As we continue to explore our world, our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand exactly how massively big it is…and how tiny we are in comparison. Most of us will never travel to space — much less to far reaches outside our solar system — and get the chance to stick it all inside our visual cortex to put it in perspective.

Our efforts to send people to the moon seemed to cause an existential crisis regarding our place in the universe, and in 1968 two exceptional short films were produced in response.  Cosmic Zoom was one of the first valiant tries to make the size of things knowable. Many of you might have seen this Canadian-produced movie in school, watching as it zoomed from a boy rowing his canoe out, out, out to the edges of our (then) knowable universe and back again. The American film Powers of Ten was the other big hit that year, starting in a park on a summer day and stepping back at, well, powers of ten.

Another high-quality visualization, the Interactive Scale of the Universe Tool, was made just a couple years ago. It uses a bar you can drag from yocotometers to yottometers (and if those two words are the coolest thing you learn today, we don’t blame you).

We got to thinking about these scaling attempts when we stumbled upon the most recent version. The Known Universe, produced by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is essentially a 21st-century upgrade to Cosmic Zoom. The graphics are from scientific data pulled from their Digital Universe Atlas, a project they’ve maintained with the Hayden Planetarium for the last decade. The video is part of an exhibit, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, that runs at AMNH through May 10.

Update: One of our colleagues reminded us of another interactive visualization by the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies that allows you to compare astronomical objects to relatable every day objects, like basketballs and baseballs, and even overlay distances onto Google Maps.

We promise not to post every single one of the videos the astronauts shoot from the International Space Station, but they’ve been capturing some nice scenes lately in High-Definition, including this trip up the East Coast of the United States.

And, of course, this beautiful moonset, which was filmed over the North Atlantic ocean on January 9.  The video is sped up: the sequence covers 10 minutes as the station orbited from northeast of the Caribbean to just west of Europe.

Click on the image to watch the video.

January 22, 2012 solar flare. Photo courtesy NASA/SDO/AIA.

Despite being the strongest solar storm since 2005, this week’s flareup appears to have caused few disruptions on Earth. (As Space.com reports, the Coronal Mass Ejection “hit Earth at an angle, so the electromagnetic burst was largely shielded by the planet’s magnetic field.”)

But the storm did lead some airlines—including Delta, Qantas, and Air Canada—to alter their transpolar routes to reduce potential disruptions to high-frequency radio communication along the way. At least one Qantas flight, reports AvWeb, carried an extra five tons of fuel in order to fly a less southerly route.

We may have gotten off easy. The remarkable electrical effects of solar storms have been recorded in newspapers since British astronomer Richard Carrington noticed a solar eruption in 1859 while sketching sun spots seen through his telescope. Just days later, the northern lights—seen as far south as Cuba—damaged telegraph systems, even setting offices on fire and melting wires. On August 30, 1859, the New York Times included this observation from the superintendent of the Canadian Telegraph Company:

I never, in my experience of fifteen years in the working of telegraph lines, witnessed anything like the extraordinary effect of the Aurora Borealis, between Quebec and Further Point last night. The line was in most perfect order, and well-skilled operators worked incessantly from 8 o’clock last evening till 1 o’clock this morning, to get over in even a tolerably intelligent form about four hundred words of the steamer Indian‘s report for the Associated Press, and at the latter hour so completely were the wires under the influence of the Aurora Borealis, it was found utterly impossible to communicate between the telegraph stations, and the line was closed for the night.

Another solar storm, nearly as strong as what has come to be known as the Carrington event, occurred in 1921. On May 16, 1921, the Los Angeles Times reported that “electrical influences exerted by the Aurora Borealis…continued today to play havoc with telegraph traffic throughout the United States…. For more than an hour before midnight Saturday nearly every telephone wire leading from New York and Chicago was out of condition.”

The New-York Tribune hoped to calm its readers by noting that the sun would soon “turn [its] spotted face away and end earthly wire troubles,” while the New York Times reported disturbances in France: “The operators at the central transmission stations came to the conclusion that a strange force had got into their instruments, for nothing would go right. Morse instruments, instead of making dots and dashes, recorded one long line. Hughes instruments produced words in what might have been an unknown language, and Baudot, of which French telegraphers are proud because it is very intricate, seemed possessed by evil spirits.”

Newcomb Carlton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, was quoted in the New York Times as saying: “The magnetic disturbances were much the worst ever experienced. A great many fuses were blown out on our land lines and we had great difficulty with the submarine cables.” The story also reports that the solar storm burned out a telephone station in Sweden, which then contributed to a short circuit in the New York Central signal system, which was followed by a fire in the Fifty-seventh Street signal tower.

In 1989, the Washington Post reported on December 18 that a solar storm—or “titanic temper tantrum”—set off radiation alarms aboard the supersonic Concorde in flight, damaged orbiting satellites, and caused a nine-hour power blackout in most of Canada’s Quebec province.

In comparison, Space.com reports, this week’s solar flare caused “minor disruptions to spacecraft and power grids.”

For the last 12 years, astronomers have been using a dedicated telescope in New Mexico to make the most detailed map of our universe as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Last week, at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting, the scientists presented a mesmerizing visual of the matter that makes up, well, everything.

Don’t worry if the 3D animation is confusing; it’s not so much a Thomas Guide (Take the 405 to the Pegasus Galaxy) as a statistical representation of how mass is distributed through the universe. It’s the clumps and lack of clumps that are important. Astronomers took measurements of nearly a million galaxies, and by graphing them out are able to learn about the structure of the universe, including how it evolved over time, back to the inflationary epoch — the moment just after the Big Bang when the universe rapidly expanded. In the animation, each green dot represents one galaxy. The image covers a redshift range from 0.25 to 0.75, reaching back to six billion years ago.

The measurements are ongoing, and will eventually include around 1.5 million galaxies, which the researchers hope to be finished with sometime this year. They’re already making interesting finds: Their data shows that dark matter makes up 73% of the density of the universe.

An artist rendering of the gas cloud being pulled towards Sgr A*. Courtesy ESO/MPE/Marc Schartmann

Not long from now, astronomers are going to witness something they’ve never seen before: a black hole chowing down on a feast. Although scientists have a short list of probable black holes, there’s only one close enough for us to observe with any detail, and that’s the one in the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics confirmed this week in Nature that they’ve discovered a gas cloud plowing straight for it.

Sgr A* is a “supermassive” black hole, with the mass of about four million Suns. Although these still mysterious objects are difficult to observe directly, since they absorb all light that gets too close, there are a few ways to gather data. One is by studying the accretion disk; the extreme gravitational forces coming from the black hole compress material as it falls ever closer, and this causes an emission of electromagnetic radiation. With black holes, that radiation is usually in the x-ray range. Studying this radiation can tell astronomers a lot about the black hole itself.

So why is the discovery of this gas cloud so exciting? Because Sgr A* is a fairly quiet black hole. There’s not a lot of nearby material for it to feast on, and so not a lot of data for astronomers to collect. But this gas cloud is barreling down a path almost straight toward Sgr A*. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama desert, the astronomers have been able to track the cloud’s path and determine its size and mass — it covers an area about the size of our solar system, with the mass of just three Earths.

Even more exciting, in a universe where human life spans are mere blips in astronomical time, it turns out this gas cloud is going to reach Sgr A* in just about 18 months. The same Max Planck scientists who authored the Nature paper will be the ones collecting data from the VLT in mid-2013. That has to be high on the list of astronomer dreams.

The cloud is already close enough to start being stretched apart by gravitational forces, which are pulling it toward the black hole faster and faster — the speed of the cloud has doubled in the last seven years, and it is now moving over 5 million miles per hour. In this short film, astronomer Stefan Gillessen says the cloud “will be elongated and stretched, it will become essentially like spaghetti, and… fall into the black hole.” Or, as one of the best lines we’ve read in a science article in a long time puts it, “The inevitable doom of such a blob of gas is its inexorable tendency towards fragmentation.”

Pretty, pretty outer space. Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)

As Oscar Wilde said, “Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.” So what better place to turn the lens of aestheticism than images from our universe?

Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have been doing just that though the Aesthetics and Astronomy project. They hoped that by studying how the public reacts to the beauty of nebulas and far-off galaxies, they can foster fascination with the science behind the images as well.

Turns out, however, that people don’t always choose beauty over science.  From The Harvard Crimson:

People responded more positively to images that were accompanied by an explanation, suggesting curiosity about the nature of the celestial event or object pictured, according to [Randall] Smith.

“There is a devaluing when you separate out function and form,” [Kimberly Kowal] Arcand said.

The A&A researchers said they believe that an understanding of the scientific nature of astronomical imagery can let people more fully appreciate its beauty—and conversely, that its aesthetic appeal can increase appreciation of the science.

The group’s research is ongoing, as they try to develop the best ways to convey scientific information through astronomical images, like using the “Cocktail Format” in captions — quick, memorable facts instead of lengthy, descriptive text.

Detail of "Underwater" by Stanley Goldstein, featured in Celestial Matters

And while we’re talking about pretty things in space, we should mention an unusual art exhibit appearing next weekend. Celestial Matters features ten artworks that spent time on the International Space Station. Well-known space tourist Richard Garriott de Cayeux, who hitched a ride on a Soyuz up to the ISS in 2008, commissioned a handful of artists to create pieces for the trip.  They were given weight, size, and material restrictions, but otherwise just instructed to “present a compelling interpretation of space and how it impacts and inspires the human perspective.” The exhibition is by Zero G Art and supports the Challenger Center.

You have to head to the Lower East Side to see it in person, but at least it’s a bit more doable than low-Earth orbit.  (You can see the works online, too.)  The exhibit is on display at the Charles Bank Gallery at 196 Bowery, New York City, from Friday through Sunday, Oct. 14-16, 12 to 7 p.m.

Volcanic activity on the moon, traveling to asteroids, and crashing galaxies are just a few of the topics covered in the ten free lectures you can attend at the National Air & Space Museum over the next few months.  Created in partnership with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian’s Stars series will feature experts and visuals in the Albert Einstein Planetarium. Afterwards, weather permitting, you can get your own view of the sky at the Public Observatory outside the museum.

Albert Einstein Planetarium, Photo Courtesy NASM

The series starts this Saturday with Dr. Gareth Morgan, a geologist with the museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, discussing “The Changing Face of the Moon: Exploring the Ancient History of Giant Impacts and Volcanism.”  Tickets are free but you must reserve one here.  Lecture starts at 5:45 p.m.; observing at 6:45 p.m.

Click over to the full list of lectures and save the date for your favorites.

Among the things one expects to find while sifting through former President Bill Clinton’s stuff, a lost moon rock might be low on the list.  The half ounce piece, one of the Goodwill Moon Rocks brought back on Apollo 17, was given to Arkansas three decades ago and reported missing sometime last year. Wednesday morning, reports the AP, an archivist who was looking through the former governor’s papers opened a box and discovered it. No one knows how it got in there, but the archivist, Bobby Roberts, who directs the Central Arkansas Library System, seems content to set ‘em up and knock ‘em down, “I guess it’s one more Arkansas mystery solved.”

Apollo 11 moon rocks. Photo credit: NASA

This recently found moon rock is one of about 200 small fragments presented as gifts to foreign nations, U.S. states and territories. All were sliced from a single Apollo 17 sample, number 70017, and many are unaccounted for today. Various investigations have been pursued over the years to track down these and other missing moon rocks, including Operation Lunar Eclipse, the joint sting operation between NASA, the U.S. Postal Service and U.S. Customs that recovered the Goodwill Moon Rock originally given to Honduras.  Another somewhat famous escapade includes the interns at Johnson Space Center who smuggled out a 600 pound safe containing samples from all the Apollo missions (the F.B.I. caught them).

NASA’s Office of the Inspector General keeps tabs on any information surfacing about moon rocks, both to collect missing pieces and to sweep counterfeit rocks off the market. Updates are published in the office’s semi-annual reports — just last year they recovered a Goodwill Moon Rock intended as a gift to Cyprus (pdf), however, “The plaque had been intended for delivery by a U.S. diplomat to the people of Cyprus as a gift when hostilities broke out in that country. The plaque had remained in the custody of the diplomat until his death and was recovered from his son.”

Wikipedia’s moon rocks page collects more stories, such as the ill-fated gift to Ireland: the Apollo 11 rock ended up in a landfill. (Their Apollo 17 rock is safe in a museum, at least.) Clearly, some of these will never be recovered.  But sometimes, every once in a while, you can just open a box.

The last time we looked in on the European comet-chaser Rosetta, the spacecraft was still years away from its destination. Well, it’s still years away—three to be precise. And it just went into hibernation. But before going to sleep, Rosetta took this first, very long-distance picture of its target: comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Not much to look at, huh? Don’t worry, the close-ups in 2014 will be much better. And while you’re waiting, you can make your own comet:

I became fascinated by the Xbox 360 Kinect system long before it hit the stores—back when Microsoft was still developing it under the name Project Natal. The commercial product hasn’t yet delivered on the full promise of this demo, but I expect that it will, and fairly soon. Kinect is already the fastest-selling consumer electronics device of all time.

It’s not just virtual volleyball and dancing, either. Hackers started “improving” and fiddling around with Kinect almost from the beginning. Here’s a cool Kinect interaction with Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope:

Amazing what you can see in a 10-inch telescope if the conditions are right.  Dutch amateur astronomer Ralf Vandebergh got a picture of STS-133 astronaut Steve Bowen spacewalking outside the International Space Station last week.

Hubble has done it again, squinting deeper into the universe, and hence farther back in time, than ever before. What it sees is a little smudge of light that turned out to be the most distant galaxy ever detected, 13.2 billion light-years away. It’s not seeable in visible light, only in infrared. That’s because the light waves that have traveled toward Earth for the past 13.2 billion years have been stretched, or redshifted, into the infrared end of the light spectrum.

So we see the galaxy, named UDFj-39546284, as it existed only 480 million years after the Big Bang. The new research was released in a Nature paper co-authored by Rychard Bouwens of Leiden University in the Netherlands and Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz. The team had previously found up to 60 galaxies about 170 million years younger, so this little galaxy, which was only one-hundreth the size of the Milky Way, seems to  have existed in a lonesome place in a very young universe long before the Milky Way and billions of other galaxies formed.

The little galaxy, picked from a swarm in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (University of California, Santa Cruz, and Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team)

The scientists say that this is it for Hubble’s capabilities. “This is really about the limit for Hubble for directly seeing an object,” says Illingworth. “It will take the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to go farther away.”

That instrument, planned for launch in 2014 into an orbit around the sun, will offer another advance over Hubble’s observing power, which has been revolutionary. “We certainly expect to have objects at greater than 13.2 billion light-years, or closer to  the Big Bang than 480 million years,” said Illingworth. “We saw a big change from 480 to 650 million years, but it certainly doesn’t mean that there are no objects earlier than 500 million years. We expect that there are, and that they will go out to about 300 or so million years after the Big Bang.” By that measure, the JWST will push our observing power about another 200 million years into the past.

The crucial tool for dating the universe was the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, launched by NASA in 2001. “The WMAP mission and [Hubble] have very convincingly shown us—very independently—that the universe is really 13.7 billion years old,” said Illingworth. “And so the first stars and galaxies must have occurred just 200-300 million years previously from this [new] observation.”

Illingworth feels confident that the 13.7-billion-year age won’t budge as a result of the JWST. “I would be prepared to bet that astronomers’ and physicists’ current estimate of the age of the universe is really good. We know that better than we know about how galaxies formed in the early universe. So JWST may tell us lots more about dark energy and dark matter, but the age of the universe is already very well determined.”

The 13.7-billion-year timeline of the universe. Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

Meanwhile, the universe continues to expand at an accelerating rate, something discovered only at the end of the 1990s. So at some future point, the new (old) little galaxy will be 13.3 billion light-years away, and later, 13.4, and so on. “To see the first galaxies we will have to look ever farther back at later times,” said Illingworth, “but 10, 20, 50, 100, or 1000 years doesn’t make much of a difference. For humanity, it’s effectively fixed.”

The idea that ancient cultures were keen observers of the night sky is neither surprising nor new: think of the Druids, the Mayans, and the Babylonians. But most examples from the annals of archaeoastronomy seem to come from the northern hemisphere.

Now a team of researchers from Macquarie University in Austrlia is reporting what they believe is the only indigenous record of one of the most spectacular southern astronomical events of the 19th century.

Hubble view of Eta Carinae (N. Smith, J. A. Morse (U. Colorado) et al., NASA)

This Hubble image of the binary star Eta Carinae has always been one of my favorites. It looks like an explosion—which is exactly what it is. In 1843, this “hypergiant” star system, 100 times more massive than our sun and four million times as luminous, suddenly flared up to become brighter than every star in the sky except Sirius. Astronomers still aren’t sure exactly what prompts Eta Carinae’s periodic outbursts—it isn’t a supernova, although it may someday become one. And by 1858 the star had settled back to its normal brightness, just as it always does.

A few years after the 1843 “Great Eruption,” William Stanbridge, a wealthy Australian landowner, went out among the Boorong people of northwest Victoria to collect information on their knowledge of and myths about the night sky. Stanbridge found “two members of a Boorong family who had the reputation of having the best astronomical knowledge in the community,” according to the Macquarie researchers. They sat down at “a small campfire under the stars, located on a large plain near Lake Tyrell,” and talked about the sky overhead.

One of the stars named by the Boorong was Collowgullouric War, meaning “female crow,” which the researchers identify (in a paper to be published in the Journal for Astronomical History and Heritage), as Eta Carinae. The dramatic temporary brightening “would have been widely observed by most, if not all, indigenous peoples of the southern hemisphere,” say the authors. But as far as they can tell, Stanbridge’s 1858 report is the only mention of it in the literature. Read the full paper here.

With the chill of fall in the air it’s that time of year when we’re reminded of turning leaves, football, and the fact that the known universe looks like a Thanksgiving cornucopia.

A cornucopia of planets, stars, galaxies, dark energy, etc. Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

Cosmologists have come up with this graphic to convey how the universe formed, expanded, cooled, and, more recently (on a cosmic time scale), began to accelerate its expansion due to a mysterious and theoretical force called dark energy.

One tool that has been crucial in understanding this evolution is the space-based Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), named for David Wilkinson, a Princeton University cosmologist and founding team member who died in 2002, a year after the observatory was launched into space. From a sun-Earth gravitational balancing point called L2, WMAP has spent nine years scanning the sky, and has just concluded its mission.

WMAP did its work from L2, orbiting the sun about 930,000 miles from Earth. Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

WMAP measured subtle temperature differences in the cosmic microwave background that continues to ring throughout the universe like the fading crash of gong. In this case the gong strike was The Big Bang. WMAP has given astronomers their best look at this remnant radiation, considered the oldest “light” in the universe (it can’t be seen in the visible portion of the spectrum), which was first detected in 1992 by NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer spacecraft.

WMAP collected its final data on August 20, 2010. On September 8, the satellite fired its thrusters, left its working orbit, and entered into a permanent parking orbit around the sun.

Read more about WMAP’s accomplishments here.

The LSST: The whole sky in just three days.

Every ten years or so, the nation’s astronomers put their heads (actually committees) together to come up with a collective wish list for the projects they’d like to see funded over the next decade. Politicians tend to like this method of setting scientific priorities, as it saves them from choosing, and Congress and the White House generally try to follow the plan, like parents working down a Christmas list.

The latest of these “decadal surveys” was just released today by the National Research Council, and if it comes to pass, astronomers should have plenty of fun new tools to play with by 2020.

Topping the wish list are two multipurpose survey instruments: a $1.6 billion spacecraft called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), and a $465 million ground-based observatory, to be built in Chile, called the LSST, for Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Both are good at multiple jobs, and both will address two of modern astronomy’s most pressing questions: determining the nature of “dark energy,” and finding habitable planets around other stars.

I’ve heard a number of presentations on the LSST over the years, and have always been mystified as to why the National Science Foundation, NASA, or somebody else didn’t rush out to complete it. It’s astronomy’s Everything Machine, and there are few things it won’t do. The telescope is a little over 8 meters, not the biggest in the world, but with a wide field of view. More importantly, it surveys the entire sky, with exquisite sensitivity, every three days, which is truly revolutionary. In the past, comparable surveys have taken months or years to cover the whole sky. The LSST will do that twice a week. I’ve heard it called astronomy’s Google in terms of the sheer volume of data it will produce, and in fact the information company is a partner in the project.

Among many other tasks, the LSST should be great at picking out Earth-threatening asteroids, which will stand out as streaks of light against the non-moving stellar background.

I can’t wait to see this thing built.

Read the full decadal survey report here.