Decided to share something rather mind-bending today. Don’t worry… this one’s only 9 minutes and 34 seconds long. Of course, if you’d rather watch the 10 hour, 7 minute, and 10 second one, then here you go…
(There are 5 images and a video here…)
This is a pretty awesome story…
Basically, 5 quasars were studied to figure out the expansion rate of the universe, and the results were… interesting:
When astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered nearly 100 years ago that the universe was uniformly expanding in all directions, the finding was a big surprise. Then, in the mid-1990s, another shocker occurred: astronomers found that the expansion rate was accelerating perhaps due to a repulsive property called “dark energy.” Now, the latest measurements of our runaway universe suggest that it is expanding faster than astronomers thought. The consequences could be very significant for our understanding of the shadowy contents of our unruly universe. It may mean that dark energy is shoving galaxies away from each other with even greater – or growing – strength. Or, the early cosmos may contain a new type of subatomic particle referred to as “dark radiation.” A third possibility is that “dark matter,” an invisible form of matter that makes up the bulk of our universe, possesses some weird, unexpected characteristics. Finally, Einstein’s theory of gravity may be incomplete.
These unnerving scenarios are based on the research of a team led by Nobel Laureate Adam Riess, who began a quest in 2005 to measure the universe’s expansion rate to unprecedented accuracy with new, innovative observing techniques. The new measurement reduces the rate of expansion to an uncertainty of only 2.4 percent. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it does not agree with expansion measurements derived from probing the fireball relic radiation from the big bang. So it seems like something’s amiss – possibly sending cosmologists back to the drawing board.
I’ve always wondered why goats yell like that…
Like what?
Like this:
Apparently, back in 2013, Slate went looking for the answer…
So… our Screaming Carrot Demon in Chief announced the name of the man who will be leading his Education Task Force.
If you were expecting someone who was actually qualified, you clearly weren’t paying attention to Betsy Devos. If the name I’m about to give you sounds like “of course. He would pick him.”, then you have been paying attention…
Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, will lead an education task force put together by President Donald Trump, a spokesman for the university told CNN Thursday.
Len Stevens, the school’s spokesman, said Falwell — the son of Jerry Falwell Sr., the late televangelist — will push to stop regulations coming out of the Education Department, especially those that apply to colleges and universities.
The White House declined to comment.
Okay… you might be thinking I’ve jumped the shark with this series now, but before getting back to images of objects within our observable universe, I just have to go here…
You see, I’m fascinated by the idea of multiple universes, especially the idea that there could be an infinite number of universes, because that means that everything is real. In such a multiverse, there is no such thing as fiction or fantasy. I kind of love that. I won’t go into detail, because this is largely an image series, but just let your imagination go wild thinking about this.
It’s awesome.
The following image is an artist’s rendition of one idea born out of various multiverse ideas, including String Theory, Superstring theory, and M-Theory. I got it from an article on The Physics of the Universe.
Artist’s visualization of rippling membranes
I remember seeing this membrane idea described on one of those TV science documentary shows. It was something like this…
(I’m also incorporating this series into my Self Care series for the foreseeable future…)
I guess this is the best way to follow up the last post. I’m using Wikipedia for this one.
This is one simulated image of the entirety of the observable universe. As I already mentioned last week, the universe is currently estimated to be roughly 93 billion lightyears in diameter, putting the edge around 46.5 billion lightyears away from us.
This image is taken from the Wiki page linked to above, as is the information I’m including about it and about the universe…
Visualization of the whole observable universe. The scale is such that the fine grains represent collections of large numbers of superclusters. The Virgo Supercluster – home of Milky Way – is marked at the center, but is too small to be seen.
Diameter 8.8×1026 m (28.5 Gpc or 93 Gly)[1] Volume 4×1080 m3[2] Mass (ordinary matter) 1053 kg[3] Density 9.9×10−30 g/cm3 (equivalent to 6 protons per cubic meter of space)[4] Age 13.799±0.021 billion years[5] Average temperature 2.72548 K[6] Contents Ordinary (baryonic) matter (4.9%)
Dark matter (26.8%)
Dark energy (68.3%)
So the universe is not only old (to us), but huge.
This video comes from Dianna Cowern, aka Physics Girl. She’s talking about seeing the smallest things in the universe (obviously). I’m a big fan of Physics Girl, and this is an awesome video. (Incidentally, it was also posted on my 28th birthday: May 22, 2015. 😀 )
This video is 8 hours, 54 minutes, and 19 seconds long. It’s basically a compilation of so much of what Hubble has brought us, along with images from the Spitzer, Herschel and Chandra Telescopes, as well as from the ISS.
I did actually have this video playing once a few days ago for the entire nearly 9 hours when I just had no interest in doing anything else but cleaning, eating, and relaxing. What I would do is, if you can, cast this to your TV or set it to full-screen on your monitor and just enjoy the view while doing other stuff.
The James Webb Space Telescope is meant to be the successor to Hubble. I’m really excited about this, and have been following it for a couple years, now.
Just how was our solar system formed?