esiegel | May 11, 2011"Master looks after us now, we don't need you anymore. Leave now and never come back!" -Smeagol, LOTR
You all know how to find the farthest galaxy ever, right? You take the most powerful telescope in the world, put it into space, and have it stare into the darkness for days on end. What do you find?
Image credit: Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
Galaxies! In just a tiny area like this, only about a fiftieth of a single degree on a side, over ten thousand galaxies are visible.
And, as you'll notice if you click through, and zoom in on a small section of these, some of these galaxies are much dimmer…
esiegel | May 9, 2011John Oliver: So, roughly speaking, what are the chances that the world is going to be destroyed? One-in-a-million? One-in-a-billion?
Walter Wagner: Well, the best we can say right now is a one-in-two chance.
John: 50-50?
Walter: Yeah, 50-50... It's a chance, it's a 50-50 chance.
John: You come back to this 50-50 thing, what is it Walter?
Walter: Well, if you have something that can happen and something that won't necessarily happen, it's going to either happen or it's gonna not happen. And, so, it's kind of... best guess at this point.
John: I'm... not sure that's how probability works,…
esiegel | May 7, 2011"If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late." -Henny Youngman
Normally, the best wonders of the night sky -- stars, planets and beyond -- happen, well, late at night. But every once in a while, it's actually the very early morning sky that holds the greatest sights. Just make sure you get up before -- as David Grisman and Tony Rice might tell you -- your sky is ruined by the
Morning Sun.Why's that? Well, if you look to the East, just before sunrise, you might see a sight like this:
Image credit: Luis Argerich.
Well, what do we have here?…
esiegel | May 6, 2011"God does not play dice with the Universe." -Einstein
"Einstein, don't tell God what to do." -Neils Bohr (disputed, but awesome)
Einstein, the brilliant mind behind general relativity and the concept of "spacetime," is making the news again this week. As you all know, gravity isn't some mysterious invisible force traveling across space, it comes about because energy itself -- most commonly in the form of mass -- distorts the very fabric of space.
Image credit: GNU user Johnstone and NASA's Galileo spacecraft.
Of course, wrapping your head around this can prove quite difficult. Space, as we…
esiegel | May 4, 2011"You still don't get it, do you? He'll find her! That's what he does! That's ALL he does! You can't stop him!" -Kyle Reese, the Terminator
Now that we've all survived Judgment Day, we can stop looking for ways to stop the Terminators, and go back to the search for dark matter. Let's back up a bit, though, and take a look at normal matter first.
As you well know, normal matter here on Earth is always subjected to the force of gravity. You throw something up into the air, and the Earth's gravity always works to pull it back down. In general, something moving under only the influence of the…
esiegel | May 2, 2011"I have departed from this planet and I have left behind my poor earthly ones with their occupations which are as many as they are useless; at last I am living in the scintillating splendor of the stars, each of which used to seem to me as large as millions of suns." -Jules Massenet
Each star in the night sky, just a distant, shining point of light, holds the same potential as our Sun. The potential for other worlds, for life, for civilization both as we know it and as we can only imagine it. On a clear, dark night, the possibilities seem almost limitless.
Image credit: ForestWander, Summit…
esiegel | April 30, 2011"Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you."
-William Arthur Ward
Here at my college, as well as at all those colleges and Universities on the semester system, the academic year is coming to an end. For those of you in elementary or secondary schools -- or on quarters at college -- you've got less than two months until the years is out.
And while "school's out" may be the ultimate goal for many of you, as your finals, last papers, grading, and exams will all be over at last, I'd…
esiegel | April 28, 2011"Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go." -e. e. cummings
Sometimes, you just need to take stock of what we know, and appreciate how far we've come. A hundred years ago, we thought the Universe consisted of the stars and nebulae in our Milky Way. We thought Newton's Law of Gravity governed it all, and that the other forces -- electromagnetism and a few weird quantum things -- were all there was.
So why not -- all in one article -- go through the entire history of the Universe, from as early as we can say anything sensible to as late as we can say anything sensible? Let'…
esiegel | April 26, 2011"Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it -- and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvelous discovery and an artist making a painting." -Carlo Rubbia, famous and infamous Nobel Prize-winning physicist
Unless you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you're aware that the largest, most powerful physics experiment in the history of the world is currently going on at CERN: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Image credit: CERN.
Colliding protons with other…
esiegel | April 24, 2011"Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are." -Kurt Cobain
Back in the early 1990s, not only a new sound, but also a new attitude emerged in Rock 'n' Roll. One that was dark and heavy, one that expressed the frustration and malaise of youth, and one that -- perhaps surprisingly -- swept the nation. The most prominent of these bands, without a doubt, was Nirvana, and here's their opening track off of my favorite album of theirs (and easily one of the best of all time):
About A Girl.Although it aired on MTV in December of 1993, I first heard that album about this time of year,…
esiegel | April 22, 2011"We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth." -Bill Anders, Apollo 8 Astronaut
This Earth Day, I think -- for anyone interested in space, astronomy, or the Universe -- gives us perhaps the best opportunity to look back on our planet as we understand it now, having traveled so far away from it.
It was only, believe it or not, back in the 1940s that we first photographed our planet from high enough up to directly observe that, in fact, the Earth is curved!
The above image, from 1948 in space over New Mexico, was the first panorama…
esiegel | April 20, 2011"You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn't care." -Clayton Christensen
What's the deal with gravity, dark matter, and this whole "lensing" business anyway? You've probably heard that energy -- most commonly mass -- bends light. And perhaps you've seen an image or two like this one to illustrate that.
Image credit: ESA, NASA, J.-P. Kneib and Richard Ellis.
Above is the great galaxy cluster Abell Cluster 2218. But those giant, stretched arcs you see? Those are actually background galaxies that get distorted and magnified by the giant cluster.
As the light leaves its source, the mighty gravity…
esiegel | April 18, 2011"The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow outvalues all theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
As a theorist, one of the challenges I face is bringing the experimental and observational sides of what we study to all of you. I understand its importance, its significance, and how it is the ultimate arbiter of our understanding. And yet, it is not my strongest…
esiegel | April 17, 2011"The loss of the night sky is most troubling for children. Whole generations of kids in cities and suburbs are growing up seldom if ever having seen the milky way and what a sky full of thousands of stars look like." -Timothy Ferris
While Dave Chappelle will tell you that everything looks better in slow motion, when you're looking at the night sky, you need a lot going for you these days. Paramount among them, as the Easy Star All-Stars might tell you (covering Pink Floyd), is
Time.Because if all you do is look up from within your city, you're likely to see something like this.
A pretty…
esiegel | April 14, 2011"All of nature begins to whisper its secrets to us through its sounds. Sounds that were previously incomprehensible to our soul now become the meaningful language of nature." -Rudolf Steiner
For millenia, humans have looked to the heavens for answers about the cosmos.
Image credit: ESO/S. Guisard.
And one of the main reasons I write what I do for all of you is to help give you -- as I've said many times -- is an awareness and an appreciation for what we've learned, what we think we know, and how we think we know it.
Which is why I was a little bit confused when I read this article from…
esiegel | April 12, 2011"I could have gone on flying through space forever." -Yuri Gagarin
It was April 12th, 1961, or fifty years ago today, that Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to leave Earth -- the ground, the atmosphere, the stratosphere -- and to soar into outer space.
Image credit: GETTY images.
What was unimaginable just half-a-century ago has become an amazing journey full of accomplishments, setbacks, disasters and unmitigated triumphs.
And to recap some of our greatest achievements, I thought I'd make up a fun little ten-question quiz for you, with answers (and pictures) below! Ready?
1.) What…
esiegel | April 11, 2011"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." -William Shakespeare
Ahh, the glorious shadows of our Universe. Everywhere that sunlight is blocked gives us shadow.
Image credit: Kaguya (Selene).
For the Earth, of course, this results in night and day each time the Earth rotates.
The Earth, though, is also tilted on its axis a significant amount, by about 23.5 degrees. When a pole tilts towards the Sun, it receives continuous daylight, while when…
esiegel | April 8, 2011"School sucks, right? I mean you do what you can to improve it, but in the end, there's a limit. Because it's school. And 'school sucks.' Remember?" -Louis C.K.
At every level, education always seems to be a hot button issue. Whether it's in primary and secondary schools, where testing at every level is the primary means to evaluate teachers, or in adult life, where we're always hearing about how scientifically illiterate the public is, we have pressing issues facing us.
And we can't be experts in everything, even the best of us.
Image credit: NASA and the European Space Agency.
Sure, if…
esiegel | April 6, 2011"Although important nuclear physics work was to go on in laboratories such as ours had become - and we had to cut down to a lower energy group - it was not fundamentally opening up new insights on the structure of matter. That required you to be in a higher league." -John Henry Carver
Okay, before we get into speculating, the short answer is maybe. And that's amazing! Let's recap the basics, and bring you up to speed of what could be the Tevatron's last -- and possibly greatest -- hurrah.
Image credit: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a.k.a. Fermilab.
This is the Tevatron. For decades…
esiegel | April 5, 2011"Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once." -Henry David Thoreau
This past weekend, the Astronomy Picture of the Day was a remarkable shot of the giant spiral galaxy NGC 6872, taken by the Gemini Telescope. (It's not Hubble, but Gemini is pretty impressive in its own right!)
One look at this galaxy should tell you that it's an interacting galaxy in the process of a collision! How should you be able to tell?
The distorted shape is a big clue; normal galaxies don't have extra-long tails stretched out in a line through space! That's…