Category Archives: Light

Faster than the Speed of Light

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Marissa LePore

In summer of 2013, the New York Times published an article about NASA’s (then) newest project. Physicists and engineers were trying to determine whether “warp drive” might one day be possible. Warp drive, for those of you who are not Trekkies, is traveling faster than the speed of light or 3.0 x 10^5 km/s, and thus far […] Continue reading →

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William Herschel believes in ghosts!

Posted on January 20, 2015 by karenagrebenc

picture from: www.redorbit.com One of my favorite moments in the Neil deGrasse Tyson-hosted show Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey takes place in the first moments of one of the first few episodes.  It “flashes back” to the early 1800’s, showing a cartoon involving the famous astronomer William Herschel and his young son, John, walking along the […] Continue reading →

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Blog Post #1: What would happen if you threw a baseball at the speed of light?

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Elizabeth D.

This web page gives us the answer. Basically, if any object with mass were moving at that speed, especially within our …

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Traveling Faster Than The Speed of Light

Posted on January 18, 2015 by pgolemanska

Can you possibly travel at a speed faster than the speed of light? Scientists think it might be possible even without violating Einstein’s theory that the speed of light is the “galactic speed limit.” Some theoretical models show that in the early stages of the universe, right after the Big Bang, space expanded at a […] Continue reading →

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Light Travel Time and Observing Extraterrestrial Life

Posted on January 15, 2015 by robbyks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#mediaviewer/File:NASA-HS201427a-HubbleUltraDeepField2014-20140603.jpg A topic that has really intrigued me is the speed of light and the time it takes for light to travel. The above image was taken by the Hubble Space telescope of galaxies billions of light years away. Some of these galaxies even extend back in time to only a few hundred million years of […] Continue reading →

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Warp Drive: Science Fiction or Future Reality?

Posted on April 20, 2014 by gradytlynch

This video segment explores the possibilities of creating a warp drive spacecraft that isn’t bound by the cosmic speed limit of lightspeed. The idea highlighted in the video is that fluctuations in spacetime itself would propel the spacecraft, as opposed to the spacecraft propelling itself through space. This complex theoretical process is described in the […] Continue reading →

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A Different Kind Vacation

Posted on March 17, 2014 by hindsolar

During several of our classes we have taken time to watch videos and view pictures of aurora. All that kept going through my head was where I can go to see this and this would be great for a vacation. I found a Huffington Post article about aurora. In it the writer states that the […] Continue reading →

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Aurora

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Leigh

The Aurora, both Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis, is an incredibly beautiful phenomenon that is the result of important characteristics of our planet and its atmosphere. It is actually a result of electrically charged particles from the sun entering our … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Aurora

Posted on March 16, 2014 by eschellhase

The Earth has a magnetosphere that protects us from charged solar particles coming from the sun. However, some charged particles manage to penetrate the magnetosphere. These then follow the magnetic lines of our magnetosphere. If these gain enough energy they can travel down into Earth’s atmosphere. Here they hit atoms and molecules, causing them to […] Continue reading →

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What is a Quasar?

Posted on March 15, 2014 by gradytlynch

This brief video explains our current understanding of quasars, and how the generate so much energy and are able to be seen from so far away. As the video discusses, when quasars were first observed in the 1960’s, there was a great deal of interest generated about these distant yet incredibly bright objects. As we […] Continue reading →

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