October 10, 2016
"They most likely form as subsystems within looser associations and evolve by gravitational processes. Strong galaxy interactions result and merging is expected to lead to the ultimate demise of the group. Compact groups are surprisingly numerous, and may play a significant role in galaxy evolution…
October 9, 2016
“Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.” -Raymond Carver
As we make our way through October, Halloween approaches here at Starts With A Bang! But as eerie as the world and our Universe…
October 8, 2016
"There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That's where the real art lies." -Martin McDonagh
There is a whole lot of cosmic detective work we can do to figure out the history of the Solar System. By examining the fossil…
October 7, 2016
“What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents.” -Jay Griffiths
At the earliest times, we can trace the history of our Universe…
October 6, 2016
"You are both fools. You cannot see thoughts, or angels. One is an abstract, the other a fantasy. To compare the two would be silly. Of course, using inferential logic, we can detect the existence of thought by the evidence of its actions, just as I detected the existence of a new form of radiation…
October 5, 2016
“She didn’t even know what she’d do when she got back to New Orleans, but inside she felt a yearning to shove her hands in the dirt, to cling to the ground there, forever.” -Sarah Rae
Hurricanes are among the most destructive natural disasters to occur on Earth, with extensive flooding, property…
October 4, 2016
"'Topology is destiny,' he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time." -Neal Stephenson
If you want to understand the Universe, there are two big areas you need to know: Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which governs the gravitational force and the curvature of spacetime, and quantum…
October 3, 2016
"If you are fearful, a horse will back off. If you are calm and confident, it will come forward. For those who are often flattered or feared, the horse can be a welcome mirror of the best in human nature." -Clare Balding
One of the most iconic astronomy images is that of the Horsehead Nebula.…
October 2, 2016
“Put two ships in the open sea, without wind or tide, and, at last, they will come together. Throw two planets into space, and they will fall one on the other. Place two enemies in the midst of a crowd, and they will inevitably meet; it is a fatality, a question of time; that is all.” -Jules Verne…
October 1, 2016
"There will be peace when the people of the world, want it so badly, that their governments will have no choice but to give it to them. I just wish you could all see the Earth the way that I see it. Because when you really look at it, it's just one world." -Superman
So, you want to shoot Earth’s…
September 30, 2016
“Everyone has his dream; I would like to live till dawn, but I know I have less than three hours left. It will be night, but no matter. Dying is simple. It does not take daylight. So be it: I will die by starlight.” –Victor Hugo
Whether you’re at rest or in motion, you can be confident that — from …
September 29, 2016
"Nothing in the standard cosmological model predicts this, and it is almost impossible to imagine how that model could be modified to explain it, without discarding the dark matter hypothesis completely." -David Merritt
Dark matter is a hugely successful theory for explaining a whole slew of…
September 28, 2016
"Teaching man his relatively small sphere in the creation, it also encourages him by its lessons of the unity of Nature and shows him that his power of comprehension allies him with the great intelligence over-reaching all." -Annie Jump Cannon
A look up at the stars in the night sky shows a clear…
September 27, 2016
"Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson hated each other so much. But that hate that they had for each other did not come before the love of their country." -David Scott
You can't make America great 'again' without looking at what made us great in the first place. It wasn't industry or…
September 26, 2016
"We conducted the first fully blind, three-dimensional search for cool gas in the early universe. Through this, we discovered a population of galaxies that is not clearly evident in any other deep surveys of the sky." -Chris Carilli
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field and its successor images represent…
September 25, 2016
“To study things from a scientific standpoint means to take an inventory of them—to find the process in which they are being produced; to connect them with other things; to see things in their causal process. ” -William Harris
As is pretty much always the case, it's been a big week here at Starts…
September 24, 2016
"Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before." -Star Trek, in many incarntions
When Star Trek debuted 50 years ago, we didn’t know that there would be regions of the Universe that were forever…
September 23, 2016
“Between cold fusion and respectable science there is virtually no communication at all. …because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for…
September 22, 2016
“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.” -Virginia Woolf
If you think about the Universe, what it is today, what it…
September 21, 2016
“All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.” -Sylvia Plath
Even on the darkest night skies from the most pristine locations on Earth, the night sky is never truly dark. Not even if you look away from the plane of the galaxy, on a moonless night, between the stars and away from any human-made…
September 20, 2016
"Science cannot tell theology how to construct a doctrine of creation, but you can't construct a doctrine of creation without taking account of the age of the universe and the evolutionary character of cosmic history." -John Polkinghorne
What is the Universe? What are those points of light in…
September 19, 2016
“It may be that ultimately the search for dark matter will turn out to be the most expensive and largest null result experiment since the Michelson-Morley experiment, which failed to detect the ether.” -John Moffat
Dark matter is a puzzle that’s now more than 80 years old: the presence of all the…
September 18, 2016
“We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest. We must learn to sail in high winds.” -Aristotle Onassis
Welcome back to the end of another big week at Starts With A Bang! There's been a lot of fantastic stories that have gone down, including:
Can stars escape from the galaxy, with…
September 17, 2016
“When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.” -Michel Houellebecq
If you take anything in the Universe and…
September 16, 2016
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” –Marcus Aurelius
How old is life on Earth? If all you had to go on was the fossil record, you’d run into severe trouble once you went back more than one or two billion…
September 15, 2016
"Even if I stumble on to the absolute truth of any aspect of the universe, I will not realise my luck and instead will spend my life trying to find flaws in this understanding - such is the role of a scientist." -Brian Schmidt
The discovery of the accelerated expansion of the Universe -- and of…
September 14, 2016
“Maybe some people don't feel scared when they think about comets and supernovas. Maybe they think it is wonderful.” -Lydia Netzer
What, in our Solar System, has a long tail from boiled-off frozen ices? What simultaneously leaves an X-ray signature when the solar wind collides with those boiled-off…
September 13, 2016
“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” -Alan Turing
The Cosmic Microwave Background data gave us an unprecedented picture of our Universe in terms of accuracy, with the latest Planck results showing us our Universe is 68% dark energy, 13.8…
September 12, 2016
“It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.” -J.K. Rowling
From 19,000 light years away, Terzan 5 looks a lot like pretty much any globular cluster you'd expect to find: it's massive, concentrated, with a huge number of stars at right around 12 billion years of age. But mixed in…
September 11, 2016
“With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” -Aaron Satie, Star Trek
It’s been a remarkable week at Starts With A Bang, and I'm especially proud of the stories we've run on Proxima b, Hubble'…
