Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

—NDT

When we examine the Coma cluster, as Zwicky did during the 1930s, we find that its member galaxies are all moving more rapidly than the escape velocity for the cluster. The cluster should swiftly fly apart, leaving barely a trace of its beehive existence after just a few hundred million years had passed. But the cluster is more than ten billion years old, which is nearly as old as the universe itself. And so was born what remains the longest-standing unsolved mystery in astrophysics

These are ordinary dangers. From the department of exotic happenings, intergalactic space is regularly pierced by super-duper high-energy, fast-moving, charged, subatomic particles. We call them cosmic rays. The highest-energy particles among them have a hundred million times the energy that can be generated in the world’s largest particle accelerators. Their

Zwicky studied the movement of individual galaxies within a titanic cluster of them, located far beyond the local stars of the Milky Way that trace out the constellation Coma Berenices (the “hair of Berenice,” an Egyptian queen in antiquity). The Coma cluster, as we call it, is an isolated and richly populated ensemble of galaxies about 300 million light-years from Earth.

Quarks are quirky beasts. Unlike protons, each with an electric charge of +1, and electrons, with a charge of –1, quarks have fractional charges that come in thirds. And you’ll never catch a quark all by itself; it will always be clutching other quarks nearby. In fact, the force that keeps two (or more) of them together actually grows stronger the more you separate them—as if they were attached by some sort of subnuclear rubber band. Separate the quarks enough, the rubber band snaps and the stored energy summons E = mc2 to create a new quark at each end, leaving you back where you started

Looking more closely at Earth’s atmospheric fingerprints, human biomarkers will also include sulfuric, carbonic, and nitric acids, and other components of smog from the burning of fossil fuels. If the curious aliens happen to be socially, culturally, and technologically more advanced than we are, then they will surely interpret these biomarkers as convincing evidence for the absence of intelligent life on Earth.

, if the Pillsbury Doughboy were a figure skater, then fast spins would be a high-risk activity

Personally, I am quite comfortable with chemicals, anywhere in the universe. My favorite stars, as well as my best friends, are all made of them

How else could we believe that sodium is a poisonous, reactive metal that you can cut with a butter knife, while pure chlorine is a smelly, deadly gas, yet when added together they make sodium chloride, a harmless, biologically essential compound better known as table salt? Or how about hydrogen and oxygen? One is an explosive gas, and the other promotes violent combustion, yet the two combined make liquid water, which puts out fires.

Yes, Einstein was a badass.