The Royal Observatory of Greenwich, England, has crafted three simple animations to explain three very complex things: What’s inside a black hole, how do we know the age of the sun—did you know the Sun weighs 4,000 trillion trillion hippopotamuses?—and how big is the Universe.
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Nothing lives forever, not even our universe. Eventually it’ll go kaput and be destroyed… but how? Smart people have wrapped their heads around the universe’s destruction and have come upwith three different theories. The Big Rip, Heat Death (or the Big Freeze) and the Big Crunch and Big Bounce. They all sound like they’re going to hurt.
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Forget UFOs — there are a lot of objects and events in space that are identified, but still completely incomprehensible. From planets in our solar system, to inexplicable energy bursts from across the universe, here are some of the enduring mysteries of the space and time we call home.
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The National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) puts it into perspective right away: “Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth.” It’s important to hold that fact in mind, as we marvel at the first images from deep in the belly of our universe to arrive from the Chile-based Dark Energy Camera (DECam). As that name might suggest, peering at remote galaxies for purely visual gratification isn’t the camera’s primary purpose. The result of eight years of planning and hard work, involving engineers and scientists from three continents, the DECam is mounted on the Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Sitting atop a 7,200-foot mountain, the camera is part of the Dark Energy Survey, which intends to gather information on over 300 million galaxies. The goal is to better understand dark energy — a concept that represents our best explanation for why the universe’s rate of expansion is speeding up, rather than slowing due to gravity. Gaze past the break for the background on the project.
Continue reading DECam: Gazing deep into the final frontier in search of dark energy
DECam: Gazing deep into the final frontier in search of dark energy originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Sep 2012 13:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sat on top of a mountain in Chile is the world’s most powerful digital camera. Known as the Dark Energy Camera, it’s recently been fired up to image the night sky, in an attempt to find the exotic stuff that gets all physicists excited. These are the first images it’s produced. And they’re magnificent. More »
The stargazers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have released a huge three-dimensional map of outer space, a core part of its six-year survey of the skies. Encompassing four billion light-years cubed, the researchers hope to use the map to retrace the movements of the universe through the last six billion years. Using the latest Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), the center says the data will help improve their estimates for the quantity of dark matter in space and the effect that dark energy has on the universe’s expansion, “two of the greatest mysteries of our time” — if you’re an astrophysicist. Even if you’re not, you’ll still want to board the animated flight through over 400,000 charted galaxies — it’s embedded after the break.
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Scientists release biggest ever 3D map of the universe, lacks turn-by-turn navigation (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Aug 2012 09:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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