April 3, 2015
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” -Vaclav Havel
When you take a look at the planets in our Solar System, one of the most striking features about them is that they all orbit in almost exactly…
April 2, 2015
“Is no one inspired by our present picture of the Universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.” -Richard Feynman
There are many scientific facts that are simply remarkable…
April 2, 2015
Out there in the Universe, black holes are some of the most extreme examples of physics in the Universe. Space is curved tremendously, there's an incredible concentration of energy all in one, singular point, and everything that occurs, in theory, outside of the event horizon can be seen in our…
April 1, 2015
When it comes to the very nature of quantum mechanics -- about the inherent uncertainty and indeterminism to reality -- it's one of the most difficult things to accept. Perhaps, you imagine, there's some underlying cause, some hidden reality beneath what's visible that actually is deterministic.…
March 31, 2015
“Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way.” -Tom Freston
Yes, the Universe can be considered the ultimate innovator, taking the fundamental particles and forces of the Universe, and assembling them into the entirety of what we know, interact with and…
March 31, 2015
It's the simple formula we all know and recognize: inner, rocky worlds closest to the Sun, an asteroid belt farther out, and then gas giant worlds out beyond them. That's how our Solar System works, at any rate. But what about the other star systems in the Universe?
Confirmed planets as of…
March 30, 2015
When you think about our world and our place in the Solar System, you very likely think about Earth, spinning on its axis, with the Moon orbiting around it, and with the entire Earth-Moon system orbiting the Sun.
But did you know that all of it -- the Earth spinning on its axis, the Moon revolving…
March 30, 2015
“If you are caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron.” -Lee Trevino
When it comes to lightning, you inevitably think of thunderstorms, rain, and the exchange of huge amounts of charge between the clouds above and the Earth.…
March 29, 2015
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” -Oscar Wilde
What do you like? No, I really mean it: don't think about the things that you're supposed to like, or the things you'll admit to the world that you like, but …
March 28, 2015
“If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special.” -Jim Valvano
It's been a little too long since I rounded up the best of your comments and doled out the astrophysics knowledge to fill in the…
March 27, 2015
“Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.” -Alfred A. Montapert
You might not think of falling into a black hole as a choice, but in the case of this week's Ask Ethan, someone is choosing to explore exactly that!
Image credit: original unknown, retrieved from http://…
March 26, 2015
“On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.” -Paul Ricoeur
What you see is what you get, except when it isn't. We're all familiar with Hubble's law, or the notion that the Universe is expanding…
March 25, 2015
“But less intelligible still was the flood that was caused by forty days’ rain, and forty nights’. For here on the moors there were some years when it rained for two hundred days and two hundred nights, almost without fairing; but there was never any Flood.” -Halldór Laxness
Once every 18 years, a…
March 24, 2015
“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.”
“And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.”
“And yours… is wilfully to misunderstand them.” -Jane Austen
Every time we go to higher and higher…
March 23, 2015
“Studying whether there’s life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there’s something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That’s something that is almost part of being human, and I’m certain that will continue.” -Sally Ride
When Curiosity landed on the martian surface in…
March 20, 2015
“If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.” -Mario Andretti
One of the toughest things to wrap your mind around in the natural world is the idea of special relativity: the faster you move, the closer you get to the speed of light, the more difficult it becomes to increase…
March 19, 2015
“The sun is a miasma
Of incandescent plasma
The sun’s not simply made out of gas
No, no, no
The sun is a quagmire
It’s not made of fire
Forget what you’ve been told in the past” -They Might Be Giants
It's such a simple fact -- that the Sun is made out of hydrogen that fuses into helium, releasing…
March 18, 2015
“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” -Marcus Aurelius
Let there be light! You'd think that would be enough: that you form stars in the Universe, you see those stars in the Universe, and that tells you about what's out there.
If only it were that simple…
March 17, 2015
“‘You are a different kind of Irishman, Goll,’ was all she said.
‘Every Irishman is a different kind of Irishman,’ said Goll.” -Charles Brady
Sure, we're all a little bit Irish today. We celebrate in a plethora of different ways, the most common of which is to prominently display the color most…
March 17, 2015
Imagine that you've got that absolutely weightless feeling, the kind you get when you lose your balance and hurtle towards the ground. Are you on a roller coaster? Did you fall out of an airplane? Or are you in an accelerating elevator?
Image credit: Dutch Experiment Support Center, via http://www…
March 16, 2015
“Curiosity is the essence of human existence. ‘Who are we? Where are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?’… I don’t know. I don’t have any answers to those questions. I don’t know what’s over there around the corner. But I want to find out.” -Eugene Cernan, last human on the Moon
It's…
March 15, 2015
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” -Isaac Asimov
Yet it's that intersection -- of science with our day-to-day lives, our imaginations, our hopes, fears and dreams -- that's going to be the thing that drives us towards a…
March 14, 2015
“That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him.” -Kim Edwards
And every time two particles interact with one another, the Universe is forever different from how it was a moment before. Here at Starts With A Bang, this past week saw us explore a…
March 14, 2015
“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.” -Alan Watts
Neutron star matter is the stuff of legends: it's the densest three-dimensional material to exist in our Universe. With a density some 10^22…
March 12, 2015
“As a boy I believed I could make myself invisible. I’m not sure that I ever could, but I certainly had the ability to pass unnoticed.” -Terence Stamp
When you take a look at the stars visible in the night sky, you're only seeing a tiny fraction of what's actually present in our galaxy. Your…
March 11, 2015
“Every time we get slapped down, we can say, ‘Thank you, Mother Nature,’ because it means we’re about to learn something important.” -John Bahcall
And what's possibly more important than learning how the Sun works? For nearly all of human history -- well into the 20th century -- we really didn't…
March 10, 2015
Imagine the surface of the Moon, so distant, and an infinitely precise and powerful laser pointer. With a flick of your wrist, you can send the dot that you see flying across the Moon's surface as quickly as you can manage.
Image credit: Sabine Hossenfelder.
Without too much difficulty, in fact…
March 9, 2015
“Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.” -Yousuf Karsh
When you find an incredibly huge, dense collection of mass, all together in one place, it generally indicates a galaxy cluster of tremendous size.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Tremblay (…
March 8, 2015
“Her will tells nearly all. She left an estate worth $314.91, mostly in Liberty Bonds, with a few items such as a desk valued at $5. She never married and had few living relatives. She also left behind a legacy of a great astronomical discovery.” -Jeremy Bernstein, on Henrietta Leavitt
Today is…
March 7, 2015
“Many have argued that a vacuum does not exist, others claim it exists only with difficulty in spite of the repugnance of nature; I know of no one who claims it easily exists without any resistance from nature." -Evangelista Torricelli
The Universe is here, within us, out there in the great abyss…
