Astronomy
esiegel | February 9, 2017"For the first time we can learn about individual stars from near the beginning of time. There are surely many more out there." -Neil Gehrels
We’ve come incredibly far in our quest to learn how the Universe came to be the way it is today. We can see out in space for tens of billions of light years, to galaxies as they were when the Universe was only a few percent of its present age. We can see how galaxies evolve, merge and the stars inside change. And we can see to even before that, when no stars or galaxies existed at all.
The farthest galaxy known to date, which was confirmed by Hubble,…
esiegel | February 8, 2017"To morrow, I believe, is to be an eclipse of the sun, and I think it perfectly meet and proper that the sun in the heavens, and the glory of the Republic should both go into obscurity and darkness together." -Benjamin F. Wade
The Moon is spherical, and so its shadow should be a circle by simple geometry, right? Only, if we view it when it strikes Earth, it’s not even close to a circle. It’s stretched into an ellipse, and further complicated by irregular, sharp edges and corners. Why would it appear that way? As it turns out, three factors combine to get us there.
An illustration of the Sun-…
esiegel | February 7, 2017"By preventing dangerous asteroid strikes, we can save millions of people, or even our entire species. And, as human beings, we can take responsibility for preserving this amazing evolutionary experiment of which we and all life on Earth are a part." -Rusty Schweickart
Asteroid strikes are among the most destructive natural disasters to ever impact planet Earth. While an extinction-level event, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago, are exceedingly rare, we face city-killer impacts somewhere on Earth's surface every few hundred years.
Meteor (Barringer) crater,…
esiegel | February 6, 2017"Put two ships in the open sea, without wind or tide, and, at last, they will come together. Throw two planets into space, and they will fall one on the other. Place two enemies in the midst of a crowd, and they will inevitably meet; it is a fatality, a question of time; that is all." -Jules Verne
When any object passes too close to the event horizon of a black hole, the tidal forces acting on it can become so strong that they’ll tear the entire object apart in a spaghettification disaster. While most of the matter will get ejected from the encounter, a significant fraction can be accreted,…
esiegel | 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 nearly a century, we’ve known that our Universe is expanding, and that the distance to a galaxy determines its average apparent recessional speed from us. But on top of that is an additional motion -- a peculiar velocity -- caused by the local gravitational field of the Universe.
A two-dimensional…
esiegel | 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 half of its orbit? If you're Giovanni Cassini, you postulate that half of the moon is darker than the other, and you work tirelessly to improve the telescope so that you can see it when it's in "faint mode." After more than 3 decades, he succeeded.
The ringed planet, Saturn, contains a number of…
esiegel | 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 of energy in there: the zero-point energy of the Universe. One consequence of quantum electrodynamics is that this sea of virtual particles is always present, and a strong magnetic field can lead to some really bizarre behavior.
VLT image of the area around the very faint neutron star RX J1856.5-…
esiegel | 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 to calibrate your data, otherwise your interpretation of what you’re looking at could be skewed by gas, dust, the atmosphere or other intervening factors that you’ve failed to consider. Without a proper calibration, you don’t know how reliable what you’re looking at is.
Pan-STARRS1 Observatory…
esiegel | 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 parent star by going to infrared wavelengths. Four years later, the system HR 8799 was determined to have three (later upgraded to four) exoplanets orbiting it. They could all not only be imaged, but imaged over time. As the planets continue to move in their orbits, follow-up observations have…
esiegel | 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 something.” -Neil Gaiman
Another week, another slew of fantastic stories down here at Starts With A Bang! If you've been wondering about what the Starts With A Bang Podcast is going to be about this month, wonder no longer! It's on the expanding Universe, and what's still so controversial about all…
esiegel | 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 stretching billions of years into the future and beyond. From the death of life on Earth to the end of the Sun, we can predict some major catastrophes our Solar System will face.
The Earth, if calculations are correct, should not be engulfed by the Sun when it swells into a red giant. It should, however…
esiegel | 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:
1.) We must be prepared to take account of the fact that our location in the Universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers.
2.) The Universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be as to admit the creation of…
esiegel | 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 what we can build on the ground. The current record-holder for largest telescope is 10.4 meters in diameter, and that takes 36 hexagonal segments to get there. But single mirrors can be cast up to about 8 meters in diameter. Thanks to a revolutionary design, the Giant Magellan Telescope will stitch 7…
esiegel | 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 quantum theory and general relativity, combined, predict something troubling: that black hole will decay, and none of the information will come out in the decay products.
While Einstein's theory makes explicit predictions for a black hole's event horizon and the spacetime just outside, quantum…
esiegel | 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 population of near-Earth asteroids we find in our Solar System today. In fact, more than 80% of the meteorites we find on Earth’s surface are entirely of the wrong class.
An H-Chondrite from Northern Chile shows chondrules and metal grains. This meteorite is high in iron, and is the most common type…
esiegel | 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 something.” -Neil Gaiman
Here we are, at the end of a momentous week here at Starts With A Bang! The world is changing; the president of the world's most powerful nation has changed; but the quest to learn ever more about the Universe still continues unabated. There's so much coming down the pipeline…
esiegel | 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 makes us special. But does that make us divinely chosen? Or, even more to the point, does that mean that the Universe was designed to give rise to human beings; with us in mind as the end goal? That isn’t necessarily a question we can know the answer to, but it’s something we can approach with science…
esiegel | 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 supporting life, we need to measure what happened at the beginning." -John Mather
Launching in October of 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope will revolutionize our conception of the Universe. The biggest scientific find that we know it can uncover is how the Universe came to be the way it is today. How…
esiegel | 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 contact binaries. That, alone, is enough to make a system spectacular.
Contact binaries come in all sorts of different masses and sizes, but cannot be directly observed or resolved by current telescopes. Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada.
But in the case of this system, KIC 9832227, the orbital…
esiegel | 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 and heat up, and X-rays will be emitted. But on rare occasion, radio emission can be found, too. Which is a puzzle, since that requires electrons to gain an extra factor of 1,000,000 in energy! How can that happen?
The most energetic shock can be clearly seen around one of the galaxies, well-offset…