"What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet." -William Shakespeare

(Image credit: Stellarium. As always, click on all images for the highest-res version available.)

5,000 light years away, this cluster of stars is loaded with the full gamut of stellar colors, from blue to white to red, and is easily visible through any astronomical tool from simple hand-held binoculars to pretty much any type of telescope. It's one of the brightest, most prominent star clusters in the entire night sky not to make it into the first astronomical catalog of interesting night sky objects.

(Image credit: Nigel Metcalfe.)

But young star clusters like this aren't all that rare, even within our own galaxy. But this one houses a surprise. With either extremely dark skies, a large, powerful, and low-magnification telescope, or a very long-exposure astrophotography project, you can see something extraordinary engulfing this star cluster.

(Image credit: Adam Block and Tim Puckett.)

This dim, red glow is actually evidence of incredibly hot temperatures, but not for the reasons you might think! Unlike lava, which glows a dim red because of its very high temperature of over a thousand degrees, this glow is produced by temperatures much, much higher than that. In fact, regions in the core of this star cluster reach a temperature of over 6 million Kelvin, and the red color that you can see comes from a very special property of the hydrogen gas surrounding the cluster.

(Image credit: Astronomy Know How.)

When this incredibly powerful radiation from the stars collides with a hydrogen atom, it kicks the atom's lone electron clear out of the nucleus, leaving just a proton behind. Eventually, another electron -- kicked off of some other hydrogen atom -- runs into our ionized nucleus, producing stable, neutral hydrogen and a cascade of infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light at well-defined frequencies.

The red color comes from the most powerful visible-light transition in hydrogen, and is the cause of this vast illumination of the interstellar medium. With temperatures this hot, you may wonder just how far this nebula extends, and the answer is a spectacular Valentine's Day treat.

(Image credit: Rosette Nebula by Adam Block and Tim Puckett.)

Spanning an amazing 130 light years in diameter, the Rosette Nebula is one of the largest, most symmetric emission nebulae in the entire galaxy.

Looking at it, you may wonder how it got to be this way, and why it's the shape and size that it is. It turns out that our galaxy, in addition to the stars, planets, and dust that you know about, is also littered with huge, diffuse, cold and (often) fast-moving clouds of gas.

Most of the time, these clouds of gas are quite content to zip along without causing any sort of fracas, but every so often, something -- perhaps a nearby supernova, or a collision with another gas cloud -- starts this cold cloud on its way towards gravitational collapse. While this happens, the densest regions start accruing the most matter the fastest, and that's where new stars first form! We can learn about the newest stars by looking in the X-ray portion of the spectrum.

(Image credit: Chandra X-ray observatory, NASA / CXC / SAO / J. Wang et al.)

What we find is that not only is the core of this nebula the hottest, containing the youngest, most massive stars, but that's also the oldest part of the nebula, and the place where star formation, although ongoing, was triggered the earliest. In other words, even though stars are forming everywhere, while the hydrogen gas slowly condenses into stars in the densest locations and evaporates in the most diffuse, star formation started at the center and slowly, over hundreds of thousands to millions of years, worked its way outward!

If we look in the far infrared part of the spectrum, we can see this in action.

(Image credit: ESA / PACS & SPIRE Consortium / HOBYS Key Programme Consortia.)

This image of gas -- taken by the Herschel Space Telescope -- on the outskirts of the Rosette Nebula shows massive stars up to ten times the mass of our Sun forming in the brightest regions here, while stars only a fraction of our Sun's mass form in the central, smallest pockets of dust.

If we go back to a section of the original, visible light image, we can see where that dust is densest, from its light-blocking properties, as well as where its evaporating the fastest, right around the edges of those dusty regions.

(Image credit: Adam Block and Tim Puckett.)

This NOAO image, although impressively detailed, doesn't quite have either the highest resolution or the most information possible in there. Because it's confined to "true color," we can't really learn what elements are present in this nebula. But by looking in false color, where different colors correspond to different elements, we can see that there's actually a rich diversity of different types of elements here.

(Image credit: Ignacio de la Cueva Torregrosa.)

In this image, the color red corresponds to the element Sulfur, prominent in the atmospheres of all the bright, young, visible stars. The familiar Hydrogen is shown in green, while the bluish regions are dominated by Oxygen. As you can see, even though there's the red glow of hydrogen everywhere, many regions are dominated by a diversity of elements!

But what about resolution? Believe it or not, there was a survey designed to probe deep inside these regions! Known as the Isaac Newton Telescope Photometric Hα Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane, this very region of the Rosette Nebula was imaged at an unbelievably high resolution. (If you're only going to click and explore one image on this page, make it the one below!)

(Image credit: Nick Wright, University College London, on behalf of the IPHAS Collaboration.)

While massive stars continue to form and grow in these dusty, stellar nurseries, the winds from the ultra-hot central stars compete to blow the remaining dust away, stunting their growth and preventing them from reaching the sizes of the greatest central monstrosities, which can be many dozens of times the mass of our Sun, and have lifetimes of under a million years!

This image is at such high resolution that I can zoom in to this small of a region (can you find it, above) and still see this level of detail:

But what about zooming out, even farther than before, and viewing the entire cosmic rose in all of its glory? Here at Starts With A Bang, this is my Valentine's Day giift to all of you, in time to send it to your favorite person in the galaxy.

(Image credit: Adam Block and Tim Puckett.)

Happy Valentines Day, from the biggest Valentine in the galaxy!

"The human world stands about midway between the infinitesimal and the immense. The size of our planet is near the geometric mean of the size of the known universe and the size of the atom. The mass of a human being is the geometric mean of the mass of the earth and the mass of a proton. A person contains about 10²⁸ atoms, more atoms than there are stars in the universe. Such considerations yield perhaps only a relative location. Still, questions of place and proportion arise." -Holmes Rolston III

You might consider a whale "large" and a mouse "small," and perhaps they are when compared to you, but that's only an incredibly tiny fraction of the scales we're talking about when it comes to the Universe. A little over a year ago, I pointed you over to an interactive application showcasing the scale of the Universe. While it was very entertaining, I was also quick to point out that it was rife with errors, and not to be trusted about some matters.

But oh, has there ever been an upgrade, and you do not want to miss this!

(All images screen captured here, credit Cary and Michael Huang.)

First off, the images are much more detailed than before and some of them are even animated!

But there's much, much more, on every scale you could ask for.

As we go to larger scales, you can see there are a great many more objects placed in the application, to help you get a handle of relative scale. Where does our Moon fit in the scheme of the great moons of the Solar System? This scale comparison should help give you a great feel for it.

What about planets and stars? A vast array are not only presented here, you may notice a tremendous feature upgrade: each object is annotated, with a small tidbit of information about each specific object in question! Although some of them are silly, other than a few typos, the information is factually accurate!

What's also amazing is the difference between these scales. The Moon may be a million times larger than we are, the star, La Superba, above, may be another factor of a million larger than the Moon!

But if you want to pick up an entire galaxy, you need to go a factor of a billion larger than even those huge, supergiant stars! And finally, to encompass the entire observable Universe, you'd need to zoom out another factor of a million. (Which, remember, because space is three-dimensional, is a difference in volume of 10¹⁸, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000!)

And this takes us to the edge of what we can ever see in the whole Universe! Unlike in the previous edition, they get the scale right in the new version, almost like they had read my criticisms exactly, and incorporated my recommended fixes!

But it gets even better, because you can zoom down to tiny scales, too. Going far inside a human, which is meter-scaled, you can go way, way down.

While the width of a strand of human DNA may be around a billion times smaller than a human, if you unravelled it and stretched the amount of DNA in any single cell, you'd find it's about ten feet long, or taller than any human being! (And all of that information is available in the annotation!)

But what about when we go to the smallest known particle scales? You actually get the information I wished they had included in the first version!

What do they tell you?

Lengths shorter than this are not confirmed
100 attometers
1 x 10^-16 m
All the objects that are smaller than this are unmeasured. The sizes that they appear are only estimates. Some things, like quantum foam, are just parts of theories. They aren't fact.

The numbers they're reporting are based on the interaction cross-section of these particles, which is what allows you to calculate the probability that they'll collide with another particle. The cross section, of course, is an area (a length-times-width), so you'll need to take the square root of that to get the approximate size, and that's how they get it!

This isn't the same as the actual, physical size, which we don't know how to measure. And that's why a low-energy neutrino -- like the ones left over from the Big Bang -- not only have a much smaller cross-section, they haven't even been detected yet!

And finally, if we go all the way down to the limit of what our best quantum theories can predict, to the Planck Scale, beyond which physics breaks down, this is where the most speculative of our theories live. Is there a quantum foam; are there strings and branes? What is the fundamental nature of spacetime at these scales; is it quantized and discrete or continuous? Is there a fundamental quantum theory of gravity or not? Although we don't know, this is where you'd look to find out, on scales 35 orders of magnitude smaller than we are.

And all of it, the whole Universe, spans some 63 orders of magnitude, from the smallest sensical quantum scale to the entire observable Universe (and beyond, for the particularly brave), is available for you to explore -- zooming in-and-out as you please -- in this one remarkable toy!

Say goodbye to a huge chunk of your weekend, and know that it will be time well spent!

"The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience." -William Herschel

(Image credit: Daniel Dendy.)

While each of these classical, wandering objects can easily be seen with the naked eye under the right conditions, the seventh planet, Uranus, was not discovered until 1781, by William Herschel himself. Under the right dark sky conditions, Uranus is just barely visible to the naked eye, right at the limit of human vision. Unless you know where to look at any given time, it's very unlikely you'll see it.

But if you take a look at the sky just after sunset, tonight, you'll be in for a remarkable treat. Particularly if you live in the Americas.

(Image credit: Stellarium.)

As you may have noticed, looking towards the southwest portion of the sky just after sunset, there are two very bright objects hovering above the horizon. Venus, the brightest object (other than the Moon) in the night sky, follows the Sun into the west, while Jupiter (the second brightest) lags behind by a few hours.

Up at my latitude (about 45 degrees North), this is what clear skies will look like around 6:00 PM. But wait just a bit longer -- maybe a half-hour -- and darkness sets in, allowing the light from those distant orbs in the night sky to dominate.

To your naked eye, Venus will still shine more brightly than any other object. It will be a few hours before the Moon comes up and a few hours before Venus falls down below the horizon. But coming closer to Venus than any other time this year is the planet Uranus, and those of you in the Americas will get to see it near its closest approach, right around 7:00 PM Pacific time.

Have a pair of binoculars languishing somewhere at home? Break them out, and point it towards Venus. If you let your eyes get adapted to the dark, even if you have relatively urban skies, here's what you're likely to see.

In addition to the bright disk of Venus, you're likely to see a small point of light a small distance away from it. While it may appear to be a faint star or a small moon, it's neither. Venus has no moons of its own, and there are no stars anywhere near that magnitude in this region of the sky. What you're seeing, billions of miles away, is the planet Uranus!

(Image credit: Bob King, retrieved from Astro Bob.)

The bright, consistent disk of the planets make this a sight visible to many even in light-polluted regions. Unlike looking for a galaxy, nebula, or other extended object, everyone should give this a try. And for those of you with even a small telescope, you are in for a treat. Normally, Uranus is very difficult to find. But tonight, it will be separated from Venus by less than the angular size of the Full Moon! If you can find Venus in your telescope, you're not only likely to find Uranus, too, but to see that it is a disc, not just a point!

For a size comparison -- how big are these disks relative to the full Moon -- I give you this chart, modified from Peter Freiman's original.

The planet Uranus is a sight that most people never get to see in their lifetimes, but if you've got clear skies and you're in the Americas, don't miss your chance to hunt for it tonight!

And I should make this clear: this is one night only!!!

Venus moves somewhat rapidly across the sky, at least in astronomical terms. While tonight, it will be separated from Uranus by maybe half the size of the full Moon (around 0.3 degrees), by tomorrow at the same time, it will be more than two full Moons away!

(Venus and Uranus' separation, at 6:09 PM on February 10, 2012 from Portland, OR.)

This close dance of Venus and Uranus is a rare one, and it's rarer still that they occur when both planets are in prime viewing location in the early evening.

Tonight: one night only, it's Venus and Uranus, together in the sky. Don't miss it!

Read the comments on this post...]]> http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2012/02/hey_america_break_out_the_bino.php http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2012/02/hey_america_break_out_the_bino.php Astronomy Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:07:08 -0500

"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

What would we find, today, if we turned our attention upwards for the first time ever?

(Image credit: Mila Zinkova.)

Up in the night sky, we'd find some different classes of objects. Some wouldn't twinkle, ever, under any atmospheric conditions. These objects -- the Moon, satellites, and the planets -- we could easily see, with a telescope, had large angular sizes and big, identifiable parallaxes, allowing us to determine their actual size and their distance from us. These would be the objects within our own Solar System.

There would also be stars, in a variety of colors, temperatures, sizes, and distances. We would quickly discover the relationship between the distance to a star and its apparent brightness, and how that was related to its intrinsic brightness.

(Image credit: NASA / JPL - Caltech.)

We'd slowly start to -- with lots of observing targets and time -- learn the science of astronomy. We'd learn about different star types, including main-sequence stars, red giants, variable stars like Cepheids and RR Lyrae stars, and stars that went nova or even supernova!

Armed with the knowledge of what's in our Solar System and of the stars that lie beyond it, we'd have a strong base for peering beyond, into the rest of the Universe. So that finally, when we looked up at the third type of object in the night sky -- the extended nebulae -- we'd be ready to learn lots of interesting things about them.

(Image credit: NASA, ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz.)

How old are these young star clusters? With an understanding of stars, we can tell you. How far away are these nebulae and supernova remnants? By understanding individual stars and the distance/brightness relationship, we can tell you. And finally, what about these faint, fuzzy blobs and spirals in the sky? Just what are they?

(Image credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA and H. Ebeling.)

At this point in time, we can resolve individual stars inside many of them, and find that unlike the stars in our own galaxy -- which are hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of light years away -- these objects are millions of light-years distant. In other words, they are island Universes, or galaxies entirely separate from our own!

This might seem like the most obvious thing in the world today, but consider that this was not known until less than a century ago. And while you were making these measurements of distances to these galaxies, you might have noticed something else.

(Image credit: retrieved from Western Kentucky University.)

These galaxies were not just very distant, but the light coming from them was also redshifted. When objects move towards or away from you, the frequency of the light gets shifted towards the blue or red end (respectively) of the spectrum, with the faster motions corresponding to a swifter velocity. According to general relativity, the expansion (or contraction) of spacetime could cause the same type of red (or blue) shift of the light.

What you'd find, when you looked out at all of the galaxies you could see, would've been something remarkable.

(Image credit: R. P. Kirshner, 2003.)

You'd find that the more distant a galaxy was from you, on average, the more redshifted its light was! You'd notice that this was virtually independent of direction on the sky, and that -- excepting the fact that there was a "scatter" of a few hundred to maybe a thousand km/s -- this was a Universal relation, extending for not just millions but billions of light years!

From this alone, you could draw a few different conclusions depending on how you interpreted your data, such as:

• the Universe was such that we were at the center, at rest, and that objects were moving away from us, with further objects moving away faster,
• light was getting tired, and that the further away a light-emitting object was, the more energy it lost, shifting further into the red end of the spectrum, or
• the Universe was expanding under the rules of General Relativity, and that the galaxies' light shifted deep into the red because of the Universe's expansion.

(Image credit: NASA / CXC / M. Weiss.)

We'd have a Universe that was expanding, that was smaller, denser, and (because of how wavelengths/frequencies work) hotter in the past. Which means we'd have a Universe that was expanding, diluting, and cooling today.

This "model" of the Universe is one you might recognize: this is the Big Bang picture of the Universe! If this were true, you'd ask yourself, what else would we expect to be the case?

(Image credit: 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey.)

If we looked into the past, we'd expect that the Universe would have been more uniform, with fewer large galaxies and fewer giant clusters of galaxies. After all, if the Universe has been around for a finite amount of time, and gravity attracts things over time, the structure that existed billions and billions of years in the past should consist of smaller galaxies that are less clumped together than the ones that exist today.

In other words, the Universe should have been more homogeneous in the past. We also said that the Universe should have been hotter in the past! What does that mean?

(Image credit: retrieved from the Ministry of Science and Technology in Brazil.)

It means, at some point, the average temperature/energy of a photon in the Universe should have been so high that neutral atoms -- the stuff that makes up everything we know on Earth -- would not have been able to form! A hot, ionized plasma is all that should have been around, as every time an atomic nucleus tried to capture an electron, a photon should have come along and blasted it apart. So at some point, the Universe should have been filled with a hot, dense plasma. (Which we know -- by the way -- is opaque, or not transparent, to light! Remember this!!!)

But we can go back even further! Imagine a time that was even hotter and denser than when this plasma existed, to a time where it was so hot that even protons and neutrons -- the constituents of atomic nuclei -- would be blasted apart by the scorching hot radiation of the Universe!

(Image credit: me, modified from Lawrence Berkeley Labs.)

At some point, the lightest elements in the Universe would have been unable to form. These are some of the consequences of this Big Bang model of the Universe, and these are theoretical predictions that we can test!

How's that?

Each of these events will leave observable signatures behind. If we start out in a hot, dense, roughly uniform state and come forward in time, we can predict what we should see today based on the Big Bang model of the Universe! Let's start at the beginning and come forward.

(Image credit: Ned Wright.)

The light elements: as the Universe expands and cools from an incredibly hot, dense state, eventually it will cool enough that the protons and neutrons, left over from an even hotter, denser state, will fuse together into the light elements deuterium, tritium, helium-3, helium-4, lithium-6, lithium-7, and beryllium-7. The only parameters that determine how much of these light elements get created are the ratio of photons to protons+neutrons. Because we know the particle physics behind it, we can know how much helium-4, helium-3, deuterium, lithium, etc., should be left over from the Big Bang, dependent only on that one, measurable parameter. If we can find some pristine gas from the early Universe, all of these elements should exist in those predicted abundances.

(Image credit: COBE / FIRAS, retrieved from Fermilab.)

The leftover radiation from the Big Bang: better known as the Cosmic Microwave Background! Because the hot plasma was opaque to light, we can't see all this radiation from the Big Bang until these neutral atoms form. But once these neutral atoms form, that leftover radiation from the Big Bang should not only stream directly to us, it should come to us practically uniformly in all directions, with a predictable, blackbody spectrum stretched by the expansion of the Universe. (Note that the other, above explanations for redshift -- including tired light -- do not give the proper spectrum!)

The discovery of this leftover radiation and the accurate measurement of its spectrum led, historically, to the acceptance of the Big Bang, as no other model of the Universe explains this observation, the abundance of the light elements, and the redshifts of the distant galaxies simultaneously. But there is one more great observation we can make.

(Image credit: V. Springel at Max-Planck-Institute at Garching.)

The Large-Scale Structure of the Universe: from the earliest stars and galaxies to modern times, from isolated dwarf galaxies to humongous clusters and superclusters, some of which have behemoth galaxies maybe 100 times the mass of the Milky Way inside of them, we should find larger, clumpier structure in the Universe today and more sparse, uniform structure in the past.

And we do! To all of it: WE DO!

And that's what the Big Bang is. That's how we'd figure it out today, and that's how we figured it out historically. And -- this is important, detractors and skeptics -- it isn't everything.

(Image credit: Composition of the Cosmos, retrieved from the LSST.)

It doesn't tell you exactly how much structure you have in the Universe and on what scales; you need a set of initial fluctuations for that, and that's what inflation gives you. It doesn't tell you exactly how the Universe has expanded over its history; you need to know how much total matter and dark energy are in the Universe for that, which is something the Big Bang doesn't predict for you. (You might assume that there isn't any dark energy, and that all the matter is normal -- protons, neutrons, and electrons -- but that would be awfully presumptive of you!) It doesn't tell you how the structure the Universe contains evolves over time; you need dark matter in addition to normal matter to get that right. And it doesn't tell you about the pattern of fluctuations you should see in the nearly-perfectly-uniform microwave background: you need inflation, dark matter, and dark energy for that. (Incidentally, the same amounts and types that the other measurements told you that you'd need, but that's a story for another time!)

But you mustn't deny the Big Bang because it couldn't predict those things. Those things went beyond the scope of the Big Bang. The Big Bang knows what to do with them if you put them in, but just like any theory, it can't do everything by itself. But that's what the Big Bang is, that's how it works, and that's how we know it's right.

Any questions?

"If people decide they're going to deny the facts of history and the facts of science and technology, there's not much you can do with them. For most of them, I just feel sorry that we failed in their education." -Harrison Schmitt

(Images credit: Dr. Roy Spencer (top) and American Meteorological Society (bottom).)

This is especially true when you're presented with biased facts or premises as your starting point. In an ideal world, every source you went to for your news would agree on the same fundamental facts, and you'd have a wide variety of logical, reasonable interpretations of those facts. No one would be misleading; no one would present counterfactual information; no one would cherry-pick the data to support a preconceived or scientifically invalidated conclusion. Every news source you heard from would be qualified to give an opinion, and that opinion would be an informed one, biased only by their experience, and not by any political or economic agenda.

This is, no doubt, a dream world, as you are probably much more familiar with what actually goes on.

(Image credit: Philadelphia Inquirer / Universal Press Syndicate.)

You might hope that your favorite mainstream news sources wouldn't fall for this type of false equivalence. Surely they -- under the guise of presenting fair, balanced, objective news -- wouldn't fail to fact-check even the most basic of claims, to ensure they're printing the truth? The most reputable ones -- the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, the New York Times -- surely this is what they do; surely that's what journalism is, right?

Hopefully you caught it, last month, when the public editor of the New York Times asked whether news sources should serve as truth vigilantes and correct untrue facts in their reporting. The overwhelming response was, thankfully,

yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth.

Throughout my time writing this blog, I've always done my best to present to you the best, most factually accurate information I can possibly find, and to present it through the lens of my experience as a theoretical astrophysicist to tell you -- to the best of my abilities -- what it most likely indicates. Sometimes this generates the good kind of controversy, such as when others disagree with my interpretation of the facts. When that happens, I welcome an interesting, if often inconclusive, dialogue. But when they make up their own facts to do so, that is not okay, and that opinion does not deserve equal voice, equal time, or any other sort of false balance. As Felix Frankfurther said (and I am fond of quoting),

It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.

(Image credit: Lamarck's Giraffe, retrieved from University of Miami.)

Given a modern understanding of genetics and DNA, of course, this is not true, and Lamarckism is not an equal idea to natural selection. When you get your news about evolution, an invalid idea such as this should not pollute your news.

So with all of this in mind, where should you go to get your science and health news? Up until now, the options were either:

• Go to an aggregator (like google news), and trust yourself to decide what's trustworthy and what isn't,
• Go to a "trusted news source" like the Times, the Journal, etc., and trust their editors and reporters to report the truth, or
• Create your own bookmarks/RSS feed of sources that you trust, and go out and manually gather that information yourself.

But all of that is about to change. I told you back in November that I had taken a new job, where my goal was to create this news source -- for quality science and health news -- that didn't yet exist. Where you or anybody could come to get a wide interpretation of perspectives, some of which are cursory, others which are more in-depth, but all of which are controlled for quality and veracity, on a huge variety of science and health issues of the day. Where political or ideological biases are minimized and sources of spam have been filtered out. Where demagoguery is not allowed. And where advertising dollars or artificially inflated SEO don't dictate what you see. Today, I am pleased to unveil to you what I've been working to create:

Say hello to Trap!t, an artificial-intelligence engine designed with the express purpose of discovering quality-checked content on any topic of interest you provide it with. In particular, I'm the head editor and curator of the Science and Health sections, doing my absolute best to bring diverse, high-quality content that doesn't compromise on medical or scientific facts.

What that's means is I've been training the software to learn what it means to be a topical article, quality site, and a reliable source for a whole variety of topics, from Autism to Climate Change, from Outer Space to Dinosaurs, from Fluoride to Vaccination. Each of these boxes, shown above, is a "trap" of relevant articles from around the web, with the most recent news items displayed first. Trap!t is a real-time, artificial-intelligence-powered news aggregator that continuously pulls content from all the reputable, original sources around the web it can find, filtering through them to bring you only the articles you've trained it to bring you. You can make your own user-created traps on any topic you like, training it by liking and disliking the first round of search results, or you can go into the featured traps sections, where I (and the rest of the curation team) have been working to optimize the content you'll see on a wide variety of relevant, newsworthy topics. (My work can be seen in every one of the featured traps for Science and Health, but any user can create and train their own user traps, which you're welcome to do if you like.)

And, of course, I'm committed to being a truth vigilante about each and every one of the Science and Health traps, and I've even written an in-depth piece on the trap!t blog explaining what that means. (Seriously, you should go read it.)

At this point, I've created and trained more than 30 traps each for science and health. The ones that are currently active and visible from the featured traps page are as follows:

Science			Health
Archaeology	Exoplanets	Plastic	Abortion	Eating Disorders	Nutrition
Bears	Fracking	Robots	Alcoholism	Fitness	Obesity
Bees	Green Cars	Saturn	Alzheimer's Disease	Fluoride	Organ Transplants
Biofuels	Hubble Space Telescope	Science Education	Assisted Suicide	Gluten Disorders	Peanut Allergy
Butterflies	Hurricanes	Sharks	Autism	H.I.V./A.I.D.S.	Plastic
Climate Change	International Space Station	Stars	Body Image	Health Care Reform	Prenatal Care
Deep Sea Life	Large Hadron Collider	Stem Cells	Breast Cancer	Hearing Loss	Skin Cancer
Dinosaurs	Lions & Tigers	Supernova	Concussions	Heart Disease	Tobacco
Dolphins	Mars	The Sun	Diabetes	Influenza	Vaccination
Earthquakes	Meteor Showers & Comets	Turtles	Domestic Violence	Medical Marijuana	Yoga
Eclipses	Neutrinos	Volcanoes	Dyslexia	Migraines
Elephants	Outer Space	Whales
Evolution	Penguins	Wolves

But I'm not satisfied with the content I've created so far, no matter how useful (and unique) it is at the moment. I'm committed to creating a high-quality science and health news outlet here, and I need your help to do it. Here's what you can do.

Go to the featured traps -- either Science, Health, or both -- and poke around inside. If you're an expert on one of these topics, that's particularly useful. Because here are the things I need to know:

• Are there articles you're seeing that aren't relevant to the topic at hand?
• Are there sources that you know are too disreputable or highly politicized when it comes to the issue at hand to be considered reliable?
• Are there glaring omissions, of stories, blogs, or online articles that should have been included in this trap, but somehow weren't?

In fact, I want you to let me know what you think, what's working, what's misfiring, and what you'd like to see so bad, that either by commenting here or by emailing me at "trapit DOT science AT gmail DOT com", I'll be giving away free stuff for your feedback! Everyone who comments or emails gets entered in a raffle to get a free trap!t T-shirt (winners TBA), and the most useful/constructive comments will get a free trap!t sweatshirt, which will instantly* transform you into a bad ass.

(* -- transformation may not actually happen.)

So, this is what I'm working on. Science news, health news, and the truth. The world needs it, and -- along with the rest of the company here at trap!t -- I'm working to make it happen. Help me out, let me know what you think, both about the idea and the implementation, and let's make this great for ourselves and for the world!

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"There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man."
-Winston Churchill

Of all the songs I could have chosen, that's the one, because I came across this product on Amazon.com:

That's right, a horse mask. What would you do if you had a horse head mask? The possibilities are... well, numerous, to say the least.

Unsurprisingly, the customers have really taken reviews of this product to the next level; see for yourself.

But the real star of the show truly highlights the creativity that's out there. The reason I couldn't stop laughing and had to share this with you is because there's a gallery of over 100 uploaded customer images of this product in action. Many of them come with captions, and here are a few of my favorites.

Thanks to the A.V. Club for the discovery, and hope the rest of your weekend is great!

"More days to come / New places to go
I've got to leave / It's time for a show
Here I am / Rock you like a hurricane!" -The Scorpions

But one doesn't often think of Saturn when it comes to devastating storms.

(Image credit: Earth-based telescope, retrieved from SolarSystemQuick.com.)

Saturn, quite famously, is a great gas giant planet, second only in size to Jupiter in our Solar System, and renowned for its spectacular rings. And although Saturn's rings are its most obvious feature, the clearly defined, featureless bands along its different latitudes also stand out.

Unless, that is, you've taken a close look in the last year or so.

(Image credit: Trevor Barry, Broken Hill, Australia.)

That is not a featureless band up there in Saturn's Northern Hemisphere!

Quite to the contrary, this is a virtually planet-wide storm plume, whose core is a 3,000-mile-wide thunderstorm, kicking up beacons of warm air and leaving behind ammonia ice crystals, which we can tell from Cassini's observations in the infrared.

(Image credit: NASA / JPL / Univ. of Arizona.)

Cassini, the famed Saturn spacecraft that's been orbiting our ringed neighbor for nearly a decade, first spotted this storm in the earliest stages of its infancy, all the way back in early December, 2010. I've highlighted it, below, visible right at Saturn's terminator.

(Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.)

Unlike storms on Earth, which typically last for days or -- in particularly devastating cases -- a few weeks, this storm on Saturn has set a new record.

Lasting for more than 200 days, this Saturnian tempest rages all the way into August of last year, with the storm's head lasting intact at least into May. This made it the longest-lasting storm of this kind ever seen on Saturn; the first one since 1990 and the longest one since the first one was ever observed, all the way back in 1876!

(Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute; click for full-size.)

As you can see, it was so powerful that, from February to April, the storm actually lapped itself, with the head of the storm clearly visible in those images.

What you might not realize is that Cassini was also able to clearly identify the tail of the storm, by looking in the infrared! Below, in false-color, the red-orange methane clouds are topped by a high blue haze signifying the main end of the tail. (The rings also appear in blue as a thin line, as there is no methane there at all!)

(Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.)

Although this is all that NASA released, Cassini is a bit of a special mission. You see, they have a publicly accessible imaging diary over at Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS (CICLOPS).

Want to see how the storm changed from one (Saturnian) day to the next? Taken 11 hours apart, from February 23rd, 2011 to February 24th, you can really see that -- at a scale of 64 miles (104 km) per pixel in the below image -- this giant hurricane is migrating across the face of Saturn at around 100 km/hr!

(Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.)

And finally, what can Cassini do, at its highest resolution in (nearly) true color, looking at the storm as it traverses its own wake across the planet? Click on the image for full-resolution, but even at its reduced screen resolution... well, see for yourself!

(Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.)

You can follow the entire saga of the Saturn Storm Chronicles' report on last year's record-breaking display over at CICLOPS, but what an amazing view from Cassini!

"The Earth's atmosphere is an imperfect window on the universe... atmospheric turbulence blurs the images of celestial objects, even when they are viewed through the most powerful ground-based telescopes." -John Bahcall

(Image credit: Bill Drelling.)

This is the globular cluster NGC 288, separated by just over 1 degree from the famed Sculptor Galaxy, as seen through a simple 3" telescope. Larger telescopes can, of course, do better, but from high above the Earth's atmosphere, Hubble's 2.4 meter primary mirror has given us this view of this remarkable object.

(Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA.)

Absolutely amazing! For over 20 years, Hubble has been returning images like this, with a resolution of just a couple of hundred-thousandths of a degree!

The reason it can do this, of course, isn't its size. At 2.4 meters, Hubble is pretty large, but we have plenty of 8-meter and 10-meter telescopes here on Earth, which could get much better resolution than Hubble if they were in space. No, Hubble's advantage is its location.

(Image credit: NASA, retrieved from the Urban Astronomer.)

While ground-based telescopes have the entire atmosphere to contend with, complete with turbulent air, a slew of different, moving layers, and intervening molecules, Hubble is literally above all that. Despite their extra size, ground based telescopes haven't been able to compete because of the atmosphere.

But a new technology -- adaptive optics -- is changing all of that. Here's how it works.

(Image credit: Gemini Observatories, NSF / AURA, CONICYT.)

You start by shooting a powerful laser with very well-defined frequencies, like this sodium laser, creating a guide star that's in the direction you're taking your observational data. You're seeing light from all of the actual stars, galaxies, etc. -- you know, the real observing targets -- as well as your artificial guide star. The beauty of using a sodium laser is that, around 100 km up, there's a thin layer of sodium in Earth's atmosphere that will absorb and re-emit the light back towards your telescope.

All the light that comes in, both from your real targets and from your guide star, gets distorted by the atmosphere. But, since you know what your guide star is supposed to look like, you can take the blurred, incoming signal from the guide star, and compute what type of weird, fun house-style mirror you'd need to un-blur the image!

(Image credit: retrieved from Isa Garcia's blog.)

Just like a fun house mirror distorts normal images, the right fun house mirror can fix distorted images, if you create just the right mirror. But if you can create the proper mirror to fix the guide star (i.e., the light from the laser), you can also fix the light from your observing targets! Creating a system that continuously adapts its mirror to the changing atmosphere, giving you an undistorted image of your observing target at the end, is the end-all goal of adaptive optics.

(Video credit: 3 minute visualization of an AO system, by Gemini Observatory.)

And when this is put into practice, adaptive optics is capable of taking what looks like turbulent, nonsense noise and turning it into a crystal-clear, real-time image of what actually lies out there in the Universe.

Want to see it in action? Take a look at this 2006 video of adaptive optics taking on a binary star system; you seriously won't believe it.

(Movie Credit: Guido Brusa, CAAO, Steward Observatory.)

That was then.

Just a couple of months ago, Gemini South Observatory released their first light image from GeMS/GSAOI, the world's most advanced adaptive optics system, attached to the 8-meter Gemini Telescope. And wouldn't you know which object they happened to take a look at for their very first image?

(Image credit: Gemini Observatory / NSF / AURA / CONICYT / GeMS/GSAOI.)

Wouldn't you know: it's globular cluster NGC 288! As the GeMS Principal Investigator, François Rigaut was absolutely amazed at this image, and said,

We couldn't believe our eyes! The image of NGC 288 revealed thousands of pinpoint stars. Its resolution is Hubble-quality - and from the ground this is phenomenal. This is somewhat uncharted territory: no one has ever made images so large with such a high angular resolution.

This is fan-freaking-tastic!!!!!!!

At this zoomed-out resolution, it doesn't look all that impressive, especially considering the monochrome nature of the ground-based image.

But let's take a look at a very small region -- those four bright horizontal stars towards the center of the above image -- with both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini telescope with the new adaptive optics!

Even at first light -- with its very first image -- the GeMS/GSAOI adaptive optics were easily just as good as Hubble's resolution, the first time that a ground-based telescope has ever done that!

Of course, that was like, two months ago already, so Gemini has since gone on to take even higher resolution images than Hubble can, like this one of NGC 2362.

(Image credit: Gemini Observatory / GeMS/GSAOI.)

Sorry that there's no Hubble image of this to compare with, only a Spitzer image that really looks like a joke, particularly next to the full-resolution Gemini version. When you're looking at the image above, remember that each quadrant is less than one ten-thousandth of a square degree! Highest. Resolution. Image. Ever.

And that's how you defeat Hubble without ever leaving the ground!

"In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms." -Stephen Jay Gould

(Image credit: cracked.com.)

Imagine my disappointment when I read this, and realized that the "6 Scientific Discoveries that Laugh in the Face of Physics" turn out to all be things that physics understands and can explain! Looking at it today, you can see that well over 1,000,000 people have read this, so let's see if we can't get the correct information back out there to as many of them as possible. Without further ado, let's take a look at these six scientific discoveries, and do our best to get it right!

(Image credit: Miloslav Druckmuller / SWNS.)

6.) The Sun Can Make Stuff Hotter Than Itself.

Above is the Sun's Corona, visible only during a total solar eclipse, as shown above. And while the surface of the Sun is very hot, at something around 5800 K, the Corona comes in at temperatures over one million Kelvin. Mysterious, mind-boggling and inexplicable by the laws of physics, right?

Except that temperature is not the same thing as heat! The Sun's surface is much, much denser than the incredibly rarified corona, so that even though the Sun's photosphere is less than 1% of the corona's temperature, it emits energy at a rate that's over 40,000 times the amount required to heat the corona up to it's high temperature. We even think we know why: the wave heating theory, where energy can be transferred over long distances from the solar interior to the corona.

(Image credits: Robert Krampf; stills taken from MetaCafe.)

Remember what temperature is: a measure of the mean speed of the particles. Similar to how two balls -- a tiny one and a very massive one -- dropped one-atop-the-other will lead the tiny ball to rocket upwards at an incredible speed, the problem isn't getting a few particles to have a very large speed. The problem also isn't unique to the Sun; if we take a look at Earth's upper atmosphere, where it gets really rarified (above 80 km), we find that it does the same thing in terms of temperature!

(Image credit: Earth's Atmosphere, from kowoma.de.)

The problem is that we associate temperature with heat in our minds, but the "very high temperature" corona contains almost no heat! But if we look in terms of heat, the Sun's photosphere contains much more than the corona; the corona merely reaches higher temperatures.

(Image credit: © 1968 George Resch - Fundamental Photographs.)

5.) When You Look Closely, Gravity Stops Making Sense.

The article laments that gravity is so mind-numbingly weak. How dare you, gravity! And it's true; weaker by something like 38 orders of magnitude than the electromagnetic force, even your puny comb can outdo the gravitational pull of the entire Earth when it comes to lifting certain objects. But this isn't a mystery, it's an empirical fact of nature!

(Image credit: Joan Adler, Technion, Israel.)

The standard model of particles and interactions can do a whole lot, but one of the things it can't do is explain why the fundamental forces are the strength that they are. Neither can general relativity, our theory of gravity. As you can see, gravity is very, mind-numbingly weak, even compared to the weakest other force.

But whether you look close or far, at something as massive as a supermassive black hole or as tiny as a laboratory mass, general relativity still gives the correct answer to everything. The only argument that one could even make that "when you look very close, it stops making sense" would be to go down to the smallest scales we know of.

(Image credits: Ultra-Cold Matter Research at William & Mary.)

Only, with gravity, we can barely make it below the millimeter-scale before it becomes too difficult to measure. And we can measure the effects of gravitation down to these sub-millimeter scales: it obeys general relativity just fine, thank you. Perhaps someday, we'll reach down to quantum mechanical scales and find that our classical theory of gravity, general relativity, is insufficient. But in theory, general relativity is good all the way down to the quantum limit of the Universe, and we have yet to find an experiment or observation that contradicts it.

(Image credit: Pioneer 10 by Don Davis, for NASA.)

4.) Satellites Speed Up for No Reason.

So, get this. In the 1970s, we launched two probes -- Pioneer 10 and 11 -- into the outer Solar System. As we tracked their positions over many decades, we knew exactly what to expect. After all, we know the laws of gravity, we know the masses and positions of the Sun and all the planets, and we should be able to predict the spacecrafts' motions flawlessly. Except we saw a small -- but definitely non-negligible -- acceleration back towards the Sun!

Immediately, a number of spectacular explanations arose. Gravity is wrong! The solar system is full of dark matter! Spaghetti! Except among most astrophysicists (like me), another explanation arose: maybe the asymmetric spacecraft is being heated (and is radiating) asymmetrically.

(Image credit: NASA / Francisco et al., retrieved from Jennifer Ouellette.)

For decades, the debate raged, as much as anything where one side doesn't really give the other side much credibility can rage. And then last year, it was definitively measured that the "anomalous acceleration" is not constant, but decreasing, and hence in total agreement with the theory that it's due to the thermal effects that the astrophysicists pointed out. So yes, cracked, satellites speed up for no reason, but only if you ignore the actual reason.

(Image credit: retrieved from Phantastic Physics / Wikispaces.)

3.) The Law of Conservation of Energy? More of a Suggestion, Really.

Looking at black holes, there are only a few types of hair they can have: mass, angular momentum, and electric charge. (And, if you believe in it, magnetic charge.) All of that stuff is conserved. But what about information? That's something that needs to be conserved. If I throw the Count of Monte Cristo into a black hole, it contains a different amount of information than an equal-mass book of all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But if energy must truly be conserved, mass, charge, and angular momentum won't take care of it! This conundrum was known as the black hole information paradox.

(Image credit: retrieved from Phantastic Physics / Wikispaces.)

I said "was known" as that. Because the information isn't lost; we know exactly where it goes! When any object falls into a black hole, from its point of view, it simply passes through the event horizon and falls into the singularity, getting torn apart in spectacular fashion. But to an observer outside the event horizon? The object appears to get stretched out, fainter, and reddened, but you'll never see it cross over onto the inside. What we see, instead, is that information gets imprinted, forever and ever, onto the surface of that black hole's event horizon!

So even though you might have amazing difficulty reading it, that information from the Count of Monte Cristo is still there on the surface, even if its mass is the only thing you know from the black hole's insides.

(Image credit: Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research.)

2.) The Particle That Knows We're Watching.

Radioactive decay, the process that allows an unstable atomic nucleus to transmute into a different element, is one of the slowest physical processes known to man. Often taking billions of years, radioactivity is built on a foundation of quantum mechanics, where a metastable nucleus must quantum mechanically tunnel into a less energetic, more stable state.

(Image credit: retrieved from Aggeli K at BrightHub.com.)

It isn't easy, as you can imagine, because there's no good way to get up-and-over the proverbial hill; it isn't like those protons and neutrons just spontaneously align into that less energetic configuration! What you need to remember is that each of these particles that make up the nucleus are quantum mechanical in nature: they're not just particles, but they're waves, too. And waves spread out over time, where they can attempt to tunnel into that more stable (post-decay) state. Every once in a while, after enough time has passed, a nucleus will find its way into that state, and when that happens, you get a decay!

(Image credit: Chi LF collaboration, from John von Neumann Institut fur Computing.)

But it takes time to get there. If you're too impatient, and you can't wait, you might be tempted to look right away. Only, you know what happens in quantum mechanics when you make an observation: you collapse the wavefunction into one particular state! So if you can't help yourself from making observations, what you're basically doing is resetting the clock every time you look!

(Image credit: Peter Byrne / Scientific American.)

If you're cracked, you'll lament that this is like the watched teapot that never boils. While if you're a physicist, you know the teapot boils, but the nucleus won't decay unless you stop continually collapsing its wavefunction!

(Image credit: CERN neutrinos to Gran Sasso, retrieved from Universe Today.)

1.) Einstein's Theory: Relatively Full of Crap (Also? Time Travel!).

And finally, the faster-than-light neutrinos thing, again. For those of you who've been living under a rock, the OPERA experiment in a mine under Gran Sasso detected neutrinos sent from CERN, and they detected them 60 nanoseconds sooner than they would have had they moved "only" at the speed of light.

Like many others, I was skeptical, and believed we were fooling ourselves. I still am, and I still do. We have plenty of evidence indicating otherwise.

(Image credit: NASA, ESA, K. France, and P. Challis and R. Kirshner.)

For one, we had a supernova in 1987, which raced photons and neutrinos for over 100,000 light years; were the neutrinos moving at the speed OPERA indicated, they'd have arrived four years earlier; instead, they arrived within hours. There are actually a host of other experiments that have constrained the speed of neutrinos, and if you look at all of them -- across a wide variety of energies -- you find that the new experiment, OPERA, is the one outlier, in conflict with everything else.

(Image credit: Matt Strassler and me.)

The OPERA results are bizarre enough that experiments in the United States and Japan are being set up right now to either verify or refute them. When it comes to this story, I've been doing my best to inform the world, and I'll stay on top of it and keep reporting all the latest developments that come up, too. But for right now, it's going to take some extraordinary evidence before I'm ready to chuck special relativity, even for something as mundane as the neutrino.

And there you have it: six scientific discoveries that might appear to laugh in the face of physics, but only until you learn the physics behind it! Isn't information beautiful?

"You cannot hope to build a better world without improving individuals. We all must work for our own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity." -Marie Curie

But what if I told you there was a way to donate to charity, help advance science, and give yourself a chance to win a nice sum of money, at really no cost to you?

May I present to you The Charity Engine, the best supercomputing project I've ever heard of. You might have heard of individual projects like Einstein@Home, which has found 16 pulsars since its inception, or SETI@Home, which sifted through telescope data for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence. Both of these relied on sending unprocessed data to individual computers all across the internet, having users donate their spare processor time to doing these computations, and sending the finished work back to the server. This basic idea -- borne from the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing -- is the core of the Charity Engine.

But the Charity Engine goes far beyond any of these projects. Let's say you've got an enormous computing job and not enough computing power to do it. I don't care whether you're a scientist, a University, or an independent company, where do you go? Enter the Charity Engine!

Charity Engine takes enormous, expensive computing jobs and chops them into 1000s of small pieces, each simple enough for a home PC to work on as a background task. Once each PC has finished its part of the puzzle, it sends back the correct answer and earns some money for charity - and for the prize fund. (It also earns more chances to win.)

Where does the money come from? Science and industry. The grid is rented like a giant supercomputer, then all the profits shared 50-50 between the charities and the lucky prize winners.

Charity Engine typically adds less than 10 cents per day to a PC's energy costs and can generate $10-$20 for charity - and the prize draws - for each $1 of electricity consumed.

It is the most efficient way to donate to charity ever invented.

As you can see, above and below, they've got an impressive array of charity partners, and a strict commitment to only rent the grid to ethical users, and to treat you, the donor, ethically, too.

You can follow them on facebook and twitter, and by joining, you can become part of what they're hoping will become the world's fastest supercomputer within a single year! For each additional dollar (or pound, or euro) you spend on electricity on this application, you generate about twenty times as much for the Charity Engine, which gets split, 50/50, between their charities and their users. (That's you!) And you never have to think about it; it only uses your CPU's idle time, and turns itself back off as soon as you try to use your machine again! (The worst thing it does is make itself your screensaver and require a restart after installation.)

Best of all, you've got a great reason to support them: they come certified by Starts With A Bang! Let's say you want to, I don't know, simulate the formation of a galaxy -- from scratch -- in the Universe?

(Video credit: Fabio Governato et al./U. of Washington/NASA Advanced Supercomputing.)

You and hundreds of other people, right? Who decides whose project is worthy of the Charity Engine's power? They'd need some kind of expert to help them decide, right?

There's an entire science panel, and yours truly sits on it, to help decide which projects get the 5-10% of the grid permanently reserved for pure science! So you're not just supporting charity, you're supporting legitimate science, hand-picked by me and the rest of the science panel! (Plus, their CEO is a huge fan of this blog, so you know there's good taste involved here!)

Read more about them at crunchbase, Fast Company, and one of Charity Engine's charity partners, OxFam. This is a great opportunity for everyone to support science, help charity, and -- for those of you who feel lucky -- maybe win a small fortune while you're at it. How can you not feel good about this; get started and help make something wonderful happen today! Read the comments on this post...]]> http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2012/01/weekend_diversion_the_best_and.php http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2012/01/weekend_diversion_the_best_and.php Random Stuff Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:55:10 -0500

"The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment." -Johannes Kepler

But earlier this week, the first supernova of the year was discovered, in a galaxy 25 million light years away, NGC 3239. The supernova, indicated below, is now known as SN 2012a.

(Image credit: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona.)

With a typical rate of about one supernova per galaxy per century, one can't help but wonder, as one of our perennial commenters did, what we'd see -- and how quickly we'd manage to see it -- if a supernova went off in our own galaxy.

Remember, now, there are two ways we can have a supernova, but both ways involve a runaway nuclear fusion reaction, giving off a tremendous amount of light and energy. But most of the energy, perhaps surprisingly, isn't in the form of light! Let's take you inside a star that goes supernova during those critical few seconds.

(Image credit: TeraScale Supernova Initiative.)

Although there are shocks and heat that are produced, you'll see that the interior reactions produce neutrinos, nearly all of which do not interact with the outer layers of the star! A few of them do, as do all of the protons, neutrons and electrons produced, and the overall production isn't instantaneous. But while it takes some time -- a couple of hours -- for the shock to reach the outer surface of the dying star, the neutrinos make it out almost immediately!

What this means is that when we have a star go supernova, neutrinos get emitted from it before the light does! We actually discovered this, firsthand, back in 1987.

(Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. Kirshner and P. Challis.)

When supernova 1987a went off just 168,000 light years away, it was close enough -- and we had enough neutrino detectors operating -- that we detected 23 (anti)neutrinos over a timespan of about 13 seconds. The largest detector, Kamiokande-II, contained 3,000 tons of water and detected 11 antineutrinos.

Today, the detector that sits in the same spot, Super Kamiokande-III, contains 50,000 tons of water and contains over 11,000 photomultiplier tubes. (There are many other excellent neutrino detectors around the world, but I'm focusing on this one in particular as an example.)

(Image credit: Kamioka Observatory, ICRR, The University of Tokyo.)

This setup is so amazing because it can not only detect neutrinos, but it can reconstruct the direction, energy, and point-of-interaction of even a single neutrino fortunate enough to interact with any one particle in those 50,000 tons of water!

(Image credit: Kamioka Observatory, ICRR, The University of Tokyo.)

Depending on where a potential supernova goes off in our galaxy, we would expect Super Kamiokande-III to see anywhere from a few thousand antineutrinos (for something on the other side of the galaxy) to over ten million of them, all in the timespan of just 10-15 seconds!

Neutrino detectors from all over the world would see a flood of detections like this, all at the same time, all coming from the same direction. At that point, we'd have something on the order of two-to-three hours to identify the direction of origin of those neutrinos, and point our telescopes towards that direction to try and obtain an optical view of the supernova -- for the very first time -- from its very beginning!

(Image credit: Rose City Astronomers.)

The closest supernova since 1987 was this one from last year, which we managed to catch just half a day after ignition, which is remarkable.

We've gotten very close -- mostly by good fortune -- with a very intense hypernova back in 2002.

(Image credit: P. Ferrero et al., Astronomy & Astrophysics, 457, 857-864 (2006).)

Even so, we didn't get to first observe this one, SN 2002ap, until 3-4 hours after first ignition. If the supernova that eventually comes is a type Ia supernova -- which originates from a white dwarf -- we have no way of predicting where in the galaxy that will occur. White dwarfs are simply too abundant, and the locations of almost all of them are simply unknown, and thought to be distributed all over the galaxy.

But if this originates from a very massive star whose core collapses under its own gravity (i.e., a type II supernova), we have a number of really good candidates, and some outstanding places to look.

(Image credit: Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer composite image.)

Most obvious is the galactic center, the location of the Milky Way's last known supernova, and also the location of the most massive stars ever discovered within our galaxy. We're certainly going to have many type II supernovae originating here over the next 100,000 years, but we have no way of knowing when we'll see the next one. As you look at the above picture, take a moment to appreciate that it's very likely already happened, and we're just waiting for the neutrinos (and then the light) to get here!

But there are closer candidates than the galactic center.

(Image credit: T. A. Rector & B. A. Wolpa, NOAO, AURA, retrieved here.)

Look inside one of the great, star forming nebulae in our galaxy, and you're going to find some of the hottest, youngest stars you're going to find anywhere in the Universe. This is where the ultra-massive stars live, and in particular, the Eagle Nebula, above, may be home to an extremely recent supernova. The Eagle Nebula, the Orion Nebula, and many other regions filled with new stars are all great places to anticipate the next supernova.

But what about known, individual stars? While there are many good candidates, we have two in particualr that we can't help but talk about.

(Image credit: Nathan Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and NASA.)

Eta Carinae, in the very last stages of its life, could literally go supernova at any second. But it may also live hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands more years before it does so. Still, if we get a flood of antineutrinos originating from anywhere near its position in space, this will be the very first place we point our telescopes!

But unlike all of these candidates that are many thousands of light-years away, we have one good one that's much closer. In fact, it's the closest supernova candidate we have!

(Image credit: A. Dupree, NASA.)

Say hello to Betelgeuse, a red supergiant just 640 light-years distant. Betelgeuse is so gigantic that it literally is the diameter of Saturn's orbit around the Sun! If Betelgeuse went supernova, our neutrino detectors around the globe would detect -- all told -- somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred million (anti)neutrinos, which is more neutrinos of any type than have ever been detected in the history of the world, combined.

But unless it's one of these known candidates that goes supernova, how will we tell whether it's a type Ia or a type II supernova?

(Image credit: Goddard Space Flight Center / NASA / Nick Short.)

We can always wait, I suppose. Supernovae of different types have very distinct light-curves, and how the light dies off after it's reached its peak brightness will tell us what type of supernova we had.

But if something this exciting happens, I'm not going to have that kind of patience. Luckily, I won't need it, because a supernova within our galaxy would likely be the very first detectable observation for the newest type of astronomy: Gravitational-Wave Astronomy!

(Image credit: Fermilab / SLAC / LIGO collaboration.)

Undisturbed by the presence of, well, anything, gravitational waves from a supernova explosion should pass through the intervening star, any gas, dust, or matter completely undisturbed, arriving at the same time the front end of the (anti)neutrino pulse arrives! The wonderful thing is that -- according to our best simulations of general relativity -- type II (core-collapse) and type Ia (inspiraling white dwarfs) should give vast different signals for gravitational waves!

If we have a type Ia supernova, we expect to see three separate regions to our signal.

(Image credit: Marc Favata / Cornell.)

The inspiral phase should give a periodic pulse that increases in frequency and magnitude as the white dwarfs reach their final stage of their separation. As the ignition occurs, there should be a spike in the signal, followed by a "ringdown" phase as the ripples go away. Very distinctive.

But if we have a type II supernova, from a super-massive collapsing star, we're only going to see two interesting things.

(Image credit: Harald Dimmelmeier, José A. Font, Ewald Müller, and Markus Rampp.)

Just a huge spike -- where the supernova itself occurs -- just a tenth of a second after the core collapses, followed by a very rapidly dying (within 0.02 seconds) ringdown. And so if we want to know what we saw, all we need to do is extract the telltale signal from gravitational waves!

And if the galaxy's next supernova were to happen today, this is what we'd see!

"Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history... illumined by the intermittent flare of the event." -Fernand Braudel

What you just witnessed was a relatively powerful Solar Flare, at class M8.7. (M is the second highest class, behind only X.) While it's nothing compared to the biggest ones we've recently seen, Solar Flares can occasionally spell trouble for us here on Earth.

(Image credit: NASA / SOHO.)

Why's that? Because Solar Flares are often accompanied by Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), as shown above in this 2002 SOHO image.

So what's so special about yesterday's Solar Flare?

(Image credit: NASA/SDO and the AIA consortium. Edited by J. Major, retrieved here.)

This Solar Flare produced a CME directed towards Earth, and since it's moving at around a whopping 1,000 miles per second, that means it's arriving... right around... NOW!

That's right, the largest solar storm since 2005 is going to hit Earth today/tonight, particularly right at the edge of the Northern Hemisphere! Here are a bunch of time-lapse views of the flare from the Sun from a number of different satellites, courtesy of space.com.

As you can see from the blue video (NASA's SOHO Satellite), there was a coronal mass ejection, followed by intense speckling on the satellite. (Did you notice that?) It turns out that that is the reason we really care about this!

A coronal mass ejection is when this heated plasma stream of electrons, protons, and heavy ions gets launched out of the Sun in a random direction in space. This charged radiation can totally do some damage to electronics; that's what the speckling you saw was! (There's a nice explanation and video by Phil, here.) What about you, you may ask?

You are fine. Know why? Because of this.

(Image credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, retrieved from SWRI.)

The Earth's magnetosphere protects us from this radiation! The magnetosphere bends the charged particles that would strike most regions of the Earth away from the equatorial regions, and funnels them only around the polar areas. As the particles come down towards Earth, they interact with the atmosphere, which does an excellent job of stopping them before they ever make it to the surface. In fact, this particular CME will mostly miss the Earth (remember, Earth is tiny on the scale of the Solar System), flying over the North Pole. Still, our magnetic field will bend some of these charged particles into the Earth's atmosphere! Know what that produces?

(Image credit: Bjørn Jørgensen; today's Astronomy Picture of the Day!)

The Aurora Borealis, or the Northern Lights! (If the flare had been below the South Pole, we'd have gotten the Southern Lights, or Aurora Australis, instead.) Anyone with clear skies in the Northern Hemisphere should go and look for them tonight; we don't know how far South they'll be visible, but even places that very rarely get aurorae might be in luck tonight!

You know who's going to get the best view?

(Video Credit: NASA, retrieved from YouTube user isoeph.)

Astronauts on board the International Space Station! You might be worried that the astronauts on board would not be shielded by the magnetosphere, and so would be in grave danger from a coronal mass ejection like this. After all, at 240 miles above the surface, there's no atmosphere to protect them by absorbing all the protons, ions and electrons!

So what does that mean; do the astronauts absorb this radiation directly?

(Image credit: NASA, retrieved from Paul Floyd's article.)

No, the ISS has a hull designed to shield them from this type of radiation. As this Universe Today article details, everyone and everything on board the ISS will be totally safe. In fact, any well-designed satellite will have shielding against the radiation from CMEs; the only pitfall is that most of them -- including GPS satellites -- were built cheaply, and don't have this type of shielding. That's the only type of danger from a flare / CME like this.

Yes, it's true that tremendous solar storms can be problematic, particularly for large power lines, plants, and grids, but this is not that storm. But the coming aurorae?

(Video credit: The Aurora by TSO Photography / Terje Sørgjerd.)

As Teri Hatcher would say, "they're real, and they're spectacular." Get out there tonight if you've got clear skies and have a look. Good luck!

"I want more muscles! I go to the gym three or four times a week with a personal trainer. I can afford that now. I can't put on weight though, no matter how much I eat." -Christopher Parker

I've always been someone who's prioritized taking care of myself, physically, as those of you who've hung around here for some time have likely noticed. But this past April, I gave myself a nasty injury, and found that I needed to take some time off from intense physical activity to heal. (It happens.) And while I've come to adopt relatively healthy eating habits, I started noticing the inevitable... well, you know.

You start using the larger holes on your belts, you start asking yourself if you can have that dessert you've had your eye on, and you start trying to cut down on portion sizes, you avoid eating later in the day, and you even go back to counting calories.

And, if you're anything like me, you combine that reduced activity level with a calorie-restricted diet, you start feeling like crap. There are a whole bunch of different diets out there and a whole bunch of people and organizations -- including the USDA -- telling you what you should eat to be healthy. And, if you're anything like me, what you'd really want is the actual, scientific information as to how nutrition, your body, your diet, and fat gain/loss work.

And it just so happens that a couple of months ago, I got an email from Jonathan Bailor, asking me if I cared for an advance copy of his new book.

His book is called, "The Smarter Science of Slim," and it does what no other diet, weight-loss, or fitness book I've ever seen does: it explains the biological workings of your body's metabolism. The first three sections of the book -- and it has seven sections -- are the most valuable book on diet and health I've ever read for the clearly presented, well-articulated and comprehensive information provided inside. Along the way, a lot of myths about food are busted, including the most common one: that restricting your calories and upping your exercise is a solid plan for losing weight, particularly in the long term.

It turns out, unsurprisingly, that people like Christopher Parker, atop (you know, "I can eat whatever I want, my metabolism just burns it up"), are real. But it also turns out that, to a much greater degree than we normally think about, what we eat helps determine our metabolism. I'm going to give you the most basic redux of how your metabolism works:

1. You get hungry, and so you eat some food that contains some non-zero amount of calories.
2. Your body produces some amount of insulin, which helps deal with the sugars and starches in the food, and moves them into your cells where they're stored as fat.
3. When your cells get the signal that the nutrition they need is coming in, your body produces leptin (only discovered in 1994!), which is the hormone that tells your body that you're full, and gives you the feeling that your hunger is satiated.

You'll find aspects of a number of popular diets in here, including the Atkins diet, the Paleo diet, and the Sugarbusters diet. But -- for me, at least -- the takeaway message was this:

• Eat meals that are high in fiber, high in protein, and low in both sugars and starches. (That means your good "friends," complex carbohydrates, are not your friends at all!)
• Ideally, you'll get between 30% and 40% of your calories from protein. While this may sound like a "high-protein" diet to you, this is actually (according to your body) the amount you want for a balanced diet! (And no, you won't start seeing liver or kidney problems until that number gets up above something like 60%!)
• As far as foods go, you should be eating vegetables as the base of your food pyramid (or as 50% of your plate). Lean proteins (like fish, chicken, lean red meat, egg whites, etc.) should be the next most common, followed by fruits, nuts, and legumes.
• Eating too much fat is bad, but so is eating too much sugar or starch. Whole fruits are not bad, so long as you're eating the vegetables and lean proteins that you should be eating. Fiber-free juices and sodas are what you want to avoid!

(Image credit: Plutarco Calles. I took 2^nd place in the Partial Beard category!)

Learning how your body deals with food and how the different types of calories and nutrients you put into it makes me strongly recommend The Smarter Science of Slim for anyone looking to improve their diet and learn how what you eat affects how your body reacts to it. The fourth and fifth sections -- about the US Government and Corporate influence -- are only okay, and the sixth and seventh sections read like a personal diet and exercise guide, which were a little bit of a turn-off to me. But the solid science of the first three sections, which were the meatiest part of this book, definitely are worth it for anyone who wants to adopt a positive, healthy-eating lifestyle for the rest of their lives!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a delicious, healthy dinner to cook...

"When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes." -Tycho Brahe

(Image credit: SN 1994D, High-Z Supernova Search Team, HST, NASA.)

What's going on, of course, is not that a star is brightening, but that the very atoms composing a star are undergoing a runaway chain reaction of nuclear fusion, creating the infamous phenomenon known as a supernova!

In perhaps one of the worst strokes of luck, we haven't seen a supernova go off in our own galaxy since the invention of the telescope! The last one, in fact, went off in 1604, and has long since faded from view. But thankfully, it isn't just in visible light that we can learn about these objects: we can turn a myriad of telescopes sensitive to different wavelengths at the regions of sky where these supernovae were recorded, and see what they look like today!

(Image credit: NASA, retrieved from Discovery Space.)

The 1604 supernova was the last one visible from Earth with a human's naked eye, and is shown here in a composite of visible light, X-rays, and infrared. We know, from the lack of a strong X-ray source (neutron star or black hole) at the center, that this explosion was probably a Type Ia, where a white dwarf star either merges or accrues enough matter and goes supernova!

Same deal for the one prior to that: SN 1572.

(Image retrieved from here.)

Visually unspectacular, the ultra-hot remnants of the exploded star have been blown off into space at breakneck speeds of thousands of kilometers per second, and are so hot that they emit X-rays! There's also dust, present throughout the galaxy, which gets heated by the supernova explosion; that's what glows in the infrared.

The last supernova before that? You have to go all the way back to 1181, and we still aren't sure we found the remnant from that. But we've definitely found the one observed prior to that: SN 1054.

(Image credit: NASA, ESA and Allison Loll/Jeff Hester, acknowledgement: Davide De Martin.)

This supernova remnant, as you will immediately notice, looks nothing like the prior two, and for a good reason: it's an entirely different type of supernova! The famed Crab Nebula, also known as Messier 1, wasn't formed by a white dwarf getting too massive, but rather by an ultra-massive star burning through all of its nuclear fuel and dying in a core collapse supernova, blowing off tens of solar masses worth of material!

The collapsed core of this star has created a pulsar, one of the most spectacular clocks in the Universe, and bested for timekeeping purposes only by our atomic clocks on Earth!

Prior to that, there was the brightest supernova ever recorded on Earth: the one of 1006.

(Image credit: Chandra, Hubble, and NRAO teams, retrieved here.)

By this point, you should be able to tell that this was once a white dwarf and not a supermassive star, and you'd be correct! After 1,000 years, the "bubble" produced by this explosion is actually light years in size, and if it were our star that exploded like this, the edge of the bubble would be halfway to Alpha Centauri by now!

Prior to 1006? There was one in 393 that we may have found, one claimed to have been found in 386 that probably wasn't, and the oldest supernova ever recorded (and verified): Supernova 185!

(Image credit: Chandra and XMM-Newton teams, NASA/CXC/ESA/J.Vink et al..)

Again, just from looking at the X-ray image, 2000 years later, you can tell this was a white dwarf that exploded, and not an ultra-massive star.

But looking at these images got me curious: how much fun would it be to take a look at these supernova remnants in visible light only, like watching snapshots from a slow-motion cosmic fireworks show? Let's go to the pictures!

(Image credit: Optical: ESO/E. Helder; X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Utrecht/J.Vink et al. .)

From nearly 2000 years ago, the supernova remnant RCW 86 (from the 185 supernova) still has a small section of the outer "bubble" visible in visible light, as shown in red, above. Like the very end stages of a fireworks display, this is the last bit that would be visible with unmodified human eyes. (The blue is shocked X-ray gas.)

But apparently, a thousand years doesn't necessarily change things all that much.

(Image credit: Middlebury College/F.Winkler, NOAO/AURA/NSF/CTIO Schmidt & DSS.)

The 1006 supernova is nearly invisible in optical light, save for a thin ribbon and some very faint gas along the outer shell. (And, of course, all the stars visible in the image, too!) But the 1054 supernova, the only one we talked about as being a remnant from a supermassive star instead of from a degenerate white dwarf (that's not a snark; they really are degenerate), has an entirely different story to tell.

(Image credit: High Energy Focusing Telescope (HEFT), NASA, retrieved here.)

That gorgeous image of the Crab Nebula I showed you earlier? That was entirely a visible light image! The outer layers of gas, rich in some of the lighter heavy elements -- oxygen, carbon, nitrogen -- create some beautiful, contrasting colors in the nebula as they get superheated and strewn across interstellar space.

But there's a very rich story to be told in a myriad of wavelengths, as you can clearly see, from the bright X-ray source at the core to the warm dust traced out by the infrared telescopes. Visible light still tells a rich story for the Crab Nebula because of the sheer amount of gas and dust, as well as the energy that was released into it.

The 1572 supernova, with almost no gas and dust, tells a very different story.

(Image credit: NASA/ESA and P. Ruiz-Lapuente (University of Barcelona) .)

Sure, they found the leftover, Sun-like star that got blasted by its companion which went supernova nearly 500 years ago, but visible fireworks? Not a trace.

So there's some variety here, and this is well-exemplified by the 1604 supernova.

(Image credit: as above, retrieved from here.)

Not a bubble or a ribbon, but just a small region of the remnant contains some visibly glowing gas.

It seems like the one thing that's missing -- that I'd want to know about, anyway -- is a supermassive explosion where that hot, visible dust were somehow stripped away. What would that look like?

Well, there weren't any naked-eye supernova that have occurred in our galaxy since 1604, unfortunately. But in the late 17th Century, there was a supernova that occurred, and while its remnant is very faint optically, it's the loudest radio source (right, Nicole?) in our galaxy: Cassiopeia A!)

(Image credit: as above, retrieved from a great Cas A database, here.)

Located an estimated 11,000 light years away, this supernova remnant is already over 10 light years across, making it larger than the Crab Nebula in just a third of the time! With the strongest radio source (other than the Sun) in our galaxy, there must be either a fantastic neutron star or black hole at the center.

But today, I wanted to show you the fireworks.

(Video credit: ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser & L. L. Christensen), retrieved from YouTube.)

Not from a simulation or visualization, though. The incomparable Hubble Space Telescope has an amazing, long-exposure photograph of the visible light left behind from this supernova explosion, which you have got to see, because it truly shows you why I call these explosions "cosmic fireworks."

(Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration.)

This is fantastic! If you have all day, I suggest you play around with the full, amazing-resolution version. I did, and so I decided to make it a little more interesting for you, by zooming in, bit-by-bit, to one of the most interesting spindly regions inside this amazing stellar show.

Let's focus first on the bubble.

And now let's take a look at the triple-layered structure atop that bubble. Look for little "columns" or "pillars" where some regions of space have greater densities of gas and/or dust than others.

And finally, let's zoom in to focus on that green region you see.

As always, click on any of the images on this page to get the fullest-resolution version available, and I hope you enjoyed the fireworks show! It's been far too many centuries since the last visible supernova in our galaxy; will we get one in our lifetime? As the Count of Monte Cristo concludes:

all human wisdom in contained in these two words: wait and hope.

"We find them smaller and fainter, in constantly increasing numbers, and we know that we are reaching into space, farther and farther, until, with the faintest nebulae that can be detected with the greatest telescopes, we arrive at the frontier of the known Universe." -Edwin Hubble

(Image credit: John Nassr / Stardust Observatory.)

A good-sized amateur telescope, looking up at the Eagle Nebula under excellent seeing condition, will see this vast, dusty expanse of glowing red gas amidst a field of hot, blue stars. The red color teaches us about the hydrogen atoms present, while the darker features within the nebula indicate very dense clouds of gas and dust. This is where new stars are suspected to be forming, but we can't know for sure simply by looking like this.

The very same visible light that allows us to see this intricate structure is the same set of wavelengths that the interstellar dust is very good at absorbing, even with the Hubble Space Telescope!

(Image credit: NASA/ESA/STScI, Hester & Scowen (Arizona State University).)

Very much like the region where our own Sun was born 4.5 billion years ago, these "Pillars of Creation" contain, at the very borders, a large number of evaporating gaseous globules. The light-absorbing dust here is not only where newborn stars are being creating, but these stars are actually in the final stages of growth, as soon the cold gas that can create new stars will be either used up or blasted away.

The false-color showcases the different gaseous compositions of different regions of the cloud (focusing on Oxygen, Hydrogen and Sulfur), but still cannot show us exactly where the vast majority of these ultra-hot, newly formed stars are. But if we can look with a different wavelength of light, sensitive to these stars but insensitive to the intervening dust, we could find out where those stars are.

(Image credit: NASA/CXC/U.Colorado/Linsky et al., composite with HST image above.)

The Chandra X-ray Observatory, a space-based X-ray telescope, is sensitive to such wavelengths! There are lots of things that emit X-rays: supernova, black holes and neutron stars, as well as hot, ultra-massive newborn stars! It turns out that the evaporating gaseous globules themselves do not contain X-ray emitting stars; in fact most of the X-ray sources are not even in the pillars themselves.

Interesting! But we can learn even more about what is present inside these pillars by looking at still different wavelengths of light. For example, the 8.2 meter Very Large Telescope has taken a look at these pillars in the near-Infrared. What did it find?

(Image credit: VLT/ISAAC/McCaughrean & Andersen/AIP/ESO.)

Most (but not all) of these evaporating gaseous globules do not contain stars at all, and of the ones that do, pretty much all of the stars in there are less massive (and cooler) than our Sun is!

But looking in the near-infrared can only reveal so much, and leads to even more questions. Are there even less massive stars in there than the VLT can detect? Do each of these globules contain a star (or multiple stars), or are some of them truly sterile? And what came first, these globules or the stars that are inside of them? We tried looking with the ESA's Infrared Space Observatory,

(Image credit: ESA/ISO/Pilbratt et al..)

but it didn't have sufficient resolution to teach us anything beyond what we already knew. But just yesterday, the Herschel Space Observatory released an image of the Eagle Nebula that probed deep into the far Infrared, where the hottest (blue) regions represent a temperature of just 40 Kelvin, while the coldest (red) regions are merely 10 Kelvin above absolute zero. Take a look for yourself!

(Image credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/Hill, Motte, HOBYS Key Programme Consortium.)

This wide-field image of the Eagle Nebula shows that there's plenty of cool gas still there to form stars even in the hottest regions, but it also shows that the pillars themselves are the hottest regions with the least amount of ultra-cold gas. Yes, the other regions of the nebula are far cooler, and you can clearly see that the interior region looks like a partially carved-out pumpkin, devoid of any cold gas. Know what we think would drive that cold gas away, by heating it up?

A recent supernova. And -- if you remember from earlier -- supernovae would leave a signature in the X-ray. Let's take a wide-field look with the best X-ray telescope in space today: XMM-Newton.

(Image credit: ESA/XMM-Newton/EPIC/XMM-Newton-SOC/Boulanger.)

In this image, the red colors are the coldest and the blue are the hottest, with temperatures ranging from only a few million Kelvin up to, for the brightest, darkest blues, around 90 million Kelvin. Let's overlay the XMM-Newton and Herschel images atop one another and see how this stacks up.

Could there have been a recent supernova at the center? To be honest, they don't know, yet! What you'd look for is faint and diffuse X-ray emission, and you'd see how far it extends around the interior regions of the nebula. If XMM-Newton sees too much of it, it would invalidate this theory, but a small (but non-zero) amount would support it. The work is still being done, but this is the current working theory, and it's consistent with what Chandra (X-ray) and Spitzer (infrared) have seen in their previous observations.

Still wondering about the pillars themselves, and if there are stars forming at the edges there? Let's take a look deep inside the pillars themselves, to the maximum resolution that Herschel can achieve.

Those edge regions, where the evaporating gaseous globules are located, are definitely where the hottest portions of the cold gas are, further evidence that this is where the evaporation is occurring. But although there are some stars inside those globules, are they providing the heat that's causing the evaporation? Or are they simply being formed in regions that are evaporating for entirely unrelated reasons? I wish I had the answer!

It's clear that the pillars are evaporating, but whether there are necessarily stars, proto-stars or any other interior heat source heating up these globules, or if it was a recent cataclysmic release of energy (i.e., from a supernova) nearby is unclear. Where does that leave us? At the edge of our knowledge, where we're pushing the limits of what we currently understand; welcome! There's a wonderful composite image over at Universe Today showcasing all the different data sets, but I prefer this ESA video to illustrate just how remarkable the Eagle Nebula is, looked at with a myriad of different instruments and telescopes.

(Video credit: all the above plus MPG/ESO, via YouTube user djxatlanta.)

It's also important to realize that I, personally, have no claim to any of these images, telescopes, or missions. The only reason I can bring you these images, this video, this story and this information is because the entire community of astronomers, astrophysicists and physicists have decided to make all of this information public, and that it should be public. It's not only for the people who work on it, who discover it, or who pay for it; it's for everyone. So share this information -- and all the information about the Universe that we learn from here on out -- with everyone who wants to know it. It's your Universe, too, and we all have a right to it.