecutive weeks, we finally arrived at our final entry last week. What better way to celebrate than to take a look back at all 110 entries?
Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University).
From Messier 1 through Messier 110, we've got you absolutely covered, with enough eye-candy (and link-candy, too) for days.
Image credit: Adam Block / NOAO…
esiegel | November 30, 2014“Devote yourself, but do not lose who you are!” -Marvel vs. Capcom
With Thanksgiving behind us, it's officially the holiday season here in the USA (and in many other places across the world), and so it's time to kick that off with a great holiday song by Calexico,
Gift X-change,
and to check out the fusion of two great holiday traditions: video games and seasonal sweaters!
Image credit: fuZZdandy of eBay, via http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/231129773827?lpid=82.
There are plenty of products out there that look good on the surface, but that turn out to be mere screen prints on sweatshirts.…
esiegel | November 29, 2014“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every week brings a new set of challenges, but also a new opportunity to find not only great things within ourselves, but wonder wherever we look and the prospect of getting to share it with others. This past week has seen some remarkable stories get told at Starts With A Bang, including:
The birth of space and time (for Ask Ethan),
Make 2015 a year in…
esiegel | November 28, 2014“The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.” -Molière
So if the Universe is expanding and cooling, what does that mean for the matter in it? Sure, it's easy to visualize how radiation cools: it has a wavelength, space expands, and so as the wavelength gets stretched, the energy drops.
Image credit: James Imamura of University of Oregon, viahttp://hendrix2.uoregon.edu/~imamura/123cs/lecture-5/lecture-5.html.
But the energy must have dropped for matter as well, otherwise it wouldn't have lost enough kinetic energy to become gravitationally bound into gas clumps, stars and galaxies…
esiegel | November 27, 2014“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George Bernard Shaw
And despite all of that, when we pause and look around at all the good things we have -- which hopefully many of us will be doing at some point today -- we'll find something remarkable that we all have to be thankful for: the very Universe and our shared cosmic history that enabled us all to be here!
Image credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble…
esiegel | November 26, 2014“We… are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.” -Jill Tarter
But that doesn't mean we can't also look to the hydrogen itself, and use its information to learn about where other things may have come from!
Image credit: Lionel BRET/EUROLIOS.
An extraordinary example of this -- including what's possible, if not yet practical -- comes from looking at the 21-cm emission line of hydrogen, a forbidden transition with the smallest inherent line width of all!
Images credit: R Nave of Hyperphysics from Georgia…
esiegel | November 25, 2014When you think about cosmology and the fundamental questions scientists are trying to address, you inevitably wind up thinking about dark matter, dark energy and black holes as the three biggest topics that shape our view of the Universe.
Image credit: NASA/WMAP science team.
But there are plenty of other aspects to this branch of science that deserve at least equal attention, including two important aspects that are rarely talked about with the same fervor or frequency: the highest energy particles in the Universe and the Universe's "dark ages," a period after the formation of neutral…
esiegel | November 25, 2014When you think of the origin of life, you probably think about the atoms coming together to make molecules, the molecules coming together to make self-replicating, information-encoded strands, and how all that took place here on Earth. But you might want to consider a different point of view!
A cosmological simulation of dark matter growing clumpier over time. Image credit: Andrey Kravtsov
Instead, try thinking about the fact that, to make those complex atoms, and to recycle them into new generations of stars, we needed a lot of generations of stars to live, die, expel that processed…