Tag Results
13 posts tagged universe
Saturn hurricane snapped by Cassini craft
An enormous hurricane raging at Saturn’s north pole has an eye 2,000km (1,250mi) across - big enough to cover the UK 12 times over.
The striking images of the storm were snapped from a height of 420.000km (260,000mi) by the Cassini spacecraft, which arrived at Saturn in 2004.
They were captured in red and infrared wavelengths and have been false-coloured to show detail.
Posted by
gazette inspiration collector / the blog
Source 
M51: The Whirlpool Galaxy in Dust and Stars
Image Credit: N. Scoville (Caltech), T. Rector (U. Alaska, NOAO) et al., Hubble Heritage Team, NASA
Explanation: The Whirlpool Galaxy is a classic spiral galaxy. At only 30 million light years distant and fully 60 thousand light years across, M51, also known as NGC 5194, is one of the brightest and most picturesque galaxies on the sky. The aboveimage is a digital combination of a ground-based image from the 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory and a space-based image from the Hubble Space Telescope highlighting sharp features normally too red to be seen. Anyone with a good pair of binoculars, however, can see this Whirlpool toward the constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici. M51 is a spiral galaxy of type Sc and is the dominant member of a whole group of galaxies. Astronomers speculate that M51’s spiral structure is primarily due to its gravitational interaction with a smaller galaxy just off the top of the image.
(via atomstargazer)
Posted by
gazette inspiration collector / the blog
by KORB and ECHOLAB
Echolab is a studio specialized in sound design. They have imagined with the motion design studio Korb what would the spread of sound be like on Mars. The result is simply amazing, both for visuals and sounds.
Acoustic dust performance on the Red planet (northwestern part of the Aeolis Quadrangle at 5.4˚S, 137.8˚E) by KORB and ECHOLAB.
A gale is very strong wind. Gale is also a crater on Mars where NASA Curiosity rover landed on August 2012. It is the most advanced mobile robotic science lab ever to explore another planet. The rover aims to behave for a Martian year, but the nuclear power source may last for 14 years. What does the future hold for Curiosity? Will Mars rover ever leave Gale Crater?
Posted by
gazette inspiration collector / the blog
Spinning Black Hole Observed for the First Time
Astronomers have conclusively measured the spin of a black hole for the first time by detecting the mind-bending relativistic effects that warp space-time at the very edge of its event horizon — the point of no return, beyond which even light cannot escape.
(via discoverynews)
Posted by
gazette inspiration collector / the blog
![Will our Universe end in a “big slurp”?
Higgs-like particle suggests it might
If the “Higgs-like particle” discovered last year is really the long-sought Higgs boson, the bad news is that its mass suggests the universe will end in a fast-spreading bubble of doom. The good news? It’ll probably be tens of billions of years before that particular doomsday arrives.
That’s one of the weirder twists coming out of the continuing analysis of results from Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, which produced the first solid evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson last year. Current theory holds that the Higgs boson plays a role in imparting mass to other fundamental particles. Confirming the discovery of the Higgs would fill in the last blank spot in that theory, known as the Standard Model.
Physicists discussed the state of the Higgs quest in Boston on Monday during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
[[MORE]]
So far, the particle that was found at the LHC fits all the requirements for the Higgs boson, but scientists aren’t quite ready to confirm that the particle is really, truly the Higgs boson. It could be, say, just the first of multiple particles involved in the process. “The door is still very much open that there’s [another] particle that has a role to play, or even more than that,” said Christopher Hill, a physicist at Ohio State University who is also deputy physics coordinator for the LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid experiment.
The LHC has just started a two-year shutdown for equipment upgrades — and Howard Gordon, deputy chair of the physics program at Brookhaven National Laboratory, said “it’s going to take another few years” after the collider is restarted to confirm definitively that the newfound particle is the Higgs boson.
In the meantime, physicists have tightened their estimates of the particle’s mass: Hill said the current estimate from the Compact Muon Solenoid is 125.8 billion electron volts, or 125.8 GeV, plus or minus 0.6 GeV. The figure from the LHC’s other Higgs-boson detector, known as ATLAS, is 125.2 GeV, plus or minus 0.7 GeV.
Those figures can be factored into equations that point to the long-term fate of the universe, said Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab.
So what’s the outlook?
“If you use all the physics that we know now, and we do what we think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” Lykken said. “It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable. At some point, billions of years from now, it’s all going to be wiped out.”
He said the parameters for our universe, including the Higgs mass value as well as the mass of another subatomic particle known as the top quark, suggest that we’re just at the edge of stability, in a “metastable” state. Physicists have been contemplating such a possibility for more than 30 years. Back in 1982, physicists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek wrote in Naturethat “without warning, a bubble of true vacuum could nucleate somewhere in the universe and move outwards at the speed of light, and before we realized what swept by us our protons would decay away.”
Lykken put it slightly differently: “The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realize that, a little bubble of what you might think of as an alternate universe will appear somewhere, and it will spread out and destroy us.”
That alternate universe would be “much more boring,” Lykken said. Which led him to ask a philosophical question: “Why do we live in a universe that’s just on the edge of stability?” He wondered whether a universe has to be near the danger zone to produce galaxies, stars, planets … and life.
Even Hill found it interesting that the parameters of particle physics put our universe right along the critical line. “That’s something new, which we didn’t know before, and which leads some of us to that there’s something else coming,” Hill said.
When Hill referred to “something else,” he was talking about new discoveries in physics — not the end of the world. Lykken emphasized that it would be at least tens of billions of years before vacuum instability took hold.
“To get the exact number, we need more funding,” he joked.
Read article here
Image Credit: Corbis](http://24.media.tumblr.com/791759713d70de452cc63907393c37d8/tumblr_migfdtTLf01r66v14o1_r1_250.jpg)
Will our Universe end in a “big slurp”?
Higgs-like particle suggests it might
If the “Higgs-like particle” discovered last year is really the long-sought Higgs boson, the bad news is that its mass suggests the universe will end in a fast-spreading bubble of doom. The good news? It’ll probably be tens of billions of years before that particular doomsday arrives.
That’s one of the weirder twists coming out of the continuing analysis of results from Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, which produced the first solid evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson last year. Current theory holds that the Higgs boson plays a role in imparting mass to other fundamental particles. Confirming the discovery of the Higgs would fill in the last blank spot in that theory, known as the Standard Model.
Physicists discussed the state of the Higgs quest in Boston on Monday during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
(via astronomerinprogress)
Posted by
gazette inspiration collector / the blog
![Revealed: first image of a new planet being formed with star dust
World’s highest radio telescope captures image (left) providing evidence of how ‘gas’ planets are formed
The world’s highest radio telescope, built on a Chilean plateau in the Andes 5,000 metres above sea level, has captured the first image of a new planet being formed as it gobbles up the cosmic dust and gas surrounding a distant star.
[[MORE]]
Astronomers have long predicted that giant “gas” planets similar to Jupiter would form by collecting the dust and debris that forms around a young star. Now they have the first visual evidence to support the phenomenon, scientists said.
The image taken by the Atacama Millimetre-submillimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile shows two streams of gas connecting the inner and outer disks of cosmic material surrounding the star HD 142527, which is about 450 light-years from Earth.
Astronomers believe the gas streamers are the result of two giant planets – too small to be visible in this image – exerting a gravitational pull on the cloud of surrounding dust and gas, causing the material to flow from the outer to inner stellar disks, said Simon Casassus of the University of Chile in Santiago.
“The most natural interpretation for the flows seen by ALMA is that the putative proto-planets are pulling streams of gas inward towards them that are channelled by their gravity. Much of the gas then overshoots the planets and continues inward to the portion of the disk close to the star, where it can eventually fall onto the star itself,” Dr Casassus said.
“Astronomers have been predicting that these streams exist, but this is the first time we’ve been able to see them directly. Thanks to the new ALMA telescope, we’ve been able to get direct observations to illuminate current theories of how planets are formed,” he said.
The image, published in the journal Nature, appears to answer a long-standing conundrum of star formation: how does a new sun continue to grow by accumulating cosmic material when orbiting proto-planets are busy gobbling up the same source of cosmic dust and gas, creating huge gaps in the star-forming cloud of material.
“This has been a bit of a mystery, but now we have found a process that allows the star to continue to grow despite the gap,” Dr Casassus said.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/e238b5f2ca9c1b710b7dd74bb6e99703/tumblr_mg1idvqEao1rpbss2o1_250.png)
Revealed: first image of a new planet being formed with star dust
World’s highest radio telescope captures image (left) providing evidence of how ‘gas’ planets are formed
The world’s highest radio telescope, built on a Chilean plateau in the Andes 5,000 metres above sea level, has captured the first image of a new planet being formed as it gobbles up the cosmic dust and gas surrounding a distant star.
Posted by
gazette inspiration collector / the blog
On the 40th anniversary of the famous ‘Blue Marble’ photograph taken of Earth from space, Planetary Collective presents a short film documenting astronauts’ life-changing stories of seeing the Earth from the outside – a perspective-altering experience often described as the Overview Effect.
Posted by
gazette inspiration collector / the blog
![plate10:The sizes of the celestial bodies [in some copies the terrestrial sphere has the continents drawn in by hand]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdttxaZ8uY1rpbss2o2_r1_250.jpg)
by Andreas Cellarius
The publication of Andreas Cellarius’ Harmonia Macrocosmica in 1660 forms the final chapter of an ambitious cartographic project initiated 25 years earlier by the Amsterdam publisher Johannes Janssonius (1588-1664), namely, the publication of an ATLAS in several volumes which described not only the surface of the Earth but the whole of Creation, including the cosmos and its history.
Posted by
gazette inspiration collector / the blog
What does the universe look like on small scales? On large scales? Humanity is discovering that the universe is a very different place on every proportion that has been explored. For example, so far as we know, every tiny proton is exactly the same, but every huge galaxy is different. On more familiar scales, a small glass table top to a human is a vast plane of strange smoothness to a dust mite — possibly speckled with cell boulders. Not all scale lengths are well explored — what happens to the smallest mist droplets you sneeze, for example, is a topic of active research — and possibly useful to know to help stop the spread of disease. The below interactive flash animation, a modern version of the classic video Powers of Ten, is a new window to many of the known scales of our universe. By moving the scroll bar across the bottom, you can explore a diversity of sizes, while clicking on different items will bring up descriptive information. (text source)
experience it on the official website on it’s actual size
Flash Animation Credit & Copyright : Cary & Michael Huang
14 year old Cary said he invites people to correct any errors they find. This is the second version.
______
Powers of Ten is a 1968 American documentary film written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten (see also logarithmic scale and order of magnitude)
duration 9 mins
Posted by
gazette inspiration collector / the blog
The Average Color of the Universe
Credit: Karl Glazebrook & Ivan Baldry (JHU)
Explanation: What color is the universe? More precisely, if the entire sky were smeared out, what color would the final mix be? This whimsical question came up when trying to determine what stars are commonplace in nearby galaxies. The answer, depicted above, is a conditionally perceived shade of beige. To determine this, astronomers computationally averaged the light emitted by one of the largest sample of galaxies yet analyzed: the 200,000 galaxies of the 2dF survey. The resulting cosmic spectrum has some emission in all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, but a single perceived composite color.
via NASA
Posted by
gazette inspiration collector / the blog
Distant rocky planet ‘could be future human home’
While Gliese 581d shows potential, it would take around 300,000 years to get there with current space traveling technology.
PARIS — A rocky world orbiting a nearby star has been confirmed as the first planet outside our solar system to meet key requirements for sustaining life, scientists said on Monday.
Modelling of planet Gliese 581d shows it has the potential to be warm and wet enough to nurture Earth-like life, they said.
It orbits a red dwarf star called Gliese 581, located around 20 light years from Earth, which makes it one of our closest neighbours.
Gliese 581d orbits on the outer fringes of the star’s “Goldilocks zone”, where it is not so hot that water boils away, nor so cold that water is perpetually frozen. Instead, the temperature is just right for water to exist in liquid form.
“With a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere — a likely scenario on such a large planet — the climate of Gliese 581d is not only stable against collapse but warm enough to have oceans, clouds and rainfall,” France’s National Centre for Scientific Research said in a press release.
More than 500 planets orbiting other stars have been recorded since 1995, detected mostly by a tiny wobble in stellar light.
Exoplanets are named after their star and listed alphabetically, in order of discovery.
Until now, the big interest in Gliese 581’s roster of planets focussed on Gliese 581g.
It leapt into the headlines last year as “Zarmina’s World,” after its observers announced it had roughly the same mass as Earth’s and was also close to the Goldilocks zone.
But that discovery has since been discounted by many. Indeed, some experts suspect that the Gliese 581g may not even exist but was simply a hiccup in starlight.
Its big brother, Gliese 581d, has a mass at least seven times that of Earth and is about twice our planet’s size, according to the new study, which appears in a British publication, The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The planet, spotted in 2007, had initially been dismissed as a candidate in the hunt for life.
It receives less than a third of the solar radiation Earth gets, and may be “tidally locked”, meaning that one side of it always faces the sun, which would give it permanent dayside and nightside.
But the new model, devised by CNRS climate scientists Robin Wordsworth, Francois Forget and colleagues, showed surprising potential.
Its atmosphere would store heat well, thanks to its dense CO2, a greenhouse gas. And the red light from the star would also penetrate the atmosphere and warm the surface.
“In all cases, the temperatures allow for the presence of liquid water on the surface,” say the researchers.
For budding travellers, though, Gliese 581d would “still be a pretty strange place to visit,” the CNRS said.
“The denser air and thick clouds would keep the surface in a perpetual murky red twilight, and its large mass means that surface gravity would be around double that on Earth.”
Getting to the planet would still require a sci-fi breakthrough in travel for earthlings.
A spaceship travelling close to light speed would take more than 20 years to get there, while our present rocket technology would take 300,000 years.
Posted by
gazette inspiration collector / the blog
