Nothing to comment excepting it is fun.
Space Locomotion
Sun
Our Galaxy
Cat’s Space Jump. This gif of the infamous internet cat jump mashed together with Felix Baumgartner’s space jump is why the internet was created Created by Reddit’s CharlieDarwin2
Crying in space
Sources:
http://geekologie.com/2013/04/freaky-deaky-what-it-looks-like-to-cry-i.php
Cosmic Dawn, Looks Like Vishnu’s Conch
From Hubble Telescope.
COSMIC DAWN IN A NUTSHELL
Cosmologists have shown that the Universe began in a hot, dense, and featureless state about 13.7 billion years ago. The Universe we observe today, however, is rich with structures such as galaxies, the product of billions of years of expansion, cooling, and gravity.
The era between 380,000 and 100 million years after “the Big Bang” is called the cosmic dark ages; a time before the first stars formed to light up the Universe. Between 100 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, primordial gas collapsed gravitationally into galaxies, where it cooled and compressed enough to form the first stars, ending the dark ages. Light from these first galaxies ripped apart (“re-ionized”) and heated hydrogen atoms in the inter-galactic gas that filled the Universe. This “feedback” impacted future galaxy and star formation and left observable imprints which astronomers are just now beginning to detect. Understanding this epoch of reionization and first light is a key goal in Cosmology and Astrophysics.
http://www.as.utexas.edu/~gfigm/fri/nutshell.html
Cosmic Dawn
Credit: H. Ford (JHU/STScI), the Faint Object Spectrograph IDT, and NASA
Image Credit: European Space Agency & NASA Acknowledgment: E. Olszewski (University of Arizona)
Phenomenon that is causing awe and least understood is Black Hole.
It is said to be so dense that it does not allow even the light rays to escape and its presence is inferred.
They swallow matter.
A rare photo of Black hole destroying matter is captured.
Here they are:
A Radio-Optical View of the Galaxy Hercules A
Artist’s illustraton of the disk around a giant black hole. Image credit: A. Hobart, CXC
Probable Black Hole Destroys Star, Puttenham & NASA’s Artists Compar
Cosmic Journeys : The Largest Black Holes in the Universe
Black holes may be the most ironic objects in the Universe. They are objects with gravity so fierce that if you venture too close, literally no force in the Universe can prevent you from falling in. Not even light can escape, which is why we call them what we do.
Yet they also power the brightest objects in the Universe. As matter falls in, it forms a diskjust outside the black hole that gets infernally hot, blasting out radiation bright enough that it can be seen across the Universe. Not only that, due to forces in the disk like friction and magnetism ramped up to mind-numbing intensities, this disk can focus and blast out two incredibly powerful beams of matter and energy which scream out into space, forming structures both vast and beautiful … like the ones seen in the galaxy Hercules A:
eriously, grab the embiggened version of that. It’s stunning. I’m using it as my computer’s desktop image, in fact. There’s also an incredible 5000 x 3500 pixel version.
In the heart of the galaxy Hercules A is a monster black hole: It’s about 600 times as massive as the black hole in the center of our Milky Way, making it about 2.5 billion times the Sun’s mass. It’s one of the largest known black holes in the Universe, so big we call it “supermassive.”
And it’s hungry. Material is actively funneling down into the maw of that beast, forming a huge disk and blasting out those jets of material you can see in the picture (which is a combination of visible light seen by the Hubble Space Telescope and radio waves—colored pink in the image—detected by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array). Focused tightly, those jets march across space at ridiculously high speed, slamming into material around them. Eventually they lose enough energy that they slow and puff outward, forming those twin lobes. When this happens, the material emits light in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The lobes of Herc A make it one of the brightest sources of radio waves in the entire sky.
The scale of this will turn your brain into goo: Those lobes are well over 1.5 million light years across from tip to tip, 15 times the size of our entire galaxy! And they’re powerful, emitting a billion times the energy our Sun does at radio wavelengths. The energy flowing out of Hercules A is simply insane. In X-rays alone it blasts out 100 billion times as much energy as our Sun does in all wavelengths of light. Replace our Sun with an object that bright and the Earth would vaporize.
On the one hand the Space is reported to be expanding and on the other hand the objects in the Universe are heading for collision by pulling each other because of their Gravitational pull.
Universe expands t the level of Space and the Objects are converging, becoming larger and thus relatively less in number.
Again new Stars are being born, thus increasing the numbers.
Totally contradicting in Nature for us to understand.
I am reminded of the Upanishad‘s Statements on Reality.
‘It is neither big nor small,It is neither tall nor short,It is everywhere, yet nowhere’
Sounded to me confusing.
What can I comprehend about these astronomical findings!
Only that Human mind can not comprehend Nature/Reality.
[sli
deshow]“
NASA astronomers announced Thursday they can now predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our galaxy, sun, and solar system: the titanic collision of our Milky Way galaxy with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.
The Milky Way is destined to get a major makeover during the encounter, which is predicted to happen four billion years from now. It is likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed.
“Our findings are statistically consistent with a head-on collision between the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy,” said Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore.
The solution came through painstaking NASA Hubble Space Telescope measurements of the motion of Andromeda, which also is known as M31. The galaxy is now 2.5 million light-years away, but it is inexorably falling toward the Milky Way under the mutual pull of gravity between the two galaxies and the invisible dark matter that surrounds them both.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/milky-way-collide.html
Hurtling Galaxies by Hubble Space Telescope.
Explanation: A mere 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda Galaxy really is just next door as large galaxies go. So close, and spanning some 260,000 light-years, it took 11 different image fields from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite’s telescope to produce this gorgeous portrait of the spiral galaxy in ultraviolet light. While its spiral arms stand out in visible light images of Andromeda (also known as M31), the arms look more like rings in the GALEX ultraviolet view, dominated by hot, young, massive stars. As sites of intense star formation, the rings have been interpreted as evidence Andromeda collided with its smaller neighboring elliptical galaxy M32 more than 200 million years ago. The large Andromeda galaxy and our own Milky Way are the dominant members of the local galaxy group.
: Rising as the Sun sets, tonight’s Full Moon could be hard to miss. Remarkably, its exact full phase (May 6 03:36 UT) will occur less than two minutes after it reaches perigee, the closest point to Earth in the Moon’s orbit, making it the largest Full Moon of 2012. The Full Perigee Moon will appear to be some 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than a Full Moon near apogee, the most distant point in the elliptical lunar orbit. In comparison, though, it will appear less than 1 percent larger and almost as bright as April’s Full Moon, captured in this telephoto image rising over suburban Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. For that lunation, Full Moon and perigee were about 21 hours apart. Of course, if you manage to miss May’s Full Perigee Moon, make a note on your calendar. Your next chance to see a Full Moon close to perigee, will be next year on June 23.
http://digg.com/newsbar/topnews/apod_2012_may_18_galex_the_andromeda_galaxy
