esiegel | July 8, 2014“When you’re finally up at the moon looking back on earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this really is one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people.” -Frank Borman, Apollo 8
You've got to wonder about the Moon. I'm not talking about what it looks like or what it has to teach us about Earth, but why the far side of the Moon looks so different from the side that faces us?
Image credit: NASA / JPL - Caltech / LRO.
For the past 55 years, we've known that the far side…
esiegel | July 7, 2014“When someone demands blind obedience, you’d be a fool not to peek.” -Jim Fiebig
But sometimes, it's the wonders of the Universe that peek out at us from behind the intervening gas and dust that would block the light from them otherwise.
Image credit: © Copyright 1970 — 2014 by Fred Espenak, via http://astropixels.com/globularclusters/M9-01.html.
This week's deep-sky object for Messier Monday -- Messier 9 -- has the distinction of being one of the closest globulars to the galactic center, yet its stars are incredibly old and metal-poor. Oh, and it's been spectacularly imaged by Hubble,…
esiegel | July 6, 2014“Hard times don’t create heroes. It is during the hard times when the ‘hero’ within us is revealed.” -Bob Riley
But we all have our heroes, for a myriad of reasons. Perhaps it will serve you to think of them as you listen to Dropkick Murphys singing about the
Heroes From Our Past.
But heroes exist as much in our minds as they do in real life, and so I'm pleased to share with you the amazing imaginings of Alex Tuis!
Image credit: Alex Tuis, via http://a.tuis.free.fr/SuperHero.html, of Rutger Hauer as Thor.
By combining a number of Hollywood legends (and rising stars) with a selection of…
esiegel | July 5, 2014“I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active -- not more happy -- nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.” -Edgar Allan Poe
It's been quite a fun-filled week for thinking about science and the Universe over at the main Starts With A Bang blog. Just in case you missed anything, this past week (from last Friday to this Thursday) we tackled the following topics:
Decaying Gravitational Orbits (for Ask Ethan),
Happy Perfect Number Day (as a special bonus for June 28th),
An Observatory Made for…
esiegel | July 4, 2014“One has to be an optimist; one has to hope that somewhere there’ll be new measurements to be made and that they will open up new vistas for us theorists to play with.” -Jim Peebles
It was one of the most hotly contested questions for decades: we first expected and then found supermassive black holes at the centers of practically all large galaxies. But how did they get there?
Image credit: KIPAC / SLAC / Stanford, via http://kipac.stanford.edu/kipac/research/agn.
In particular, you could imagine it happening either way: either there was this top-down scenario, where large-scale structures…
esiegel | July 3, 2014“Some prophecies are self-fulfilling
But I’ve had to work for all of mine
Better times will come to me, God willing
Cause I can’t leave this world behind” -Josh Ritter
Sure, many of us have dreams of leaving this world at one time or another. How wonderful it would be to leap from one giant rock to the next, if only it were easier. But the sheer amount of energy it would take leaves it well out of reach for most of us.
Image credit: Daniel Dou of http://www.theendearingdesigner.com/anti-gravity-artwork-seems-to-be-fl….
But what if it were easier? What if we had a gravitational assist from…
esiegel | July 2, 2014“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” -Werner Heisenberg
You might think there are few sacred quantities when it comes to matter: properties that are so fundamentally inherent that even the weirdness of quantum mechanics can't touch them.
Image credit: Matt Strassler, via http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics….
But the quantum nature of the Universe will have none of our prejudices, and will simply do what it does whether we like it or not. And that means, puzzlingly enough, that it's physically impossible…
esiegel | July 1, 2014“Since stars appear to be suns, and suns, according to the common opinion, are bodies that serve to enlighten, warm, and sustain a system of planets, we may have an idea of the numberless globes that serve for the habitation of living creatures.” -William Herschel
When you look up at the stars in the night sky -- bright and dim, young and old, near and far -- can you help but wonder which ones of them might house life of any variety? And if so, how similar or different it might be from that on Earth? It's one of the greatest as-of-yet unanswered questions in all of science.
Illustration…
esiegel | June 30, 2014“In a word, in the eyes of a giant, to whom our Suns were what our atoms are to us, the Milky Way would only look like a bubble of gas.” -Henri Poincaré
When it comes to the wonders of the night sky, it seems like no matter what direction you look in, if you peer far enough, you're bound to see something distant, exotic and wonderful. But the Messier catalogue is special for exactly the opposite reason: these are the brightest, most prominent objects as seen from our corner of the Universe.
Image credit: Jim Mazur’s Astrophotography via Skyledge, at http://www.skyledge.net/Messier80.htm.…
esiegel | June 29, 2014“Catch on fire and people will come for miles to see you burn.” -John Wesley
There's nothing quite like a fire on a temperate summer's night, as John Fahey will play for you in his rendition of a Mississippi Fred McDowell classic,
Keep Your Lamps Trimmed & Burning.
But I bet you never thought of combining the biggest burning festival with a 100% flammable astronomical observing party.
Image credit: Tom Varden “Major Tom” of Black Rock Observatory, via http://www.blackrockobservatory.com/.
That's exactly what the folks at Black Rock Observatory are doing, however, with their plans to…
esiegel | June 28, 2014"We converse as we live by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again just as nature does when of elementary particles it builds a world." -William H. Gass
Only here, when you repeat, combine and recombine your letters and words, the thoughts, questions and comments you submit are as completely as though no one else in the world had the same ones you did. This past week over on the main Starts With A Bang blog saw us take a deep dive into a number of diverse topics, including:
Is the Sun brighter in the summer? (for Ask Ethan),
5 doses of Terry Crews'…
esiegel | June 28, 2014“If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow.” -Beyoncé
As human beings, we may be far from perfect. Even our mathematical celebrations, like Pi Day, are mere approximations. But there are a few mathematical quantities out there that really are perfect. And today, June 28th, I'd like to share with you a celebration we should all be able to partake in: perfect number day!
Image generated by me.
Most numbers are deficient, in the sense that if you added up all their divisors (other than themselves), you get a number less than the original one you began with. A…
esiegel | June 27, 2014“I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.” -Johannes Kepler, 1601
It's easy to think of some things as eternal, even though nothing truly is. The Sun is long lived, and it has another 7 billion years (or so) to go before it runs out of fuel, but eventually it, too, will die. But surely gravitational orbits will outlast us all, right?
Image credit: Petr Scheirich, 2005, via http://sajri.astronomy.cz/asteroidgroups/groups.htm.
As it turns out, even the simplest system you can set up -- of a single small mass orbiting a large…
esiegel | June 26, 2014“Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.” -James Jeans
When you think of carbon, you very likely think of materials from diamonds to nanotubes to graphite to all organic matter, which -- as far as we know -- requires carbon as a central building block.
Image credit: Robert Johnson / University of Pennsylvania.
But 98.9% of all that carbon is Carbon-12, with six protons and six neutrons, with the vast majority of the remaining 1.1% composed of Carbon-13, with one extra neutron in there. Yet these isotopes of carbon were formed in…
esiegel | June 25, 2014“They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.” -Stephen King
Black holes are an endlessly fascinating topic to learn and speculate about. We've talked about the largest ones in the Universe, but have you ever wondered about the other side of that coin: what about the smallest?
Illustration credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss, via http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2012/igr/.
As it turns out, although there's one main major way to create black holes, it isn't the only one. A number of theoretical options ought to make it possible to have a black hole that's even smaller than the…
esiegel | June 23, 2014“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.” -William Shakespeare
When I started Messier Monday nearly two years ago, I wanted to highlight two halves of a story: the brightest deep-sky objects visible from Earth and the science of where they come from and what they teach us about the Universe. Today's object -- one of the closest of all the Messier objects to Earth -- provides the perfect chance to do that.
Image credit: Rich Richins’ 2009 Messier…
esiegel | June 22, 2014“I call myself the Amusement Park. That’s because I’m funny and scary at the same time.” -Terry Crews
There's something to be said for the power of unique talents, or for combining a set of rare skills in a unique way. This weekend, have a listen to Murder By Death's interesting song,
You Are the Last Dragon (You Possess the Power of the Glow),
while I share with you a little bit of the story -- and my favorite awesome roles -- of former NFL'er and actor/entertainer extraordinaire Terry Crews!
Image credit: Andy Kropa, on the set of one of the Expendables movies, via http://movieswallpapers…
esiegel | June 21, 2014"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer." -F. Scott Fitzgerald
The moment of Solstice has passed, and we've officially entered Summer (in the north) here at Starts With A Bang. Of course, that doesn't mean anything is different; just warmer days and different celestial sights visible throughout the night than during other times of year. While I ponder getting my first big light bucket for enjoying the night sky directly, there's still…
esiegel | June 20, 2014“The brighter you are, the more you have to learn.” -Don Herold
There's a big difference between the Summer Sun and the Winter Sun, and I'm not talking about anything to do with the Sun itself.
Image credit: SOHO-EIT Consortium, ESA, NASA.
No, I'm talking about what you feel here on Earth due to the Sun's rays! There's no doubt that the Sun warms the Earth, and that it warms your portion of the Earth very differently during the Summer months as opposed to the Winter months. But did you ever stop to consider why? Is it the Sun's fault? Our orbit's fault? Something else?
Image credit: Larry…
esiegel | June 19, 2014“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.” -James A. Baldwin
But each day is a chance for hope, learning something new and experiencing something wonderful. In fact, in just a couple of days, it will be the June solstice here on Earth, where the Sun reaches its highest (or lowest) position in the sky for Northern (or Southern) hemisphere observers!
Image credit: Kevin of Build it Solar, via http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Educational/Solargraphy/Solargraph….
You might…