Astronomy

“There’s no god, it’s the elements that control this world and everything on it.” -Scott A. Butler From hydrogen through uranium and even beyond, the Universe gives us a huge variety of elements that can bond together in practically innumerable ways, creating all the matter we've ever observed in existence. Everything beyond helium in the periodic table way made inside of stars, but not all stars create elements equally. Artist’s impression of the red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris. Our Sun will become a more modest red giant, but a giant nonetheless. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user…
"The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so vast and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment." -Johannes Kepler, and the adopted saying of the Kepler mission The latest haul from NASA's Kepler mission indicates that, in it sample of some 150,000 stars, there are over 2,000 confirmed exoplanets, with approximately 40% of them rocky worlds. If we extrapolate this to our entire galaxy, we have about 60 billion habitable zone planets in our galaxy alone. The 21 Kepler planets discovered in the habitable…
"In other words, theory attempts to segregate the minimum number of possible worlds which must include the actual world we inhabit. Then the observer, with new factual information, attempts to reduce the list further. And so it goes, observation and theory advancing together toward the common goal of science, knowledge of the structure and observation of the universe." -Edwin Hubble To gaze into the empty abyss of deep space with the most expensive telescope of all requires a great leap of faith: that you’ll find something worth observing when you look. In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope…
“Even when Darwin’s teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology.” -Trofim Lysenko When it comes to many issues, democracy and popular opinion does and should determine the outcome. But when it comes to science and scientific issues, popular opinion or the votes of even an elite group of people doesn't mean very much at all. Instead, it's the truth that the Universe tells us about itself, through experiment, measurement and…
“Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.” -Carl Sagan Glittering above high overhead, the canopy of night offers thousands of points of light, each one a blazing Sun, starring in the story of its own Solar System. But even armed with that knowledge, it's difficult to calculate exactly how far away such a star would actually be. The brightness/distance relationship is a great start, but stars intrinsically come in different brightnesses,…
"Actually I think Art lies in both directions - the broad strokes, big picture but on the other hand the minute examination of the apparently mundane. Seeing the whole world in a grain of sand, that kind of thing." -Peter Hammill When fine-and-coarse-grained sand is carried by the winds across uneven terrain, sand dunes form here on Earth. But on Mars, where the atmosphere is only 0.7% what it is here, the sand is made of different composition and the winds gust to up to 60 mph (100 kph), do sand dunes behave the same way? A close-up of the dunes from the Curiosity rover. Image credit: NASA…
"This event marks the culmination of many years of hard work on behalf of all involved." -Jane Bachynski If you want to take an ideal image of the Universe, you need to not only minimize your light pollution, cloud cover and build the largest-aperture telescope you can, you also need to take away as much of the atmospheric distortion as you can. The effects of the Earth’s Atmosphere on the Telescopic Image of alpha Piscium from Edinburgh and from Alta Vista 10,700 ft., compared. From a 1863 engraving by Charles Piazzi Smyth, in the public domain. Typically, this involved building your…
"The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience." -William Herschel We typically think of Saturn as our Solar System’s ringed world, thanks to its huge, glorious rings spanning nearly three times the diameter of the planet from tip-to-tip. But the other three gas giant worlds have their own impressive ring systems, with Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune boasting four, thirteen and five rings, respectively. A stitching together of two 591…
"We are not learning to view ourselves as an advanced, evolving civilization. That is what we really must learn to do, in due course, if we were to survive. All of that will take place, in due course, and we will be able to explore solar system. We will be able to go beyond it, provided we get our act together and learn to live as a civilization." -Edgar Mitchell There are a great many world with opportunities for life, both in our Solar System and beyond, and we’ve only just begun to discover them. Perhaps Enceladus, Europa or Titan harbor some form of life right now, and perhaps Mars or…
"You cannot rob me of free nature's grace, You cannot shut the windows of the sky Through which Aurora shows her brightening face." -James Thomson The northern (aurora borealis) and southern (aurora australis) lights are caused by a combination of three phenomena on our world, that make our aurorae unique among all worlds in our solar system: Outbursts from the Sun that can go in any direction, Our magnetic field, that funnels charged particles into circles around the poles, And our atmospheric composition, that causes the colors and the displays we see. Image credit: flickr user Image…
"That’s the next step: to simultaneously see [gravitational waves] with three, four or five interferometers, localize it quickly, within minutes, and have other observatories catch it instantly, and catch it in the optical or the X-ray bands. That’s going to provide a whole new understanding in these cataclysmic events." -Dave Reitze, executive director of LIGO On September 14th, 2015, both LIGO detectors in Hanover, WA and Livingston, LA, detected an unambiguous gravitational wave signal from two merging black holes some 1.3 billion light years distant. About 0.4 seconds later, NASA’s Fermi…
"This is the plan. Get your ass to Mars, and go to the Hilton Hotel and flash the fake Brubaker I.D. at the front desk, that's all there is to it. Just do as I tell you." -Total Recall Every two years, Earth passes Mars in orbit, as the inner, faster world overtakes the outer one. This year, it happens when Earth approaches aphelion, its farthest point from the Sun, while Mars approaches perihelion, or its closest approach. Earth’s and Mars’ orbits, to scale, as viewed from the Solar System’s north direction. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Areong under a c.c.a.-s.a.-2.5 license. On…
"Fundamental physics is like an art more or less. It's completely non-practical, and you can't use it for anything. But it's about the universe and how the world came into being. It's very remote from your daily life and mine, and yet it defines us as human beings." -Yuri Milner In one of the boldest initiatives ever announced, billionaire Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking are working on developing a "Breakthrough Starshot" project, where an advanced laser array will power a sail-driven spacecraft to speeds exceeding 60,000 km/s, taking it to the nearest stars within a single human lifetime. A…
“This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” -W.G. Sebald In the 1600s, the earliest telescopes saw that Saturn had "ears," while later observers all the way back then finally saw their true nature: a ringed system with complex gaps, bands and colorations throughout. Since then, Saturn’s rings have been a source of wonder and puzzlement to skywatchers everywhere. The only ring system visible through…
"The older people that one admires seem to be fearless. They go right out into the world. It's astounding. Maybe they can't see or they can't hear, but they walk out into the street and take life as it comes. They're models of courage, in a strange way." -James Hillman The scientific enterprise has uncovered a huge number of astounding, surprising and yet fundamental truths about our Universe, what composes it and the way it works. From the formation and evolution of life on Earth to the existence and behavior of subatomic particles to the birth of the matter and radiation filling our…
"I'm here for several reason, Mr. Pepin, first of all for aid. When something tragic happens in our skies, we do our utmost to extend sympathy. But sympathy without action,that's an empty emotion. Mainly I'm here for the purposes of reentry." "I don't understand." "Adjustment," Harold said, "to earth. I'm here to make sure you didn't leave your whole life in the sky." -Adam Ross When we launch a satellite into orbit around the Earth, we expend a tremendous amount of fuel and energy to make it happen. From hundreds of miles up -- well above the definition of space -- these satellites zip…
"This job is a great scientific adventure. But it's also a great human adventure. Mankind has made giant steps forward. However, what we know is really very, very little compared to what we still have to know." -Fabiola Gianotti On Earth, star trails inevitably appear in any long-exposure image unless you account for the rotation of the Earth, requiring specialized mounts, advanced pointing software, or both. But from space, those same familiar motions appear, albeit for very different reasons. Image credit: Chris Luckhardt at flickr, of a long-exposure photograph of the stars from Earth.…
"When I was in high school, I was certain that being an astronaut was my goal. It was a very important time -- Sally Ride was making her first flight into space and she had a real impact on me. Those 'firsts' kind of stick in your head and really become inspirations for you." Karen Nyberg, astronaut On September 14th, less than 72 hours after being activated at its highest sensitivity ever, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) detected its first unambiguous signal in both detectors, a signal that corresponded to the merger of two massive black holes: 36 and 29 solar…
“The slow philosophy is not about doing everything in tortoise mode. It’s less about the speed and more about investing the right amount of time and attention in the problem so you solve it.” -Carl Honore Einstein's theories of special and general relativity tell us that there's no Universal, preferred frame of reference. But that doesn't necessarily mean that our physical Universe doesn't have an average frame of reference, one which minimizes the relative speeds of all the galaxies to one another. Image credit: Cosmography of the Local Universe/Cosmic Flows Project — Courtois, Helene M. et…
"TW Hydrae is quite special. It is the nearest known protoplanetary disc to Earth and it may closely resemble the Solar System when it was only 10 million years old." -David Wilner For hundreds of years since the realization that Earth and the other planets orbited the Sun, humanity had only hypotheses about how planets formed around stars. The consensus was that gas clouds collapsed along one direction first, forming a disk, which then rotated and formed instabilities, leading to the development of planetary systems. Image credit: Mark McCughrean (Max-Planck–Inst. Astron.); C. Robert O’Dell…