esiegel | January 3, 2012"Change, like sunshine, can be a friend or a foe, a blessing or a curse, a dawn or a dusk." -William Arthur Ward
Few things are as essential to our world as we know it as the primary source of our light, heat, and all the life that flourishes on Earth as the Sun itself.
Image credit: NASA / ESA / SOHO-EIT Consortium, retrieved from legacy.spitzer.caltech.edu.
And yet, there are two things that may strike you as very important when it comes to our Sun. One may be the fact that, at 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) distant, the Sun is so much closer to us than even the next closest…
esiegel | January 1, 2012"The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once." -Rene Descartes
Happy New Year, everyone! While many of you are still awestruck at the image of the Universe compressed into a single year, it's time to move forward to the next thing. For those of you new to the game, as is tradition around here, every weekend I come to you with some music you may not have heard before and some important, fun, interesting, or educational thing to amuse you.
To start this year off right, I bring you Tim O'Brien's upbeat song,
Turning Around.…
esiegel | December 30, 2011The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. -Carl Sagan
If the story of our entire Universe's history, from the last stages of inflation and the Big Bang up to the present day, were to be compressed into one calendar year, what would it look like?
As 2011 comes to an end, here's my final present of the year to you.
(As always, click for a more readable, higher-resolution version.)
Happy new year to all; may you all enjoy our shared story and journey while you celebrate. See you in 2012!
esiegel | December 28, 2011"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened." -Dr. Seuss
2011 has been an amazing year over here. After more than two hundred new posts this year here on Starts With A Bang, where we covered everything from the science of tiny snowflakes to the earliest, farthest and most spectacular galaxies in the Universe, I've finally gone through and compiled the top 10 posts of 2011! (And sadly, no, the BEST climate study and associated controversy did not make the cut.)
Feel free to take a look back -- or if you somehow missed one of these stories, a deep look for the first time -- at the…
esiegel | December 26, 2011"And you may find yourself in another part of the world.
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife.
And you may ask yourself, 'Well, how did I get here?'" -Talking Heads
What would you do if you woke up one day, and found yourself in completely unfamiliar surroundings? You don't know what day it is, what year it is, or even where you are.
Is there any way, without any other information, that you could figure out exactly where in the world you were?
Image credit: World Map from Theodora.com.
We…
esiegel | December 24, 2011(This post first appeared on December 23, 2009, but has been reproduced, edited, and improved for 2011.)
089:32:50 Mattingly: Apollo 8, Houston. [No answer.]
089:33:38 Mattingly: Apollo 8, Houston.
089:34:16 Lovell: Houston, Apollo 8, over.
089:34:19 Mattingly: Hello, Apollo 8. Loud and clear.
089:34:25 Lovell: Roger. Please be informed there is a Santa Claus.
089:34:31 Mattingly: That's affirmative. You're the best ones to know. -NASA
The world is an awfully big place now. Santa's job has to be tougher than its ever been before, with more and more people relying on his deliveries each year.…
esiegel | December 23, 2011"Just as I did some 25 years ago, my graduate student is right now using one of the NOAO telescopes, learning how to do observational astronomy... Closing down one of these observatories in the next few years would likely lead to long term problems with producing adequately prepared astronomers in the future, and they are as necessary to achieving the goals of our decadal reports as any multi-billion dollar facility." -Adam Stanford, UC Davis
Every week, I come to you so excited to tell you all about some amazing physics or astronomy story, whether it's something new that's just been…
esiegel | December 22, 2011"A farmer travelling with his load
Picked up a horseshoe on the road,
And nailed if fast to his barn door,
That luck might down upon him pour;
That every blessing known in life
Might crown his homestead and his wife,
And never any kind of harm
Descend upon his growing farm." -James Thomas Fields
One of the greatest joys the Hubble Space Telescope has given us is the ability to peer deeper into the distant Universe than ever before. Not just at the giant, luminous galaxies visible with smaller, ground-based telescopes, but at the great sea of galaxies billions of light years away.
Image…
esiegel | December 20, 2011"Continue to surprise those who would put you in a neat demographic. Be insistently curious." -Gordon Gee
Twenty years ago, our Solar System was the only one we knew of that we were certain had planets orbiting around a main-sequence star.
Image credit: retrieved from Universe-Review.ca.
Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn't until 1995 that the first Extra-Solar Planet (exoplanet) -- or planet orbiting a star outside of our Solar System -- was discovered. And when it was, it was nothing like the planets in our Solar System. In fact, most of the earliest exoplanets discovered were not only more…
esiegel | December 18, 2011"None of you seem to understand. I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me! " -Rorschach, from Watchmen
One of the best graphic novels I've ever read is Watchmen, created by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins. (Decent movie, too.) One of the things that struck me most about it is how fatalistic and, in many ways, hopeless it all seems. To set the mood this week, I give you Ben Harper's melancholic song,
Widow Of A Living Man.With a slew of well-developed, major characters, a case can be made for any number of them as either the most heroic or villainous; in my case…
esiegel | December 17, 2011"Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help." -May Sarton
It's unbelievable how much more amazing the world becomes in slow-motion. You've probably seen some high speed cameras that shoot at astounding frame rates, such as the video (below) of a popping water balloon, at literally ten thousand frames-per-second.
Video credit: Youtube user Nathan Gray IX.
Compared to normal television or film, where frame-rates are typically only 24 to 30 frames-per-second, it's no wonder that this appears spectacular to our eyes…
esiegel | December 14, 2011"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 Heinrich Lambert
One of the greatest discoveries of the 20th Century was that many of the great, faint, extended nebulae in the night sky were not merely objects within our own galaxy, like the stars. Rather, these objects were many millions of light-years distant, and were entire galaxies unto themselves.
Image credit: Boren-Simon 2.8-8 ED POWERNEWT Astrograph Image Gallery.…
esiegel | December 13, 2011"There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool." -Richard Davisson
The Large Hadron Collider is the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, capable of accelerating protons absurdly close to the speed of light: 99.9999991% of the way there! Within a 26-kilometer-long ring, largest in the world, protons are accelerated both clockwise and counterclockwise up to these…
esiegel | December 11, 2011"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for." -Georgia O'Keeffe
There are secret dreams, hopes, and fears that live inside the heads of all of us. And it's one of the highest forms of art to release those internal visions in ways that touch other people. This week, the song I've picked for you is the little-known (and now-defunct) band Groovulous Glove, and their funk masterpiece,
Draw the Line.But what I'm most excited to show you is a true brilliancy: The Monster Engine, from artist Dave DeVries. (All images here taken from…
esiegel | December 9, 2011"Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear whenever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the Earth."
-Harold Urey
One of the most exciting investigations going on right now in space is NASA's Kepler Mission, which is on the hunt for planets beyond our Solar System!
Image credit: Dana Berry / NASA / Kepler Mission.
From high above the Earth's atmosphere in outer space, Kepler points at a small region of our sky, sensitive to a remarkable 150,000 stars within our galaxy!
Image credit: NASA / Kepler, retrieved from the Astronomical…
esiegel | December 7, 2011"Alas! must it ever be so?
Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go,
And fight our own shadows forever?" -Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Ever since it was conjectured that the speed of light was the ultimate speed limit of the Universe, we have tried -- with the most powerful of our tools -- to push as close to it as possible.
Image credit: Sven Geier, retrieved from Alpha Centauri.
And we know the speed of light in vacuum -- in perfectly, completely empty space -- exactly: 299,792,458 meters-per-second. That's what we refer to as c, or more casually, the speed of light. And that's really exact,…
esiegel | December 5, 2011"Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy." -Carl Sagan
(This post is coauthored by Dr. Peter Thieberger, Senior Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.)
A cheap, clean, efficient and virtually limitless source of energy would be just what our world needs right about now. The cheap sources -- coal, oil, and gas -- are dirty, destructive, and limited, while the clean sources -- wind and solar -- are expensive and…
esiegel | December 4, 2011"Welcome, new comers. The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people! And now you're gonna hear about it!" -Frank Costanza, Seinfeld
With the winter solstice and the end of the year approaching, the short days, long nights, and the annual holiday frenzy can be a great stressor. Take the time to remember the good things in life, including -- as Marvin Gaye might say -- all the people who matter most, including
You.Whether you're religious or not, this time of year is filled with lights, gifts, and decorations. And for those of you who…
esiegel | December 2, 2011"I have long held an opinion... that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, one into another, and possess equivalents of power in their action." -Michael Faraday
For centuries, the idea that you can't get something for nothing was floating around long before we knew about the most important conservation law in all of the Universe: the Conservation of Energy.
Image credit: Mr. Torgerson's 6th grade class.
For example, the ball…
esiegel | December 1, 2011"Years of science fiction have produced a mindset that it is human destiny to expand from Earth, to the Moon, to Mars, to the stars." -Barney Oliver
Just five days ago, the newest rover sent to Mars, Curiosity, was successfully launched aboard an Atlas V rocket.
Image credit: NASA / Bill White, retrieved from gizmag.com.
But if you're anything like me, you can't just sit around and wait until its arrival in August of next year! After all my favorite rover is still rolling around on Mars after eight years, and has just uncovered something no other craft on Mars has seen before.
Image credit…