esiegel | May 31, 2012"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -Douglas Adams
Here inside the Milky Way galaxy, all you need are some dark skies and a decent set of eyes, and you'll be greeted of a spectacular, close-up view of the galaxy you inhabit.
Image Credit: ESO / Stephane Guisard, from http://www.astrosurf.com/sguisard/
But getting a handle on the size and scale of our Milky Way? Perhaps paradoxically, that's a question we're still figuring out the answers…
esiegel | May 28, 2012"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there." -Ray Bradbury
Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, where we honor all the soldiers who have fought and fallen for our country. The peace and prosperity that I have enjoyed my entire life is because of a price paid, many times over, mostly by people…
esiegel | May 27, 2012"Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead." -Kyle Reese, the Terminator
Sure, they may look innocent now. Maybe you think they'll even live peacefully with us and create nothing but beauty, as Florence + the Machine might have you believe with their song,
Cosmic Love.
But the apocalypse will soon be upon us. And I think that this cute fella may be just the thing that ushers it in.
NAO robot, courtesy of Aldebaran Robotics,…
esiegel | May 26, 2012"This seems to be the law of progress in everything we do; it moves along a spiral rather than a perpendicular; we seem to be actually going out of the way, and yet it turns out that we were really moving upward all the time." -Frances Willard
As spring gives way to summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, one of the most beloved sights of the night sky becomes ever more prominent: the Big Dipper.
(Image credit: NASA, ESA, Z. Levay (STScI) and A. Fujii.)
These seven bright stars shine high above the horizon after sunset, and will continue to do so over the rest of the Spring and all Summer…
esiegel | May 24, 2012"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot." -D.H. Lawrence
Here in our Solar System, the planet closest to our Sun is Mercury, speeding around in a complete orbit once every 88 days, with daytime temperatures reaching a sweltering 400° C, or around 800° F.
(Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University / Carnegie Institute of Washington.)
With its size, temperatures, and distance from the Sun, Mercury has had its entire atmosphere stripped away by the Sun. And while these temperatures might seem hot, in comparison with…
esiegel | May 23, 2012"As always on this boulevard, the faces were young, coming annually in an endless migration from every country, every continent, to alight here once in the long journey of their lives." -Brian Moore
Even the Universe experiences a "great migration" every now and again, where giant, massive globules of interstellar gas are blown thousands of light years across the galaxy by their hot, star-forming surroundings.
(Image credit: R. Jay GaBany of cosmotography.com.)
And if I do say so myself, in the case of the Cone Nebula, it looks like the classic "V" pattern that migrating birds engage in. Of…
esiegel | May 21, 2012"A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success." -Elbert Hubbard
I've had the great fortune in my life to see a great many wonderful things with my own eyes, including the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus, a couple of faint, distant galaxies, and a large number of sunsets, sunrises, and lunar eclipses. But as far as solar eclipses go, I missed the only realistic opportunity I ever had to see -- as Cara Beth Satalino would say -- that
Shimmering Thing.Back in 1994, an annular solar eclipse happened just 300 miles from where I…
esiegel | May 19, 2012"But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn't know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved." -Wittgenstein
One of the most fundamental questions about the Universe that anyone can ask is, "Why is there anything here at all?"
Image credit: Patrick at vignetted.com.
Out beyond Earth, of course,…
esiegel | May 17, 2012"The Earth destroys its fools, but the intelligent destroy the Earth."
-Khalid ibn al-Walid
Usually, when we talk about terraforming, we think about taking a presently uninhabitable planet and making it suitable for terrestrial life. This means taking a world without an oxygen-rich atmosphere, with watery oceans, and without the means to sustain them, and to transform it into an Earth-like world.
The obvious choice, when it comes to our Solar System, is Mars.
Image credit: Daein Ballard.
The red planet, after all, is not a total stranger to these conditions. On the contrary, for the first…
esiegel | May 15, 2012"The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells - caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls." -John Hersey
Everyone (well, almost everyone) recognizes that radiation is bad for you. And the higher the energy of the radiation, the worse it is for you. The reason is relatively straightforward.
Image credit: Environmental Protection Agency.
When high energy particles (or photons) come into contact with normal matter, they…
esiegel | May 11, 2012"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." -Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut may have it right for most of us, but not all of us spend all of our time on Earth. A select dozen of us, in fact, have made it, as Cat Power would sing, to
The Moon.
Image credit: Apollo 15, Dave Scott, NASA.
Back in 1971, the Apollo 15 astronauts made huge strides in space exploration, making use of the first manned lunar rover and spending over 18 hours on activities outside of the spacecraft. But two (of the three) crew members experienced heartbeat irregularities on…
esiegel | May 10, 2012"They say 'A flat ocean is an ocean of trouble. And an ocean of waves... can also be trouble.' So, it's like, that balance. You know, it's that great Oriental way of thinking, you know, they think they've tricked you, and then, they have." -Nigel Tufnel
Black holes* are some of the most perplexing objects in the entire Universe. Objects so dense, where gravitation is so strong, that nothing, not even light, can escape from it.
Image credit: Artist's Impression from MIT.
But there are a number of very counterintuitive things that happen as you get near a black hole's event horizon, and a…
esiegel | May 8, 2012"There's nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you."
-Woody Hayes
There's no doubt that we lucked out when it came to the formation of our Solar System.
Image credit: Michael Pidwirny, retrieved from cosmosportal.org.
Our inner Solar System, where temperatures are ideal for liquid water and life-as-we-know-it, is full of rocky planets and devoid of any gas giants for many hundreds of millions of miles. But, as we know all too well from the last twenty years of finding exoplanets, this isn't the only way it could have turned out.
In fact, of the some 2,300…
esiegel | May 6, 2012
"There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody." -Adlai E. Stevenson
One of the worst feelings that I've ever experienced is when I feel as though someone has played me for a fool, and fleeced me out of my time, my money, and my trust. The Dang-Its know what I'm talking about; have a listen to their song,
Make A Fool Out Of Me.
One of the most common ads I see on the internet is for these miraculous, weight-loss, muscle-building "solutions," usually accompanied by some spectacular before-and-after photos. Here are a couple of examples, all…
esiegel | May 5, 2012"Without a wish, without a will,
I stood upon that silent hill
And stared into the sky until
My eyes were blind with stars and still
I stared into the sky." -Ralph Hodgson
The next month -- from May 5th to June 5th -- brings three of the most spectacular astronomy sights possible on Earth back-to-back-to-back for skywatchers of all types, without telescopes, binoculars, or any special equipment. Tonight, May 5th, marks what's come to be known as a Supermoon, or the largest, brightest full Moon of the year.
Image credit: Chris Kotsiopoulos at Earth Science Picture of the Day.
Not that you'll…
esiegel | May 2, 2012"This is the way I wanna die. Torn apart by angry fans who want me to play a different song." -Regina Spektor
You're familiar with the classic picture of a black hole: a dark, dense region at the center from which no light can escape, surrounded by an accretion disk of matter that constantly feeds it, shooting off relativistic jets in either direction.
Image credit: University of Warwick, retrieved from bordermail.com.au.
This is a pretty accurate picture of active black holes. But most black holes aren't active, and of the ones that are, they aren't active most of the time!
Most people…
esiegel | May 1, 2012"A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us." -John Steinbeck
Here on Earth, we all get to enjoy the delight of being located in an extremely fortuitous place in our Solar System. Not just today, mind you, but billions of years ago, when the Solar System's planets were first forming!
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech, retrieved from Jodrell Bank CfA.
Located close enough to our Sun, when the Earth first formed, like our neighbors Mercury,…
esiegel | April 28, 2012"They will see us waving from such great heights
'Come down now,' they'll say.
But everything looks perfect from far away
'Come down now,' but we'll stay." -The Postal Service
Whether you're under urban, city skies, where only a few dozen stars are visible on a clear night, or beneath some of the darkest skies on Earth, the Universe is out there, and you can get started discovering it, right now, for yourself. You can have yourself, as Bishop Allen would sing,
Another Wasted Night,or you can take advantage of it. For me, I currently live in Portland, OR, where the twilight looks like this.…
esiegel | April 27, 2012"And what I wanted to do was, I wanted to explore problems and areas where we didn't have answers. In fact, where we didn't even know the right questions to ask." -Donald Johanson
You can learn an awful lot about the Universe by asking it different questions than you asked about it previously. If all you ever used were your own senses, there would be an awful lot to learn, but you would be severely limited.
Image credit: Kerri Rankin Thoreson.
Even from the highest mountaintops, for example, you'd never be able to distinguish whether the Earth was round like a sphere or flat as a pancake,…
esiegel | April 25, 2012"Through that last dark cloud is a dying star... And when it explodes, it will be reborn. You will bloom... and I will live." -The Fountain
I want to start off by letting you all know that I, myself, do not have any children of my own. I have taught children, adolescents and adults for nearly a full generation now in varying capacities, and while each learner is different, there's one science fact that universally seems to shatter each and every one of them.
Image credit: the bloggers at Dear Kugluktuk.
The fact that the Sun, our Sun, the bringer of warmth, light, energy, and the sustaining…