Astronomy
esiegel | October 3, 2011"To me it made no sense to pull one of even a few objects out of the swarm and call them something other than part of the swarm." -Mike Brown, A.K.A. PlutoKiller
In our Solar System, the four rocky planets dominate the inner portion, while the four gas giants dominate the outer Solar System. But out beyond Neptune, thousands of icy, rocky worlds -- including Pluto, the former ninth planet -- make up a vast, wide ring known as the Kuiper Belt.
Image credit: NASA.
What began as a curious collection of a few icy worlds has since revealed itself to us as an incredibly busy place, where -- since…
esiegel | September 30, 2011"We should do astronomy because it is beautiful and because it is fun. We should do it because people want to know. We want to know our place in the universe and how things happen." -John Bahcall
Of course you're all going to watch the exciting Live interview with me on KGW tonight (streaming here; video should be posted after-the-fact here), but shouldn't we give you some extra fun facts about neutrinos?
Here we go...
Both photons and neutrinos are created in the core of stars. But while photons take tens of thousands of years to reach the edge of the Sun, neutrinos make the trip in just…
esiegel | September 22, 2011"A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie."
-Robert Green Ingersoll
One of the most amazing facts to comprehend about the Universe is that it actually is comprehensible! A few basic laws, properties and particles, given our current understanding, can take us from a hot, dense, nearly uniform Universe to the complexity of the billions of stars within the billions of galaxies we see today…
esiegel | September 21, 2011"When Columbus lived, people thought that the earth was flat. They believed the Atlantic Ocean to be filled with monsters large enough to devour their ships, and with fearful waterfalls over which their frail vessels would plunge to destruction. Columbus had to fight these foolish beliefs in order to get men to sail with him. He felt sure the earth was round."
-Emma Miler Bolenius, American Schoolbook Author, 1919
One of the most enduring myths that children grow up with is the idea that Columbus was the only one of his time who believed that the Earth was round; everyone else believed it was…
esiegel | September 16, 2011Daughter, age 7: "Daddy, will the Earth always go around the Sun forever?"
Louis CK: "Well no, at some point the Sun is going to explode."
Daughter: (starts crying)
Louis CK: "Oh honey, this is not going to happen until you and everyone you know has been dead for a very long time."
Daughter: (continues crying)
As you all know, the closest supernova to us in the last quarter-century has recently gone off, currently shining in the faint, but relatively close Pinwheel Galaxy. (And starting tonight, early in the night, those of you with telescopes should go look for it!)
Image credit: Retrieved…
esiegel | September 14, 2011[caption id="attachment_19545" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Image credit: NASA and the James Webb Space Telescope Team."]
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The news has just come in: the United States Senate has decided to fully fund the James Webb Space Telescope, and it should be set to launch in 2018, which is the earliest it can possibly go ahead at this point.
Universe Today has the full story, and reports:
The 2012 fiscal year appropriation bill, marked up today by the Senate, allows for continued funding of the James Webb Space Telescope and support up to a launch in 2018!
...
In addition to…
esiegel | September 14, 2011"We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but is somewhat beauty and poetry." -Maria Mitchell
When you look up at the vastness of the night sky, if you've got few clouds, no Moon and sufficient darkness, you won't merely see thousands of tiny white pinpricks illuminating the black canopy of night.
Image credit: Flickr user kronerda.
Although, on average, stars are white in color, there's a very important reason for that. Our eyes have evolved to see a very narrow set of wavelengths of light, which we know as the visible light spectrum, ranging…
esiegel | September 12, 2011"Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed." -Howard Nemerov
I know many of you are still mad at the night sky because of the full Moon preventing you from seeing the recent, close-by supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy, at least until the end of the week.
Image credit: Original source unknown, retrieved from the Rose City Astronomers.
With the full Moon brightly illuminating your sky (and filling it with light pollution), only the brightest, most compact objects are visible at most locations on Earth.
But there is one object -- rising…
esiegel | September 9, 2011"After your death you will be what you were before your birth." -Arthur Schopenhauer
If only every star's death could be as glorious as a supernova, rocketing anywhere from thousands to millions of Earth-masses out of a star and into interstellar space. When we get one in our galaxy, like we do every few hundred years, the view from Earth can be spectacular.
Video Credit: ESA / Hubble.
The Crab Nebula, above, sprung from a supernova nearly a thousand years ago, in 1054. And while that supernova, and a handful of others since, have been visible from Earth with nothing more than the naked eye…
esiegel | September 8, 2011"A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else." -John Burroughs
The greatest tool for astronomers of the past 20 years has, without a doubt, been the Hubble Space Telescope.
Image credit: NASA; view from the Space Shuttle.
Since its launch in 1990, it's no stretch to say more scientific knowledge has come out of this telescope than out of any instrument in history. It's taught us what the expansion rate of the Universe is, that the expansion is accelerating, has helped us understand how stars are born, directly imaged the first planets outside of…
esiegel | September 6, 2011"We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown." -Arthur Eddington
Since the dawn of mankind, we've left innumerable footsteps across the lands, as we've traveled far and wide across the globe.
Image credit: Greg Prohl.
But (with very rare exceptions) these footsteps don't last. With winds and/or rains abundant all over Earth, among many other phenomena, it's usually just a brief matter of time until all memory of these footsteps are removed from the shifting landscape.
Image credit: Byron Jorjorian.
But what about a world without winds and rains? What about, in fact, a…
esiegel | September 3, 2011"As long as one person lives in darkness then it seems to be a responsibility to tell other people." -Bill Hicks
If you've ever been out in the wilderness at night, in a place where it truly gets dark, and where you've got, as the English band Keane would tell you,
Clear Skies,you will find yourself treated to an amazing view of the night sky.
Image credit: Jerry Lodriguss.
On a moonless night, depending on the quality of your darkness, not only is the Milky Way visible, but anywhere from 6,000 up to a maximum of 45,000 naked-eye stars are available to the keenest of observers.
Although,…
esiegel | August 26, 2011"A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale." -Benoit Mandelbrot
It isn't just the clouds that appear smooth, but aren't if you zoom in close. In fact, it isn't just the mathematical curiosity known as the Mandelbrot set that's full of irregularities and ever increasing complexity as you zoom in.
It turns out that the entire Universe itself has these properties.
"Excuse me," you might say. "My Universe is certainly not smooth."
And of course, you'd be right.…
esiegel | August 25, 2011"Fortunately for serious minds, a bias recognized is a bias sterilized." -Benjamin Haydon
You might look up at the night sky, at the vast canopy of stars we can see, and ask, exactly, what we're seeing?
Image credit: Jim at Pictures Of My Universe.
Thousands upon thousands of stars, of course, even with just your naked eye. These stars come in all sorts of different sizes, temperatures, and distances, and what we see in the night sky is largely determined by a star's brightness and distance from us.
All the stars you can see with your naked eye belong to one of the seven color classes of…
esiegel | August 23, 2011"The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering." -Ben Okri
Let me take you back 20 years, to the early 1990s. Back then, the world's most powerful particle accelerator was right here in the United States: Fermilab's Tevatron.
With energies of one Tera-electron-Volt (hence Tevatron) per beam, and a beam of protons colliding with anti-protons, it was the most powerful accelerator in the world by a large margin.
And even though plans for the Large Hadron Collider were in the works (with 7 TeV per…
esiegel | August 21, 2011"The heart, Ramone. Don't forget the heart. Aim for the heart, or you'll never stop me." -Clint Eastwood, in A Fistful of Dollars
Sometimes, the greatest things that art, music, or even astronomy has to offer are the traditional standards that have been around for a very long time. Only, a new interpretation sheds a different light on the meaning, feeling or depth that comes along with it. Take the traditional song Columbus Stockade Blues, where the late Jeff Hickey performs my favorite version, recorded as:
Columbus Stockade.So it goes with the skies as well. Take a look at the Eagle Nebula…
esiegel | August 12, 2011"...it is reasonable to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star." -Arthur Eddington, 1926
(For Mike H., who wanted to know.)
The Sun -- like nearly all stars -- burns bright through its nuclear reactions, sending light, heat and energy out into the Universe over a timespan of billions of years.
Image credit: NASA / ISS / Space Shuttle Atlantis.
But it didn't need to be that way. With the mass of about 300,000 Earths, nearly all of it in the form of hydrogen fuel, you can just as easily imagine a huge nuclear explosion on the…
esiegel | August 5, 2011"A new 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
(For Alan L., from the comments on this post.)
When you look out at the night sky, with the deepest, sharpest eyes possible, what is it that you see?
Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. Windhorst, S. Cohen, M. Mechtley, M. Rutkowski, R. O'Connell, P. McCarthy, N. Hathi, R. Ryan, H. Yan, and A. Koekemoer.
Galaxies! Lit by hundreds of billions of suns each (and that's just on average),…
esiegel | August 4, 2011"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the Moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'" -Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut
It was nearly 50 years ago that we left Earth for the first time.
Image credit: B. Anders, Apollo 8, NASA, in 1968.
We've walked on the Moon.
Image credit: Voyager 1, NASA, in…
esiegel | August 2, 2011"A birthday is just the first day of another 365-day journey around the sun. Enjoy the trip." -Author Unknown
Each of us has a birthday; mine is tomorrow, August 3rd. And while we're mucking around here on the ground, the Earth relentlessly orbits the Sun.
And while a sidereal year, or the time it takes the Earth to return to its same position in space, is not quite identical to a calendar year, it's awfully close. So much so, in fact, that with the exceptions of the planets having wandered a bit from year-to-year, you get the same night sky each and every year on your birthday.
Image…