65630215
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
The formation of new stars happens in stages: cold molecular gas clouds contract and collapse under their own gravity, forming proto-stars in the densest regions that grow to undergo nuclear fusion. The new stars then emit ionizing radiation, and burn off the rest of the nebula, leaving a young star cluster behind. For the most part, we observe this story in different stages when we look at different objects, but there's one place in our galaxy where the entire story is being told all at once. It's the Eagle Nebula: the one place in our galaxy that showcases all the stages of star formation simultaneously!
65608443
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
We like to think of the Mercury 7 — the very first group of NASA astronauts — as the "best of the best," having been chosen from a pool of over 500 of the top military test pilots after three rounds of intense physical and mental tests. Yet when women were allowed to take the same tests, one of them clearly distinguished herself, outperforming practically all of the men. If NASA had really believed in merit, Jerrie Cobb would have been the first female in space, even before Valentina Tereshkova, more than 50 years ago. She still deserves to go.
65559395
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
The past century saw a revolution in the way we perceive the nature of the Universe. Rather than being made up of fixed space and time, general relativity brought along with it spacetime, and the idea that it wasn't fixed at all but rather dynamical. We discovered that the fabric of this spacetime itself is expanding over time, and by measuring multiple independent lines of evidence, we determined that the expansion itself is accelerating. This general phenomenon is due to dark energy, but what exactly is this dark energy we speak of so frequently? The observations are good enough now that we can (preliminarily) say that it's a cosmological constant, or the energy inherent to space itself, or the non-zero zero-point-energy of the quantum vacuum. There's still a little wiggle room, but not much!
65531065
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
If you can reach the fabled "breakeven point" of nuclear fusion, you’ll have opened up an entire new source of clean, reliable, safe, renewable and abundant energy. You will change the world. At present, fusion is one of those things we can make happen through a variety of methods, but — unless you’re the Sun — we don’t have a way to ignite and sustain that reaction without needing to input more energy than we can extract in a usable fashion from the fusion that occurs. One alternative approach to the norm is, rather than try and up the energy released in a sustained, hot fusion reaction, to instead lower the energy inputted, and try to make fusion happen under “cold” conditions. If you listen in the right (wrong?) places, you'll hear periodic reports that cold fusion is happening, even though those reports have always crumbled under scrutiny. Here's why, most likely, they always will.
65491903
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
Last week, outlets reported an independent test of the E-cat, an alleged cold fusion device that could revolutionize energy for our world. Or, alternatively, it could simply be a hoax perpetrated by a charlatan and a team of either accomplices or incompetents. How would you distinguish between the two? When you look at the scientific standards, the results of the "independent test" leave a lot to be desired.
65419715
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
4.6 billion years ago, a large molecular cloud collapsed in the Milky Way, giving rise to around a thousand or so new stars and star systems, one of which just happened to become our home. But those early days showcased a violent time for our Solar System, and wasn't so different from what's currently taking place in the Omega Nebula, just 5,500 light years away in our own galaxy. Take an in-depth look inside, and catch a glimpse of what our Solar System's environment was like back during its earliest days!
65363645
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
Nothing in this Universe lasts forever: not life, planets, stars, atoms or even galaxies. But the longest-lived thing of all — black holes — have a limit on their lifetime, too! The phenomenon of Hawking radiation ensures that even they will decay and evaporate after a long enough time. But the popular picture — of particle-antiparticle pairs created outside the event horizon, with one falling in and the other escaping — is wildly oversimplified, and creates the misconception that Hawking radiation is particles-and-antiparticles escaping. It isn't; it's a blackbody spectrum of photons, and here's what you need to know about what actually goes on!
65308729
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
If you want to take the best-ever images of objects in deep space, you build the largest possible telescope, you equip it with the best possible camera equipment, and you send it up to space. Right? Only, the "large" part and the "send it to space" part are mutually exclusive! We can build much larger telescopes on the ground than we can send to space, so how, then, could ground-based observatories ever compete with something like Hubble? You need to find a way to adapt to the ever-changing, turbulent atmosphere. Believe it or not, that's exactly what the lasers these observatories shoot allow us to do!
65305201
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
If you want an electron to be free, all you have to do is put in enough energy to ionize an atom. If you want a mass to be free, all you need is enough energy to overcome its gravitational binding. But a quark is a tricky thing: as much as we might try, we can never free it from being bound to other quarks (or antiquarks). The reason is tricky, and its explanation won the Nobel Prize exactly 10 years ago. Here's a great explainer o the physics behind it.
65247377
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
Yes, the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics went to the invention of the blue LED, which came about through a new technique in diode creation that has been used, copied and improved upon over the past 20 years. Many people have been outraged that such a mundane discovery won the Nobel Prize, but the physics behind it is undeniably groundbreaking, not to mention the applications.
65201803
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
Globular clusters are some of the oldest objects in the Universe, with typical ages ranging from 10 billion years to more than 13 billion years, approaching the age of the Universe itself. Intermediate mass black holes have been found in a few of them: small versions of the supermassive black holes found at the center of most galaxies. In 2012, astronomers identified two stellar mass black holes near (but not at) the center of Messier 22, the brightest globular cluster visible from Earth, and it's now believed that there are around 100 black holes in every single globular in the sky!
65184479
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
If you’ve ever participated in BOINC projects such as Einstein@home, SETI@home, Malaria Control or one of many protein folding projects, you recognize the power of using the idle cycles of your CPU (and GPU) for helping science. But that’s nothing compared to what the Charity Engine is doing to help science, charities and build the world’s largest cloud-based supercomputer for lease only by vetted, ethical companies! For those of you with tons of old hardware lying around, you've got no excuse not to do it.
65143481
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
When you look at a black hole from the outside, there are only a few quantities of it that you can measure: its mass, electric charge and angular momentum. Whether it was made of matter, antimatter or dark matter is lost to its history. But based on what we know of astrophysics and the Universe, we can calculate how much dark matter ought to be eaten by them over the Universe's history. As it turns out, black holes are born dark-matter-free, but can grow to have up to 0.004% of their mass originate from dark matter. Normal matter: not doing so bad for just 5% of the Universe!
65120993
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
The Universe as we know it (i.e., when it's filled with "stuff" like matter and radiation) has been expanding and cooling for 13.8 billion years, leading up to the present day. Does that mean we can see for 13.8 billion light years in all directions? Under the laws of General Relativity, it turns out that would be impossible, as the Universe must be either expanding or contracting. So how big is it? 46 billion light years in radius, with only a very small uncertainty!
65113805
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
One of the biggest questions in all of science is that of just how ubiquitous — or rare — life in the Universe is. With the sole exception of Earth, all the worlds in our Solar System seem devoid of life. Or at least, their detection has eluded us so far. But what of all the other planets, star systems and galaxies in the Universe? We all share the same common, cosmic history, and as far as we can tell, the ingredients for life are everywhere. But for the first time in human history, we may not need life to come and contact us; we can simply stay here and look for surefire signatures from afar. Come find out how we may be on the cusp of, for the first time, finding out we’re not alone in the Universe!
