ADVENTURE OF DISCOVERYS

The Big Bang   "Big things have small beginnings." All right, so that's actually a quote from Michael Fassbender in ( Prometheus, ) but nothing could be more true for radio astronomer duo Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias. The secret to discovering the prevailing theory to how the universe was made began with noise, like common radio static. In 1964, while working with the Holmdel antenna in New Jersey, the two astronomers discovered a background noise that left them perplexed. After ruling out possible interference from urban areas, nuclear tests, or pigeons living in the antenna, Wilson and Penzias came across an explanation with Robert Dicke's theory that radiation leftover from a universe-forming big bang would now act as background cosmic radiation. In fact, only 37 miles from the Holmdel antenna at Princeton University, Dicke and his team had been searching for this background radiation. When he heard the news of Wilson and Penzias' di...

Global Warming Greenland's Melt Season Started Nearly Two Months Early Apr 14, 2016 12:37 PM ET // by Brian Kahn, Climate Central A satellite image shows Greenland from space (file photo). Warm, wet weather helped set a record for the earliest start to the Greenland ice sheet melt season. NASA Related Links What's Ahead for Climate Change in 2016? Climate Change Is Drying Up Islands Climate Change May Threaten $2.5 Trillion in Assets   To say the 2016 Greenland melt season is off to the races is an understatement. Warm, wet conditions rapidly kicked off the melt season this weekend, more than a month-and-a-half ahead of schedule. It has easily set a record for earliest melt season onset, and marks the first time it’...

Dec 12, 2012 03:00 AM ET 10. Pluto-Sized Eris Rocks Solar System In January 2005, Mike Brown and his team at Palomar Observatory, Calif. discovered 136199 Eris, a minor body that is 27 percent bigger than Pluto. Eris had trumped Pluto and become the 9th largest body known to orbit the sun. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided that the likelihood of finding more small rocky bodies in the outer solar system was so high that the definition "a planet" needed to be reconsidered. The end result: Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet. Pluto acquired a "minor planet designator" in front of its name: "134340 Pluto." Mike Brown's 2005 discovery of Eris was the trigger that changed the face of our solar system, defining the planets and adding Pluto to a growing family of dwarf planets.

The Darkest World: Scientists Discover 'Darth Vader' Planet August 18, 2011 11:22 AM ET       The distant exoplanet TrES-2b, shown here in an artist's conception, is darker than the blackest coal. It refuses to give back light. Why? That's a mystery. David A. Aguilar /CfA The polarities of darkness and light have been central to human cultural imaginings since our origins. In the 5th century B.C. there was Zoroastrian religion, based on the eterna l battle between darkness (evil) and light (spiritual purity). In the modern world we have the mythic conflict between Luke Skywalker in his white tunic and his black-shrouded, fallen father, Darth Vader. Given our penchant for pulling the world apart into this kind of dichotomy, it is, perhaps, no wonder that the recent discovery of the darkest of dark planets has made news. A few weeks ago, two astronom...

Tech Darkest Material on Earth Gets Even Darker Mar 7, 2016 12:10 PM ET // by Tracy Staedter ‹ › A material called Vantablack is the darkest, most blackest, most void-on-earth material ever invented. It was introduced by Surrey NanoSystems in 2014 and back then, the company said the material was capable of absorbing 99.96 percent of light. As if that wasn’t dark enough, the company announced this week that they’ve made Vantablack even darker and by how much is unknown — because it’s so black, even spectrometers can’t measure it. How Nanotech Can Make You Better: Photos The material is made by growing a forest of carbon nanotubes on aluminum-based surfaces. Until Vantablack came out, other attempts at making super black materials required expens...

Scientists have come to some surprising conclusions about the world and our place in it. Are some things just better left unknown? The consequences of burning fossil fuels are already apparent. We have just begun to see the effects of human-induced climate change. (AlaskaStock / Corbis) By Laura Helmuth smithsonian.com May 13, 2010 (Continued from page 1) 4. Things that taste good are bad for you. In 1948, the Framingham Heart Study enrolled more than 5,000 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, to participate in a long-term study of risk factors for heart disease. ( Very long term—the study is now enrolling the grandchildren of the original volunteers.) It and su...

The Ten Most Disturbing Scientific Discoveries Scientists have come to some surprising conclusions about the world and our place in it. Are some things just better left unknown? The consequences of burning fossil fuels are already apparent. We have just begun to see the effects of human-induced climate change. (AlaskaStock / Corbis) 1. The Earth is not the center of the universe. We’ve had more than 400 years to get used to the idea, but it’s still a little unsettling. Anyone can plainly see that the Sun and stars rise in the east, sweep across the sky and set in the west; the Earth feels stable and stationary. When Copernicus proposed that the Earth and other planets instead orbit the Sun, … his contemporaries found his massive logical leap “patently absurd,” says Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “It would take several generations to sink in. Very few scholars saw it as a ...