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☆ The Dusty Magnets ofthe Milky Way
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-19 | by ( Dennis Overbye | More About Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Every new generation of eyes sees a new version of our galaxy, the Milky Way. This Impressionistic swirl of color represents the churning magnetic fields in giant dust clouds near the center of the galaxy. The map, painted in infrared wavelengths, reveals new details in a stretch of our galactic home 500 light-years wide. Cool, dense dust is green; warmer dust is pink. The map is a first step toward understanding how magnetism can shape the universe.

☆ Peter Higgs, Nobelist Who Discovered the ‘God Particle,’ Dies at 94
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-09 | by ( Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

His death was announced by the University of Edinburgh, where he was an emeritus professor. Dr. Higgs lived in Edinburgh. Dr. Higgs was a 35-year-old assistant professor at the university in 1964 when he suggested the existence of a new particle that would explain how other particles acquire mass. Dr. Higgs was a modest man who eschewed the trappings of fame and preferred the outdoors. For years he relied on a colleague Alan Walker, a physics professor at Edinburgh, to act as his “digital seeing-eye dog,” in the words of a former student.

Persons: Peter Higgs, Higgs, Alan Walker Organizations: University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Locations: Edinburgh

Thousands of residents and visitors viewed the event from the baseball field at Hidalgo de Dolores Elementary School. Residents began renting out their homes after area hotels reached capacity. ET Cuatro Ciénegas Amid a vast landscape of gypsum dune fields — formed over millions of years — spectators viewed the eclipse. ET Dallas Crowds set up their picnic blankets alongside the Trinity River, which runs through Dallas, one of the largest cities to experience the total eclipse. ET Russellville More than 100 couples were married in a giant ceremony just minutes before the eclipse, during the Total Eclipse of the Heart festival.

Persons: — Dennis Overbye, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, ” Federico Garza, ”, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Sun Ra, Taylor Swift Organizations: North America Today, Hidalgo de Dolores Elementary School, Nazas, Residents, Dallas Crowds, Russellville, Eclipse, Liverpool, Illinois Department of Transportation, Indiana, Indianapolis, Indianapolis Zoo, Lucas Oil, Roll Hall of Fame, Attica Railroad, Eclipse Fest, Buffalo State, Syracuse, Syracuse Mets, Worcester Red Sox, Hotels, Montreal Locations: North America, — Dennis Overbye Mexico, Sinaloa State, Mazatlán, Mexico, Hidalgo, Texas, Eagle, Dallas, Arkansas, Ozark, . Illinois, Southern Illinois, Midwest, . Ohio, Lake Erie, Cleveland, Taylor Swift . New York, Niagara Falls, England, Burlington , Vt, Burlington, Lake Champlain, Maine, Canada, U.S, Montreal, Fredericton , New Brunswick, New Brunswick, EclipseFest

☆ A Tantalizing ‘Hint’ That Astronomers Got Dark Energy All Wrong
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-04 | by ( Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Dark energy was assumed to be a constant force in the universe, both currently and throughout cosmic history. He shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other astronomers for the discovery of dark energy, but was not involved in this new study. “It may be the first real clue we have gotten about the nature of dark energy in 25 years,” he said. That conclusion, if confirmed, could liberate astronomers — and the rest of us — from a longstanding, grim prediction about the ultimate fate of the universe. Instead, it seems, dark energy is capable of changing course and pointing the cosmos toward a richer future.

Persons: “, Biden, ”, Adam Riess, — Organizations: Johns Hopkins University, Telescope Science Locations: Baltimore

☆ A Lifetime Under the Moon’s Shadow
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-02 | by ( Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A total solar eclipse, when the cosmos clicks into place with the worlds aligned like cue balls, may be one of the most profoundly visceral experiences you can have without ingesting anything illegal. Eight times, I’ve been through this cycle of light, darkness, death and rebirth, feeling the light melt and seeing the sun’s corona spread its pale feathery wings across the sky. As you read this article, I will be getting ready to go to Dallas, along with family and old friends, to see my ninth eclipse. One old friend won’t be there: Jay M. Pasachoff, who was a longtime astronomy professor at Williams College. I’ve stood in the shadow of the moon with him three times: on the island of Java in Indonesia, in Oregon and on a tiny island off Turkey.

Persons: I’ve, won’t, Jay M, Pasachoff, Jay Organizations: Williams College Locations: Dallas, Java, Indonesia, Oregon, Turkey

☆ The Doomsday Clock Keeps Ticking
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-12 | by ( Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

In Seattle, where I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, it was common wisdom that in the event of nuclear war, we were No. 2 on the target list because Seattle was the home of Boeing, maker of B-52 bombers and Minuteman missiles. In school we had various drills for various catastrophes, and we had to remember which was which. “The 40-year-long East-West nuclear arms race has ended.”A year ago, after Russia invaded Ukraine and brandished the threat of using nuclear weapons, the clock was set to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has yet come to The End. The threat of nuclear weapons in Ukraine has diminished since then, but the clock remains poised at 90 seconds before zero.

Persons: “, ” Organizations: Seattle, Boeing, Minuteman, Atomic Scientists Locations: Seattle, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, San Fernando Valley, Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine

☆ Exactly How Much Life Is on Earth?
▼ + stars: | 2023-12-01 | by ( Dennis Overbye | More About Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

According to a recent calculation by a team of biologists and geologists, there are a more living cells on Earth — a million trillion trillion, or 10^30 in math notation, a 1 followed by 30 zeros — than there are stars in the universe or grains of sand on our planet. Still, it boggled my mind that such a calculation could even be performed. Could Earth harbor even more life? How much life is too much? The finding “allows us to more quantitatively ask questions about alternative trajectories life could have taken on Earth and how much life could be possible on our planet.”

Persons: I’ve, ” Peter Crockford Organizations: Carleton University Locations: Ottawa

☆ ‘Vortenses’ and the Storms of Space-Time
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-07 | by ( Dennis Overbye | More About Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

If you have ever wondered what it might feel like to be sucked into a black hole — twisted, stretched, confused, doomed — you could do worse than trip through “The Warped Side of Our Universe, An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel and Gravitational Waves,” a collaborative book project by Kip Thorne, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and Lia Halloran, a visual artist and chair of the art department at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.Dr. Thorne brings impressive credentials to the task. In 2017 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which discovered space-time vibrations resulting from the collision of two distant black holes. He was also the executive producer of the movie “Interstellar.” Ms. Halloran, who grew up surfing and skateboarding in the Bay Area, became obsessed with science after a high school internship at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The book consists of illustrations of what Dr. Thorne likes to call the “space-time storms” predicted by general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, alternating with his own explanations of the physics, which appear in verse. Many of the illustrations, which are in ink on drafting film, portray Ms. Halloran’s wife, Felicia, being whipped around, crushed and twisted by the forces of nature.

Persons: Kip Thorne, Lia Halloran, Thorne, Ms, Halloran, Halloran’s, Felicia Organizations: California Institute of Technology, Chapman University in Locations: Chapman University in Orange, Calif, Bay, San Francisco

From a distance, the whole site could be mistaken for an old mining camp you might come across in Montana or Idaho. They were listening to the last sigh of the Big Bang, which birthed the universe 13.8 billion years ago and is detectable now only as a faint, omnipresent hiss of microwave radiation. Up until then, scientists had debated whether the universe even had a beginning; maybe it was timeless. As important, the discovery brought the beginning of time into the lab, where it could be pinched, squeezed and dissected. The cosmic microwave background offered a new window into the nature of reality, one into which astronomers have been peering intently ever since.

Persons: Crawford Hill, Arno Penzias, Robert Wilson, Penzias, Wilson Organizations: Historic Landmark Locations: Crawford, Monmouth County, N.J, Manhattan, Montana, Idaho

☆ Breaking With the News, One Breath at a Time
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-21 | by ( Patrick Laforge | More About Patrick Laforge | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

And then there is the mental effort of focusing awareness on the breath while the mind serves up plans, memories and emotions, not all of them pleasant. “Leave your front door and your back door open,” the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki used to say. Back in the newsroom these days, I’m more able to take a beat amid the stress of breaking news. After the first day on the retreat in June, thoughts of work slipped out the back door. The week ahead would bring fresh headlines, many of misery — more wildfire smoke, contaminated strawberries and deadly tornadoes in the South.

Persons: Shunryu Suzuki, I’m, Dennis Overbye, “

☆ Christopher Nolan and the Contradictions of J. Robert Oppenheimer
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-20 | by ( Dennis Overbye | More About Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

A quick question about the Trinity test, when Oppenheimer, Groves and the physicists and engineers set off the first nuclear bomb. Some of the things they came up with were extremely small and microscopic that play as bigger. As I do interviews and the film’s coming out, I’m always asked, do you know what you’re doing next? For me, I do one thing at a time and I put everything into it obsessively, and the film is not finished. It’d be much more sensible to work on three things at once and have the next thing all lined up.

Persons: Oppenheimer, Groves, “ Tenet, ”, Howard Hughes, Scorsese, I’m, It’d, I’ve Organizations: Trinity

☆ The Biggest Explosion in the Cosmos Just Keeps Going
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-12 | by ( Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Not two weeks ago, on May 3, astronomers reported observing a star that was in the process of swallowing one of its own planets. Just two days earlier, another team had described black holes that were ripping stars apart and consuming them in a process known as tidal disruption event, or T.D.E. Now an international group of astronomers reports that it is observing one of the most violent and energetic acts of cosmic cannibalism ever witnessed, perhaps the biggest explosion seen yet in the history of the universe. A study of the phenomenon appeared Friday in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Most supernovas fade after a few weeks; this one, known as AT2021lwx, kept going — and has continued to explode for three years now.

☆ Who Will Have the Last Word on the Universe?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-02 | by ( Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The universe as we know it originated in a fiery burst 13.8 billion years ago and has been flying apart ever since. The bigger the universe gets, the harder this “dark energy” pushes it apart. The more time goes on, the less we will know about the universe. Worse, because thinking takes energy, eventually there will not be enough energy in the universe to hold a thought. In the end there will only be subatomic particles dancing intergalactic distances away from each other in a dark silence, trillions upon trillions of years after there was any light or life in the universe.

☆ Back Then, Baby Galaxies. Next, a Super-Mega Galactic Cluster?
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-29 | by ( Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Like basketball scouts discovering a nimble, super-tall teenager, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope reported recently that they had identified a small, captivating group of baby galaxies near the dawn of time. These galaxies, the scientists say, could well grow into one of the biggest conglomerations of mass in the universe, a vast cluster of thousands of galaxies and trillions of stars. The seven galaxies they identified date to a moment 13 billion years ago, just 650 million years after the Big Bang. He described the proto-cluster as the most distant and thus earliest such entity yet observed. Dr. Morishita was the lead author of a report on the discovery, which was published on Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

☆ A Fresh View of an Increasingly Familiar Black Hole
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

By observing its subject at slightly longer radio wavelengths, the team was able to bring into visibility the cooler outer regions of the black hole’s fiery accretion disk, from which the jet seems to emanate. “We know that jets are ejected from the region surrounding black holes,” Dr. Lu said in a statement issued by the European Southern Observatory. “But we still do not fully understand how this actually happens. To study this directly we need to observe the origin of the jet as close as possible to the black hole.”In the meantime, the Event Horizon Telescope team is gathering resources for more observations, with the goal of making a black-hole movie. We will be able to film how the matter falls into a black hole and eventually manages to escape.”

☆ That Famous Black Hole Just Got Even Darker
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Four years ago, astronomers released the first ever image of a black hole: a reddish, puffy doughnut of light surrounding an empty, dark hole in the center of the giant galaxy M87, which lies 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. The image made visible what astronomers, and the rest of us, had only been able to imagine: a celestial entity so massive that its gravity warped space-time, drawing matter, energy and even light into its bottomless vortex. The image was released on April 10, 2019, by an astronomy squad called the Event Horizon Telescope, so named for the boundary of no return around a black hole. The new image, they say, will sharpen constraints on how well the black hole in M87 fits with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which first predicted the existence of black holes. Dr. Medeiros and her colleagues published the new image on Thursday in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

☆ Oumuamua Was a Comet After All, a Study Suggests
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-22 | by ( Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Ever since 2017, when astronomers in Hawaii discovered an object they called Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “scout”) zipping through the solar system, they have been arguing about what it was. To date, all the comets observed in our solar system have ranged from around a half-mile to hundreds of miles across. Initially Oumuamua was pegged as an asteroid, as it exhibited none of the sizzle and flash typical of comets. There was no evidence of gas or dust around the object, and radio telescopes heard nothing when pointed at it. But further analysis revealed that something was making Oumuamua speed up as it exited the solar system, leaving scientists with a delicious puzzle.

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