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What’s wrong with the sun. Time spent doing what you love is never wasted. Humungous bubbles blown from small black hole. July 9, 2010 § You know how much I love bubbles. This is the coolest one I have seen in a while. The universe is such an amazing place. I wouldn’t live anywhere else. ;-) Read the Story behind this image on NewScientist.com Like this: Like Loading... Tagged: Cool, Science, Space. Beginning and End of the Universe. July 26, 2010 § Universe History * The diagram below outlines the major Eras of the Universe according to the Big Bang Theory. Click the picture for many more details and a larger image. The one line in the article that caught my attention the most was at the end.

“One important point is that since everything that we learn about the Universe comes from light (photons), if there are no photons there is no information. That is a point that has been bothering me. Via Astronomy 309: COSMOLOGY. Like this: Like Loading... Tagged: Cool, Evolution, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Science, Space, Supersymmetry, Unified Field Theory. Milky Way Time Lapse — Nature is Awesome. Big Bang Abandoned in New Model of the Universe. July 29, 2010 § This is one of the most exciting theories I have heard in a long time. I am going to tell you why and you are going to think I am even nuttier than you already do. But, as you know, I don’t care. One night after watching some documentary about Stephen Hawking and the black hole wars, I was lying in bed just contemplating the Universe.

Suddenly and image came into focus and a said aloud to my husband. “I get it. Of course he groggily responded. “What the hell are you talking about?” I went on to explain that I had seen an image of the Universe. “A new cosmology successfully explains the accelerating expansion of the universe without dark energy; but only if the universe has no beginning and no end.Shu’s idea is that time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other. Via Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Big Bang Abandoned in New Model of the Universe. Like this: Like Loading... Global Telescope Network | Science for Citizens. Quantum space monster leaps from a gravity well - space - 17 May. GRAVITY may have the power to create quantum monsters. A strong gravitational field can induce a runaway effect in quantum fluctuations in apparently empty space, resulting in a burgeoning concentration of energy that may explode stars or create black holes.

So say Daniel Vanzella and William Lima at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. Quantum phenomena are not thought to have any significant influence over processes on the astrophysical scale, such as the compression of gas clouds into stars. That's the domain of gravity, which in turn is not supposed to be much affected by quantum events, like an elephant unaware of the microbes on its skin. Now calculations by Vanzella and Lima suggest gravity can trigger a powerful reaction in the fluctuating quantum fields of forces in ... Home. How to See the Best Meteor Showers of 2010: Tools, Tips and 'Sav. NASA JPL Home California Institute of Technology. How to See the Best Meteor Showers of 2010: Tools, Tips and 'Sav.

HubbleSite -- Out of the ordinary...out of this world. Did Phoenix lose a wing? The Mars Phoenix lander touched down near the Red Planet’s north pole in May of 2008. It was designed to investigate the history of water on Mars, digging into the surface soil and examining the chemistry there. It had a limited design lifetime of only a few months, since the onset of Martian winter in the north made weather conditions too severe to continue operations. The hope was that NASA would be able to revive the lander once spring had sprung. Many such attempts have failed, and we may now know why: new images show the lander may be damaged.

The image on the left was taken in July 2008 with the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and shows the lander in blue. The image on the right was taken just a few days ago, on May 7, 2010. The illumination is similar in the two shots — note the landscapes are very similar looking — but the shadow cast by the lander looks different now. Space exploration is hard, damn hard. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona. Mysterious New Object Discovered in Space. A strange and mysterious new object in space may the brightest and long-lasting "micro-quasar" seen thus far, a miniature version of the brightest objects in the universe. The object suddenly began pumping out radio waves last year in the relatively nearby galaxy M82, some 10 million light-years away. Its discovery was announced Tuesday. "The new object, which appeared in May 2009, has left us scratching our heads — we've never seen anything quite like this before," said researcher Tom Muxlow, a radio astronomer at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory in England.

M82 is a "starburst galaxy," one that churns out new stars at a prodigious rate. Most of these stars die in huge explosions, with supernovas occurring roughly every 20 to 30 years in M82. However, the supernovas the researchers expect to see in that galaxy brighten at radio wavelengths over several weeks and then subside in later months. Quasars big and small More study needed. Lasing Beyond Light. Coolest new Free toy from NASA. Swift Catches 500th Gamma-ray Burst. X-Ray Observations Find Evidence for "Missing Matter" in the Uni. [/caption] From a Chandra press release: Scientists have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton to detect a vast reservoir of gas lying along a wall-shaped structure of galaxies about 400 million light years from Earth. In this artist’s impression, a close-up view of the so-called Sculptor Wall is depicted. Spiral and elliptical galaxies are shown in the wall along with the newly detected intergalactic gas, part of the so-called Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM), shown in blue.

This discovery is the strongest evidence yet that the “missing matter” in the nearby Universe is located in an enormous web of hot, diffuse gas. The X-ray emission from WHIM in this wall is too faint to be detected, so instead a search was made for absorption spectrum of light from a bright background source by the WHIM, using deep observations with Chandra and XMM. Source: Chandra Like this: Like Loading... A hole in space… no really, an actual hole! | Bad Astronomy | Di. Space is black. I mean, duh, right? But really, it’s black because it’s almost entirely empty, so even with stars scattered around, there’s nothing to light up. But some parts of space are bright: clouds of gas can be lit up by nearby stars, making them glow. However, just to make things more fun, there can be thicker patches of dust mixed in that block the light from the stars and gas behind them.

We see lots of those, they’re pretty common. NGC 1999 — seen here in a famous Hubble picture — has all these ingredients. A lot of the time those dense spots are where stars are being born, and the only way to see them is in the infrared. Here’s the Herschel image they got. Wait, what? So the astronomers followed up with more observations from the ground, and found something astonishing: it really is a hole, an actual empty region in the middle of a dense cloud! It turns out that the fault may lie in the stars themselves. NGC 1999 is a familiar object to a lot of astronomers. Doctor Who: The Universe Song. 100 epic images from Hubble Space Telescope - Coolvibe.

Japanese Spacecraft Deploys First-Ever Solar Sail | Wired Scienc. The unfurling of a Japanese solar sail, the first demonstration of a new space propulsion technology, went exactly according to plan. According toJAXA’s blog posts and photos from the event, the IKAROS spacecraft’s sail appears to be in place. It’s a big step in its attempt to travel driven only by sunlight. “This is the first sail ever deployed in space, and if they succeed in using it for solar-sail flight — it’ll still be a few weeks before we know that — it’ll be a milestone,” said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, an organization dedicated to promoting space exploration, which is readying its own solar-sailing mission. A solar sail uses the pressure from photons striking its surface to push the spacecraft through space. Materially, the 650 square-foot sail is made of incredibly thin, aluminized plastic that’s only 0.0003 inches thick, a little thicker than spider silk, or about the diameter of a red blood cell.

See Also: Does dark matter come in two types? Contradictory results from experiments searching for dark matter can be resolved if the elusive dark stuff is made up of two types of particle, according to physicists in the US. The new theory could clear up a mystery that came to light in 2008, when the PAMELA collaboration released one of the strongest pieces of evidence yet for the direct detection of dark matter – a substance thought to make up over 80% of the universe's matter. PAMELA saw a bump in the abundance of cosmic anti-electrons, also known as positrons, thought to be generated as dark-matter particles annihilate.

But there was no concordant signal for anti-protons, which should also be generated by the annihilation. That isn't the only problem. Lurking in the 'hidden sector' Now Daniel Feldman at the University of Michigan and colleagues at other US institutions think that they have found a way to join up these mismatching signals. Tantalizing hints The other particle would be an unconventional, hidden-sector WIMP. NASA Face in Space. Science Shorts: Jon Jenkins on Kepler. Rhapsody in Black. Symphony of Science - 'The Case for Mars' (ft. Zubrin, Sagan, Co. Brian Cox: Why we need the explorers. Astronomers Identify the Mystery Meteor That Inspired Walt Whitm. H2356-309 :: 11 May 10.

Scientists have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton to detect a vast reservoir of gas lying along a wall-shaped structure of galaxies about 400 million light years from Earth. In this artist's impression, a close-up view of the so-called Sculptor Wall is depicted. Spiral and elliptical galaxies are shown in the wall along with the newly detected intergalactic gas, part of the so-called Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM), shown in blue. This discovery is the strongest evidence yet that the "missing matter" in the nearby Universe is located in an enormous web of hot, diffuse gas. The X-ray emission from WHIM in this wall is too faint to be detected, so instead a search was made for absorption of light from a bright background source by the WHIM, using deep observations with Chandra and XMM. This background source is a rapidly growing supermassive black hole located far beyond the wall at a distance of about two billion light years.

Back to the Moon! Oh Cool, Super Bubbles! Are We Living Inside a Black Hole. July 23, 2010 § This is a new one. I don’t know about you, but I will have fun thinking abut this one this weekend. My definition of fun is different than most. “Scientists trying to explain the universe’s accelerating expansion usually point to dark energy, which seems to be pushing everything apart.But an Indiana University professor has a new theory, reports New Scientist: We’re inside a black hole that exists in another universe. Specifically, a black hole that rebounded, somewhat like a spring.Some fairly mind-blowing physics is involved here, but the gist is that Nikodem Poplawski of IU-Bloomington used a modified version of Einstein’s general relativity equation set that takes particle spin into account.” Via Are We Living Inside a Black Hole? Like this: Like Loading... Tagged: Astronomy, Cool, Puzzle, Quantum Mechanics, Science.