Colliding galaxies NGC 4038 and 4039. B. Whitemore/NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STSC/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration
1. Eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant was one of the first people to theorize that the Milky Way was not the only galaxy in the universe. Kant coined the term island universe to describe a galaxy.
2. Astronomers now estimate that there are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.
3. One of the earliest uses of the English term Milky Way was in Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th-century poem “The House of Fame.” He likened the galaxy to a celestial roadway.
4. While we’re talking road trips: Due to the expansion of the universe, all other galaxies are receding from our own. Galaxies farther from the Milky Way are speeding away faster than those nearby.
5. Some of the galaxies receding from the Milky Way are ellipsoidal, like footballs. Galaxies can also be thin and flat with tentacle-like arms — just like the Milky Way.
6. Galaxies come in irregular shapes, too, including many dwarf galaxies. These galaxies, the smallest in the universe, contain only a few hundred or a few thousand stars (compared with 100 billion stars in the Milky Way).(more…)
Ethan Siegel is a theoretical astrophysicist living in Portland, Oregon, who specializes in cosmology. He has been writing about the Universe for everyone since 2008, and can’t wait for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. A different version of this post appeared on his blog, Starts With a Bang.
“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” –Joseph Campbell
One of the bravest things that was ever done with the Hubble Space Telescope was to find a patch of sky with absolutely nothing in it—no bright stars, no nebulae, and no known galaxies—and observe it. Not just for a few minutes, or an hour, or even for a day. But orbit-after-orbit, for a huge amount of time, staring off into the nothingness of empty space, recording image after image of pure darkness.
What would we find, out beyond the limits of what we could see? Something? Nothing? After a total of more than 11 days of observing this tiny area of the sky, this is what we found:
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field—the deepest view ever of the Universe, was the result. With all those orbits spent observing what appears to be a blank patch of sky, what we were really doing was probing the far-distant Universe, seeing beyond what any human eye—even one aided by a telescope—could ever hope to see. It took literally hundreds of thousands of seconds of observations across four separate color filters to produce these results.(more…)
Ultraviolet light robot kills Ebola in two minutes; why doesn’t every hospital have one of these?
Saturday, October 11, 2014
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
While vaccine makers and drug companies are rushing to bring medical interventions to the market that might address the Ebola pandemic, there’s already a technology available right now that can kill Ebola in just two minutes in hospitals, quarantine centers, commercial offices and even public schools.
It’s called the Xenex Germ-Zapping Robot, and it was invented by a team of Texas doctors whose company is based on San Antonio. (And no, I didn’t get paid to write this. I’m covering this because this technology appears to be a viable lifesaving invention.)
The Xenex Germ-Zapping Robot uses pulsed xenon-generated UV light to achieve what the company calls “the advanced environmental cleaning of healthcare facilities.” Because ultraviolet light destroys the integrity of the RNA that viruses are made of, it renders viruses “dead.” (Viruses aren’t really alive in the first place, technically speaking, so the correct term is “nonviable.”)(more…)
In a recent experiment, a person in India said “hola” and “ciao” to three other people in France. Today, the Web, smartphones and international calling might make that not seem like an impressive feat, but it was. The greetings were not spoken, typed or texted. The communication in question happened between the brains of a set of study subjects, marking one of the first instances of brain-to-brain communication on record.
The team, whose members come from Barcelona-based research institute Starlab, French firm Axilum Robotics and Harvard Medical School, published its findings earlier this month in the journal PLOS One. Study co-author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School, hopes this and forthcoming research in the field will one day provide a new communication pathway for patients who might not be able to speak.
“We want to improve the ways people can communicate in the face of limitations—those who might not be able to speak or have sensory impairments,” he says. “Can we work around those limitations and communicate with another person or a computer?”(more…)
It has been written about before, over and over again, but cannot be emphasized enough. The world of quantum physics is an eerie one, one that sheds light on the truth about our world in ways that challenge the existing framework of accepted knowledge.
What we perceive as our physical material world, is really not physical or material at all, in fact, it is far from it. This has been proven time and time again by multiple Nobel Peace Prize (among many other scientists around the world) physicists, on of them being Niels Bohr, a Danish Physicist who made significant contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory.
“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet. Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” – Niels Bohr
At the turn of the ninetieth century, physicists started to explore the relationship between energy and the structure of matter. In doing so, the belief that a physical, Newtonian material universe that was at the very heart of scientific knowing was dropped, and the realization that matter is nothing but an illusion replaced it. Scientists began to recognize that everything in the Universe is made out of energy.
Does Objective Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?
In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect’s name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein’s long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect’s findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.
Quora user Ross Heyman shared the following thought experiment by Neil deGrasse Tyson, famed astrophysicist and host of the TV show “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”:
There’s a worm in the street, you walk by it. Does the worm know that you think you’re smart? The worm has no concept of your smarts. Because you’re that much smarter than the worm. So the worm has no idea that something smart is walking by it. Which makes me wonder whether we have any concept—if a super species walked by us. Maybe they’re uninterested in us because we’re too stupid for them to even imagine having a conversation. You don’t walk by worms and go, “Gee, I wonder what the worm is thinking.” This is just not a thought that you have! So one of the best pieces of evidence for why we haven’t been visited by aliens is that they have actually observed us, and concluded there is no intelligent sign of life on earth.
Scientists Capture The Sound Of An Atom For The First Time
September 12, 2014 | by Stephen Luntz
Photo credit: Philip Krantz, Krantz NanoArt. An artificial atom (right) generates sound waves consisting of a stream of quantum particles picked up on the left by a “microphone” of metal fingers.Illustration not to scale.
It’s been only a day since an “artificial atom” was used to do extraordinary things with light, but now it’s the turn of sound. In a new paper published in Science, lead author Martin Gustafasson describes how an artificial atom and “the weakest sound that can be detected” form a tool for studying quantum behavior.
An artificial atom is a material made to behave electronically like a single atom. They can be formed from millions of billions of atoms, but share the atomic trait that they absorb certain quantities of energy and may then release this energy as light.
In a preparatory paper published in a July issue of Physical Review A, a sub-group of the Science authors note that an important feature of atoms is that they are much smaller than the wavelength of optical light, making them appear like a point. To achieve the same effect with formations made from multiple atoms, it is necessary to use the longer wavelengths of microwave radiation.(more…)
Photo credit: Princeton University, Engineering School. By creating a “self-trapping regime” scientists have made light behave like a crystal
On a late summer afternoon it can seem like sunlight has turned to honey, but could liquid—or even solid—light be more than a piece of poetry? Princeton University electrical engineers say not only is it possible, they’ve already made it happen.
In Physical Review X, the researchers reveal that they have locked individual photons together so that they become like a solid object.
“It’s something that we have never seen before,” says Dr. Andrew Houck, an associate professor of electrical engineering and one of the researchers. “This is a new behavior for light.”
The researchers constructed what they call an “artificial atom” made of 100 billion atoms engineered to act like a single unit. They then brought this close to a superconducting wire carrying photons. In one of the almost incomprehensible behaviors unique to the quantum world, the atom and the photons became entangled so that properties passed between the “atom” and the photons in the wire. The photons started to behave like atoms, correlating with each other to produce a single oscillating system.(more…)
Astronomer and mathematician Bernard Carr theorizes that many of the phenomena we experience but cannot explain within the physical laws of this dimension actually occur in other dimensions.
Bernard Carr (Wikimedia Commons)
Albert Einstein stated that there are at least four dimensions. The fourth dimension is time, or spacetime, since Einstein said space and time cannot be separated. In modern physics, theories about the existence of up to 11 dimensions and the possibility of more have gained traction.
Carr, a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London, says our consciousness interacts with another dimension. Furthermore, the multi-dimensional universe he envisions has a hierarchical structure. We are at the lowest-level dimension.
“The model resolves well-known philosophical problems concerning the relationship between matter and mind, elucidates the nature of time, and provides an ontological framework for the interpretation of phenomena such as apparitions, OBEs [out-of-body experiences], NDEs [near-death-experiences], and dreams,” he wrote in a conference abstract.
Carr reasons that our physical sensors only show us a 3-dimensional universe, though there are actually at least four dimensions. What exists in the higher dimensions are entities we cannot touch with our physical sensors. He said that such entities must still have a type of space to exist in.(more…)
Stanford University Professor Emeritus William A. Tiller has been researching a level of physical reality hitherto undetectable with conventional measurement instruments.
He says two kinds of substances exist:
1. The electric atom/molecule level: Substances on this level can be measured with traditional instruments. We can measure them because they are electric-charge based.
2. The magnetic information waves level: Tiller explains in an introduction to his research on his website: “This new level of substance, because it appears to function in the physical vacuum (the empty space between the fundamental electric particles that make up our normal electric atoms and molecules), is currently invisible to us and to our traditional measurement instruments.”
This second type of substance has great power, and it is affected by human thought.
Power of the Magnetic Information Waves
Tiller put the energy of the magnetic information waves level into perspective in an interview for the documentary “What the Bleep Do We Know?” (See the interviews below) He compared the latent energy of the entire known universe to the latent energy in the vacuum inside a single hydrogen atom.(more…)
By Tara MacIsaac, Epoch Times | September 10, 2014A visitor takes a phone photograph of a large back lit image of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the Science Museum’s ‘Collider’ exhibition in London, England, on Nov. 12, 2013. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
The universe is full of mysteries that challenge our current knowledge. In “Beyond Science” Epoch Times collects stories about these strange phenomena to stimulate the imagination and open up previously undreamed of possibilities. Are they true? You decide.
The Large Hadron Collider earned its fame finding the Higgs boson particle, the so-called “God particle,” but it failed to find something very important it was looking for—superpartner particles. The search for superpartner particles has frustrated physicists to the point of figurative nail-biting—the particles aren’t where they were very much expected to be, and if they don’t exist, a paradigm shift could be imminent.
A principle called supersymmetry (casually referred to as “Susy,” pronounced “Suzy”) is supposed to balance the equation of our existence. According to Susy, every particle has a superpartner particle that we haven’t yet been able to detect.
“If superpartners are not found, we face a paradigm rupture in our basic grasp of quantum physics. Already this prospect is inspiring a radical rethinking of basic phenomena that underlie the fabric of the universe,” wrote Maria Spiropulu, an experimental particle physicist who works on the search for Susy using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist based at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, in a Scientific American article published May. They continued: “Indeed, results from the first run of the LHC have ruled out almost all the best-studied versions of supersymmetry. The negative results are beginning to produce if not a full-blown crisis in particle physics, then at least a widespread panic.”(more…)
Keeping a sense of perspective in these crazy times is imperative, and as astronomy pushes the envelope, seeking an ever greater understanding of our place in the cosmos, we are sometimes rewarded with fascinating new visual interpretations of our universe that have the power to completely re-write our sense of purpose and possibility. Making the struggles we have here on Earth seem small. The following 3 videos are inspiring examples of how technology can assist in our evolution, and help us to keep stay grounded, by providing us renewed perspectives on life here on Gaia.
1. Laniakea – The Immeasurable Universe
Thanks to the recent work of a team of researchers at the University of Hawaii, we now have an even better of idea of just how tiny our little lives are in the big picture of the universe. In fact, as a new model for mapping the movement of galaxies has revealed, the cluster of galaxies that is home to planet earth may be around 100 times bigger than previously thought.
Setting out to answer the question, “where in the universe is the Milky Way?,” the team of scientists has drawn a compelling new map of the super cluster of galaxies which is our home, in relation to neighboring clusters. Gathering data on the positions and relative movements of over 8000 galaxies, while accounting for the effects of the continuous tug of gravity, they have mapped the cosmic flows, or flight paths of these galaxies, which gives the most comprehensive picture we’ve ever had of how the universe organizes itself.(more…)
Carl Edward Sagan (9 November 1934 – 20 December 1996) was an American astronomer and popular science writer and presenter, revered and loved for his inspired and enlightened perspective and sincere efforts to truly educate. Enjoy these selected quotes. – Zen
“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.”
“It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English (up to fifty words used in correct context) no human being has been reported to have learned Dolphinese.”
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”(more…)
New Experiment Will Answer Some Mind-Bending Questions On Whether We Live In a Hologram
The Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is completing a unique experiment called the Holometer which has recently started collecting data to answer some mind-bending questions about our universe–including whether we live in a hologram.
Much like characters on a television show would not know that their seemingly 3-D world exists only on a 2-D screen, we could be clueless that our 3-D space is just an illusion. The information about everything in our universe could actually be encoded in tiny packets in two dimensions.
Take a look around you. The walls, the chair you’re sitting in, your own body – they all seem real and solid. Yet there is a possibility that everything we see in the universe – including you and me – may be nothing more than a hologram.
All physical matter, everything we have around us is the result of a frequency. If the frequency is amplified, the structure of the matter will change. This self-contained system is a hologram. Change any one aspect of the hologram, and you change the entire system. (more…)
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Spacetime Odyssey”:
Carl Sagan on Life, Learning and the Universe