Life Advice From 50 Beloved Characters In Kid’s Entertainment By AAA State Of Play -source-

Ask Ethan: Could The Fabric Of Spacetime Be Defective?

“The topic I’d like to suggest is high-energy relics, like domain walls, cosmic strings, monopoles, etc… it would be great to read more about what these defects really are, what their origin is, what properties they likely have, or, and this is probably the most exciting part for me, how we expect them to look like and interact with the ‘ordinary’ universe.”

So, you’d like to ruin the fabric of your space, would you? Similar to tying a knot in it, stitching it up with some poorly-run shenanigans, running a two-dimensional membrane through it (like a hole in a sponge), etc., it’s possible to put a topological defect in the fabric of space itself. This isn’t just a mathematical possibility, but a physical one: if you break a symmetry in just the right way, monopoles, strings, domain walls, or textures could be produced on a cosmic scale. These could show up in a variety of ways, from abundant new, massive particles to a network of large-scale structure defects in space to a particular set of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Yet when it comes time to put up or shut up, the Universe offers no positive evidence of any of these defects. Save for one, that is: back in 1982, there was an observation of one (and only one) event consistent with a magnetic monopole. 35 years later, we still don’t know what it was.

It’s time to investigate the possibilities, no matter how outlandish they seem, on this week’s Ask Ethan!

Métaphore d’un voyage initiatique au coeur de l’oreille adapté aux enfants :

- traversée de l’onde aérienne en avion à l’intérieur du conduit auditif jusqu’à la membrane du tympan

- découverte de l’onde mécanique sur la chaîne des osselets en vue de la fenêtre ovale

- plongée de l’onde de pression dans la cochlée qui contient l’organe de l’audition relié au cerveau

“evolution is written on the wings of butterflies” - charles darwin

photos by linden gledhill of butterfly and moth wings, which are actually made up of thousands of tiny scales, at seven to ten times magnification (save the last). 

5 Vital Lessons Scientists Learn That Can Better Everyone’s Life

“4. Following your intuition will never get you as far as doing the math will. Coming up with a beautiful, powerful and compelling theory is the dream of many scientists worldwide, and has been for as long as there have been scientists. When Copernicus put forth his heliocentric model, it was attractive to many, but his circular orbits couldn’t explain the observations of the planets as well as Ptolemy’s epicycles – ugly as they were – did. Some 50 years later, Johannes Kepler built upon Copernicus’ idea and put forth his Mysterium Cosmographicum: a series of nested spheres whose ratios could explain the orbits of the planets. Except, the data didn’t fit right. When he did the math, the numbers didn’t add up.”

There are a lot of myths we have in our society about how the greatest of all scientific advances happened. We think about a lone genius, working outside the constraints of mainstream academia or mainstream thinking, working on something no one else works on. That hasn’t ever really been true, and yet there are actual lessons – valuable ones – to be learned from observing scientists throughout history. The greatest breakthroughs can only happen in the context of what’s already been discovered, and in that sense, our scientific knowledge base and our best new theories are a reflection of the very human endeavor of science. When Newton claimed he was standing on the shoulders of giants, it may have been his most brilliant realization of all, and it’s never been more true today.

Come learn these five vital lessons for yourself, and see if you can’t find some way to have them apply to your life!

9 Squares 8

Top: David Stanfield, Skip Hursh, Jamie Muntean Middle: David Urbinati, Al Boardman, Jake Williams Bottom: Riccardo Albertini, Bee Grandinetti, Qais Sarhan

About the project

We’re Way Below Average! Astronomers Say Milky Way Resides In A Great Cosmic Void

“If there weren’t a large cosmic void that our Milky Way resided in, this tension between different ways of measuring the Hubble expansion rate would pose a big problem. Either there would be a systematic error affecting one of the methods of measuring it, or the Universe’s dark energy properties could be changing with time. But right now, all signs are pointing to a simple cosmic explanation that would resolve it all: we’re simply a bit below average when it comes to density.”

When you think of the Universe on the largest scales, you likely think of galaxies grouped and clustered together in huge, massive collections, separated by enormous cosmic voids. But there’s another kind of cluster-and-void out there: a very large volume of space that has its own galaxies, clusters and voids, but is simply higher or lower in density than average. If our galaxy resided near the center of one such region, we’d measure the expansion rate of the Universe to be higher-or-lower than average when we used nearby techniques. But if we measured the global expansion rate, such as via baryon acoustic oscillations or the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, we’d actually arrive at the true, average rate.

We’ve been seeing an important discrepancy for years, and yet the cause might simply be that the Milky Way lives in a large cosmic void. The data supports it, too! Get the story today.

W. M. Keck Observatory telescopes logo. December 2, 2014

Image above: A dusty planetary system (left) is compared to another system with little dust in this artist’s conception. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Planet hunters received some good news recently. A...

New Discoveries about Star Formation in the Flame Nebula

Stars are often born in clusters, in giant clouds of gas and dust. Astronomers have studied two star clusters using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared telescopes and the results show that the simplest ideas for the birth of these clusters cannot work.

This composite image shows one of the clusters, NGC 2024, which is found in the center of the so-called Flame Nebula about 1,400 light years from Earth. In this image, X-rays from Chandra are seen as purple, while infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope are colored red, green, and blue.

A study of NGC 2024 and the Orion Nebula Cluster, another region where many stars are forming, suggest that the stars on the outskirts of these clusters are older than those in the central regions. This is different from what the simplest idea of star formation predicts, where stars are born first in the center of a collapsing cloud of gas and dust when the density is large enough.

Credit: NASA/Spitzer/Chandra

‘아렌델’은 빅뱅 이후 첫 10억년 이내에 존재했던 별입니다. 우리 지구에 닿기까지 129억년이나 걸린 것이지요!

우리 태양보다 적어도 50배 크고, 몇백만 배 밝아요. 평소에는 지구에서 볼 수 없지만, 우리와 ‘아렌델’ 사이에 있는 은하단이 렌즈 역할을 했습니다!

A View into the Past

Our Hubble Space Telescope just found the farthest individual star ever seen to date!

Nicknamed “Earendel” (“morning star” in Old English), this star existed within the first billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang. Earendel is so far away from Earth that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us, far eclipsing the previous single-star record holder whose light took 9 billion years to reach us.

Though Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions of times as bright, we’d normally be unable to see it from Earth. However, the mass of a huge galaxy cluster between us and Earendel has created a powerful natural magnifying glass. Astronomers expect that the star will be highly magnified for years.

Earendel will be observed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb's high sensitivity to infrared light is needed to learn more about this star, because its light is stretched to longer infrared wavelengths due to the universe's expansion.