Q & A
Category archives for Q & A
So, you want to get involved in Astronomy?
Posted by Ethan on May 3, 2010 “An educational system isn’t worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn’t teach them how to make a life.” -Unknown Every now and again, people with all sorts of backgrounds — from some graduate school all the way to having not finished high school — ask me…
Is the Universe a Giant Hologram?
Posted by Ethan on March 24, 2010 Note: I’m on vacation this week, so here’s one from the vault. This article first appeared on my old website, back in February of 2009. Some days the questions I get are easy, and some days I get questions from our longtime reader, Ben. This past week, there have been reports all over the news…
Q & A: Inside a Gas Giant
Posted by Ethan on January 20, 2010 I’m always happy to receive questions from those of you interested enough to ask them, and every once in a while one of them feels just right to write up an article about it. Today’s comes from Brad Walker, who asks about the inside of gas giants. Specifically, The question pertains to the insides of…
Q & A: Did Inflation Happen Before the Big Bang?
Posted by Ethan on January 12, 2010 There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth… not going all the way, and not starting. -Siddhārtha Gautama, a.k.a. Buddha Last week, I started a new series on The Greatest Story Ever Told, about the origin and evolution of the Universe. In it, I asserted that inflation is the very first…
Blue Moons: Fact or Fiction?
Posted by Ethan on December 31, 2009 Blue Moon You knew just what I was there for You heard me saying a prayer for Someone I really could care for… -Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart Tonight is the last night of 2009, there’s a full Moon, there’s a sliver of a partial lunar eclipse, and it’s the second full Moon this month.…
LHC Smash!
Posted by Ethan on December 3, 2009 You’re making me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry. -Bruce Banner Hey, LHC, what did those protons ever do to you? You take them, accelerate them to the fastest speeds we’ve ever accelerated protons to on Earth, and then smash them into one another with more energy than ever before! The Large Hadron…
The Lights Stay On Inside a Black Hole!
Posted by Ethan on November 23, 2009 The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. -Vladimir Nabokov Last Friday, I posed a question to you, and you kindly responded by voting as to whether, when you crossed the event horizon of a black hole,…
Believe it or not: A Black Hole Question!
Posted by Ethan on November 20, 2009 Black holes have come up a couple of times this week, and I’ve always wondered something. When you fall into a black hole, all sorts of strange things happen. The most well-known one is that nothing — not even light — can ever escape once it falls in. Well, my question is, if you fell…
Are Black Holes Forbidden Mathematically?
Posted by Ethan on November 18, 2009 In the comments on one of my posts, someone pointed me towards Stephen Crothers, who gives the following argument (in a nutshell) as to why black holes cannot possibly exist: General Relativity is our theory of gravity, which relates the curvature of space to the gravitational acceleration of objects. This theory only works in certain…
Q & A: How could a meteor *explode*?
Posted by Ethan on October 28, 2009 In 1908, a huge fireball streaked across the sky and exploded a few kilometers above the Earth’s surface, downing trees for miles and miles around but leaving no impact crater on the ground. This mystery was known as the Tunguska event. But how did this happen? The amount of energy released was estimated to be…
