share this to save tumblr :(
//OVER MY DEAD BODY, YAHOO.
signal boost
at first I wasn’t sure if it was hype …. I’m sorry to say its not! http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/should-yahoo-buy-tumblr/2013/05/17/7c55ef7e-befe-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_story.html
(via katy-j)
“A friend took this pic in Arizona USA. The meteorologists don’t have a name for it.
Seems to be high energy to be in a Rainbow and a tornado! ”(source: Council of World Elders)
Oh my
lhjhcxgjhc
All I could think of is the Bifrost.
(via kara-echelon)
“3113 AD - Remnants of a species felled by their own hearts (this was incomprehensible to the robots of 3113 AD)”
(pen & watercolor, 2.5” x 3.25”)
Hubble finds dead stars “polluted” with planetary debris
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them. This discovery suggests that rocky planet assembly is common in clusters, say researchers.
The stars, known as white dwarfs — small, dim remnants of stars once like the Sun — reside 150 light-years away in the Hyades star cluster, in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull). The cluster is relatively young, at only 625 million years old.
Astronomers believe that all stars formed in clusters. However, searches for planets in these clusters have not been fruitful — of the roughly 800 exoplanets known, only four are known to orbit stars in clusters. This scarcity may be due to the nature of the cluster stars, which are young and active, producing stellar flares and other outbursts that make it difficult to study them in detail.
Hubble’s spectroscopic observations identified silicon in the atmospheres of two white dwarfs, a major ingredient of the rocky material that forms Earth and other terrestrial planets in the Solar System. This silicon may have come from asteroids that were shredded by the white dwarfs’ gravity when they veered too close to the stars. The rocky debris likely formed a ring around the dead stars, which then funnelled the material inwards.
The debris detected whirling around the white dwarfs suggests that terrestrial planets formed when these stars were born. After the stars collapsed to form white dwarfs, surviving gas giant planets may have gravitationally nudged members of any leftover asteroid belts into star-grazing orbits.
Besides finding silicon in the Hyades stars’ atmospheres, Hubble also detected low levels of carbon. This is another sign of the rocky nature of the debris, as astronomers know that carbon levels should be very low in rocky, Earth-like material.
This new study suggests that asteroids less than 160 kilometres across were gravitationally torn apart by the white dwarfs’ strong tidal forces, before eventually falling onto the dead stars.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, and G. Bacon (STScI)
Penguin Doppelgänger.
From two different pages in my sketchbook.
Illustration on the Festival of Fools and CQAF for Quarter Beat Magazine’s May Issue, out in Belfast now…
Bill Brandt (British, b. Germany, 1904-1983)
Stonehenge in the Snow, c. 1947.
© Bill Brandt Archive Ltd./Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York.
Dark Matter - “The Tip of an Iceberg of Another World Unrelated to Ours
Answering the observation that the dark matter particle might not be detectable at a colloquium organized by the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, Michael Turner, a theoretical cosmologist trained in both particle physics and astrophysics who coined the term “dark energy,” said that for 20 to 30 years, this idea that dark matter is part of a unified theory has been our Holy Grail and has led to the WIMP hypothesis and the belief that the dark matter particle is detectable. “But there’s a new generation of physicists that is saying, ‘Well, there’s an alternative view. Dark matter is actually just the tip of an iceberg of another world that is unrelated to our world. And I cannot even tell you about that world. There are no rules for that other world, at least that we know of yet.
“Ten years ago,” Turner says, “I don’t think you would’ve found astronomers, cosmologists, and particle physicists all agreeing that dark matter was really important. And now, they do. And all of them believe we can solve the problem soon. It’s wonderful listening to particle physicists explain the evidence for dark matter, and vice versa –astronomers explaining WIMPs as dark matter. ”“As cosmologists,” said Rocky Kolb, who studies the application of elementary-particle physics to the very early Universe, and is the co-author with Michael Turner of The Early Universe, the standard textbook on particle physics and cosmology, “one of our jobs is to understand what the universe is made of. To a good approximation, the galaxies and other structures we see in the universe are made predominantly of dark matter. We have concluded this from a tremendous body of evidence, and now we need to discover what exactly is dark matter. The excitement now is that we are closing in on an answer, and only once in the history of humans will someone discover it. “
“Nothing in cosmology makes sense without dark matter, says Turner. “We needed it to form galaxies, stars and other structures in the Universe. And so it’s absolutely central to cosmology. We also know that none of the particles known to exist can be the dark matter particle. So it has to be a new particle of nature. Remarkably, our most conservative hypothesis right now is that the dark matter is a new form of matter – out there to be discovered and to teach us about particle physics.”
“Dark matter is absolutely central to cosmology, said Turner, “and the evidence for it comes from many different measurements: the amount of deuterium produced in the big bang, the cosmic microwave background, the formation of structure in the Universe, galaxy rotation curves, gravitational lensing, and on and on.”
The moonlight carries a message of love
