March 7, 2017
"If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day." -John Archibald Wheeler
Today, we take the existence of gravitational waves for granted. They were predicted by Einstein almost immediately following the first publication of general relativity, they were…
March 6, 2017
"A bird cannot fly with one wing only. Human space flight cannot develop any further without the active participation of women." -Valentina Tereshkova
Sally Ride was the first American woman in space, launched aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1983 amidst controversy. At 32, she was the…
March 5, 2017
“A theory is a supposition which we hope to be true, a hypothesis is a supposition which we expect to be useful; fictions belong to the realm of art; if made to intrude elsewhere, they become either make-believes or mistakes.” -G. Johnstone Stoney
It's been another exciting week here at Starts With…
March 4, 2017
"For the first time we can learn about individual stars from near the beginning of time. There are surely many more out there." -Neil Gehrels
We know what NASA’s James Webb and WFIRST are designed for, and we know what we expect to find. James Webb will be the largest space telescope ever, focused…
March 3, 2017
"Mars' atmosphere is so thin, you do not need a lot of streamlining. By the time the ship is going fast enough for air resistance to matter, it'll be high enough that there will be practically no air." -Andy Weir, The Martian, as spoken by Bruce Ng
If you had taken a trip to our Solar System four…
March 2, 2017
"If we get rid of the moon, women, those menstrual cycles are governed by the moon, will not get PMS. They will stop bitching and whining." -Joe Scarborough, misattributing a quote to Arnold Schwarzenegger that was actually spoken by an impersonator
Our Moon is pretty unusual as far as the Solar…
March 1, 2017
"The [James Webb] telescope is basically designed to answer the big questions in astronomy, the questions Hubble can't answer." -Amber Straughn
Have you ever asked the biggest questions in the Universe? Questions like how the Universe came to be the way it is today? How the first stars and galaxies…
February 28, 2017
“In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, as far as possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.” -Niels Bohr
When it comes to galaxies, clusters of galaxies or the largest-scales on the Universe,…
February 27, 2017
"When a star goes supernova, the explosion emits enough light to overshadow an entire solar system, even a galaxy. Such explosions can set off the creation of new stars." -Todd Nelsen
In February of 1987, the first light from a supernova some 168,000 light years away was observed on Earth. It…
February 26, 2017
“I didn't even know there were stars to look at to not see. If you don't know that they're there, you don't know that you're missing them.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson, on light pollution
As with pretty much every week that goes by, we've had a slew of fantastic stories here at Starts With A Bang! There…
February 25, 2017
"The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons." -Edwin Hubble
As you look to greater and greater distances, you’re looking back in time in the Universe. But thanks to dark energy, what we can see and access today isn’t always going to be accessible. As galaxies grow more distant with…
February 24, 2017
"It's the gravity that shapes the large scale structure of the universe, even though it is the weakest of four categories of forces." -Stephen Hawking
Galaxies don’t just exist in isolation in our Universe, but are often found bound together as a part of even grander structures. Our own Milky Way…
February 23, 2017
"When Benjamin Franklin inveted the lightning rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God." -Bertrand Russell
You’ll often hear charges that science has become too politicized, but it’s the other…
February 22, 2017
"It isn't only the beauty of the night sky that thrills me. It's the sense I have that some of those points of light are the home stars of beings not so different from us, daily cares and all. who look across space with wonder, just as we do." -Frank Drake
What is it that makes our Solar System…
February 21, 2017
"The larger inner moons fall back to Mars after about 5 million years due to the tidal pull of the planet, after which the two outer satellites evolve into Phobos- and Deimos-like orbits." -Pascal Rosenblatt, et al.
Compared to the other moons we know of in the Solar System, Mars’s two, Phobos and…
February 20, 2017
"Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a…
February 19, 2017
“We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, is all ancient history. Then, before you can blink an eye, suddenly, it threatens to start all over again.” -Captain Picard
It’s been another remarkable week here at Starts With A Bang! Of course there's been news, science,…
February 18, 2017
"I really didn't have to work, shall we say, with Star Trek. It was a natural. When I opened my mouth, there was Scotty. It's like I tell people what you see in Scotty is 99% James Doohan and 1% accent." -James Doohan
So, your friend on the USS Enterprise beamed you aboard, took you on a…
February 17, 2017
"It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole." -Dmitri Mendeleev
When the Universe…
February 16, 2017
"How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them." -Christiaan Huygens
It was quite a surprise when we started discovering all the exoplanets that were out…
February 15, 2017
"I've heard it said that God made all men, but Samuel Colt made all men equal. We'd see what Mr. Colt could do for a woman." ― Cherie Priest
Bullets are incredibly dangerous when fired from a gun, but that's true even when they're fired up in the air, not at a target directly. Falling, stray…
February 14, 2017
"'I'll follow him to the ends of the earth,' she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends." -Tom Robbins
We have some pretty good definitions of what it takes to be a planet, and one part of that definition is that a world needs to be massive enough to pull itself into hydrostatic…
February 13, 2017
"The problem is, you’re trying to find these really faint things, but you’re looking behind these really bright things. The brightest galaxies in the universe are in clusters, and those cluster galaxies are blocking the background galaxies we’re trying to observe." -Rachael Livermore
One of the…
February 12, 2017
“We have finally established the contours that define the supercluster of galaxies we can call home … This is not unlike finding out for the first time that your hometown is actually part of much larger country that borders other nations.” -Brent Tully
It's been another remarkable week here at …
February 11, 2017
“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” -Kurt Vonnegut
We all know how explosions work: a tremendous release of energy causes a rapid outward expansion, and the most energetic particles get…
February 10, 2017
"To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." -Nicolaus Copernicus
As we peel back the layers of information deeper and deeper into the Universe’s history, we uncover progressively more knowledge about how everything we know today…
February 9, 2017
"For the first time we can learn about individual stars from near the beginning of time. There are surely many more out there." -Neil Gehrels
We’ve come incredibly far in our quest to learn how the Universe came to be the way it is today. We can see out in space for tens of billions of light years…
February 8, 2017
"To morrow, I believe, is to be an eclipse of the sun, and I think it perfectly meet and proper that the sun in the heavens, and the glory of the Republic should both go into obscurity and darkness together." -Benjamin F. Wade
The Moon is spherical, and so its shadow should be a circle by simple…
February 7, 2017
"By preventing dangerous asteroid strikes, we can save millions of people, or even our entire species. And, as human beings, we can take responsibility for preserving this amazing evolutionary experiment of which we and all life on Earth are a part." -Rusty Schweickart
Asteroid strikes are among…
February 6, 2017
"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…
