Jul 05, 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…
Jul 03, 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…
Jul 01, 2013 The following press release from the European Southern Observatory has been corrected to reflect the discovery that 99.99% of the universe is composed of plasma. This dramatic new image of cosmic clouds a plasma discharge in the constellation of Orion reveals what seems to be a fiery…
Jun 14, 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…
May 16, 2013 “Planetary nebulae are glowing shells of gas around white dwarfs,” according to the standard explanation. This is a better description of dogma than of the image. “Astronomers have long debated how these symmetric jets could be created,” the press release continues. “Stars are spherical”; the jets not so much….
May 07, 2013 The Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy to the Milky Way, is called a nursery for new stars. The growing awareness of plasma should make it also a nursery for new ideas to explain its features. It features glowing filaments of ionized…
Apr 30, 2013 Both nuclear powered stars and electrically powered stars produce bubbles in the plasma surrounding them. From that common observational beginning, the theoretical explanations diverge. Nuclear generated bubbles come in two types: planetary nebulae (PNs) and supernova (SN) remnants. The PNs are bubbles that are produced during a star’s…
Apr 25, 2013 The geometry of gravity is spherical: a uniform attraction toward a center of mass that tends to produce ball-shaped objects. This “bias for balls” predisposes astronomers to interpret rings as spherical shells. The European Southern Observatory press release announcing new observations (above) of the “old” star R Sculptoris…
Apr 23, 2013 To talk about something, we have to conceive ideas and words with which to describe the thing. We can’t avoid these pre-conceptions. But will we try to compensate for this prejudice by conceiving more than one? The Seagull Nebula is a splotch of light that resembles a bird:…
Mar 19, 2013 This recent image of the Pencil Nebula from La Silla Observatory showcases a cosmic counterpart to “hair” discharges from Tesla coils. Electric forces separate the plasma into parallel filaments. Magnetic forces further constrict them (the “z pinch”) and induce them to twist around each other, producing a braided…
