Stars
esiegel | January 20, 2015“It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!” -George Gamow
But how was it that this happened? Sure, the Universe may have started off with hydrogen and helium alone, but when we look around at the world today -- at our world in particular -- there's so much more than that.
Image credit: Theodore Gray, via http://theodoregray.com/periodictable/Posters/index.posters.html.
Good thing, too, because without it, the molecular combinations essential to our existence wouldn't be possible! There are…
esiegel | January 5, 2015“A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.” -Niels Bohr
There's a wonderful story that the Universe tells us about itself: the story of where everything in it came from, and how it came to be this way. From the perspective of a human being, there's possibly no component of that as important to our existence as the humblest of all building blocks: the atoms.
Image credit: (c) Theodore W. Gray, from http://periodictable.com/.
Yet when the Universe first cooled from the Big Bang, over 99.999999% of what existed was nothing more than hydrogen and helium. So where did the atoms…
esiegel | October 29, 2014“Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.” -Ovid
With all that we know of astronomy, with the hundreds of billions of galaxies and hundreds of billions of stars in each that we know are there, it might surprise you to learn that the stars -- for the most part -- don't segregate themselves by age, but rather live together in well-mixed populations.
Image credit: European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, of Planetary Nebula IC 1295.
So how, then could we possibly hope to find the oldest stars that are out there? Believe it or not, we have more than just a…
esiegel | September 17, 2014“What’s that star?
It’s the Death Star.
What does it do?
It does Death. It does Death, buddy. Get out of my way!” -Eddie Izzard
It's said -- at least by Darth Vader -- that the power to destroy a planet is nothing compared to the power of the force. But how much energy is that, really?
Image credit: Lucasfilm / Star Wars: Episode IV, a New Hope. (Motion Picture).
While it is, objectively a lot of energy, that kind of destruction really isn't so unfathomable, not if you're willing to consider the ultimate tool of destruction for physically practical purposes: antimatter.
Image credit:…
esiegel | June 2, 2014“But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes.” -John Adams
Not every swarm is a danger, however, particularly if you're talking about the densest individual swarms of stars out there in the Universe: globular clusters!
Image credit: © 2006 — 2012 by Siegfried Kohlert, via http://www.astroimages.de/en/gallery/M107.html.
For today's Messier Monday, the Moon will be out and polluting your skies, but that doesn…
esiegel | May 12, 2014“It’s not what you have on the outside that glitters in light, it’s what you have on the inside that shines in the dark.” -Anthony Liccione
You might look out at a picture of a star cluster, globular cluster, or galaxy in space and think of this as mundane by this point in time. After all, how many of these have you seen by this point in your life, and so what's one more?
Image credit: © 1998-2004 David Haworth, via http://www.stargazing.net/david/messierD70/m10.html.
But you have to remember that for all of human history, we not only couldn't see these things at all, but when we enhanced…
esiegel | May 5, 2014“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” -John Lubbock
Each Messier Monday, we take a look at one of the 110 deep sky wonders that make up the Messier catalogue, each one providing a unique window into our nearby Universe and the history it holds. This week, however, rather than giving you a delight that's easily visible in the early part of the night from my (45° N) Latitude, let's celebrate cinco de Mayo by showing you one that …
esiegel | April 23, 2014“Don’t gain the world and lose your soul;
wisdom is better than silver or gold.” -Bob Marley
Going back to ancient times, it's hard to think of a more commonly coveted element than gold. In fact, trying to transmute other elements into it was perhaps the holy grail of the pseudoscience of alchemy, the forerunner of modern chemistry.
Image credit: National Etruscan Museum at Villa Giulia, of Etruscan Gold, via flickr user HEN-Magonza, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/hen-magonza/4256649637/.
Yet, when was the last time you thought about where elements like gold actually came from? It's true…
esiegel | April 20, 2014“Iron helps us play!” -The Simpsons
If you were to peel back the layers of a supermassive star, before it went supernova, what you'd find were a slew of layers abundant in the even-numbers elements up to iron, but little else. Well, this weekend, have I got a fun little find for you! First off, enjoy the sounds of Jeff Austin (and Chris Castino) as they perform the best rendition of
Flatiron Suite
I've ever heard. And then, when you're ready, prepare for a fun and addicting stellar-nucleosynthesis based game: Fe[26].
Image credit: screenshot from http://newbrict.github.io/Fe26/.
Go read…
esiegel | April 16, 2014“Mr. Burns: Smithers, hand me that ice-cream scoop.
Smithers: Ice-cream scoop?
Mr. Burns: Damn it, Smithers! This isn’t rocket science, it’s brain surgery!” -The Simpsons
I bet you're one of those people who hears a term like "nuclear physics" and thinks that's hard stuff, way over your head. But in many ways, it's the easiest of all physics branches: if you can count protons and neutrons, you can do nuclear physics!
Image credit: Plasma Physics at University of Helsinki, via http://theory.physics.helsinki.fi/~plasma/lect09/12_Fusion.pdf.
Well, nuclear fusion is the process that powers…
esiegel | April 10, 2014“Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.” -Samuel Johnson
You might look up at our Sun in the sky, delighted at its brilliance and life-giving brightness, thankful for all it's brought to our world. But we're all just a little bit dismayed at the crushing realization that it won't live forever, and will someday burn through its fuel and die.
Image credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgment: W. Sparks (STScI) and R. Sahai (JPL).
But the Sun is a very common type of star, and shares certain properties with the vast majority of them. In…
esiegel | April 8, 2014“The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the ‘evolution’ of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.” -William James
Summer is coming. No, not to Westeros, but to your night skies, and with it, views of the galactic plane and even the galactic center, which holds more than a few surprises inside. In particular, it contains the most famous nebula in the entire night sky: the Eagle Nebula.
Image credit: T.A.Rector (NRAO/AUI/NSF…
esiegel | March 17, 2014“A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?” -Khalil Gibran
When you think about globular clusters, you normally think about great collections of hundreds of thousands of stars located in the halo of our galaxy, spherically distributed.
Image credit: user Antilhue from Chile, via Astrosurf, at http://www.astrosurf.com/antilhue/m68.htm.
So what do you do if you discover a loose, faint collection of a couple hundred…
esiegel | February 28, 2014"Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle." -Georg C. Lichtenberg
It's the end of the week here at Starts With A Bang, and so it's time for still another Ask Ethan! This is -- for those of you wondering -- the final Ask Ethan we'll have here on Scienceblogs; starting next week we'll move the series over to Medium with the rest of the new Starts With A Bang content. But keep on sending in your questions and suggestions, and not only will we continue using this site as a forum for the new posts, but next week we'll begin a new series unique to Scienceblogs, where I'…
esiegel | December 24, 2013"Bethany: Is your house on fire, Clark?
Clark: No, Aunt Bethany, those are the Christmas lights." -National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Ahh, Christmas. It's easy to forget how much the invention of the light bulb in 1879 reduced the number of tree fires in people's homes. It was a mere three years later that people began decorating Christmas trees with strings of lights instead of candle flames, and as you can imagine, the reduction in open flames atop fresh kindling had its benefits, and caught on like wildfire. Trees now routinely sport previously unfathomable numbers of lights, limited…
esiegel | December 23, 2013"A sister is both your mirror - and your opposite." -Elizabeth Fishel
With 110 deep-sky wonders to choose from in the Messier catalogue, our long-running series on Messier Monday promises to keep us busy for some time to come! As we've finally passed the winter solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, many new spectacular sights await skygazers in the early part of the night. As it's also the 1-year anniversary of when we adopted a little sister for our dog from the local humane society, I thought it would only be fitting to highlight the little sister to last week's Messier object.
Image…
esiegel | December 20, 2013"To be is to be the value of a variable." -Willard Van Orman Quine
It's the end of the week once again, and the very end of our Year In Space 2014 Wall Calendar giveaway! So for this week's Ask Ethan column, after dipping into our question/suggestion box, I'm very pleased to let Vera from Italy know that her question was the winning one, as she asked:
I saw the video you posted about the variable star RS Puppis, by the Hubble Space Telescope, and I really would like a post about what exactly are variable stars.
Thank you very much Ethan!! :-)
So -- no burying the lede here -- there was a…
esiegel | December 16, 2013"Do not look at stars as bright spots only. Try to take in the vastness of the universe." -Maria Mitchell
It's time again for Messier Monday, where we highlight the various wonderous deep-sky objects of the night, and show you how to find them against the expansive backdrop of stars. The (almost) full Moon is out tonight, polluting your night sky with as much light as a large-sized urban area, but that doesn't mean all of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier catalogue are off-limits!
Image credit: Mike Keith’s delightful (a)periodic table of Messier objects!
While extended…
esiegel | December 13, 2013"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." -Joseph Campbell
Ever since we created a question/suggestion box here, we've been deluged by far more excellent questions than one person could possibly answer, but that doesn't mean we aren't trying! For this week's Ask Ethan, our question comes from long-time fan and reader crd2, who asks:
As we look at the furthest quasars we see they have supermassive black holes, as large as 109 solar masses. By what mechanism are they able to reach such large sizes over so short a…
esiegel | December 2, 2013"Give me a man who says this one thing I do, and not those fifty things I dabble in." -Dwight L. Moody
While star clusters may dabble in a number of physically interesting things, there's one thing that they do above all others, and that is shine. For today's Messier Monday, where we spotlight one of the 110 deep-sky wonders of the Messier catalogue, let's take a look at one of the brilliant open clusters of stars that's recently formed in our neighborhood of the galaxy and that will appear all winter long: Messier 50.
Image credit: Greg Scheckler, using the robotic telescopes of http://…