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Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.


ikenbot: Messier 94: Galactic Wheels within Wheels How many rings do you see in this striking new image of the galaxy Messier 94 (NGC 4736) as seen by the infrared eyes of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope? While at first glance one might see a number of them, astronomers believe there is just one. Historically, Messier 94 was considered to have two strikingly different rings: a brilliant, compact band encircling the galaxy’s core, and a faint, broad, swath of stars falling outside its main disk. Astronomers have recently discovered that the outer ring, seen here in the deep blue glow of starlight, may actually be more of an optical illusion. Their 2009 study combined infrared Spitzer observations with ultraviolet data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, and ground-based surveys in visible (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) and near infrared light (Two Micron All Sky Survey). This more complete picture of Messier 94 indicates that we are really seeing two separate spiral arms that, from our perspective, take on the appearance of a single, unbroken ring. The bright inner ring of Messier 94 is very real, however. This area is sometimes identified as a “starburst ring” because of the frenetic pace of star formation in this confined area. Starbursts like this can often be triggered by gravitational encounters with other galaxies, but in this case may instead be caused by the galaxy’s oval shape. Tucked in between the inner starburst ring and the outer ring-like arms we find the galaxy’s disk, striated with greenish filaments of dust. While, at first glance, these dusty arcs look like a collection of rings, they actually follow tightly wound spiral arcs. Messier 94 is about 17 million light years away, making it a distant neighbor of our own Milky Way galaxy. It was first discovered by Charles Messier’s assistant, Pierre Méchain, in 1781 and was added to his supervisor’s famous catalog two days later.






laboratoryequipment: First Evidence for Extraterrestrial High-Energy NeutrinosA massive telescope in the Antarctic ice has reported the detection of 28 extremely high-energy neutrinos that might have their origin in cosmic sources. Two of these reached energies greater than one petaelectronvolt (PeV), an energy level thousands of times higher than the highest energy neutrino yet produced in a manmade accelerator.The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, run by an international collaboration and headquartered at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) at the Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison, identified the neutrinos, which were described in a talk at the IceCube Particle Astrophysics Symposium at UW–Madison.Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/first-evidence-extraterrestrial-high-energy-neutrinos

Physics: At the Heart of Everything: Quick clarification

imagineatoms:

If light has no mass how can it be affected by gravity?

Because it has momentum

But momentum is mass x velocity so how can it have momentum?

Because language can sometimes bring more problems than answers. Light does not obey the same laws as ordinary matter. To help…