Feb 25, 2014 Popular accounts of nebulas usually omit mention of their “hairy” structure. Because gravity can’t produce long, evenly spaced filaments of matter, astronomers don’t talk about them. Perhaps they don’t even see them. This double nebula is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small, irregular galaxy that’s considered to…
Feb 06, 2014 Modern astronomy has a planetary nebula (PN) problem: Gravity can’t do what PNs do. Astronomers invent a kind of pseudo-magnetism to fill the explanatory holes. This pseudo-magnetism is a reified presumption that’s unplugged from the electric currents that generate real magnetic forces. Consensus theory has PNs…
Feb 04, 2014 Radio-wave observations of a Herbig-Haro (jetted) star at the edge of an opaque plasma cell reveal the wiring harness that drives it. In visible light, a spiraling filament jets toward the upper left of the image. It ends in a bright double layer. Surrounding it is a…
Jan 30, 2014 A gravity-only Universe cannot explain certain discrepancies. Ilya Prigogine, from a young age, was concerned that accepted physical theory had a couple of glaring discrepancies from observation: determinism and time symmetry. Most observations are of contingency and irreversibility. No one has yet seen an egg “un-fry”…
Jan 28, 2014 Rediscovering F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order has been exciting. Hayek began his inquiry into the foundations of theoretical psychology in 1919 before specializing in economics (and winning a Nobel Prize in that latter field in 1974). He didn’t publish The Sensory Order until 1952, when…
Jan 09, 2013 NGC 4666 is one of the younger additions to the Virgo cluster of galaxies. It has also apparently given birth to another generation. The galaxy lies eight degrees south of M49, the great-grandmother of the Virgo cluster. Whether NGC 4666 is the daughter of M49 or…
Dec 24, 2013 A second generation of stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752 stopped evolving. Perhaps they’re waiting for a better theory. The idea that stars evolve is one of those unjustifiable preconceptions with which observations are interpreted and understood. With that idea for ink, astronomers can draw…
Dec 10, 2013 NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory recently discovered this object, which the dusty plasma near the center of the Milky Way obscures in optical light. X-rays penetrate the dust: low-energy signals are red, intermediate-energy signals are green, and high-energy signals are blue. The white dots are stars from the…
Dec 05, 2013 Modern instruments enable astronomers to look at the universe in wavelengths of light beyond human biological limitations. Astronomers are surprised that the x-ray and radio images are different from what they expected. Although they’re looking in a different light, they’re still seeing—trying to understand—with the same concepts and theories…
Dec 03, 2013 Experimenters slid blocks of dry ice down sand dunes and reproduced some of the features of the long straight grooves on Martian hillsides.* The smart folks at Jet Propulsion Laboratory are to be commended for not only thinking up an explanation for the linear gullies on Mars but also…
