Seven to 10 billion years ago, a bunch of galaxies fell in with a bad crowd at the Coma cluster — a galactic group comprising thousands of their ilk. That crash “quenched” the ill-fated galaxies. They’d never again burn with hot, young stars. But the crash should have done more than shut down the unfortunate galaxies’ stellar birth rate. It should have strewn their stars across space.
So what kept these cosmic corpses intact? Read on, if you dare (OK, so the title is a bit of a hint …).
The faster you go, the less inclined the air becomes to get out of your way. This simple fact, which stood for years as an impediment to breaking the sound barrier, can also be ingeniously harnessed to create an engine capable of zipping along at supersonic speeds without the fuel weight required by rockets.
In this article, I trace the history, science and engineering behind this revolutionary “flying stovepipe,” from its theoretical birth during the biplane era to its modern military and commercial offshoots. By the time we’re done, you’ll understand…
For two decades, the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope helped pierce the veil of time, image stellar nurseries and prove that galaxies collide. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope stands poised to take those observations to the next level, making the delicate observations possible only in the cold, dark spaces beyond the moon.
Slated for a 2018 launch date and team-built by 14 countries, 27 states and the District of Columbia, Webb will take astronomers closer to the beginning of time than ever before, granting glimpses of sights long hypothesized but never seen, from the birth of galaxies to light from the very first stars. Join us as we explore…
Far too many scientists who made major contributions to knowledge and human health go unremarked, forgotten save for the occasional postage stamp or Google doodle. So when I was offered the chance to write about a few of the many outstanding scientists who came from Spanish-speaking lands, cultures and ancestors, I was understandably excited…and a little nervous. On the one hand, combining such a varied assemblage of people under one term – especially the political term Hispanic – wasn’t ideal. On the other hand, it gave me the chance to explore, and raise awareness of, a remarkably diverse array of persons, backgrounds and accomplishments. I hope you’ll find their stories as inspiring as I did.
The 2014 loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 revived a perennial argument among airline safety wonks: In the age of satellites, big data and cloud storage, why do we lock away essential flight data on a box that can go down with the plane? It wasn’t simply a question of losing the device, as nearly happened with the Air France Flight 447 crash five years earlier; it was the risk that, when we finally found it, the data we needed to understand the calamity might already have been erased.
Does the black box need a 21st-century update? And, if so, is cloud storage practical, affordable, reliable and secure enough to supplement or replace the status quo? In other words…
