perseus
esiegel | August 17, 2012"We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form." -Carlos Frenk
The Universe has been around for a long time: nearly 14 billion years, to the best of our knowledge. When it was very young, there were absolutely zero stars in it, while today, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of which contains anywhere from a few billion to many trillions of stars.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI / AURA) - ESA / Hubble Collaboration
The galaxy shown above, NGC 2841, is very similar to our own Milky Way. Approximately the…
esiegel | August 11, 2012"Stuff that's hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don't know what it does." -Jerry Garcia
Earlier this month, one of my favorite musical artist of all-time would have turned seventy. This weekend, I'm off at a fantastic music festival where they're celebrating the life of Jerry Garcia, and in addition to being the leader of the Grateful Dead, he was also a huge influence in the world of bluegrass, americana and folk music. While I always loved his songs about lovable scoundrels, here's a duet of him with David Grisman performing the much more pastoral
Shady Grove,
and there's…