esiegel | July 6, 2017“There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me” -Gustave Flaubert
Last week, Donald Trump restored the National Space Council, promising to take America and the world to new heights in space. He also made some statements claiming that this is infinity here, and that we don’t know, but it could be infinity. In both cases, the statements don’t quite match the facts, as the funding cuts proposed by the President are inconsistent with increased exploration efforts, and, more to the point, we know we’ll never access infinity.
Looking back…
esiegel | July 5, 2017"When you listen to a lecture, you should not have any idea of yourself. You should not have your own idea when you listen to someone. Forget what you have in your mind and just listen to what he says. To have nothing in your mind is naturalness. Then you will understand what he says. But if you have some idea to compare with what he says, you will not hear everything; your understanding will be one-sided; that is not naturalness." -Shunryu Suzuki
When we take a look at the Universe, there are a whole slew of things we can measure: densities, masses, couplings, and so on. When these…
esiegel | July 4, 2017"Eddington had needed to make significant corrections to some of the measurements, for various technical reasons, and in the end decided to leave some of the Sobral data out of the calculation entirely. Many scientists were suspicious that he had cooked the books. Although the suspicion lingered for years in some quarters, in the end the results were confirmed at eclipse after eclipse with higher and higher precision." -Peter Coles
If ever you attempt to come out with a new scientific theory, there are three criteria you must fulfill:
You must reproduce all the successes of the old theory,…
esiegel | July 3, 2017"This new insight may force us to rethink the whole cosmological context of how galaxies burn out early on and evolve into local elliptical-shaped galaxies. Perhaps we have been blind to the fact that early "dead" galaxies could in fact be disks, simply because we haven't been able to resolve them." -Sune Toft
How do galaxies form and grow? The theory behind it is simple and straightforward. You start with a collection of normal-and-dark matter, the normal matter collects in the center, pancakes, and forms stars over time. A little later, more gas falls in, and the galaxy continues to form…
esiegel | July 2, 2017“Sometimes the silences, the gaps, tell us more than anything else.” -Peter Ackroyd
Did you know that there's even more going on than before here at Starts With A Bang!? Yes, we have our articles at Forbes; yes, we have our Podcasts on Soundcloud; yes, we have our first book out and our second available for preorder. But we also have had a recent appearance on Portland's NBC affiliate to talk about the eclipse, I've also been doing podcasts to promote Treknology and will be recording another interview this afternoon, and I've been researching and speaking with scientists and engineers…
esiegel | July 1, 2017"I would argue that in any habitable zone that doesn't boil or freeze, intelligent life is going to emerge because intelligence is convergent." -Simon Conway Morris
Someday, in the far distant future, the evolution of the Sun will cause it to heat up and emit so much energy that the Earth’s surface will reach a terrible threshold: 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit). When this happens, the oceans will boil away, rendering the surface completely uninhabitable and inhospitable to even the most extreme known forms of life.
If we do nothing to prevent it, then at some point over the…
esiegel | June 30, 2017"By its very nature science knows no boundaries. Walling off any group, for any reason, from full participation damages the entire enterprise of science. We must be scientists without borders." -Rocky Kolb
We normally think of “let there be light” as when the Universe got its start. In a particular sense, this is true, since you can go back to a time before stars and galaxies existed, when the Universe was only a few million years old or less. But even before the first star, there was still light.
According to the original observations of Penzias and Wilson, the galactic plane emitted some…
esiegel | June 29, 2017"Space and time may have a structure as intricate as the fauna of a rich ecosystem, but on a scale far larger than the horizon of our observations." -Martin Rees
On the largest scales, dark matter has been undoubtedly the most successful theory in modern cosmology for explaining a huge variety of observations. From the motions of galaxies in clusters to the separation of mass and light when they collide, from the correlations between galactic positions to the fluctuations in the CMB, from the bending of starlight to the formation of large-scale structure, it’s clear that the Universe needs…
esiegel | June 28, 2017"We hope that interested people will repeat our calculations and will make up their own minds regarding the significance of the results. It is obvious that "belief" is never an alternative to "understanding" in physics." -J. Creswell et al.
Three times now, the LIGO collaboration has produced very strong evidence that black hole pairs, from across the Universe, inspiraled and merged, producing gravitational waves. The twin LIGO detectors in Hanford, WA and Livingston, LA each detected these signals, and the signals were correlated between both detectors. For the first time ever (and the…
esiegel | June 27, 2017"Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul." -Victor Hugo
On August 21, 2017, the Moon will pass between the Earth and the Sun, casting its shadow onto the Earth’s surface and causing a total solar eclipse. For the first time since 1979, a portion of that eclipse will cross the continental United States, with the path of totality running coast-to-coast and crossing through 14 states. It’s poised…
esiegel | June 26, 2017"There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, “Oh it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything.” and an optimist who says, “Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyways.” Either way, nothing happens." -Yvon Chouinard
Are the beautiful and iconic Pillars of Creation, located deep within the Eagle Nebula, still around today? At a distant of 7,000 light years, the Pillars could have been destroyed at any point from about 5,000 B.C. to the present, and we’d have no way of knowing. When they were first imaged in 1995, many speculated that the nebula, containing new…
esiegel | June 25, 2017“Already in my original paper I stressed the circumstance that I was unable to give a logical reason for the exclusion principle or to deduce it from more general assumptions. I had always the feeling, and I still have it today, that this is a deficiency.” -Wolfgang Pauli
There's never a shortage of scientific topics to explore and take interest in here at Starts With A Bang! While we have our usual slew of articles, controversies, opinions and more this week, I'm also so pleased to share a new podcast with you! This month, thanks to our Patreon supporters, we took on a very bold topic, the…
esiegel | June 24, 2017"[Brown dwarfs] appear to live a more exciting life than we presumed. They are too big to be planets and two small to be stars, but it does appear that if you watch one it has very active events... there is action going on." -Lars Bildsten
For every star that’s out there in the Universe, for every object that ignited hydrogen fusion in its core, there are many other objects out there that never got massive enough to do so. The largest failures, those that gathered between 13 and 80 Jupiter masses’ worth of material, are known as brown dwarfs. They achieve deuterium fusion in their core, but…
esiegel | June 23, 2017"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence." -Christopher Hitchens
65 million years ago, a catastrophic impact from outer space caused the last great mass extinction on Earth, destroying 30% of the species that lived on our world at the time. These mass extinction events happened many times in Earth’s past, and the Solar System also passes through denser stellar regions of space periodically, as determined by the orbit of the Sun and stars in the Milky Way.
Every 31 million years or so, the Sun moves through the galactic plane, crossing over the region of…
esiegel | June 22, 2017"Einstein's gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea." -Richard Feynman
There’s no doubt that LIGO has given us one of the most incredible breakthroughs of the 21st century: the direct detection of gravitational waves. But as wonderful as LIGO is, so far it’s only been able to detect the very final stages of mergers of stellar mass-scale black holes, and only every few months at that. The technique of laser…
esiegel | June 21, 2017"Although we were initially quite skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the outer solar system, we become increasingly convinced that it is out there." -Konstantin Batygin
Last year, scientists Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown made a huge splash when they announced that the Solar System likely contained a super-Earth-sized object beyond the orbit of Neptune. They dubbed the world ‘Planet Nine,’ and claimed that it was responsible for the orbits of the longest-period Trans-Neptunian Objects ever discovered. The fact that…
esiegel | June 20, 2017"Chapel Hill is a beautiful place, and I was wanting to get out of Livermore for an academic position, so we went there, both of us, as visiting research professors. After a few years I was given a regular professorship and Cecile was demoted to a lecturer." -Bryce DeWitt
"Without being told it was a demotion. 'Oh, it will be so much better for you.' And that's the part I didn't like, the hypocrisy of letting me believe that it was better." -Cecile DeWitt-Morette
When you have rules that treat men and women equally in theory, but the practical application of the rules leads to unequal results…
esiegel | June 19, 2017"It shows you exactly how a star is formed; nothing else can be so pretty! A cluster of vapor, the cream of the milky way, a sort of celestial cheese, churned into light." -Benjamin Disraeli
From here on Earth, most of the stars we see in the night sky are ancient, having departed from the star-forming regions and open clusters that spawned them many millions or even billions of years ago. But there are still new stars forming in the Milky Way, and the vast majority of these star-forming regions are located in the galactic plane itself.
The Omega nebula, known also as Messier 17, is an…
esiegel | June 18, 2017“Many people today agree that we need to reduce violence in our society. If we are truly serious about this, we must deal with the roots of violence, particularly those that exist within each of us. We need to embrace 'inner disarmament,' reducing our own emotions of suspicion, hatred and hostility toward our brothers and sisters.” -Dalai Lama XIV
From subatomic scales to very human ones to the largest conceivable ones in the cosmos, we do our best to cover the entire Universe here at Starts With A Bang! There's always so much to discuss that we're never going to lack for potential topics,…
esiegel | June 17, 2017"In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance." -Henry Miller
You know it as the most fundamental law of relativity: that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And yet, the observable Universe itself, which has been around for 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, is now 46.1 billion light years in radius. If everything were contracted down to a tiny volume of space, it seems that such a size would be impossible to achieve. Unless, somehow, space itself were expanding faster than the speed of light.
The Hercules galaxy cluster showcases a great…