Astronomy
esiegel | July 10, 2010"We want our sound to go into the soul of the audience, and see if it can awaken some little thing in their minds... 'Cause there are so many sleeping people."
-Jimi Hendrix
One of the greatest challenges in music is to take a great original song and cover it, adding your own twist or flavor, and produce something that's even better. Most of you have heard the Four Tops' song It's the Same Old Song, which has its own interesting story.
It's The Same Old SongBut this past week, I discovered a cover of it by Iron & Wine, which kind of, well, awakened something inside of me listening to it.…
esiegel | July 9, 2010"I admitted, that the world had existed millions of years. I am astonished at the ignorance of the masses on these subjects. Hugh Miller has it right when he says that 'the battle of evidences must now be fought on the field of the natural sciences.'"
-James A. Garfield, future U.S. President, in 1859
You will find all sorts of ideas out there on how old the Earth, the Galaxy, and the Universe are. Some contend that it's only a few thousand years old, while others contend that it's infinitely old.
You and I are free to believe whatever we want, of course. But before you decide what you…
esiegel | July 7, 2010"Don't wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful." -Mark Victor Hansen
Last week, the Obama Administration unveiled their new National Space Policy for the United States of America. This is the first national space policy since Bush's policy from 2006.
Do you remember what the main stated goal of the Bush administration was? To "…
esiegel | July 6, 2010"To exist in this vast universe for a speck of time is the great gift of life. Our tiny sliver of time is our gift of life. It is our only life. The universe will go on, indifferent to our brief existence, but while we are here we touch not just part of that vastness, but also the lives around us." -Terry Goodkind
Our view of the Universe changed forever in the 1960s with the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, known today to be the leftover glow from the Big Bang. This microwave-wavelength radiation, coming uniformly from all directions in the sky, was discovered with this…
cevans | July 5, 2010
Readers, help me sort out an egregious detail of astronomical lore.
The most common method of classifying stars -- Harvard Spectral Classification -- was thought up by one of the most famous female astronomers of all time, Annie Jump Cannon. Adapted from a cumbersome older method which sorted stars into 22 alphabetical categories of observable hydrogen in their spectra, the Cannon method orders stars from hottest to coldest. This, despite being functional and elegant, left her (and us) with an unpronounceable acronym: OBAFGKM. With the recent addition of two colder categories of stars, the…
esiegel | June 28, 2010The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what no body yet has thought about that which everyone sees. -Arthur Schopenhauer
Most of you who've been reading Starts With A Bang for a while have seen this picture come up many, many times.
Why do I keep putting it up, and why is it so important?
Let's go back to the 1960s for a little bit. Back then, there were two major rival theories about the origin of the Universe: the Big Bang theory and the Steady-State model of the Universe. The Big Bang contended that the Universe was hotter and denser in the past, and thus of…
sb admin | June 22, 2010by Nathalie A. Cabrol
I realize how immodest the title of this first blog may sound and it is certainly not my intention to convince anybody that I will answer this question in the limited space allowed here or even in a lifetime. My hope is, instead, to stir thoughts and invite an exchange of diverse perspectives to make this a thread that we can all pull from time to time. It is an immense subject debated in an abundant literature, but discussing it is certainly not the exclusive privilege of those called explorers. All beings, from the greatest minds to the simplest forms of life on this…
esiegel | June 21, 2010A person without a shadow should keep out of the sun, that is the only safe and rational plan. -Adelbert von Chamisso
A few years ago, there was a rumor going around that the Earth's axis had shifted, and that we were no longer inclined to the Sun at 23.5°.
Well, guess what? Today, June 21st, like most June 21sts, is the Summer Solstice for the Northern Hemisphere. This means, for everyone (like me) living North of the Tropic of Cancer, this is the one day of the year where the Sun reaches its absolute highest point in the sky.
(If you're South of the Tropic of Capricorn, this will apply to…
esiegel | June 18, 2010"No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit." -Helen Keller
If you've been paying attention, you heard that the Kepler mission, earlier this week, announced the discovery of 706 candidate planets orbiting stars in its field of view.
And while most of the planets it found were Neptune-sized or smaller, they were still mostly gas giants, and still mostly closer than Mercury to their parent stars. Kepler's looking at 100,000 stars, and while finding 706 planets is certainly not bad for just over a month's…
esiegel | June 17, 2010"We are all captives of the pictures in our head -- our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists." -Walter Lippmann
For a long time, humans have wondered about life on other worlds, and about worlds around other stars. Until the 1990s, this was mostly speculation and hope. But shortly thereafter, some clues started rolling in. In 1992, the first planet outside of our Solar System was detected, and three years later, the first planet around a solar-like star was found.
Only, something was awfully weird about this planet. You see, in our Solar System, Mercury…
esiegel | June 16, 2010"If anyone, then, asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him -- it means just what Concord and Lexington meant; what Bunker Hill meant; which was, in short, the rising up of a valiant young people against an old tyranny to establish the most momentous doctrine that the world had ever known -- the right of men to their own selves and to their liberties." -Henry Ward Beecher
Yes, folks, on Monday it was Flag Day here in the United States. Like many flags, there's no shortage of stars on this one.
But these stars are merely symbolic, and not actually representative of stars in the night sky…
esiegel | June 10, 2010"A good heart is the Sun and the Moon; or, rather, the Sun and not the Moon, for it shines bright and never changes." -William Shakespeare
Did I ever tell you how lucky you are?
Lucky, indeed, to have the Sun for a star?
Our Sun -- the ultimate source of all the light, heat, energy, and life on our world -- is remarkable in how constant it is. In fact, we didn't even know just how constant it was until we launched the SOHO satellite, shown below.
SOHO has just released their results from more than 12 years of observing the Sun from space, and found that the size of the Sun has been constant…
drorzel | June 10, 2010The Science Channel debuted a new show last night, Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, with the premier apparently designed by committee to piss off as many Internet types as possible. The overall theme was "Is there a creator?" and it featured physicist-turned-Anglican-priest John Polkinghorne talking about fine-tuning but no atheist rebuttal. It spent a good ten minutes on Garrett Lisi and his E8 theory, making it sound a whole lot more complete than it is. And it got this aggressively stupid review in the Times:
Oh, let's face it: it was hard to concentrate on the first half of the…
drorzel | June 10, 2010One of the questions asked of Neil deGrasse Tyson at the WSF thing last week was "When did you change from a mild-mannered astrophysicist to a rock-star scientist?" (or something close to that phrasing). In his answer, he said that after his first tv interview was edited down to a three-second shot of him wiggling his hips, he made a deliberate effort to practice giving sound bites-- answering questions in 3-4 sentences with a good "hook" for the tv people to work with.
I thought of this when I stumbled across the following YouTube clips, which were shot by TV Ontario when I was at the…
mikethemadbiologist | June 8, 2010...or maybe they're just really unlucky. By way of ScienceBlogling Josh, we come across this Research 2000 poll of attitudes about astronomy. People were asked:
Most astronomers believe the universe formed about 13.7 billion years ago in a massive event called the Big Bang. Do you think that's about right or do think the universe was created much more recently?
As you might guess, Republicans outdid themselves in their stupidity (and in other news, dog bites man...). But these were the numbers that I found interesting:
Yes, white people did much, much worse than blacks or Latinos. If one…
esiegel | June 7, 2010"We can continue to try and clean up the gutters all over the world and spend all of our resources looking at just the dirty spots and trying to make them clean. Or we can lift our eyes up and look into the skies and move forward in an evolutionary way." -Buzz Aldrin
Sometimes, you go away for one weekend and you miss out on some awfully big news. So while I was competing in the USA Beard & Mustache championships (and I -- along with everyone else -- was put to shame by Willi Chevalier), some amazing news came back from our closest astronomical neighbor.
Back when the space race was in…
esiegel | June 3, 2010"Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great." -Comte DeBussy-Rabutin
As many of you know, I'm not around for the rest of the week/weekend, as I'm off competing in the USA Beard & Mustache Championships!
But I wouldn't feel right without leaving you something to tide you through to next week, so here goes.
Image credit: ©2012-2013 ~Hitman35mm, via DeviantArt.
As unbelievable as it may sound, 100 years ago, this is what we thought the entire Universe was. Our collection of stars, known as the Milky Way, operating under Newton's Laws of…
esiegel | June 3, 2010"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice -- there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia." -Frank Zappa
There are many websites around telling you that the world is going to end on the winter solstice -- December 21st -- in the year 2012. And one of the ways that people are saying the world is going to end is that, on this date, the Earth will pass through the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, destroying us all.
Where to begin with this? First off, let me show you what our galaxy looks like. When you look up at an extremely dark night sky…
sb admin | June 3, 2010At 8:00 pm EST tonight, tune in to the live stream of Black Holes and Holographic Worlds, which Greg Boustead and myself will also be covering live from NYU's Skirball Center. Moderator Alan Alda and physicists Raphael Bousso, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Andrew Hamilton and Kip Thorne will explore recent discoveries about what are perhaps the most mysteriously named objects in the universe - black holes - and how they have led to the idea that our entire world might be something like a hologram. Hope you join us!
esiegel | June 2, 2010"Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs." -Vaclav Havel
It's arguable that vision is the most important tool that an astronomer can have. This was particularly important back before the invention of the telescope, as the greatest astronomers of their time (like Tycho Brahe) were renowned for their visual acuity.
How do you stack up? You were curious about learning how good your hearing was, but what about your vision? Well, you can always get your vision tested using a Snellen eye chart, and read the bottom-…