How baby stars are made, as reproted by NewScientist.
“The neighborhood around a black hole seems like no place to raise a star. Violent gravitational forces can rip gas clouds apart, making it hard for stars to condense. But astronomers have spotted evidence of very young stars in a ring of gas close to the heart of the Milky Way, where a massive black hole is thought to reside.”
We may all be aliens, as reported by NewScientist.
“Some fundamental building blocks of our genetic code might have come from outer space, according to a controversial new meteorite study.”
Now it all makes sense, as reported by NewScientist
“Dark energy is not necessary to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe observed by astronomers, suggest controversial new calculations. Instead, gigantic ripples in space-time - larger than the observable universe - may be the cause.”
Desktop armageddon, as reported by BBC News.
“It was generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, US, which smashes beams of gold nuclei together at near light speeds.”
No, really, fucking STAR QUAKE!!! as reported by BBC News.
“The flash of radiation on 27 December was so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth’s atmosphere.”
Mirror mirror, as reported by NewScientist.
“Our universe may one day be obliterated or assimilated by a larger universe, according to a controversial new analysis.”
Now if we only had some dilithium crystals, as found on ZDNet.
“If you’re a science fiction reader, you know that spaceships are using antimatter to travel through space.”
How to put a bomb in space, as reported by NewScientist.
“An enormous ring of superconducting magnets similar to a particle accelerator could fling satellites into space, or perhaps weapons around the world, suggest the findings of a new study funded by the US air force.”
LOS ANGELES, May 19 - I have a thing for it.
Dark matter.
Yes, that applies to the content of my books. But that’s not what I’m on about just now.
I’m more talking about the invisible and intangible stuff of which makes up the overwhelming majority of the universe. I’ve been facinated by dark matter since I first heard of the stuff in a junior college astronomy class. The idea itself facinated me, that the bulk of the universe might be a form of matter that was entirely invisible and undetectable. Known to be there only through its absence.
Simply put, in order for the universe to behave the way it does, and for our various theories of mass and gravity to maintain, there must be huge gobs of the stuff floating about and, essentially, sticking things together. Without our being about to see or feel or find any of it.
Neat-o!
Being naive, I’ve always wondered if the problem might be with some of the more traditionally established ideas about what matter is and how it behaves, but that’s me. Thinking we could just be wrong about a bunch or shit, before theorizing that most of the universe is bizarro matter. Anyway.
I love dark matter. I love thinking about the idea of it as much as I love thinking about the stuff itself.
Which should explain this the batch of dark matter related posts below. Any number of dark matter stories have occured to me, but I’m still looking for the right one.
-c
The invisibly intangible is mapped, as reported by New Scientist.
“The results confirm that dark matter provided the scaffolding that allowed ordinary matter to clump together to form galaxies and clusters of galaxies.”
Space cloud powered by black holes, as reported by New Scientist.
“An enormous cloud of roiling plasma in space may be drawing its energy from black holes, new observations suggest.”
Sounding ever more like people have no fucking clue what holds the universe together, as reported by NewScientist.
“The mysterious cosmic presence called dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the universe, might be lurking in hidden dimensions of space.”
A big fucking chunk of empty, as reported by NewScientist.
“Radio astronomers have found the biggest hole ever seen in the universe. The void, which is nearly a billion light years across, is empty of both normal matter and dark matter. The finding challenges theories of large-scale structure formation in the universe.”
As described on Wikipedia.
In astronomy, Planet X is a large hypothetical planet beyond Neptune. It was postulated to explain apparent discrepancies in the orbits of the gas giants, especially those of Uranus and Neptune. Those discrepancies were resolved by measurements made in the 1980s.
New ways to get off the planet, as reported by NewScientist.
“A slim cable for a space elevator has been built stretching a mile into the sky, enabling robots to scrabble some way up and down the line.”
How to protect your laptop porn, as reported by NewScientist.
“Intergalactic radio signals from quasars could emerge as an exotic but effective new tool for securing terrestrial communications against eavesdropping.”
One of my SF childhood dreams come true, almost, as found at Cosmos Magazine
“The cloak works by deflecting microwave radiation around an object, making it appear to an receiving instruments as though there were nothing obstructing it at all, rendering it, effectively invisible. The technology is described in a paper published today in the U.S. journal Science.”
Why science fiction is losing its romance, as reported in the NY Times.
“The spaceport’s great allure, said Rick Homans, New Mexico’s economic development secretary, is that it borders the missile range, where outside air traffic is already restricted. Also, the weather is sunny and dry. And the elevation puts spaceships 4,300 feet closer to the moon.”
Time travel, as reported by physorg.com.
“Black holes, wormholes, and cosmic strings – each of these phenomena has been proposed as a method for time travel, but none seem feasible, for (at least) one major reason. Although theoretically they could distort space-time, they all require an unthinkably gigantic amount of mass.”