esiegel | August 28, 2011"Some of them act badly because they've had a hard life, or have been mistreated...but, like people, some of them are just jerks. Stop that, Mr. Simpson." -The Simpsons
Sometimes, it's good to just take a step back and enjoy something that's easy. There's a lot in this world to think about, worry about, learn about, and fight about. So while you enjoy this weekend's song,
Fight Like The Night,by Malcolm Middleton, I present to you the latest in time-wasting, entertaining, funny animal websites: Animals Being Dicks.
Short, animated gifs of... well, exactly what you might expect. And, as you…
esiegel | August 26, 2011"A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale." -Benoit Mandelbrot
It isn't just the clouds that appear smooth, but aren't if you zoom in close. In fact, it isn't just the mathematical curiosity known as the Mandelbrot set that's full of irregularities and ever increasing complexity as you zoom in.
It turns out that the entire Universe itself has these properties.
"Excuse me," you might say. "My Universe is certainly not smooth."
And of course, you'd be right.…
esiegel | August 25, 2011"Fortunately for serious minds, a bias recognized is a bias sterilized." -Benjamin Haydon
You might look up at the night sky, at the vast canopy of stars we can see, and ask, exactly, what we're seeing?
Image credit: Jim at Pictures Of My Universe.
Thousands upon thousands of stars, of course, even with just your naked eye. These stars come in all sorts of different sizes, temperatures, and distances, and what we see in the night sky is largely determined by a star's brightness and distance from us.
All the stars you can see with your naked eye belong to one of the seven color classes of…
esiegel | August 23, 2011"The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering." -Ben Okri
Let me take you back 20 years, to the early 1990s. Back then, the world's most powerful particle accelerator was right here in the United States: Fermilab's Tevatron.
With energies of one Tera-electron-Volt (hence Tevatron) per beam, and a beam of protons colliding with anti-protons, it was the most powerful accelerator in the world by a large margin.
And even though plans for the Large Hadron Collider were in the works (with 7 TeV per…
esiegel | August 21, 2011"The heart, Ramone. Don't forget the heart. Aim for the heart, or you'll never stop me." -Clint Eastwood, in A Fistful of Dollars
Sometimes, the greatest things that art, music, or even astronomy has to offer are the traditional standards that have been around for a very long time. Only, a new interpretation sheds a different light on the meaning, feeling or depth that comes along with it. Take the traditional song Columbus Stockade Blues, where the late Jeff Hickey performs my favorite version, recorded as:
Columbus Stockade.So it goes with the skies as well. Take a look at the Eagle Nebula…
esiegel | August 20, 2011"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."
-Winston Churchill
Ever wonder what will happen to the Earth once the Sun dies? Although it's happening very slowly, the Sun is burning through the nuclear fuel that powers it, giving off a tremendous amount of energy all the time as it happens.
Image credit: NASA's STEREO A spacecraft.
Like all stars, the Sun burns progressively hotter as it ages. A few billion years ago, solar output was 10% less than it is today, and a few billion years from now, it will burn so hot that our oceans will boil, something that only…
esiegel | August 18, 2011"The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience." -Milton Friedman
Dark matter is one of the most important components of the Universe today. And yet in the public's eye, almost no one accepts it the way, say, the Big Bang is accepted. But it should be, and I'll show you why.
Image credit: NASA / ESA / Marc Davis.
I've talked before about what it took to convince me that dark matter was the best theory out there (and gave a simpler version here), but -- with alternative theories making big headlines -- it's important to truly know why dark…
esiegel | August 16, 2011"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." -Winston Churchill
It's often said that you can't get something from nothing. And while this may be true for most practical applications of your life, it isn't true for our physical Universe.
And I don't just mean some tiny part of it; I mean all of it. When you take a look at the Universe out there, whether you're looking at the wonders of this world or all that we can see for billions of light years, it's hard not to wonder -- at some point -- where it all came from.…
esiegel | August 14, 2011"Anyone who has spent any time in space will love it for the rest of their lives. I achieved my childhood dream of the sky." -Valentina Tereshkova
We all have our heroes. Many of them meet with tragedy, and get eulogized in song. This week, I present to you a wonderful, bluegrass cover by Keller and the Keels of Pink Floyd's classic,
Another Brick In The Wall.But some heroes live on, and continue to share their ever-growing and evolving dreams with us.
Many of you may recognize this hero as Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman ever in space! (Also, she's the answer to #3 on my human…
esiegel | August 12, 2011"...it is reasonable to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star." -Arthur Eddington, 1926
(For Mike H., who wanted to know.)
The Sun -- like nearly all stars -- burns bright through its nuclear reactions, sending light, heat and energy out into the Universe over a timespan of billions of years.
Image credit: NASA / ISS / Space Shuttle Atlantis.
But it didn't need to be that way. With the mass of about 300,000 Earths, nearly all of it in the form of hydrogen fuel, you can just as easily imagine a huge nuclear explosion on the…
esiegel | August 10, 2011"Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently."
-Henry Ford
Back in 2003, a twin pair of rovers -- Spirit and Opportunity -- were launched from Earth to Mars. For no good reason at all, Opportunity has long been my favorite of the two.
Image Credit: NASA / JPL, as are all the Opportunity rover pictures.
Opportunity landed in January of 2004 in Eagle Crater, a relatively small crater on the surface of Mars. Originally slated for a 90-day mission, Opportunity has been going strong for nearly seven years now!
Over that time, it's made some amazing discoveries…
esiegel | August 9, 2011"Magnetism, as you recall from physics class, is a powerful force that causes certain items to be attracted to refrigerators." -Dave Barry
One of the first "invisible forces" people encounter in this world is when they're first exposed to the humble magnet.
As the image above shows, you're most familiar with what magnets do to other magnetic (or magnetizable) materials, like the paper clip.
But magnets also exert forces on electrically charged objects. They do it, though, in a way that you're certainly not used to. Unlike gravity, where the gravitational field pulls you in the direction of…
esiegel | August 7, 2011"Dang it, I am sick and tired of everyone's asinine ideas about me. I'm not a redneck, and I'm not some Hollywood jerk. I'm something else entirely. I'm... I'm complicated!" -Hank Hill
One of the most common questions I get from writing all I do about the Universe is whether or not I believe in a higher power, in any religion, whether I'm an atheist, etc. And up until this point, I've always declined to answer, on the grounds that it really shouldn't matter for what I do. But I've also declined to answer because, well, my own personal views don't really align very well with the views I've…
esiegel | August 5, 2011"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -Max Planck
(For Alan L., from the comments on this post.)
When you look out at the night sky, with the deepest, sharpest eyes possible, what is it that you see?
Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. Windhorst, S. Cohen, M. Mechtley, M. Rutkowski, R. O'Connell, P. McCarthy, N. Hathi, R. Ryan, H. Yan, and A. Koekemoer.
Galaxies! Lit by hundreds of billions of suns each (and that's just on average),…
esiegel | August 4, 2011"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the Moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'" -Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut
It was nearly 50 years ago that we left Earth for the first time.
Image credit: B. Anders, Apollo 8, NASA, in 1968.
We've walked on the Moon.
Image credit: Voyager 1, NASA, in…
esiegel | August 2, 2011"A birthday is just the first day of another 365-day journey around the sun. Enjoy the trip." -Author Unknown
Each of us has a birthday; mine is tomorrow, August 3rd. And while we're mucking around here on the ground, the Earth relentlessly orbits the Sun.
And while a sidereal year, or the time it takes the Earth to return to its same position in space, is not quite identical to a calendar year, it's awfully close. So much so, in fact, that with the exceptions of the planets having wandered a bit from year-to-year, you get the same night sky each and every year on your birthday.
Image…
esiegel | August 1, 2011"Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy." -Wislawa Szymborska
Our Milky Way Galaxy is home to not only our Earth and our Solar System, but hundreds of billions of other stars.
Image credit: Aarne Bielefeldt.
Held together by not only the incredible gravity of all of our stars, but by dark gas and dust far outweighing all the stars, and by trillions of suns worth of dark matter as well, our galaxy represents one of perhaps a hundred billion just like it in our vast Universe.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. Windhorst, S. Cohen, M. Mechtley, M.…
esiegel | July 30, 2011"And all your future lies beneath your hat." -John Oldham
Yes, with all the space, astronomy and astrophysics I do here, I can still recognize that there are things of great beauty and importance happening here on the lower 50% of our gaze. For this weekend, I've got a sweet song by Railroad Earth:
Neath The Stars.(Railroad Earth is great live, by the way. Don't miss your chance to see them if you get one!)
Well, beneath the ground, in many places across the world, lie a series of underground caves. The most spectacular one I've ever been to is Kartchner Caverns in Arizona, spectacular…
esiegel | July 29, 2011"It has been rightly said that nothing is unimportant, nothing powerless in the universe; a single atom can dissolve everything, and save everything! What terror! There lies the eternal distinction between good and evil." -Gerard De Nerval
(For Rich C. and Sili, for their questions on this post.)
The humble hydrogen atom -- one proton and one electron, bound together -- is the most common form of normal matter in the entire Universe. When you look out at all the galaxies in the Universe, what you're seeing is predominantly light coming from those simple hydrogen atoms fusing together at the…
esiegel | July 28, 2011"To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything." -Albert Camus
Our Sun has been shining brightly for over four billion years now, giving light, heat, and energy to our entire Solar System. But -- like every other star -- it won't continue to burn forever. In an estimated five-to-seven billion years, the Sun will cease its nuclear fusion reactions, and eventually contract down into a white dwarf star, losing a good fraction of its mass and…