Science and Exploration

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Located some 200,000 light-years away, in the constellation of Tucana, Hubble spies an active star forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud -- a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

The star cluster, which is formally designated as NGC 602, is a mere 5 million years young.
The infant stars are still encased in their stellar cocoons, tucked away with the remainder of the gas and dust leftover from their formation.
The intricate ridges that are around the inner brownish portion of the image are the result of erosion, which was caused by the harsh ultraviolet light that is radiating from the energetic baby stars inside, who will eventually eat their way out of their predicament.

This image is a composite, stitched together using several different exposures, each of whic, were made by the ACS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope using several different filters.
Two filters were used to capture broad wavelength ranges. Another was used to sample narrow wavelength emission.

[Hollylane]

Richard III: The twisted bones that reveal a king

Richard III: Facial reconstruction shows king's features

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by femmeInterrupted

[COLOR="Gray"][SIZE="3"][FONT="Palatino Linotype"]Located some 200,000 light-years away, in the constellation of Tucana, Hubble spies an active star forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud -- a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

Wrap your mind around this: when the light of those stars left their points of origin Homo sapiens was just getting its start on this planet. Music, art, religion, all of the things we are accustomed to as culture were still tens of thousand of years in their future. There was no agriculture, no farming, no indication that we buried our dead, no indication that we made music or art, there was certainly no writing. The Hubble Space Telescope is a time machine in that it allows us to, quite literally, look at the universe as it was.

Cheers
Aj

[femmeInterrupted]

I found this fascinating:


Today, we bring you some food for thought about the reality of perception -- not the glass empty or half full debacle, but the sort of perception that seriously impairs us on a cosmological time scale, and biologically too. As we know, due to the finite speed that light travels in a almost-perfect vacuum, we are incapable of seeing things in "real time." We see the moon as it was 1.3 seconds ago, the sun eight minutes ago, Proxima Centauri (the closest star from Earth) as it was more than four years ago, and the Andromeda galaxy (our closest galactic neighbor) as it was more than 2.5 MILLION years ago.

In essence, observing anything in space from our little chunk of rock is surprising, in the sense that simply looking out into the night sky is the closest thing to time travel we currently know of. In the same way, observers in other parts of our galaxy could look at Earth's development over the course of our evolutionary time-line, and they would see the Earth as it appeared hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago (depending on which part of the galaxy they live in and how far away this location is from Earth).

The phenomena of how fast the speed of light is also allows us to study the universe as it appeared mere hundreds of millions of years after the big bang occurred. The most distant sources of light were emitted from the first generation of stars and galaxies in the primordial universe more than 13.7 billion years ago.

Something else that limits our overall perception of the universe is our inability to see light in all of its various wavelengths. Light with properties of both particles and waves (in its various forms) is just like the universe, in that it is an expression of energy. Albeit, an extraordinarily unique expression of it. Most obvious to us is light at optical wavelengths, which is emitted from many stars glittering throughout the universe. Then there is light at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. Astonishingly, our sun only emits about 44% of its total electromagnetic radiation at optical wavelengths, the rest of it is emitted in other frequencies invisible to the naked eye (but their true nature can be discerned using special tools and filters).

These phenomena are most obvious at large distances, but they are also very applicable to our day to day lives here on Earth, though the effects are not nearly as extreme or noticeable.

I want all of you to stop whatever you are doing for a moment (unless all you are doing is reading this article) and participate in a little experiment with me.

First, close your eyes and extend both of your index fingers. After you've done that, take one of your fingers and touch your nose. With the other finger on the other hand, touch your knee or ankle. Repeat this a few times. (Even better, have a friend do it to you!) After which, you should be able to feel your fingers touching your nose and ankle simultaneously. Think about this for a second...the nerve signal from your ankle had to travel exponentially farther (about twenty times over) to get to your brain than the signal from your nose did, but it *FEELS* simultaneous, doesn't it?

Basically, (and this is trippy) we aren't sure if the ankle and the nose were truly touched at the same time, or if they were touched at slightly different moments, and the brain reassembled asynchronous signals which led to the sensory information being put together at exact same time.

There was actually an experiment done on this very subject where scientists had a group of volunteers press a button that would cause a light to flash after a small delay. After several rounds of this, they found that the volunteers were seeing the flash only milliseconds AFTER they pushed the button, as the brain edited the delay out after it got used to it...suggesting that our brain modifies the sensory information from our bodies in different ways, ways that would typically make more sense to us, causing our consciousness to exist in the past (on a microscale).. kind of like radio stations that operate on a delay of a few seconds to prevent the f-bomb (or something equally scandalous) from being played live on air.

Now, let's tie some of these portions together... if you were to stick your hand straight in front of your face, you will not see a present image of it. Instead, it will be delayed over the course of a few milliseconds due to the constraints of Einstein's theory of special relativity (given the time that it takes light to illuminate your hand, and the biological processes we must undergo before our brain can register stimulus). In addition, we must also factor in the speed of nerves traveling to the visual cortex in the back of our brain, where visual information is sorted through and the "speed of thought," which is largely different form person to person.

In conclusion, many things on a micro and macroscale are directly influenced from our perspective due to a myriad of variables placed on us by the laws of physics and our anatomy itself. There is the reflection and refraction of light scattered in our atmosphere, the observer effect witnessed with subatomic particles, light at various frequencies, and even the properties of time itself, or time dilation more specifically, whose effects can be seen on our satellites in LEO and the event horizons of black holes. All of this bring up an interesting philosophical question... Are we really observing reality, or can we only see into the past--glimpse the world as it was a nanosecond ago?

What are your thoughts?

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...of-perception/

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/1st-photo-alie...153016924.html

1st photo from ESO in Chile of alien planet being formed.

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Making Waves Stellar Style

Zeta Ophiuchi is making waves in its neighborhood. The star is located 370 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus.
It is six times hotter, eight times wider, twenty times more massive and 80,000 times brighter than our sun.
Zeta Ophiuchi would be ranked among the brightest stars if not shrouded by cosmic dust.

This massive star is moving fast enough (54,000 mph) to break the sound barrier, creating “bow shocks” in surrounding material.
Bow shocks in space are similar to the wake caused by boats and are usually visible when two areas of gas or dust collide.
Zeta Ophiuchi produces very strong winds of hot gas particles that collide with the surrounding interstellar dust clouds.

Normally bow shocks can be seen in visible light, but Zeta Ophiuchi’s dust veil only allows NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to view the longer infrared wavelengths.
The red areas in the image are the “bow shocks” and have a slightly longer wavelength than the fine dust filaments shown in green.

source:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/...hp?id=PIA16604

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Scientists from NASA's Johnson Space Center are in the process of developing warp technology.
Specifically, they are in the process of investigating the logistics of the Alcubierre drive, which would hypothetically allow spaceships to travel more than ten times faster than light-speed WITHOUT violating the laws of physics. Instead, this technology would use deformations in the foundations of spacetime that are permitted by general relativity to propel a spaceship forward.



http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/s...eal-star-trek/

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Beautiful Images




Venus shines through the rings of Saturn, in one of two photos taken by the Cassini spacecraft on Nov. 10, 2012.

It appears as a bright white dot, just above and to the right of the picture’s center.

The image was taken while Cassini was slightly below the ring plane, looking towards the unlit side of the rings.
Each dot represents about 44km (28miles).
The Cassini was at the time 802,000 km away from Saturn and about 1,42 billion km from Venus.

Venus is much hotter than the Earth(reaching 500 degrees Celsius) and has a surface pressure 100 times our own.
Its thick, carbon-dioxide-dominated atmosphere is to blame.
However, it is still considered a twin to Earth due to similar size, mass, orbit, and rocky composition.
Its brightness is enhanced by thick sulfuric acid clouds covering the planet.

Venus is not the only planet that the Cassini has seen from Saturn.
An image snapped in 2006, called “In Saturn’s Shadow”, shows a staggering view of Earth, and happens to be one of the most popular pictures taken from the Cassini.





In Saturn's Shadow
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ca.../pia08329.html