Mar 2, 2015 An image of the Helix Nebula in the constellation Aquarius exposes more details of its electrical structure. The infrared image shows radial Birkeland currents (called “strands” in the press release) crossing the concentric rings and converging on the central star. (Will “strands” now replace the former…
Feb 2, 2105 An apparently empty patchwork of darkness strung across this field of stars is actually full—of dust and gas and Other Things. The dust and gas doesn’t show up because there’s not sufficient light that we can see for it to reflect, and it isn’t hot enough…
Jan 30, 2015 These two galaxies appear to be elbowing each other with their spiral arms. The consensus interpretation is that they’re colliding and generating shock waves that initiate gravitational collapse of gas clouds. The collapsing clouds become stars, many of which are extremely massive. These quickly run through…
Jan 28, 2015 M47 is an open cluster of fewer-than-usual stars. The contrasting colors of blue and red have an aesthetic appeal. One can even detect a few orange and yellow stars. A person may glimpse an occasional green one, especially if that person fiddles with the RGB settings…
Jan 21, 2015 “The Book of Nature” is a metaphor. In science, metaphors are usually passed over as mere embellishments of language. The metaphor is expanded into “the Book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics,” and then scientists turn away from embellishments and get down to…
Jan 16, 2015 Another epistemological tour de force. Probable, Possible, my black hen, She lays eggs in the Relative When. She doesn’t lay eggs in the Positive Now Because she’s unable to postulate how. — The Space Child’s Mother Goose By Frederick Winsor People don’t pay much attention…
Jan 3, 2015 “Our choicest plans have fallen through, our airiest castles tumbled over, because of lines we neatly drew and later neatly stumbled over.” — Piet Hein GROOKS I was checking out the dynamics describing the orbit of SOHO, the sun-watching satellite oscillating around a mathematical point in…
Dec 5, 2014 The Wishing Well Cluster in the southern sky is twice the size of the full Moon. The conjectures about how it works are as varied as the colors of its stars. The consensus conjecture of stellar evolution has been developed in detail over several generations. A…
Dec 03, 2014 European astronomers have discovered that some quasar spin axes are aligned with the Large Scale Structure (LSS) in which they’re embedded. The Electric Universe (EU) also expects quasars to be aligned with the larger Birkeland currents that power them. But the LSSs of the Big Bang…
Dec 01, 2014 ESO (European Southern Observatory) has announced the discovery of a “huge” star-forming region obscured by dust in the Spiderweb Galaxy protocluster. Alternatively, it may be a tiny spatter of dusty plasma ejected from a nearby galaxy. The Spiderweb Galaxy is a radio galaxy with a redshift…
