December 3, 2012
"Who is wise? He that learns from everyone.
Who is powerful? He that governs his passions.
Who is rich? He that is content.
Who is that? Nobody." -Benjamin Franklin
Welcome to Messier Monday, where each week we take a journey into one of the 110 objects in the Messier Catalogue of non-cometary deep…
December 2, 2012
"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting." -Henry David Thoreau
Every day that we have free or leisure time, there's this great conflict as to how we spend it: working to better…
November 30, 2012
"You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there." -Edwin Louis Cole
Our Solar System is -- at least from our perspective -- the most well-studied system of planets, moons, asteroids and comets in the entire Universe.
Image credit: Olaf Frohn, from earlier in 2012.
And in this…
November 28, 2012
"Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night." -Hal Borland
Of course you know the danger that would befall us if the Earth ever got too close to the Sun, as the Perry Bible Fellowship shows, atop. But have you ever…
November 26, 2012
"The man's a born straggler... another lucky exception to the rules of natural selection. A million years ago he would've been an easy snack for a saber-toothed tiger." -Carl Hiaasen
Welcome to the latest Messier Monday, where each week we take a look at one of Charles Messier's original catalogue…
November 24, 2012
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, 'Wow! What a Ride!'” -Hunter S. Thompson
For those of you who've…
November 21, 2012
“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George Bernard Shaw
All that is real about ourselves is…
November 19, 2012
"When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system." -Kalpana Chawla
Welcome to this week's Messier Monday, where I pick a new object out of the original catalogue of 110 "faint fuzzies" designed to help comet-…
November 17, 2012
“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” -Niels Bohr
One of the most amazing recent technological innovations is the advent of 3D Printing, where any shaped or textured object can be accurately reproduced with the right software and printing materials. The things…
November 16, 2012
"Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for me." -Craig Ferguson
Earlier this week, evidence was presented measuring a very rare decay rate -- albeit not incredibly precisely -- which point towards the Standard Model being it as far as new particles accessible to…
November 14, 2012
"...this consensus has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preference or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data." -Steven Weinberg
One of the most fundamental questions we could ever ask about all of existence is "What makes up the Universe…
November 12, 2012
"When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old." -Mark Twain
Welcome to yet another installment of Messier Monday, where each week, I'll pick one of the 110 Messier Objects -- deep-sky objects catalogued to avoid confusion for comet hunters -- to…
November 11, 2012
“There is no such thing as magic, supernatural, miracle; only something that's still beyond logic of the observer.” -Toba Beta
It might be hard to believe, but science tells us truths about the Universe that we might never have intuited or philosophized about if the Universe itself didn't reveal…
November 8, 2012
"You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it." -Henry Louis Gates
When it comes to stars, their fates are very well known. Every single star that's massive enough to fuse hydrogen into helium in its core will someday run out of fuel and die.
Image credit: NASA,…
November 7, 2012
"It's a brilliant surface in that sunlight." - Neil Armstrong
Indeed, all that glitters so brilliantly in the cosmos does so because of the stars that have formed throughout it.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team.
Over the 14 billion-or-so years that our Universe has been around…
November 5, 2012
"I hate that expression, 'fusion.' What it means to me is this movement where nothing ever really fused." -Wayne Kramer
Welcome to another Messier Monday, where each week, I pick one of the 110 Messier Objects -- deep-sky objects catalogued to avoid confusion for comet hunters -- to highlight and…
November 3, 2012
"Only the knife knows what goes on in the heart of a pumpkin." -Simone Schwarz-Bart
With Halloween just behind us, the only things that pumpkins may mean to you now are pie, soups, or -- as John Prine would sing you -- a condescending term of affection, as in,
Daddy's Little Pumpkin.
But I recently…
November 2, 2012
"The important point is that since the origin of life belongs in the category of at least once phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at-least-once. And for life as we know it…
October 31, 2012
"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux ... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad
Despite the wondrous, luminous…
October 29, 2012
"Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter,
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades." -Walt Whitman
Last week, we kicked off…
October 28, 2012
"Where there is no imagination there is no horror." -Arthur Conan Doyle
Halloween, for those of you who've been here a while, is my favorite holiday. Every year for the past dozen years now, I've dressed up as whatever I've wanted for Halloween. And -- if you haven't seen the pattern yet -- it's…
October 26, 2012
"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." -Niels Bohr
What's going to happen next? It's perhaps the most important thing to know if we want to be prepared for practically anything in our lives. And without even thinking about it, most of us are actually very good at this…
October 24, 2012
"The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees" -They Might Be Giants
It's so ingrained in us that the Sun is a nuclear furnace powered by hydrogen atoms fusing into heavier elements that it's difficult…
October 22, 2012
"This nebula had such a resemblance to a comet in its form and brightness that I endeavored to find others, so that astronomers would not confuse these same nebulae with comets just beginning to shine." -Charles Messier
Let's take a journey back in time to when our known Universe was a lot smaller…
October 21, 2012
"The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web." -Pablo Picasso
People find artistic inspiration from a plethora of different sources, ranging from the very complex to the…
October 20, 2012
"I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter. I went to bed. Eight o'clock the next morning I was up writing again." -Abraham Pais, physicist
You've been in graduate school for many years…
October 17, 2012
"The particle and the planet are subject to the same laws and what is learned of one will be known of the other." -James Smithson
The entirety of the known Universe -- from the smallest constituents of the atoms to the largest superclusters of galaxies -- have more in common than you might think.…
October 15, 2012
“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.” -Bertolt Brecht
One of the most frequent questions I get about the Universe -- as a cosmologist -- isn't quite about the Big Bang in and of itself.
The expansion of the Universe in reverse; image…
October 14, 2012
"History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power has destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again." -Carl Sagan
From the streets and people of our hometown to the nations, planets, stars and galaxies (and beyond…
October 11, 2012
"A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth." -Ernst Mach
Our Sun, like all Sun-like stars, will come to the end of its life someday. All the hydrogen fuel in its core…
