Science of Astronomy

The Sombrero Galaxy (Messier 104) offers a fine view for visual observers and imagers. This nearly edge-on spiral galaxy about 30 million light years away in the Virgo galaxy cluster shows a smoky lane of interstellar dust finely etched against a brilliant galactic disk and unusually bright halo. This new image from the Dark Energy Camera on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter telescope at CTIO in Chile shows an immense halo of stars around the galactic plane along with a loop of stars (lower right), all of which likely came from smaller galaxies gobbled by this big spiral. The galaxy contains some 2,000 globular clusters, nearly twenty times as many as our Milky Way. It’s a beautiful image to behold.

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The first stars were big, bright, and burned out only a few million years after their formation. These stars formed out of nearly pure hydrogen and helium with no traces of heavier elements like iron and sodium found in later generation of stars, since these elements formed in nuclear reactions in the first stars themselves. None of these primordial ‘Population III’ stars exist in the local universe since they long ago exploded as supernovae. But astronomers have been searching for these first stars in distant galaxies that formed long ago. For the first time, a team of researchers have found the first signatures of these stars in a small galaxy observed with the JWST (and with the help of gravitational lensing by an intervening galaxy cluster). Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the what they found in the above video.

If you’re keen on learning more about the first stars, have a look at my feature article about stellar archaeology and the first stars published in Sky & Telescope magazine in June 2020 at this link.

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On March 15, 1955, Albert Einstein learned of the death of his close friend Michele Angelo Besso at the age of 81. An engineer by training, Besso attended university with Einstein and worked with him at the Swiss patent office, serving as a supporter and sounding board for some of the great scientist’s early and most profound ideas. Upon hearing of his friend’s passing, and although he himself was ill with only weeks to live, Einstein sent a letter of condolence to Besso’s family in which he wrote this beguiling passage:

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Some might dismiss this passage as comforting words to a grieving family. But this was Albert Einstein writing, and Einstein knew a thing or two about time and space. He must have meant something here, perhaps something profound, but what? [Read more…] about Einstein, Immortality, and the Stubborn Illusion of Time

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