Beyond awesome for so many reasons…

Frothy Magnetic-Bubble Sea Found at Solar System’s Edge: “The edge of the solar system may be a frothy sea of giant magnetic “bubbles,” a new NASA study says.

The new findings may mean that our system’s magnetic barrier—once thought to be a smooth shield—may be letting in more harmful cosmic rays and energetic particles than previously thought.”

Head over and read the whole piece. Fascinating.

Think about the implications for astronauts traveling to Mars… how might this impact our ability to one day visit other planets?

Striving for the Speed of Light : Starts With A Bang: “It’s always easy to point out the difficulties with a dream. The stars, after all, are so incredibly far away, that the distances are, well, astronomical.”

Great post!

CfA Press Room: “Cambridge, MA – Today, astronomers unveiled the most complete 3-D map of the local universe (out to a distance of 380 million light-years) ever created. Taking more than 10 years to complete, the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS) also is notable for extending closer to the Galactic plane than previous surveys – a region that’s generally obscured by dust.”

Wow! This took 10 years to complete and gives us realistic 3D coordinates of the 43,000 galaxies 380 light years from earth.

If you’re wondering where we are, we’re running on the X Axis (horizontal) through the middle of the map.

Amazing.

Supernova Sonata from Alex Parker on Vimeo.

Observations: The Real Explosions in the Sky: Supernovae Translated into Music [Video]: “What does a supernova sound like? Hopefully we will never find out directly—getting within earshot of an exploding star is probably a bad idea. “

Incredible! Head over to the link above and see how they did it.

Wow!

Bye Bye Comet! [HD Video] | Flickr – Photo Sharing!: “SOHO watched as a fairly bright comet dove towards the Sun in a white streak and was not seen again after its close encounter (May 10-11, 2011). The comet, probably part of the Kreutz family of comets, was discovered by amateur astronomer Sergey Shurpakov. In this coronagraph the Sun (represented by a white circle) is blocked by the red occulting disk so that the faint structures in the Sun’s corona can be discerned. Interestingly, a coronal mass ejection blasted out to the right just as the comet is approaching the Sun.”

We live in a beautiful (and violent) universe!

You’ll be 23 (and I’ll be a chipper 45) in 2023 when we could launch the first boat in space.

Head over to NewScientist to read this great post on a possible future probe that will also be the first “space-boat”…

NASA floats Titan boat concept – space – 09 May 2011 – New Scientist: “Titan’s surface is dotted with lakes, making it strangely reminiscent of Earth. But rather than water, the lakes are filled with a mixture of methane and ethane, which are gases on Earth but are liquid at Titan’s surface temperature of -180 °C.

NASA is now considering sending a probe to splash down into one of the lakes. It has selected a mission called the Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) as one of three finalists competing for a chance to fly in 2016. The TiME project is led by Ellen Stofan of Proxemy Research in Gaithersburg, Maryland.”

Awesome.

Stephen Hawking Speaks – NYTimes.com: “On a screen attached to his wheelchair, commonly used words flash past him. With a cheek muscle, he signals an electronic sensor in his eyeglasses to transmit instructions to the computer. In this way he slowly builds sentences; the computer transforms them into the metallic, otherworldly voice familiar to Dr. Hawking’s legion of fans.”

We’ll talk a little more about him tomorrow in relation to Einstein!

Perhaps!

Going to read the quoted paper tonight and I’ll let you know how it goes.

The universe’s very first black holes might be even older than the Big Bang itself: “But that hasn’t stopped physicists Bernard Carr and Alan Coley from taking these two ideas and knitting them together into one spectacular proposal: that there are primordial black holes that formed not in the Big Bang at the beginning of our universe but in the Big Crunch at the end of the one before.

Carr and Coley calculate that black holes of surprisingly reasonable mass could have survived the Big Crunch/Bang – black holes with as much mass as our Sun could have survived the journey from one universe to the next. This means that there really could be objects in our universe that are older than the universe.”

Feel free to read along!

Beautiful…

These Little Lights of Mine: “Scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) have created the largest ever three-dimensional map of the distant universe by using the light of the brightest objects in the cosmos to illuminate ghostly clouds of intergalactic hydrogen. The map provides an unprecedented view of what the universe looked like 11 billion years ago.”

You live in amazing times!

Go outside and ponder the stars tonight.

Here’s the video we watched in class on a gamma ray burst…

Gamma-ray bursts: Introduction to a Mystery: “Gamma-ray bursts are short-lived bursts of gamma-ray photons, the most energetic form of light. At least some of them are associated with a special type of supernovae, the explosions marking the deaths of especially massive stars.

Video: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/Videos/news/GRBstar2.mov