Astronomy
esiegel | May 4, 2015“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” –Joseph Campbell
Imagine you just stared into darkness, collecting every photon of light that came by. What would you wind up seeing? The Hubble Space Telescope has done this many times, creating the Hubble Deep Field first and then the Hubble Ultra Deep Field with upgraded cameras and more time. But most recently, the eXtreme Deep Field has surpassed even that.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R.…
esiegel | May 1, 2015“A single tiny light creates a space where darkness cannot exist. The light vanquishes the darkness. Try as it might, the darkness cannot conquer the light.” -Donald L. Hicks
While it might seem like there are an endless supply of stars in the Universe, the process that powers each and every one requires fuel to burn. At some point -- even though it's far in the future -- that fuel will all be spent, and all we'll be left with are stellar corpses of various types.
Image credit: E. Siegel.
But the Universe is full of second chances, and opportunities to bring not only burned-out stars back…
esiegel | April 28, 2015“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.” -Carl Sagan
For thousands of years, humanity has looked up at the night sky and wondered at what might be out there. For the first time in all of our history, we not only have the answers to what's present in the Universe, we not only know the nature of most objects we see (and infer), but we even have images and true-to-life (we think) illustrations of them all.
Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration.
Wouldn't it be great if there were a book out…
esiegel | April 28, 2015Over at Starts With A Bang, Jillian Scudder of Astroquizzical takes on a doozy of a question:
If a photon of light escapes from a star, when it hits another star, does it get absorbed and have to complete another cycle before it can escape again?
After all, it takes (on average) over 100,000 years for a photon created in a star's core to find its way to the surface and exit.
Image credit: NASA/Jenny Mottar.
But what about the photons -- much lower energy than the gamma rays the core generates -- that hit the surface? Will they simply be absorbed and re-emitted outward, the way the Earth's…
esiegel | April 27, 2015“But I see it differently now. There has to be a middle. Without it, nothing can truly be whole. Because it is not just the space between, but also what holds everything together.” -Sarah Dessen
Sure, the Hubble Space Telescope gives us unparalleled views of our Universe. We can even use it -- with its near-infrared camera, NICMOS -- to view the very center of our galaxy, something completely blocked by dust in visible light.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and Q.D. Wang (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), via http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/02/image/b/.
But part of the…
esiegel | April 25, 2015“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” -Marcel Proust
As another fine week comes to a close at Starts With A Bang, let's take a look back at all the topics we've taken on:
Where did light first come from? (for Ask Ethan),
Zooming into a fractal (for our Weekend Diversion),
Space turns green on 4/20 (for Mostly Mute Monday),
The illusion of reality (a great contribution from Brian Koberlein),
Everybody wants to rule the quantum world (a special extra from Paul Halpern),
Earth day in the Universe,
What is the strong force? (for Throwback Thursday),…
esiegel | April 22, 2015“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” -Bill Anders, Apollo 8, 1968
We've come an incredible distance in exploring the Universe. In the span of just a single human lifetime, we've gone from speculations about what other worlds in our Solar System might be like, the possibility of planets around other stars and wondering how many galaxies might be in our observable Universe to actual answers about all three of these profound questions.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
But as far as we've come, Earth is still the only planet…
esiegel | April 21, 2015When you look out at the nebulae in the night sky -- especially if you're seeing them with your eye through a telescope for the first time -- you might be in for a big surprise.
Image credit: Chris Spratt of http://www.islandnet.com/.
These faint, fuzzy, extended objects are far dimmer, sparser and more cloud-like than almost anyone expects. Yet thanks to some incredible image processing, assigning colors to different wavelengths and adjusting the contrast, we can make out detailed structures beyond what even your aided eye could ever hope to perceive.
Hubble images of M57 taken at…
esiegel | April 19, 2015“The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.” -Carl Sagan
The Universe is filled with a wide variety of stars, planets, galaxies and other optical phenomenon. Despite the fact that there are no such things as green stars, on rare occasions, galaxies themselves appear to be emitting isolated green wisps into intergalactic space.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI), with science by NASA, ESA, and W. Keel…
esiegel | April 13, 2015“Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.” -Marguerite Yourcenar
Galaxies are everywhere we look in the Universe, clustered together in groups and separated by voids. It stands to reason that if we look beyond the local group, one of those galaxies would have to be the brightest. But the one that is turns out to be most unusual.
Image composite credit: X-ray: NASA/UMass/…
esiegel | April 9, 2015“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” -Joseph Campbell
When we look at the centers of galaxies, it's no surprise that there are large black holes there, millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun.
Image credit: Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), Hubble Space Telescope (green), Spitzer Space Telescope (pink), & GALEX (purple).
As we look farther and farther away, and hence farther back in time, we'd expect these masses to be much smaller. But what we find is that we have supermassive black…
esiegel | April 9, 2015“The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it’s scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based. And if you can’t find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don’t deserve to wear that uniform!” -Captain Picard
The scientific story of the Universe is a remarkable one. All at once, it's exciting, it's the very frontiers of knowledge and discovery, and and it's always going forward. As time goes on, we're continuously discovering new things that surprise us, and it's…
esiegel | April 6, 2015“The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.” -Lao Tzu
With hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, you'd think the largest star we've ever discovered would be in the most intense star-forming regions here, perhaps towards the galactic center. It's a good thought, as we've discovered stars up to 175 solar masses there, but it's wrong.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, ESO, D. Lennon and E. Sabbi (ESA/STScI), J. Anderson, S. E. de Mink, R. van der Marel, T. Sohn, and N. Walborn (STScI), N. Bastian (Excellence Cluster, Munich), L. Bedin (INAF, Padua), E. Bressert (ESO), P. Crowther…
esiegel | April 2, 2015“Is no one inspired by our present picture of the Universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.” -Richard Feynman
There are many scientific facts that are simply remarkable when it comes to the Universe, including the stories of the stars, of galaxies, of matter, of life, of atoms and of subatomic particle. In short, every aspect of nature we can think of has its own unique, remarkable story.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, HEIC, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).
But…
esiegel | March 30, 2015When you think about our world and our place in the Solar System, you very likely think about Earth, spinning on its axis, with the Moon orbiting around it, and with the entire Earth-Moon system orbiting the Sun.
But did you know that all of it -- the Earth spinning on its axis, the Moon revolving around Earth, the Earth revolving around the Sun, and even the Sun spinning on its own axis -- spins in the same direction? If you floated "above" the north pole of Earth, everything would rotate counterclockwise. It makes you wonder, as one of Jillian Scudder's questioners did:
Do all planets…
esiegel | March 26, 2015“On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.” -Paul Ricoeur
What you see is what you get, except when it isn't. We're all familiar with Hubble's law, or the notion that the Universe is expanding, and that the farther away you look, the faster you'll see that distant galaxy moving away from you. This relation would be exact, if only the rest of the objects in the Universe didn't exert gravitational forces on one another.
Image credit: Cosmic Flows Project/University of Hawaii, via http://…
esiegel | March 23, 2015“Studying whether there’s life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there’s something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That’s something that is almost part of being human, and I’m certain that will continue.” -Sally Ride
When Curiosity landed on the martian surface in 2012, surviving "seven minutes of terror," it went straight to work, examining its surroundings and teaching us about the martian geology of its region.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems, via http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16453.html#.VQYFwmR….
But by…
esiegel | March 19, 2015“The sun is a miasma
Of incandescent plasma
The sun’s not simply made out of gas
No, no, no
The sun is a quagmire
It’s not made of fire
Forget what you’ve been told in the past” -They Might Be Giants
It's such a simple fact -- that the Sun is made out of hydrogen that fuses into helium, releasing energy by E=mc^2 -- that it's easy to forget that a century ago, we knew none of these things.
Image credit: ESA and NASA,Acknowledgment: E. Olszewski (University of Arizona).
Not that nuclear fusion was a thing, not that the Sun got its energy from E=mc^2, and not even that the Sun was made out…
esiegel | March 18, 2015“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” -Marcus Aurelius
Let there be light! You'd think that would be enough: that you form stars in the Universe, you see those stars in the Universe, and that tells you about what's out there.
If only it were that simple.
Image credit: ESO, via http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0102a/.
In order to truly see the first stars, you need a lot more that just starlight: you need that light to be able to freely travel through space. And -- as bad luck would have it -- visible light, the kind of light we've built our…
esiegel | March 17, 2015“‘You are a different kind of Irishman, Goll,’ was all she said.
‘Every Irishman is a different kind of Irishman,’ said Goll.” -Charles Brady
Sure, we're all a little bit Irish today. We celebrate in a plethora of different ways, the most common of which is to prominently display the color most associated with Ireland: green.
Image credit: 451 Marketing Heat, via http://451heat.com/2014/03/14/google-add-ons-apple-selfies-pocket-app-s….
But did you know that not only is the planet Earth on track to celebrate St. Paddy's day in style with a spectacular auroral display, but that even though…