Tag: sensitivity

Falcon Flight to the Galaxy

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In the APOD photo from May 14th, it is easy to imagine the rocket launching far away into the galactic disk.  Sadly the rocket can’t traverse the thousands of light years to reach the distant stars, and is restricted to orbiting the Earth. Another beautiful part of this image is the technique involved in producing it.  It required combining two exposures. The first, with low sensitivity to capture the orange rocket trail of the Falcon 9.  The second with high sensitivity and a longer exposure time to capture the faint light of the Milky Way galaxy beyond.  The result is...

Dark Matter is Complicated

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The fact that we have found gravitational waves tells us that we have come a long way in terms of science and technology.  We detected a perturbation in the fabric of space-time that was one one-thousandth the diameter of a proton.  It’s insane to think about that level of precision.  And yet we still can’t find Dark Matter, the stuff that is literally everywhere in the universe.  Is it our problem? Or is dark matter just on a whole different level? By now, we know that dark matter isn’t some clump of stuff sitting out there in space.  But that...