Category: Science

The Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, which uses something called "drift scanning" to document the vastness of the sky, has been snapping pictures of the heavens for twelve years as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The Survey's findings have been compiled into a 3D map of space, picturing 200 million galaxies and "7 billion years worth of cosmic movement." The map will get bigger, soon.

I don't know about you, but watching this full screen (and happening to be listening to one of the Doctor Who soundtracks when I first viewed it) almost brought me to tears. Keep in mind that each of those blobs of lights aren't stars—they're entire galaxies. How can anyone seriously believe we are the only sentient life in such vastness? The thought that there is so much life teeming in the darkness gives me chills. The Universe is so incredibly huge, even if reincarnation were a reality and we "visited" only a single world during each lifetime, we could never experience it all.

I am humbled by the immensity of it all, and makes the fact that the a group of clever apes on a grain of sand orbiting an insignificant speck of light are arguing over who they can love even sadder, doesn't it?

Put on some music that inspires you (preferably through headphones) and watch (be sure to expand to full screen):

And thank you for making me—if only for a few brief minutes last night—a wide eyed ten year old again.

I honestly didn't think the sky crane was going to work, but I confess when it was confirmed that Curiosity had touched down on Mars as planned, I was as giddy as any of the engineers I saw on JPL's video feed.

Europa (minus the Pirate Twins)

Titan and Saturn

This is what true creation looks like; it's how stars and planets come to be. These are called the Pillars of Creation and they are immense. Mind-numbingly immense. Immense as in 4 light years tall, the distance between the sun and its nearest neighbor Alpha Centauri.

Boring Description: This is a video simulation of how the Curiosity Rover (which was launched today) will get to and land on Mars.

Actual Description: A video simulation of the Curiosity Rover that will impress the shit out of you. Holy crud.

Think of what NASA could do if their budget was larger than .5% of the Federal budget.

Still, I will be amazed if NASA actually pulls this off.  So many moving parts that can break; so many things that can go wrong on the very ambitious descent.

Despite some truly amazing success stories, on the whole, Mars hasn't exactly put out the welcome mat for our probes, but I'll hope for the best!  Guess we'll know in July…

Definitely meant to be watched full screen.

Four moons, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn. (The fourth is a pinprick dot in the middle of the Enke gap in the rings if you haven't spotted it.)

(Click to embiggen.)

And proves beyond a doubt that everything on his planet could be blotted out in the wink of an eye…and we'd never even see it coming.

From Dvice:

In August of 1883, an astronomer in Mexico named José Bonilla spotted hundreds of fuzzy objects passing in front of the sun that nobody could explain. A new analysis of these observations suggests that what Bonilla saw was anywhere from a billion to a trillion tons of comet passing as close as a few hundred miles from the surface of the Earth.

At the time, Bonilla had no idea what he was looking at. All he knew was that over a period of about two days, he counted about 450 objects surrounded by fuzziness passing between his telescope and the sun. Contemporary astronomers didn't see anything, and when Bonilla published a paper in an astronomical journal a few years later, the journal editor suggested that Bonilla must have accidentally been counting birds or bugs or something like that.

As it turns out, it may not have been bugs. It may have been the remnants of an immense comet that narrowly missed completely destroying our entire civilization that nobody else saw because it was so freakin' close to us. Based on Bonilla's account of the size and number of the objects and the length of time that they were visible, modern astronomers have been able to estimate what the original size of the comet probably was, and just how close all of its fragments came to Earth. The numbers are shocking: each of the 450 fragments probably ranged in size from 150 feet to a solid mile across, and the upper limit on the size of the original comet (before it broke up) is something like nine trillion tons.

Let's just put a few trillion tons of fragmented comet in perspective, shall we? We're talking about an object with a mass that's equivalent to at least eight Halley's comets. And if you're wondering what would happen if a couple-hundred-foot wide comet fragments made it through Earth's atmosphere, we're pretty sure it happened over Sibera back in 1908, resulting in an explosion approximately equal to the detonation of a moderately-sized thermonuclear weapon. Nobody was around to experience the blast, but a few trees did get knocked over. And by a few, I mean 80 million.

Now, keep in mind that those 450 objects that Bonilla counted over two days only come from a few hours of observations, and extrapolating his objects per hour out over two days, we get over 3,000 cometary fragments. So take that type of fun little thermonuclear-equivalent destructive experience, and imagine it happening thousands of times all over the Earth in a period of a day or two. Yeah, we're talking the equivalent of global thermonuclear war, except way, way worse. Odds of humanity (or much in the way of any other plants or animals) surviving the bombardment and the climate change that would follow is not good, not good at all.

The really scary part is just how close this comet came to hitting the Earth: since only Bonilla saw the fragments and no other astronomers did, that means that it had to be close to us. Very close. Very, seriously, it's not even funny close. The minimum distance that the fragments passed was calculated to be about 400 miles from the Earth's surface, which is nothing. That's only 150 miles or so above the International Space Station. If the comet had been in a slightly different orbit, or had broken up at a slightly different time, as of about a hundred years ago, our entire civilization might have ceased to exist.

I went to see Body Worlds at the Arizona Science Center this evening. I'd been hoping to somehow be able to see this exhibit since I first got word of it back in the late 90s, but I figured the chance of that ever happening was remote at best. Not only was it only touring Europe and the Far East at that time, it seemed to spawn controversy wherever it went. And knowing the uptight, body and death-phobic attitudes of my fellow Americans, and how Christofascists certain, umm… "narrow-minded" individuals had the propensity for raising a stink about anything they disapproved of, I figured the exhibition would never be allowed into this country, much less that I'd ever get a chance to see it in person.

I had all but forgotten about Gunter von Hagen's work until billboards for the show started appearing across Phoenix. Imagine my surprise when I learned that not only had the exhibit arrived in the U.S., it was going to be on display in this backwater, armpit-of-a-city!

Despite nearly a decade having passed since I learned of it, I still wasn't sure if I'd be completely disgusted or totally enthralled when I actually got around to seeing it in person.

In reality, I had neither reaction. All I can say is that it was interesting. I had wanted to be a doctor when I was a kid, and since I had grown up building Renwal's Visible Man model (and dozens of variations thereof), the basic nuts and bolts of human anatomy weren't exactly foreign to me. In fact, the pieces of the Body Worlds exhibit reminded me of nothing more than incredibly detailed plastic models. It was hard at times to keep in mind that these had at one point been real, living people.

I didn't see anything that I personally would consider controversial or in poor taste, and if anything the atmosphere in the exhibition hall seemed to be one of reverence. People were talking in hushed tones and seemed to be very mindful of what they were seeing.

What surprised me the most about the anatomical displays themselves was not the unusual posing of the subjects (another source of outrage from certain segments of society), but rather seeing the actual size of the internal organs. Some are much larger, and others much smaller than I had ever believed. It's one thing to intellectually know the bones of your inner ear are small; it's quite something else to actually see them. Did you know that your trachea is at most the diameter of your middle finger, or that your kidneys are about the size of those small, portable laptop computer mice? It was an intriguing, thought-provoking hour, but by the time I'd made my way through the entire exhibition, I'd seen enough and was ready to go home.