Galaxies
Category archives for Galaxies
So much more than an Atom Smasher
Posted by Ethan on December 6, 2012 
“Forget it. I didn’t have that thing inside me where I wanted to smash against somebody and watch them break. I was too sensitive for that and disliked being that sensitive.” -Josh Brolin How do you figure out what something is made of? You take it apart — cracking it open if necessary — and…
Giving thanks for our place in the Universe
Posted by Ethan on November 21, 2012 
“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George Bernard Shaw All that is real about ourselves is nothing…
Messier Monday: Bode’s Galaxy, M81
Posted by Ethan on November 19, 2012 
“When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system.” -Kalpana Chawla Welcome to this week’s Messier Monday, where I pick a new object out of the original catalogue of 110 “faint fuzzies” designed to help comet-hunters avoid…
Every Galaxy will have New Stars for Trillions of Years!
Posted by Ethan on November 7, 2012 
“It’s a brilliant surface in that sunlight.” – Neil Armstrong Indeed, all that glitters so brilliantly in the cosmos does so because of the stars that have formed throughout it. Over the 14 billion-or-so years that our Universe has been around, we’ve formed hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone. Given that our…
Why I am a liar straight from the pit of hell
Posted by Ethan on October 5, 2012 
“It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!” -George Gamow Earlier today, a video (from last month) was released where one of the members of the US House of Representative — a member who sits…
The Deepest View of the Universe. EVER.
Posted by Ethan on September 28, 2012 
“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” -Joseph Campbell One of the bravest things that was ever done with the Hubble Space Telescope was to find a patch of sky with absolutely nothing in it — no bright stars, no…
If it comes back to you, it’s yours!
Posted by Ethan on September 10, 2012 
“Not even light can escape such hollowing, this huge mass in a small space. Even the Milky Way with its open arms is said to have a black hole at its heart.” -Susan B.A. Somers-Willett Our Milky Way is home to us all. With its hundreds of billions of stars, massive spiral arms, dust lanes,…
Where will we all be in 100 billion years?
Posted by Ethan on August 23, 2012 
“It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.” -Winston Churchill We’ve come a long way in this Universe. Over the past 13.7 billion years, we’ve formed the light elements out of a sea of protons and neutrons, cooled and expanded to form neutral atoms for the first…
Get Your Galaxy in Gear!
Posted by Ethan on August 17, 2012 
“We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form.” -Carlos Frenk The Universe has been around for a long time: nearly 14 billion years, to the best of our knowledge. When it was very young, there were absolutely zero stars in it, while today, there are hundreds…
What does the Universe look like beyond our Galaxy?
Posted by Ethan on August 9, 2012 
“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” -Carl Sagan Our night sky, quite literally, is our window to the Universe. Well, it’s kind of a…
