As soon as I got over the fainting spell from looking at the Planck satellite’s map – and if you haven’t seen it, look now, faint, and then click – showing the Milky Way, I had a burning question. Okay, true, the Planck satellite wasn’t intended to map the Milky Way. It was supposed to […]
The Cosmos
The word, “data” – tables of numbers, incomprehensible graphs — for most of us would make a good sleep aid. For astronomers, though, “data” means a star-sized thing that outshines a galaxy, or a galaxy just being born, or a star that spins in milliseconds. Data for astronomers is a way to survive, a reason […]
Cosmology did it to me again. First it started out by saying that the universe is expanding, but all its mutual gravity pulls against the expansion so the universe is actually slowing down and might just end by being pulled into a cosmic black hole. I thought this sounded a little extreme but it made […]
In 2007, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey had just filled a public database with a gazillion galaxies and Kevin Schawinski, a graduate student, needed a sample of the ones called, for their shape, ellipticals. Identifying shape isn’t something computers are much good at, so Kevin looked for his ellipticals, culling out the spirals and irregulars, […]
This is the kind of image editors tell me is not interesting, but editors in this case are as wrong as wrong can be. This is a picture by the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory. It’s of the universe clear back, close to its beginning. The Herschel looked in far infrared wavelengths at a […]
Science is not normally in the metaphor business, but occasionally when it crosses the cultural divide between it and the rest of us, it does so via metaphors. Maybe the most common one is black holes. To scientists, black holes are singularities so dense, so gravitationally powerful, that nothing falling into them can return. To […]