I have nothing to add to this, except to say it’s great, and I saw it because Brian Cox mentioned it on Twitter.
Oh yeah: one more thing; watch it in HD and full screen. Coooool.
-
About Bad Astronomy
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking, movie reviews, and all that) can be found here.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
Bad Astronomy was chosen as one of Time.com's Best Blogs of 2009. Science Getaways
Subscribe to BA
Death from the Skies!
Order a copy of Death from the Skies! from Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?"
-- Adam Savage, Mythbusters
"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating."
-- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot UprisingSocial/Networking/Cool Stuff
DISCOVERmagazine.com: Latest Articles on Space- How to Turn a Blazing-Hot Fusion Reactor Into a Sunny Paradise, in 10 Easy Steps | Discoblog
- A Big Blue Swirl in the Ocean is a Sign of Microscopic Life | 80beats
- Randall Munrion | Bad Astronomy
- The two tails of Comet Garradd | Bad Astronomy
- Super-Earth exoplanet likely to be a waterworld | Bad Astronomy
- DISCOVER Blogs: The Loom
Copyright © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.
Privacy - Terms - Reader Services - Subscribe Today - Advertise - About Us
January 26th, 2012 at 12:45 pm
Absolutely charming.
January 26th, 2012 at 1:17 pm
This video was an edit of material shown on Stargazing Live 2012. This show reminded us the “Brian Cox effect” (also mentioned here) . Telescope retailers in UK reported a 500% increase in sales as soon as the show ended.
January 26th, 2012 at 1:24 pm
Cool indeed.
And Brian Cox is cute even when he’s not on screen.
January 26th, 2012 at 1:48 pm
How do we model dark matter if we aren’t sure what it is?
January 26th, 2012 at 2:07 pm
@Kappy
We do not know what the particles are that make up dark matter, but we do know what their total mass is, and their “temperature,” which dictates how and when they cluster due to their self-gravity.
January 26th, 2012 at 2:11 pm
Somehow I expected an episode of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. A British accent always make it seem smarter.
January 26th, 2012 at 2:14 pm
We know its distribution through space and how it affects visible and well-known objects like galaxies. This shows a model of those, not of what it actually is.
January 26th, 2012 at 2:23 pm
Kappy: We know that the dark matter has mass, doesn’t whizz about too much (“cold” rather than “hot”) and doesn’t do much else apart from attracting anything else with mass – dark matter or baryonic matter – so it is relatively easy to add something to the models which is a bit like normal matter but which does not interact in other ways.
But until we actually detect dark matter – a wimp or an axion or a string thing or something – it has to me a bit of the flavour of luminiferous aether or phlogiston. Everyone expects it to exist, but might not the implications be more interesting if it does not exist? MOND, or another theory of modified gravity, or worse?
January 26th, 2012 at 2:36 pm
@Chris
Very nice! Nothing about sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha
January 26th, 2012 at 3:12 pm
Can’t wait to get home to watch this. As a matter of fact, this is motivation to leave the office.
January 26th, 2012 at 3:59 pm
I liked the use of the word “cheat” a sly nod to the climategate nonsense perhaps?
January 26th, 2012 at 4:57 pm
Awesome. I think I may need to inject this into my standard colloquium talk…
January 26th, 2012 at 9:20 pm
Don’t you people have anything better to do?
January 27th, 2012 at 1:14 am
Ok, this is Earth…
January 27th, 2012 at 3:33 am
Great clip there.
Except we not only can fly through galaxies we *are* flying through our Galaxy – we’re just doing that very slowly! (Relatively.)
@10. Larian LeQuella : You need extra motivation for that!?
January 27th, 2012 at 4:56 am
Nice, but by the time I got to the end I was expecting something else.
January 27th, 2012 at 6:53 am
Well done. I always enjoy Brian Cox’s narration (but somehow it really annoys me when he says “methane”).
There is a general consensus that Americans think a British accent makes people sound smarter. That may be true, but there is also a consensus that a New York accent makes them sound dumber. Those people have never listened to Mike Massimino.
January 27th, 2012 at 12:02 pm
If Brian Cox and Phil Plait both like it….then it MUST be good!
January 27th, 2012 at 2:17 pm
That’s not actually Brian Cox narrating the video. It was featured, as Stathis Dimopoulos said on Stargazing Live 2012. I believe the narrator in the video, is the scientist from that episode, where he explained it live. I don’t know his name unfortunately.
January 27th, 2012 at 8:29 pm
Agreed. It didn’t sound like Cox at all, except for the accent of course.
January 28th, 2012 at 2:44 am
the narrator is Andrew Pontzen, who also takes part in an excellent monthly astronomy podcast- Naked Astronomy, a spin off of the equally excellent weekly podcast Naked Scientists hosted by Chris Smith. I highly recommend both. Hadn’t seen this video though!
January 28th, 2012 at 1:02 pm
[...] "CRITEO-300×250", 300, 250); 1 meneos Esto es una galaxia blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/01/26/this-i… por Edusan hace [...]
January 28th, 2012 at 11:13 pm
Evidently not.
January 28th, 2012 at 11:13 pm
I maked you a galaxy. But I eated it.
February 6th, 2012 at 11:43 am
This was used as one of the break time videos at the monthly All Space Considered talk at the Griffith Observatory last Friday