Ghostly gamma-ray beams blast from Milky Way's center (Phys.org) -- As galaxies go, our Milky Way is pretty quiet. Active galaxies have cores that glow brightly, powered by supermassive black holes swallowing material, and often spit twin jets in opposite directions. In contrast, the Milky Way's center shows little activity. "These faint jets are a ghost or after-image of what existed a million years ago," said Meng Su, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and lead author of a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal. "They strengthen the case for an active galactic nucleus in the Milky Way's relatively recent past," he added. The two beams, or jets, were revealed by NASA's Fermi space telescope. The newfound jets may be related to mysterious gamma-ray bubbles that Fermi detected in 2010. "The central accretion disk can warp as it spirals in toward the black hole, under the influence of the black hole's spin," explained co-author Douglas Finkbeiner of the CfA. The two structures also formed differently.
An Atlas of The Universe How to Appreciate Death Metal: 6 steps wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, 118 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has also been viewed 824,905 times. Categories: Featured Articles | Heavy Metal Music In other languages: Español: apreciar el death metal, Italiano: Apprezzare il Death Metal, Português: Apreciar Death Metal, Русский: полюбить дэт–метал, Deutsch: Death Metal zu schätzen lernen, Français: apprécier le death metal
The Bitterroot Footage My name is Chad. I'm a student at a university in New York. I just moved to a studio apartment and needed some furniture. An old wooden box caught my attention. The film was pretty damaged so I just kept it on my bookshelf as decoration, but I couldn't get the images of the pictures out of my head. With help from Dario, we got an old 8mm projector in good working condition on Ebay. I asked my friend to help me make this website so I can share my findings. Wooden Box and photos Open Box with film can and photos One of the photos The projector we're using with plastic reels. Footage online The Photos are online as I promised. Main Page Hubble Goes to the eXtreme to Assemble Farthest-Ever View of the Universe Hubble Goes to the eXtreme to Assemble Farthest-Ever View of the Universe Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe. (Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive, and contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. Magnificent spiral galaxies similar in shape to our Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy appear in this image, as do the large, fuzzy red galaxies where the formation of new stars has ceased. Related Link
Black holes may have been fundamental building blocks of the early universe So roughly a billion years after the Big Bang, the galaxies formed around the gigantic black holes at their cores, sort of like how some snow flakes form around tiny particles of dust. That's very interesting but these new observations open a lot of new questions. The old thinking was that stars, gas and dust at the centers of galaxies often became dense enough to form the giant holes at the cores of galaxies but this new data suggests maybe the holes were there first. How did these primordial black holes form? Where these giant holes like the quantum black holes that Hawking proposed? Hawking's quantum black holes all evaporated from his well known Hawking radiation. For example, by what physical process, can a singularity split into other less massive singularities? The mind reels.
30 Albums That Define Cool Any album “list” is going to be incomplete. It’s going to be filled with albums you agree with, artists you hate and some sort of commentary that you probably disagree with. This list is no different. However, rather than ranking these in order of importance or influence, we decided to pick 30 Albums that Define Cool. London Calling – The Clash Long before Punk Rock was about frosted tips and dudes wearing eyeliner, there was The Clash. Legend – Bob Marley & The Wailers The likelihood of anyone reading this having heard of Reggae music without Bob Marley is unlikely. The Dark Side of the Moon – Pink Floyd Four words: The Wizard of Oz. OK Computer / Kid A – Radiohead Debating OK Computer and Kid A is like discussing religion or politics in public, so we’re not going to. OK Computer: Amazon | iTunes Kid A: Amazon | iTunes Licensed to Ill – Beastie Boys 9 million copies sold. American Recordings – Johnny Cash The Black Album – Metallica Live at Wembley ‘86 – Queen Stankonia – Outkast
Glowing Nebula's Clouds Look Like Giant Human Face in New Photo | NGC 3324, Nebulas & Star Formation | Space Photos & European Southern Observatory The wispy clouds of a distant nebula bursting with newborn stars take on an eerie face-like shape sculpted by stellar winds in a new photo snapped by a telescope in Chile. The hotbed of star birth, called NGC 3324, is full of hot young stars, whose ultraviolet radiation is making the gas clouds glow. The stellar wind and radiation from the newborn stars has also punched out a cavity in the surrounding gas and dust. Astronomers often attach nicknames to nebulas based on their shape and their earthly likenesses. The new image was captured by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) La Silla Observatory in Chile's Atacama Desert. NGC 3324 is located approximately 7,500 light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation of Carina (The Keel, which is part of Jason's ship the Argo). Strong stellar winds and intense ultraviolet radiation from these young stars have carved out a pocket in the nearby gas and dust.
Radiation Rings Hint Universe Was Recycled Over and Over | Wired Science Most cosmologists trace the birth of the universe to the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. But a new analysis of the relic radiation generated by that explosive event suggests the universe got its start eons earlier and has cycled through myriad episodes of birth and death, with the Big Bang merely the most recent in a series of starting guns. That startling notion, proposed by theoretical physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford in England and Vahe Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute and Yerevan State University in Armenia, goes against the standard theory of cosmology known as inflation. The researchers base their findings on circular patterns they discovered in the cosmic microwave background, the ubiquitous microwave glow left over from the Big Bang. The circular features are regions where tiny temperature variations in the otherwise uniform microwave background are smaller than average. See Also:
Metal singer drunkenly records music video with his cat The problem with webcams? Mixing them with alcohol tends to allow things like this to take shape. Here’s what happened when Give Zombies the Vote singer Shaun Callaghan had a few too many, started cuddling his cat—named Bill Murray—and decided to toss together a makeshift music video for their song “Black Hole.” Naturally, he did this in secret, but as soon as his bandmates found the video they wasted no time posting it on reddit because what are friends for, if not humiliating you in front of thousands of total strangers?
Astronomers estimate 100 billion habitable Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, 50 sextillion in the universe Astronomers at the University of Auckland claim that there are actually around 100 billion habitable, Earth-like planets in the Milky Way — significantly more than the previous estimate of around 17 billion. There are roughly 500 billion galaxies in the universe, meaning there is somewhere in the region of 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (5×1022) habitable planets. I’ll leave you to do the math on whether one of those 50 sextillion planets has the right conditions for nurturing alien life or not. The previous figure of 17 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way came from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in January, which analyzed data from the Kepler space observatory. The University of Auckland’s technique, called gravitational microlensing, instead measures the number of Earth-size planets that orbit at twice the Sun-Earth distance. Gravitational microlensing, an effect theorized by Einstein back in 1936, is exactly what it sounds like.
A Huge Ocean Likely Covered More Than a Third of Mars 3.5 Billio It took NASA a few decades, several probes, and a whole lot of money to find hard evidence for the existence of water on the surface of Mars. But timing is everything. Had the agency been looking for water on the Red Planet a few billion years earlier, all they would've needed was a telescope. The CU researchers are by no means the first to suggest that Mars was once home to large oceans, but their research does lend a lot of credence to earlier assertions to that effect, assertions that have been challenged repeatedly over the years. The ocean -- which likely covered about 36 percent of the planet and contained 30 million cubic miles of water, about ten times less than Earth's oceans -- was fed by at least 52 river deltas which were in turn fed by countless river valleys and tributaries. Those deltas, identified by various orbiting missions analyzing the Martian surface, are more than just boundary markers for an ancient ocean. [Science Daily]
A New Equation Reveals Our Exact Odds of Finding Alien Life I find it beyond weird that these supposedly smart people never factor time into the equation. If you miss someone by a minute or a millennium, you've still missed them. Even assuming a habitable world chemically, radiationally and biologically identical to Earth where evolution matched Earth's right up until the rise of humans, we still could've missed a high tech society by 100,000 years. (Radiationally is totally a word. Now.) There's a good reason for that. So it's good to start with an assumption that we do know: Earth like conditions are necessary* but not sufficient for life. *I mean necessary in the logical sense, as in "In the presence of Earth like conditions, life can happen." Did you miss the "L" factor is the Drake equation? The Drake equation factors in such a variable: "L" the lifespan of an intelligent civilization.
Dim Star Becomes 7 Times Hotter in 160 Seconds Hence there would never be an inhabited planet in this system. suddenly putting out 4 to 12 times more thermal energy, even if only briefly, would fry anything resembling a planet near that star. No time for life to develop, as it would need to be almost immune to the scorching irregular flares of the star from the word go. :) Oceans would boil, atmospheres would probably burn off, if that star has planets it must be pretty spectacular to see the energy of such a flare wash outward and turning the closest planets into glowing cinders for a brief period of time. :) A significant portion of the output of a star at 30000 Kelvin would be UV+ . Assuming planets suitable for life have an atmosphere like Earth's designed to shield against UV, X-Rays, and Gamma Rays, Planets around flare stares might not experience the 13000 times increase in total radiation that (sigma * T^4 ) suggests.