This is the universe at present. You’re seeing not the light but the dark — you knew that most of the universe’s matter is dark, right? — and its motions. Not until the far right end are you seeing the light. Go ahead and clickety click all over this; zoom it in and out, drag it around. […]
Astronomy
By the late 1800s, astronomy had moved on from simple human observation to the collection of images of the sky on photographic plates — pieces of glass coated with light-sensitive silver salts. At the time they were made, these plates could be analyzed only through tedious, labor-intensive work. A person had to scan and measure and compare […]
Granted that Abstruse Goose is being a little juvenile — I prefer to think of him not as immature but just young — and certainly Galileo occasionally had non-astronomical thoughts, even if AG is making them up. But the writing and the drawing of Jupiter and its little stars, its “stellae,” Galileo called them, are […]
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was, in a way, a foregone conclusion. The 1998 discovery by two teams of scientists that the expansion of the universe is accelerating—under the influence of something that scientists have shruggingly come to call dark energy, which later studies have revealed to comprise 72.8 percent of the universe—was one […]
I was helping an astronomer write a sentence. It was about disentangling the color a supernova has intrinsically, from the reddening in its color caused by cosmic dust. He wrote he wanted to “break the degeneracy” between the colors. Break the degeneracy. I got so excited. I’d always thought degenerates were people who didn’t, for […]
A friend I run into regularly says, “Hey, Ann. Do you know that guy from around here who won that Nobel whatever?” He means Adam Riess, and yes, I know Riess. I’ve interviewed him, I say hello, he says hello back. “I have a question for you,” says my friend. “Is your Nobel guy really, […]
The news of a detection of faster-than-light speed neutrinos by the OPERA experiment stunned the physics and astronomy community last week. I read the paper, and I listened to the talk from Geneva over the Web. This is seriously weird stuff! Faster-than-light speed neutrinos!? The talk was filled with wonderfully arcane geodetic methods for measuring […]
I’ve had occasion in these pages before to write about searches for alien planets and alien life and for both, to register the loftiest disdain. I mean, crissakes, the universe is jam-packed with philosophy-shattering freakshows, and we’re looking for things we already know exist? Planets and life are not news. I learned this outlook from […]