An Illustrated Map of Every Known Object in Space: Asteroids, Dwarf Planets, Black Holes & Much More

in Astronomy, Science | November 28th, 2019

Name all the things in space in 20 min­utes. Impos­si­ble, you say? Well, if there’s any­one who might come close to sum­ma­riz­ing the con­tents of the uni­verse in less than half an hour, with the aid of a handy info­graph­ic map also avail­able as a poster, it’s physi­cist Dominic Wal­li­man, who has explored oth­er vast sci­en­tif­ic regions in con­densed, yet com­pre­hen­sive maps on physics, math­e­mat­ics, chem­istry, biol­o­gy, and com­put­er sci­ence.

These are all aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­plines with more or less defined bound­aries. But space? It’s poten­tial­ly end­less, a point Wal­li­man grants up front. Space is “infi­nite­ly big and there are an infi­nite num­ber of things in it,” he says. How­ev­er, these things can still be named and cat­e­go­rized, since “there are not an infi­nite num­ber of dif­fer­ent kinds of things.” We begin at home, so to speak, with the Earth, our Sun, the solar sys­tem (and a dog), and the plan­ets: ter­res­tri­al, gas, and ice giant.

Aster­oids, mete­ors, comets, dwarf plan­ets, moons, the Kuyper Belt, Dort Cloud, and helios­phere, cos­mic dust, black holes…. We’re only two min­utes in and that’s a lot of things already—but it’s also a lot of kinds of things, and those kinds repeat over and over. The super­mas­sive black hole at the cen­ter of the Milky Way may be a type rep­re­sent­ing a whole class of things “at the cen­ter of every galaxy.”

The uni­verse might con­tain an infi­nite num­ber of stars—or a num­ber so large it might as well be infi­nite. But that doesn’t mean we can’t extrap­o­late from the com­par­a­tive­ly tiny num­ber we’re able to observe as rep­re­sen­ta­tive of gen­er­al star behav­ior: from the “main sequence stars”—Red, Orange, and Yel­low Dwarves (like our sun)—to blue giants to vari­able stars, which pul­sate and change in size and bright­ness.

Mas­sive Red Giants explode into neb­u­lae at the end of their 100 mil­lion to 2 bil­lion year lives. They also, along with Red and Orange Dwarf stars, leave behind a core known as a White Dwarf, which will become a Black Dwarf, which does not exist yet because the uni­verse it not old enough to have pro­duced any. “White dwarves,” Wal­li­man says, “will be the fate of 97% of the stars in the uni­verse.” The num­ber of kinds of stars expands, we get into the dif­fer­ent shapes galax­ies can take, and learn about cos­mic radi­a­tion and “mys­ter­ies.”

This project does not have the scope to include expla­na­tions of how we know about these many kinds of space objects, but Wal­li­man does an excel­lent job of turn­ing what may be the biggest pic­ture imag­in­able into a thumbnail—or poster-sized (pur­chase here, down­load here)—out­line of the uni­verse. We can­not ask more from a twen­ty-minute video promis­ing to name “Every Kind of Thing in Space.”

See oth­er sci­ence-defin­ing video maps, all writ­ten, researched, ani­mat­ed, edit­ed, and scored by Wal­li­man, at the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Chem­istry: New Ani­ma­tion Sum­ma­rizes the Entire Field of Chem­istry in 12 Min­utes

The Map of Biol­o­gy: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Biol­o­gy Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence: New Ani­ma­tion Presents a Sur­vey of Com­put­er Sci­ence, from Alan Tur­ing to “Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Stephen Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox Explained in Animation

in Astronomy, Physics, Science | November 21st, 2019

Many of us have heard of Stephen Hawk­ing but know him only as a sym­bol of a pow­er­ful mind ded­i­cat­ed for a life­time to the thorni­est prob­lems in astro­physics. Even more of us have heard of black holes but know of them only as those dan­ger­ous things in sci-fi movies that suck in space­ships. But if we gain an under­stand­ing of Hawk­ing’s work on black holes, how­ev­er basic, we gain a much clear­er view of both enti­ties and what they mean to the human endeav­or of grasp­ing the work­ings of real­i­ty. What it all has to do with “one of the biggest para­dox­es in the uni­verse,” and why that para­dox “threat­ens to unrav­el mod­ern sci­ence,” pro­vide the sub­ject mat­ter for the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above.

In order to explain what’s called the “Black Hole Infor­ma­tion Para­dox,” astro­physi­cist Fabio Pacuc­ci must first explain “infor­ma­tion,” which in this usage con­sti­tutes every part of the real­i­ty in which we live. “Typ­i­cal­ly, the infor­ma­tion we talk about is vis­i­ble to the naked eye,” he says. “This kind of infor­ma­tion tells us that an apple is red, round, and shiny.” But what physi­cists care about is “quan­tum infor­ma­tion,” which “refers to the quan­tum prop­er­ties of all the par­ti­cles that make up that apple, such as their posi­tion, veloc­i­ty and spin.” The par­ti­cles that make up every object of the uni­verse have “unique quan­tum prop­er­ties,” and the laws of physics as cur­rent­ly under­stood hold that “the total amount of quan­tum infor­ma­tion in the uni­verse must be con­served.”

Smash the apple into sauce, in oth­er words, and you don’t cre­ate or destroy any quan­tum infor­ma­tion, you just move it around. But in the parts of space­time with grav­i­ty so strong that noth­ing can escape them, bet­ter known as black holes, that par­tic­u­lar law of physics may not apply. “When an apple enters a black hole, it seems as though it leaves the uni­verse, and all its quan­tum infor­ma­tion becomes irre­triev­ably lost,” says Pacuc­ci. “How­ev­er, this doesn’t imme­di­ate­ly break the laws of physics. The infor­ma­tion is out of sight, but it might still exist with­in the black hole’s mys­te­ri­ous void.”

Then we have Hawk­ing Radi­a­tion, the epony­mous genius’ con­tri­bu­tion to the study of black holes, which shows that “black holes are grad­u­al­ly evap­o­rat­ing,” los­ing mass over “incred­i­bly long peri­ods of time” in such a way that sug­gests that “a black hole and all the quan­tum infor­ma­tion it con­tains could be com­plete­ly erased” in the process. What might go into the black hole as an apple’s infor­ma­tion does­n’t come out look­ing like an apple’s infor­ma­tion. Quan­tum infor­ma­tion seems to be destroyed by black holes, yet every­thing else about quan­tum infor­ma­tion tells us it can’t be destroyed: like any para­dox, or con­tra­dic­tion between two known or prob­a­ble truths, “the destruc­tion of infor­ma­tion would force us to rewrite some of our most fun­da­men­tal sci­en­tif­ic par­a­digms.”

But for a sci­en­tist in the Hawk­ing mold, this dif­fi­cul­ty just makes the chase for knowl­edge more inter­est­ing. Pacuc­ci cites a few hypothe­ses: that “infor­ma­tion actu­al­ly is encod­ed in the escap­ing radi­a­tion, in some way we can’t yet under­stand,” that “the para­dox is just a mis­un­der­stand­ing of how gen­er­al rel­a­tiv­i­ty and quan­tum field the­o­ry inter­act, that “a solu­tion to this and many oth­er para­dox­es will come nat­u­ral­ly with a ‘uni­fied the­o­ry of every­thing,’ ” and most bold­ly that, because “the 2D sur­face of an event hori­zon” — the inescapable edge of a black hole — “can store quan­tum infor­ma­tion,” the bound­ary of the observ­able uni­verse “is also a 2D sur­face encod­ed with infor­ma­tion about real, 3D objects,” imply­ing that “real­i­ty as we know it is just a holo­graph­ic pro­jec­tion of that infor­ma­tion.” Big if true, as they say, but as Hawk­ing seems to have known, the truth about our real­i­ty is sure­ly big­ger than any of us can yet imag­ine.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Hawking’s Final Book and Sci­en­tif­ic Paper Just Got Pub­lished: Brief Answers to the Big Ques­tions and “Infor­ma­tion Para­dox”

Stephen Hawking’s Lec­tures on Black Holes Now Ful­ly Ani­mat­ed with Chalk­board Illus­tra­tions

Watch A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Errol Mor­ris’ Film About the Life & Work of Stephen Hawk­ing

Stephen Hawking’s Uplift­ing Mes­sage: You Can Get Your­self Out of Any Hole, No Mat­ter What Their Size

The Largest Black Holes in the Uni­verse: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion

Watch a Star Get Devoured by a Super­mas­sive Black Hole

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Very First Picture of the Far Side of the Moon, Taken 60 Years Ago

in Astronomy, History, Photography | November 5th, 2019

Six­ty years ago, mankind got its very first glimpse of the far side of the Moon, so called because it faces away from the Earth. (And as astronomers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson have long tak­en pains to point out to Pink Floyd fans, it isn’t “dark.”) Tak­en by the Sovi­et Union, that first pho­to may not look like much today, espe­cial­ly com­pared to the high-res­o­lu­tion col­or images sent back from the sur­face itself by Chi­na’s Chang’e‑4 probe ear­li­er this year. But with the tech­nol­o­gy of the late 1950s, even the tech­nol­o­gy com­mand­ed by the Sovi­ets’ then-world-beat­ing space pro­gram, the fact that it was tak­en at all seems not far short of mirac­u­lous. How did they do it?

“This pho­to­graph was tak­en by the Sovi­et space­craft Luna 3, which was launched a month after the Luna 2 space­craft became the first man-made object to impact on the sur­face of the Moon,” explains astronomer Kevin Hain­line in a recent Twit­ter thread. “Luna 2 fol­lowed Luna 1, the first space­craft to escape a geo­syn­chro­nous Earth orbit.” Luna 3 was designed to take pho­tographs of the Moon, hard­ly an uncom­pli­cat­ed prospect: “To take pic­tures you have to be sta­ble on three-axes. You have to take the pho­tographs remote­ly. AND you have to some­how trans­fer those pic­tures back to Earth.” The first three-axis sta­bi­lized space­craft ever sent on a mis­sion, Luna 3 “had to use a lit­tle pho­to­cell to ori­ent towards the Moon so that now, while sta­bi­lized, it could take the pic­tures. Which it did. On PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM.”

Even those of us who took pic­tures on film for decades have start­ed to take for grant­ed the con­ve­nience of dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy. But think back to all the has­sle of tra­di­tion­al pho­tog­ra­phy, then imag­ine mak­ing a robot car­ry them out in space. Once tak­en Luna 3’s pho­tos “were then moved to a lit­tle CHEMICAL PLANT to DEVELOP AND DRY THEM.” (In oth­er words, “Luna 3 had a lit­tle 1 Hour Pho­to inside.”) Then they con­tin­ued into “a device that shone a cath­ode ray tube, like in an old­er TV, through them, towards a device that record­ed the bright­ness and con­vert­ed this to an elec­tri­cal sig­nal.” You can read about what hap­pened then in more detail at Damn Inter­est­ing, where Alan Bel­lows describes how the space­craft sent “the light­ness and dark­ness infor­ma­tion line-by-line via fre­quen­cy-mod­u­lat­ed ana­log sig­nal — in essence, a fax sent over radio.”

Sovi­et Sci­en­tists could thus “retrieve one pho­to­graph­ic frame every 30 min­utes or so. Due to the dis­tance and weak sig­nal, the first images received con­tained noth­ing but sta­t­ic. In sub­se­quent attempts in the fol­low­ing few days, an indis­tinct, blotchy white disc began to resolve on the ther­mal paper print­outs at Sovi­et lis­ten­ing sta­tions.” As Luna 3’s pho­tos became clear­er, they revealed, as Hain­line puts it, that “the back­side of the moon was SO WEIRD AND DIFFERENT” — cov­ered in the craters, for exam­ple, which have become its visu­al sig­na­ture. For a mod­ern-day equiv­a­lent to this achieve­ment, we might look not just to Chang’e‑4 but to the image of a black hole cap­tured by the Event Hori­zon Tele­scope this past April — the one that led to an abun­dance of arti­cles like “In Defense of the Blur­ry Black Hole Pho­to” and “We Need to Admit That the Black Hole Pho­to Isn’t Very Good.” Astropho­tog­ra­phy has come a long way, but at least back in 1959 it did­n’t pro­duce quite so many takes.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mankind’s First Steps on the Moon: The Ultra High Res Pho­tos

8,400 Stun­ning High-Res Pho­tos From the Apol­lo Moon Mis­sions Are Now Online

How Sci­en­tists Col­orize Those Beau­ti­ful Space Pho­tos Tak­en By the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope

There’s a Tiny Art Muse­um on the Moon That Fea­tures the Art of Andy Warhol & Robert Rauschen­berg

The Glo­ri­ous Poster Art of the Sovi­et Space Pro­gram in Its Gold­en Age (1958–1963)

Won­der­ful­ly Kitschy Pro­pa­gan­da Posters Cham­pi­on the Chi­nese Space Pro­gram (1962–2003)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell & 350 Other Artists to Visually Document America’s Space Program

in Art, Astronomy, History, Science, Technology | August 9th, 2019

It’s hard to imag­ine that the space-crazed gen­er­al pub­lic need­ed any help get­ting worked up about astro­nauts and NASA in the ear­ly 60s.

Per­haps the wild pop­u­lar­i­ty of space-relat­ed imagery is in part what moti­vat­ed NASA admin­is­tra­tor James Webb to cre­ate the NASA Art Pro­gram in 1962.

Although the pro­gram’s hand­picked artists weren’t edit­ed or cen­sored in any way, they were briefed on how NASA hoped to be rep­re­sent­ed, and the emo­tions their cre­ations were meant capture—the excite­ment and uncer­tain­ty of explor­ing these fron­tiers.

NASA was also care­ful to col­lect every­thing the artists pro­duced while par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pro­gram, from sketch­es to fin­ished work.

In turn, they received unprece­dent­ed access to launch sites, key per­son­nel, and major events such as Project Mer­cury and the Apol­lo 11 Mis­sion.

Over 350 artists, includ­ing Andy Warhol, Nor­man Rock­well, and Lau­rie Ander­son, have brought their unique sen­si­bil­i­ties to the project. (Find NASA-inspired art by Warhol and Rock­well above.)

(And hey, no shame if you mis­tak­en­ly assumed Warhol’s 1987 Moon­walk 1 was cre­at­ed as a pro­mo for MTV…)

Jamie Wyeth’s 1964 water­col­or Gem­i­ni Launch Pad includes a hum­ble bicy­cle, the means by which tech­ni­cians trav­eled back and forth from the launch pad to the con­crete-rein­forced block­house where they worked.

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Annie Lei­bovitz offers two views of NASA’s first female pilot and com­man­der, Eileen Collins—with and with­out hel­met.

Postage stamp design­er, Paul Calle, one of the inau­gur­al group of par­tic­i­pat­ing artists, pro­duced a stamp com­mem­o­rat­ing the Gem­i­ni 4 space cap­sule in cel­e­bra­tion of NASA’s 9th anniver­sary. When the Apol­lo 11 astro­nauts suit­ed up pri­or to blast off on July 16, 1969, Calle was the only artist present. His quick­ly ren­dered felt tip mark­er sketch­es lend a back­stage ele­ment to the hero­ic iconog­ra­phy sur­round­ing astro­nauts Arm­strong, Aldrin and Collins. One of the items they car­ried with them on their jour­ney was the engraved print­ing plate of Calle’s 1967 com­mem­o­ra­tive stamp. They hand-can­celed a proof aboard the flight, on the assump­tion that post offices might be hard to come by on the moon.

More recent­ly, NASA’s Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­to­ry has enlist­ed a team of nine artists, design­ers, and illus­tra­tors to col­lab­o­rate on 14 posters, a visu­al throw­back to the ones the WPA cre­at­ed between 1938 and 1941 to spark pub­lic inter­est in the Nation­al Parks. You can see the results at the Exo­plan­et Trav­el Bureau.

View an album of 25 his­toric works from NASA’s Art Pro­gram here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lau­rie Ander­son Cre­ates a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Instal­la­tion That Takes View­ers on an Uncon­ven­tion­al Tour of the Moon

Star Trek‘s Nichelle Nichols Cre­ates a Short Film for NASA to Recruit New Astro­nauts (1977)

NASA Dig­i­tizes 20,000 Hours of Audio from the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Mis­sion: Stream Them Free Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for anoth­er sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Queen Guitarist Brian May Is Also an Astrophysicist: Read His PhD Thesis Online

in Astronomy, Music, Physics | July 1st, 2019

Pho­to by ESO/G. Huede­pohl, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Queen could­n’t pos­si­bly have been Queen with­out Fred­die Mer­cury, nor could it have been Queen with­out Bri­an May. Thanks not least to the recent biopic, Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, the band’s already larg­er-than-life lead singer has become even larg­er still. But its gui­tarist, despite the film’s sur­face treat­ment of his char­ac­ter, is in his own way an equal­ly implau­si­ble fig­ure. Not only did he show musi­cal promise ear­ly, form­ing his first group while still at school, he also got his A Lev­els in physics, math­e­mat­ics, and applied math­e­mat­ics, going on to earn a Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence in Physics with hon­ors at Impe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don.

Nat­u­ral­ly, May then went for his PhD, con­tin­u­ing at Impe­r­i­al Col­lege where he stud­ied the veloc­i­ty of, and light reflect­ed by, inter­plan­e­tary dust in the Solar Sys­tem. He began the pro­gram in 1970, but “in 1974, when Queen was but a princess in its infan­cy, May chose to aban­don his doc­tor­ate stud­ies to focus on the band in their quest to con­quer the world.” So wrote The Tele­graph’s Felix Lowe in 2007, the year the by-then 60-year-old (and long world-famous) rock­er final­ly hand­ed in his the­sis. “The 48,000-word tome, Radi­al Veloc­i­ties in the Zodi­a­cal Dust Cloud, which sounds sus­pi­cious­ly like a Spinal Tap LP, was stored in the loft of his home in Sur­rey.” You can read it online here.

Accord­ing to its abstract, May’s the­sis “doc­u­ments the build­ing of a pres­sure-scanned Fab­ry-Per­ot Spec­trom­e­ter, equipped with a pho­to­mul­ti­pli­er and pulse-count­ing elec­tron­ics, and its deploy­ment at the Obser­va­to­rio del Tei­de at Iza­ña in Tener­ife, at an alti­tude of 7,700 feet (2567 m), for the pur­pose of record­ing high-res­o­lu­tion spec­tra of the Zodi­a­cal Light.” Space.com describes the Zodia­cial Light as “a misty dif­fuse cone of light that appears in the west­ern sky after sun­set and in the east­ern sky before sun­rise,” one that has long tricked casu­al observers into “see­ing it as the first sign of morn­ing twi­light.” Astronomers now rec­og­nize it as “reflect­ed sun­light shin­ing on scat­tered space debris clus­tered most dense­ly near the sun.”

In his abstract, May also notes the unusu­al­ly long peri­od of study as 1970–2007, made pos­si­ble in part by the fact that lit­tle oth­er research had been done in this par­tic­u­lar sub­ject area dur­ing Queen’s reign on the charts and there­after. Still, he had catch­ing up to do, includ­ing obser­va­tion­al work in Tener­ife (as much of a hard­ship post­ing as that isn’t). Since being award­ed his doc­tor­ate, May’s sci­en­tif­ic activ­i­ties have con­tin­ued, as have his musi­cal ones and oth­er pur­suits besides, such as ani­mal-rights activism and stere­og­ra­phy. (Some­times these inter­sect: the 2017 pho­to­book Queen in 3‑D, for exam­ple, uses a VR view­ing device of May’s own design.) The next time you meet a young­ster dither­ing over whether to go into astro­physics or found one of the most suc­cess­ful rock bands of all time, point them to May’s exam­ple and let them know doing both isn’t with­out prece­dent.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gui­tarist Bri­an May Explains the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’

Bri­an May’s Home­made Gui­tar, Made From Old Tables, Bike and Motor­cy­cle Parts & More

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D. The­sis, “Prop­er­ties of Expand­ing Uni­vers­es,” Now Free to Read/Download Online

Watch 94 Free Lec­tures From the Great Cours­es: Dystopi­an Fic­tion, Astro­physics, Gui­tar Play­ing & Much More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Atlas of Space: Behold Brilliant Maps of Constellations, Asteroids, Planets & “Everything in the Solar System Bigger Than 10km”

in Astronomy, Design, Science | June 20th, 2019

A great deal remains to be learned about our solar sys­tem, but a great deal has already been learned about it as well. Yet huge amounts of data such as those pro­duced by out­er-space research so far can’t do much for us unless we can inter­pret them. Luck­i­ly, the age of the inter­net has made pos­si­ble unprece­dent­ed­ly easy access to data as well as unprece­dent­ed­ly easy dis­tri­b­u­tion of inter­pre­ta­tions of that data. Eleanor Lutz, a biol­o­gy grad­u­ate stu­dent at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton and the cre­ator of the sci­ence illus­tra­tion blog Table­top Whale, has tak­en advan­tage of both con­di­tions to wow her ever-grow­ing fan base with her maps of the realms beyond Earth.

“Atlas of Space, her lat­est project, is all about the solar sys­tem,” writes Wired’s Sara Har­ri­son. “She plumbed the depths of pub­licly avail­able data sets from agen­cies like NASA and the US Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey and used them to cre­ate vivid maps of con­stel­la­tions, aster­oids, and plan­ets. In one image, lumi­nes­cent bands of fuch­sia and aqua­ma­rine aster­oids swirl around the bright, white point of the Sun. In anoth­er, Earth seems to pul­sate as an ani­ma­tion of Arc­tic sea ice shows how it extends down the con­ti­nents dur­ing the win­ter and then retracts back to the poles in sum­mer.”

Lutz plans to release all the images she has cre­at­ed for her Atlas of Space over the next few weeks, along with instruc­tions teach­ing read­ers how to cre­ate sim­i­lar illus­tra­tions them­selves. In her intro­duc­to­ry post to the project, she promis­es “an ani­mat­ed map of the sea­sons on Earth, a map of Mars geol­o­gy, and a map of every­thing in the solar sys­tem big­ger than 10km.”

Lutz also briefly describes her plans to write about every­thing from “work­ing with Dig­i­tal Ele­va­tion Mod­els (DEMs) in Bash and Python” to “using the NASA HORIZONS orbital mechan­ics serv­er and scrap­ing inter­net data” to “updat­ing vin­tage illus­tra­tions and paint­ing in Pho­to­shop.” That last ele­ment has already made the project par­tic­u­lar­ly eye-catch­ing: you’ll notice the Atlas of Space pages pub­lished so far, “An Orbit Map of the Solar Sys­tem” and “A Topo­graph­ic Map of Mer­cury,” both pos­sess a strong retro design sen­si­bil­i­ty, though each of a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent kind. Levi Wal­ter Yag­gy would be proud — and no doubt aston­ished by just how much more infor­ma­tion we’ve man­aged to gath­er about the solar sys­tem over the past 130 years.

via Wired

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Strik­ing­ly Beau­ti­ful Maps & Charts That Fired the Imag­i­na­tion of Stu­dents in the 1880s

A Plan­e­tary Per­spec­tive: Tril­lions of Pic­tures of the Earth Avail­able Through Google Earth Engine

3D Map of Uni­verse Cap­tures 43,000 Galax­ies

A Mas­sive, Knit­ted Tapes­try of the Galaxy: Soft­ware Engi­neer Hacks a Knit­ting Machine & Cre­ates a Star Map Fea­tur­ing 88 Con­stel­la­tions

The Solar Sys­tem Quilt: In 1876, a Teacher Cre­ates a Hand­craft­ed Quilt to Use as a Teach­ing Aid in Her Astron­o­my Class

The Solar Sys­tem Drawn Amaz­ing­ly to Scale Across 7 Miles of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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How the Universe Will Come to Its Explosive End: Trillions of Years Covered in 29 Timelapse Minutes

in Astronomy | June 18th, 2019

We all know that Earth won’t last for­ev­er. But noth­ing else in the uni­verse will either, and you can wit­ness the series of explo­sions, evap­o­ra­tions, expi­ra­tions, and oth­er kinds of cos­mic deaths that will con­sti­tute the next one tril­lion tril­lion tril­lion tril­lion tril­lion tril­lion tril­lion tril­lion years in the video above. Con­ve­nient­ly, it does­n’t take quite that long to watch: the time-lapse gets from just a few years into the future to the time at which the last black hole van­ish­es in under half an hour, dou­bling its own speed every five sec­onds. Not only does Earth go first, destroyed by the dying sun, but it hap­pens at the 3:20 mark.

Most of us have no idea what might pos­si­bly play out in the uni­verse over the next 26 or so time-lapsed min­utes. But more astro­physics-inclined minds like Bri­an Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sean Car­roll, Jan­na Levin, and Michio Kaku have put a great deal of thought into just that, and it is from their words that this video’s cre­ator John D. Boswell, known on Youtube as melodysheep, crafts its nar­ra­tion.

And what this for­mi­da­ble cast of sci­en­tists nar­rates resem­bles sequences from the biggest-bud­get sci­ence-fic­tion movies, which shows how far visu­al effects have come since A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Errol Mor­ris’ the­mat­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar 1991 doc­u­men­tary on the late Stephen Hawk­ing — a fig­ure who has also appeared in Boswell’s pre­vi­ous work.

How­ev­er it’s told, the nar­ra­tive remains the same: “the death of the sun, the end of all stars, pro­ton decay, zom­bie galax­ies, pos­si­ble future civ­i­liza­tions, explod­ing black holes, the effects of dark ener­gy, alter­nate uni­vers­es, the final fate of the cos­mos,” as Boswell puts it. “This is a pic­ture of the future as paint­ed by mod­ern sci­ence,” and one that “gives a pro­found per­spec­tive — that we are liv­ing inside the hot flash of the Big Bang, the per­fect moment to soak in the sights and sounds of a uni­verse in its glo­ry days, before it all fades away.” Thanks to the work of gen­er­a­tion upon gen­er­a­tion of sci­en­tists, as well as the work of cre­ators like Boswell who inter­pret their find­ings in far-reach­ing ways (this time-lapse of the future has already racked up near­ly 12.5 mil­lion views), we know how the sto­ry of the uni­verse ends. Now what will we do with the chap­ters grant­ed to us?

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

NASA Archive Col­lects Great Time-Lapse Videos of our Plan­et

Super­mas­sive Black Hole Shreds a Star, and You Get to Watch

Watch A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Errol Mor­ris’ Film About the Life & Work of Stephen Hawk­ing

The Very End of Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Johannes Kepler Theorized That Each Planet Sings a Song, Each in a Different Voice: Mars is a Tenor; Mercury, a Soprano; and Earth, an Alto

in Astronomy, Music, Science | May 24th, 2019

Johannes Kepler deter­mined just how the plan­ets of our solar sys­tem make their way around the sun. He pub­lished his inno­v­a­tive work on the sub­ject from 1609 to 1619, and in the final year of that decade he also came up with a the­o­ry that each plan­et sings a song, and each in a dif­fer­ent voice at that. Mars is a tenor, Mer­cury is a sopra­no, and Earth, as the BBC show QI (or Quite Inter­est­ing) recent­ly tweet­ed, “is an alto that sings two notes Mi and Fa, which Kepler read as ‘Mis­e­ri­am & Famem’, ‘mis­ery and famine’ ” — two phe­nom­e­na not unknown on Earth in Kepler’s time, even though the sci­en­tif­ic rev­o­lu­tion had already start­ed to change the way peo­ple lived.

Not all of the best minds of the sci­en­tif­ic rev­o­lu­tion thought pure­ly in terms of cal­cu­la­tion. The blog Thats­Maths describes Kepler’s mis­sion as explain­ing the solar sys­tem “in terms of divine har­mo­ny,” find­ing “a sys­tem of the world that was math­e­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect and har­mon­i­cal­ly pleas­ing.” Tru­ly divine har­mo­ny could pre­sum­ably find its expres­sion in music, an idea that led Kepler to explain “plan­e­tary motions in terms of har­mon­ic rela­tion­ships, a scheme that he called the ‘song of the Earth.’ ”

Accord­ing to this scheme, “each plan­et emits a tone that varies in pitch as its dis­tance from the Sun varies from per­i­he­lion to aphe­lion and back” — that is, from the near­est they get to the sun to the far­thest they get from the sun and back — “pro­duc­ing a con­tin­u­ous glis­san­do of inter­me­di­ate tones, a ‘whistling pro­duced by fric­tion with the heav­en­ly light.’ ”

Kepler named the com­bined result “the music of the spheres,” but what does it sound like? Switzer­land-based cor­net­tist Bruce Dick­ey wants to give us a sense of it with Nature’s Whis­per­ing Secret, “a project for a CD record­ing explor­ing the ideas about music and cos­mol­o­gy of Johannes Kepler.” Demand­ing the musi­cian­ship of not just Dick­ey but com­pos­er Cal­liope Tsoupa­ki, singer Hana Blažíková, and a group of singers and instru­men­tal­ists from across Europe and Amer­i­ca as well, all “among the most dis­tin­guished musi­cians per­form­ing 16th-cen­tu­ry poly­phon­ic music today.” The Indiegogo cam­paign for this ambi­tious trib­ute to Kepler’s ideas at the inter­sec­tion of sci­ence and aes­thet­ics, which involves an album as well as a series of live per­for­mances into the year 2020, is on its very last day, so if you’d like to hear the music of the spheres for your­self, con­sid­er mak­ing a con­tri­bu­tion.

via Quite Inter­est­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Declas­si­fied, Eerie “Space Music” Heard Dur­ing the Apol­lo 10 Mis­sion (1969)

NASA Puts Online a Big Col­lec­tion of Space Sounds, and They’re Free to Down­load and Use

Relax with 8 Hours of Clas­si­cal Space Music: From Richard Strauss & Haydn, to Bri­an Eno, Philip Glass & Beyond

The Sound­track of the Uni­verse

Kepler, Galileo & Nos­tradamus in Col­or, on Google

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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