The 25 Biggest Turning Points in Earth's History. Sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy. Gigapixels of Andromeda [4K] Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time in 4,000 Years of Mapping the Universe. Long before Galileo pioneered the telescope, antagonizing the church and unleashing a “hummingbird effect” of innovation, humanity had been busy cataloging the heavens through millennia of imaginative speculative maps of the cosmos.
We have always sought to make visible the invisible forces we long to understand, the mercy and miracle of existence, and nothing beckons to us with more intense allure than the majesty and mystery of the universe. Four millennia of that mesmerism-made-visible is what journalist, photographer, and astrovisualization scholar Michael Benson explores with great dedication and discernment in Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time (public library) — a pictorial catalog of our quest to order the cosmos and grasp our place in it, a sensemaking process defined by what Benson aptly calls our “gradually dawning, forever incomplete situational awareness.”
Büyüleyici şekilde rahatsız edici bir düşünce - Neil deGrasse Tyson. We Are a Cosmic Accident: Alan Lightman on Dark Energy, the Multiverse, and Why We Exist. By Maria Popova How we drew the one we have from the zillions of possible universes in the cosmic lottery hat.
Questions like why our world exists and what nothing is have occupied minds great and ordinary since the dawn of humanity, and yet for all our scientific progress, they continue to do so, yielding only hypotheses rather than concrete answers. But there is something immutably heartening in the difference between the primitive hypotheses of myth, folklore and religion, which handed off such mysteries to various deities and the occasional white-bearded man, and the increasingly educated guesses of modern science. The most compelling example of fine-tuning is dark energy — an invisible and unexpected cosmological force that hides in empty space and works against the universe’s slowing expansion, a sort of “cosmic accelerator pedal” that is speeding up its expansion and causing galaxies to drift away from one another.
On one thing most physicists agree. Donating = Loving. Measuring the Universe Likes. Chromoscope - View the Universe in different wavelengths. A Brain Cell is the Same as the Universe. A Brain Cell is the Same as the Universe by Cliff Pickover, Reality Carnival Physicists discover that the structure of a brain cell is the same as the entire universe.
Image Source Return to Reality Carnival. If you like stories like this, Reality Carnival has many more. If the Moon Was Only 1 Pixel - A tediously accurate map of the solar system. Mercury Venus Earth. What is the Multiverse, and why do we think it exists? — Starts With A Bang! “In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.”
-Walt Whitman When you think about our Universe, the scale of it is hard to conceive of. Each of us is just a simple human being, a little under two meters tall; a collection of just under 10^28 atoms. Yet our Earth is — literally —more than a million times larger than us in all three dimensions: a nearly perfect sphere more than 10,000 kilometers in diameter.
But what we have access to is so much more than just the Earth. But what if we went up another factor of a million? After all, space is an awfully big place. Believe it or not, another factor of a million — which is a little more than a million million million (just over 10^18) times larger in every direction than we are — begins to capture everything within hundreds of light years of us. But that’s three factors of a million, and we haven’t even left our own galaxy. Observationally, we can’t know for sure which one we have. Digital Universe. Solar System Scope. E X P E R I E N C E. The Scale of the Universe. The Scale of the Universe 2 — Other Languages. Big Spin" Model of Gravity.
By Sergey Ivanenko Posted: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 Last updated: Saturday, February 25, 2006 PACS 04.50.
+h – Alternative theories of gravity (formerly "Inertial Theory of Gravity ", modified) This is an attempt to explain fundamental reasons for gravity, going beyond its relativistic definition as spacetime curvature. The “Big Spin” model suggests that gravity is a result of rotation of the Universe’s hypersphere (not a Gödel's rotation). It assumes that space possesses elastic properties and Newton’s law of inertia holds true for higher dimension(s). Motivation Although General Relativity is a widely accepted theory of gravity with some aspects of it proved experimentally, it serves as a mathematical model, rather than physical explanation of a phenomena that can be matched with an intuitive analogy from everyday life. How We Know Gravity is Not (Just) a Force. Want to stay on top of all the space news?
Follow @universetoday on Twitter Illustration of a binary system radiating gravity waves. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada. Gaia hypothesis. The study of planetary habitability is partly based upon extrapolation from knowledge of the Earth's conditions, as the Earth is the only planet currently known to harbour life The Gaia hypothesis, also known as Gaia theory or Gaia principle, proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet.
Exploring-space-720.jpg (JPEG Image, 720 × 5850 pixels) - Scaled (11%) Space, Stars, Mars, Earth, Planets and More - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. W. M. Keck Observatory. Solarham. HubbleSite - Out of the ordinary...out of this world. THE SAGAN SERIES (Part 10) - The Pale Blue Dot. M83-Starstream-M. The Beginning of the Universe and the Limit of Knowledge. “Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at all.
It is really only a theory of the aftermath of a bang.” -Alan Guth So you finally understand it. The Big Bang tells us that the Universe was hotter, denser, and expanding at a faster rate in the past. Image credit: original source unknown. The farther back we go, the closer together everything was, the higher in temperature (and shorter in wavelength) all the radiation was, and — of course — the younger the Universe was. Image credit: Ned Wright (possibly Will Kinney, too), via At some point, it was hot enough that neutral atoms couldn’t even form; as soon as an electron would find an atomic nucleus, a high-enough-energy photon would come along and ionize the atom’s constituents. Image credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Image credit: Ned Wright. Inflation is a period of time where the Universe was expanding exponentially. Image credit: Ned Wright, via Image credit: Cosmic Inflation by Don Dixon. Black marble: new high-resolution satellite images of the Earth at night. Further Up Yonder: A Message from ISS to All Humankind. Www.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/orrery_2011_bce.swf.
How Far is it to Mars? 100,000 Stars.