A spiral galaxy is a certain kind of galaxy originally described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work The Realm of the Nebulae[1] and, as such, forms part of the Hubble sequence. Spiral galaxies consist of a flat, rotating disk containing stars, gas and dust, and a central concentration of stars known as the bulge. These are surrounded by a much fainter halo of stars, many of which reside in globular clusters.

Spiral galaxies are named for the (usually two-armed) spiral structures that extend from the center into the disk. The spiral arms are sites of ongoing star formation and are brighter than the surrounding disk because of the young, hot OB stars that inhabit them. Roughly half of all spirals are observed to have an additional component in the form of a bar-like structure, extending from the central bulge, at the ends of which the spiral arms begin. Our own Milky Way has recently (in the 1990s) been confirmed to be a barred spiral, although the bar itself is difficult to observe from our position within the Galactic disk.[2] The most convincing evidence for its existence comes from a recent survey, performed by the Spitzer Space Telescope, of stars in the Galactic center.[3]

Together with irregulars, spiral galaxies make up approximately 60% of galaxies in the local Universe.[4] They are mostly found in low-density regions and are rare in the centers of galaxy clusters.[5]

You never fail to amaze me, both you and John, in the "broad church" of your interests and the obvious love of the planet and its history.

I could never have never been able to reach the heights of your experiences which are very influential since I doubt that more than very few scientific people in the fellow-travelers of my class could appreciate what you are trying to inform us.  That is, it is beyond me.

In my twilight years I am enjoying the pleasure and satisfaction of the feeling of true freedom in having a voice and have become more enlightened in almost unbelievable  ways since you two have accepted me as a contributor to your fair dinkum “free speech” site, for which I am grateful.

However, the sword is double sided - you allow me to contest your posts.  Thank you.

Having said that – let’s get back to the Corporations taking back the Howard “New Order” to even lower levels.

God Bless Australia. NE OUBLIE.

A "galactic lens" has revealed that the Universe will probably expand forever.

Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos.

Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the Universe.

Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the Universe was to keep on expanding.

It will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland, researchers say.

The study, conducted by an international team led by Professor Eric Jullo of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is published in the journal Science.

Dark energy makes up three-quarters of our Universe but is totally invisible. We only know it exists because of its effect on the expansion of the Universe.

To work out how dark energy is spread through space, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the way that light from distant stars was distorted around Abell 1689, a nearby cluster of galaxies.

Abell 1689, found in the constellation of Virgo, is one of the biggest galactic clusters known to science.

...

Knowing the distribution of dark energy tells astronomers that the Universe will continue to get bigger indefinitely.

Eventually it will become a cold, dead wasteland with a temperature approaching what scientists term "absolute zero".

-------------------------

I will refrain to compare dark energy and Tony Abbott... The process of the universe forces are amazingly beautiful... Dark energy is far more important and far true-er than a zillion Tony Abbott... Dark matter, anti-matter, dark holes, anti-energy, dark energy, stars, planet, galaxies, atoms, molecules, neutorns, quarks, gluons, electrons... All cooling down to a zero zero paste... Us? Long gone...

NASA scientists say a star that exploded in 1979 has begun to form a black hole, providing the first opportunity to observe the phenomenon in its infancy.

Dan Patnaude, an astrophysicist with the Harvard Smithsonian Centre, says the black hole has been forming for the past 30 years, or 50 million years, depending on your perspective.

"When we talk about how old the black hole is, or how old the supernova is, we're actually referring to how old it is with regards to when we first observed it," he said.

"So when we say it's 30 years ago it means that that's when we saw it.

"Now the galaxy is 50 million years away, so in its own frame of reference it occurred 50 million years ago."

Mr Patnaude says it is the first time a black hole has been observed in its infancy.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/11/16/3068111.htm

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I will refrain comparing black holes and Tony Abbott... The process of the universe forces are amazingly beautiful... Black holes far more important and far true-er than a zillion Tony Abbott... Dark matter, anti-matter, dark holes, anti-energy, dark energy, stars, planet, galaxies, atoms, molecules, neutorns, quarks, gluons, electrons... All cooling down to a zero zero paste... Us? Long gone...

meanwhile:

One of the most ambitious scientific undertakings in history, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has switched to smashing lead ions, recreating in miniature temperatures on par with ones theorised to have existed during the Big Bang.

Built near Geneva in Switzerland with the goal of investigating particle physics interactions, the LHC at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) took only four days to using lead ions in the particle accelerator, CERN said in a statement on November 8.

"Operating the LHC with lead ions – lead atoms stripped of electrons - is completely different from operating the machine with protons. From the source to collisions, operational parameters have to be re-established for the new type of beam," CERN said. 

Smashing accelerated lead ions, which have 82 protons, produced short-lived minuscule fireballs with temperatures of about 10 trillion degrees Celsius. At such temperatures, atoms melt into quark-gluon plasma, predicted by the theory of quantum chromodynamics.

"One of the main objectives for lead-ion running is to produce tiny quantities of such matter, which is known as quark-gluon plasma, and to study its evolution into the kind of matter that makes up the Universe today," CERN said.

http://sofiaecho.com/2010/11/08/990062_world-survives-large-hadron-collider-mini-big-bangs

see pictures at top and toon/story overthere...

After 16 years and $1.5 billion of other people’s money, it is almost showtime for NASA and Sam Ting.

Sitting and being fussed over by technicians in a clean room at the Kennedy Space Center in preparation for a February launching — and looking for all the world like a giant corrugated rain barrel — is an eight-ton assemblage of magnets, wires, iron, aluminum, silicon and electronics that is one of the most ambitious and complicated experiments ever to set out for space.

The experiment, if it succeeds, could help NASA take a giant step toward answering the question of what the universe is made of. It could also confer scientific glory on both the International Space Station and a celebrated physicist reaching one last time, literally, for the stars. If it fails, it will validate critics who think it a scandal the experiment was ever approved.

The device, named the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, is designed to sift the high-energy particles flying through space known as cosmic rays. On Feb. 27, the space shuttle Endeavour will ferry the spectrometer to a permanent berth on the space station. But the real destination is the shadow universe.

You might think you learned in high school that the universe is made of atoms and molecules, protons and electrons, stars and galaxies, but over the last few decades astronomers have concluded — not happily — that all this is just a scrim overlying a much vaster shadowy realm of invisible “dark matter” whose gravity determines the architecture of the cosmos.

If they are lucky, scientists say, the Alpha spectrometer could confirm that mysterious signals recorded by other satellites and balloons in recent years are emanations from that dark matter, revealing evidence of particles and forces that have only been theoretical dreams until now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/science/space/17dark.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

see pictures at top...

This is the extraordinary place where we all live - the Universe.

The picture is the first full-sky image from Europe's Planck telescope which was sent into space last year to survey the "oldest light" in the cosmos.

It took the 700m-euro observatory just over six months to assemble the map.

It shows what is visible beyond the Earth to instruments that are sensitive to light at very long wavelengths - much longer than what we can sense with our eyes.

Researchers say it is a remarkable dataset that will help them understand better how the Universe came to look the way it does now.

"It's a spectacular picture; it's a thing of beauty," Dr Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency's (Esa) Planck project scientist, told BBC News.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10501154

Meanwhile:

Evidence of events that happened before the Big Bang can be seen in the glow of microwave radiation that fills the Universe, scientists have asserted.

Renowned cosmologist Roger Penrose said that analysis of this cosmic microwave background showed echoes of previous Big Bang-like events.

The events appear as "rings" around galaxy clusters in which the variation in the background is unusually low.

The unpublished research has been posted on the Arxiv website.

The ideas within it support a theory developed by Professor Penrose - knighted in 1994 for his services to science - that upends the widely-held "inflationary theory".

That theory holds that the Universe was shaped by an unthinkably large and fast expansion from a single point.

Much of high-energy physics research aims to elucidate how the laws of nature evolved during the fleeting first instants of the Universe's being.

"I was never in favour of it, even from the start," said Professor Penrose.

http://www.glasgowwired.co.uk/news.php/111366-Cosmos-may-show-echoes-of-events-before-Big-Bang

Birth and death within Andromeda

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News



The great life cycle of stars, from the moment they switch on to the point they destroy themselves, is caught in a new view of the Andromeda Galaxy.

This picture, released to the BBC, combines the power of Europe's Herschel and XMM-Newton space telescopes.

Herschel is sensitive to infrared light and sees the cold clouds of gas and dust where stars are forming.

XMM-Newton, on the other hand, sees X-rays, a signature of the violent cosmos and the death throes of stars.



We've never seen galaxies [in the infrared] with such high resolution as this before”

Dr Jacopo Fritz Ghent University

Acquired in just the past few weeks, the joint observation from the two European Space Agency (Esa) telescopes has been featured on the BBC's Stargazing Live series.

Andromeda is something of a twin to our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. It is part of the Local Group and is a mere 2.5 million light-years distant. Like the Milky Way, it is also a spiral galaxy.

Studying Andromeda is therefore seen as an excellent way to unravel some of the mysteries of our own stellar neighbourhood; and using Herschel and XMM-Newton in combination makes for a powerful probe.

Herschel is Europe's new flagship space observatory. The billion-euro mission was launched in 2009 and carries a 3.5m-diameter mirror, the biggest ever sent into space.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12100971

IN a great many fields, researchers would give their eyeteeth to have a direct glimpse of the past. Instead, they generally have to piece together remote conditions using remnants like weathered fossils, decaying parchments or mummified remains. Cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe, is different. It is the one arena in which we can actually witness history.

The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand. The light from more distant objects, captured by powerful telescopes, has been traveling toward us far longer than that, sometimes for billions of years. When we look at such ancient light, we are seeing — literally — ancient times.

During the past decade, as observations of such ancient starlight have provided deep insight into the universe’s past, they have also, surprisingly, provided deep insight into the nature of the future. And the future that the data suggest is particularly disquieting — because of something called dark energy.

This story of discovery begins a century ago with Albert Einstein, who realized that space is not an immutable stage on which events play out, as Isaac Newton had envisioned. Instead, through his general theory of relativity, Einstein found that space, and time too, can bend, twist and warp, responding much as a trampoline does to a jumping child. In fact, so malleable is space that, according to the math, the size of the universe necessarily changes over time: the fabric of space must expand or contract — it can’t stay put.

For Einstein, this was an unacceptable conclusion. He’d spent 10 grueling years developing the general theory of relativity, seeking a better understanding of gravity, but to him the notion of an expanding or contracting cosmos seemed blatantly erroneous. It flew in the face of the prevailing wisdom that, over the largest of scales, the universe was fixed and unchanging.

Einstein responded swiftly. He modified the equations of general relativity so that the mathematics would yield an unchanging cosmos. A static situation, like a stalemate in a tug of war, requires equal but opposite forces that cancel each other. Across large distances, the force that shapes the cosmos is the attractive pull of gravity. And so, Einstein reasoned, a counterbalancing force would need to provide a repulsive push. But what force could that be?

Remarkably, he found that a simple modification of general relativity’s equations entailed something that would have, well, blown Newton’s mind: antigravity — a gravitational force that pushes instead of pulls.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/opinion/16greene.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

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I would propose that dark matter is made of unattached particles and atoms at near absolute zero temperature... We know the behaviour of matter at near absolute zero is weird and show "superconductivity and super-fluidity which could be akin to repulsion such as in an "anti-gravity" behaviour. Considering the amount of non aligned matter (super "cold" particles) in the universe, gravity may not be enough to hold the universe together and thus the superfluidity of these "cold" particles is accelerating the expansion of the universe...

Just a thought.

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected what scientists believe may be the oldest galaxy ever observed.

It is thought the galaxy is more than 13 billion years old and existed 480 million years after the Big Bang.

A Nasa team says this was a period when galaxy formation in the early Universe was going into "overdrive".

The image, which has been published in Nature journal, was detected using Hubble's recently installed wide field camera.

According to Professor Richard Bouwens of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands: "We're seeing these galaxies - 'star cities' - that are building themselves up over cosmic time."

The research team observed rapid growth over a relatively short period of time: Their sample data showed there was just one galaxy in existence about 500 million years after the Big Bang. But this rises to 10 galaxies some 150 million years later. The tally has doubled about 100 million years later.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12289840

"The Higgs-boson is a piece that goes into the puzzle that we already have," Prof Punzi said.

"Whereas this is something that goes a little bit beyond that - a new interaction, a new force."

Prof Punzi said the new observation behaves differently than the Higgs-boson, which would be decaying into heavy quarks, or particles.

The new discovery "is decaying in normal quarks", Prof Punzi said. "It has different features.

"One thing we know for sure - it is not the Higgs-boson. That is the only thing we know for sure."

For more than a year physicists have been studying what appears to be a "bump" in the data from the Illinois-based Fermilab, which operates the powerful particle accelerator, or atom-smasher, Tevatron.

The Tevatron was once the most powerful machine in the world for such purposes until 2008 when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) became operational at CERN.

The US machine began its work in the mid 1980s, and is scheduled for shutdown later this year when its funding runs dry.

"These results are certainly tantalising," said Nigel Lockyer, director of Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, TRIUMF.

NASA is studying a surprising cosmic burst at the centre of a distant galaxy that has burned for more than a week, longer than astronomers have ever seen before, the US space agency said on Thursday.

Calling it "one of the most puzzling cosmic blasts ever observed", NASA said it has mobilised the Hubble Space Telescope along with its Swift satellite and Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the phenomenon.

"More than a week later, high-energy radiation continues to brighten and fade from its location," NASA said in a statement.

"Astronomers say they have never seen such a bright, variable, high-energy, long-lasting burst before. Usually, gamma-ray bursts mark the destruction of a massive star, and flaring emission from these events never lasts more than a few hours."

The first in a series of explosions was detected by a NASA telescope on March 28 in the constellation Draco.

Astronomers think the the blast occurred "when a star wandered too close to its galaxy's central black hole", NASA said.

"Intense tidal forces probably tore the star apart, and the infalling gas continues to stream toward the hole. According to this model, the spinning black hole formed an outflowing jet along its rotational axis. A powerful blast of X- and gamma rays is seen when the jet is pointed in our direction."

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/cosmic-burst-in-far-away-galaxy-puzzles-nasa-20110408-1d6kz.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13009718

Nasa's Gravity Probe B has produced remarkable new confirmation of some key predictions of Albert Einstein.

The satellite's observations show the massive body of the Earth is very subtly warping space and time, and even dragging it around with it.

Scientists were able to see these effects by studying the behaviour of four perfectly engineered spinning balls carried inside the probe.

The results are published online in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"We've completed this landmark experiment, testing Einstein's Universe - and Einstein survives," said Francis Everitt, the mission's principal investigator at Stanford University.

Gravity Probe B was launched in 2004, but it has taken seven years for researchers to assess the data and to be sure of their observations.

Part of their difficulty has been in showing that some fantastically small deviations are real and not biases introduced by flaws in the experimental set-up.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13286241

The Crab Nebula has shocked astronomers by emitting an unprecedented blast of gamma rays, the highest-energy light in the Universe.

The cause of the 12 April gamma-ray flare, described at the Third Fermi Symposium in Rome, is a total mystery.

It seems to have come from a small area of the famous nebula, which is the wreckage from an exploded star.

The object has long been considered a steady source of light, but the Fermi telescope hints at greater activity.

The gamma-ray emission lasted for some six days, hitting levels 30 times higher than normal and varying at times from hour to hour.

While the sky abounds with light across all parts of the spectrum, Nasa's Fermi space observatory is designed to measure only the most energetic light: gamma rays.

These emanate from the Universe's most extreme environments and violent processes.

The Crab Nebula is composed mainly of the remnant of a supernova, which was seen on Earth to rip itself apart in the year 1054.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13362958

A cataclysmic explosion of a huge star near the edge of the observable Universe may be the most distant single object yet spied by a telescope.

Scientists believe the blast, which was detected by Nasa's Swift space observatory, occurred a mere 520 million years after the Big Bang.

This means its light has taken a staggering 13.14 billion years to reach Earth.

Details of the discovery will appear shortly in the Astrophysical Journal.

The event, which was picked up by Swift in April 2009, is referred to by astronomers using the designation GRB 090429B.

The "GRB" stands for "gamma-ray burst" - a sudden pulse of very high-energy light that the telescope is tuned to find on the sky.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13539914

Russian scientists expect humanity to encounter alien civilisations within the next two decades, a top Russian astronomer said on Monday.

"The genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms ... Life exists on other planets and we will find it within 20 years," said Andrei Finkelstein, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Applied Astronomy Institute, according to the Interfax news agency.

Speaking at an international forum dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life, Finkelstein said 10% of the known planets circling suns in the galaxy resemble Earth.

If water can be found there, then so can life, he said, adding that aliens would most likely resemble humans with two arms, two legs and a head.

"They may have different colour skin, but even we have that," he said.

Finkelstein's institute runs a programme launched in the 1960s at the height of the cold war space race to watch for and beam out radio signals to outer space.

"The whole time we have been searching for extraterrestrial civilisations, we have mainly been waiting for messages from space and not the other way," he said.

In March a Nasa scientist caused controversy after claiming to have found tiny fossils of alien bugs inside meteorites that landed on Earth.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jun/27/alien-encounters-twenty-years-russian-astronomer

see pictures at top... and ponder...

Asteroid dust collected by a Japanese spacecraft has given scientists their first look into the skin of an asteroid.

The Hayabusa craft was launched in 2003 and successfully re-entered Earth's atmosphere in June last year, burning up but dropping a capsule safely at Woomera in outback South Australia.

Professor Trevor Ireland form the Australian National University says the dust has now been analysed and matches dust from asteroids that have hit Earth.

"We see the rocks of meteorites, we don't see the skin because when the meteorites come in they hit the upper atmosphere and it all burns off," he explained.

"So the big thing about this mission is that we've actually got the skin of an asteroid for the first time."

The spacecraft took its dust particles from the surface of asteroid 25143 Itokawa.

The analysis showed ordinary chondrites, the most common meteorites found on Earth, are from S-type asteroids.

It indicated Itokawa is an asteroid made of reassembled parts of a once-bigger asteroid.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-26/asteroid-skin-hayabusa-woomera/2857192

Australian astronomers have discovered a planet they think is made of diamond.

The galactic gem could be as large as 60,000 kilometres across – five times the diameter of Earth.

Astronomers have found a tiny star at the edge of our galaxy, which may send them back to the drawing board to explain how stars are formed.

The star, called SDSS102915+172927, is reported today in the journal Nature.

It has about 80 per cent the mass of the Sun and is composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, something previously thought impossible.

An analysis of the star's properties by scientists led by Dr Elisabetta Caffau from the Zentrum fur Astronomie der Universitat Heidelberg in Germany indicates it has the lowest level of elements heavier than helium of any star ever studied, and more than 20,000 times less than the Sun.

All stars contain hydrogen and helium with trace amounts of lithium. These were the original elements created after the big bang which seeded the first generation of stars.

It's these first generation stars which produced all other elements from which subsequent stars were made. Astronomers refer to these other elements as 'metals'.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/09/01/3306919.htm

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One thing that we must remember: we live in a relative universe. Einstein proposed and refined a theory that sticks. Relativity demands anomalies and uncertainties such as distortion of time and the existence of black holes. Though we all know how the three major quantum mechanic forces work — BECAUSE we can "manipulate" them — the fourth force of nature — the weakest force at atomic level but the strongest at universal level — is gravity. So far we have not been able to manipulate gravity. And no scientific theory has been able to place it in relation to the quantum mechanics.

Thus at universal level, there may be no universal ways in which stars are formed, exist and decay. There could be several ways in which nebulous gases interact and create stars. This is "relativity"...

..

But the findings, they said, could potentially reshape our understanding of the physical world.

"If this measurement is confirmed, it might change our view of physics," CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci said.

The view was echoed by several independent physicists.

In the experiments, scientists blasted a beam producing billions upon billions of neutrinos from CERN, which straddles the French-Swiss border near Geneva, to the Gran Sasso Laboratory 730 kilometres away in Italy.

Neutrinos are electrically neutral particles so small that only recently were they found to have mass.

"The neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds earlier than the 2.3 milliseconds taken by light," Professor Ereditato said....

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It is quite extraordinary that the Murdoch driven drivel straight away annouces that Einstein was wrong. while other news sites are more circumspect http://www.firstpost.com/tech/faster-than-light-neutrinos-could-turn-physics-on-its-head-90527.html. Still waiting for confirmation of the neutrinos' behaviour...

If one analyses the theory of relativity (and what Laplace expressed in the 18th century) from Einstein in the 20th century, in regard to "black holes", one can only accept that the theory of relativity is relative to the elasticty of last dark horse in the universe: gravity. Time and speed are relative — and are relative to gravity. In black holes, light cannot "escape" the singularity... Thus gravity could be faster than light...

One of Gus's postulates is that gravity works in negative time, thus it's more or less impossible to capture (or modify like we "master" electricty) as a singular force. Gravity's effect is only "sensed" as it works similarly to the energy equation: E = MC2. I would say that in the gravity equation E = MG2. Though G is negative because of "negative speed" (speed in negative time), but the reality of gravity has to be a positive because of being squared.

Anyway, remember that "nothing is ever lost, all is transformed".

Australian National University astronomer Brian Schmidt has been named a joint winner of the 2011 Nobel physics prize for his research into supernovae.

The prize was awarded "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae", the Nobel Committee for Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said.

Half of the 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.5 million) prize money went to US citizen Saul Perlmutter, and the other half to US-Australian citizen Professor Schmidt and US scientist Adam Riess.

"They have studied several dozen exploding stars, called supernovae, and discovered that the universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate," the committee said.

"The discovery came as a complete surprise, even to the laureates themselves."

The breakthrough came in 1998, when one research team headed by Professor Perlmutter and another led by Professor Schmidt and accompanied by Professor Riess reached the same astounding conclusion that the expansion of the universe was rapidly accelerating.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-04/australian-astrophysicist-wins-nobel-prize/3209216

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Gus: super conductivity and super fluidity at near zero degree Kelvin may explain the way the universe "behaves", despite the dark matter that we can't see...

Bose–Einstein condensates behave in a weirder fashion still...

in a much larger vacuum that just a test tube, the universe has many flaws and weird behaviourial singularities  such as "black holes" and of course is subject to the "flexibility of time"......

The temperature in space is approximately 2.725 Kelvin. That means the universe is barely three degrees above absolute zero temperature... The very hot parts such as stars (including the sun — 5000 K degrees) are far away from each others and even "hot gases in space", seen by our best telescopes are quite "cold". To get Bose-Einstein condensates — a "fourth" state of matter — which could exist in space, who knows, though I believe there is no proof of that, temperature needs to be very close to Absolute Zero — less than one millionth of a degree away from absolute zero. From what I understand, at that temperature, light travels through this ultra-cold deconstructed matter  — now into pure quark particle/energy — possibly strings with no core and no specific identity — at less than 10 kilometres an hour, while retaining its own energy. Emerging from a Bose-Einstein condensate, light regains its full speed of about 300,000 kilometres per seconds... Amazing working of matter, energy and time... Amazing proven research, especially when we know that light does not travel through walls.

That neutrinos have been clocked at 300,000.6 kilometres per seconds or such is most likely a fluke of misplaced accuracy or a distortion of time... We all know that the kilometre is only a human arbitrary measure based on the circumference of planet earth...

At that level, understanding climate change is child's play... it's only a relative very small change in the wrong direction of natural decay, due to a chemical human-added process but a process that will burn our arses if we do not do anything about it.

good night.

A puzzle that has baffled astronomers for centuries has been solved – almost 2,000 years after the first supernova was documented by the ancient Chinese.

The exploded star was recorded as a 'guest star' by Chinese astronomers in the year 185 AD, and was visible for eight months. It was later found to be a bigger-than-expected supernova remnant, 8,000 light years away.

Infrared observations have shown that the explosion took place in a cavity in space. The hollowed-out cavity allowed stellar shrapnel, the material expelled by the star, to travel much faster and farther out into the universe than it would have otherwise.

The star, which was similar to our sun, died peacefully and turned into a dense white dwarf.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/25/massive-supernova-mystery-rcw86-nasa

There are few things as awful as the detritus of the 1970s. An era that gave us crock pots, Pintos, pet rocks, shag carpet, the avocado green refrigerator and the Captain and Tennille is an era best lost to history.

see pictures at top...

The universe as we know it was saved today. The instrument of its salvation, and that of the very edifice of physics itself? A fiber-optic cable in a GPS receiver at the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN) near Geneva.

The universe was first endangered back in September, when a group of CERN physicists fired a swarm of neutrinos — ghostly particles that don’t give a fig about objects in their path—through a mountain to a receiver beneath Italy’s Apennine Mountains, located 450 miles (724 km) away. Since the mountain might as well not have been there, the neutrinos should have moved at the speed of light the entire way — no slower, and definitely no faster, since, as Albert Einstein pointed out, nothing in the universe can do that...

...

Now, after poring over 100,000 images and reams of other Messenger data, space scientists have achieved consensus: Mercury is one weird world.

It is radically unlike the other rocky bodies of our solar system — Venus, Mars, Earth, the moon, and the moons of other planets. Its core is too big; its surface too scrunched. It looks shriveled, like a liposuction patient left with too much skin. It contains too much iron. Its internal structure — how the planet is built — is confounding. Its magnetic field is out of whack, asymmetrical. And its surface is strange, a jagged, ragged landscape of soaring escarpments, snaking faults, half-buried “ghost craters,” dead volcanos and mysterious pit-marked “hollows.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nasa-probe-offers-new-view-of-mercury-an-alien-world-right-in-our-back-yard/2012/03/22/gIQAt28bcS_story.html?hpid=z5

Sure, but the earth itself is still a lot weirder than this...

Astronomers have measured the precise distance to over a quarter of a million galaxies to gain new insights into a key period in cosmic history.

The 3D map of the sky allows scientists to probe the time six billion years ago when dark energy became the dominant influence on the Universe's expansion.

No-one knows the true nature of this repulsive force, but the exquisite data in the internationalBOSS survey will help test various theories.

The analysis appears in six papers.

These have all been posted on the arXiv preprint server.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17559286

Because those models include a few educated guesses, GRBs are not completely out of the running as the source of the highest energy cosmic rays we see; perhaps neutrinos are not produced in the numbers that physicists expect.

Nevertheless, Julie McEnery, a project scientist on the Fermi space telescope who was not involved with the research, said it was a "huge breakthrough for IceCube to make an astrophysically meaningful measurement".

"This is the question," she told BBC News. "The origin of cosmic rays is in general one of the longest-standing questions in astrophysics, and the ultra-high-energy rays are particularly interesting.

"They're just completely cool however you think about them, but they're also pointing to something extraordinary that can happen in some astrophysical sources - and it's key to understanding not only where but how they are produced."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17768771

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/scientists-watch-black-hole-feast-on-unlucky-star-20120503-1y00x.html#ixzz1tmnOYj4F

A renowned astronomer who introduced the revolutionary concept of dark matter has been awarded one of Australia's top science prizes.

Professor Ken Freeman from the Australian National University received the $300,000 Prime Minister's Prize for Science in a ceremony at Parliament House this evening.

Professor Freeman's discovery changed the course of astronomy and says he hopes the award will encourage the next generation to follow the galactic path.

"Science is hard and it's really great if they're excited enough about science to make the effort to carry it through the last couple of years of high school and then into university," he said.

"That's something we all hope for - that what we're doing now is going to excite the next generation of people who are going to come into this kind of work."

"It's a fantastic recognition. It's a real career highlight."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-31/astronomer-to-be-honoured-at-pm27s-science-awards/4344624

My view on dark matter and superfluidity...

At the moment it is a faint object, visible only in sophisticated telescopes as a point of light moving slowly against the background stars. It doesn't seem much – a frozen chunk of rock and ice – one of many moving in the depths of space. But this one is being tracked with eager anticipation by astronomers from around the world, and in a year everyone could know its name.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/brighter-than-a-full-moon-the-biggest-star-of-2013-could-be-ison--the-comet-of-the-century-8431443.html

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And god created the smart arses.... One has only got to read some of the comments attached to this story to see how the once obscure and ignored puerile minds are finding their empowered voices, including my feeble one... It could be that the more we know, the more ignorance is fighting back with a half-witty style, swallowing luminous reason like a black hole devours stars... It's quite funny though — as long as ignorance is not completely taking over the human world, covering it with with a blanket of stupid crap...

Australian researchers say they have helped map "monster outflows" of energy which are visible from Earth and are streaming from the centre of the Milky Way at an estimated 1,000 kilometres per second.

A team of astronomers observing the phenomenon from a telescope in the New South Wales town of Parkes say the so-called space geysers are being spewed out of newly-formed stars - and not from a black hole at the centre of the galaxy as previously postulated.

The outflows were detected by astronomers from Parkes as well as the USA, Italy and The Netherlands. They report their finding in today's issue of Nature.

"These outflows contain an extraordinary amount of energy - about a million times the energy of an exploding star," the research team's leader, CSIRO's Dr Ettore Carretti, said.

"They are not coming in our direction, but go up and down from the Galactic Plane. We are 30,000 light-years away from the Galactic Centre, in the Plane. They are no danger to us."

From top to bottom the outflows extend 50,000 light-years out of the galactic plane, equal to half the diameter of our galaxy...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-03/scientists-shed-light-on-space-geysers/4450956

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A gamma ray burst, the most powerful explosion known in the Universe, may have hit the Earth in the 8th Century.

In 2012 researchers found evidence that our planet had been struck by a blast of radiation during the Middle Ages, but there was debate over what kind of cosmic event could have caused this.

Now a study suggests it was the result of two black holes or neutron stars merging in our galaxy.

This collision would have hurled out vast amounts of energy.

The research is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Nature's snapshot

Last year, a team of researchers found that some ancient cedar trees in Japan had an unusual level of a radioactive type of carbon known as carbon-14.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21082617

The edge of the solar system has no edge, it turns out. It has a fuzzy transitional area, not quite “solar system” and not quite “interstellar space.”

This basic fact of our star’s environment has been discovered by Voyager 1, one of the most remarkable spaceships ever built. Our premier scout of deep space, Voyager 1 is currently 11 billion miles from the sun, beaming data to Earth as it scoots at 38,000 mph toward the constellation Ophiuchus.

Scientists had assumed that Voyager 1, launched in 1977, would have exited the solar system by now. That would mean crossing the heliopause and leaving behind the vast bubble known as the heliosphere, which is characterized by particles flung by the sun and by a powerful magnetic field.

The scientists’ assumption turned out to be half-right. On Aug. 25, Voyager 1 saw a sharp drop-off in the solar particles, also known as the solar wind. At the same time, there was a spike in galactic particles coming from all points of the compass. But the sun’s magnetic field still registers, somewhat diminished, on the spacecraft’s magnetometer. So it’s still in the sun’s magnetic embrace, in a sense.

This unexpected transitional zone, dubbed the “heliosheath depletion region,” is described in three new papers about Voyager 1 published online Thursday by the journal Science.

read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/voyager-1-finds-that-edge-of-solar-system-isnt-as-defined-as-scientists-once-thought/2013/06/27/95e76cba-deb1-11e2-b2d4-ea6d8f477a01_print.html

Please, read all articles in this line of blogs...

Since the 1920s, the astronomers assumed, thanks to gravity doing its 'sucking' thing that this expansion would mellow and slow down.

But in May 1998, cosmologists held a conference called The Missing Energy in the Universe. Some of them presented their data showing that the universe had strangely increased its rate of expansion, about five billion years ago and, as a result, the universe was bigger and emptier than we previously thought.

Of the 60 scientists at the conference, 40 accepted the revolutionary new findings. Now, this was very unusual. Generally, a poll is not taken at scientific meetings asking if the scientists do or do not accept a result. The science of 'dark energy' was just beginning — like a baby.

But, how did astronomers measure that the universe was expanding at a decreasing rate until about five billion years ago and then it gently began to expand at a faster rate?

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/08/13/3824492.htm

For the first time ever, astronomers have discovered a ring system surrounding an asteroid. The finding is a complete surprise to planetary scientists, who are yet unsure exactly how such rings could have formed.

The cosmic bling was found around an object named Chariklo, which orbits in a region between Saturn and Uranus. At 155 miles across, or about the length of Massachusetts, Chariklo is the largest known asteroid in its neighborhood. Looking to get a better idea of its exact size and shape, astronomers trained their telescopes on the giant space rock as it passed in front on a distant star in June 2013. As Chariklo performed its eclipse, researchers noticed something odd: The star’s light flickered just a bit immediately before and after Chariklo’s pass.

The reason for this darkening was the asteroid’s two dense rings, which had briefly blocked the starlight. The thicker inner ring is about four miles wide, while the thinner outer ring is a little less than two miles. Spectroscopic analysis of the starlight also revealed that the rings are composed partially of water ice.

The ice rings reflect light like a mirror, a property that helps explain an earlier anomalous finding regarding Chariklo. After the asteroid was discovered in 1997, its brightness mysteriously dropped off and only came back again in 2008. What apparently happened was that, as Chariklo moved through its orbit, its ring system turned edge-on when viewed from Earth. As they turned back to face us with their flat side, they reflected light toward our planet and Chariklo’s brightness grew by 40 percent.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/03/asteroid-ring-system/

PS1-10afx demonstrated the same color and the change in brightness over time as a Type Ia supernova, but its peak brightness was 30 times greater than expected.

There are a few, rare supernovae that have been found with comparable luminosities, but PS1-10afx was different in just about every way. It evolved too fast, its host galaxy is too big, and it was too red.

These anomalies led some astronomers to conclude that PS1-10afx was a completely new type of supernova.

“Generally, the rare supernovae that have been found to shine brighter than Type Ia usually have higher temperatures (bluer colors) and larger physical sizes (and thus slower light curves). New physics would thus be required to explain PS1-10afx as an intrinsically luminous supernova,” explained Dr Robert Quimby from the University of Tokyo’s Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, the lead author of the study published in the journal Science.

Other astronomers suggested PS1-10afx was a normal Type Ia supernova magnified by a gravitational lens in the form of a massive object.

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/science-superluminous-supernova-ps110afx-01880.html

According to the theory of relativity, light can be bent by gravity. Thus an unseen dense object (such as a black hole) "in the line of sight" of a super nova (or even an ordinary star) will bend the light beams slightly back around it. Light beams that would normally be dispersed progressively in space are redirected and in this case become more concentrated in the region forward of the heavy object. It happens the earth is positioned to let us see this "concentration" of light beam. Somewhere else in space, where the Super Nova should be seen brightly, may only be noted as an ordinary star as the light beams that would have been in that region of space were redirected somewhere else by the gravitational forces. 

Gus Leonisky

Your local astronomical observatory.

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JUNE 3, 2014: Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have assembled a comprehensive picture of the evolving universe — among the most colorful deep space images ever captured by the 24-year-old telescope. This study, which includes ultraviolet light, provides the missing link in star formation.

read more: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/27/

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In what amounts to a back-to-school gift for pupils with nerdier leanings, researchers have added a fresh line to the cosmic address of humanity. No longer will a standard home address followed by "the Earth, the solar system, the Milky Way, the universe" suffice for aficionados of the extended astronomical location system.

The extra line places the Milky Way in a vast network of neighbouring galaxies or "supercluster" that forms a spectacular web of stars and planets stretching across 520m light years of our local patch of universe. Named Laniakea, meaning "immeasurable heaven" in Hawaiian, the supercluster contains 100,000 large galaxies that together have the mass of 100 million billion suns.

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, lies on the far outskirts of Laniakea near the border with another supercluster of galaxies named Perseus-Pisces. "When you look at it in three dimensions, is looks like a sphere that's been badly beaten up and we are over near the edge, being pulled towards the centre," said Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.

Astronomers have long known that just as the solar system is part of the Milky Way, so the Milky Way belongs to a cosmic structure that is much larger still. But their attempts to define the larger structure had been thwarted because it was impossible to work out where one cluster of galaxies ended and another began.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/03/milky-way-laniakea-galaxy-supercluster-immeasurable-heaven

The clearest ever image of planets forming around an infant star has been taken by the Alma radio telescope.

In a vast disc of dust and gas, dark rings are clearly visible: gaps in the cloud, swept clear by brand new planets in orbit.

The sun-like star at the centre, HL Tau, is less than a million years old and is 450 light years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.

The image was made possible by Alma's new high-resolution capabilities.

Because the process of planet formation takes place in the midst of such a huge dust cloud, it can't be observed using visible light.

Alma, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, has snapped the impressive new image using much longer wavelengths, which it detects by comparing the signal from multiple antennas up to 15km apart.

To test out its latest high-resolution capability, only in operation since September, Alma scientists pointed the antennas at HL Tau. They found themselves looking at a "protoplanetary disc" in more detail than ever before.

"I think it's phenomenal," said Dr Aprajita Verma, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford.

"This shows how exciting Alma is going to be - it's going to be an incredible instrument."

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29932609

This photograph reasonably closely follows the hypothesis of formation of solar systems by Pierre-Simon de Laplace.

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– By Byron Jennings, Theorist and Project Coordinator

Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (1749 – 1827) was one of the great French mathematical physicists. In math, his fame is shown by the number of mathematical objects named after him: Laplace’s equation, Laplace transforms, the Laplacian, etc.  In physics, he was the first to show that planetary orbits are stable and he developed a model—the nebular model—to account for how the solar system formed.  In modified form, the nebular model is still accepted. In spite of these important contributions, he was also very much a lackey, being very careful to keep on the right side of all the right people. During the French revolution, that might have been just good survival strategy. After all, he served successive French governments and, unlike Lavoisier, kept his head.

Laplace presented his definitive work on the properties of the solar system to Napoleon.  Napoleon, liking to embarrass people, asked Laplace if it was true that there was no mention of the solar system’s Creator (ie God) in his opus magus. Laplace, on this occasion at least, was not obsequious and replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.” This is essentially the simplicity argument discussed in a previous blog, but stated very crisply and succinctly.

Laplace was not just a whistlin’ Dixie. Newton had needed that hypothesis, ie God, to make the solar system work. Newton believed that the planetary orbits were unstable and unless God intervened periodically, the planets would wander off into space. Newton had not done the mathematical analysis sufficiently completely. Laplace rectified the problem. Newton also had no model for the origin of the solar system. Laplace eliminated these two gaps that Newton had God fill.

Back to Napoleon—he told Joseph Lagrange (1736 – 1813), another of the great French mathematicians/physicists, Laplace’s comment about no need for the God hypothesis. Lagrange’s reply was, “Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.” Laplace’s apocryphal reply was, “This hypothesis, Sir, explains in fact everything, but does not permit to predict anything. As a scholar, I must provide you with works permitting predictions.” This is the ultimate insult in science: it explains everything but predicts nothing. Explanations are a dime a dozen; if you want explanations, read Kipling’s Just so Stories. Now, there are some fine explanations. I particularly like The Cat That Walked by Himself.

Lapalce’s argument, I had no need of that hypothesis, is still being used today. Hawking and Mlodinow in their book, The Grand Design, created a stir by claiming God did not exist. But their argument was just Laplace’s pushed back from the beginning of the solar system to the beginning of universe:  they had no need of that hypothesis.  Whether their physics is correct or not is still an open question. It is not clear that string theory has gotten past the “it explains everything but predicts nothing” stage.

http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/09/16/there-is-no-need-for-god-as-a-hypothesis/

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Distant supernovae outside our galaxy are difficult to study because they're so far away.

Fesen and co-author Dr Dan Milisavljevic, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, used near-infrared spectroscopy to measure expansion velocities of extremely faint material inside the supernova remnant, providing the crucial third dimension for the 3D model.

"We're sort of like bomb squad investigators," says Milisavljevic.

"We examine the debris to learn what blew up and how it blew up. Our study represents a major step forward in our understanding of how stars actually explode."

The study revealed that cavities in the supernova's interior are caused by plumes of radioactive nickel 56, says Fesen.

"Nickel 56 will eventually decay into iron, and during that decay process a lot of energy is generated. These plumes of nickel move through the non-radioactive material, pushing it away and making cavities.

"We can see that Cassiopeia A blew up in a violent way powered by these plumes of radioactive nickel."

The scientists found the same bubble like structure inside other supernova remnants.

"Cassiopeia A may be showing us how all core collapse supernovae actually explode," says Fesen.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2015/01/30/4169882.htm

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An Australian-based PhD student has cracked an international mystery that had some of the best minds in astrophysics stumped. Working at the Parkes radio telescope in NSW, Emily Petroff has identified the source of mysterious radio bursts of terrestrial origin that mimic signals from outside our own galaxy. 

The strange radio signals being detected on Earth, known as "perytons", are very similar in frequency and duration to deep space signals that some astronomers thought could be caused by neutron stars becoming black holes. However, Ms Petroff and her colleagues identified a far more mundane source for perytons – microwave ovens used by astronomers to heat up their pot noodles. 

read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/astronomy/astronomy-mystery-solved-theyre-space-pings-but-not-as-we-know-them-20150504-1mur6m.html

This reminds me of the Big Bang theory when the troop goes to study string theory at the north pole and the results were falsified with a can opener... I have no clue as to the right number for the episode, just gave it a wild number.

Astronomers are about to embark on a project to measure the movement of a million galaxies, building the largest map of dark matter ever attempted.

The TAIPAN galaxy survey will measure the galaxies at an unprecedented speed, also providing scientists with the most accurate measurement of the rate of expansion of the universe.

"This will be about ten times larger than our best previous survey," says Professor Andrew Hopkins of the Australian Astronomical Observatory.

"By measuring the movement of individual galaxies, we can measure the gravitational influences they're subjected to and we can use that to measure the distribution of dark matter in the universe."

Scientists don't know what dark matter is, however they know it exists because they can see its gravitational influence.

TAIPAN will also allow astronomers to develop the most precise measurement yet of the expansion of the universe, known as the Hubble constant.

"The Hubble constant is the speed at which galaxies appear to be receding from us," says Hopkins.

Despite it's name, the Hubble constant is not constant. The current best measurement for it is about 72 kilometres-per-second, per-megaparsec. One megaparsec is about 3.2 million light years.

This means a galaxy 3.2 million light years away is moving away from us at 72 kilometres per second, and a galaxy 6.4 million light years away is moving away from us at 144 kilometres per second, and so on.

"Our best current measurements of the Hubble constant are accurate to within three to four per cent," says Hopkins.

TAIPAN will allow Hopkins and colleagues to measure more galaxies more quickly, allowing them to get a more precise figure for the Hubble constant.

"We think we can get our accuracy down to an error rate of just one per cent," says Hopkins.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2015/09/04/4304998.htm

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The turbulent cosmic cloud known as the Orion nebula has been captured by astronomers with a powerful robotic camera freshly installed at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego in California.

The nebula is a stellar nursery 1,500 light years from Earth where more than 1,000 young stars are thought to reside. It forms the brightest spot in the sword of Orion, in the constellation of the hunter.

It is the first image taken by the camera, which forms the centrepiece of a new automatic survey of the sky known as the Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF, named after Fritz Zwicky, a Swiss astronomer who discovered 120 exploding stars in his lifetime.

The camera can capture hundreds of thousands of stars and galaxies in a single shot and will be used to scour the heavens for interesting objects from supernovae and black holes, to asteroids and comets.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/14/powerful-new-robotic-cam...

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British researchers have warned that it will be a sudden bang rather than a slow disruption that will add to the end of the Universe, a process which they claimed may already be in place.

In a study published by the journal Physical Review D, Harvard University physicists specifically mentioned the Biblically destructive role of a giant cosmic bubble, which they claimed may be generated by Higgs boson, an elementary particle in physics sometimes referred to as "the God particle."

The mass of the Higgs boson, which was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, currently stands at 125 gigaelectronvolts, a figure which scientists said may one day be altered, according to the rules of quantum physics.

READ MORE: Hawking Sheds Light on What Happened Before the Universe Was Born (VIDEO)

If this mass finally changes, it will ride roughshod over all the vital elements in the Universe, altering existence itself and destroying all life.

The similar metamorphosis of "the God particle" would give birth to a bubble of expanding negative energy, within which all the laws of physics would be disrupted.  The ball would grow until it finally devours the Universe, according to researchers.

They warned that the process may have already begun and that it is impossible to know about the possible breakdown of the Higgs boson because of the fact that our Universe is infinitely huge.

READ MORE: What's the Matter? Scientists Spot the Missing Part of the Universe (VIDEO)

At the same time they assured that only about ten quinquadragintillion years on, it could be relevant to talk about the end of the Universe.

"That is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very long time. Our sun will burn up and many things will happen in our solar system before this is very likely to happen," Anders Andreassen, lead author of the study, pointed out.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/science/201804041063208881-universe-bubble-end-s...

Writing in the journal Nature Astronomy, its discoverers claim the stars at the centre of the turmoil are primed to produce the most extreme explosion known to astronomy: a gamma ray burst. 

"This is the first time we've seen all of the ingredients to make one of those particular events,all wrapped up in one place," said study co-author Peter Tuthill of the University of Sydney. 

He and his colleagues dubbed the swirling formation Apep, in honour of the Egyptian serpent deity who battles with the sun god Ra.

Apep has a pair of enormous stars at its core known as Wolf-Rayets, which are on the cusp of exploding as supernovae.

"When we find a massive star in the Wolf-Rayet phase it is the very, very last stop before oblivion," Professor Tuthill explained.

It is thought that when they collapse to form ultra-dense neutron stars, or black holes, these massive stars could create long gamma ray bursts — jets of high-powered energy lasting more than two seconds.

But not all big stars shoot out gamma rays when they blow up.

"We think the [difference] between a normal, vanilla supernova and these sort of ferocious gamma ray bursts is rotation," Professor Tuthill said.

And according to the team's calculations, one of the two stars rotating within Apep's "central engine" is spinning very, very fast.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-11-20/wolf-rayet-star-may-blast-milky-way-with-gamma-ray-burst/

For those who want to know a bit more stuff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemaître–Tolman_metric

Scientists have glimpsed the event horizon of a black hole for the very first time.

• The world-first image shows the supermassive black hole at the centre of M87, a neighbouring galaxy to our own Milky Way
• The image is the result of a seven-year project linking telescopes all over the world to create 'a dish the size of the planet'
• The fact the image matches so closely to predictions is a confirmation of Einstein's theory of general relativity

Until now, every image of a black hole you have ever seen has been an artist's impression.

"We've been studying black holes so long that sometimes it's easy to forget that none of us has actually seen one," said France Cordova, director of the US National Science Foundation, at one of seven simultaneous press conferences where the scientists announced their findings to the world.

"This is a huge day in astrophysics. We're seeing the unseeable."

The first image shows a bright fringe of gas, which is being squeezed and heated as it falls towards the event horizon of a supermassive black hole at the centre of M87, a galaxy near our own Milky Way.

This cosmic monster sits 55 million light-years from Earth and is 6.5 billion times heavier than the Sun. 

Black holes are notoriously hard to see, because their gravitational pull is so strong that nothing — not even light — can escape once it crosses the black hole's event horizon, the point of no return.

Today's historic portrait is the result of decades of theoretical predictions and technical advances.

"This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers," said Dr Sheperd Doeleman from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago."

The first photo ever released of a supermassive black hole. This image shows M87, which is at the centre of our neighbouring Virgo A galaxy. (Supplied: Event Horizon Telescope)

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-04-10/black-hole-event-horizon-...

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is "warped and twisted" and not flat as previously thought, new research shows.

Analysis of the brightest stars in the galaxy shows that they do not lie on a flat plane as shown in academic texts and popular science books.

Astronomers from Warsaw University speculate that it might have been bent out of shape by past interactions with nearby galaxies.

The new three dimensional map has been published in the journal Science.

The popular picture of the Milky way as the flat disc is based on the observation of 2.5 million stars out of a possible 2.5 billion. The artists' impressions are therefore rough approximations of the truer shape of our galaxy, according to Dr Dorota Skowron of Warsaw University.

"The internal structure and history of the Milky Way is still far from being understood, in part because it is extremely difficult to measure distances to stars at the outer regions of our galaxy," she said.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49182184

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