Gravity
Tag archives for Gravity
Q & A: Inside a Gas Giant
Posted by Ethan on January 20, 2010 I’m always happy to receive questions from those of you interested enough to ask them, and every once in a while one of them feels just right to write up an article about it. Today’s comes from Brad Walker, who asks about the inside of gas giants. Specifically, The question pertains to the insides of…
Hole in the Universe? What Hole?
Posted by Ethan on May 20, 2008 Some of you who’ve been following astronomy for awhile might remember this report, where a group of astronomers reported finding a giant “void” in the Universe. What is a void? Well, galaxies are distributed pretty randomly, but because of gravity, they cluster together. A small example is our local group which looks like this, and…
How “Quantum” is the Big Bang?
Posted by Ethan on May 13, 2008 There is a very techincal paper this morning by Martin Bojowald that asks the question, How Quantum Is The Big Bang? Let me break it down for you. If you took a look at empty space and zoomed in on it, looking at spaces so small that they made a proton look like a basketball,…
The Story of Neptune
Posted by Ethan on May 6, 2008 (This is adapted from my public lecture, Afraid of the Dark: How We Know What We Can’t See.) Let’s go back over 200 years ago, to 1781. William Herschel (left) discovered the planet Uranus, noticing that an object, as bright as a star, was actually moving relative to the other stars. The other five inner…
Ethan takes on Johannes Kepler
Posted by Ethan on May 2, 2008 Can you believe that I had a fight today with someone who’s been dead for over 350 years, and I’m losing? — Ethan, yesterday Of course you can believe it, when the man I’m fighting with is Johannes Kepler. I don’t get a chance to tell you about my research very often, mostly because it’s…
Black Hole Kicked Out of Galaxy
Posted by Ethan on April 29, 2008 No, not because it was too young to drink! Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics were looking at some X-ray objects, and discovered something really weird: a very bright X-ray source moving out of a galaxy at nearly 3,000 kilometers/second! This thing is a goner. If our Sun were moving at even…
Why Do We Only See One Side of the Moon?
Posted by Ethan on April 29, 2008 And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes I’ll see you on the dark side of the Moon. One of my favorite readers, Zrinka, asks us why we’re only able to see one side of the Moon from Earth. Seriously, look at the different phases; we always see the same side of the…
Weekend Diversion: A Fun Online Game!
Posted by Ethan on April 19, 2008 Sometimes, gravity and motion has the power to mesmerize me. I found this online game called “compulse” which was so much fun, that I spent about 90 minutes this week just playing this game until I had beaten every level on the “pro” setting. Yikes. (My score is 104 under par, 8 under pro.) And…
Gravitational Waves: Inflation or not?
Posted by Ethan on April 17, 2008 Nothing gets past you, does it? A scientific paper came out earlier this week, and I took a look at it, sighed, and Jamie asked me, “What?” And I said to her, “When I see bad science, it just makes me a little bit frustrated and sad.” Of course, I had no intention to write…
Q & A: On String Theory
Posted by Ethan on April 14, 2008 Over the past few months, I have been asked a number of questions about String Theory and the Universe, including from readers Benhead and Mastery Mistery. But now Jamie, whom I’m going to marry later this year, has been asking me about it, and so it’s time to write something about the scientific topic of…
