esiegel | October 26, 2011"Where there is no patrol car, there is no speed limit." -Peter Beckmann
You've of course heard the news that the OPERA collaboration in Italy has measured what appears to be neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light.
Image credit: Raoul Pop.
The way they did it was pretty straightforward. Shoot a pulse of protons moving at ultra-high energies -- at speeds indistinguishable from the speed of light -- into a fixed target.
Image credit: The OPERA collaboration's recent preprint.
They'll produce all sorts of high energy particles: baryons, mesons, electrons, positrons, muons, and more…
esiegel | October 25, 2011"In science, even when you're convinced that you know the right answer, you keep testing your understanding in new ways. You keep looking for phenomena that might do something different than what your best ideas and theories predict. As long as there's a Universe out there to investigate, science doesn't end." -Ethan Siegel
We've talked many times here about how the term theory gets abused by non-scientists, what scientific theories do and do not do, and of course, just yesterday, how important science and scientists actually are for progress in our quest to understand the Universe.
Image…
esiegel | October 24, 2011"Science is facts; just as houses are made of stone, so is science made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is not necessarily science." -Jules Henri Poincaré
The higher you fall from, the faster you'll be moving when you hit the ground.
Image credit: Marianne Holland.
Seems like the most obvious thing in the world. You know this intuitively, of course, based on all your experience in the world. Drop an egg from too great a height and it breaks.
While you wouldn't be afraid to jump off of a diving board like the one above, jumping from a greater height…
esiegel | October 22, 2011"I see miracles all around me
Stop and look, it's all astounding
Water, fire, air and dirt
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don't wanna talk to no scientist,
Y'all motherfuckers lyin', and gettin' me pissed." -Insane Clown Posse
While music certainly has the power to be uplifting, the Insane Clown Posse simply won't make the cut for this site. You'd do better listening to LZ Love's song,
Lift Me Up,which just might do it for you. Even so, it's nothing compared to the power of physics! In particular, the following fantastic video has been making the rounds. Have a look!
I first ran…
esiegel | October 21, 2011"By now you must know that your father can never be turned from the Dark Side. So will it be with you." -Emperor Palpatine, Return of the Jedi
You've heard about dark matter. It's the notion that the Universe is somehow very much different than the small corner of it that we're most familiar with.
Photo credit: International Astronomical Union, retrieved from bbc.co.uk.
When we look at our Solar System, we can add up all the rocky planets, the gas giants, the asteroids, moons, and comets, as well as the entire Kuiper belt, and find out just how much of our neighborhood is dark.
And we can…
esiegel | October 18, 2011"If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew." -Albert Einstein
One of the most famous scientific developments in the 20th century was the revelation that the Universe had a speed limit: the speed of light.
Image credit: United Visual Artists / Tom Oldham.
Clocking in at exactly 299,792,458 m/s, Einstein's theory of relativity states that any particle with mass can only approach -- but can…
esiegel | October 17, 2011"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." -Joseph Campbell
Space, as you know, is mostly empty, as the typical distance between galaxies far exceeds the size of the galaxies themselves.
But in a few select regions of the Universe, where the mass density is unusually above average, galaxies cluster together by the thousands. The closest huge cluster to us like this is the Coma Cluster, containing more galaxies than 95% of all known galaxy clusters.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / L. Jenkins (GSFC).
One of the first thing you'll notice about these galaxies is, unlike our…
esiegel | October 16, 2011"Appearances are often deceiving." -Aesop
While the Louvin Brothers might tell you that something else is more deceiving than appearances, as they sing
Satan Lied To Me,there's an internet site out there I've just discovered that celebrates creativity in deceptive appearances.
For your enjoyment, I present Things That Look Like Other Things! Some of my favorites are:
floor pillows that look like pancakes, complete with pats of butter,
a light fixture that looks like an ice-cream cone, perfect for your fluorescent bulbs,
kitchen utensils that look like household and garden tools,
a…
esiegel | October 14, 2011"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." -Albert Einstein
Now that you know how many galaxies are in our expanding Universe, you might be wondering about their speeds.
After all, since the Universe is expanding, that means that the farther away a galaxy is from us, the faster it's speeding away from us.
Graph credit: Michael Rowan-Robinson.
What's more than that, since the expansion itself is accelerating, galaxies speed away from us ever faster as time progresses.
It should come as no surprise, then, that galaxies that we see moving away from us at high…
esiegel | October 13, 2011"The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books---a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects."
-Albert Einstein
Earlier today, I had the pleasure of visiting a high school astronomy class via Skype, answering…
esiegel | October 11, 2011"The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it." -Alan Saporta
One of the greatest puzzles in the Universe today is just why the Universe is structured the way it is.
Image credit: Robert Gendler / Hubble Legacy Archive.
For the individual galaxies that we see, the puzzle is why they rotate at the speeds they do. If the only matter in these galaxies were normal matter (made out of protons, neutrons, electrons, etc.), the outskirts of these galaxies would rotate around their centers much more slowly than they actually do.
Image credit: Victor Andersen, University of Alabama, KPNO,…
esiegel | October 10, 2011"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." -Neil Armstrong
It still boggles my mind when I think about it, every time I look up at the brightest object in our night sky.
Image credit: Michael H. Myers.
After four-and-a-half billion years, life from Earth made it off of this planet, launching ourselves out of the Earth's atmosphere and away from the bounds of Earth's gravity.
Image credit: NASA.
After a more-than-200,000 mile…
esiegel | October 8, 2011"Oh, you gonna love this, boy. Tyrone calls you up, you know -- in the game -- and he says 'I can dig more clams than you, stupid!' And you gotta say 'Nuh-uh, boy!' And y'all gotta race down to the beach with your buckets and your shovels, and the object of the game...is to find parking." -Meatwad
The winners of this year's Nobel Prizes were announced this past week, and in honor of that, I present to you M. Ward's song,
Eyes On The Prize.
This year, I was ecstatic to report that the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three cosmologists, for their discovery -- through observations of distant…
esiegel | October 6, 2011"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before." -Edgar Allen Poe
Earlier this week, the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced for the discovery that the Universe is not only expanding,
but that this expansion is accelerating!
What does an accelerated expansion physically mean?
If all you had in the Universe was some initial expansion and the mutual gravitational attraction of everything in it, you'd expect that as an object got farther and farther away from you, over time, its apparent motion away from…
esiegel | October 4, 2011Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. -Robert Frost
Ever since the discovery of the radiation glow left over from the initial hot, dense state of the Universe -- the cosmic microwave background -- the Big Bang has proven to be the best description of the early Universe.
Image credit: Stephen van Vuuren.
This hot and dense initial state has, for the past 14 billion years, been expanding…
esiegel | October 3, 2011"To me it made no sense to pull one of even a few objects out of the swarm and call them something other than part of the swarm." -Mike Brown, A.K.A. PlutoKiller
In our Solar System, the four rocky planets dominate the inner portion, while the four gas giants dominate the outer Solar System. But out beyond Neptune, thousands of icy, rocky worlds -- including Pluto, the former ninth planet -- make up a vast, wide ring known as the Kuiper Belt.
Image credit: NASA.
What began as a curious collection of a few icy worlds has since revealed itself to us as an incredibly busy place, where -- since…
esiegel | October 2, 2011"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent." -Martin Luther King, Jr.
Whether you're someone who pays attention to the news or not, you are surely aware of the titanic struggles for freedom going on all over the world, from the United States to Libya, from Cairo to Kabul, from Saudi Arabia to Thailand. This weekend I've got a…
esiegel | September 30, 2011"We should do astronomy because it is beautiful and because it is fun. We should do it because people want to know. We want to know our place in the universe and how things happen." -John Bahcall
Of course you're all going to watch the exciting Live interview with me on KGW tonight (streaming here; video should be posted after-the-fact here), but shouldn't we give you some extra fun facts about neutrinos?
Here we go...
Both photons and neutrinos are created in the core of stars. But while photons take tens of thousands of years to reach the edge of the Sun, neutrinos make the trip in just…
esiegel | September 28, 2011"Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me. Like tall
And painless guillotines they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From…
esiegel | September 28, 2011"If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because, man, they're gone." -Jack Handey
Take a look at our home planet, Earth, and one of the things you'll notice is that over 70% of the surface is coated in water.
Image credit: NASA / Apollo 17.
We all know why this is, of course: it's because the Earth's oceans float atop the rocks and dirt that make up what we know as land.
This concept of floatation and buoyancy -- where the less dense objects rise above the denser ones, which sink to the bottom -- does much more than just explain the oceans.
This same principle…