esiegel | August 28, 2013"There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it." -David Attenborough
It's been a long time since I've written anything on this blog about global warming, climate change, or most Earth-based environmental topics in general. After all, I'm a physicist -- an astrophysicist in particular -- and although I'm well-versed in the physics of the Earth and in science in general, it's not my particular area of expertise.
Image credit: NASA, Johnson Space Center, Apollo 17 crew.
Recently, I've had a number of requests to take a…
esiegel | August 26, 2013"A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle." -Khalil Gibran
It’s time again for another Messier Monday! The Messier Catalogue was the original comprehensive and accurate catalogue of fixed, deep-sky objects visible to any dedicated (northern hemisphere) skywatcher with even the most primitive of astronomical equipment. Over the centuries, as our understanding of what we're looking at has improved, these 110 celestial wonders have provided classic examples of astronomical phenomena ranging from stellar corpses to new star-forming regions, from young…
esiegel | August 24, 2013"I'm happy to report that everybody whose face I've wanted to punch on Earth has already been punched." -Greg Kinnear
Well, it's finally happened. After the javascript music player I'd been using to share music with you was discontinued, I finally found a new one here. There's no better way to test it out than with Soïg Sibéril's masterful guitar work, as showcased here in his song,
The Jug of Punch/Master Crowley.So enjoy that beautifulness, while I walk you way down memory lane. I grew up during the golden age of nintendo, when Mario, Zelda and Metroid were some of the best ways to spend…
esiegel | August 23, 2013“People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” -Oscar Wilde
Beyond the planet Earth, beyond all the stars in the night sky, and beyond the Milky Way galaxy, there's literally an entire Universe out there.
Image credit: R. Jay GaBany, of http://cosmotography.com/.
The farther away we're able to look, the more galaxies we're able to see. As far as our…
esiegel | August 21, 2013"I am undecided whether or not the Milky Way is but one of countless others all of which form an entire system. Perhaps the light from these infinitely distant galaxies is so faint that we cannot see them." -Johann Lambert
When we look out at the Universe, our view is pretty consistently dominated by the stars within our own galaxy. Although we know that many interesting things lie beyond -- globular clusters, individual galaxies, and rich clusters and superclusters of galaxies -- being in the Milky Way makes it very hard to see beyond it.
Image credit: Richard Payne, of Arizona…
esiegel | August 20, 2013"[S]cience is not a consumption good to be expanded in good times and restricted in bad times. The doing of science as well as the supporting of science is an expression of faith in the future. It would have been possible to have told Newton and Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg that, given the poverty and squalor around them, their research were luxuries which could not be afforded. To have done so would be to destroy the economic c progress that came out of their science and which was the main factor in relieving that poverty and squalor. We seem to be on the verge of…
esiegel | August 19, 2013"We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows." -Robert Frost
It's time again for another Messier Monday! To kick off each week, we've been taking a look at one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier catalogue. Compiled in the 18th Century to help skywatchers avoid these fixed night sky wonders (so that they could better hunt comets), these represent some of the most viewed and easily visible nebulae, star clusters and galaxies visible from our home world.
Image credit: Tenho Tuomi of Tuomi Observatory, via http://rockpoint.dyndns.org/.
An…
esiegel | August 18, 2013"[F]or those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us." -Charles Bukowski
Making sense of our existence is one of the most daunting tasks -- should we choose to accept it -- set before any…
esiegel | August 16, 2013"On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise." -Paul Ricoeur
Ask anyone who's looked up at a dark sky on a clear, moonless night, and you'll immediately hear tales about how incomprehensibly vast the Universe is.
Image credit: Randy Halverson, flickr user dakotalapse, from http://dakotalapse.com/.
But what you're looking at isn't much of the Universe at all. In fact, practically every point of light you see, including the vast swath of stars too dim to individually resolve, comes from…
esiegel | August 14, 2013"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge." -Enrico Fermi
As you probably know, the Large Hadron Collider -- site of discovery of the last fundamental particle in the Standard Model, the Higgs Boson -- is the most energetic particle accelerator in the history of humankind. When the upgrades it's currently undergoing are complete, it will reach collision energies of 14 TeV.
Image credit: CERN / LHC, add-on created by http://www.panglosstech.com/.
The way this happens is that protons are circulated in a giant ring, underground, that'…
esiegel | August 12, 2013"There is an ancient saying among men that you cannot thoroughly understand the life of mortals before the man has died, then only can you call it good or bad." -Sophocles
Imagine looking up at the night sky -- able to survey the full depths of space -- with eyes the size of saucers instead of our paltry, few-millimeter-sized pupils. What do you suppose you'd see? Well, here on Messier Monday, we take a journey through the first catalogue to effectively do just that! Charles Messier catalogued, over many years in the late 18th Century, 110 deep-sky objects, each unique, and each telling its…
esiegel | August 11, 2013"I'll chop your head off!" -Axe Cop
What games did you play with your imagination as a little kid? Did you make up stories involving muppets? Horses? Cartoon characters? Cowboys and... native americans? Or, as the Hoosiers would sing,
Cops And Robbers?
Well, if ever any of that amused you, have I got a discovery for you.
Image credit: Ethan Nicolle and Malachai Nicolle.
A cartoon created, literally, by the imagination of a (then) five-year-old! When Ethan Nicolle, an animator/graphic artist in his late 20s, went to his parents house in 2009 to visit his little brother Malachai, the…
esiegel | August 9, 2013“Next to reasoning, the greatest handicap to the optimum development of Man lies in the fact that this planet is just barely habitable. Its minimum temperatures are too low, and its maximum temperatures too high. Its day is not long enough, and its night is too long... These factors encourage depression, fear, war, and lack of vitality. They describe a planet, which is by no means perfectly devised for the nurturing or for the perpetuation of a higher intelligence.” -James Thurber
It's been just about three years, now, since the first announced discovery of a planet in another star system…
esiegel | August 8, 2013"What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the Moon, but that they set eye on the Earth." -Norman Cousins
What would life on Earth be like without the Moon?
Our nearest neighboring body in the cosmos has a profound effect on us. It's helped not only shape our evolution, biologically, but has shaped the entire evolution of our planet. Created some 4.5 billion years ago -- when our planet and Solar System were still in their infancy -- when a roughly Mars-sized planetoid crashed into a young proto-Earth, the Moon has been our companion-in-orbit ever since.…
esiegel | August 7, 2013"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." -Robert Frost
Middle school -- or junior high, which we called it when I went -- should really be classified as a form of child abuse. I recognize that it isn't as bad for everyone as it was for me, but those two years I spent in 7th and 8th grade were easily the worst and most unhappy times of my life.
Image credit: Edgewood Middle School of Hartford County, via http://www.hcps.org/.
Maybe that's hyperbole, or maybe you have a similar feeling when you look back on that time. Moving…
esiegel | August 5, 2013"Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Welcome back to another Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! Each Monday, we go through one of the 110 deep-sky wonders of the Messier Catalogue, some of the brightest and most prominent of the night sky wonders. Originally compiled by Charles Messier and his assistant, Pierre Méchain, in the late 18th Century, these telescopic wonders showcase the cosmic beauty and variety easily visible from our vantage point here on Earth.
Image credit: Alistair…
esiegel | August 4, 2013"My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people." -Orson Welles
I just completed my 35th trip around the Sun yesterday, which was a great time! But, it got me thinking, has my time in this world resulted in a build-up of toxic substances in my body? Is there any way to get rid of them? Is there anything, as Olenka & the Autumn Lovers might sing, that can get me
Clean?
Well, maybe there is, if you look in the right place!
Image credit: http://www.cleansevsdiet.com/. *NOT* an endorsement, by any means!
Think your kidneys and liver aren't…
esiegel | August 2, 2013“Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection; no more” -Lord Alfred Tennyson
Ahh, the Standard Model of elementary particles and their interactions. It's right up there with General Relativity -- our theory of gravitation in the Universe -- as the most successful physical theory of all-time.
Image credit: DoE, NSF, LBNL, and CPEP, via http://www.cpepphysics.org/.
While General Relativity describes the relationship between matter-and-energy and spacetime, the Standard Model describes all the known particles in the Universe and how they interact with one another. This…
esiegel | August 1, 2013“We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson
The story of the Universe is the story of us all; we all share the same cosmic history, coming from a hot, dense state some 13.8 billion years ago known as the Big Bang and emerging after billions of years of cosmic evolution to the Universe we know and love today.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration.
It's a beautiful story -- and one I've told before -- but it might seem, at least from our perspective, that something is missing from the astrophysicist's version of events. Yes, we…
esiegel | July 31, 2013"You can't exactly bake a man to your specifications... A hybrid of Einstein, Tarzan and Inge Meysel doesn't exist." -Peer Steinbruck
Of course, if you create enough chances, all the things that could eventually happen will come to pass. This is as true for human beings as it is for the physical Universe. And for our planet, our nearest major neighbor in the Universe -- the Moon -- provides us with a huge variety of sights, if only we're willing to wait.
Image credit: Doug Zubenel.
Every 27.3 days, the Moon makes a complete orbit around the Earth, traveling a full 360° through space. As it…