February 5, 2017
"Sometimes I even now feel like a stranger in my country. But I knew there would be problems because I had seen the world... Freedom is good, but it is not easy." -Katarina Witt
Yes, as always, as another week goes by at Starts With A Bang! there have been a huge number of great stories we've…
February 4, 2017
"For the first time, astronomers have outlined and named the network of galaxies that includes the Milky Way, adding a line to our cosmic address and further defining our place in the universe." -Douglas Quenqua
There’s been a longstanding puzzle in astrophysics that’s finally coming to a head. For…
February 3, 2017
“The dance between darkness and light will always remain — the stars and the moon will always need the darkness to be seen, the darkness will just not be worth having without the moon and the stars.” -C. JoyBell C.
What do you do when you discover a moon around Saturn that's only visible during…
February 2, 2017
"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." -Werner Heisenberg
Empty space, according to quantum mechanics, isn’t exactly empty. Take away all the matter, radiation and anything else you can have populating your space, and you’ll still have some amount…
February 1, 2017
“If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.” -H. James Harrington
If you want to observe the night sky, it’s not quite as simple as pointing your telescope and collecting photons. You have…
January 31, 2017
"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." -Ernest Rutherford
It’s a difficult thing to do, to go against your gut instinct. It’s even more difficult when your gut is backed up by the facts you’ve found doing your own independent research. But the greatest…
January 30, 2017
"The Beta Pic animation looked so cool that we’ve wanted to do more. We wanted to make one that was even more impactful for the audience and could begin to show what one of these systems looks like." -Jason Wang
In 2004, humanity was able to take the first direct image of an exoplanet around its…
January 29, 2017
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing…
January 28, 2017
"'Space-time' - that hideous hybrid whose very hyphen looks phoney." -Vladimir Nabokov
Sure, you know what space and time are. If you heard of Einstein and relativity, you might know that they’re not absolute quantities, but that how you experience distances and the ticking of clocks is dependent…
January 27, 2017
"The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost." -G. K. Chesterton
Worried about the environment of Earth today? Here’s a sobering fact: we already know how it’s all going to end. Not just when the next ice age will come or the next supervolcano will blow, but on cosmic scales…
January 26, 2017
“There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long,
‘I feel this is right for me,
I know that this is wrong.’” -Shel Silverstein
When it was first proposed in 1973 by Brandon Carter, there were only two simple statements that one could hardly disagree with concerning the anthropic principle…
January 25, 2017
"For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift." -Wernher von Braun
Sure, going to space is great for overcoming Earth’s atmosphere, but it’s no substitute for the sheer size of…
January 24, 2017
"Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it." -Stephen Hawking
Throw a book into a black hole, and the information must somehow wind up inside. Same goes for a star, a planet, or even a single proton: that information must be maintained. But allow enough time to pass, and…
January 23, 2017
"Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone." -Henry W. Longfellow
When you look at the meteors striking Earth today, as well as over the past 466 million years, you find something surprising: they don’t line up with the…
January 22, 2017
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing…
January 21, 2017
"It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away." -Lisa Unger
If you want to experience zero gravity, all you need to do is go to space, turn your rocket off and feel that weightless sensation,…
January 20, 2017
“It's so easy to become a grumbler, someone who condemns and carps at everything on principle and sees an ulterior motive behind it.” -Eric Metaxas
If we find out that we truly are alone in the Universe, whether there’s no other life, intelligent life, or spacefaring life, there’s no doubt that…
January 18, 2017
"There are now dozens of hockey sticks and the all come to the same basic conclusion. The recent warming does appear to be unprecedented as far bas as we can go. But even if we didn't have that evidence, we would still know that humans are warming the planet, changing the climate and that…
January 18, 2017
"One way or another the first stars must have influenced our own history, beginning with stirring up everything and producing the other chemical elements besides hydrogen and helium. So if we really want to know where our atoms came from, and how the little planet Earth came to be capable of…
January 17, 2017
"We have chased away the clouds, the sky is all 'rose.'" -Francois Hollande
When you have a light curve with two different large, periodic dips in it, a binary star system is the likeliest explanation. The stars eclipse, and in the case where they're so close their envelopes touch, they're known as…
January 16, 2017
"Speculating and predicting what lies beyond the boundary is fascinating. Finding out is even more fascinating." -Wallace H. Tucker
When two galaxy clusters collide, there are a slew of cosmic certainties you can bet on: all the galaxies will miss one another, the intracluster gases will collide…
January 15, 2017
“Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.” -Saint Augustine
Well, another week has gone by -- the…
January 14, 2017
"Lives are snowflakes - unique in detail, forming patterns we have seen before, but as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection.)" -Neil Gaiman…
January 13, 2017
“The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.” -Edwin Hubble
Over its more than 25 year lifetime, the Hubble Space Telescope has shown us what the Universe truly looks like. It’s done so in a myriad of ways, from planets to stars – dying and forming – to galaxies to gravity’s effects…
January 12, 2017
"In the far, far future, essentially all matter will have returned to energy. But because of the enormous expansion of space, this energy will be spread so thinly that it will hardly ever convert back to even the lightest particles of matter. Instead, a faint mist of light will fall for eternity…
January 11, 2017
"Through basic science literacy, people can understand the policy choices we need to be making. Scientists are not necessarily the greatest communicators, but science and communication is one of the fundamentals we need to address. People are interested." -James Murdoch
Are you scientifically…
January 10, 2017
"...because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone." -John F. Kennedy
The Hubble Space Telescope, for all of its scientific findings and how it revolutionized…
January 9, 2017
"The discovery that young galaxies are so unexpectedly bright--if you look for this distinctive green light--will dramatically change and improve the way that we study Galaxy formation throughout the history of the Universe." -Matthew Malkan
Galaxies come in many different colors today: white, blue…
January 8, 2017
"Life would be tragic if it weren't funny." -Stephen Hawking
Well, the first week of the year is behind us here at Starts With A Bang! For most people, that means struggling to return from a long holiday break, but in the world of astronomy that means we've just come back from an incredible week of…
January 7, 2017
“We are part of the universe that has developed a remarkable ability: We can hold an image of the world in our minds. We are matter contemplating itself.” -Sean Carroll
If you take a look at our Universe today, you can learn all sorts of things about it. How the matter in it is distributed, what…
