How The Universe Works | stars' sizes — if our Sun was Betelgeuse, it would reach to Jupiter — features Lawrence Krauss, Theoretical Physicist — original from YourDiscovery dot com
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away. ~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist _________________
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space — NASA, International Space Station
[BAD ASTRONOMY NOTES.] The video, taken by astronauts and edited by Michael König, was from a high-resolution camera with low-light abilities, so it can see faint sources of light. The footage was all taken from August to October 2011.
I’m so overwhelmed by the beauty and coolness of this video I’m not sure which part I like best! The cities streaming by underneath; the instantly recognizable outlines of familiar places like the Great Lakes or the boot of Italy; the incredible flickering thunderstorms — giving you an understanding that there are always thousands of such storms all over the planet at any one time; the incredible 3D view of the green and red aurorae which you can actually see as towering structures dozens or even hundreds kilometers in height; the stars rising and setting and spinning over the horizon; the reflection of the Moon on the Earth below following along our point of view at 2:50 into the footage; or the thin glowing arc above the horizon: airglow, caused by molecules in the upper atmosphere slowly emitting light as they release energy accumulated during the day.
[BAD ASTRONOMY NOTES.] < snip from the top > This devastatingly beautiful image shows the birth pangs of a massive star. Called IRS 4 (for Infrared Source 4; it was first seen in IR images), it’s the really bright star just below center where the two blue lobes come together. It’s a bruiser, an O-type star with at least 15 times the Sun’s mass — 30 octillion tons! — and is a staggering 10,000 times as bright. It’s still in the process of forming, but it’s nearly there.
Located about 2000 light years away, IRS 4 is surrounded by an enormous cloud of gas and dust that may have a mass as high as 25,000 times the mass of the Sun. When the star first ignited, fusing hydrogen into helium in its core, the vast amount of energy it started pouring out lit up the cloud in the immediate vicinity around it. Most of the cloud is still dark and cannot be seen here, but everything within a few light years of the star is being illuminated, if not ionized, by the fierce ultraviolet light from the star.
Generally, very young stars are still surrounded by the thick disk of material from which they formed. That’s true of IRS 4; the dark line on the left of the star is actually the shadow of that disk on the gas and dust around it.
“Rosetta took an image every hour for 24 hours; they’re making a movie which will be online soon. That should be spectacular!”
_________________ I couldn’t be sure this movie is the one Phil Plait announced in 2009. Anyone know for sure?
Rosetta Earth Flyby Movie | 2009.11.12
[YOUTUBE NOTES.] As Rosetta approached Earth on November 12, 2009, the OSIRIS camera instrument periodically imaged the Earth once every hour for 24 hours. The images from the green optical color filter have been combined into a movie sequence. The images were taken beginning when Rosetta was 1.1 million km from Earth, until it came 320,000 km close.
Hubble took the deepest visible light image yet made.
In 2003, an astronomer (and friend with whom I worked on a Hubble project) named Tom Brown pointed Hubble at the outer fringes of the Andromeda Galaxy, a nearby large spiral like our own Milky Way. Using the Advanced Camera for Surveys, he commanded the space telescope to basically sit and stare at one spot for a total of three and a half days. His goal to was to be able to get good data on very faint stars in Andromeda, to characterize the way stars form in the galaxy.
He certainly was able to do that (and found many stars younger than expected; in Andromeda’s halo the stars were several billion years younger than in our own halo), but what he also got was the deepest optical image of the Universe ever taken. Stars down to 31st magnitude can be seen in the data — those are stars one ten-billionth as bright as what you can see with your unaided eye!
The image here shows different regions in that deep image. You can see faint background galaxies, stars in both Andromeda and the Milky Way, a densely-packed globular cluster, and much more. If you dare, download a monster-sized version of the whole schmeer to see how powerful a space telescope can be.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away. ~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist _________________
Something like 6000 light years away, roughly toward the downtown area of our galaxy, lies NGC 6604, a tight cluster of young, massive, hot, bright stars. Just starting to shrug off the gas cloud of its birth, these stars emit a fierce light that makes the gas glow. When you point the 2.2 meter ESO/MPG telescope at this cluster what you get is startling beauty:
NGC 6604 is the compact group of bright blue stars in the upper left. This whole complex of gas (called Sharpless 2-54)is about 200 – 250 light years across, making it rather huge! You’re only seeing a fraction of it here, though. It’s actually part of an even larger series of nebulae which include the more famous Eagle nebula (the Pillars of Creation) and the Omega nebula.
The image is a composite of pictures from different filters. Ultraviolet and blue filtered images were combined to make blue in this image; green filtered light is colored green, yellowish light from nitrogen is yellow, and the red is actually red from warm hydrogen. As you can see, hydrogen is plentiful in this area!
Also, see those odd diagonal features on the lower left? Those extend for a long way, well outside the frame here. That structure is called a “chimney”, and may be 650 light years long! As stars are born, they can blow massive winds from their surfaces. This puts pressure on the surround gas, and if there’s a weak spot — where the gas is less dense, or if it’s near the edge of the cloud — the winds can push through. It’s not clear exactly how these form, or why they tend to be so straight. It’s suspected magnetic fields are involved, but that complicates things hugely. Still, the chimney in Sharpless 2-54 is the closest one known (of dozens), providing a nice clear view of it. If we ever do figure out the detail mechanics of chimneys, no doubt this one will play a role.
POST 2209
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away. ~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist _________________
I am glad brainpanhandler responded! It got me thinking AND writing: what in the universe doesn’t have a musical scale of some sort? If inquiring minds want to know, here are (some of) the musical scales we humans have produced and studied. I love supposing too that there are more scales yet to be heard from just around the corner and possibly from the next universe. Another relevant query would be, ‘where in the universe is music not?’
You probably know I’m a classical pianist, but not a physicist, astronomer, biologist, logician and philosopher, or writer. So, perhaps you’ll give me a little more rope as I tend like a astronaut to want to wander too far from the ship!
Some physicists are fascinated about vibrations the universe probably manifested since the big bang; or maybe it was vibrations and rhythms that created the big bang, hence the universe; hence everything known and unknown. The several inclinations and questions I’ve held back in a file save were inspired last week after viewing TED’s Talk featuring physicist, Janna Levin (who is apparently neither a musician nor a practicing musician). For instance, Ms. Levin speaks to the soundtrack of black holes, and I speak, however wobbly, to the musical scale in soundtracks of dolphins. So, yes, dolphins I think communicate via vibrations and rhythms of their particular scale(s), although dolphins don’t wear’em.
Follows is a premise—a working premise that is awaiting more evidence: I think and speak in terms of music as vibrations, an idea which is pretty much at the core of my personal cosmology. (Notwithstanding, the little studied vibrational and rhythmical partnership between the brain and physical heart.)
A working premise: by way of heat fluctuations, our known universe vibrates infinite numbers of rhythms creating infinite numbers of particular processes, as we presume to know them.
^ clicks and whistles Here are only a few queries I thought better to expose from my file save so you’d know why I’m wanting to expand black hole suppositions about which Ms. Levin speaks.
⋅ How would we know that dolphins’ clicks and whistles are not pleasurable to them?
⋅ If dolphins’ vibrations and rhythms as sounds, and their soundless vibrations and rhythms, are not pleasurable for them, for what purposes would pleasurable vibrations and rhythms be necessary for communications?
⋅ If those clicks and whistles are forms of communication, and enjoyable and imperative for survival, may we then call dolphins’ communications forms of music as vibrations yet not melodious and harmonious as we humans are so apt to expect.
⋅ Well, then, if vibrations and rhythms manifested within, around, or between anything would be described as music, then what in our known universe is not manifesting vibrations, thus not rhythms?
⋅ Furthermore, during, let’s say, the most recent 100 million years, what forms of communications have each (and every single?) species demonstrated? That notion would include vibrations of plants, for example.
⋅ Must any culture, anywhere, at any moment in the history of our species have been predisposed to melodies and harmonies? If human ears were not so predisposed to melodies and harmonies, why wouldn’t radio bursts, with their particular rhythms distinguished or not by humans, be resultant communications and musical forms within the universe? Hear radio bursts.
Still, I want to believe music of the universe is created by fluctuations of heat—most if not all of what we humans would call violence—the results of which can be infinite vibrations and rhythms within, around and between all things. Music could then be imagined as intrinsic manifestations birthed in violence, as birthing stars or converging black holes are violent; each thing vibrated into existence by what we humans would call a musical scale with each tone in that scale rhythmically vibrating. Vibrations, rhythms, music, musical scales, and all that jazz are somethings the universe doesn’t know or is able to speak about, because the universe just is. Now there’s a thought .
_________________ [TED NOTES.] We think of space as a silent place. But physicist Janna Levin says the universe has a soundtrack — a sonic composition that records some of the most dramatic events in outer space. (Black holes, for instance, bang on spacetime like a drum.) An accessible and mind-expanding soundwalk through the universe.
Janna Levin:The sound the universe makes ^ TED Recorded March 2011 She holds a BA in Physics and Astronomy from Barnard College with a concentration in Philosophy, and a PhD from MIT in Physics. She has worked at the Center for Particle Astrophysics (CfPA) at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to the UK where she worked at Cambridge University in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). Just before returning to New York, she was the first scientist-in-residence at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford with an award from the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and Arts (NESTA).
Orion is the gift that keeps on giving. When you look toward that constellation in the sky, you’re facing a region of massive ongoing star formation. A sprawling cloud of gas and dust occupies Orion’s midsection, most of it thick and opaque. Some of it is illuminated by stars embedded inside, and some by the reflected light of nearby stars.
M78 is a section of the cloud just above Orion’s Belt that’s evidence of the latter. But even then, much of the dust is dark to our eyes. But if you look in the far, far infrared, where warm material glows, a different — and spectacular — view appears:
This is actually a combination of two views: one in visible light from the Digitized Sky Survey, and the other from the APEX telescope, which can see light in the submillimeter wavelength range — 1000 times the wavelength the human eye can see. Only cold, cold objects emit at this wavelength, things a few degrees above absolute zero.
The blue material in the image is gas and dust reflecting starlight from nearby blue stars, so it can be seen in visible light. The cold dust, though, threads in front and behind the visible material, and can only be seen by APEX’s eye, tuned as it is to the far infrared. Falsely colored in this image, it glows an eerie orange like fire running through cracks in the nebula.
But it turns out the cracks are the fire itself…
The inset image here is from my friend Travis Rector. It covers roughly the top 2/3 of the picture above, but shows only the light that we can see with our eyes. You can see that where the cold dust glows in the APEX image, it appears dark here. Thick cold dust absorbs visible light, so it appears dark to our eyes. In astronomy, what looks bright and what looks dark depends very strongly on how you look at it.
But there’s more to this story, too. That thick dust is actually shrouding a nursery! Buried deep in that cocoon are stars that are forming — you can see them as bright knots in the orange APEX image. M78 is known to house quite a few young stars, several dozen, some only a few million years old. Using just visible light telescopes we’d only see those stars that are out in the open, while the others swaddled in that blanket of dust would remain invisible. Using APEX, they pop out like embers in a dark fireplace.
It’s always fun to be reminded that we see only a narrow, narrow slice of the Universe with our eyes. But we’ve extended our vision across the spectrum, enhancing and expanding our view. The Universe glows fiercely everywhere we look, and places we once thought dark are actually ablaze with new light.
Image credits: ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/T. Stanke et al./Igor Chekalin/Digitized Sky Survey 2; Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage) and H. Schweiker (WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF)
POST 2218
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away. ~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist _________________
There are times when I see an astronomical image so powerful that I’m momentarily stunned, my brain kicked hard enough that all I can do is stare at it and soak it in.
This picture of Saturn is the latest to affect me this way:
This astonishing image was taken on June 13, 2012 by the Cassini spacecraft when it was 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from the ringed planet — that’s more then six times farther than the Moon is from the Earth. Even then Saturn’s rings span too broad a space to see completely. But artistically, perhaps, it works even better; their vast size is intimated instead of spoken aloud, the thousands of thinner component rings only hinted at. You can see their shadow on the tops of Saturn’s southern clouds thousands of kilometers below, the Sun shining down from the north — to the left as seen in this oddly-angled shot. The clouds themselves are almost featureless, but you can still see some boundaries between oppositely-blowing wind belts, and even the long, snaking remnants of a titanic storm that raged in the north last year. It’s incredible.
Moreover, this image has not been processed in any way: it’s raw, taken right off Cassini’s detectors and sent home to Earth (I shrank it a bit to fit the blog, but otherwise didn’t touch it). The sky behind the planet isn’t entirely dark, there are a handful of hot pixels you can see on the planet, and there are other defects here and there that catch the eye. But even that takes nothing away from the power of this image to me, and in many senses actually adds to it.
Cassini is out there. It’s well over a billion kilometers away from Earth and the Sun’s warmth, moving through space, enthralled by the deep and long-reaching gravity of this huge planet. Quietly, obediently, and with hardly any glitches or complaints, it takes picture after picture, reads and records the environment around it, saves the data, and then sends it via radio waves back to Earth, no more than a blue dot in its sprawling sky.
This is what I see, this is how my mind reacts once my brain has a moment to compose itself. It’s a fantastic tableau, a static shot of a magnificent planet such a long, long way away. And always, when I see these, I also think: we did this. We flung this complex machine into the distant solar system to study Saturn, and we did it because we want to find things out.
It is among the best things we do.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Thanks to Michael Interbartolo for posting about this latest batch of raw images in his Google+ stream.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away. ~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist _________________
. Ms. Burchat explains, “…the questions on the smallest and largest scale are actually very connected.”
^ Patricia Burchat sheds light on dark matter — TED Talk | Feb 2008
[YOUTUBE NOTES.] Physicist Patricia Burchat sheds light on two basic ingredients of our universe: dark matter and dark energy. Comprising 96% of the universe between them, they can’t be directly measured, but their influence is immense.
Patricia Burchat studies the universe’s most basic ingredients— the mysterious dark energy and dark matter that are massively more abundant than the visible stars and galaxies. She is one of the founders of the BaBar Collaboration at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a project that’s hoping to answer the question, “If there are as many anti-particles as there are particles, why can’t we see all these anti-particles?”
She’s a member of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project, which will allow scientists to monitor exploding supernovae and determine how fast the universe is expanding— and map how mass is distributed throughout the universe. She’s also part of Fermilab Experiment E791, studying the production and decay of charmed particles. Burchat received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005.
“By the time I arrived at Stanford, I knew I was a reductionist at heart. I am most interested in trying to understand nature at its most fundamental level.” — Patricia Burchat.
POST 2380
Last edited by Allegro on Sat Jun 23, 2012 11:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away. ~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist _________________
. Here we go again . We’re back to the scale of things as in music, that is.
First, a note. Mr. Plait needs a studied musician to edit his blog post, because he’s overreached his knowledge of what can be listened for and written in musical terms. Many scientists neither know what they’re listening to nor what to listen for, but I’m posting the blog and video for the sake of some scientists’ seeming enthusiasm for sounds of music!
Besides that, can anyone know where sounds of music are headed by blending vibrations of musical notes and scales with astronomical data or data from any of the hard sciences?
I do enjoy Mr. Plait, and his target audience, else I wouldn’t have known about the video, the title of which includes the word sonata that’s another musical term used indiscriminately in questionable contexts in the 21st century.
Via reddit (if you’re a redditor, go there and upboat!) I found a very interesting use of astronomical data in music. The composer took the orbital information from the six-planet system called Kepler 11 and codified it into musical notes! From the YouTube notes:
Here, I’ve taken each transit seen by the observatory and assigned a pitch and volume to it. The pitch (note) is determined by the planet’s distance from its star (closer=higher), and they are drawn from a minor 11 chord. The volume is determined by the size of the planet (larger=louder).
The result is actually quite listenable!
^ Kepler 11: A Six-Planet Sonata That’s lovely, and oddly compelling. It’s like the notes are trying to reach some sort of coherence, straining to achieve a melody, but don’t quite make it. I find this interesting: after listening, and without having to check, I knew the planets weren’t in orbital resonance.
A resonance is when one planet’s orbit is a simple fraction of another’s; for example, one planet might circle the star every 2 days, and the next one out in 4 days. Resonances take many ratios, like 3:2, or 5:3. The planets in Kepler-11 don’t do this (though two of them are near a 5:4 resonance). If they did, then eventually the sonata’s melody, such as it is, would repeat. But I didn’t get a sense of that listening to it.
Isn’t that amazing? You can take data using light, convert it to sound, and actually be able to get insight into it. In this case, of course, you could just make a spreadsheet with the planetary periods in it and start dividing away, but that’s no fun!
Perhaps this is just an oddity with no real impact. But I wonder. We convert data into charts and graphs so that we can look for trends, correlations, compare one datum to another visually. In a sense — haha, “sense”! — this is just another case of that, appealing to hearing instead of sight. I’m not a musician per se* so I don’t know if this method has real use or not.
But it’s still cool. And rather pleasant, don’t you think?
* 20+ years of playing bass trombone may be used to argue my musicianship either way, I suspect.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away. ~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist _________________
by hanshan » Mon Aug 22, 2011 5:54 pm 
This devastatingly beautiful image shows the birth pangs of a massive star. Called IRS 4 (for Infrared Source 4; it was first seen in IR images), it’s the really bright star just below center where the two blue lobes come together. It’s a bruiser, an O-type star with at least 15 times the Sun’s mass — 30 octillion tons! — and is a staggering 10,000 times as bright. It’s still in the process of forming, but it’s nearly there.
too far from the ship!
wear’em. 
⋅ If those clicks and whistles are forms of communication, and enjoyable and imperative for survival, may we then call dolphins’ communications forms of music as vibrations yet not melodious and harmonious as we humans are so apt to expect. 
.
The inset image here is from my friend Travis Rector. It covers roughly the top 2/3 of the picture above, but shows only the light that we can see with our eyes. You can see that where the cold dust glows in the APEX image, it appears dark here. Thick cold dust absorbs visible light, so it appears dark to our eyes. In astronomy, what looks bright and what looks dark depends very strongly on how you look at it.
.