When Isaac Newton quantified gravity, his theory explained how everything in the world around us behaved in its presence. It opened a door to an understanding of something fundamental, yet elusive in explanation. Centuries later, Einstein came along and took a step back, finding a larger more comprehensive theory of gravity, one that explained the strange things that happen in the grand universe. His theory could even explain things that Newton’s theory of gravity could not, such as the odd orbit of Mercury around the Sun. But the greatest part of Einstein’s theory is that if you use it to...
If you look up into the sky on a clear night, you would see thousands of stars. There are surely many more that you would need a telescope to see. But there are not stars everywhere. You can zoom in further and further with bigger and bigger telescopes, until eventually you find gaps where you simply don’t see stars. For a long time it was thought that the gaps were empty, until the Hubble telescope peered through the darkness by taking a 200 hour exposure of a supposedly empty patch of sky. What it revealed was a universe full of...
Are equations beautiful? Does a mathematician see the machine code of the universe in the complex language they use? Does a Chemist see the flow of matter? Does a Biologist see the evolution of life? Does a physicist see the probabilistic nature of electrons? Many scientists would affirm their view that the equations that dictate their respective fields are artistic, in addition to logical. So if equations can be beautiful, what is the most beautiful equation? Naturally, the most beautiful equation should be simple. It should be somewhat intuitive, yet surprising in it’s result. It should explain something fundamental about the universe,...
It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. The incredible and rare dark star cluster, hiding the evil super villain’s headquarters. A dark star cluster is something I would imagine as a spooky, eerie type of place where everything you see changes when you enter its space. Science fiction aside, a dark star cluster is real, and it’s a new type of cluster that is similar to the mighty dense globular clusters that orbit most galaxies. Globular clusters orbit in a halo of space around the centres of galaxies, and though our Milky Way harbours 150 of them,...
The two major solar observatories, SDO and SOHO, both saw a massive solar event in exceptional clarity. Starting April 28th, a huge solar plasma loop broke away and was blasted millions of miles out into space from the surface of the Sun! This massive outburst of energy comes during the peak of the 11-year solar activity cycle, and shows us just how incredible and energetic our home star can be. Solar filaments like the one that broke away are long chains of solar plasma, a state of matter where super-heated gas becomes stripped of its electrons. The plasma filaments follow...
We call it dark matter because it doesn’t give off light, right? Well there is a lot of matter than doesn’t radiate, but the difference is that whatever the stuff is that we call dark matter doesn’t interact with anything through the small-scale fundamental forces. The only way we have been able to detect it’s presence is through large-scale gravitational interaction. Dark matter is ‘dark’ because it doesn’t interact with anything in a way that lets us figure out what it’s made of. Well now that we’ve got that out of the way, we can look at the new...
You might think simulating the entire Universe is difficult, and it is, but not for the reasons you would think. The Physics is actually somewhat straightforward. We know the math behind star formation, Gravity, and fluid dynamics, and throwing in a few other effects is not too bad. The hard part is finding a computer powerful enough to do the calculations in a reasonable amount of time. Think about it. Imagine having a universe of 100 Billion ‘particles’ used for a simulation. Each particle has a starting point, and that it pretty easy to do. But then for every...
Dark Matter; Dark Energy; We basically use the term ‘dark’ as a cool sounding version of ‘We have no clue what this is.’ But Dark Matter is a better name than ‘We haven’t a clue’ Matter. Over the years, Astronomers have been trying to pinpoint what the stuff actually is that seems to permeate the universe and makes up 26.8% of the entire total energy-mass (Compare this to a paltry 4.9% of ordinary matter, ie the stuff we can see). But now, as per usual, theorists have come up with another possibility for the source of dark matter: moderately sized,...
