Cosmos Is A Greek Word For The Order Of The Universe. It Is, In A Way, The Opposite Of Chaos. It Implies

Ep. 34 Stargazing - HD and the Void

Not enough people in the real world listened to my stories about my recent stargazing adventure, so I distilled my process and plans so that the process of selecting a site and using a stargazing app seems more attainable for those who have never ...

I went stargazing in early August of this year (2019) and I want to suggest a few options that will hopefully make this sort of trip accessible to people who are curious about stargazing but haven’t tried it yet. I talk through the process of finding the right time and location, selecting campsites, preparing some tools to maintain your nightvision, and using an app to figure out stars and constellations more easily.

Below the cut are the transcript, sources, and music credits. Send me any topic suggestions via Tumblr message (you don’t need an account to do this, just submit as anonymous). You can also tweet at me on Twitter at @HDandtheVoid, or you can ask me to my face if you know me in real life. Subscribe on iTunes to get the new episodes of my semi-monthly podcast, and I’d love if you could rate and review it. Go ahead and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it, too!

(The next episode is undecided, but I’m hoping to have it out for September.)

Transcript

Sources

Dark Site Finder

SkyView Lite

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Filler Music: me singing ‘House of Gold’ by Twenty-One Pilots off their album Vessel

me singing a parody of ‘Mexican Wine’ by Fountains of Wayne off their album Welcome Interstate Managers

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

Happy Labor Day. Today I learned about probably the first strike to happen IN SPACE.

Ep. 2 Cosmology - HD and the Void

Learn about some of the major cosmological models that scientists through the ages have assigned to our universe, even when the known universe was only as big as our solar system. I talk about Claudius Ptolemy, Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, Nicolaus Co...

Welcome to the second episode!

Below the cut are my sources, music credits, a glossary, a timeline of all the people I mention in the podcast, and the script I was working with. I’m on Twitter @HDandtheVoid if you want to tweet at me instead of tumblr-ing me!

Let me know what you think of this episode, let me know what you think I should research next*, tell me a fun space fact… any feedback is helpful!

*(My current thoughts are henges, spectroscopy dark matter, or black holes. Let me know by April 27th so I can start researching before I put up the next podcast on May 8th!)

Glossary:

astronomy - first used to describe a field of study in the 12th century, it concerns the study of objects and matter outside the earth's atmosphere, as well as their physical and chemical properties

corpuscles - any very small particles. A precursor to atoms.

cosmology—the study of the properties of our universe as a whole.

eccentric orbit - an orbit proposed by Ptolemy’s model of the universe where each planet's circular orbit is not centered on the Earth but at a point slightly away from Earth. See an example in the link.

elliptic orbit - also known as a Kepler orbit, it is an orbital system where a smaller body, like the moon or the planets, orbits a larger body like the Earth or the Sun, with the Earth or Sun at one focus of the ellipse while the other focus is empty. See an example in the link.

epicycle - a planet’s smaller orbit around a point on the larger orbiting sphere it is assigned to. See an example in the link.

Platonic Solid - a regular, 3-dimensional, convex polyhedron constructed by regular polygonal faces with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex. Only five shapes meet these criteria: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. See an example in the link.

precession of the equinoxes - also called axial precession, it is a slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body's rotational axis due to gravity. On Earth, it is seen as a westward movement of the equinoxes along the ecliptic relative to the fixed stars, opposite to the yearly motion of the Sun along the ecliptic. See an example in the link.

solar system - first used in 1704, this term describes the Sun together with the group of celestial bodies that are held by its attraction and orbit around it.

Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe—a spacecraft operating from 2001 to 2010 which measured temperature differences in the cosmic microwave background radiation leftover from the Big Bang.

Script/Transcript (It’s not exactly what I said, but it’s what I was going off of. It’s conversational and it’s less rambly than what I actually said)

Timeline of people mentioned:

Claudius Ptolemy, Greek (100-170) Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, Arab (965-1040) Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish (1473-1543) Tycho Brahe, Danish (1541-1601) Giordano Bruno, Italian (1548-1600) Galileo Galilei, Italian (1564-1642) Johannes Kepler, German (1571-1630) René Descartes, French (1596-1650) Sir Isaac Newton, English (1642-1726/7) Edmond Halley, English (1656-1742) Immanuel Kant, German (1724-1804) Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace, French (1749-1827) William Huggins, English (1824-1910) Heber Curtis, American (1872-1942) V. M. Slipher, American (1875-1969) Albert Einstein, German (1879-1955) Harlow Shapley, American (1885-1972) Edwin Hubble, American (1889-1953)

Sources:

Mars in retrograde during Tycho’s time

History of the idea of black holes

Size of the universe since 1919, presented as a teacher resource

Timeline of cosmological models

Current cosmological model

Measuring the size of our universe via NASA, with links to further universe-size resources

19th-century size of our universe debate between Shapley and Curtis

Cosmological Constant via NASA

Cosmological Constant via HubbleSite

NASA’s breakdown of the makeup of our universe

Dark Energy via NASA

Kirshner, Robert P.  “Hubble’s Diagram and Cosmic Expansion.”  In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101.1 (Jan. 6, 2004), 8-13.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/3148363 [accessed 2 December 2013].

McLennan, Evan. Cosmological Evolution: Critical and Constructive. 2nd ed., Gazette-Times Press: Corvallis, OR, 1916.

Pickover, Clifford A. Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them. Oxford UP: NY, 2008.

Sabra, A. I.  “Configuring the Universe: Aporetic, Problem Solving, and Kinemaic Modeling as Themes of Arabic Astronomy.” In Perspectives on Science 6 (1998), 288-330.  Retrieved from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/posc [accessed Oct. 4, 2013].

Shank, Michael H.  “Setting the Stage: Galileo in Tuscany, Veneto, and Rome.”  In The Church and Galileo, 57-87.  Edited by Ernan McMullin.  Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2005.

Sharratt, Michael.  Galileo: Decisive Innovator.  New York: Cambridge U P, 1994.

Smith, R. W.  “The Origins of the Velocity-Distance Relation.” In Journal for the History of Astronomy 10.29 (Oct 1979), 133-165.

Westfall, Richard S.  Essays on the Trial of Galileo.  Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Foundation, 1989.

…and class notes from a class on Ancient Astronomy I took with Prof. James Evans.

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Filler Music: ‘Epigram’ by Tycho off their album Dive

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

I still highly recommend this good, beautiful web comic about love in space, and now it's all done! You can read it all.

The final three chapters are up. Read it now. 

That’s it folks, On A Sunbeam is over. Though I am pondering a sequel. 

Thank you all so much for following along. 

Ten minutes till this happens! I can’t watch it live but I’m excited to see what happens in the aftermath…

In about 20 minutes SpaceX will attempt to reuse a rocket booster they’ve already used before. If they succeed it could be a very serious step forward in space exploration capabilities.

Go SpaceX. Pleassssse…

The original nine. js

Allow us to reintroduce someone … the name’s Perseverance. 

With this new name, our Mars 2020 rover has now come to life! Chosen by middle school student Alex Mather, Perseverance helps to remind ourselves that no matter what obstacles we face, whether it’s on the way to reaching our goals or on the way to Mars, we will push through. In Alex’s own words, ⁣⁣

“We are a species of explorers, and we will meet many setbacks on the way to Mars. However, we can persevere. We, not as a nation but as humans, will not give up. The human race will always persevere into the future.” ⁣

Welcome to the family.⁣ ❤️

⁣Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Raising the bar for antimatter exploration

CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research logo.  March 18, 2017 The absence of antimatter in the universe is a long-standing jigsaw puzzle in physics. Many experiments have been exploring this question by finding asymmetries between particles and their antimatter counterparts. GBAR (Gravitational Behaviour of Antihydrogen at Rest), a new experiment at CERN, is preparing to explore one aspect of this puzzle – what is the effect of gravity on antimatter? While theories exist as to whether antimatter will behave like matter or not, a definitive experimental result is still missing.

Image above: Installation of the GBAR linac in its shielding bunker. The electrons accelerated to 10 MeV toward a target will produce the positrons that are necessary to form antihydrogen with the antiprotons coming from the ELENA decelerator. (Image: Max Brice/CERN). GBAR will measure the effect of gravity on antihydrogen atoms. Located in the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) hall, GBAR is the first of five experiments that will be connected to the new ELENA deceleration ring. On 1 March, the first component of the experiment was installed – a linear accelerator (linac). In sharp contrast to the LHC’s chain of big accelerators and fast particles, the AD world of antimatter is small and its particles are as slow as they come. The GBAR linac is only 1.2 metres long and it will be used to create positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons. The experiment will use antiprotons supplied by ELENA and positrons created by the linac to produce antihydrogen ions. They consist of one antiproton and two positrons, and their positive charge makes them significantly easier to manipulate. With the help of lasers, their velocity will be reduced to half a metre per second. This will allow them to be directed to a fixed point. Then, trapped by an electric field, one of their positrons will be removed with a laser, which will make them neutral again. The only force acting on them at this point will be gravity and they will be free to make a 20-centimetre fall, during which researchers will observe their behaviour. The results might turn out to be very exciting. As the spokesperson of GBAR, Patrice Pérez, explains: “Einstein’s Equivalence Principle states that the trajectory of a particle is independent of its composition and internal structure when it is only submitted to gravitational forces. If we find out that gravity has a different effect on antimatter, this would mean that we still have a lot to learn about the universe.” Five other experiments are based at the Antiproton Decelerator, two of which – AEGIS and ALPHA – are also studying the effect of gravity on antimatter. Note: CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature. The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions. Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 22 Member States. Related links: GBAR (Gravitational Behaviour of Antihydrogen at Rest): https://gbar.web.cern.ch/GBAR/public/index.html Antiproton Decelerator (AD): https://home.cern/about/accelerators/antiproton-decelerator ELENA: http://home.cern/about/updates/2016/11/new-ring-slow-down-antimatter linear accelerator (linac): http://home.cern/tags/linear-accelerator AEGIS: http://home.cern/about/experiments/aegis ALPHA: https://home.cern/about/experiments/alpha For more information about European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Visit: http://home.cern/ Image (mentioned), Text, Credits: CERN/Iva Raynova. Greetings, Orbiter.ch Full article

Comet That Took a Century to Confirm Passes by Earth

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center logo. March 31, 2017 On April 1, 2017, comet 41P will pass closer than it normally does to Earth, giving observers with binoculars or a telescope a special viewing opportunity. Comet hunters in the Northern Hemisphere should look for it near the constellations Draco and Ursa Major, which the Big Dipper is part of. Whether a comet will put on a good show for observers is notoriously difficult to predict, but 41P has a history of outbursts, and put on quite a display in 1973. If the comet experiences similar outbursts this time, there’s a chance it could become bright enough to see with the naked eye. The comet is expected to reach perihelion, or its closest approach to the sun, on April 12.

Image above: In this image taken March 24, 2017, comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák is shown moving through a field of faint galaxies in the bowl of the Big Dipper. On April 1, the comet will pass by Earth at a distance of about 13 million miles (0.14 astronomical units), or 55 times the distance from Earth to the moon; that is a much closer approach than usual for this Jupiter-family comet. Image Credits: image copyright Chris Schur, used with permission. Officially named 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák to honor its three discoverers, the comet is being playfully called the April Fool’s Day comet on this pass. Discovery credit goes first to Horace Tuttle, who spotted the comet in 1858. According to the Cometography website, 41P was recognized at the time as a periodic comet — one that orbits the sun — but astronomers initially were uncertain how long the comet needed to make the trip. The comet was rediscovered in 1907 by Michael Giacobini but not immediately linked to the object seen in 1858. Later, the astronomer Andrew Crommelin determined that the two observations had been of the same object and predicted that the comet would return in 1928 and 1934, according to the Cometography entry for the comet. However, the object was not seen then and was considered lost. In 1951, L’ubor Kresák discovered it again and tied it to the earlier observations. A member of the Jupiter family of comets, 41P makes a trip around the sun every 5.4 years, coming relatively close to Earth on some of those trips. On this approach, the comet will pass our planet at a distance of about 13 million miles (0.14 astronomical units), or about 55 times the distance from Earth to the moon. This is the comet’s closest approach to Earth in more than 50 years and perhaps more than a century. For scientists, 41P’s visit is an opportunity to fill in details about the comet’s composition, coma and nucleus.

Image above: An artist’s illustration of a group of comet enthusiasts. Image Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “An important aspect of Jupiter-family comets is that fewer of them have been studied, especially in terms of the composition of ices in their nuclei, compared with comets from the Oort cloud,” said Michael DiSanti of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He and his team will be observing 41P on April 1 using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii. Astronomers will try to determine characteristics such as how quickly 41P’s nucleus rotates, which provides clues about how structurally sound the nucleus is, and whether any changes can be documented in the coma and tail. Observers also will look for outbursts, which are an indication of how active a comet is. By cataloging the subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, differences among comets, researchers can construct a family tree and trace the history of how and where these objects formed as the solar system was taking shape. “Comets are remnants from the early solar system,” said DiSanti. “Each comet that comes into the neighborhood of Earth gives us a chance to add to our understanding of the events that led to the formation of our own planet.” Related links: Comets: http://www.nasa.gov/comets Goddard Space Flight Center: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/home/index.html Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, by Elizabeth Zubritsky/Rob Garner. Greetings, Orbiter.ch Full article

Peak Perseid mornings: August 11, 12, 13 | EarthSky.org

When is the peak of the Perseid meteor shower in 2020? The greatest number of meteors is most likely to fall in the predawn hours on August 12, yet under the light of a wide waning crescent moon.

Where to look, and when.