Physics Buzz

If there is one thing that everyone thinks they understand about black holes, it’s spaghettification. After all, it’s a popular plot device in countless sci-fi books and movies; there’s just something incredibly gripping about the image of some intrepid—or massively unlucky—soul being strung out until she is merely atoms thick.  In fact, the concept is so ingrained in the minds of scientists and the general public alike that reviewers tore the 2014 film Interstellar to shreds (see here and here ) precisely because the protagonist wasn’t stretched into oblivion!

It’s a supernova… It’s a tidal event… It’s a cow?

DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument , aims to map the universe in three dimensions and shine a light on the mysterious force of nature we call dark energy. Its five-year sky survey will begin in 2020, but the project achieved an important milestone this fall when collaborators started assembling key pieces of equipment at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but exploring DESI by pictures and numbers offers an in-depth glimpse into this unique, ambitious instrument—and a peek at the excitement to come.

For decades, astronomers have puzzled over the age of globular clusters, heavenly objects made up of hundreds of thousands of stars, living and dying together as they travel through their galaxies. They tend to shine red, indicating that their stars are ancient; in fact, their accepted age is somewhere between 10 and 14 billion years. This is only slightly younger than the Universe itself (13.7 billion years)—which begs the question, how could such complex objects form so soon after the Big Bang? Stars need time to form and drift together into clusters, and gravity works slowly at large scales.

Gonçalo, from Portugal wants to know: "Can a planet, theoretically, manage life without a sun?" Gonçalo, Your suggestion is surprisingly plausible! To understand how, we'll have to explore some of the darkest places on Earth, where life is as close to "alien" as you're ever going to find.

Light is one of the most powerful tools we have for exploring the unknown. From a flashlight in a dark cave to starlight from distant galaxies, light illuminates the things and physical processes that surround us. In an article published yesterday in the American Physical Society’s Physical Review X , a team of scientists from the National University of Singapore describe how we can learn even more from light, using measurement techniques rooted in quantum mechanics. Their work could lead to dramatic improvements in the images we can resolve with microscopes and telescopes. Two Brown Dwarfs in Our Backyard. This image highlights the resolution problem. At first, the central light in the larger image, taken by the NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), appeared to be from a single object, but a sharper image from Gemini Observatory in Chile revealed that it was from a pair of cool star-like bodies called brown dwarfs. Image Credit: More NASA/JPL-Caltech/Gemin

Yesterday, scientists from NASA’s Kepler team added a whopping 1,284 planets to the official list of planets we’ve found outside of our solar system. Credit for the large number of new exoplanets being added at the same time goes to a new, automated technique for analyzing planet-like signals and verifying that they actually are from planets.

In honor of yesterday's  Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day , here is a look at some important scientific advancements made by parent-child collaborations. Just imagine the dinner conversations… *Please note that each person mentioned is an esteemed scientist in his or her own right, with many other important contributions that aren’t mentioned in these brief highlights.

Most iron meteorites are thought to be the remnants of planetesimals that grew large enough to differentiate very early during the formation of the solar system. Later destroyed by violent collisions, the parent body broke into pieces, some of them fragments of the nickel-iron core at the center, and others parts of the silicate crust and mantle. Some of these fragments were perturbed in their orbits enough to careen into the inner solar system, and a lucky few have ended up on Earth.

Astronomers are building a global collaboration to identify recently discovered radio blips seemingly originating from deep space. Called "fast radio bursts," or FRBs for short, these enigmatic cosmic signals have so far confounded astronomers, and are the subject of a growing effort to track and observe them . An artist's rendition of the Parkes telescope observing a cosmic radio signal. Image: Swinburne Astronomy Productions. A lot of questions surround the origins of these strange signals, and astronomers are stepping up efforts around the world to identify where they're coming from. Each radio chirp lasts just a few milliseconds and were only identified after scientists went back and reviewed years-old data and found them hiding in plain sight. "We've known about these FRBs for a while but we don’t know a lot about them," said Emily Petroff , a PhD candidate at Swinburne University of Technology and organizer of the collaboration.

Rise and shine early tomorrow morning to catch the last total lunar eclipse of 2014. The Moon will be visible from nearly all of North America as it passes through the shadow of the Earth and 'blushes' red in the early hours of October 8th. Animation credit:  Tomreun Viewers in the western United States and Canada will be able to witness all 59 minutes of eclipse totality, when the moon is fully-contained within the shadow of the Earth. On the eastern side of North America, the partial and total eclipse phases will be visible just as the Moon is setting in the west tomorrow morning, starting at 5:15AM Eastern Time, according to NASA .

This week on the physics central podcast I talk with David Waltham, a geologist at the University of London and the author of Lucky Planet: Why Earth is Exceptional—and What That Means for Life in the Universe.  In the book, Waltham presents the evidence supporting the idea that Earth is a very rare, very lucky planet, and that there may not be another life-supporting planet in our galaxy or even in the visible universe. Waltham doesn't think we're totally alone in the universe—but he does think we are effectively alone. This debate includes information from biology, geology, astronomy, cosmology and even history. Listen to the podcast to hear some of the evidence that supports this side of the argument—and a few of the things that could prove it wrong. Also, there are rumors flying that scientists have detected an Earth-like planet and will announce it soon.

The largest ground-based astronomy project of all time perches more than three miles above sea level in one of the driest deserts on Earth. A particularly parched region of the Atacama Desert in South America is the Antofagasta Region, which is where the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array calls home. ALMA is the “hardest place on the planet to work” according to astronomer Joaquin Vieira. Vieira, who is an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, knows what it’s like to work in harsh conditions. Operational antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array. Credit: ESO About six years ago he spent a month and half in the South Pole helping build the 10-meter South Pole Telescope. With that telescope, Vieira and fellow team members surveyed a part of the sky mapping out locations of distant galaxies. Years later, Vieira directed ALMA to that same spot on the sky and, with a team of more than 60 scientists, publi

On June 16, 1995, Robert Nemiroff ( MTU ) and Jerry Bonnell ( UMCP ) posted the first Astronomy Picture of the Day . The site received 14 page views that day. The breathtaking beauty and didactic efforts of the APOD ’s daily posts have earned it global renown, and the site now receives over one million page views each day. From 14 to a million hits: Learn about the site first-hand from co-founder Robert Nemiroff in this telling Q&A, and don't forget to " Discover the cosmos! " Q. How did you and Jerry first come up with the idea for APOD? A. In 1995 Jerry and I shared an office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and were watching the web develop. We would contemplate how we could contribute and brainstormed several ideas. The Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) was one of those ideas. This idea played off an underlying concern that astronomy images were sometimes being circulated as email attachments without people knowing what was being pictured.

There are some giant stars out there. Our sun is more than 300,000 times more massive than Earth. That's pretty big, but there are stars much larger. One particularly big one, imaginatively named WR 102ka, is located near the center of the galaxy is 100 times larger than our sun. Ever since scientists started noticing these behemoths near the galactic core, they've wondered where they came from. Now a team of scientists from the University Potsdam in Germany think they have an answer. The Peony Nebula, which lies between us and WR 102ka. The nebula blocks out all but the giant star's infrared light. The yellow circle indicates WR 102ka location behind the dust and gas. Image:NASA. Stars form when vast clouds of gas and dust coalesce together, growing denser and denser, until its atoms start fusing together and set off a nuclear reaction . Sometimes they form by themselves with  no other stars nearby, and sometimes they're created within vast star cluster full o

For thousands of years, humans have looked to the stars for guidance on their long journeys. But humans aren't alone in their reliance on the heavens. Research released earlier this year suggested that dung beetles also look to the night sky for navigation — albeit not quite in the same way we do. Last week, the authors of the dung beetle research earned an Ig Nobel (an award with the tagline "For achievements that first make people laugh then make them think). Also last week, astronomer Michael J. West from the Maria Mitchell Observatory published an article on the arxiv raising the idea that whales use the stars to navigate across vast migratory distances. Although the article errs on the side of speculation (it's not intended to be a peer-reviewed research article), West's piece raises some interesting questions about how some mammals adapt to both their immediate and celestial surroundings. One astronomer speculates that humpback whales may use the star

Scientists think they might have pinpointed where the infamous Russian meteorite  of 2013 came from. Astronomers Carlos de la Fuente Marcos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos from the Complutense University of Madrid calculated that it likely originated as a piece of a near-Earth asteroid named 2011 EO40. On the morning of February 15, the skies above Chelyabinsk, Russia lit up as an enormous fireball streaked out of the sky and exploded overhead. Scientists estimate that the meteorite was about the size of a six-story building. It's one of the biggest meteor impacts in recorded history, but it's a pretty small rock compared with some of the ones out there. It exploded 14 miles above the Earth's surface with the force of about 25 Hiroshima bombs, injuring about 1,500 people.

Nothing puts a skip in your brisk autumnal step like the the announcement of the 2012 MacArthur 'genius' Fellows , which provides an inspiring and concise account of twenty-three veritably brilliant individuals working on daring and creative projects from filmmaking to neurobiology to instrument bow-making. In the excitement of the moment, I'd like to highlight one of this year's MacArthur Fellows, Olivier Guyon, an astronomer and optical physicist who has proposed a cool investment of some of his no-strings-attached MacArthur grant: crowdsourcing the planet hunt. Olivier Guyon-- Planet Hunter. Image courtesy of The John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Reproducibility forms one of the cornerstones of physics; independent scientists need to corroborate a finding before it's widely accepted in the scientific community. But sometimes the window of observation only lasts for several hours twice every hundred years or so. That makes reproducibility fairly difficult. Earlier this summer, Venus passed in front of — or transited — the sun for the last time this century. While the astronomical event amazed viewers across the world, a group of physicists were re-creating an observation from over 250 years ago: the discovery of Venus' atmosphere. At the same time, they've stoked the fire in a debate over who first made this discovery. The entire Venus transit of 2012 in one image. Image courtesy of NASA.

There's something funky in the universe: dark matter, that is. And now you can learn about its history with some new beats and rhymes. Michael Wilson, AKA Coma Niddy, has been making science music videos for awhile now, and he sent me his latest dark matter rap this weekend. The rap hasn't reached Snoop Lion status yet, but it could become the next Large Hadron Rap (created by former Physics Central team member Kate Mcalpine). As far as I can tell, the science in the lyrics is quite accurate, and Niddy's ability to condense such a complex topic into a rap is commendable. The song's catchy to boot. You can watch the video below, and I've re-posted the science-y lyrics from Coma Niddy's Youtube page as well.