Alan Burdick's Blog, page 6

An Exoplanet Too Far

Another day, another world. Since 1995, when astronomers discovered the first planet orbiting a star other than our sun, more than thirty-five hundred extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, have come to light. Gliese 1214b, which orbits the star Gliese 1214, forty-two light-years away, is thought to be a steamy ocean planet, with a thick atmosphere and seas hundreds of miles deep. The temperature on Smertrios, two hundred and fifty-seven light-years away, in the constellation Hercules, is so high—twenty-three hundred degrees Kelvin, far above the melting point of silicon or iron—that it can only mean the planet is perfectly black, absorbing all the energy that its star shines on it. Janssen, which orbits the star 55 Cancri A, forty light-years away, is so carbon-rich that researchers suspect that at least a third of it, a mass equivalent to about three Earths, is diamond. In 2012, Forbes estimated the planet’s value at 26.9 nonillion dollars—26.9 with thirty zeroes after it.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The End of Darkness
Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them
Discovering Planet Nine

The Kings of Seventeenth Place

Three years ago, when my grade-school-age sons began playing soccer seriously—by which I mean when I began coaching their Sunday-league team, and took it too seriously—they told me that they wanted to call our team Sunderland, after the reliably abysmal Premier League team. I asked why. “Because they’re the best of the worst, dad!” one said.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Discovering Planet Nine

Very briefly some years ago, Mike Brown discovered the tenth planet in the solar system. This was in 2005; Brown, an astronomer at Caltech, had spotted an object that officially became known as Eris (he preferred the nickname Xena). Eris was about as big as Pluto, which was still a planet back then, and it orbited the sun at a distance nearly three times greater. But the existence of Eris raised troubling questions, such as: What’s a planet, exactly? And if Eris is a planet, why not also various other small spheres that orbit the sun? In the end, the An Exoplanet Too Far
The End of Darkness
Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them

Slide Show: Secret Lives of the Serengeti

If the GoPro camera is first-person singular—Here I am, BASE jumping from the top of New York City’s Freedom Tower, at night, while it’s still under construction, and getting arrested when I land on the West Side Highway—the camera trap is third-person plural. It removes the observer from the observation. You set it up and walk away, for days or weeks at a time. In your absence, triggered by a combination of heat and motion, it photographs whatever appears in front of it.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Germany 48, Argentina 15

When the World Cup is finally over and the last tears have fallen, there will still be statues. There are more than four hundred public, soccer-related statues around the world, according to a database just published by the Sporting Statues Project— statues of Pelé, of Ronaldo, of Northern Ireland’s George Best, of players and managers otherwise lost to time. They stand outside stadiums; they occupy town squares, traffic circles, and graveyards. Of the four life-size statues honoring the retired Mexican striker Hugo Sánchez, two are installed on the roof of his own house in Cancún.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Cheating the Beautiful Game

In the sixty-ninth minute of the World Cup’s opening match, between Brazil and Croatia, with the score tied 1–1, the Brazilian striker Fred—players in Brazil typically go by their first names—went down in front of the opposing goal, seemingly shoved or tripped by a Croatian defender. Players from the Croatian team swarmed the referee to protest, but in vain; the referee gave the defender, Dejan Lovren, a yellow card and awarded the Brazilians a penalty kick. Neymar, a forward, briskly converted it, giving the Brazilians a permanent lead.

But, by then, even the television commentators were howling, as replays exposed the foul for what it actually was: a spectacular bit of theatre. Lovren had barely touched Fred, who nonetheless slid down on a pillow of air, his arms raised in mock protest even before he hit the ground. He’d faked it, to draw the penalty.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
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The Best Eleven Minutes in Sports in 2016
The Cartoon Lounge: Him, Robot; I, Robert

When Cicadas Fall in Love

It is the nature of youth to make a racket. This happens reliably in New York City every weekday between two and three in the afternoon, when school lets out. Teen-agers spill onto the sidewalks and descend below ground into the subway, where, having loosened their uniforms and shed decorum, they occupy the airwaves—shouting, flirting, arguing, cajoling, checking in, checking out. They sing the song of themselves, loudly, jubilantly, to a rhythm that only they can hear.

In the coming days, the woods and lawns in and around the city will experience a similar visitation, from periodical cicadas. For seventeen years, juveniles of three species of the genus Magicicada have been underground, sipping on rootlets and quietly growing. When the soil reaches the right temperature—64 degrees F, measured eight inches down—they will emerge in astonishing numbers, molt, climb into the trees, and, for the remaining three weeks or so of their lives, sing an exoskeleton-rattling chorus. Periodical cicadas are distinct from the species that emerge annually, in far lesser numbers, and sing in the dog days of summer. (There are seven Magicicada species in all, four of which emerge, every thirteen years, in the Southern and Midwestern states; they seem to like prime numbers.) The reason for the long life cycle is the subject of debate, but the point of the din is clear: to court and mate and so start the period anew.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Dung Beetles, Dancing to the Milky Way

Look up at the sky on a clear, moonless night, and you can make out the broad, hazy band of the Milky Way. For the longest time, observers were unsure what the milkiness was. Celestial clouds? Tiny stars? The “fiery exhalation” of large, sublunar stars, as Aristotle proposed? In 1610, using a telescope (a recent invention), Galileo revealed that the haze is made up of individual, barely visible stars; they are faint only because they are so distant. So continued the hard process of putting us in our proper cosmic place—an orientation that only gets more disorienting with each new scientific discovery.

Today we know that the Milky Way is a galaxy a hundred thousand light-years wide and that it contains more than two hundred billion stars, including our sun. Our galaxy is shaped like a flat, spiraling disk, with a bulge at the center where the density of stars is greatest (there’s a black hole in there, too); we live more than halfway out, on one of the spiral arms. When you view the Milky Way, you are gazing through the plane of this disk and at the universe around and beyond—which, astronomers report, is imponderably vast and contains billions of other galaxies. Are there other sentient beings out there? Who knows. On Earth, at least, humans suppose that we alone seek out the sweep of our own galaxy. But we’re wrong. Late last week, in a paper in Current Biology, Marie Dacke, a biologist at Lund University, in Sweden, and her colleagues revealed that at least one other species takes guidance from the Milky Way: the dung beetle.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Nietzsche at the Beach

It isn’t summer, or the end of it, until I’ve been to the beach. I don’t mean a beach by a lake, where the waves loll and it’s mucky underfoot and you can see weeds growing on the bottom. Nor do I mean the bay-side beach where we sometimes go, though that’s pleasant enough. I need an honest ocean beach, with white sand dunes and a sea breeze that snaps the lifeguard’s flag, where your hair gets salty just sitting there and the surf slams and tosses foam and reminds you that there’s nothing but sea between you and Normandy.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
An Ancient City Emerges in a Remote Rain Forest
Gay America’s Harrowing, Heartening Year
The Growing Gap Between the U.S. and the International Anti-Death-Penalty Consensus