January 6, 2017
"Other galaxies like Andromeda are shooting these ‘spitballs’ at us all the time." -James Guillochon, coauthor on the new study
Imagine you're a star passing too close to a black hole. What's going to happen to you? Yes, you'll be tidally disrupted and eventually torn apart. Some of the matter will…
January 6, 2017
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so…
January 5, 2017
"The mystery about α is actually a double mystery. The first mystery – the origin of its numerical value α ≈ 1/137 has been recognized and discussed for decades. The second mystery – the range of its domain – is generally unrecognized." -Malcolm H. MacGregor
We assume that the fundamental constants…
January 4, 2017
"Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask." -Friedrich Nietzsche
If you want to see all the way back to the Big Bang -- to the cosmic microwave background -- that means looking back through billions of light years worth of space. While…
January 4, 2017
“I have difficulty to believe it, because nothing in Italy arrives ahead of time.”
–Sergio Bertolucci, research director at CERN, on faster-than-light neutrinos
A little over five years ago, the OPERA collaboration announced an astounding result: that neutrinos sent through more than 700km of rock…
January 3, 2017
"For me the best answer is not in words but in measurements." -Elena Aprile
Dark matter is perhaps the most mysterious substance in the Universe. It outmasses normal matter and radiation, which includes all the known particles in the Standard Model, by a factor of 5-to-1. The observational,…
January 2, 2017
“You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn’t care.” –Clayton Christensen
If all we had were galactic rotation curves -- like those measured by Vera Rubin -- we would know that something was wrong with our picture of the Universe, but we wouldn’t know how. Two equally good explanations, that there was…
January 1, 2017
"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." -Winston Churchill
Happy new year here at Starts With A Bang! No matter how 2016 was for you, there's a new year dawning today, and whether you've got sun, clouds, rain or snow where…
December 31, 2016
"It's a brilliant surface in that sunlight. The horizon seems quite close to you because the curvature is so much more pronounced than here on earth. It's an interesting place to be. I recommend it." -Neil Armstrong
There are many impressive optical phenomena that we can see with our own eyes here…
December 30, 2016
“The joy of life consists in the exercise of one’s energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.” -Aleister Crowley
As we learn more and more about the Universe, we'd…
December 29, 2016
"The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything." -Theodore Roosevelt
Scientists make mistakes. We fail. We have our intuition lead us astray; we synthesize information in ways that lead to catastrophically wrong predictions. Whether we make sloppy, calculational errors,…
December 28, 2016
"Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions." -Vera Rubin
When you look at a galaxy in the night sky, it’s easy to imagine that it’s just a system of masses like our Solar System, except on a larger scale. Instead of a single, central mass, you have many stars…
December 27, 2016
"It's the first time the universe has spoken to us through gravitational waves, up to now we've been deaf to them." -Dave Reitze
No doubt about it: the greatest science advance of 2016 was the end of the century-long wait for the first direct detection of gravitational waves. Not only were we able…
December 26, 2016
“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” -Edgar Allan Poe
No matter where you look in the night sky, a powerful enough telescope appears to reveal points of light. Even if you find a region with no…
December 25, 2016
"I think that Walter Schirra aboard Mercury 8 was the first of the astronauts to use the code name 'Santa Claus' to indicate the presence of flying saucers next to space capsules." -Maurice Chatelain
Well, here we are: December 25th, Christmas day, here at Starts With A Bang! Whether you're a Santa…
December 24, 2016
“The very closest stars would require many years to visit, even traveling at the speed of light, which is impossible according to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Today’s fastest spaceships would require 200,000 years to travel to Alpha Centauri, our closest bright star. The energy required to send…
December 23, 2016
“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.” –Rabindranath Tagore
You can’t answer a hypothetical question for certain, at least in science, without doing the experiment for yourself. Here on Earth, liquid water is plentiful; our planet has the stable temperatures and…
December 22, 2016
“If antimatter and matter make contact, both are destroyed instantly. Physicists call the process ‘annihilation.” -Dan Brown
Antimatter is the counterpart to matter: it exists with the same mass, opposite charge, and if ever the two should touch, they annihilate away into pure energy via Einstein’s…
December 21, 2016
"Just to clarify, neither Jason or myself ... are advocating that it is an alien megastructure, but we also can't completely rule it out." -Kimberly Cartier
When we launched the Kepler spacecraft, we expected that we’d be able to measure the light from over 100,000 stars at once, practically…
December 20, 2016
"Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder." -Thomas Aquinas
Sure, you've studied a little physics. You know about Einstein and General Relativity, the quantum nature of…
December 19, 2016
"A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars." -Victor Hugo
In the distant future, about 7 billion years from now, our Sun will run out of all the nuclear fuel it’s capable of burning in its core. As it contracts under its own gravity, radiation becomes unable to hold it…
December 18, 2016
"You're not looking for perfection in your partner. Perfection is all about the ego. With soulmate love, you know that true love is what happens when disappointment sets in - and you're willing to deal maturely with these disappointments." -Karen Salmansohn
It's been a great week full of great…
December 17, 2016
"Each ray of light moves in the coordinate system 'at rest' with the definite, constant velocity V independent of whether this ray of light is emitted by a body at rest or a body in motion." -Albert Einstein, 1905
The more kinetic energy you impart to something, the faster you go. But there’s a…
December 16, 2016
“First, you should check out my house. It’s, like, kinda lame, but way less lame than, like, your house.” -Lumpy Space Princess, Adventure Time
Billions of years ago, before the Universe contained clusters, galaxies, stars or even neutral atoms, everything was uniform. Almost perfectly uniform,…
December 15, 2016
"October extinguished itself in a rush of howling winds and driving rain and November arrived, cold as frozen iron, with hard frosts every morning and icy drafts that bit at exposed hands and faces." -J.K. Rowling
As cold as it gets outside over the coming months, particularly with the effect of a…
December 14, 2016
"Bringing an asteroid back to Earth? What's that have to do with space exploration? If we were moving outward from there, and an asteroid is a good stopping point, then fine. But now it's turned into a whole planetary defense exercise at the cost of our outward exploration." -Buzz Aldrin
Between…
December 13, 2016
"Even with all the collected data we cannot say with 100% certainty that the ASASSN-15lh event was a tidal disruption event. But it is by far the most likely explanation." -Giorgos Leloudas
Last year, a record-shattering event occurred: we saw the brightest supernova ever observed in the Universe.…
December 12, 2016
"When we recall the past, we usually find that it is the simplest things - not the great occasions - that in retrospect give off the greatest glow of happiness." -Bob Hope
When a very massive star reaches the end of its life, it runs out of burnable fuel. As a result, the core collapses, heats up…
December 11, 2016
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” -Andy Warhol
Any week that passes by that leaves you knowing more than when you started is a good one here at Starts With A Bang! I hope this past week didn't disappoint, as many of you became acquainted not only…
December 10, 2016
“I’m coming back in… and it’s the saddest moment of my life.” -Ed White, at the end of his first spacewalk
A great many of us had dreams of becoming an astronaut when we were younger, and many of us still have that dream today. But turning that dream into reality involves a lot of choices, a lot of…
