Here’s an awesome talk by Lawrence Krauss on the structure of the Universe, the current state of Cosmology, and why what our remote descendants will eventually conclude about the Universe — based on observation — will be completely wrong:
Lawrence Krauss gives a talk on our current picture of the universe, how it will end, and how it could have come from nothing. Krauss is the author of many bestselling books on Physics and Cosmology, including “The Physics of Star Trek.”
One of my favorite Lawrence Krauss quotes comes from this talk:
Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life – weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
This is one of my favorite passages from Carl Sagan’s book, Pale Blue Dot — the sequel to Cosmos:
We were hunters and foragers.
The frontier was everywhere.
We were bounded only by the Earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls.
Our little terraquious globe as the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds.
We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; Are we to venture out into space?
By the time we’re ready to settle even the nearest of other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We’re… an adaptable species.
It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.
What new wonders, undreamed of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation? And another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? And the next millennium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life there may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth.
They will gaze up, and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of raw potential once was. How perilous, our infancy. How humble, our beginnings. How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.
In this picture (click for full size), the Sun, which is 109 times larger than the Earth, represents only a single pixel. Think about that for a second. Now consider that the largest star shown, YV Canis Majoris, isn’t even the largest we know of; that title belongs to R136a1, a massive star that shines 10 million times brighter than the Sun and has a surface temperature of roughly 40,000 degrees celsius. Incomprehensible.
I wonder what these celestial monstrosities would be to those of our ancestors who thought a god of our little pixel.
During a total solar eclipse, the Sun’s extensive outer atmosphere, or corona, is an inspirational sight. Subtle shades and shimmering features that engage the eye span a brightness range of over 10,000 to 1, making them notoriously difficult to capture in a single photograph. But this composite of 7 consecutive digital images over a range of exposure times comes close to revealing the crown of the Sun in all its glory. The telescopic views were recorded from the Isla de Pascua (Easter Island) during July 11′s total solar eclipse and also show solar prominences extending just beyond the edge of the eclipsed sun. Remarkably, features on the dim, near side of the New Moon can also be made out, illuminated by sunlight reflected from a Full Earth.
This magnificent view of the region around the star R Coronae Australis was created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. R Coronae Australis lies at the heart of a nearby star-forming region and is surrounded by a delicate bluish reflection nebula embedded in a huge dust cloud. The image reveals surprising new details in this dramatic area of sky.
There’s a good chance that solar flares will send large amounts of magnetic energy our way soon — “sometime around 2013″ (let’s ignore that the popular doomsday, December 21st 2012, falls within that time frame). This solar storm could knock out power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications — well, anything sensitive to electromagnetic disturbance.
Normally, I’d be more than a tad skeptical, but here’s what Richard Fisher of NASA’s Heliophysics Division has to say:
The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we’re getting together to discuss.
Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years. Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation. He said large swathes of the world could face being without power for several months, although he admitted that was unlikely. A more likely scenario was that large areas, including northern Europe and Britain which have “fragile” power grids, would be without power and access to electronic devices for hours, possibly even days.
Of course, the important question here is whether the iPad is resistant to these solar storms, or if such technology — let’s call it ‘Flare Guard’ — will be introduced through a software update to the Retina Display at a later stage. I’ve reached out to Steve Jobs for a comment, but have not yet received a response.
This is how it looks when a spacecraft like Hayabusa enters the Earth’s atmosphere:
Sparkles!
A group of astronomers from NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and other organizations had a front row seat to observe the Hayabusa spacecraft’s fiery plunge into Earth’s atmosphere. The team flew aboard NASA’s DC-8 airborne laboratory, packed with cameras and other imaging instruments, to capture the high-speed re-entry over an unpopulated area of central Australia on June 13, 2010. The Japanese spacecraft completed its seven-year, 1.25 billion mile journey to return a sample of the asteroid Itokawa.
Perhaps the original spiral nebula, M51 is a large galaxy, over 60,000 light-years across, with a readily apparent spiral structure. Also cataloged as NGC 5194, M51 is a part of a well-known interacting galaxy pair, its spiral arms and dust lanes clearly sweeping in front of companion galaxy NGC 5195 (top). This dramatically processed color composite combines M51 image data from the Calar Alto Observatory’s 1.2 meter telescope. The data include long exposures through a narrow hydrogen alpha filter that trace emission from atomic hydrogen. Reddish hydrogen emission regions, called HII regions, are the regions of intense star formation seen to lie mainly along M51′s bright spiral arms. Intriguingly, this composite also shows red hydrogen emission structures in the faint features extending even beyond NGC 5195, toward the top of the frame.
Credit: CAHA, Descubre Foundation, DSA, OAUV, Vicent Peris (OAUV / PixInsight), Jack Harvey (SSRO), Steven Mazlin (SSRO), Carlos Sonnenstein (Valkanik), Juan Conejero (PixInsight).
Zoomed to 6.066e+228 (2^760), this Mandelbrot fractal, which took 6 months to render, will make your room spin around if you stare at it long enough. To put things in perspective: An electron needs to be zoomed to 1E42 to equal the size of the known Universe. This is zoomed to 1E228:
If the music isn’t your taste, disable it by dragging left on the rightmost bars in the player.
Two days to set up, and then six months to render, resulted in around forty 1.9GB uncompressed .AVI files. I added watermarking, fx and time remapping, before multi-pass encoding the 80GB video in h264 (32,768 kbit/sec) and the audio in AAC.
Want some perspective?
1E6 Vancouver Island
1E9 Jupiter’s radius
1E12 Earth’s orbit
1E18 distance to Alpha Centauri
1E21 Milky Way galaxy
1E30 large doesn’t cover it!
1E42 size of electron to the universe
1E228 incomprehensibly big…but we did it!
For the record, 1 to 6e228 is like expanding a proton to 70000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000 times the size of the visible universe.
(Proton has 1 femtometer diameter, universe has 93 billion light year diameter)
If you were actually traveling into the fractal, you would be moving faster than the speed of light.
— the sequel to 
:
