esiegel | November 24, 2014“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” -William Shakespeare
But in the case of Orion, it's great because of not only how it was born, but where and when: recently, and so close to us! And that makes our views of not only the main nebula fantastic, but also of its smaller companion.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user RawAstroData, via http://www.rawastrodata.com/dso.php?type=nebulae&id=m42.
It's all part of the great Orion molecular cloud complex, but somehow the smaller region illuminated by a single…
esiegel | November 22, 2014“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.” -W. Somerset Maugham
There are so many things out there in this world to marvel at, that it's important to remember to appreciate all that's out there -- both terrestrially and well beyond -- that are far older and grander than anything we'll ever experience. Have a listen to M. Ward's mystifying song,
One Hundred Million Years,
while I share with you a wonderful effort to bring the Universe to us all.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science…
esiegel | November 22, 2014"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living." -Omar N. Bradley
There are some words that, seemingly, you can't utter without inflaming people's passions in one way or another, and nuclear seems to fall squarely in that category. This week, we touched on a number of remarkable topics over on Starts With A Bang, including:
The biggest spiral galaxy (for Ask Ethan),
Norway vs. Kenya (for our Weekend Diversion),
An all-season cluster, M35 (for Messier Monday),
The chameleon in the vacuum…
esiegel | November 22, 2014“You can try to lie to yourself. You can try to tell yourself that you put in the time. But you know — and so do I.” -J.J. Watt
Before there was the Universe we know and love today, there were many epochs and eras that came before, including one before there were galaxies and stars, one before there were atoms, one before there were nuclei, and even one where matter and antimatter were spontaneously created at ultra-high energies.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration, modified by me.
But throughout all those eras, spacetime has been a constant companion. Given that we had an…
esiegel | November 20, 2014“I am undecided whether or not the Milky Way is but one of countless others all of which form an entire system. Perhaps the light from these infinitely distant galaxies is so faint that we cannot see them.” -Johann Lambert
There's a problem with our view of the night sky: beautiful though it is, we're incapable of seeing with our own eyes what the Universe is like from an outsider's perspective. No matter where we are, we're stuck inside our own galaxy, with all its light-blocking and obscuring properties.
Image credit: Richard Payne, of Arizona Astrophotography.
But there's a trick to…
esiegel | November 19, 2014“Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.” -Judith Thurman
You'd think that landing on a comet for the first time, with all ten instruments functioning, and collecting more than two full Earth-days worth of data would be more than enough to sate the scientifically curious among us.
Image credit: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA.
But the sad reality is that despite the tremendous successes of Philae, we'll always be left to wonder what might have been if it had functioned optimally, and given us…
esiegel | November 18, 2014The particles of the standard model, some type of dark matter and dark energy, and the four fundamental forces. That's all there is, right?
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user MissMJ, with info from PBS Nova, FNAL, DOE and PDG.
What if that isn't true? What if dark energy, for example, isn't simply energy inherent to space itself? What if it isn't just an unusual property of gravitation, but rather a dynamical property that emerges from the Universe: a sort of fifth force? Would there be any way to discover that?
Perhaps unbelievably, if this is the case, it may be accessible and testable…
esiegel | November 17, 2014“Derive happiness in oneself from a good day’s work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.” -Henri Matisse
But the surrounding fog might not come from our minds nor from our world, but rather from the plane of the galaxy itself. Nevertheless, the brightest clusters -- the ones placed serendipitously -- are clearly visible (and quite spectacular) from our vantage point here on Earth.
Image credit: Messier 35 by Jorge Garcia, via http://www.pbase.com/image/91887467.
One of my favorites, and one of the greatest views of a star cluster offered to skywatchers everywhere during…
esiegel | November 16, 2014“I didn’t know any successful actors in Kenya, so I felt like I could get away with going to college to study film more easily than I could with saying, ‘I want to be an actor.’ That’s what I did.” -Lupita Nyong’o
There's nothing that gets me excited quite like... completely fabricated, unnecessary bickering on the internet between two countries. I don't know why that is, but there's something both charming and addicting about the classic internet video where Kenya shoots jabs at Norway for no reason at all.
But did you know there's been a Norwegian response to it? In particular, a response…
esiegel | November 16, 2014"It's a tad easier to be proud when you come in first than it is when you finish further back. But there's no reason to hide when you don't do as well as you'd hoped. You can't run away from your problems." -My Little Pony
It's been two weeks since our last edition of Comments of the Week here on our Starts With A Bang forum, and -- to my great pleasure -- that hasn't meant a thing for the flow of great comments here! There's plenty to catch up on if you missed anything, as the last two weeks have seen some amazing posts, including:
Why is the Universe's energy disappearing? (for Ask Ethan…
esiegel | November 14, 2014“Sometimes, I sit alone under the stars
and think of the galaxies inside my
heart, and truly wonder if anyone will
ever want to make sense of all that
I am.” -Testy McTesterson
The largest galaxies in the Universe all have a few things in common: they all contain many trillions of stars, they all contain many times their stellar mass in the form of dark matter, and they're all found towards the centers of great galactic clusters.
Image credit: ESO and Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin. Via http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0949m/.
Oh, and one more thing: none of…
esiegel | November 13, 2014“I asked the Zebra,
are you black with white stripes?
Or white with black stripes?
And the zebra asked me,
Are you good with bad habits?
Or are you bad with good habits?
Are you noisy with quiet times?
Or are you quiet with noisy times?
Are you happy with some sad days?
Or are you sad with some happy days?
Are you neat with some sloppy ways?
Or are you sloppy with some neat ways?
And on and on and on and on and on and on he went.
I’ll never ask a zebra about stripes…again.” -Shel Silverstein
What about, though, when it comes to the fundamental nature of things in the Universe? Are they waves…
esiegel | November 12, 2014“I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.” -Henri Nouwen
So, maybe you've been living under a rock, but whether you have or haven't, the news is still amazing: we've just landed on our first not-a-rock in space, but rather the remnants of an icy world from our Solar System's early moments of formation.
Image credit: ESA / CNES / Philae, via https://twitter.com/ObservingSpace/status/532596055783661568/photo/1.
That's right, for the first time ever, we've landed a manmade probe on a comet, and are now prepared to…
esiegel | November 11, 2014When our science fiction fills our heads with ideas that could make our lives tremendously improved, we like to believe it's only a matter of time before technology catches up with our imaginations. Indeed, tricorders, wireless communicators and rocket ships were just some of the breakthroughs predicted by sci-fi on their way to becoming commonplace technology.
Image credit: Peter Nussbaumer.
But many of our dreams are a long way from becoming reality, including human-sized teleporters, wormholes and time travel. What happens when science fiction runs into the cold, hard wall that is…
esiegel | November 10, 2014“If there is nothing new under the sun, at least the sun itself is always new, always re-creating itself out of its own inexhaustible fire.” -Michael Sims
It takes the death of old stars to create the newer generations of stars in the Universe, and it's through the very act of that stellar death that "interesting" material finds its way into the Universe. This way, the subsequent generations of star systems will have more heavy elements, more rocky planets, more complex chemistry, and -- in the end -- more opportunities for life.
Image credit: J-P Metsavainio, via http://astroanarchy.…
esiegel | November 7, 2014“In my dreams and visions, I seemed to see a line, and on the other side of that line were green fields, and lovely flowers, and beautiful white ladies, who stretched out their arms to me over the line, but I couldn’t reach them no-how. I always fell before I got to the line.” -Harriet Tubman
One of the things we learn about the gravitational force is that it has an "infinite range" to it. Because it's a ~1/r^2 force, and because as you move radially away from the source, a sphere spreads out (in surface area) as ~r^2, you don't lose anything as you move farther and farther away. So long as…
esiegel | November 6, 2014“It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
Out beyond Neptune, the last of our Solar System's gas giants, the icy graveyard of failed planetesimals lurks: the Kuiper Belt. Among these mixes of ice, snow, dust and rock are a number of worlds -- possibly a few hundred -- massive enough to pull themselves into hydrostatic equilibrium.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Lexicon; modified from the NASA original.
The most famous among them are Pluto, the first one ever discovered, and Eris, of…
esiegel | November 5, 2014“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” -Jean-Luc Picard
We like to think of nature as beautiful, elegant and infallible. Yet our notions of what's beautiful and elegant don't always line up with what reality gives us. Take the notion of symmetry, for example: the gravitational force is symmetric, always exerting equal magnitude forces on whatever two masses it occurs between.
WikiPremed MCAT Course, via http://www.wikipremed.com/01physicscards.php.
But as similar as they are, electricity and magnetism are not symmetric at all. There are…
esiegel | November 4, 2014If you wanted to travel to the stars -- and by that, I mean star systems beyond our own -- you'd better be prepared to take your sweet time. Even at the speeds the Apollo astronauts traveled to the Moon, it would take millions of years to reach even the next nearest star beyond our own, Proxima Centauri.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, via http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1343a/.
And yet, General Relativity admits an astounding possibility to short-cut the great cosmic distances by punching a hole in spacetime, connecting two far-separated events to one another through a…
esiegel | November 4, 2014Sure, the Big Bang is great. Going back to very early times, it tells us the Universe was in a hot, dense state, where even the possibility of forming neutral atoms was impossible due to the incredible energies of the Universe at that time. The patterns of fluctuations that are left over from that time give us insight into the primordial density fluctuations that our Universe was born with.
Image credit: NASA / WMAP.
But there's an additional signature encoded in this radiation, one that's much more difficult to extract: polarization. While most of the polarization signal that's present…