blueshift
esiegel | June 10, 2013"It's coming right for us!" -Uncle Jimbo, from South Park
Welcome back to another Messier Monday, only here on Starts With A Bang! Each Monday, we take an in-depth look at one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier Catalogue, the first accurate and comprehensive deep-sky catalogue of relatively bright, extended celestial objects that can be viewed with even the most primitive of skywatching equipment under good skies. Each one of these objects -- ranging from nebulae to star clusters to galaxies -- holds its own, unique story.
Image credit: © 2008 by Patrick Freeman of http://…
esiegel | January 9, 2013"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." -Albert Einstein
It may be hard to believe, seeing as how it's been our leading theory of gravity for nearly a century now, but Einstein's General Relativity is possibly the most frequently challenged scientific idea of all-time. Of course, it's emerged victorious from each and every one of those challenges, making a slew of unintuitive predictions that have been spectacularly confirmed each time they've been tested.
Image credit: Miloslav Druckmuller (Brno U. of Tech.), Peter Aniol, and Vojtech Rusin.
This…