Malahim. Ragnarok. Armageddon. Those are terms we use to describe the end of the world.
As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity this November, we can appreciate the fact that this brilliant scientist came up with ideas that have fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe.
General relativity, in short, tells us that gravity is not quite the force Isaac Newton envisioned; gravity is actually the bending of space and time by mass and energy. This discovery led us to the widely accepted theory of Big Bang, which establishes the birth of the universe as 14 billion years ago.
But what about the death of the universe? For that, we need to turn to dark energy, one of the biggest scientific mysteries of our time.
For decades, astronomers thought that an expanding universe bound by gravity should grow quickly in the beginning and gradually slow as the stars and galaxies obeyed gravity’s inexorable tug. The only question really was whether gravity was sufficient to eventually stop the expansion of the universe and bring it all back together in a hot “Big Crunch.” This seemed like a very plausible scenario.
But in 1998, to everyone’s surprise, two groups of astronomers announced measurements of distant supernovae that showed while the early universe followed their expectations, about four billion years ago, the expansion of the universe began to speed up.
In complete contradiction to predictions, it seemed that something was overcoming the effects of gravity and pushing everything farther away at an ever increasing rate. These observations have long since been confirmed.
It turned out that Einstein imagined such a phenomenon when he was developing his theory of general relativity. He envisioned a “cosmological constant” that provided a repulsive form of gravity.
Following the best theoretical understanding and experimental evidence of his time, Einstein first added the term to his equations, but then took it out, as it didn’t seem necessary. Einstein regarded the fact that he invented the cosmological constant as a colossal mistake.
With the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe, Einstein’s cosmological constant came back into vogue. But it wasn’t the only explanation.
Szilárd was a canny young scientist who also filed a patent for the electron microscope back in 1928. However, it was Ernst Ruska in 1933 who managed to build the first electron microscope that exceeded the resolution of a standard light microscope. His invention, today an everyday piece of research equipment, used electron beams to illuminate tiny specimens and produce a magnified image of their structure.
This very instrument was used by the scientist Sir James Chadwick, who discovered the neutron. As a young man he studied radiation in Germany under the creator of the counter, Hans Geiger. The Geiger counter detects the emission of nuclear radiation and is perhaps one of the world’s best known radiation instruments. Still in Germany when WW1 broke out, Chadwick spent a few years in a detention camp west of Berlin, but after the war went on to be knighted for his achievements in physics.
A journey of discovery: the inventions that taught us everything we know
The Geiger counter 1932 – This very instrument was used by the scientist Sir James Chadwick, who discovered the neutron. As a young man he studied radiation in Germany under the creator of the counter, Hans Geiger. The Geiger counter detects the emission of nuclear radiation and is perhaps one of the world’s best known radiation instruments. Still in Germany when WW1 broke out, Chadwick spent a few years in a detention camp west of Berlin, but after the war went on to be knighted for his achievements in physics.
The most famous equation ever written by arguably the most famous scientist ever to live, Einstein’s greatest tool was his brain. This is the earliest and longest manuscript on relativity that he ever wrote. In it he negates many assumptions made in earlier physical theories and redefines concepts of space, time, matter, energy, and gravity. While the equation denotes his theory of special relativity, which is concerned with light, Einstein’s theory of general relativity helps us to understand planetary dynamics and the evolution of the universe.
This apparatus was used to discover the electron. In 1896, in Cambridge, Joseph John Thomson began experiments on cathode rays. Thomson showed that the cathode rays were particles with a negative charge and much smaller than an atom. They were later named electrons and in 1906 Thomson was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering one of the fundamental building blocks of matter.
This device was developed by French physicist Pierre Curie and used by him and his wife, Marie Curie, in radioactivity investigations. Both were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics alongside Henri Becquerel in 1903 for their pioneering work in spontaneous radioactivity — a term that Marie coined. Marie Curie went on to use her knowledge of radioactivity extensively in medicine, for example to treat tumors. With it, she also discovered the elements polonium and radium.
It may not look very complicated, but when Michael Faraday spent 10 days winding two long pieces of copper wire around an iron ring, he may not have realized the magnitude of his what he was doing. When he passed an electric current through one coiled wire, it induced electricity in the other — he had created the first electric transformer. Today, transformers are crucial to mass supply of electricity to towns and cities as they reduce high-voltage electricity generated by power stations to a lower, safer voltage.
This is the glass prism used by Sir William Herschel to discover infrared radiation. He discovered this invisible type of radiation by studying the area just past red on the color spectrum. To his surprise, it was hotter than all the rest. He was the first person to discover forms of light that are not visible to the human eye. Oh yes, and he also discovered Uranus and wrote 24 symphonies.
Could this really be the tree under which Sir Isaac Newton sat and conceived the universal theory of gravity as an apple conked him on the head? Well, we’re pretty sure it isn’t, considering the story itself is widely considered to be apocryphal. But, according to the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge, where Newton was a fellow, <a href="http://www.newton.ac.uk/art/tree.html" target="_blank">it was taken as a cutting from the alleged tree</a> at Newton’s birthplace in Woolsthorpe Manor, UK. Other alleged cuttings have been replanted as far as Nebraska, Vancouver, and Tokyo.
Here are two of the telescopes belonging to Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was famous for the improvements he made to the instrument. With his advancements in observational astronomy he was the first to see craters on the moon and confirmed the four largest satellites of Jupiter.
Deep in the Kitakami Mountains of Japan, a group of impassioned scientists are working on proposals for a revolutionary project: a machine that will hunt for dark matter. The aim of the International Linear Collider (ILC) is to shed light on the mystery of what makes up most of the universe. This problem has been pursued for millennia, but could this machine hold the key? Here, we take a closer look at the ILC and go on a journey through time to look at some of the inventions that led to the most significant breakthroughs in scientific history. <em>Gallery by <strong><em></em>Monique Rivalland</strong></em>
The machine is colossal. Once built, it will consist of two opposing tunnels that run underground for 31km — over 10 times bigger than the current largest linear particle accelerator in the world. But what is a particle accelerator? Think of it as an atom smasher, a device that propels particles — in this case electrons and positrons — towards each other at extremely high speeds (almost the speed of light) so that they collide and create a myriad of other subatomic particles that otherwise might not exist or that we might not be able to see. Observing these particles could teach us critical things about our origins and even uncover entirely new dimensions.
Scientists estimate that we remain in the dark about a mind-boggling 96% of the universe. Brian Foster, European Regional Director of the International Collider Collaboration and former professor of physics at Oxford University explained to CNN how the ILC would "recreate the conditions fractions of a second after the Big Bang that created our universe." "If we are lucky," he added, "the ILC will detect a whole new family of particles that might help us to realize Einstein’s dream of uniting all the theories of physics into one overarching theory." Decisions on the multi-billion dollar machine looks likely to start by 2015 and construction would take 8-10 years.
Plans for the ILC follow the recent discovery of the elusive Higgs Boson, which resulted in professors Peter Higgs and Francois Englert winning the Nobel Prize in Physics last month. The Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle that may help us understand why other particles have mass, was proposed by the two winners (and Robert Brout) back in 1964 but only proved last year by use of a circular particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider (pictured) at CERN.
Two scientists show the scale of an earlier accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The Super HILAC (Super Heavy Ion Linear Accelerator) was one of the first accelerators that could accelerate the ions of all known natural elements to energies where they could be smashed apart. The lab is aptly named after Ernest Lawrence who invented the first circular accelerator at the University of California, Berkeley, back in 1929.
It looks like a prop from a sci-film but in fact it’s a research vessel called a bubble chamber. The bubble chamber was first used back in 1970 to detect subatomic particles called neutrinos. By filling the device with super hot liquid hydrogen scientists were able to watch particles interact. This 15-foot version was installed in the Bubble Chamber Building at U.S. research center Fermilab in 1971. Now obsolete, the chamber has been on public display since 2004.
Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Bottom and Top. These are the six ‘flavors’ of quarks. But you can’t taste them — they’re the elementary particles that make up bigger particles such as neutrons and protons. Quarks exist only fleetingly outside of these particles and thus only be detected by their behaviour in high-energy collisions, which is precisely what happened back in 1968 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (pictured), when scientists observed Up and Down quarks. Initially proposed by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964, the discovery of quarks gave further credence to the "Standard Model" of physics and prior to the discovery of a Higgs Boson was widely regarded as the most significant advancement in physics of the last 50 years.
In the throes of World War II, an important letter arrived for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Written by Hungarian scientist Léo Szilárd and signed by Albert Einstein, the letter warned the President that Germany may be working on a powerful bomb. For the previous 10 years Szilárd, along with Italian scientist Enrico Fermi, had been experimenting with nuclear chain reactions and had filed a patent for a simple nuclear chain reactor. Finally, on December 2, 1942, the first artificial nuclear chain reaction took place in a racquets court at the University of Chicago (artist’s impression). This launched the Manhattan Project and three years later the U.S. produced the first atomic bomb.
Szilárd was a canny young scientist who also filed a patent for the electron microscope back in 1928. However, it was Ernst Ruska in 1933 who managed to build the first electron microscope that exceeded the resolution of a standard light microscope. His invention, today an everyday piece of research equipment, used electron beams to illuminate tiny specimens and produce a magnified image of their structure.
This very instrument was used by the scientist Sir James Chadwick, who discovered the neutron. As a young man he studied radiation in Germany under the creator of the counter, Hans Geiger. The Geiger counter detects the emission of nuclear radiation and is perhaps one of the world’s best known radiation instruments. Still in Germany when WW1 broke out, Chadwick spent a few years in a detention camp west of Berlin, but after the war went on to be knighted for his achievements in physics.
The most famous equation ever written by arguably the most famous scientist ever to live, Einstein’s greatest tool was his brain. This is the earliest and longest manuscript on relativity that he ever wrote. In it he negates many assumptions made in earlier physical theories and redefines concepts of space, time, matter, energy, and gravity. While the equation denotes his theory of special relativity, which is concerned with light, Einstein’s theory of general relativity helps us to understand planetary dynamics and the evolution of the universe.
This apparatus was used to discover the electron. In 1896, in Cambridge, Joseph John Thomson began experiments on cathode rays. Thomson showed that the cathode rays were particles with a negative charge and much smaller than an atom. They were later named electrons and in 1906 Thomson was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering one of the fundamental building blocks of matter.
This device was developed by French physicist Pierre Curie and used by him and his wife, Marie Curie, in radioactivity investigations. Both were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics alongside Henri Becquerel in 1903 for their pioneering work in spontaneous radioactivity — a term that Marie coined. Marie Curie went on to use her knowledge of radioactivity extensively in medicine, for example to treat tumors. With it, she also discovered the elements polonium and radium.
It may not look very complicated, but when Michael Faraday spent 10 days winding two long pieces of copper wire around an iron ring, he may not have realized the magnitude of his what he was doing. When he passed an electric current through one coiled wire, it induced electricity in the other — he had created the first electric transformer. Today, transformers are crucial to mass supply of electricity to towns and cities as they reduce high-voltage electricity generated by power stations to a lower, safer voltage.
This is the glass prism used by Sir William Herschel to discover infrared radiation. He discovered this invisible type of radiation by studying the area just past red on the color spectrum. To his surprise, it was hotter than all the rest. He was the first person to discover forms of light that are not visible to the human eye. Oh yes, and he also discovered Uranus and wrote 24 symphonies.
Could this really be the tree under which Sir Isaac Newton sat and conceived the universal theory of gravity as an apple conked him on the head? Well, we’re pretty sure it isn’t, considering the story itself is widely considered to be apocryphal. But, according to the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge, where Newton was a fellow, <a href="http://www.newton.ac.uk/art/tree.html" target="_blank">it was taken as a cutting from the alleged tree</a> at Newton’s birthplace in Woolsthorpe Manor, UK. Other alleged cuttings have been replanted as far as Nebraska, Vancouver, and Tokyo.
Here are two of the telescopes belonging to Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was famous for the improvements he made to the instrument. With his advancements in observational astronomy he was the first to see craters on the moon and confirmed the four largest satellites of Jupiter.
Deep in the Kitakami Mountains of Japan, a group of impassioned scientists are working on proposals for a revolutionary project: a machine that will hunt for dark matter. The aim of the International Linear Collider (ILC) is to shed light on the mystery of what makes up most of the universe. This problem has been pursued for millennia, but could this machine hold the key? Here, we take a closer look at the ILC and go on a journey through time to look at some of the inventions that led to the most significant breakthroughs in scientific history. <em>Gallery by <strong><em></em>Monique Rivalland</strong></em>
The machine is colossal. Once built, it will consist of two opposing tunnels that run underground for 31km — over 10 times bigger than the current largest linear particle accelerator in the world. But what is a particle accelerator? Think of it as an atom smasher, a device that propels particles — in this case electrons and positrons — towards each other at extremely high speeds (almost the speed of light) so that they collide and create a myriad of other subatomic particles that otherwise might not exist or that we might not be able to see. Observing these particles could teach us critical things about our origins and even uncover entirely new dimensions.
Scientists estimate that we remain in the dark about a mind-boggling 96% of the universe. Brian Foster, European Regional Director of the International Collider Collaboration and former professor of physics at Oxford University explained to CNN how the ILC would "recreate the conditions fractions of a second after the Big Bang that created our universe." "If we are lucky," he added, "the ILC will detect a whole new family of particles that might help us to realize Einstein’s dream of uniting all the theories of physics into one overarching theory." Decisions on the multi-billion dollar machine looks likely to start by 2015 and construction would take 8-10 years.
Plans for the ILC follow the recent discovery of the elusive Higgs Boson, which resulted in professors Peter Higgs and Francois Englert winning the Nobel Prize in Physics last month. The Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle that may help us understand why other particles have mass, was proposed by the two winners (and Robert Brout) back in 1964 but only proved last year by use of a circular particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider (pictured) at CERN.
Two scientists show the scale of an earlier accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The Super HILAC (Super Heavy Ion Linear Accelerator) was one of the first accelerators that could accelerate the ions of all known natural elements to energies where they could be smashed apart. The lab is aptly named after Ernest Lawrence who invented the first circular accelerator at the University of California, Berkeley, back in 1929.
It looks like a prop from a sci-film but in fact it’s a research vessel called a bubble chamber. The bubble chamber was first used back in 1970 to detect subatomic particles called neutrinos. By filling the device with super hot liquid hydrogen scientists were able to watch particles interact. This 15-foot version was installed in the Bubble Chamber Building at U.S. research center Fermilab in 1971. Now obsolete, the chamber has been on public display since 2004.
Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Bottom and Top. These are the six ‘flavors’ of quarks. But you can’t taste them — they’re the elementary particles that make up bigger particles such as neutrons and protons. Quarks exist only fleetingly outside of these particles and thus only be detected by their behaviour in high-energy collisions, which is precisely what happened back in 1968 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (pictured), when scientists observed Up and Down quarks. Initially proposed by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964, the discovery of quarks gave further credence to the "Standard Model" of physics and prior to the discovery of a Higgs Boson was widely regarded as the most significant advancement in physics of the last 50 years.
In the throes of World War II, an important letter arrived for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Written by Hungarian scientist Léo Szilárd and signed by Albert Einstein, the letter warned the President that Germany may be working on a powerful bomb. For the previous 10 years Szilárd, along with Italian scientist Enrico Fermi, had been experimenting with nuclear chain reactions and had filed a patent for a simple nuclear chain reactor. Finally, on December 2, 1942, the first artificial nuclear chain reaction took place in a racquets court at the University of Chicago (artist’s impression). This launched the Manhattan Project and three years later the U.S. produced the first atomic bomb.
Szilárd was a canny young scientist who also filed a patent for the electron microscope back in 1928. However, it was Ernst Ruska in 1933 who managed to build the first electron microscope that exceeded the resolution of a standard light microscope. His invention, today an everyday piece of research equipment, used electron beams to illuminate tiny specimens and produce a magnified image of their structure.
internatinal linear collider renderinginternational linear collider diagram science equipment ILC detector science equipmentLarge hadron collider CERN science equipmentSuper Heavy Ion Linear Accelerator science equipmentbubble chamber neutrinoStanford linear accelerator science equipmentnuclear chain reactor stagg science equipmentelectron microscope ernst ruska science equipmentGeiger counter neutron science equipmenteinstein relativity manuscriptJ J Thomson electron cathode science equipmentmarie curie ionisation chamberfaraday electromagnetism ring science equipmentglass prism infrared science equipmentisaac newton tree science equipmentGalileo telescope science equipment
Scientists generically call the repulsive form of gravity “dark energy,” but there are several models of it. One is Einstein’s cosmological constant, which, as the name suggests, is a field of constant energy density throughout the universe. Another idea is called quintessence, which has the proper repulsive properties but can change over time.
Exactly which model is correct has yet to be determined, although there is a vibrant ongoing experimental program that is trying to figure it out. The biggest current effort is called the Dark Energy Survey, which uses a 570 megapixel camera and the 4-meter Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
By studying distant supernovae and measuring the positions and properties of hundreds of millions of galaxies and hundreds of thousands of galaxy clusters, the DES collaboration hopes to shed light on the nature of dark energy.
If we understand dark energy, we may well be able to answer a profound question: How will the universe end?
NASA has captured a stunning new image of the so-called "Pillars of Creation," one of the space agency’s most iconic discoveries. The giant columns of cold gas, in a small region of the Eagle Nebula, were popularized by a similar image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.
24 photos: Wonders of the universe
NASA has captured a stunning new image of the so-called “Pillars of Creation,” one of the space agency’s most iconic discoveries. The giant columns of cold gas, in a small region of the Eagle Nebula, were popularized by a similar image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.
Planetary nebula Abell 33 appears ring-like in this image, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. The blue bubble was created when an aging star shed its outer layers and a star in the foreground happened to align with it to create a "diamond engagement ring" effect.
This long-exposure image from the Hubble Telescope is the <a href="http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/01/full/" target="_blank">deepest-ever picture taken of a cluster of galaxies. The cluster, </a>called Abell 2744, contains several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5 billion years ago; the more distant galaxies appear as they did more than 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang.
24 photos: Wonders of the universe
This long-exposure image from the Hubble Telescope is the deepest-ever picture taken of a cluster of galaxies. The cluster, called Abell 2744, contains several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5 billion years ago; the more distant galaxies appear as they did more than 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang.
A supernova was spotted on January 21 in Messier 82, one of the nearest big galaxies. This wide view image was taken on January 22.
The M82 supernova, seen here, has been designated SN2014J because it is the 10th supernova detected in 2014. At 11.4 million light years from Earth, it is the closest Type Ia supernova recorded since systematic studies with telescopes began in the 1930s.
Is that a giant hand waving at us? Actually, it’s what’s left of a star that died and exploded a long time ago. Astronomers nicknamed it the "Hand of God." <a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA17566" target="_blank">NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR</a>, took this image in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue. The image was combined with images from another space telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, one of the largest and closest galaxies of its kind. <a href="http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1403/" target="_blank">The center of the galaxy is mysterious</a>, researchers say, because it has a double nucleus — a supermassive black hole that may be ringed by a lopsided disc of stars, giving it the appearance of a dual core.
Hubble scientists say this is the best-ever view of the Tarantula Nebula, which is located in one of our closest galactic neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud.
24 photos: Wonders of the universe
Hubble scientists say this is the best-ever view of the Tarantula Nebula, which is located in one of our closest galactic neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud.
This Hubble image looks a floating marble or a maybe a giant, disembodied eye. But it’s actually a nebula with a giant star at its center. Scientists think the star used to be 20 times more massive than our sun, but it’s dying and is destined to go supernova.
24 photos: Wonders of the universe
This Hubble image looks a floating marble or a maybe a giant, disembodied eye. But it’s actually a nebula with a giant star at its center. Scientists think the star used to be 20 times more massive than our sun, but it’s dying and is destined to go supernova.
An artist’s impression of what a black hole might look like. In February, researchers in China said they had spotted a super-massive black hole 12 billion times the size of the sun.
24 photos: Wonders of the universe
An artist’s impression of what a black hole might look like. In February, researchers in China said they had spotted a super-massive black hole 12 billion times the size of the sun.
Astronomers have discovered powerful auroras on a brown dwarf that is 20 light-years away. This is an artist’s concept of the phenomenon.
Venus, bottom, and Jupiter shine brightly above Matthews, North Carolina, on Monday, June 29. The apparent close encounter, called a conjunction, has been giving a dazzling display in the summer sky. Although the two planets appear to be close together, in reality they are millions of miles apart.
Jupiter’s icy moon Europa may be the best place in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life, according to NASA. The moon is about the size of Earth’s moon, and there is evidence it has an ocean beneath its frozen crust that may hold twice as much water as Earth. NASA’s 2016 budget includes a request for $30 million to plan a mission to investigate Europa. The image above was taken by the Galileo spacecraft on November 25, 1999. It’s a 12-frame mosaic and is considered the the best image yet of the side of Europa that faces Jupiter.
This nebula, or cloud of gas and dust, is called RCW 34 or Gum 19. The brightest areas you can see are where the gas is being heated by young stars. Eventually the gas burst outward like champagne after a bottle is uncorked. Scientists call this champagne flow. This new image of the nebula was captured by the European Space Organization’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. RCW 34 is in the constellation Vela in the southern sky. The name means "sails of a ship" in Latin.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured images of Jupiter’s three great moons — Io, Callisto, and Europa — passing by at once.
A massive galaxy cluster known as SDSS J1038+4849 <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/10/tech/space-smiley-face/index.html">looks like a smiley face</a> in an image captured by the Hubble Telescope. The two glowing eyes are actually two distant galaxies. And what of the smile and the round face? That’s a result of what astronomers call "strong gravitational lensing." That happens because the gravitational pull between the two galaxy clusters is so strong it distorts time and space around them.
Using powerful optics, astronomers have found a planet-like body, J1407b, with rings 200 times the size of Saturn’s. This is an artist’s depiction of the rings of planet J1407b, which are eclipsing a star.
A patch of stars appears to be missing in this image from the La Silla Observatory in Chile. But the stars are actually still there behind a cloud of gas and dust called Lynds Dark Nebula 483. The cloud is about 700 light years from Earth in the constellation Serpens (The Serpent).
This is the largest Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled. It’s a portion of the galaxy next door, Andromeda (M31).
NASA has captured a stunning new image of the so-called "Pillars of Creation," one of the space agency’s most iconic discoveries. The giant columns of cold gas, in a small region of the Eagle Nebula, were popularized by a similar image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space pieced together this picture that shows a small section of space in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax. Within this deep-space image are 10,000 galaxies, going back in time as far as a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Planetary nebula Abell 33 appears ring-like in this image, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. The blue bubble was created when an aging star shed its outer layers and a star in the foreground happened to align with it to create a "diamond engagement ring" effect.
This long-exposure image from the Hubble Telescope is the <a href="http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/01/full/" target="_blank">deepest-ever picture taken of a cluster of galaxies. The cluster, </a>called Abell 2744, contains several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5 billion years ago; the more distant galaxies appear as they did more than 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang.
NASA’s NuSTAR telescope array generated the first map of radioactivity in the remnants of an exploding star, or supernova. Blue in this image of Cassiopeia A represents radioactive material.
A supernova was spotted on January 21 in Messier 82, one of the nearest big galaxies. This wide view image was taken on January 22.
The M82 supernova, seen here, has been designated SN2014J because it is the 10th supernova detected in 2014. At 11.4 million light years from Earth, it is the closest Type Ia supernova recorded since systematic studies with telescopes began in the 1930s.
Is that a giant hand waving at us? Actually, it’s what’s left of a star that died and exploded a long time ago. Astronomers nicknamed it the "Hand of God." <a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA17566" target="_blank">NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR</a>, took this image in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue. The image was combined with images from another space telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, one of the largest and closest galaxies of its kind. <a href="http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1403/" target="_blank">The center of the galaxy is mysterious</a>, researchers say, because it has a double nucleus — a supermassive black hole that may be ringed by a lopsided disc of stars, giving it the appearance of a dual core.
Hubble scientists say this is the best-ever view of the Tarantula Nebula, which is located in one of our closest galactic neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Those spots on our sun appear small, but even a <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/giant-january-sunspots/" target="_blank">moderate-sized spot is about as big as Earth</a>. They occur when strong magnetic fields poke through the sun’s surface and let the area cool in comparison to the surrounding area.
This Hubble image looks a floating marble or a maybe a giant, disembodied eye. But it’s actually a nebula with a giant star at its center. Scientists think the star used to be 20 times more massive than our sun, but it’s dying and is destined to go supernova.
An artist’s illustration shows a binary black hole found in the quasar at the center of the Markarian 231 galaxy. Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/31/us/double-black-hole-nasa-hubble-feat/" target="_blank">discovered the galaxy being powered by two black holes</a> "furiously whirling about each other," the space agency said in a news release.
An artist’s impression of what a black hole might look like. In February, researchers in China said they had spotted a super-massive black hole 12 billion times the size of the sun.
Are there are oceans on any of Jupiter’s moons? The Juice probe shown in this artist’s impression aims to find out. Picture courtesy of ESA/AOES
Astronomers have discovered powerful auroras on a brown dwarf that is 20 light-years away. This is an artist’s concept of the phenomenon.
Venus, bottom, and Jupiter shine brightly above Matthews, North Carolina, on Monday, June 29. The apparent close encounter, called a conjunction, has been giving a dazzling display in the summer sky. Although the two planets appear to be close together, in reality they are millions of miles apart.
Jupiter’s icy moon Europa may be the best place in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life, according to NASA. The moon is about the size of Earth’s moon, and there is evidence it has an ocean beneath its frozen crust that may hold twice as much water as Earth. NASA’s 2016 budget includes a request for $30 million to plan a mission to investigate Europa. The image above was taken by the Galileo spacecraft on November 25, 1999. It’s a 12-frame mosaic and is considered the the best image yet of the side of Europa that faces Jupiter.
This nebula, or cloud of gas and dust, is called RCW 34 or Gum 19. The brightest areas you can see are where the gas is being heated by young stars. Eventually the gas burst outward like champagne after a bottle is uncorked. Scientists call this champagne flow. This new image of the nebula was captured by the European Space Organization’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. RCW 34 is in the constellation Vela in the southern sky. The name means "sails of a ship" in Latin.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured images of Jupiter’s three great moons — Io, Callisto, and Europa — passing by at once.
A massive galaxy cluster known as SDSS J1038+4849 <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/10/tech/space-smiley-face/index.html">looks like a smiley face</a> in an image captured by the Hubble Telescope. The two glowing eyes are actually two distant galaxies. And what of the smile and the round face? That’s a result of what astronomers call "strong gravitational lensing." That happens because the gravitational pull between the two galaxy clusters is so strong it distorts time and space around them.
Using powerful optics, astronomers have found a planet-like body, J1407b, with rings 200 times the size of Saturn’s. This is an artist’s depiction of the rings of planet J1407b, which are eclipsing a star.
A patch of stars appears to be missing in this image from the La Silla Observatory in Chile. But the stars are actually still there behind a cloud of gas and dust called Lynds Dark Nebula 483. The cloud is about 700 light years from Earth in the constellation Serpens (The Serpent).
This is the largest Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled. It’s a portion of the galaxy next door, Andromeda (M31).
double black hole 0831black holeJuice probe Jupiter01 Brown dwarf aurorasJupiter Venuseuropa 0529RCW 3401 Jupiter moons eclipse 0206Hubble galaxy smiley facegiant planetary ring systemMissing starsAndromeda galaxy02 Pillars of CreationHubble color galaxiesnebula abell 33 EMBARGOED TILL 0409Faraway GalaxiesSupernova Cassiopeia Asupernova SN 2014Jsupernova SN2014Jhand of god 0110Galaxy with two heartsCosmic creeply crawlysun spotsStar Set to Explode
Current thinking is that the effects of dark energy will increasingly dominate. As the speed of the expansion of the universe speeds up, distant galaxies will be pushed away until they are no longer observed. In the far future, astronomers will see a very different night sky than they do now. Our universe will consist of but a few nearby galaxies (called the Local Group), with all the others pushed too far away to see. Indeed, we live in a privileged time in cosmic history that allows us to study the story of our universe from the beginning to now.
If the quintessence theory is true and the amount of dark energy happens to increase, the story is even more dramatic. The expansion of the universe will eventually rip apart our galaxy, the solar system, Earth and eventually all matter, so that individual atoms will be separated by unfathomable distances.
Given present-day observations, it appears that the continuing expansion of the universe will isolate small clumps of galaxies, which will slowly run out of fuel and fade away, stellar fires extinguished forever, leaving a cold and desolate cosmos.
But we don’t have all the answer yet, so who knows, we may be surprised.
As we thank Einstein for giving us a revolution in science, it might seem ironic that one of his mistakes could have an impact on that grandest question of all — the ultimate fate of the universe itself.
Poet Robert Frost once asked if the world would end in fire or ice. It seems that the answer is that in a few billion years perhaps you should be looking for a really good parka.
Clifford “RAY” Hackett 440 Kapiolani, Hilo, HI, 96720 P: 8083659745
www.adapt.org I founded ADAPT in 1980 it now has over 50 million members.
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