Astronomy
esiegel | April 14, 2014“All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.” -Victor Hugo
During all other full Moons, I wouldn't dare show you a galaxy for Messier Monday. But when you get a total lunar eclipse on the occasion, not only do the nebulous deep-sky objects become visible, but Mars will be a more worrisome source of light pollution than the totally eclipsed Moon!
Image credit: Bethany and Amanda VanStavern at NOAO, via https://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/…
esiegel | April 10, 2014“Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.” -Samuel Johnson
You might look up at our Sun in the sky, delighted at its brilliance and life-giving brightness, thankful for all it's brought to our world. But we're all just a little bit dismayed at the crushing realization that it won't live forever, and will someday burn through its fuel and die.
Image credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgment: W. Sparks (STScI) and R. Sahai (JPL).
But the Sun is a very common type of star, and shares certain properties with the vast majority of them. In…
esiegel | April 9, 2014“And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.” -Pink Floyd
We normally think of eclipses as rare phenomena, something that happens only occasionally. While it's true than any particular location only experiences eclipses -- particularly solar eclipses -- infrequently, we actually experience these things around four times a year, typically, somewhere on Earth.
Image credit: Chaisson & McMillan, Astronomy Today.
If you've been paying attention, you might have heard that we're in store for a total lunar eclipse just next week here on Earth, and that it will…
esiegel | April 8, 2014“The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the ‘evolution’ of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.” -William James
Summer is coming. No, not to Westeros, but to your night skies, and with it, views of the galactic plane and even the galactic center, which holds more than a few surprises inside. In particular, it contains the most famous nebula in the entire night sky: the Eagle Nebula.
Image credit: T.A.Rector (NRAO/AUI/NSF…
esiegel | April 7, 2014“When we are sure that we are on the right road there is no need to plan our journey too far ahead. No need to burden ourselves with doubts and fears as to the obstacles that may bar our progress. We cannot take more than one step at a time.” -Orison Swett Marden
Every Messier Monday, we've taken a look at one of the 110 remarkable and unique deep-sky objects that make up the Messier catalogue. Of all these objects, the galaxies are the largest, most distant and also the most numerous. But only one of these galaxies can be the farthest of them all!
Image credit: Steve Mandel / Adam Block /…
esiegel | March 31, 2014“I recognize my limits, but when I look around I realise I am not living, exactly, in a world of giants.” -Giulio Andreotti
There are a huge number of deep-sky objects visible from Earth, and every Monday -- with the Messier Monday series -- I've made it my goal to tell you about one of them in spectacular fashion.
Image credit: Tenho Tuomi of Tuomi Observatory, via http://www.lex.sk.ca/astro/messier/index.html.
But only one can be the largest of them all. For today's Messier Monday, meet our supercluster's largest, most gigantic galaxy: Messier 87!
Image credit: John C. Smith of Hidden…
esiegel | March 29, 2014"A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -Max Planck
It’s been a great week for learning a little more about our Universe, from fundamental particles to scales beyond our observable Universe. Our new articles at the main Starts With A Bang blog got quite a response over here, and I'm happy to share with you the Comments of the Week, and my responses to them! Let's start with last week's Ask Ethan.
Image credit: Albert Abraham…
esiegel | March 24, 2014“We’ll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one’s been.” -Tool
A beautifully undisturbed, large spiral can be found right at the heart of the Virgo Cluster. Sure, looking at the heart of the Virgo Cluster on its own, you might totally overlook today's Messier object.
Image credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo of Deep Sky Colors.
But you sure would be missing out if you did! Larger than the Milky Way, with a supermassive black hole more than 20 times the size of our own, a super hot, ionized central region, and speeding through the intergalactic medium at 1,000 km/s -- stripping its…
esiegel | March 19, 2014“I don’t think at this point we have any way of knowing where the laws of physics came from. We could hope that when we really understand the laws of physics that they will describe how the Universe came into existence.” -Alan Guth
So, since Monday's big story -- about the BICEP2 collaboration announcing the discovery of the signature of gravitational waves on the cosmic microwave background -- I realized that there are simply too many misconceptions and misunderstandings out there about cosmic inflation, the Big Bang, and how the whole story comes together.
Image credit: Bock et al. (2006,…
esiegel | March 17, 2014“A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?” -Khalil Gibran
When you think about globular clusters, you normally think about great collections of hundreds of thousands of stars located in the halo of our galaxy, spherically distributed.
Image credit: user Antilhue from Chile, via Astrosurf, at http://www.astrosurf.com/antilhue/m68.htm.
So what do you do if you discover a loose, faint collection of a couple hundred…
esiegel | March 10, 2014“[L]ife is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” -Virginia Woolf
One of the only members of the Virgo Cluster… that isn’t located in Virgo!
When it comes to wonders of the night sky, you might think that if you've seen one galaxy, you've seen them all. But much like our own Milky Way, each one has its own history, its own present, and its own future. To each of its hundred billion stars and all their planets, it's the most important galaxy in the Universe.
Image credit: © 2006 — 2012 by Siegfried Kohlert, via http://www.…
gregladen | March 10, 2014If you missed the first (or later any) episode of Cosmos 2014, you can get it on Amazon Prime streaming (for a fee). It's worth it. Here are a few comments I jotted down (then lightly edited) while watching the first episode.
Neil does have his own spaceship, like Carl did. That's important because it lets him fly to interesting places. It is one of those spaceships of the imagination. Everybody should have one.
The visuals are amazing and informative and seem to be scientifically accurate to the extent possible. There is quite a bit of attention to scale, and how perspective shifts with…
esiegel | March 6, 2014“All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.” -Thomas J. Watson
You’ll frequently hear people say, “the science is settled.” Scientifically speaking, can it ever be? (And yes, what follows below is meant to be an inflammatory image.)
Image credit: Ramirez of the Weekly Standard, via http://www.IBDeditorials.com/cartoons.
Let's take a look at five major instances -- gravitation, evolution, the Big Bang, germ theory and…
esiegel | March 6, 2014“Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.” -Larry Niven
From Earth and beyond, these time lapses show our one-of-a-kind motion through the Universe.
Here on Earth, the night sky (and all the stars in it) appear to rotate a full 360° every 24 hours, producing star trails in long-exposure or time-lapse photography.
Image credit: Roger Groom at http://www.AstroPhotography.com.au/.
But what would you see if you went to space? Would there be star trails up there, and would a spacecraft like the Hubble Space Telescope see the same thing or…
esiegel | March 3, 2014“We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” -Carl Sagan
A galaxy very different from our own may hold the key to seeing what our far future looks like.
If you've ever had the opportunity to see the Virgo cluster of galaxies, you probably think of a wonderland of galaxies littering the sky. Something like this, perhaps.
Image credit: © 2014 Scott Rosen’s Astrophotography, via http://www.astronomersdoitinthedark.com/index.php?c=113&p=512.
But did…
esiegel | February 24, 2014“Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!” -Harry Truman, to a music critic who panned his daughter’s singing
When you think about the Messier objects in the night sky, you hope for skies like the ones coming up over the next few days. The Virgo cluster and a slew of deep-sky objects rise in the east in the early part of the night, a waning Moon that won't rise until after midnight holds the potential for excellent deep-sky seeing, and the 40 galaxies that make up the 110 objects of the Messier…
esiegel | February 21, 2014"They will see us waving from such great heights
'Come down now,' they'll say.
But everything looks perfect from far away
'Come down now.' But we'll stay." -The Postal Service
Welcome back to another Ask Ethan! You keep sending in your questions and suggestions, and each week, I'll pick one of my favorites to answer for you and the world. Today's Ask Ethan comes from John, who asks one of the more fanciful and personal questions I've fielded yet, as he wants to know:
If you could jump into the Enterprise, or the Millennium Falcon, or whatever is your favorite faster-than-light starship, what…
esiegel | February 20, 2014“If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens… Where Is Everybody?” -Stephen Webb
If stars, planets, and biological processes are so common in the Universe, then where is everyone?
Image credit: NASA / Space Shuttle Atlantis mission 110.
Here on Earth, we take for granted how easy it was for life to form. Our world has been around for some four-and-a-half billion years, and the oldest records of life go back to nearly the oldest rocks: 3.8 billion years ago.
But if we ran the "experiment" of having a Solar System similar to our own form in the Universe over and over again, how many times would…
esiegel | February 19, 2014“Both the solutions must be rejected, and as these are the only statical solutions of the equations… the true solution represented in nature must be a dynamical solution.” -Willem de Sitter
First off, welcome, everyone! As you well know, the main Starts With A Bang blog has moved to Medium, something that's received mixed reviews from you, my longtime and most loyal of readers. Some people love the new layout, the larger images, and the ad-free experience, while others really miss the commenting features, the community we have here, and the ability to say whatever you like without a Twitter…
jdupuis | February 10, 2014Sometimes a book isn't quite what you expected. And you're disappointed.
Sometimes a book isn't quite what you expected and you're pleasantly surprised.
Chris Impey and Holly Henry's Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration definitely falls into the latter category. What was I expecting? From the subtitle I was hoping the book would be a fairly straightforward account of the history of unmanned space exploration -- all the missions, how they were planned, the engineering challenges involved in getting them off the ground, the logistical challenges of keeping…