MetaFilter posts tagged with astronomy and cosmology

The Size of Things

nola — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:13:16 -0800

Welcome to the Universe - III: The Size of Things . . .we take a breif trip through the Solar System and beyond to see the size of the Universe. A youtube video by AndromedasWake about the scale of the Universe.

Composition of the Universe

knave — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:19:07 -0800

A fascinating talk about the composition of the universe [Youtube, approx 1 hour], presented by Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist at CIT. [via] His talk is fast-paced and high level, but has enough detail to get the imagination fired up. Topics include ordinary matter, the standard model, dark matter, dark energy, string theory, supersymmetry, and the expanding universe. The presentation is extremely coherent and easy to follow, even for non-theoretical-physicists such as myself. Enjoy.

Not the Ford Galaxy

Kronos_to_Earth — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:42:12 -0800

Five years and 800,000 images went into producing a 4 gigapixel mosaic image of the galactic plane, which when printed out is 180 feet long. But it has been made browser-sized by GLIMPSE, the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire, the research group which, along with MIPSGAL, created the image: A Glimpse of the Milky Way.

Orders of Magnitude

Kronos_to_Earth — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:07:59 -0800

Leave the planet to travel into the largest structures of the universe, then plunge into the tiniest. Forty two orders of magnitude in thirty six minutes.... Cosmic Voyage. (single link Google video via) The picture is a little pixelated, and you might need to turn up the volume a bit. It might just have been my connection.

There's a hole in the Universe, dear Martha, dear Martha

scalefree — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 07:16:50 -0800

Astronomers find a giant hole a billion light years across & located 8 billion light years away from us. They believe it could be evidence of another Universe at the edge of ours.

The dark energy backlash

snoktruix — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 14:06:07 -0800

Prominent cosmologist Simon D.M. White has written a provocative paper posted to the astrophysics arxiv complaining that too much time is being devoted to the quest to understand the nature of the elusive dark energy: "Dark Energy is undeniably an interesting problem to attack through astronomical observation, but it is one of many and not necessarily the one where significant progress is most likely to follow a major investment of resources." He worries generally that observational cosmology/astrophysics/astronomy may turn away from the construction of instruments of general utility (such as the Hubble Space Telescope), to concentrate on a small number of massive experiments narrowly focused on solving particular problems (such as WMAP and the Large Hadron Collider), to the detriment of the "quirky small-science" type of astronomy.

Newtonian dynamics unmodified

kliuless — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 19:46:09 -0800

Good evidence that dark matter is for real.

The truth behind the first cheesy special effects

Gyan — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:57:05 -0800

Misconceptions about the Big Bang