esiegel | September 26, 2014“I sometimes catch myself looking up at the Moon, remembering the changes of fortune in our long voyage, thinking of the thousands of people who worked to bring the three of us home. I look up at the moon and wonder, when will we be going back, and who will that be?” -Tom Hanks
Imagine, hopefully, the not-too-distant future, when humanity launches the first manned mission to another planet in our Solar System: probably Mars. You're on your way, and then -- all of a sudden -- you realize that something is wrong.
Image credit: Frank G., via https://shufti.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/aaa-around-…
esiegel | September 25, 2014“It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. It’s a crazy world out there. Be curious.” -Stephen Hawking
The story of where everything came from in the Universe -- of how we came from empty, expanding space to our rich and complex Universe-of-today -- is without a doubt the most remarkable story ever told: the story the Universe has to tell us about itself!
Image credit: Kfir Simon / Demetrius Gore, via http://www.pbase.com/tango33/image/140317019/original..
Although there…
esiegel | September 25, 2014“Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.” -Darth Vader
Supervillains always disappoint me. With ambitions like murdering a single human, destroying a city, or endangering all life on the planet, they're always thinking small. Where are the great, ambitious evildoers -- real or mythological -- seeking to destroy everything in all of existence?
Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Dana Berry.
Recently, Stephen Hawking came out and proposed the following scenario: that the Higgs field exists in a…
esiegel | September 23, 2014When you think of astrology today, you probably think of someone who makes false promises and proclaims either platitudes or fabrications as though they were preordained truths. But for many millennia dating to just a few centuries ago, astrology was anything but. In fact, by many metrics, it was the very beginning of what has grown into the enterprise of science.
House of Wisdome. Maqamat of al-Hariri Illustration by Yahyá al-Wasiti, 1237 (Wikimedia commons)
Our initial thoughts on the idea that what happens in the heavens affects what happens on Earth may have been flawed, but as it…
esiegel | September 23, 2014When it comes to Einstein, the first thought that comes to people's mind is usually relativity -- either special or general -- or perhaps his famous E = mc^2. (Except for Anupam Garg; my old classical mechanics professor used to joke that Einstein's greatest contribution to physics was his shortened summation notation.) But Einstein's legacy goes much deeper than any of that.
Image credit: Wikimedia commons users Markus Poessel and Pbroks13.
You see, one of the greatest things that Einstein pioneered was the Gedankenexperiment, or the idea of performing an experiment in your mind. These…
esiegel | September 22, 2014“A hungry man can’t see right or wrong. He just sees food.” -Pearl S. Buck
But what of a hungry galaxy? As it turns out, pretty much anywhere in space, it's the biggest galaxies that are the hungriest, seeing all their smaller, neighboring galaxies as food. This was the case for the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, which we discovered -- in 1994 -- was in the process of being consumed by the Milky Way.
Image credit: Chris W. Purcell, James S. Bullock, Erik J. Tollerud, Miguel Rocha, and Sukanya Chakrabarti, via http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/html/MilkyWayImpact.html.
But at the core of this…
esiegel | September 21, 2014“I created this project for fun. Initially, I had no business goals with it. I created this project recently. I was and still am a teenager myself, that is why I had a certain feeling of what other teenagers would want to see on the Internet. I myself enjoyed talking to friends with Skype using a microphone and webcam. But we got tired of talking to each other eventually. So I decided to create a little site for me and my friends where we could connect randomly with other people.” -Andrey Ternovskiy, founder of Chatroulette
You know there's nothing quite like improvising, and there's perhaps…
esiegel | September 21, 2014“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” -Sylvia Plath
It's been two weeks since our last edition of our Comments of the Week, and from the heartbreaking to the mystifying, there's a lot we've written about and explored together. If you missed anything, go ahead and take a look back at our amazing suite of articles over that time:
What is the Big Rip (for Ask Ethan),
Saving Salmon... with a Cannon (for our Weekend Diversion),
The Inconstant Moon (a super article from Summer Ash),
The Teapot Dome Cluster, M28 (for Messier Monday),
The Planets That…
esiegel | September 19, 2014“From earliest times, humans — explorers and thinkers — have wanted to figure out the shape of their world. Forever, the way we’ve done that is through storytelling. It is difficult to let the truth get in the way of a good story.” -Adam Savage
When we look back into the Universe, there's a wonderful, remarkable story that it tells us about itself. The more light we gather, of different wavelengths and over longer periods of time, the more we can discover.
Image credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and…
esiegel | September 18, 2014“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” -Carl Sagan
That might be true: all the heavy elements -- in theory -- were created after at least one generation of stars lived-and-died. But if we want to know what the Universe started off with, we have to find what the Universe was like before any stars formed.
Image credit: NASA, WMAP Science Team and Gary Steigman.
This is a seemingly paradoxical task: how can you find a signature of what the Universe was…
esiegel | September 17, 2014“What’s that star?
It’s the Death Star.
What does it do?
It does Death. It does Death, buddy. Get out of my way!” -Eddie Izzard
It's said -- at least by Darth Vader -- that the power to destroy a planet is nothing compared to the power of the force. But how much energy is that, really?
Image credit: Lucasfilm / Star Wars: Episode IV, a New Hope. (Motion Picture).
While it is, objectively a lot of energy, that kind of destruction really isn't so unfathomable, not if you're willing to consider the ultimate tool of destruction for physically practical purposes: antimatter.
Image credit:…
esiegel | September 15, 2014“I told my father that someday when I grow up and become an astronomer ‘I’m going to discover something.’” -Thomas Bopp
But who ever would have imagined that a kid with an armchair interest in astronomy, one who as an adult didn't even own a telescope, would stare into a friend's one fateful night at a run-of-the-mill Messier object and find what would grow into the comet of the century?
Image credit: Jim Mazur’s Astrophotography, via Skyledge at http://www.skyledge.net/Messier70.htm.
That man was Thomas Bopp, that comet was Hale-Bopp, and that Messier object that started it all was today'…
esiegel | September 15, 2014“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.” -Milan Kundera
Many of you have been along on this journey with me for years now. And one of the great joys in my life that I got to share with you -- at least a little bit -- was that of my dog, Cordelia.
Image credit: me.
You may also have noticed that I didn't do an Ask Ethan this week, I didn't write a Comments of the Week article, and I didn't give you a diversion for this…
esiegel | September 11, 2014“It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.” -Carl Sagan
Although I often hear people utter sentiments that knowledge somehow undermines the beauty of the natural world -- quoting some farcical poem about bad teachers like When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer -- I never quite understood it. How could there possibly be a more engaging, romantic experience than perceiving and knowing at the same time?
Image credit: ESO Photo Ambassador Gianluca Lombardi.
So it is with not only the sunset, but with one of the most elusive and inimitable phenomena that sometimes…
esiegel | September 10, 2014“I was confided to your loyalty and accepted by your treason; you offer my death to those to whom you had promised my life. Do you know who it is you are destroying here? It is yourself.” -Victor Hugo
So those of you who've been paying attention may have just heard that we've mapped out our supercluster of galaxies -- Laniakea -- to unprecedented accuracy, identifying a region 500 million light-years in diameter that's responsible for our local group's motion through space.
Image credit: R. Brent Tully (U. Hawaii) et al., SDvision, DP, CEA/Saclay, of Laniakea, our local “supercluster” of…
esiegel | September 9, 2014In 1992, scientists discovered the first planets orbiting a star other than our Sun. The pulsar PSR B1257+12 was discovered to have its own planetary system, and since then, exoplanet discoveries have exploded!
Artist’s conception of worlds around PSR 1257+12, the first system (discovered 1992) with verified extrasolar planets. Illustration credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC).
But did you know that long before that, back in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, a scientist studying Barnard's Star -- the second-closest star system to the Sun -- claimed to have discovered the first exoplanets in…
esiegel | September 8, 2014“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.” -Amelia Earhart
While the summer may be coming to an end here in the Northern Hemisphere, the days getting shorter carry with it one benefit: it's getting darker earlier, meaning that you've got a huge opportunity in the early part of the night to view some of the highlights of the summer skies you may have missed!
Image credit: John Mirtle of http://www.…
esiegel | September 8, 2014“O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.” -Romeo & Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2
Tonight holds a full Moon in store for skywatchers everywhere. Not just any old full Moon, mind you, but a Supermoon, the last one of the year.
Image credit: John Gaughan / Pete Lardizabal / WJLA, via http://www.wjla.com/pictures/2012/10/daily-eye-wonder-november-2012/sup….
What makes a Supermoon so super? As it turns out, not a whole lot. But as far as the physics, astronomy and science of why-and-how the Moon appears to…
esiegel | September 7, 2014“You ain’t supposed to get salmon when they’re swimming upstream to spawn. But if you’re hungry, you do.” -Loretta Lynn
One of the most remarkable stories in the natural world is the end-of-life story of the salmon. After being born in a stream, tributary, or other small spawning ground, baby salmon swim downstream into the ocean, and then back upstream to their original spawning ground -- often many hundreds of miles -- to spawn and die. Have a listen to Leftover Salmon’s song this week,
It's Your World,
while you consider how the advent of hydroelectric dams has changed things.
Image…
esiegel | September 7, 2014"All you touch and all you see,
is all your life will ever be." -Pink Floyd
It's been another great week exploring the Universe over at the main Starts With A Bang blog, as we've taken on the following topics since our last week:
How long has the Universe been accelerating? (for Ask Ethan),
Sharing Your Art (for our Weekend Diversion),
A Titan in a Teapot, M69 (for Messier Monday),
What most people get wrong about science, and
The Ten Brightest Stars in the Sky (for Throwback Thursday).
As always, you've had (and taken advantage) of your chance to have your say here on our forum here, so…