gravity
esiegel | September 11, 2013"Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't." -Edward Burtynsky
It's really a romantic notion when you think about it: the heavens, the Milky Way, is lined with hundreds of billions of stars, each with their own unique and varied solar systems.
Image credit: 湖北直行便 of AstroArts, via http://www.astroarts.jp/photo-gallery/photo/13870.html.
But beyond that -- in addition to the stars -- there are hundreds of billions of planets…
esiegel | September 5, 2013"One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range." -Victor Hugo
A couple of weeks ago we took a look at the most distant galaxy (so far) in the known Universe, a galaxy so far away that it takes exclusively infrared observations from our most power space telescopes (Hubble and Spitzer) in order to detect it. What's perhaps even more remarkable is that the light we do detect from it -- the light we detected in the infrared -- was actually emitted in the Ultraviolet part of the spectrum!
Image credit: NASA, ESA, Garth Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Rychard…
esiegel | August 26, 2013"A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle." -Khalil Gibran
It’s time again for another Messier Monday! The Messier Catalogue was the original comprehensive and accurate catalogue of fixed, deep-sky objects visible to any dedicated (northern hemisphere) skywatcher with even the most primitive of astronomical equipment. Over the centuries, as our understanding of what we're looking at has improved, these 110 celestial wonders have provided classic examples of astronomical phenomena ranging from stellar corpses to new star-forming regions, from young…
esiegel | August 23, 2013“People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” -Oscar Wilde
Beyond the planet Earth, beyond all the stars in the night sky, and beyond the Milky Way galaxy, there's literally an entire Universe out there.
Image credit: R. Jay GaBany, of http://cosmotography.com/.
The farther away we're able to look, the more galaxies we're able to see. As far as our…
esiegel | August 16, 2013"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
Ask anyone who's looked up at a dark sky on a clear, moonless night, and you'll immediately hear tales about how incomprehensibly vast the Universe is.
Image credit: Randy Halverson, flickr user dakotalapse, from http://dakotalapse.com/.
But what you're looking at isn't much of the Universe at all. In fact, practically every point of light you see, including the vast swath of stars too dim to individually resolve, comes from…
esiegel | July 31, 2013"You can't exactly bake a man to your specifications... A hybrid of Einstein, Tarzan and Inge Meysel doesn't exist." -Peer Steinbruck
Of course, if you create enough chances, all the things that could eventually happen will come to pass. This is as true for human beings as it is for the physical Universe. And for our planet, our nearest major neighbor in the Universe -- the Moon -- provides us with a huge variety of sights, if only we're willing to wait.
Image credit: Doug Zubenel.
Every 27.3 days, the Moon makes a complete orbit around the Earth, traveling a full 360° through space. As it…
esiegel | July 3, 2013"To disagree leads to study, to study leads to understanding, to understand is to appreciate, to appreciate is to love. So maybe I'll end up loving your theory." -John Wheeler
Out there in the Universe, there's a lot to marvel at. Over billions of years, gravity has attracted different portions of the expanding Universe together into large superclusters and filaments, each made up of clusters, groups, and individual galaxies separated by great cosmic voids.
Image credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey, 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, and Millenium Simulation.
From the observations of this structure…
esiegel | June 26, 2013“...the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.” -Carl Sagan
As many of you know, I'm fortunate enough to live in a city that values science and scientific knowledge so highly that the our local news station, KGW, routinely brings on scientists to talk about the lastest developments in our endeavors to understand the Universe around us. Just last week, I was invited to share five wonderful minutes of airtime with the viewers of not just Portland, OR, but (thanks to the web)…
esiegel | June 17, 2013“God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die.” -Bill Watterson
Welcome back to another Messier Monday, only here on Starts With A Bang! With each new Monday, we take an in-depth look at a prominently visible random object from Messier's catalogue of 110 deep-sky curiosities, objects that range from stellar corpses to star-forming regions, to open clusters, globular clusters, distant galaxies, and even a few anomalies!
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons users Jim Cornmell and Zeimusu.
The objects in Messier's catalogue…
esiegel | May 23, 2013“Because dark energy makes up about 70 percent of the content of the universe, it dominates over the matter content. That means dark energy will govern expansion and, ultimately, determine the fate of the universe.” -Eric Linder
It's been a while since we've spoken about dark energy, and we were just talking about Einstein's greatest blunder, so let's just dive right in.
Image credit: S. Beckwith & the HUDF Working Group (STScI), HST, ESA, NASA.
This is our observable Universe, as unveiled by the Hubble Space Telescope. With hundreds of billions of galaxies stretched out some 41…
esiegel | May 17, 2013"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." -Albert Einstein
Back when Einstein first proposed his theory of General Relativity, his revolutionary picture of the Universe was met with a mix of curiosity, awe, and intense skepticism. It isn't every day that your most cherished of all physical theories -- the theory of Newtonian Gravity that had ruled the cosmos for nearly two-and-a-half centuries -- gets challenged by a newcomer.
Image credit: Brooks/Cole - Thomson publishing, 2005.
And yet, that's exactly what Einstein did when he proposed General Relativity at the…
esiegel | May 10, 2013"As seismologists gained more experience from earthquake records, it became obvious that the problem could not be reduced to a single peak acceleration. In fact, a full frequency of vibrations occurs." -Charles Francis Richter
You've all been around long enough to be familiar with the severe damage that earthquakes can cause, rattling and cracking the ground, shaking down buildings, and creating catastrophic tsunamis tidal waves. In short, the largest ones that occur in the wrong places will cause billions of dollars worth of damage and will kill thousands of people.
Image credit: AP / Press…
esiegel | May 1, 2013"The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality." -Hermann Minkowski
When it comes to gravity, you probably think you understand it pretty well.
Image credit: Heavens Above, via http://heavens-above.com/.
Everything with mass (or energy) attracts everything else with mass-or-energy, explaining everything from falling…
esiegel | April 19, 2013"Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at all. It is really only a theory of the aftermath of a bang." -Alan Guth
So you finally understand it. The Big Bang tells us that the Universe was hotter, denser, and expanding at a faster rate in the past.
Image credit: original source unknown.
The farther back we go, the closer together everything was, the higher in temperature (and shorter in wavelength) all the radiation was, and -- of course -- the younger the Universe was.
Image credit: Ned Wright (possibly Will Kinney, too), via http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu…
esiegel | April 10, 2013"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad
Three classic observations -- the Hubble expansion of the Universe, the leftover cosmic microwave background radiation, and the observed abundance of the light elements -- lead us inevitably to modeling our Universe as having begun in a hot, dense state from which it expanded and cooled. There is no other explanation that agrees…
esiegel | March 1, 2013"The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size." -Oliver Wendell Holmes
When General Relativity supplanted Newton's work as our theory of how gravity works in the Universe, it didn't just change how we view how masses attract, it gave us a new understanding of what the questions where and when actually mean. It gave us the very fabric of spacetime.
Image credit: Christopher Vitale of http://networkologies.wordpress.com/.
What this meant is that no longer could we view objects like matter and radiation as existing in some fixed, grid-like…
esiegel | February 27, 2013"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night." -Edna St. Vincent Millay
I'm sure you've thought about it before: what would happen if you dropped something into a bottomless pit?
Image credit: original source unknown.
No, not one of those fake bottomless pits that you find in various Mystery Spots off the beaten trail.
Image credit: Mel's Hole, courtesy of http://komonews.com/ in Seattle, Washington.
Those may be deep, but they're definitely not bottomless. And I want something truly bottomless…
esiegel | February 22, 2013"When I say, 'I love you,' it's not because I want you or because I can't have you. It has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try. I've seen your kindness and your strength. I've seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are." -Joss Whedon
I bet you love science; practically all of us do, whether we realize it or not. As children, we all live as scientists, born with no knowledge or experience of this world, but with inherent ability to learn and adapt.
Image credit: ©2005-2013 ~cchhrriissttaa, of deviantART.…
esiegel | February 15, 2013“Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.” -Roger Zelazny
It's always the ones you least expect that get you the worst, it seems. I went to bed last night excited that Asteroid 2012 DA14, a 200,000 ton asteroid, was going to pass within just 28,000 km (or 17,000 miles) of Earth's surface, which would make it the closest pass of an asteroid that large that we've ever observed.
Image credit: NASA / JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office.
I thought that would be the best way to celebrate today, which would be Galileo's 449th birthday. After all, it was…
esiegel | February 6, 2013"According to the special theory of relativity nothing can travel faster than light, so that if light cannot escape, nothing else can either. The result would be a black hole: a region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape to infinity." -Stephen Hawking
You may have encountered objects that are the same size as one another, but have very different masses.
Image credit: Basic Science Supplies / © Accelerate Media.
This is because they're made out of different elements. The higher you go in the periodic table, the larger and more massive your individual atoms are, and so…