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"Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery When you look out into the Universe, what is it that you typically think of? Do you think of reliable, fixed stars and constellations? The vast expanse of the Milky Way, with its memorable dust lanes and amorphous shapes? The unchanging nature of the points of light in the sky? Image credit: Roth Ritter (Dark Atmospheres), of the double cluster in Perseus. Maybe you think deeper and farther than that. Maybe you think about the distant galaxies and clusters, and the deepest deep-sky objects we know of. How the light took millions or even billions of years to reach us, and yet how every time we look at them, we see them exactly the same way. Image credit: Misti Mountain Observatory. I couldn't fault you for thinking like this; from mankind's point of view, the Universe -- for all intents and purposes -- … [Read more...] about The Universe is Alive

"We don't understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form." -Carlos Frenck When we look out into the distant Universe, we're also looking back into the Universe's past. The farther away an object is, the longer it's taken its light to travel from it to our eyes. And each time we observe something farther away than anything we've seen before, we're looking farther back into the past -- closer to the Big Bang -- than ever before. Image credit: NASA, ESA and A. Felid (STScI). The earliest thing we've ever been able to see -- of course -- is the Cosmic Microwave Background, or the leftover glow of radiation from the Big Bang. When we observe this radiation background, which was emitted when the Universe finally cooled to low enough temperatures that neutral atoms could form, we're getting a snapshot of the Universe as it was from when it was only 380,000 years old! Image credit: NASA / WMAP science team. But there is a theoretical prediction of the … [Read more...] about Found: The First Atoms In The Universe!!!