The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. – Benjamin Franklin
– New frontier for science as astronomers witness neutron stars colliding:
Extraordinary event has been ‘seen’ for the first time, in both gravitational waves and light – ending decades-old debate about where gold comes from
…
H/t reader kevin a.
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– Astronomers: ‘death star’ has devoured 15 Earth sized worlds:
From PRINCETON UNIVERSITY and the “That’s no moon…” department:
Devourer of planets? Princeton researchers dub star ‘Kronos’
Sun-like star Kronos shows signs of having ingested 15 Earth masses worth of rocky planets, prompting Princeton astronomers to name it after the Titan who ate his children.
Read moreAstronomers: ‘death star’ has devoured 15 Earth sized worlds
‘Planet Nine’ may have caused the solar system to tilt six degrees
– Mysterious ‘Ninth Planet’ may have caused entire solar system to tilt:
The hypothesised ‘Planet Nine’, which is believed to exist beyond Pluto, may have tilted the entire solar system, astronomers believe.
Earlier this year, scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) announced that a planet ten times the mass of Earth probably exists around 19 billion miles away. It was shown to exert such a huge influence on its region of space that it was dubbed ‘the most planety of all planets.’
Now the same team believes ‘Planet Nine’ is also responsible for one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy – why the solar system lies on a strange tilt.
All of the planets, including Earth, orbit in a flat plane with respect to the Sun. But that plane rotates on a six-degree angle with respect to the Sun’s equator, a misalignment which has left astronomers scratching their heads for decades.
Read moreMysterious ‘Planet Nine’ may have caused entire solar system to tilt
20.06.2013
One of the most briliant astronomers in the world confirms that Hercolubus is very real and is coming.
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– Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter & Saturn all align for first time in 11 years:
Earthlings can now observe a rare celestial gathering: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all in alignment in our sky – and will continue to be for around a month. The last time the five paraded in a line was December 2004 to January 2005.From January 20 to February 20 sky-gazers can see the five planets almost literally lined up, as their positions along the ecliptic (the sun’s perceived path in our sky) form a diagonal line. Even the naked eye will be enough to see them, though a telescope and binoculars will help.
Read moreMercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter & Saturn all align for first time in 11 years
Flashback:
– Nibiru And Dozens Of Dead Astronomers (Video)
– Second Super-Fast Flip Of Earth’s Magnetic Poles Found
– Large ‘Planet X’ May Lurk Beyond Pluto
– Dark Jupiter-Sized Object May Haunt Edge of Solar System
– Russian TV Reports On Brown Dwarf Star ‘Nibiru’ (Video)
I’ve added some more info down below.
– Astronomers say a Neptune-sized planet lurks beyond Pluto:
FLASHBACK.
I thought this deserves to be reposted.
A MUST-SEE!!!
(This should be shown to all those sheeple that still believe that there could not possibly be a conspiracy by a power elite.)
Synopsis:
Secrets In Plain Sight is an awe inspiring exploration of great art, architecture, and urban design which skillfully unveils an unlikely intersection of geometry, politics, numerical philosophy, religious mysticism, new physics, music, astronomy, and world history.
Exploring key monuments and their positions in Egypt, Stonehenge, Jerusalem, Rome, Paris, London, Edinburgh, Washington DC, New York, and San Francisco brings to light a secret obsession shared by pharaohs, philosophers and kings; templars and freemasons; great artists and architects; popes and presidents, spanning the whole of recorded history up to the present time.
As the series of videos reveals how profound ancient knowledge inherited from Egypt has been encoded in units of measurement, in famous works of art, in the design of major buildings, in the layout of city streets and public spaces, and in the precise placement of obelisks and other important monuments upon the Earth, the viewer is led to perceive an elegant harmonic system linking the human body with the architectural, urban, planetary, solar, and galactic scales.
This deep image shows the Nebula (cyan) with a size of 2 million light-years discovered around the quasar UM287 (at the center of the image). The energetic radiation of the quasar makes the surrounding intergalactic gas glow revealing the physical structure of a cosmic web filament.
– Astronomers Capture The First Image Of The Mysterious Web That Connects All Galaxies In The Universe (Business Insider, Jan 19, 2014):
For the first time, astronomers were able to see a string of hot gas known as a filament that is thought to be part of the mysterious underlying structure that dictates the layout of all the stars and galaxies in our universe.
Scientists believe that matter in the universe is arranged into a gigantic web-like structure. This is called the cosmic web.
Read moreThe First Image Of The Mysterious Web That Connects All Galaxies In The Universe
– 42 Alien Planets Discovered By Amateur Astronomer Group (International Business Times, Jan 12, 2013):
A team of amateur astronomers has made a fascinating discovery, uncovering evidence of 42 alien planets, one of which is roughly the size of Jupiter and could potentially be habitable by humans.The 40 volunteers who staff the crowdsourcing project Planet Hunters made their discovery by sorting through data provided by NASA, Space.com reported.
Among the 42 planets discovered by the group, 15 have the potential to support human life. One in particular, named PH2 b, is roughly the size of Jupiter and has been confirmed to exist in its star’s habitable zone.
Read more42 Alien Planets Discovered By Amateur Astronomer Group
Light from the most distant quasar yet seen reveals details about the chemistry of the early universe.
– Largest structure in universe found — and it’s mind-boggling (NBC News, Jan 11, 2013):
Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe, a clump of active galactic cores that stretches 4 billion light-years from end to end.
The structure is a large quasar group (LQG), a collection of extremely luminous galactic nuclei powered by supermassive central black holes. This particular group is so large that it challenges modern cosmological theory, researchers said.
“While it is difficult to fathom the scale of this LQG, we can say quite definitely it is the largest structure ever seen in the entire universe,” lead author Roger Clowes, of the University of Central Lancashire in England, said in a statement. “This is hugely exciting, not least because it runs counter to our current understanding of the scale of the universe.”
YouTube Added: 28.08.2012
YouTube Added: 29.05.2012
Description:
In this extended interview we find out all about the Transit of Venus from Carlos Bacigalupo, Sydney Observatory Astronomer.
Carlos answers all of our questions:
What is the Transit of Venus?
Why is it important?
What is black drop effect?
How can we watch it safely?
and more!Watch the transit online on 6 June 2012 from 8.15am until 2.44pm (AEST) at: www.endeavourvoyages.com.au
A MUST-SEE!!!
(Especially for all those sheeple that still believe that there could not possibly be a conspiracy by a power elite.)
Synopsis:
Secrets In Plain Sight is an awe inspiring exploration of great art, architecture, and urban design which skillfully unveils an unlikely intersection of geometry, politics, numerical philosophy, religious mysticism, new physics, music, astronomy, and world history.
Exploring key monuments and their positions in Egypt, Stonehenge, Jerusalem, Rome, Paris, London, Edinburgh, Washington DC, New York, and San Francisco brings to light a secret obsession shared by pharaohs, philosophers and kings; templars and freemasons; great artists and architects; popes and presidents, spanning the whole of recorded history up to the present time.
As the series of videos reveals how profound ancient knowledge inherited from Egypt has been encoded in units of measurement, in famous works of art, in the design of major buildings, in the layout of city streets and public spaces, and in the precise placement of obelisks and other important monuments upon the Earth, the viewer is led to perceive an elegant harmonic system linking the human body with the architectural, urban, planetary, solar, and galactic scales.
See also:
A century of comet data suggests a dark, Jupiter-sized object is lurking at the solar system’s outer edge and hurling chunks of ice and dust toward Earth.
“We’ve accumulated 10 years’ more data, double the comets we viewed to test this hypothesis,” said planetary scientist John Matese of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “Only now should we be able to falsify or verify that you could have a Jupiter-mass object out there.”
In 1999, Matese and colleague Daniel Whitmire suggested the sun has a hidden companion that boots icy bodies from the Oort Cloud, a spherical haze of comets at the solar system’s fringes, into the inner solar system where we can see them.
In a new analysis of observations dating back to 1898, Matese and Whitmire confirm their original idea: About 20 percent of the comets visible from Earth were sent by a dark, distant planet.
This idea was a reaction to an earlier notion that a dim brown-dwarf or red-dwarf star, ominously dubbed Nemesis, has pummeled the Earth with deadly comet showers every 30 million years or so. Later research suggested that mass extinctions on Earth don’t line up with the Nemesis predictions, so many astronomers now think that object doesn’t exist.
“But we began to ask, what kind of an object could you hope to infer from the present data that we are seeing?” Matese said. “What could possibly tickle [comets’] orbits and make them come very close to the sun so we could see them?”
Rather than a malevolent death star, a smaller and more benign companion called Tyche (Nemesis’ good sister in Greek mythology) could send comets streaming from the Oort Cloud toward Earth.
Read moreDark Jupiter-Sized Object May Haunt Edge of Solar System
This artist’s impression of a magnetar contains hundreds of very massive stars, some shining with a brilliance of almost one million suns Photo: ESO
The “magnetar” lies in a cluster of stars known as Westerlund 1, located 16,000 light years away in the constellation of Ara, the Altar.
Westerlund 1, discovered in 1961 by a Swedish astronomer, is a favoured observation site in stellar physics. It is one of the biggest cluster of superstars in the Milky Way, comprising hundreds of very massive stars, some shining with a brilliance of almost a million Suns and some two thousand times the Sun’s diameter.
The cluster is also, by the standards of the Universe, very young.
The stars were all born from a single event just three and a half to five million years ago.
Within Westerlund 1 is the remains of one of galaxy’s few magnetars – a particular kind of neutron star, formed from the explosion of a supernova, that can exert a magnetic field a million, billion times strong than Earth’s.
The Westerlund star which eventually became the magnetar must have been at least 40 times the mass of the Sun, according to the study, which appears in the research journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. If so, intriguing questions are raised.
The mainstream assumption is that stars of between 10 and 25 solar masses go on to form neutron stars. But those above 25 solar masses produce black holes — the light-gobbling gravitational monsters that are formed when a massive, dying star collapses in on itself.
In that case, the magnetar’s mother should have become a black hole because it was so big.
But another alternative, say the authors, is that the star “slimmed” to a lower mass, enabling it to become a neutron star.
How did this happen? The answer, says the paper, could lie in a binary system: the star that became the magnetar was born with a stellar companion.
As the stars evolved, they began to interact, and the companion star, like a demonic twin, began to steal mass from the progenitor star.
Eventually the progenitor exploded, becoming a supernova.
Read moreMagnetic Mega-Star Discovery Challenges Black Hole Theory
The most massive star ever found looms behind other young star types in an artist’s impression.
A newfound star has shattered the record as the most massive stellar monster ever seen, astronomers announced today.
Weighing in at a whopping 265 times the mass of our sun, the behemoth may have actually slimmed down since birth, when it likely tipped the scales at 320 times the sun’s mass.
The discovery could rewrite the laws of stellar physics, since it’s long been thought that stars beyond a certain mass would be too unstable to survive.
“We are really taken aback, because up until now the astronomical community at large has assumed that the upper size limit for stars would be around 150” times the mass of the sun, said study co-author Richard Parker, an astronomer at the University of Sheffield in the U.K.
“This giant could really revolutionize the way we think about how stars form and die in clusters and galaxies.”
(Related: “Most Massive Stellar Black Hole Found in Binary System.”)
Most Massive Star to Blow Itself Apart?
Parker’s team found the stellar monster in images taken with the European Southern Observatory‘s Very Large Telescope in Chile. The star is tucked inside a dense cluster of other hot, young, massive stars in one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Read moreMost Massive Star Ever Discovered, 265 Times The Sun’s Mass
A total solar eclipse is seen in Varanasi, India, Wednesday, July 22, 2009. The longest solar eclipse of the 21st century pitched a swath of Asia from India to China into near darkness Wednesday as millions gathered to watch the phenomenon. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das)
Related article: Two killed in stampede during eclipse in India (China Daily)
State television in China broadcast this image of the eclipse.
(CNN) — The longest solar eclipse of the century cast a wide shadow for several minutes over Asia and the Pacific Ocean Wednesday, luring throngs of people outside to watch the spectacle.
Day turned into night, temperatures turned cooler in cities and villages teemed with amateur stargazers.
The total eclipse started in India on Wednesday morning and moved eastward across Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Vietnam, China and parts of the Pacific. Millions cast their eyes towards the heavens to catch a rare view of the sun’s corona.
Cloud cover in some areas prevented people from fully savoring the phenomenon. Still, many were awed.
Tim O’Rourke, a 45-year-old freelance photographer from Detroit, Michigan, lives in Hong Kong but traveled up to Shanghai — touted as one of the best spots to watch the eclipse. 
Watch the ‘exceptional’ eclipse »
“It was pitch black like midnight,” said O’Rourke, standing in People’s Square with what appeared to be a crowd of thousands.
“Definitely not disappointed we came. Of course it would have been much better with nice weather, blue skies. But still it was a great experience, it was a lot of fun.” he said. 
Viewing the eclipse in pictures »
Total eclipses occur about twice a year as the moon passes between the Earth and the sun on the same plane as Earth’s orbit. Wednesday’s event lasted up to more than six minutes in some places. Watch what a total solar eclipse entails »
In India, where an eclipse pits science against superstition, thousands took a dip in the Ganges River in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi to cleanse their souls, said Ajay Kumar Upadhyay, the district’s most senior official. Send us your photos of the eclipse