When you start to think about the most massive and extreme ‘stuff’ in the universe, you inevitably go to Dark Matter and Dark Energy. They exist as opposites, one with incredible gravity holding the universe together, and the other a mysterious vacuum energy tearing it apart. Studying this cosmic tug of war gives astronomers a chance to determine the past and future of the entire universe. To study the immense scale of these two quantities, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) program of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III (SDSS) constructed a 3D map of the sky, amounting to a volume...
Data is fascinating. And what’s even more fascinating is that the laws of nature produce predictable patterns in data. For example, if you toss a coin 100 times and measure how many times heads comes up, you’ll get a number between zero and 100. If you repeat that experiment again and again and again, you’ll get different values each time, but usually the number will be around 50, and 50 will come up more than any other value if you repeat the experiment enough times. If you plot this data, with the # of heads in 100 coin tosses on...
A few hundred million years after the big bang, the first stars formed. We aren’t exactly sure how, but we do know that they contained Hydrogen, Helium, and a little bit of Lithium. These were the only elements in the entire universe at the time. Within these first stars, the fusion of heavier elements began. Oxygen, Nitrogen, Carbon, Iron, and all the other elements that make up everything we know formed Billions of years ago in these first stars and in their progenitors. It was a slow process to produce these elements and seed them throughout the cosmos, but over...
