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The Science of the Cosmic Microwave Background
Posted by Ethan on March 27, 2013 
“The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to -271.3°C, not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it.” -Stephen Hawking One of the most powerful predictions of the Big Bang — the…
WMAP results: Cosmology from the CMB
Posted by Ethan on March 6, 2008 The cosmic microwave background is the radiation left over from the big bang. It’s very uniform, 2.725 Kelvin everywhere. We’re moving with respect to it, so there’s a doppler shift, and we see that as a dipole moment in the Temperature. When we subtract that out, we see variations on the order of 30 microKelvins!…
Pulsars, Dark Matter, and the Size of our Galaxy
Posted by Ethan on February 20, 2008 Alright, startswithabang-ers, Ben, my most avid commenter, saw me online while I was eating breakfast this morning, and pointed me to this new press release. Now, before you get started clicking on everything, the guy who the release is about is Brian Gaensler, who’s a really nice guy, lives in Australia, whom I met at…
Question: The Milky Way to an outsider…?
Posted by Ethan on January 25, 2008 I got a great question earlier today from my buddy Zrinka, and decided to figure out the answer for her, and also for myself. She asks: Ethan, is it possible to know, or better to say to imagine somehow how our galaxy looks from outside? What a simple-sounding question! After all, we know what the…
