2013 Science In Review: Death of a Comet and Birth of New Theories of Everything

If Comet ISON had not travelled quite as close to the Sun, we would all have been spending time admiring an amazing "Big Star" over this Christmas time, some 2,000 years after the events at Bethlehem. Instead, the Sun with its overwhelming gravity gobbled up most of this ball of rock and ice denying billions of people grandstand views of what might have been the Comet of the Century, perhaps brighter than the Moon, and even visible during the daytime! I was lucky enough to get sight of this ball just before Thanksgiving, before it met its final fate.

But there was a series of momentous events in 2013, not as public as the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012, but perhaps with equal future impact. Scientific papers were published showing that our Universe could indeed contain as many as ten dimensions (8 space, one time and one gravity) and that it can actually be interpreted as a hologram projected from another flat universe comprising just one dimesional vibrating strings. The fact that we can translate mathematically from one view to the other means that the world of the large (with Einstein's relativity) we live in can be mapped totally to the infintesimally small quantum world of these tiny strings and that they are equivalent.

This is a huge breakthrough confirming a conjecture that has been proposed for several years now. I have not previously been a supporter of String theory but this work is impressive and the mind boggles as to the possibilities - we cannot ignore the math. With the Higgs Boson work possibly pointing to problems with the Big Bang Theory, we might be on the verge of turning all our world of physics upside down as we travel further into this century accompanied by all our new technology of the cloud, smartphones and drones.

Galaxy Central and a Quasar

Last weekend I spent Saturday night bathing my eyes in my favorite part of the night sky, the Virgo Galaxy Cluster, my eyes endlessy scanning countless grey fuzzy gems of island universes some 50 million light years away. Few sights conjure in the mind just how insignificant we are in the astronomical scale of the universe.

But then I shudder when I think of one tiny bluish speck that expands this unimaginable scale some 40 fold larger still. Amongst all the elliptical and spiral galaxies of every shape and size imaginable, this one tiny speck once revealed a whole new class of massive deep sky objects. Discovered some 40 years ago, 3C 273 is the brightest Quasar visible from Earth, an active galaxy that is so voraciously swallowing stars and planets into its black hole that massive jets of particles and energy are streaming out into space for thousands of light years (see the jets in the inset picture). The relative brightness (between magnitude 12.8 and 12.9 on this night) belies its huge distance. Using the Cosmology Calculator program I developed, I know that the light we are seeing left the Quasar 1.95 billion years ago. However, based on the discovery only 10 years ago that the expanson of the universe is actually accelerating, my same Cosmology Calculator shows that 3C 273 is already actually 150 million light years further away right now, some 2.1 billion light years distant. It won't be forever before so many of these Quasars, these denizens of ealier active times in the universe's history, disappear beyond the obsrvable universe forever. I can't help but wonder what scale of history and civilizations are already beyond the visible universe horizon.