astronomers

"Art has never been a popularity contest." -James Levine Sometimes, you might feel like you've heard it all, seen it all, and that nothing's original anymore. But I beg to differ. Just because great things have come before doesn't mean that there aren't great things happening right now. While it might "only" be a cover of a Kanye West song (which itself heavily samples a Ray Charles song, at one time featured here), I encourage you to listen to the Automatic's brilliant version of Gold Digger. And while the stories of the Universe I tell you about here don't tend to be my personal, original…

Some of you who've been following astronomy for awhile might remember this report, where a group of astronomers reported finding a giant "void" in the Universe. What is a void? Well, galaxies are distributed pretty randomly, but because of gravity, they cluster together. A small example is our local group which looks like this, and a larger example is the Virgo cluster, which is about 1,000 times as massive as our local group, and looks like this: Well, a void is the opposite of a cluster, where you have a large volume of space that's simply empty of galaxies and matter. This press release…

When I think of molecules, I think of Conan O'Brien doing his skit where he plays Moleculo... the molecular man! I don't think of astronomy, and I certainly don't think of the leftover radiation from the big bang (known as the cosmic microwave background)! But somebody over at the European Southern Observatory put these two together and made an incredibly tasty science sandwich. See, we can measure the cosmic microwave background today, because we have photons (particles of light) coming at us in all directions at all locations, with a temperature of 2.725 Kelvin. Theoretical cosmology…