Traverse The Mind

simplynorule:

Lightning Over Miami (by LeventMagic)

So this happened yesterday! I have a video but I need it to be pulled off in HD because it beautiful.

Sunshine through the rain.

Clouds.

ikenbot:

Difference Between Astronomy and Astrology

by Carl Edward Sagan — From Cosmos: A Personal Voyage

There are two ways to view the stars, as they really are.. or as we might wish them to be. These, are the Pleadeas a group of young stars leaving their stellar nurseries, gas, and dust, and this.. is the Crab Nebula, a stellar graveyard where gas and dust are being dispersed back into the interstellar medium. Inside it lies a pulsar. Both the Pleadeas and the Crab Nebula are in a constellation where Astrologers long ago named Taurus The Bull, They imagined it to influence our daily lives. Astronomers say, that the Planet Saturn is an immense globe of hydrogen and helium and circled by a ring of snowballs 50,000 Kilometers wide and that Jupiter’s great red spot was a giant storm raging for perhaps a 1,000,0000 years.

But Astrologers see the Planets, as affecting human character and fate. Jupiter represent a regal baring and a gentle disposition and Saturn the gravedigger fosters they say, stress, suspicion & evil. The Astronomers Mars was as real as the Earth, a world awaiting exploration. But the Astrologers saw Mars as a warrior a creator of quarrels, violence, and destruction. Astronomy and Astrology were not so distinct, for most of human history the one encompassed the other. But there came a time when Astronomy escaped from the confines of Astrology. The two traditions became to diverge in the life and mind of Johannes Kepler. It was he who demystified the heavens by discovering that a physical force laid behind the motions of the Planets.

He was the first astrophysicist and the last scientific astrologer. Intellectual foundations of astrology were swept away 300 years ago and yet it is still taken serious by yet many people. You ever notice how easy it is to find a magazine about astrology? Virtually every newspaper in America has a column on Astrology. Almost none, have even a weekly column on Astronomy. People wore Astrological pendants, checked their Horoscopes before leaving the house, even our languages preserve some astrological consciousness. For example take the word, “Disaster” it comes from the Greek for “Bad Star” Italians believed disease was caused by the influence of the stars its the origin of our word “Influenza”. The Zodiacal signs used by Astrologers even ornament this statue of Prometheus in New York City.

Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods…

ikenbot:

Triton: The Outer Most Ocean in The Solar System

A new day dawns on Triton. It’s going to be a cold one, much like the last. And the one before that… and every day since the moon settled into its present orbit around Neptune. Even the volcanoes here spew out cold gases and liquid water rather than hot magma. But below the frigid surface, which registers a temperature of -235 °C, there’s something more clement: a liquid ocean.

At first glance, Triton seems to be just another icy moon – a featureless, barren world spinning around Neptune, the outermost planet of our solar system. But Triton is different.

For one thing, it orbits Neptune backwards, moving in the opposite direction to Neptune’s rotation. It’s the only large moon in the solar system to do so. Satellites can’t form in these “retrograde” orbits, so Triton must have begun life elsewhere before being captured by the gas giant. It looks a lot like Pluto, and probably came from the same place – the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt, close to Neptune.

The Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past Triton in 1989, sending back images of the moon’s frozen surface. They revealed signs of cryovolcanism – the eruption of subsurface liquids which quickly freeze when exposed to the cold of the outer solar system. As such, Triton joins a short list of worlds in the solar system known to be geologically active.

Its surface ice is unique, too: largely composed of nitrogen, with some cantaloupe-textured terrain, and a polar cap of frozen methane.

Continue..

ikenbot:

New Research Confirms The Existence of Dark Matter

Image: Don Dixon

Fans of dark matter can rest easy. A study published last month raised eyebrows by suggesting that our cosmic neighbourhood is empty of the extra mass needed to hold the galaxy together. But a re-analysis shows that the dark matter was there all along.

Dark matter is the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up 83 per cent of the matter in the universe. It is responsible for keeping galaxies from flying apart despite their high spinning speeds, and has aided our understanding of how structures in the universe formed.

The most popular theories say that dark matter is a hitherto undetected particle called a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle) that is shy of interacting with ordinary matter through any force except gravity.

But several underground detectors waiting for WIMPs have come up empty, or with conflicting results. If the galaxy is so full of dark matter, why hasn’t it shown up yet?

In April, a team led by Christian Moni-Bidin of the University of Concepcion in Chile thought they had a solution: the WIMPs aren’t actually there.

The team tracked the motions of more than 400 stars within 13,000 light years of Earth to estimate the mass of matter – visible and dark – in the sun’s local neighbourhood. They concluded that the mass they found could be explained by the visible matter alone, with no need for dark matter.

But the team made a subtle error, say Jo Bovy and Scott Tremaine of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Moni-Bidin and colleagues considered stars whose orbits take them far above or below the Milky Way’s main bright disc, and used the speed at which they orbit the centre of the galaxy to figure out how much of a pull they feel from the nearby mass of stars and dark matter. They assumed that the stars’ speeds would be the same no matter how far they were from the galactic centre. Observations of dust clumps have shown that this assumption is true for young stars orbiting in the galactic disc, which mostly move in a near-perfect circle.

But the stars that orbit high above or far below the disc can’t have circular orbits, Bovy says. The only stars that reach such great heights have been kicked away from the disc by matter in the galaxy’s spiral arms, which sent them on highly elliptical orbits.

Full Article: Crisis averted: Dark matter was there all along

pjosepherum:

Happy Plankton @reddit.com

n-a-s-a:

Sharpless 308

Credit & Copyright: Don Goldman