brookhavenlab:

The Sound of the Big Bang

If a universe explodes into existence, and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? The answer, according to physicist John Cramer, is a resounding yes.

“The early universe was like a hypersphere of space that was resonating with frequencies rollicking around in it,” said Cramer, a University of Washington physics professor who also conducts research at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). He used temperature fluctuation maps of the early universe to create a recording of the Big Bang as it might have sounded 14 billion years ago.

“There’s that saying from the Alien movie franchise: In space, nobody can hear you scream. The logic is that it’s a vacuum and sound waves can’t propagate, but in the early universe, someone could hear you scream. The medium was a lot more dense than even the atmosphere of today’s Earth,” Cramer said.

“The special thing about the early universe is that because it was so small, sound waves could propagate and come back around on themselves. As it opened up, as the universe expanded, the sound got Doppler-shifted to higher and higher frequencies,” he said.

The Big Bang was a bass singer to rival all others. The frequencies of the volatile birth of the universe were so low, they were out of range of human hearing. Just to get the recording to a frequency humans can hear, Cramer had to increase the frequency of the universe’s big debut by 100 septillion times.

So, yes, the Big Bang made a sound, but even if we were around to hear it, we couldn’t have done so without the help of modern technology.

veracrossing:

This is my favorite leap year quote. 

thedailywhat:

Gaming News of the Day: Astronomers Study StarCraft Strategies

Earlier this week, Royal Observatory of Edinburgh research astronomers Dr. Thomas Targett and Dr. Duncan Forgan released an academic paper investigating which StarCraft II race has the most viable game strategies. The team observed 500 professional StarCraft II matches in order to gather their data, taking notes on when players made choices that would affect their long-term success or if they were playing to make the battle end swiftly. After running 100 simulations through the Monte Carlo method, they determined the members of the Terran Dominion had the best chance of permanently defeating the Zerg and Protoss races for control over the Milky Way. Disagree? Join in the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #StarcraftScience.

Hat tip to Wired.

Terran imba. It’s science.

ikenbot:

International Efforts Accurately Measure Black Hole’s Spin for First Time: It’s Near The Speed of Light

Astronomers have recently been able to finely measure the spin of a supermassive Black hole and as expected, it’s really really fast, near light speed fast:

The black hole in question resides 60 million light years away at the centre of the NGC 1365 spiral galaxy, is a mind-boggling 3.2 million kilometres in diameter, has a mass two million times that of our Sun and is spinning at a rather impressive 1.08 billion km/h. Astronomers can now say this with confidence, after combining the efforts of Nasa’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (Nustar) — which measures high-energy X-rays — and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, which measures low-energy X-rays.

The former was launched in June 2012 to track and measure the highest energy events in space. However, without the aid of ESA’s device, it was unable to determine whether the measurements of warped X-rays being taken were a result of nearby gas clouds manipulating results, or the black hole’s own gravitational pull.

—

The find is an important one, because it helps astronomers understand the life of a black hole — which stretches, pulls on and distorts space, and can affect the evolution of galaxies — which in turn helps test the accuracy of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which argues that gravity can bend space and time.

“The black hole’s spin is a memory, a record, of the past history of the galaxy as a whole,” Guido Risaliti of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, the lead author of a paper revealing the results, said in a statement.

Journal Reference: Nature

For more on Black Holes and Astrophysics.

benigoat:

A Sense Of Scale: The United States overlaid on the Moon.

That’s right, the moon’s the size of freedom.

4gifs:

The arctic summer, when the sun does not set

Guys! I’ve found it! The only place where you can go to make a day last so much longer!

theatlantic:

Why You Can’t Cry in Space

Astronauts can, certainly, tear up — they’re human, after all. But in zero gravity, the tears themselves can’t flow downward in the way they do on Earth. The moisture generated has nowhere to go. Tears, Feustel put it, “don’t fall off of your eye … they kind of stay there.” NASA spacewalk officer Allison Bollinger, who oversaw Feustel’s EVA, confirmed this assessment. “They actually kind of conglomerate around your eyeball,” she said. 

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

In space, no one can see you cry.

mothernaturenetwork:

Largest structure in universe discovered

The object is composed of 73 quasars and spans about 1.6 billion light-years in most directions, though it is 4 billion light-years across at its widest point.

maxistentialist:

The distance between the Earth and Moon is 238,900 miles. Most people get this very, very wrong.

People also do shockingly poorly when asked how long a 100 meter track is. Even more interestingly, their fitness tends to skew their perception and distance judgement. Likewise, the moon looks awfully big when it is intensely focused on, just like any single letter in this sentence. It is a valuable heuristic that people interpret “large-in-view” to mean “close” because more often than not, it is right. In this case, it is actually not that large in view and not that close.

rfar:

The Overview Effect and the Psychology of Cosmic Awe

Since the dawn of recorded history, humanity has been mesmerized by Earth’s place in the cosmos. Overview is a fascinating short film by Planetary Collective, written by Frank White, exploring the “overview effect” — the profound, shocking feeling that grips astronauts as they see our planet hang in space and the strange new self-awareness it precipitates. The film is based on Frank White’s 1987 book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution and celebrates the 40th anniversary of NASA’s iconic Blue Marble photograph.

[source: Brain Pickings]

It is nothing that requires a trip to space to experience, nor does it have to be a broadening of scope. The same effect can be experienced through a simple magnifying glass.

mothernaturenetwork:

Biggest black hole blast could solve cosmic mystery
Scientists have wondered why galaxies are generally less massive than they should be, and black hole eruptions could be the key.

aamukherjee:

$12.8 Billion Budget Approved for European Space Agency

I know for a fact that Tumblr science readers hold a special place in their hearts for anything astronomy-related (along with Brian Cox, Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson…)

So, without further ado, rejoice!

thisistheverge:

‘Explore the Galaxy’ lets you travel across the Milky Way from the comfort of your browser

Google’s Chrome Experiments have long provided users with in-browser distractions that simultaneously show off the power of HTML 5, Javascript, and other open web technologies, but a new one that arrived today is definitely one of our favorites. “Explore the Galaxy” lets you zoom all the way in on the Sun and a number of other nearby stars and then click, drag, and scroll your way across the entire Milky Way galaxy. It’s a visual treat that really drives home the vastness of outer space that simultaneously fills your brain with knowledge — clicking on the 87 stars closest to Earth will pull up quick Wikipedia-sourced descriptions for each.