Hubble
esiegel | January 4, 2012"At the last dim horizon, we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be oppressed." -Edwin Hubble
Given the relative peace of our night skies, combined with the vast distances from our Solar System to the nearest star, we don't often think about the cosmic catastrophes that took place in our past. But these catastrophes are the very things that gave rise to our Solar System in the first place!
Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (…
esiegel | December 22, 2011"A farmer travelling with his load
Picked up a horseshoe on the road,
And nailed if fast to his barn door,
That luck might down upon him pour;
That every blessing known in life
Might crown his homestead and his wife,
And never any kind of harm
Descend upon his growing farm." -James Thomas Fields
One of the greatest joys the Hubble Space Telescope has given us is the ability to peer deeper into the distant Universe than ever before. Not just at the giant, luminous galaxies visible with smaller, ground-based telescopes, but at the great sea of galaxies billions of light years away.
Image…
esiegel | December 14, 2011"I am undecided whether or not the Milky Way is but one of countless others all of which form an entire system. Perhaps the light from these infinitely distant galaxies is so faint that we cannot see them." -Johann Heinrich Lambert
One of the greatest discoveries of the 20th Century was that many of the great, faint, extended nebulae in the night sky were not merely objects within our own galaxy, like the stars. Rather, these objects were many millions of light-years distant, and were entire galaxies unto themselves.
Image credit: Boren-Simon 2.8-8 ED POWERNEWT Astrograph Image Gallery.…
esiegel | October 17, 2011"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." -Joseph Campbell
Space, as you know, is mostly empty, as the typical distance between galaxies far exceeds the size of the galaxies themselves.
But in a few select regions of the Universe, where the mass density is unusually above average, galaxies cluster together by the thousands. The closest huge cluster to us like this is the Coma Cluster, containing more galaxies than 95% of all known galaxy clusters.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / L. Jenkins (GSFC).
One of the first thing you'll notice about these galaxies is, unlike our…
esiegel | October 13, 2011"The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books---a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects."
-Albert Einstein
Earlier today, I had the pleasure of visiting a high school astronomy class via Skype, answering…
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 | July 14, 2011"At the last dim horizon, we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be oppressed." -Edwin Hubble
It still boggles my mind that a scant 100 years ago, many of the greatest astronomers and physicists of the day still thought that the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the entire Universe. It wasn't until the 1920s that Edwin Hubble definitively showed that the great Andromeda Nebula was actually a separate galaxy from our own.
Image credit: Rogelio…
esiegel | May 11, 2011"Master looks after us now, we don't need you anymore. Leave now and never come back!" -Smeagol, LOTR
You all know how to find the farthest galaxy ever, right? You take the most powerful telescope in the world, put it into space, and have it stare into the darkness for days on end. What do you find?
Image credit: Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
Galaxies! In just a tiny area like this, only about a fiftieth of a single degree on a side, over ten thousand galaxies are visible.
And, as you'll notice if you click through, and zoom in on a small section of these, some of these galaxies are much dimmer…
esiegel | April 3, 2011Intel Science Talent Search Winner: Mr. Bush, please save Hubble.
Then-President Bush: Is Hubble in trouble?
Oh my, yes, for those of you who don't know, Hubble is, in fact, in trouble once again. To set the mood, I've got one of the best songs about it: Ray LaMontagne's
Trouble.
For the uninitiated, Hubble -- imaged here from the Space Shuttle Atlantis -- is not only the telescope that changed the Universe, it is the single most scientifically productive piece of equipment of all time. That's right, as Neil de Grasse Tyson wrote,
More research papers have been published using its data than…
catdynamics | February 25, 2011Every year we contemplate the Hubble Call for Proposals demand curve.
Four years ago we started to quantify the demand curve
the calm rational analysis soon broke into a nerd gambling frenzy
we then started theorizing about proposal scale invariance which annoyingly enough apparently works
by then Julianne was analyzing the observations of the proposal submission rate - this was back in the good old days when blogging was hot and we had time to actually do stuff
so, can't let a good analysis down:
this is the linear plot, the time is in theorist units, rounded
data collected anecdotally…
catdynamics | February 25, 2011As the Hubble deadline slips away, later than ever, we ask the Mighty iPod One the question whose answer we all must know:
Oh, Mighty iPod One: what will come out of Hubble for cycle 19?
Whoosh goes the iPod.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Deep Dark Truthful Mirror - Elvis Costellor
The Crossing: O Isis und Osiris - Mozart
The Crown: Richard - Billy Bragg
The Root: Carnival of the Animals: Aviary
The Past: I'm on Fire - Johnny Cash
The Future: Interlude VI - Mannheim Steamroller
The Questioner: Oksn - Ruth Rubin
The House: Ten Little Fish - Twin Sisters
The Inside: The Obvious Child - Paul…
esiegel | January 27, 2011"It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come with them..." -Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Just last week, I wrote to you about one of the deepest images of the distant Universe, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
Image credit: Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
And in particular, how we're able…
esiegel | December 23, 2010"When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes." -Tycho Brahe
Supernovae are the most spectacular death-knells of the largest stars in our Universe. Nearly all stars burn light elements into heavier ones, releasing energy through the incredible process of nuclear fusion.
But all stars eventually run out of this fuel. For our Sun, we've got about another 6 billion years left. But the more massive your star, the faster it burns through its fuel.…
esiegel | December 20, 2010"We find them smaller and fainter, in constantly increasing numbers, and we know that we are reaching into space, farther and farther, until, with the faintest nebulae that can be detected with the greatest telescopes, we arrive at the frontier of the known Universe." -Edwin Hubble
There's really only one way to appreciate just how far we've come in our quest to learn about the Universe thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope.
That is, to take a look at something before the Hubble Space Telescope came along, and then to look at it with Hubble. Preferably, we can look at it multiple times, as…
esiegel | December 18, 2010"You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back."
-Steve Prefontaine
But there are lots of amazing ways to propel yourself forward, indeed. Listen to one of the greatest musical groups of our times, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, as they perform Victor Wooten's song,
Sex In A Pan,off their album UFO Tofu.
Last week, I told you about a runaway galaxy, speeding through the Universe and leaving a tail behind it.
Image credit: GALEX.
Of course, this is a composite image in visible and ultra-violet light. We saw here that the galaxy looks normal in visible light; only in the…
esiegel | November 19, 2010"I came at exactly the right time... I was 26 years old, and all the monks and priests down here were ready to retire. So I overlapped enough that I got to know them all." -Allan Sandage
As many of you have heard, Allan Sandage passed away last Saturday. Let me tell you a little bit about this man, why he stands as such a towering figure in modern cosmology, and why he should be held in even higher esteem than he normally is.
Allan Sandage was a coworker of Edwin Hubble's, and he took up one of the most pressing questions of the day after Hubble's death in 1953: What is the Age of the…
esiegel | November 17, 2010"I've been noticing gravity since I was very young." -Cameron Diaz
Yesterday, I told you about one of the simplest arguments for dark matter. We look out at the fluctuations in the microwave background on all the different angular scales we can measure -- from about 0.2 degrees all the way up to the whole sky -- and look at what the temperature fluctuations are doing.
We also look at the large-scale structure in the Universe, and try to correlate how mass clumps together.
We are only allowed -- by the laws of physics -- a few parameters to play with to try to fit this massive data set. We…
esiegel | August 13, 2010"A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises. Ghosts were created when the first man awoke in the night." -J. M. Barrie
But off in space, a whopping 320 million light years away, lies the great Coma Cluster, the closest huge cluster of galaxies to us.
Whereas our local group just has two large galaxies in it (our Milky Way and Andromeda), the Coma Cluster has over 1,000. In fact, the two large galaxies at the center of the Coma Cluster are each over one hundred…
drorzel | July 23, 2010Earlier this week, there was some interesting discussion of science communication in the UK branch of the science blogosphere. I found it via Alun Salt's "Moving beyond the 'One-dinosaur-fits-all' model of science communication" which is too good a phrase not to quote, and he spun off two posts from Alice Bell, at the Guardian blog and her own blog, and the proximate cause of all this is a dopey remark by a UK government official that has come in for some justifiable mockery.
Bell and Salt both focus on the narrowness of the "dinosaurs and space" approach-- a reasonably representative quote…
cevans | June 1, 2010As NASA's Space Shuttle program winds down -- Endeavour's final mission is slated for later this year, then that's it -- let us take a moment and remember the Shuttles. Sure, they had a tendency to explode into balls of fire. Sure, they were expensive, risky, and besieged by problems. But now is not the time for criticism: 25 years of American engineering, 132 missions, and over 20,000 orbits of this planet are nothing to shake a stick at. It is in this spirit of recognition that Universe presents a very subjective chronology of the Shuttle's greatest moments. Onward!
Gene Roddenberry, Star…