esiegel | June 16, 2017"What's really exciting is what comes next. I think we're opening a window on the universe -- a window of gravitational wave astronomy." -Dave Reitze, executive director of LIGO
It revolutionized our view of the Universe when the LIGO annoucements – and we’re up to three, now – came out. They indicated the direct detection of gravitational waves from merging black holes, teaching us about a new population of stellar remnants, confirming the existence of gravitational waves, and showcasing yet another victory for Einstein’s General Relativity. But it all rests on one critical assumption: that…
esiegel | June 16, 2017“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
It’s hard to believe, but despite being at rest here on the surface of Earth, we’re actually hurtling through the Universe in a variety of impressive ways. The Earth spins on its axis, giving someone at the equator a speed of some 1700 km/hr. Yet at even faster speeds, the Earth orbits the Sun, the Sun moves through the Milky Way, and there’s a great cosmic motion that applied to the…
esiegel | June 15, 2017"There is, then, no water that is wholly of the Pacific, or wholly of the Atlantic, or of the Indian or the Antarctic. The surf that we find exhilarating at Virginia Beach or at La Jolla today may have lapped at the base of antarctic icebergs or sparkled in the Mediterranean sun, years ago, before it moved through dark and unseen waterways to the place we find it now. It is by the deep, hidden currents that the oceans are made one." -Rachel Carson
Later this year, one of the most epic Earth-monitoring missions of all time, the NASA/NOAA collaboration JPSS-1, will launch. With a suite of five…
esiegel | June 14, 2017"Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer." -Dave Barry
When we break out the big guns -- space telescopes like Hubble or James Webb -- we can see the Universe as it was billions of years ago, if we look for long enough. From the first moment that the Universe forms stars and galaxies, so long as that light has a path to our eyes, humanity can view it with the right equipment. This record-breaking approach has brought us in contact with galaxies from as early as when the Universe was…
esiegel | June 13, 2017"Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire." -Arnold Glascow
When someone makes a shot, it’s a little instinctive to want to give them the ball again to see if they’ll make another. If they make three or four in a row, you’ll really want to ride that ‘hot hand’ as far as it will go. And if your teammate has made six, seven, or eight shots in a row, you know you’re beginning to witness something very special. There’s nothing like getting hot in quite that way.
When you hear that someone made a basket, you're already biasing your probabilities of success,…
esiegel | June 12, 2017"This would be like an F8 tornado sweeping across the surface. These are winds on Mars that will never be seen again unless [there is] another impact." -Peter Schultz
When you examine craters on the surfaces of worlds across the solar system, you find that there are rays emanating outward, containing a mix of ejecta from the impactor and the surface itself. But there’s a limit to how far those rays go, and that’s normally dependent on the size of the crater. In a few instances on Mars, however, those rays go much, much farther than physics would indicate.
A detailed, infrared view of a…
esiegel | June 11, 2017“There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed.” -Ray Goforth
We've really investigated some amazing scientific stories this week here at Starts With A Bang! There's always so much to consider, think about and enjoy, and I'm already looking ahead to what's on the plate for this week: a new podcast to put together, progress on designing and constructing our timeline-of-the-Universe poster, and putting the final touches on my upcoming book, Treknology! In fact, I had an…
esiegel | June 10, 2017"Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder." -Carl Sagan
“Bigger mass makes a bigger star,” you might be inclined to say. The smallest stars in size should be small because they have the least amount of material in them, while the largest ones of all are the largest because they’ve got the most material to make stars out of. And that’s a tempting explanation, but it doesn’t account for either the smallest stars or the largest ones in the Universe.
The (modern) Morgan–Keenan spectral classification system, with the…
esiegel | June 9, 2017"People who work every day are kind of scared of things they don't understand." -Young Jeezy
From Mercury out to Neptune, most of the worlds in the Solar System have moons, with a hitherto discovered population of around 200 known ones. Yet despite all of it, we don’t know of a single instance of a moon that has its own natural satellite: a moon with a moon of its own. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t exist!
The major moons in our Solar System could contain some objects with candidates for potentially having orbiting moons of their own. If many of these moons were situated differently,…
esiegel | June 8, 2017"The black holes collide in complete darkness. None of the energy exploding from the collision comes out as light. No telescope will ever see the event." -Janna Levin
Whenever there’s a catastrophic, cataclysmic event in space, there’s almost always a tremendous release of energy that accompanies it. A supernova emits light; a neutron star merger emits gamma rays; a quasar emits radio waves; merging black holes emit gravitational waves. But if there’s any sort of matter present outside the event horizons of these black holes, they have the potential to emit electromagnetic radiation, or light…
esiegel | June 7, 2017
“No matter what technique you use, you should get the same value for the expansion rate of the universe today.” -Ben Hoscheit
When you think of the Universe on the largest scales, you likely think of galaxies grouped and clustered together in huge, massive collections, separated by enormous cosmic voids. But there’s another kind of cluster-and-void out there: a very large volume of space that has its own galaxies, clusters and voids, but is simply higher or lower in density than average.
The construction of the cosmic distance ladder involves going from our Solar System to the stars to…
esiegel | June 5, 2017"One volcano puts out more toxic gases - one volcano - than man makes in a whole year. And when you look at this 'climate change,' and when you look at the regular climate change that we all have in the world, we have warm and we have cooling spells." -John Raese
Every year, dozens of volcanoes actively erupt across the Earth’s surface. In addition, other active volcanoes continue to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and even dormant volcanoes and other fissures in the Earth contribute to our overall carbon dioxide content. If we want to understand the effects that humanity is…
esiegel | June 4, 2017“It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole.” -Dmitri Mendeleev
When the Big Bang first occurred, the Universe was filled with all the various particles and antiparticles making up the Standard Model, and perhaps still others yet to be discovered. But missing from the list were protons, neutrons, or any of the atomic nuclei key to the life-giving elements in our Universe today.…
esiegel | June 4, 2017“Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.” -Marquis de Lafayette
There's so much science to talk about in any given week here at Starts With A Bang! It's sometimes hard to choose, but one particular topic stole the show this past week: black holes. Sure, we took on other things, too, but we didn't even talk all that much about the biggest discovery of all: LIGO's direct detection of a third pair of merging black holes! If you had doubts after one, and they were allayed after two, then three should hammer home that these are real, robust and common. There are a lot of nuances to…
esiegel | June 3, 2017"Black holes are the seductive dragons of the universe, outwardly quiescent yet violent at the heart, uncanny, hostile, primeval, emitting a negative radiance that draws all toward them, gobbling up all who come too close…these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order." -Robert Coover
For the third time since it began taking data, the LIGO collaboration discovered direct evidence for merging black holes in the Universe. There's an incredible amount we've learned about black holes and where they're located, however, and very little of it comes from…
esiegel | June 2, 2017“Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.” -Jean Dubuffet
In the far future, all the galaxies within our Local Group will merge together, with enough gas and stellar material to form trillions upon trillions of new stars. But the amount of fuel is finite, and gravitational interactions are chaotic. At some point, the star forming material contained in our galaxy will come to an end, while more and more stars and stellar remnants are ejected from the galaxy.…
esiegel | June 1, 2017"There are several categories of scientists in the world; those of second or third rank do their best but never get very far. Then there is the first rank, those who make important discoveries, fundamental to scientific progress. But then there are the geniuses, like Galilei and Newton. Majorana was one of these." -Enrico Fermi
Want to uncover the secrets to the Universe? Find out what particles and interactions there are beyond the Standard Model? The conventional approach is to take particles up to extremely high energies and smash them together, hoping that something new and exciting comes…
esiegel | May 31, 2017"Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see." -Sam Neill, Event Horizon
Are event horizons real? With data taken from around a dozen observatories earlier this year, simultaneously, the Event Horizon Telescope is poised to put together the first-ever direct image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy Sagittarius A*. If event horizons are real, this data should be able to create the first-ever image of it, proving that nothing escapes from inside a black hole once you’ve been swallowed.
Five different simulations in general relativity, using a magnetohydrodynamic model of the black…
esiegel | May 30, 2017"If you're puzzled by what dark energy is, you're in good company." -Saul Perlmutter
We normally assume that the fundamental constants of the Universe are actually constant, but they don’t have to be that way. They could vary in space, in time, or with the energy density of the Universe, in principle. Before believing in such an extraordinary claim, however, you’d need some remarkable evidence. It’s arguable that exactly that sort of evidence is emerging: from the tensions in the expansion rate of the Universe.
Three different types of measurements, distant stars and galaxies, the large…
esiegel | May 29, 2017"N6946-BH1 is the only likely failed supernova that we found in the first seven years of our survey. During this period, six normal supernovae have occurred within the galaxies we've been monitoring, suggesting that 10 to 30 percent of massive stars die as failed supernovae." -Scott Adams
Everyone knows the recipe for a black hole: create a massive enough star, allow it to burn through the fuel it its core, and wait. After enough time, the core will collapse, creating a type II supernova and a runaway fusion reaction. The outer layers explode while the core implodes, leaving behind a black…