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"When a star goes supernova, the explosion emits enough light to overshadow an entire solar system, even a galaxy. Such explosions can set off the creation of new stars. In its own way, it was not unlike being born." -Todd Nelson
Did you follow all the action this past week over at the main Starts With A Bang blog? With a new post nearly every day, we've really put together a set of amazing stories about the Universe we know (and are still discovering) for you, including:
Do the cosmic unknowns cast doubt on the Big Bang? (for Ask Ethan),
Martha Wash's biggest fan (for our…
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“Es ist immer angenehm, über strenge Lösungen einfacher Form zu verfügen.” (It is always pleasant to have exact solutions in simple form at your disposal.) -Karl Schwarzschild
The Universe is a vast and complex place, full of a diversity of structure from the smallest scales to the largest. And yet, by many accounts, it's a wonder that it came to be this way at all.
Image credit: NASA, retrieved from Pearson Education / Addison Wesley.
If things were just a little bit different at the very beginning, the Universe could have recollapsed in on itself in a mere fraction-of-a-second after the…
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“When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.” -Tycho Brahe
The Milky Way is home to many of the greatest sights ever to grace the night sky, including some spectacular, transient objects: supernovae! Formed from the death of supermassive stars or the "second-chance" explosions of white dwarfs, they brighten incredibly and then fade away, leaving spectacular remnants (and a plethora of heavy, enriched elements) behind.
Image credit: NASA, ESA and…
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“To be loyal to myself is to allow myself to grow and change, and challenge who I am and what I think. The only thing I am for sure is unsure, and this means I’m growing, and not stagnant or shrinking.” ‐Jarod Kintz
But for the Universe, although it's constantly changing, growing in a gravitational sense is a thing of its past. Sure, we continue to form new stars, galaxies continue to merge, and the structure we see on the largest scales continues to evolve.
Image credit: Bob Franke, via http://bf-astro.com/.
But there once was a time when there were no stars, no galaxies, and no…
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There are a few questions that have perplexed humans for all of recorded history, ranging from the nature of matter to the origin of the Universe to whether there are limits to what is knowable in principle about all there is. One of the great questions that people have wondered about since ancient times -- that we still wonder about today -- is whether there's a fundamental smallest scale to the Universe or not.
Image credit: The Mona Lisa, by Sanghyuk Moon.
From the ancient paradoxa posed by Zeno to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, it might seem like there either could or…
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“And then you wake up, only to see that the darkness has gone, the light now truly makes you feel vulnerable and you wonder why this darkness did not wish you well and why did it leave you so sudden, without revealing the answers you were looking for.” -Chirag Tulsiani
"You've seen one, you've seen them all," said no skywatcher ever when it comes to these wonders of the night sky. Every star, cluster, galaxy and nebula has its own cosmic story, and Messier Monday provides us with a fabulous opportunity to highlight and explore each one.
Image credit: ©2007–2012 Twin City Amateur Astronomers…
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“I’m just thankful that I’m still here. I hope I’m still relevant to somebody. I don’t trip on all that icon stuff. I’m still that down-to-earth girl I was all those years ago.” -Martha Wash
Everyone has their own unique set of contributions that they can make to the world: some do it scrupulously, and others less so. But I always admire the people who do it right, succeed, and then turn right back around and help the same community that helped them achieve that success. Have a listen to Martha Wash's greatest hit,
It's Raining Men,
while you take a moment to learn about her story and her…
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"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity." -Rod Serling
It's been an action-packed week here on Starts With A Bang, and we've tackled a whole slew of topics you're unlikely to see anyplace else! The past week has seen us take a look at the following:
Where does cosmic rotation come from? (for Ask Ethan),
Cartoons for social justice (for our Weekend Diversion),
The most curious object of all, M24 (for Messier Monday),
The man who invented the 26th dimension (a stellar contribution from Paul Halpern),…
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“Whenever you have infinities in a theory, that’s where the theory fails as a description of nature. And if space was born in the Big Bang, yet is infinite now, we are forced to believe that it’s instantaneously, infinitely big. It seems absurd.” -Janna Levin
Of course, we don't believe space was born in the Big Bang, but this wasn't intuitive for a long time! Indeed, given the cosmic unknowns of inflation, dark matter and dark energy, and the fact that what we consider to be "normal matter" only makes up around 5% of the total amount of energy in the cosmos, isn't it time to revisit the…
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"I’m a shooting star. A meteor shower. But I’m not going to die out. I guess I’m more like a comet then. I’m just going to keep on coming back.” -C. JoyBell C.
Every year, meteor showers sizzle and fizzle, yet no matter what happens in the skies, there's always one meteor shower that's reliable for a good show: the Perseids. After sunset tonight (and for about the next week) in the skies, they'll delight skywatchers across the globe.
Image credit: created by me using Stellarium, available free at http://stellarium.org/.
Have you ever wondered where these (or any) meteors come from? If you'…
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“You can’t cheat an honest man. Never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump.” -W.C. Fields
Well, it was bound to happen. A bad science story -- a story of illegitimate science with all the right buzzwords -- has gone viral. By now, you, too, have probable heard about the "impossible" space engine that's been validated by NASA and could take us to Mars: the EmDrive.
Image credit: SPR, Ltd.
But did it really work? Could it work? Or is this another hallmark example of the worst in not only science reporting, but in bad science itself?
Image credit: “Registration by…
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Every once in a while, a scientist comes along who leaves an impression on the field so strong that all of the subsequent work on uses their results as a starting point, as a foundation. Einstein did that with relativity; Dirac did that with relativistic quantum mechanics; even Newton did that with mechanics.
Image credit: Claude Lovelace with Parakeet (courtesy of Rutgers), via http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/people/images/Lovelace_H.jpg.
But what about when the person who does that is someone you've never heard of? Thanks to our new writer Paul Halpern, that story is about to come…
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“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” -Thomas Sowell
Every object of the 110 in the Messier Catalogue tells its own unique story, but not every object is a true astronomical object on its own! Along with two groupings of stars -- a double star (M40) and a quadruple star (M73) -- there's also a very special object that's neither a star cluster nor a chance grouping: the Sagittarius Star Cloud!
Image credit: RoryG from East Texas, at http://eastexastronomy.blogspot.com/2011/03/messier-24-sagittarius-star….
What you're actually seeing is a hole in…
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“Everybody wants peace. That’s a truism. There is no point in accomplishing through war what you can accomplish through peace.” -Norman Finkelstein
Say what you will about this world, and there's an artist out there who can say it more effectively without needing to use a single word. For those who can do that, I tip my hat and express my admiration. When it comes to social justice, we're often promised, as KT Tunstall will sing you,
Change,
but things still seem to remain the same. Well one artist -- Pawel Kuczynski -- seems to have simply nailed that without the need for a single…
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"Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together." -James Cash Penney
We don't normally have a week like this, where we not only take on the biggest topics in all of existence, but also have a ground-shaking announcement to make that alters the very fabric of Starts With A Bang! This past week, we've had a whole slew of outstanding things that we've covered, including:
Do science and religion have to be at odds? (for Ask Ethan),
A Jedi's dream come true (for our Weekend Diversion),
Virgo's final galaxy, M100 (for Messier Monday),
The Opportunity of the…
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“In my better sense of mind, I know that I’m far from alone and far from the worst, and the earth keeps spinning. Everything keeps moving, with or without me.” -Phil Anselmo
The Universe is a chaotic place, where nothing truly exists in isolation. Even if, at the moment of the Big Bang, nothing in the Universe was born having had any interactions with anything else, that state wouldn't have lasted for long.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration.
Even the most pristine "baby picture" of the Universe we have comes only after astronomical numbers of interactions for each and…
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“Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves...” -William Shakespeare
It isn't every day that I pause to make an announcement, but it also isn't every day that I have news quite like this!
Image credit: John Hothersall (Brisbane Australia), of the Lagoon Nebula (M8), via http://www.orionoptics.co.uk/imagegallery.html.
Thanks to the new Starts With A Bang digs over at Medium, I finally have the resources to bring on a team of some of the best scientists who write about physics/astronomy/astrophysics/gravitation to…
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“The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out — there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.” -Richard Feynman
It took 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution, billions of years of biological evolution and astronomical numbers of events unfolding exactly as they have to give rise to you and me. And yet, here we are, collections of tens of trillions of cells and some 10^28 atoms.
Image credit: Ed Uthman.
Yet even though we don't often think of it, each one of those atoms has its own, unique cosmic story. It's too great…
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“By allowing the positive ions to pass through an electric field and thus giving them a certain velocity, it is possible to distinguish them from the neutral, stationary atoms.” -Johannes Stark
One of the simplest tenets of electromagnetism -- the second of the fundamental forces ever discovered -- is that charged particles are accelerated parallel to electric fields, and are deflected as they move perpendicular through magnetic fields. In spectacular fashion, our Earth shows this latter phenomenon off as its bombarded by charged particles from the Sun.
Image credit: NOAA Space…
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“In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.” -John Archibald Wheeler
It's been over a decade, nearly a hundred thousand turns of its wheels and an unprecedented journey that still continues. But finally, after all this time, the Mars Opportunity rover has arrived.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.
Not anyplace that isn't just like something it's seen hundreds of times before; this crater is run-of-the-mill if anything is. But after more than 10 years, Mars Opportunity has finally broken the distance record for a roving spacecraft of any…