esiegel | May 28, 2017“The ability to listen and learn is key to mastering the art of communication. If you don't use your verbal skills and networking, it will disappear rapidly.” -Rick Pitino
It’s been a week full of amazing and controversial stories about the Universe here at Starts With A Bang! Did you catch the fantastic live event on Wednesday at Peddler Brewing Company in Seattle: Astronomy on Tap, starring me and the incredible Sarah Tuttle? If not, you can catch it now!
If you're in a multimedia mood, you're in luck, because the newest (and twentieth!) Starts With A Bang podcast is now live: on the Fate…
esiegel | May 27, 2017"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." -Hunter S. Thompson
When we look at the nearby Universe, it looks a lot like we, ourselves, appear. Nearby galaxies are similar in structure to our own; the stars inside them have the same properties, masses, ages and distributions as our own. But as we look to greater and greater cosmic distances, we find that more distant galaxies appear younger, bluer, smaller, and less evolved. If we go back beyond a certain point, there are no more galaxies at all.…
esiegel | May 26, 2017“Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.” -George Carlin
When you think of helium, you very likely think of balloons, birthday parties, and blimps. But this inert, lighter-than-air gas has a number of unique properties among all the elements, including that it’s liquid at very low temperatures and it enters a superfluid state. It’s scientific applications include particle accelerators, MRI machines, and anything…
esiegel | May 25, 2017"First Rate People hire first rate people. Second rate people hire third rate people." -Hermann Weyl
So, here we are, encountering one another on the internet. There’s a really good chance that this is because you have some interest in space, science, astronomy, astrophysics, or some related area. Although I am an astrophysicist with a Ph,D. in theoretical physics, my focus over the past decade or so has been on education and public outreach: science communication.
As we're exploring more and more of the Universe, education and outreach becomes more vital than ever if our society wants to be…
esiegel | May 24, 2017"At least six lamp posts were snapped off while I watched. A few minutes later, I saw a side girder bulge out. But, though the bridge was bucking up at an angle of 45 degrees, I thought she would be able to fight it out. But, that wasn't to be." -Bert Farquharson
If you’ve only ever seen one bridge collapse ever, it was probably the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. On November 7th, 1940, high, sustained winds sent the bridge from an up-and-down undulation into a twisting, rocking pattern that led to the eventual collapse of the structure. It’s been used as a classic example of resonance at work,…
esiegel | May 23, 2017"I don't always bet the same way I talk. Good advice is one thing, but smart gambling is quite another." -Hunter S. Thompson
Did you know the world’s first wearable computer was built all the way back in the 1960s, was worn on your feet... and was used to help gamblers cheat at roulette? Physicists and mathematicians work with probability and predicting the behavior of a given system a lot, and when you combine that with the science of simple motion (as on a roulette wheel), the possibility of ‘beating the odds’ suddenly becomes real.
Al Hibbs won an estimated $12,000 from the casinos in…
esiegel | May 22, 2017"As far as I can tell, every telescope that can look at it right now is looking at it right now." -Matt Muterspaugh
Earlier this decade, the Kepler mission became the most successful planet-finding endeavor of all time, turning up thousands of new worlds by measuring the transit data of some 150,000 stars. When planets passed in front of their parent star, they blocked a tiny fraction of their light, leaving behind an imprint of a periodic dimming signal. But one star dims differently from all the others.
Different steps in the Kepler time series data that show the periodic and aperiodic…
esiegel | May 21, 2017“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.” -Theodore Roosevelt
It's been an incredible week here at Starts With A Bang! We've covered everything from the night sky's newest supernova to the possible fates of the Universe to what might be our window into the next unexplored mysteries of physics. Moreover, I'll be giving a public talk in Seattle this Wednesday, May 24th, for Astronomy On Tap, at Peddler Brewing Company! Join me if you can, and I promise you'll be left with plenty to wonder about! With that out of the way,…
esiegel | May 20, 2017"My discovery that black holes emit radiation raised serious problems of consistency with the rest of physics. I have now resolved these problems, but the answer turned out to be not what I expected." -Stephen Hawking
One of the most puzzling things about Black Holes is that if you wait around long enough, they’ll evaporate completely. The curved spacetime outside of the event horizon still undergoes quantum effects, and when you combine General Relativity and quantum field theory in exactly that fashion, you get a blackbody spectrum of thermal radiation out.
Hawking radiation is what…
esiegel | May 19, 2017“It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.” -Ernest Rutherford
Nuclear physics has, for decades now, been regarded less as a window into fundamental physics and more of a derived science. As we’ve discovered that nuclei, baryons, and mesons are all composite particles made out of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, though, we’ve realized that there are other possible combinations that nature allows, that should exist.
Colour flux tubes…
esiegel | May 18, 2017“We had this whole big beautiful place for discovery, and all we could think to do with it was wipe out everything that made it worth discovering.” -Buzz Aldrin
It’s been more than 40 years since humans last set foot on the Moon. The final space shuttle flight occurred six years ago already, and the International Space Station is set to reach the end of its life a few years from now. At the 33rd Space Symposium last month, NASA announced their new, bold plan for crewed spaceflight: a crewed space station that orbits the Moon.
The Orion capsule would be one of many components on a proposed…
esiegel | May 17, 2017"When a massive star explodes at the end of its life, the explosion dispenses different elements-helium, carbon, oxygen, iron, nickel-across the universe, scattering stardust. That stardust now makes up the planets, including ours." -Michelle Cuevas
Every once in a while, a new light appears somewhere in the night sky: the result of a massive star reaching the end of its life. From many millions of light years away, the brilliance of a supernova shines across the cosmos. Just a few days ago, a new light was discovered in a galaxy only 22 million light years away, making it the closest…
esiegel | May 16, 2017"Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
There are a great many events that occurred to give rise to the world, the Universe, and you. Everything from the Big Bang to the existence of the laws of physics to the cosmic history that created Earth to the biological history that gave rise to the 7+ billion of us today needed to unfold exactly as it did in order for things to be the way they are today.
A standard cosmic timeline of our Universe's history. A series of extremely unlikely events all needed to occur in order so that you…
esiegel | May 15, 2017"They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially 'colonized' it. So technically, I colonized Mars. In your face, Neil Armstrong!" -Andy Weir
In the early 1960s, humanity began launching spacecraft to Mars, hoping to find out what the red planet was truly like. While early images revealed a heavily cratered surface, similar to that of the Moon, that turned out to be reflective of only a portion of the surface. Mars contains dust storms, basins, extinct volcanoes and the largest chasm of any planet in the Solar System.
A dust storm on Mars, a common occurrence during the Martian…
esiegel | May 14, 2017“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.” -Marie Curie
There's nothing like looking into the deepest mysteries the Universe has to offer, and trying to come up with the explanation and understanding we can based on all the available data. That's what we're all about here at Starts With A Bang! It's less than two weeks until my talk at the May 24th event…
esiegel | May 13, 2017"It's everywhere, really. It's between the galaxies. It is in this room. We believe that everywhere that you have space, empty space, that you cannot avoid having some of this dark energy." -Adam Riess
Have you heard about the accelerating Universe? What about dark energy, vacuum energy, or a cosmological constant? These are terms we throw around to talk about one of the strangest observations ever made in the Universe: that the more distant a galaxy is from us, the faster it appears to be receding from us. Not only that, but the rate of recession appears to actually increase over time, which…
esiegel | May 12, 2017"The origin and evolution of life are connected in the most intimate way with the origin and evolution of the stars." -Carl Sagan
The Crab Nebula is one of the most interesting and compelling objects in the entire night sky. In the year 1054, a supernova went off in the constellation of Taurus, where it became brighter than anything other than the Sun and Moon in the sky. Some 700 years later, astronomers discovered the remnant of that supernova: the Crab Nebula.
An optical composite/mosaic of the Crab Nebula as taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. The different colors correspond to…
esiegel | May 11, 2017“…an understanding of the infinite tree of universes seems to be needed in order to make statistical predictions about the properties of our own universe, which is assumed to be a typical “branch” on the tree.” -Alan Guth
The Big Bang is commonly regarded as the start of it all, but that's only the birth of what we call our observable Universe. There must have been something compelling to set it up, complete with the initial conditions that our Universe began with. An idea called Cosmic Inflation fits the bill perfectly, providing those conditions and making six explicitly new predictions.…
esiegel | May 10, 2017"When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all — except life." -Ernest Rutherford
What does the future of astrophysics look like? Have we already made all of the fundamental discoveries we’re going to make? Is the rest just categorization of objects, identification of more examples of what’s already known, and minor refinements of the knowledge we already have? Or are there fundamental discoveries still to come, just waiting for us to reveal them?
The four possible fates of our Universe into the future; the last one appears to be the…
esiegel | May 9, 2017“Finding out that something you have just discovered is considered all but impossible is one of the joys of science.” -Mike Brown
In January of last year, astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown shocked the world by proposing that there was a world larger than Earth located some five-to-ten times as distant as Neptune. That this world — known as Planet Nine — was causing the ultra-distant Kuiper belt objects we'd discovered so far to all have predicable, peculiar properties. And the observations matched up really well.
The 3D orbits of the Kuiper belt objects influenced by Planet Nine…