July 13, 2016
"If you're puzzled by what dark energy is, you're in good company." -Saul Perlmutter
The accelerated expansion of our Universe was one of the biggest surprise discoveries of all-time, and something that still lacks a good physical explanation. While many models of dark energy exist, it remains a…
July 12, 2016
"There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It's a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that's still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting." -Mike Brown, on the possibility of Planet Nine
When most people think of the Kuiper…
July 11, 2016
"My eureka moment was in the dead of night, the early hours of the morning, on a cold, cold night, and my feet were so cold, they were aching. But when the result poured out of the charts, you just forget all that. You realize instantly how significant this is—what it is you’ve really landed on—and…
July 10, 2016
“According to well-known electrodynamic laws, an electron moving in a magnetic field is acted upon by a force which runs perpendicular to the direction of motion of the electron and to the direction of the magnetic field, and whose magnitude is easily determined.” -Pieter Zeeman
We're now full-on…
July 9, 2016
“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way — things I had no words for.” –Georgia O’Keeffe
The Standard Model is great at describing all the known particles we've ever observed and how they interact, but there are a number of important hints that it isn't…
July 8, 2016
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” -Jean-Luc Picard
The laws of electromagnetism could have been incredibly different. Our Universe has two types of electric charge (positive and negative) and could have had two types of magnetic pole (north…
July 7, 2016
"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" -Stephen Hawking
One of the greatest discoveries of the 20th centuries was not only that there were just four…
July 6, 2016
"It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy." -Ursula Le Guin
If you were to rewind the Solar System to the very beginning, with only imperceptibly different initial conditions, how often would…
July 5, 2016
“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” -Richard Feynman
Writing in the New York Times on Monday, philosopher James Blachowicz argues that just as "justice" and "courage" are hard to define but easy to recognize, so science is the same way, and that…
July 4, 2016
“Have you entered the springs of the sea? Or have you walked in search of the depths?” -Job 38:16
When NASA’s Dawn spacecraft discovered the existence of bright, white spots inside one of Ceres’ largest craters, the speculations ran wild, from water to aliens. Instead, it was determined that…
July 3, 2016
“All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.” -Cesare Pavese
We're halfway through the year at Starts With A Bang, but it feels like the greatest things are just getting started! For one, enjoy our newest podcast: on Interstellar Travel, highlighted by an…
July 2, 2016
"Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain." -Joseph Campbell
One of the cardinal rules of a black hole is that anything that falls inside the event horizon -- that crosses that invisible boundary -- can never escape. That's because the escape velocity from inside…
July 1, 2016
“Celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it.” -The Simpsons
When gunpowder was first invented more than 1,000 years ago by mixing activated carbon (charcoal), sulfur and potassium nitrate together, its first major application was to the development of fireworks. By…
June 30, 2016
"How well I have learned that there is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell. There is a deep, wide gulf, a chasm, and in that chasm is no place for any man." -Johnny Cash
The largest mountains, the greatest chasms, steepest cliffs and the tallest peaks on Earth are certainly impressive,…
June 29, 2016
“I have this one little saying, when things get too heavy just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man.” –Jimi Hendrix
The second lightest and second most abundant element in the Universe, helium, is incredibly rare on Earth. Practically none of the helium that Earth was formed with still…
June 28, 2016
"We have made the discovery of a new particle - a completely new particle - which is most probably very different from all the other particles. It's nearly a once in a lifetime experience, I would say." - Rolf-Dieter Heuer
At the end of its second, high-energy run, the Large Hadron Collider…
June 27, 2016
“It used to be that Pluto was a misfit. Now it turns out that Earth is the misfit. Most planets in the solar system look like Pluto, and not like the terrestrial planets.” -Alan Stern
The combination of New Horizons and Hubble to work together allow us to create the longest-baseline parallax images…
June 26, 2016
“All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.” -Cesare Pavese
After another Universe-investigating week here at Starts With A Bang, I'm pleased to make two simple but very satisfying announcements:
The latest Starts With A Bang podcast, on Interstellar Travel,…
June 25, 2016
"You can be the Moon and still be jealous of the stars." -Gary Allen
Earlier this week, NASA announced the discovery of Asteroid 2016 HO3, calling it Earth’s second moon. And it turns out that this is an object in a stable orbit, the same distance from the Sun as the Earth, that can be found…
June 24, 2016
“Those who know that the consensus of many centuries has sanctioned the conception that the earth remains at rest in the middle of the heavens as its center, would, I reflected, regard it as an insane pronouncement if I made the opposite assertion that the earth moves.” –Nicolaus Copernicus
There…
June 23, 2016
"Black holes can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song." -Janna Levin
If you had told an astrophysicist five years ago that binary black holes were common, that would’ve been news, but not surprising. If you had told them that ~30 solar masses was a good…
June 22, 2016
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -T.S. Eliot
Now that not just one but two gravitational wave events have been directly detected, we're officially in the era of true gravitational wave…
June 21, 2016
"There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery." -Enrico Fermi
Given the huge number of stars, planets, and chances at life that the galaxy and the Universe has given…
June 20, 2016
"Mozart's music is like an X-ray of your soul - it shows what is there, and what isn't." -Isaac Stern
When supermassive black holes have a large amount of matter fall onto them, they accelerate a large amount of the ionized material -- particularly electrons -- into high-velocity, bi-directional…
June 19, 2016
“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.” -Muhammad Ali
It may have been another fun week here at Starts With A Bang, where I've just learned something fun: I have an Erdös-Bacon number of nine! On the academic side, I published with Jim Fry, who…
June 18, 2016
"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power." -Alexander Hamilton
Seen poking through…
June 17, 2016
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” –Joseph Campbell
Making up some 85% of the mass in our Universe, dark matter is necessary to explain the motions of individual galaxies, the grouping and clustering of assemblies of galaxies, the large-scale structure of the Universe and more. But…
June 16, 2016
"If you've seen one gamma-ray burst, you've seen one gamma-ray burst!" -Common quote among gamma-ray burst astronomers, emphasizing how little we know about them.
When the first gravitational wave signal ever, GW150914, was directly detected, NASA’s Fermi GBM team shocked the world by announcing…
June 15, 2016
"It turned out that nature was very kind, and there appear to be many of these black holes in the Universe and we were lucky enough to see one." -Dave Reitze, executive director of LIGO
On September 14th, 2015, just days after turning on, the twin Advanced LIGO detectors detected the first…
June 14, 2016
"In order for the light to shine so brightly the darkness must be present." -Francis Bacon
Recently, a team of international researchers has assembled the most comprehensive, up to date study on light pollution on Earth ever, including a full-Earth map of dark sky conditions or lack thereof. Its…
