February 15, 2016
"We are stardust, we are golden,
We are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden." -Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
When Charles Messier first began cataloguing nebulae, even globular clusters, just a few tens of thousands of light years distant, weren’t resolvable…
February 14, 2016
“Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.” -Henry David Thoreau
Oh, let's be real. While there was plenty to talk about here at Starts With A Bang, there was one thing that took over the news from everything else, the first ever discovery…
February 13, 2016
"I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all." -Alexis de Tocqueville
You don’t need to be right…
February 12, 2016
“Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.” -Fernando Pessoa
One of the most iconic associations with Valentine's Day is chocolate. And not just any chocolate, mind you, but good-quality chocolate, with a creamy, silky-smooth texture, a firm but shiny structure, and an even, rich…
February 11, 2016
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves." -David Reitze
More than 100 years after Einstein's relativity came out, one of its last great predictions -- the existence of gravitational radiation -- has been directly experimentally confirmed! The LIGO collaboration has observed two…
February 11, 2016
"We stand on a great threshold in the human history of space exploration. If life is prevalent in our neighborhood of the galaxy, it is within our resources and technological reach to be the first generation in human history to finally cross this threshold, and to learn if there is life of any kind…
February 9, 2016
"Einstein's gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea." -Richard Feynman
When we look out into the Universe, we normally…
February 8, 2016
"A mouse does not rely on just one hole." -Plautus
When you look at the largest, most powerful optical telescopes in the world, they all have something in common: they all have holes in their central, primary mirrors. This is for a few reasons, including that they're all reflectors, they all need…
February 7, 2016
“Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.” -Henry David Thoreau
With more stories of the Universe having been told this past week at Starts With A Bang, it's always a thrill to look back, see what we've covered and see what thoughts and…
February 6, 2016
"Biological diversity is messy. It walks, it crawls, it swims, it swoops, it buzzes. But extinction is silent, and it has no voice other than our own." -Paul Hawken
Looking at the history of life on Earth, the fossil record shows something incontrovertible: in order for new forms of life to rise to…
February 5, 2016
"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
If you want to…
February 4, 2016
“These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past.” -Fred Hoyle
It’s making headlines every time someone brings it up: a quantum calculation, a new theory or some mathematical evidence proves it once…
February 3, 2016
"It’s becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and…
February 2, 2016
"[T]he coin of life has meaning and value no matter what side it lands on. It's each individual's choice whether to bet on the outcome or not, but ultimately your coin of life will be spent somehow." -Virgil Kalyana Mittata Iordache
Coin flips are traditionally the way to settle disputes with two…
February 2, 2016
"I like cappuccino, actually. But even a bad cup of coffee is better than no coffee at all." -David Lynch
Particularly in the dead of winter, most of us enjoy a hot drink, whether it's coffee, tea, hot chocolate or soup. But if that drink is too hot, your options for cooling it down are…
February 1, 2016
"Most people don't know what's happening around them because they're just speeding through life. And before they know it, they're just old. So I just try to slow it down." -Tracy Morgan
Travel fast enough through the air, and you'll exceed the speed of sound. The compressed air in front of you…
January 30, 2016
“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” -Zig Ziglar
What a week it's been here at Starts With A Bang, where we've been proud to bring a number of stories to light for you. This past week, in case you missed anything, we've tackled:
Is…
January 30, 2016
“Go then, there are other worlds than these.” -Stephen King, The Dark Tower
When you think about the Multiverse, everyone thinks about the Universe beyond what's accessible to us. But whether you think about more Universe like our own, multiple Universe that are disconnected from ours, an infinite…
January 28, 2016
"Think about it this way - a boomerang goes out and comes back to you if you throw it. If you throw it out at the universe, it will come back down to you on Earth." -J. B. Smoove
Give a planet a kick, and it goes into a more distant orbit around our star. Give it a hard enough kick, and it will…
January 28, 2016
"Now the world has gone to bed,
Darkness won't engulf my head,
I can see by infrared,
How I hate the night." -Douglas Adams
In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched and deployed, becoming the first space-based observatory. In the years since, many others have followed, covering the entire…
January 27, 2016
"If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life." -Gus Grissom
On January 27, 1967, the Apollo 1 crew was performing a "plugs-out" test of the Command/…
January 25, 2016
"So numerous are the objects which meet our view in the heavens, that we cannot imagine a point of space where some light would not strike the eye;—innumerable stars, thousands of double and multiple systems, clusters in one blaze with their tens of thousands of stars, and the nebulae amazing us by…
January 23, 2016
“What might we learn from lines of research that are off the beaten track? They check accepted ideas, always a Good Thing, and there is the chance Nature has prepared yet another surprise for us.” -Jim Peebles
It's been a huge week here at Starts With A Bang, and one of our busiest on record. If…
January 23, 2016
"Do not look at stars as bright spots only. Try to take in the vastness of the universe." -Maria Mitchell
The analogies between small-scale, living things and large-scale, cosmic entities are abundant: between a neuron and the Universe's large-scale structure; between an atom and a solar system;…
January 22, 2016
“Our knowledge of physics only takes us back so far. Before this instant of cosmic time, all the laws of physics or chemistry are as evanescent as rings of smoke.” -Joe Silk
When people use the word theory colloquially, they use it to mean an "idea" or a "possibility" that could conceivably be at…
January 21, 2016
"Science, however, gives me the feeling of steady progress: I am convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has…
January 20, 2016
“Finding out that something you have just discovered is considered all but impossible is one of the joys of science.” -Mike Brown
Earlier today, the team of Pluto-killer Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin announced that they had found evidence of a ninth planet in our Solar System beyond the orbit…
January 20, 2016
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do." -Benjamin Franklin
The history of science is rife with stories of cases where a person or team, usually with a lot of clout, reached a conclusion that seemed incontrovertible. When that occurs, we often find that subsequent…
January 18, 2016
"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." -Albert Camus
If you ask the average person where you can find new stars in our galaxy, they might (correctly) identify the Orion Nebula, a hotbed of…
January 18, 2016
"Thou shalt not embarrass thyself and thy colleagues by claiming false planets." -Bill Cochran
Last year, Penn State astronomer Jason Wright made headlines by claiming that one of the stars being observed by NASA's Kepler mission might contain alien megastructures around it. The large dips in its…
