Planetary bodies

A new theory released recently suggests that planets may form similarly to how stars form.. In great dust clouds.

This theory is the first step in explaining why neptunian style planets can be found as close to their star half the earths distance from the sun.

The new theory suggests that planets are formed elsewhere and then pulled in by a stars gravity, at which point the star strips off the excess gas and reveals the planets..

I personally do not think this that plausible as I believe like many that stars and their planets are formed together.. However we shall wait and see.

A scientist never loves anything more than they love being wrong, because being wrong and knowing it means you are one step closer too the truth.

If you wish too read the full article it can be found here
www.Sciencenews.org

Ever wonder how they photoshop a galaxy?

This video is a timelapse photo of NGC-3982 A spiral galaxy in ursa major located nearly 70 million light years away.

Now you may think its cheating, having them photoshop color in, but remember, human eyes are weak and feeble, only able too see things in our so called "Visible spectrum" butterflies can see much further into the "Ultra violet spectrum" than we can even comprehend.

Hubble can see Further into Ultra violet and further into infra-red than we can because it takes in pure white light, unfortunately this means that the images come out in black and white because it can't selectively add color too the visible spectrum.

The image in this video is made up of 9 composite images taken across three of hubbles cameras.

There are three types of coloring they use..
It can be either
Representative,
Natural,
or
Enhanced.

Representative is false color to highlight certain elements
Natural is too show what it would look like if we where there
and Enhanced is in false color too highlight elements that would be invisible in the other two.

The Curse of Dimensionality

Picture this..
say you have a square.. Perfectly flat.
2D cube


Now say you take that square and make it 3D perhaps not a cube, but just a tiny bit of height too it.. maybe a paper cut out of a square.
3D Cube projected in wire lay out


That square now has more weight (relative) and mass than the 2D square.

The same happens going from 1D to 2D and 3D to 4D, every time you add a dimension. You add mass to the object.
4D cube in wire layout

5D cube in wire layout

This is problematic because when you are talking about a multidimensional existence (parallel universes and such)
Different universes will have different perceived weight due to their increased mass.
11D cube


Now say all dimensions appear universally but we cannot perceive any but 2 and 3 then the universe would have infinite mass as mass increases every time you add on a new dimension.

and it would have virtually no middle as 1D and 0D are imperceivable too the human mind.. BUT HANG ON, I hear you say.. You can perceive 1D..

Well no you can't sorry to say..

Imagine the smallest thing you can think of, thats 3D..
Tiniest flattest thing... Well its 3D too, everything we can perceive is 3D, accept when we look at something displayed upon something..

For example the image on your computer monitor is 2D.. The monitor is 3D the pixels are 3D but what you are viewing is a 2D image..
We can perceive this because it has length and height..

But if you take away either of these it would not be a straight line, because even a straight line has some height or some width, it would be an infinitly receding point in existence, being ever smaller than is capable.. Thus it is out of our knowledge to perceive it.

Thought you might find some geometry interesting on this the day of the NSW State election!

Shuttle Life program by Bill Nye

Shuttle Life

See the link above.. Click it..

Why click it you may ask??

Because it is a link to planetary.org which you should visit every day regardless..
But that link is special because it goes to the page for the shuttle life program.

What is the shuttle life program?

Well basically they want too put a whole bunch of funky microbes onto a space shuttle and launch it into space..
See how the organisms survive, too see if life really could have come from outer space on a rock from a distant planet..

But doing things like this is expensive, so they want moneys.. Well deserved moneys..
The planetary society was founded by the legendary CARL SAGAN, and is now founded by the amazing Bill Nye the science guy!

Donations can be anything but as incentive they have incentives for certain amounts, including a signed image of bill nye!!

Radiation chart.

The guys over at XKCD have designed this clever radiation chart to give people a realistic idea of how radiation really affects you. Click the picture for the large version, or click the link too see the article.

XKCD Radiation chart

More supernova

This is an image of N 63A a remnant left behind from a supernova located in the LMC which to us laymen is the large magellanic cloud which is the fourth largest galaxy in our local group.. what is our local group you ask, well lets get technical.

Lets start small and get big

Ok so it starts with our planet being part of the solar system, which surrounds a star. Many stars make up a sector of a galaxy in our case the spiral arm.

Add many sectors you get a galaxy ranging anywhere up to 100 million light years across.

Add a bunch of galaxies you get a group,

add a few groups you get a cluster,

add a few clusters you get a supercluster,

add a few superclusters and you have our universe.



This is an image of the LMC as seen by the hubble space telescope.
and in the LMC is a binary star system that went supernova together



and there it is, viewed falsely in Xray light and in Optical light.

These images are distributed under the creative commons license according to wikipedia.

Stars fusing

Two stars may have been caught going into a hypothesized act I like to call STAR FUSION POWER! I'm not sure if thats a good name but lets stick with it.
Basically V1309 was discovered back in 2008 when it started letting out extremely bright solar flares, and so a group of researches decided to see what they could find, luckily a project researching dark matter has had their eye in that area of the sky for a while.

So after trolling through over 2000 images section by section, they came upon the conclusion that V1309 was originally a "contact binary star" which is science slang for two stars that circle each other so close that they are touching, which sounds extremely awesome and it is, problem being that eventually they star transferring mass until eventually (tens of millions of years later) they merge to make one larger star. The amazing thing is that although the merger takes tens millions of years to prepare, the physical merger takes only a few years, the core merger happens in less than a week..

That week was in late august 2008, up to this moment it was doubling in brightness every 19 days, however in late august 2008 its brightness increased by a factor of 300 in only 10 days.

Its final burst happened at the end of that month with the most luminescent burst so far in its life time, this burst happened when the cores of the two stars finally merged, making the new star more than 10,000 times brighter than the original star and more than 30,000 times brighter than our sun.

This new star is spinning outrageously quickly, and is throwing off huge amounts of matter into space making the star almost impossible too see, however when this matter clears we may get our first view of a merged contact binary star.

via
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/71387/title/Two_stars_caught_fusing_into_one

A MATCH MADE IN THE HEAVENS from Science News on Vimeo.

The known universe

I love this video, always good to watch when feeling down, puts the whole universe into perspective.