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“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” -Maya Angelou, R.I.P.
It isn't often that I post a time-lapse video for you to enjoy, but then again it isn't often that I find one as well-constructed and with the potential to be so educational -- to showcase so much about space as it relates to the Earth -- as Thomas O'Brien's fantastic video.
Image credit: Thomas O’Brien of http://www.tmophoto.com/.
Simply titled "Meteor," this is Thomas's first foray into creating a time-lapse video, but don't let…
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“Science casts a long black shadow back over who we think we are, and where it falls the temperature falls with it. Its touch is chilly and unforgiving.” -Richard K. Morgan
Here on Earth, when we're dealing with normal matter, it's relatively easy to measure the temperature of something. Even if you don't have a thermometer handy, if you can do something like measure the speed/kinetic motion of the particles in there, you can easily figure out what the temperature of a system is.
Image credit: screenshot from Schooltube, of a video by mrcoia (Teacher),L A Webber High School.
But…
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“Man must rise above the Earth, to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.” -Socrates
It's hard to believe that it's been nearly two years since we started our Messier Monday series, and so with only 110 objects to go through, we're actually starting to run out of objects! The most numerous type of object in the Messier Catalogue are the galaxies, but only a handful of those remain.
Image credit: The Messier Objects by Alistair Symon, from 2005-2009, via http://www.woodlandsobservatory.com/messier_map.htm.
Still, the richest…
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“Some people think that the truth can be hidden with a little cover-up and decoration. But as time goes by, what is true is revealed, and what is fake fades away.” -Ismail Haniyeh
You might have thought that it's only human standards of beauty that are skewed by the rampant photoshopping of models and media figures, but the problem spreads far beyond those horizons. This weekend, have a listen to The National singing their one-of-a-kind song,
Fake Empire,
while I share with you the very fake empire of faked astronomy/space pictures.
Image credit: Justin Ng.
Some fake photos have…
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"To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour." -William Blake
Another week is behind us here at Starts With A Bang, and not only has the Universe been particularly kind to us, but you've had plenty to talk about. Over the past week, here's what we've talked about:
The Earth's Motion through the Galaxy (for Ask Ethan),
Funny (colored) honey (for our Weekend Diversion),
The unusual galaxy Messier 90 (for Messier Monday),
The Birth of a Meteor Shower,
How did the Universe begin?, and
The Big Bang's Last Great…
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“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” -Maya Angelou
From questions about the smallest scales to the largest, from Earthly phenomena to things we could only conceive of in theory, our Ask Ethan series is your opportunity to have anything you ask considered for a column. This week, though, is a little different than normal.
Image credit: Kenneth Libbrecht of http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/.
Rather than a question about science, I got a question about science writing. And in particular, what advice I'd give to a young scientist…
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“These neutrino observations are so exciting and significant that I think we’re about to see the birth of an entirely new branch of astronomy: neutrino astronomy.” -John Bahcall
From the Hubble expansion of the Universe to isotropy and homogeneity to the light elements to the leftover radiation glow to the formation of large-scale structure in the Universe, the Big Bang is by far the most successful scientific description of the Universe of all-time.
Image credit: Illustris Simulation, M. Vogelsberger, S. Genel, V. Springel, P. Torrey, D. Sijacki, D. Xu, G. Snyder, S. Bird, D. Nelson, L.…
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“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” -Douglas Adams
So, you think you know about the beginning. About where everything came from, about how our Universe got its start. As my very blog is titled, it "Starts With A Bang," right?
Image credit: wiseGEEK, © 2003 — 2014 Conjecture Corporation, viahttp://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-cosmology.htm#; original fromShutterstock / DesignUA.
Except that's not truly the beginning of everything. The Big Bang was preceded by an epoch of cosmic inflation, and started…
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“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.” -Jack London
Here on Earth, we think of shooting stars and meteor showers as things that happen periodically; sometimes they're spectacular, sometimes they're rare. But in all cases, they're caused by comet debris, and they should flare up each time the Earth crosses the comet's path.
Image credit: Gerald Rhemann, of Comet Lemmon, from April 21, 2012.
But as it turns out, every meteor shower had a point in its past where it happened for the…
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“Ali always said I would be nothing without him. But what would he have been without me?” -Joe Frazier
We don't normally think of deep-sky objects -- seemingly fixed structures in the sky -- as fighting for their lives, but when you're a spiral galaxy caught in a gravitational storm, that's exactly what you're up against!
Image credit: Blackwater Skies 2013-14, via http://www.blackwaterskies.co.uk/2013/09/widefield-in-virgo-cluster-of-….
With some 2,000 other galaxies, densely clustered towards the center, what are you to do if you're a very large spiral headed through that region at…
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“My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far today, I have finished 2 bags of M&M’s and a chocolate cake. I feel better already.” -Dave Barry
They say that the milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand, but the colored candy shell will seriously melt pretty much on anything even close to body temperature. As Great Lake Swimmers would sing, it's pretty difficult to avoid the
Changing Colours.
Image credit: Jenefur (presumably of her 3-year-old daughter) of http://jenefur.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/mms/.
But what if you'…
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"The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship." -Amelia Earhart
It's been another fantastic week for us here at Starts With A Bang! This past week, we've had a blast covering a wide range of topics, including:
The Amazing Spinning Electron (for Ask Ethan),
The Top 5 Spectacles from Eurovision 2014 (for our Weekend Diversion),
A Perfect Ten on the Celestial Equator, M10 (for Messier Monday),
Why you're not alone, but probably wrong if you don't…
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“There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.” -Thomas Hobbes
Well, it finally happened: someone asked me about the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of a certain viral video.
And as you may have guessed, there's a little bit that's based in truth, but a whole lot more that's just out-and-out wrong. So what does the motion of our Solar System through the galaxy look like?
Image credit: National Astronomical Observatory ROZHEN, via http://sob.nao-…
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“Is your Hot Pocket cold in the middle?”
“It’s frozen. But it can be served boiling lava hot.”
“Will it burn my mouth?”
“It’ll destroy your mouth. Everything will taste like rubber for a month.” -Jim Gaffigan
You've all had the experience: you're all excited to microwave your favorite snack. So you pull it out of the freezer, you throw it in, and you let it rip. A minute or two later, you pull it out, and there it is: boiling on the outside, frozen in the middle. Welcome to the world of hot pockets.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Tony Branston, via a C.C.-SA-2.0 license.
The…
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“I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.” -Mohandas Gandhi
When it comes to figuring out what's going to happen in our material world -- as far as energy, particles, interactions, space and time are concerned -- science is perhaps the only real tool of knowledge we have to guide us in our endeavors.
Image credit: me, using a public domain image of Kelvin.
And yet perhaps the most famous scientist of our modern times -- Neil de Grasse Tyson -- has just come out and disparaged the value of an entire field: philosophy. Needless to say, I am not pleased…
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“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” -Vincent Van Gogh
Ever since the BICEP2 team reported their findings -- and evidence for B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background indicating gravitational waves from inflation -- the physics world has never been the same.
Images credit: Seljak & Zaldarriaga (L), Wayne Hu (R), viahttp://cosmology.berkeley.edu/~yuki/CMBpol/CMBpol.htm.
Recently, there have been rumors that perhaps this B-mode signal is due to the Milky Way, and not due to inflation after all. If this does turn…
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“It’s not what you have on the outside that glitters in light, it’s what you have on the inside that shines in the dark.” -Anthony Liccione
You might look out at a picture of a star cluster, globular cluster, or galaxy in space and think of this as mundane by this point in time. After all, how many of these have you seen by this point in your life, and so what's one more?
Image credit: © 1998-2004 David Haworth, via http://www.stargazing.net/david/messierD70/m10.html.
But you have to remember that for all of human history, we not only couldn't see these things at all, but when we…
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“If there’s one thing that I love as an entertainer, it’s a spectacle.” -JC Chasez
I know that about half of those of you who read Starts With A Bang regularly hail from outside the United States, but I was completely unprepared for the joyous spectacle that is the Eurovision song contest when I first encountered it last year. Have a listen to the best (not the winning) song from last year's contest, as Koza Mostra and Agathon Iakovidis sing their brilliant Greek entry,
Alcohol is Free.
But each year, the Eurovision song contest gives us some of the world's most interesting and…
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"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception." -Aldous Huxley
From tiny, laser-light wavelengths to dark skies to dark matter on the largest scales in the Universe, it's been quite a week at the main Starts With A Bang collection over at Medium. New this week, we've talked about:
Is there a limit to Lasers? (for our Ask Ethan series),
Finding darkness (for our Weekend Diversion),
The globular cluster Messier 4 (for Messier Monday),
The Unparalleled Power of Experiment,
The Death of Dark Matter's #1 Competitor, and
The Whole Story on…
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“Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we’re also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite.” -Junot Diaz
"Two identical fermions cannot occupy the same state," says the Pauli Exclusion Principle, one of the most fundamental laws of quantum physics that governs our Universe. But if that's truly the case, then how can two hydrogen atoms bind together?
Image credit: New Scientist.…