The Milky Way from a Distance

by | Jul 3, 2014 | | 24 Comments

Growing up in the American Midwest, I used to haunt the library in Kirkwood, Missouri looking for books on astronomy. I had it in mind to read all of them and I pretty much did, looking with fascination at fuzzy images of distant objects I yearned to see close up. What did Saturn look like from Titan? What would it be like to be close enough to see the Crab Nebula fill the sky? Breathtakingly, what would it look like to be inside one of the great globular clusters? Early on in Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep the character Ravna finds herself looking out a window at the entire Milky Way from a distance sufficient to view it whole: She’d guessed right: tonight the Galaxy owned the sky… Without enhancement, the light was faint. Twenty thousand light-years is a long, long way. At first there was just a suggestion of mist, and an occasional star. As her eyes adapted, the mist took shape, curving arcs, some places brighter, some dimmer. A minute more and … there were knots in the mist...

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Fritz Zwicky On Moving Stars

by | Jul 2, 2014 | | 15 Comments

The great Ukrainian mathematician Israil Moiseyevich Gelfand was famous for his weekly seminars in Moscow, where sudden switches in topics and impromptu presentations were the norm. Although his listeners had heard it many times, Gelfand liked to tell this story: In the early 20th Century, a man approaches a physicist at a party and says he can't understand how the new wireless telegraphy works. How is it possible to send a signal without using wires? The physicist tells him it is simple. "To understand wireless telegraphy, you must first understand how the wired telegraph system works. Imagine a dog with its head in London and its tail in Paris. You yank the tail in Paris and the head in London barks. That is wired telegraphy. Wireless telegraphy is the same thing except without the dog." It always got Gelfand a laugh, but he liked to use the story for a deeper purpose. According to Edward Frenkel, who in his youth attended and presented at some of Gelfand's seminars, Gelfand would...

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Charter

In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For many years this site coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation. It now serves as an independent forum for deep space news and ideas. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image courtesy of Marco Lorenzi).

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