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“Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?” -Haruki Murakami
Of all the ways our Universe can end -- recollapsing into a firey singularity, freezing out into a cold, icy void -- perhaps the scariest conceivable fate is one where galaxies are ripped apart, stripped of their stars, where planets come undone, molecules and atoms are torn away from one another and, at last, spacetime itself is…
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“I’m hungry for knowledge. The whole thing is to learn every day, to get brighter and brighter. That’s what this world is about.” -Jay-Z
Of all the stars in the night sky, it's the brightest ones that capture our attentions the most. Prominent even under incredibly light-polluted conditions, their character, color and properties really comes out under dark conditions for all to see.
Image credit: Yuri Beletsky, via http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap070517.html.
Yet, when you think of the most recognizable collections of stars: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the "Teapot" in Sagittarius and the…
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“Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.” -Thomas Jefferson
If you could magically make the world a better place, what is it that you'd get rid of?
Image credit: Starving Ibos in Biafra (Nigeria) — 1967/8, via http://www.kingsacademy.com/mhodges/03_The-World-since-1900/11_The-Bewi….
The list is long, and the path there is uncertain. Yet if we look back and how much better our lives are today than they were hundreds or (especially) thousands of years ago, it's clear that we owe an awful lot to…
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“Ancients knew that you need guidance, patronage and protection as you move from one place or state to another, whenever you cross a bridge.” -Richard Rohr
When you think about the stars in the sky, it takes some study to realize that the bluest, brightest stars are also the shortest lived. So when we look at a cluster of stars -- or any stellar population -- we can figure out how old it is by looking at the color and magnitude of the brightest, bluest main-sequence stars that are still alive.
Image credit: © 2005–2009 by Rainer Sparenberg; photo by R.Sparenberg, S.Binnewies, V.Robering;…
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“If you can’t share, we’ll have to take it away.” -Myla Hendricks, age 4
One of the most difficult things for any creative person to do is to let someone else into their creative space, into their projects and into the work that they're most passionate about. But sometimes, that's really the best thing you can do. Have a listen to Jack Johnson remind us of this with
The Sharing Song,
while you take a look at what happens when an artist who really focuses on sketching detailed faces...
Image credit: Mica Hendricks, of her best friend Christine, via http://busymockingbird.com/.…
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"There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark." -Pink Floyd / Gerry O'Driscoll
It's been another fantastic week here at Starts With A Bang, where we've taken on a huge diversity of topics and run two fantastic posts from our contributing writers: Brian Koberlein and James Bullock. If you missed any of them (or if you want to catch them again), here's what we've covered this past week:
Is astrology a science? (for Ask Ethan),
The Universe in your home (for our Weekend Diversion),
The flattened fake-out globular, M19 (for Messier Monday),
The…
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“After all the ‘Universe’ is a hypothesis, like the atom, & must be allowed the freedom to have properties & to do things which would be contradictory & impossible for a finite material structure.” -Willem de Sitter
Dark energy was one of the biggest surprises to come along in the past generation, from a scientific standpoint. It's only intuitive to think that the Universe -- with gravity fighting the initial expansion ever since the Big Bang -- and all the galaxies in it would continue to slow down over time. But with a significant positive amount of energy inherent to space…
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“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.” -Oscar Wilde
So Labor Day is this coming Monday, and that means the new school year is about to start. Whether you are or whether you know a young person, say in middle-or-high school, you're likely very close to someone facing a lot of uncertainty about not only their future, but about their present.
Image credit: Health & Safety Specialists, HSS Health & Safety Solutions, UAE.
Who can be expected to know exactly what they want to do and exactly how to get…
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“When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.” -Corrie Ten Boom
When you look out into the Universe at distant galaxies, at clusters of galaxies or at the Universe on the largest scales, what you see is the luminous stuff, which is pretty exclusively stars and stellar-related objects.
Image credit: Richard Payne (Arizona Astrophotography), via http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap040223.html.
But based on what we know about gravitation on those scales, we know there's got to be much more mass than that…
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When you look out at the Universe, it comes as no surprise that it's full of galaxies, each one with a dense, central collection of brilliant stars and an intricate structure all their own. They come in all sorts of structural varieties, with some in isolation, others in small groups, and still others in huge, massive clusters.
An SDSS image of elliptical galaxy NGC474 (center) and spiral galaxy NGC470 (right).
The bright galaxies we see are huge collections of billions of stars, with large intrinsic surface brightnesses. But surely there are components to these entities -- less dense…
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If you've ever heard someone dismiss evolution, the Big Bang or climate change as "just a theory" and wanted to pull your hair out, you're not alone. In science, after all, theories are the most powerful ideas we have to explain the mechanism behind the most intricate observable phenomena in the Universe.
Mercury’s orbit shifts over time due to a deviation from Newtonian gravity.Credit: Wikimedia.
But it's where our theories fail, or at the fringes, where observations-or-experiments might disagree with the best theoretical predictions, that progress is made. This tantalizing border…
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“If I take dust in my hand and ask you if that is all the dust there is, you will answer that dust is everywhere on earth. More specks than can ever be numbered. So I can give you a handful of truth only. Besides this there are other truths. More than can ever be numbered.” -Nadeem Aslam
Some objects in the night sky are more unusual than others in appearance. In particular, when we find something out-of-the-ordinary, like a normally spherical class of objects that looks flattened, it's only natural to wonder why.
Image credit: Doug Williams, REU Program / NOAO / AURA / NSF, via http://…
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“I’m coming back in… and it’s the saddest moment of my life.” -Ed White, at the conclusion of the first American spacewalk, June 3, 1965
Adventures are funny things: we look forward to them, we enjoy them to the fullest while we're on them, and then we revel in the experience of having had them once they're behind us. But there are some adventures, as Steve Earle would sing you, that are
Somewhere Out There,
that we'll never experience for ourselves. I'm talking, for the most part, about the far reaches of deep space.
Image credit: Hubble Heritage Team (AURA / STScI), C. R. O…
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"Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another." -G.K. Chesterton
It's been a very busy week here at Starts With A Bang! You may have noticed that our blog's main page has a new layout, some of you who follow me on social media may have noticed that I took the ice bucket challenge (and my bald head proved hydrodynamic), and we had a remarkable week of outstanding posts, including:
Why didn't the Universe become a black hole? (for Ask Ethan),
The dumbest sign in history (for our Weekend Diversion),
The butterfly cluster, M6 (for Messier Monday),
Five…
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“When I was ten all I knew was that I hated the weird words used to describe whatever it was that was wrong with my brother — to this day I think it all happened because he was overtaken by evil spirits that got loose in that haunted house ride at the carnival that summer. It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way — reality.” -Tim Cummings
It's one of the oldest and most alluring ideas to all of humanity: the notion that what happens in heavens affects what happens on Earth.
Image credit: Regina Valkenborgh, via NASA’s Astronomy Picture of…
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“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” -Bill Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut
When you think about the most amazing sights available to humanity here on Earth, you probably don't think about leaving Earth in order to capture them. But sometimes, doing exactly that can give you an otherworldly perspective that adds a beauty that you'd never be able to experience otherwise.
Image credit: Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and the Russian Space Agency Press Services.
But the best collections of photos that capture this weren't taken…
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“You suddenly realize that you and your colleagues know something that no one else does… and that it is important. You’re lucky if it happens once in a lifetime. I’ve been super-lucky.” -Leon Lederman
It's the holy grail of modern particle physics: discovering the first smoking-gun, direct evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model.
Image credit: Harrison Prosper at Florida State University.
Sure, there are unanswered questions and unsolved puzzles, ranging from dark matter to the hierarchy problem to the strong-CP problem, but there's no experimental result clubbing us over the…
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Whether you've been coming around to Starts With A Bang for years or whether you just discovered us a few weeks ago, chances are you've heard us take on the issue of dark matter -- whether it exists and, if so, what its properties are -- and how we think we know that.
Image credit: CMB pattern for a universe with normal matter only compared do our own, which includes dark matter and dark energy. Generated by Amanda Yoho on the Planck CMB simulator at http://strudel.org.uk/planck/#.
And while every professional in the field has the same information at their disposal, each one pieces it…
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“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” -Nathaniel Hawthorne
It's hard to believe that we've almost reached the end of Messier Monday, but with a finite number (110) objects in the catalogue, we were bound to come to this point. By time November ends, we'll have captured them all! In the meantime, the months July-through-September are perfect for capturing the most southerly of all the Messier objects, and today's cluster -- Messier 6 -- is no exception!
Image credit: Ezequiel…
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“I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, ‘Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours.’ He said, ‘Yes, but not in a row.’” -Stephen Wright
It seems like there's a sign for everything, from warnings to advisories to just plain good counsel. Have a listen to the Kelly Bell Band perform their entertaining song,
Must've Bumped Your Head,
while I share with you the most ridiculous sign ever discovered in all of internet history: a sign that warns you against banging your head on the sign itself.
Image credit: flickr user Lush…