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A blog that explores the strange, unknown, technology, space and science with a skeptical and analytical eye.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'astrophysics'
in the beginning, there was the black hole
Just for a little astrophysics fun, let’s imagine that we’re back in the early days of the universe and the very first generation of stars is about to be born. Since the entire hot and dense universe is filled with gas, those stars will b...
say, how far away is that black hole?
Trying to pin down the distance between our planet and a nearby black hole is a very tricky business. By virtue of being pinpoints of self-gravitating energy, black holes are usually about the size of a big city and very hard to observe directly. The...
the difficult divorce between time and space
Overturning the theory of general relativity takes a lot of work as most popular science buffs know. So what’s a better way to draw in eyeballs than questioning whether Einstein’s work has finally been overturned? It’s kind of like ...
searching for the biggest stars in the cosmos
Like the overwhelming majority of stars in the universe, our sun will die with a whisper. When stars which tip the scales at more than 1.5 times the mass of our sun end their lives, they go out with a bang, leaving either a highly compressed core we ...
spaceships, now with black hole reactors?
Once upon a time, we took a look at why creating black holes in particle colliders and using them to generate energy for our power grids was fraught with problems. However, if at sometime in the future we could scale up our lasers and use them to cre...
hey, where are those galaxy clusters going?
One of my first posts on this blog was about something referred to as a dark flow, a strange current carrying galaxy clusters to the edge of the visible universe. But last year it was just a speculation based on preliminary data. Today, the results h...
who wants to build a warp drive anyway?
Usually, when I post about a scientific paper, the focus is on its methodology and interpreting its conclusions into real world applications. This time, we’re going to do something a little different and use an oft cited paper on the plausibili...
and now for something completely ridiculous
I know that by now the video in which optometrist Charlene Werner does such awful things to equations used by physicists, these poor formulas would need to use puppets to explain what happened to them in court, has been briefly covered by PZ Myers an...
are monster black holes on an entropy frenzy?
Over the last few decades, cosmologists discovered what the future of the universe may hold. That concludes the part of the post where we entertain a single shred of optimism since it seems that our future is bleak. On the biggest time scales, stars ...
answers in genesis takes on black holes
What could possibly be more shocking than finding a brutal maiming of some of the simplest scientific facts on a website ran by a fundamentalist group that created a museum of indoctrination which shows humans living with dinosaurs in the Garden of E...
replicating hawking radiation in the lab
Many a physicist wonder if black holes, the gravitational ghosts of massive stars that distort the fabric of space and time to the breaking point with their tidal forces, may have a soft underbelly. Rather than being eternal, these bizarre cosmic obj...
across the universe in a lifetime. with a catch.
New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft launched so far by humans. After a gravity assist from Jupiter, it’s on a course to rocket past Pluto at 47,000 miles per hour. At that speed it would circle our world in a little under 32 minutes, make it...
black holes and ancient dwarf galaxies
Two of the questions anyone who writes extensively about black holes gets is how we actually know where an object that’s powerful enough to funnel photons into is gravitational field really is, and how we can point to the object and decide that...
The trouble with wormholes
Unless you resolutely refuse to read anything about science fiction of ideas about traveling to alien worlds around other stars, you’re probably familiar with the concept of a wormhole. But just in case, here’s a quick and dirty review of the bas...
Why we’re stuck with dark energy
The universe seems like a very dark place. Ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets and the vast amounts of interstellar gases is less then 5% of everything in the visible universe. Some strange, unknown substance we call dark matter takes up alm...
