What’s in a Name

The best thing that ever happened to the Big Bang is its name. For scientists, the acceptance of a scientific concept depends on its explanation of existing data, its prediction of observable phenomena, the observation of those phenomena, and the duplication of those results. But for non-scientists—well, for scientists, too—the popularity of a concept can come [...]

Stars Like Flies

Scattered around the periphery of our galaxy, the Milky Way, are upwards of 150 odd creatures called globular clusters.  They’re little agglomerations of stars that are bound by gravity into a sphere and that inside it, are buzzing around like flies.  They’re odd because 1) most stars come in singles or pairs, and globulars have [...]

Making a Really Big Galaxy

This is how astronomers think giant galaxies form super-massive black holes (the adjectives are the astronomers’).  Way back at the beginning, maybe a billion years after the birth of a 14 billion year old universe, enormous galaxies a hundred times bigger than the Milky Way were born, pulling themselves together out of clouds of stars [...]