Sun's Three Years in Three Minutes

In this unusual video, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captures an image of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths, two images per day, for the past three years.

According to NASA:

"There are several noteworthy events that appear briefly in this video. They include the two partial eclipses of the sun by the moon, two roll maneuvers [by the observatory, as it changes position], the largest flare of this solar cycle, comet Lovejoy, and the transit of Venus. The specific time for each event is listed below, but a sharp-eyed observer may see some while the video is playing.” 

They appear at:

00:30:24 Partial eclipse by the moon

00:31:16 Roll maneuver

01:11:02 August 9, 2011 X6.9 Flare, the largest of this solar cycle

01:28:07 Comet Lovejoy, December 15, 2011

01:42:29 Roll Maneuver

01:51:07 Transit of Venus, June 5, 2012

02:28:13 Partial eclipse by the moon"

The music is violinist Martin Lass playing “Our Lady’s Errand of Love.”

Higgs Boson Spells Doom and Gloom

The long-sought Higgs boson might doom our universe to an unfortunate end, researchers say. The mass of the particle is a key ingredient in a calculation that predicts the future of space and time.

"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," says Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. "It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out."

The Higgs boson particle is a manifestation of an energy field pervading the universe called the Higgs field, which is thought to explain why particles have mass. After searching for decades for proof that this field and particle existed, physicists at the LHC announced in July 2012 that they'd discovered a particle whose properties strongly suggest it is the Higgs boson.

Click here for the article.

What Happens to You in a Black Hole?

Black holes are so massive they deform space and time, so dense their centers are called "points at infinity," and are absolutely black because even light can't escape them. 

So what would happen if you were sucked into one?

If you were to step into a black hole, your body would most closely resemble "toothpaste being extruded out of the tube," says Charles Liu, an astrophysicist who works at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium.

According to LiveScience.com:

"First of all, you approach the speed of light as you fall into the black hole. So the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time," Liu said. "Furthermore, as you fall, there are things that have been falling in front of you that have experienced an even greater 'time dilation' than you have. So if you're able to look forward toward the black hole, you see every object that has fallen into it in the past. And then if you look backwards, you'll be able to see everything that will ever fall into the black hole behind you.  

"So the upshot is, you'll get to see the entire history of that spot in the universe simultaneously," he said, "from the Big Bang all the way into the distant future."

Liu also explains the effects of other universal forces such as relativity on the hapless person who would encounter a black hole.

Click here for the complete description. 

Multi-verse Linked to Perceptions of Time

How we perceive time has much to do with our ability ~ or inability, as the case may be ~ to perceive parallel universes. And the key to whole mystery might be time travel, according to Andrew Cleland and other quantum physicists at the University of California.

According to Fox News:

What does it all mean? Let's say you're in Oklahoma visiting your aunt. But in another universe, where your atomic particles just can't keep up, you're actually at home watching "The Simpsons." That may sound far-fetched, but it's based on real science. 

"When you observe something in one state, one theory is it split the universe into two parts," Cleland told FoxNews.com, trying to explain how there can be multiple universes and we can see only one of them.  

The multi-verse theory says the entire universe "freezes" during observation, and we see only one reality. You see a soccer ball flying through the air, but maybe in a second universe the ball has dropped already. Or you were looking the other way. Or they don't even play soccer over there.

Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and a popular author, accepts the scientific basis for the multi-verse ~ even if it cannot be proven.  "Unless you can imagine some super-advanced alien civilization that has figured this out, we aren't affected by the possible existence of other universes," Carroll told Fox News. But he does think "someone could devise a machine that lets one universe communicate with another."

Click here for the complete article. 

Context of Our Existence on Earth

I'm a great fan of physicist Peter Russell, author of From Science to God and several other profound books. Here's a new video he just released on the composition of our universe and beyond, showing that we are "specks in infinity." For more of Peter's thoughts, writings and videos, visit his website.

String Theory May Explain Dimensions

We humans experience our universe in three dimensions, yet superstring theory claims there are 10 dimensions ~ nine spatial ones plus a dimension of time. Now some Japanese scientists think they may have an explanation for how a three-dimensional universe emerged from the original nine dimensions of space.

According to Discovery.com:

According to string theorists, there are the three full-sized spatial dimensions we experience every day, one dimension of time, and six extra dimensions crumpled up at the Planck scale like itty-bitty wads of paper. As tiny as these dimensions are, strings ~ the most fundamental unit in nature, vibrating down at the Planck scale ~ are even smaller.  

The geometric shape of those extra dimensions helps determine the resonant patterns of string vibration. Those vibrating patterns in turn determine the kind of elementary particles that are formed, and generate the physical forces we observe around us, in much the same way that vibrating fields of electricity and magnetism give rise to the entire spectrum of light, or vibrating strings can produce different musical notes on a violin.  

All matter (and all forces) are composed of these vibrations -- including gravity. And one of the ways in which strings can vibrate corresponds to a particle that mediates gravity.

Scientists believe string theory could be used to explore the infinitely tiny point of our universe's birth.

Click here for the complete article.

Southern Skies Revealed in Detail

The Swan Nebula as photographed through the VST.

A section of our universe previously not photographed now is visible to all due to a newly installed super telescope. The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) recently snapped its first impressive images of the southern sky over the Paranal Observatory in Chile.

The state-of-the-art telescope is the latest addition to the European Southern Observatory's network of telescopes at Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The first image released from the VST shows the spectacular star-forming region Messier 17, also known as the Omega nebula or the Swan nebula, as it has never been seen before.

According to LiveScience.com:

This nebula, full of gas, dust and hot young stars, lies in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer). The VST's field of view is so large that is able to observe the entire nebula, including its fainter outer parts.
 The second of the newly released images is a portrait of the star cluster Omega Centauri in unprecedented detail. Omega Centauri is the largest globular cluster in the sky and the VST's view includes about 300,000 stars.

The VST and its OmegaCAM over the next five years will make three detailed surveys of the southern sky. The data will be made public for astronomers around the world to analyze.

Click here for the article, including a video.

View of Universe May Redefine Gravity

The universe appears to be clumpier than astronomers expected, according to the largest galaxy survey ever conducted ~ a finding that might lead to a new understanding of gravity.

“Maybe on very large scales, Einstein’s general relativity is slightly wrong,” says cosmologist Shaun Thomas of University College London. “This potentially could be one of the first signs that something peculiar is going on.”

According to DailyGalaxy.com:

When viewed close up, the matter in the universe bunches up into stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters. But as you zoom out, cosmologists expect the universe to look more and more smooth, sort of the way details in an earthly landscape blend together when viewed from an airplane.  

What clumpiness there is comes from tiny fluctuations in the density of matter in the early universe. As the universe expanded, spots with a little bit of extra matter gathered more and more matter through gravitational attraction. Based on the best model of how gravity works and what the universe is made of, cosmologists can extrapolate out from the Big Bang to get a pretty good idea of how lumpy the universe should be on every scale.  

Thomas and colleagues looked at the most zoomed-out view of the universe yet acquired, and found more lumpiness than models predict, using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which covers about a fifth of the entire sky, to make a rough 3-D map of 723,556 galaxies that are at least 4 billion light-years away. The researchers calculated how evenly distributed, or smooth, the galaxies appear on length scales of 2 billion light-years.

The findings could mean cosmologists need to reassess their understanding of dark energy, the mysterious force that drives the universe outward at an ever-increasing rate. Dark energy itself is supposed to be almost perfectly smooth, but clumps of dark energy could draw clumps of visible matter around them.

Click here for the complete article.

Reconciling Parallel Universe and Multiverse

The idea that the cosmos constantly splits into parallel universes ~ in which every conceivable outcome of every event happens ~ has been unified with the idea that our universe is part of a larger multiverse. While solving a bizarre but fundamental problem in cosmology, the concept and has set physics circles buzzing with both excitement and bewilderment.

The problem is the observability of our universe. While most of us simply take it for granted that we should be able to observe our universe, it is a different story for cosmologists. When they apply quantum mechanics - which successfully describes the behavior of very small objects like atoms - to the entire cosmos, the equations imply that it must exist in many different states simultaneously, a phenomenon called a superposition. Yet that is clearly not what we observe. 

Cosmologists reconcile this seeming contradiction by assuming that the superposition eventually "collapses" to a single state. But they tend to ignore the problem of how or why such a collapse might occur, says cosmologist Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley. "We've no right to assume that it collapses. We've been lying to ourselves about this," he says.

In an attempt to find a more satisfying way to explain the universe's observability, Bousso, together with Leonard Susskind at Stanford University in California, turned to the work of physicists who have puzzled over the same problem but on a much smaller scale: why tiny objects such as electrons and photons exist in a superposition of states but larger objects like footballs and planets apparently do not.

Click here for the complete article.

String Theory Points to Parallel Universe

String theory likely holds the secret to the magnitude of our universe ~ which is probably actually a “multiverse,” according to physicist Brian Greene.

“You almost can't avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe,” Greene tells NPR. “There are many of us thinking of one version of parallel universe theory or another. If it's all a lot of nonsense, then it's a lot of wasted effort going into this far out idea. But if this idea is correct, it is a fantastic upheaval in our understanding.”

Greene believes the key to understanding these multiverses comes from string theory, the area of physics he's studied for the past 25 years.

According to NPR:

In a nutshell, string theory attempts to reconcile a mathematical conflict between two already accepted ideas in physics: quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. 

“Einstein's theory of relativity does a fantastic job for explaining big things,” Greene says. “Quantum mechanics is fantastic for the other end of the spectrum ~ for small things. The big problem is that each theory is great for each realm, but when they confront each other, they are ferocious antagonists and the mathematics falls apart.” 

String theory smoothes out the mathematical inconsistencies that currently exist between quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. It posits that the entire universe can be explained in terms of really, really small strings that vibrate in 10 or 11 dimensions ~ meaning dimensions we can't see. If it exists, it could explain literally everything in the universe ~ from subatomic particles to the laws of speed and gravity. 

Greene, the author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, tackles the existence of multiple universes in his latest book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Law of the Cosmos.

Click here for the NPR article and “Fresh Air” interview.

An Adventure in Magnitudes ~ The Power of Ten

I’d been thinking lately about the enormity of our universe, especially the concept that our universe is only one of many. Today I learned about this 10-minute film called “The Power of Ten.” Called an adventure in magnitudes, it begins on a picnic blanket near Chicago’s shore of Lake Michigan, then takes us to the farthest realm of our universe, moving 10 times farther out every 10 seconds. Then, in an interesting turnabout, it moves inward, back to the picnic blanket and into the atomic structure of a cell in the man’s hand.

As the Hermetic adage goes … “As above, so below.”

This is Your Universe

These images and many more from NASA's image bank are astounding when you consider that this is our universe in all of its complexity and beauty. This, folks, is the real thing. If you want to see more images along with more detailed captions, just visit NASA's website and check out the NASA Image of the Day Gallery.