Stunning new image of Saturn released

[Lucas]

dude, not cool.

was it hard for you to type that while smiling?

[rett]

Can we just have an astronomy thread please?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...rab_Nebula.jpg

[David Jamieson]

was it hard for you to type that while smiling?

dude....not....

[SimonM]

[rett]

Ahh... deep space. Galaxies. That's probably about a square millimeter (at arms length) of the night sky. Flippin amazing.

[wenshu]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMB_cold_spot
The CMB Cold Spot or WMAP Cold Spot is a region of the sky seen in microwaves which analysis found to be unusually large and cold relative to the expected properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). The "cold spot" is approximately 70 µK colder than the average CMB temperature (approximately 2.7 K), whereas the root mean square of typical temperature variations is only 18 µK.[1][nb 1]

Supervoid


The mean ISW imprint 50 supervoids have on the Cosmic Microwave Background[5]: color scale from -20 to +20 µK.
One possible explanation of the cold spot is a huge void between us and the primordial CMB. Voids can produce a cooler region than surrounding sightlines from the late-time integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect.[6] This effect would be much smaller if dark energy weren't stretching the void as photons went through it.
Rudnick et al.[7] found a dip in NVSS galaxy number counts in the direction of the Cold Spot, suggesting the presence of a supervoid. Since then, some additional works have cast doubt on the supervoid explanation. The correlation between the NVSS dip and the Cold Spot was found to be marginal using a more conservative statistical analysis.[8] Also, a direct survey for galaxies in several one-degree-square fields within the Cold Spot found no evidence for a supervoid.[9] However, the supervoid explanation has not been ruled out entirely; it remains intriguing, since supervoids do seem capable of affecting the CMB measurably.[5][10]
Although large voids are known in the universe, a void would have to be exceptionally vast to explain the cold spot, perhaps 1000 times larger in volume than expected typical voids. It would be 6 billion–10 billion light-years away and nearly one billion light-years across, and would be perhaps even more improbable to occur in the large scale structure than the WMAP cold spot would be in the primordial CMB.

Cosmic texture
In late 2007, Cruz et al.[11] argued that the Cold Spot could be due to a cosmic texture, a remnant of a phase transition in the early Universe.

Parallel universe
A controversial claim by Laura Mersini-Houghton is that it could be the imprint of another universe beyond our own, caused by quantum entanglement between universes before they were separated by cosmic inflation.[12] Laura Mersini-Houghton said, "Standard cosmology cannot explain such a giant cosmic hole" and made the remarkable hypothesis that the WMAP cold spot is "… the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own." If true this provides the first empirical evidence for a parallel universe (though theoretical models of parallel universes existed previously). It would also support string theory. The team claims there are testable consequences for its theory. If the parallel universe theory is true there will be a similar void in the opposite hemisphere of the Celestial sphere,[13][14] (which New Scientist reported to be the Southern hemisphere-the results of the New Mexico array study reported as Northern hemisphere[15]).

A sophisticated method of data analysis - Kolmogorov complexity - has derived evidence for a north and a south cold spots in the satellite data:[16] "...among the high randomness regions is the southern non-Gaussian anomaly, the Cold Spot, with a stratification expected for the voids. Existence of its counterpart, a Northern Cold Spot with almost identical randomness properties among other low-temperature regions is revealed."

That these predictions and others were made prior to the measurements see Laura Mersini. However, apart from the Southern Cold Spot, the varied statistical methods in general fail to confirm each other regarding a Northern Cold Spot.[17] The 'K-map' used to detect the Northern Cold Spot was noted to have twice the measure of randomness measured in the standard model - the reason is speculated to be the randomness introduced by voids (unaccounted for voids were speculated to be the reason for the increased randomness above the standard model).[18]

Sensitivity to finding method
Researchers at the University of Michigan pointed out that the cold spot is mainly anomalous because it stands out compared to the relatively hot ring around it; it is not unusual if one only considers the size and coldness of the spot itself.[4] More technically, its detection and significance depends on using a compensated filter like a Mexican hat wavelet to find it.

[wenshu]

http://web.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/ja...SCz/pview.html

Figure 1. Panoramic view of the entire near-infrared sky reveals the distribution of galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The image is derived from the 2MASS Extended Source Catalog (XSC)--more than 1.5 million galaxies, and the Point Source Catalog (PSC)--nearly 0.5 billion Milky Way stars. The galaxies are color coded by "redshift" obtained from the UGC, CfA, Tully NBGC, LCRS, 2dF, 6dFGS, and SDSS surveys (and from various observations compiled by the NASA Extragalactic Database), or photo- metrically deduced from the K band (2.2 um). Blue are the nearest sources (z < 0.01); green are at moderate distances (0.01 < z < 0.04) and red are the most distant sources that 2MASS resolves (0.04 < z < 0.1). The map is projected with an equal area Aitoff in the Galactic system (Milky Way at center).

http://web.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/jarrett/lss/index.html

[wenshu]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.

[wenshu]

http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/iss_atla...nsit_2010.html

Image of the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle Atlantis 50 minutes before docking, taken from the area of Madrid (Spain) on May 16th 2010 at 13h 28min 55s UT.

[David Jamieson]

As Above, So Below.

[Xiao3 Meng4]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1fvMSs9cps

[Drake]

"If you knew anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would have hidden from it in terror." ~Ming the Merciless

[David Jamieson]

"If you knew anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would have hidden from it in terror." ~Ming the Merciless

This is true. There is nothing more startling than to have your own face revealed after never having seen it despite it being in front of you for your whole life...

[Syn7]

I find the unknowns to be quite fascinating, and seeking is really the only thing that gets me up in the mornings. If I knew everything I would have to off myself.

But what I have learned doesn't scare me, it fascinates me. Not true for yall?
Granted there are scary things out there, but I find the more I get to know these things the less scary they are.

Besides, show me a person with true knowledge of the nature of our universe and I'll be all over it. Even if we hit something by fluke, we still don't really know we know. So we actually don't know. Even if it happens to be true. Feel me? So how could we know it's terror? People can't even agree whether reality is subjective or objective let alone comming any where near any sort of universal truth about the univers nature or otherwise.

[Drake]

I find the unknowns to be quite fascinating, and seeking is really the only thing that gets me up in the mornings. If I knew everything I would have to off myself.

But what I have learned doesn't scare me, it fascinates me. Not true for yall?
Granted there are scary things out there, but I find the more I get to know these things the less scary they are.

Besides, show me a person with true knowledge of the nature of our universe and I'll be all over it. Even if we hit something by fluke, we still don't really know we know. So we actually don't know. Even if it happens to be true. Feel me? So how could we know it's terror? People can't even agree whether reality is subjective or objective let alone comming any where near any sort of universal truth about the univers nature or otherwise.

God ****, Mr. Literal... it's just a quote from a cheesy 80s sci-fi movie. ****.