Free Republic

This is a video of some of earth’s universe grandeur. The song is, God Is So Good, sung by children. The pictures and images were taken by Hubble telescope and the last image is called the Cat’s Eye Nebula.

Images from the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed a so-called "ring of dark matter" circling a galaxy cluster. Does dark matter exist? Or is electricity a better explanation for the structure of the universe? {Galaxy Cluster CL0024+17 with an overlay showing a supposed dark matter ring. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. J. Jee and H. Ford et al. (Johns Hopkins University)} In a recent announcement, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) reported the discovery of something in deep space that seems to confirm previously inferred observations of "dark matter." Although "dark matter" cannot be seen or detected by instruments, its...

WASHINGTON - The explosion of a star halfway across the universe was so huge it set a record for the most distant object that could be seen on Earth by the naked eye. The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday. The gamma rays were detected by NASA's Swift satellite at 2:12 a.m. "We'd never seen one before so bright and at such a distance," NASA's Neil Gehrels said. It was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. However, NASA...

Heads up! Tomorrow night (February 26, 2008 at 9:00 PM), the History Channel will air a new segment of their Universe series that could be very interesting. It will try to address what was before the Big Bang. This is a subject I don't see anyway of discussing without raising religious beliefs.

The Beatles are about to become radio stars in a whole new way. NASA on Monday will broadcast the Beatles' song "Across the Universe" across the galaxy to Polaris, the North Star. This first-ever beaming of a radio song by the space agency directly into deep space is nostalgia-driven. It celebrates the 40th anniversary of the song, the 45th anniversary of NASA's Deep Space Network, which communicates with its distant probes, and the 50th anniversary of NASA. "Send my love to the aliens," Paul McCartney told NASA through a Beatles historian. "All the best, Paul." The song, written by McCartney...

Perfectly Aligned Galaxies Found For the First Time John Roach for National Geographic NewsJanuary 11, 2008 Astronomers have found three galaxies in a never before seen perfect alignment—a discovery that may help scientists better understand the mysterious dark matter and dark energy believed to dominate the universe. The three galaxies are like beads on a string, one directly behind the other, scientists announced yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas. This makes the massive galaxy closest to Earth appear nestled in a pair of circular halos known as Einstein rings. The phenomenon occurs because the...

Mysterious Explosion Detected In The Distant Past, Halfway Back To Big BangNobody knows how the short gamma-ray burst GRB 070714B was triggered, but a leading possibility is the in-spiral and merger of two neutron stars, depicted in this artist rendition. (Credit: NASA/Dana Berry) ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2008) — Using the powerful one-two combo of NASA’s Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang....

The void: Imprint of another universe? 24 November 2007 Marcus Chown Magazine issue 2631 IN AUGUST, radio astronomers announced that they had found an enormous hole in the universe. Nearly a billion light years across, the void lies in the constellation Eridanus and has far fewer stars, gas and galaxies than usual. It is bigger than anyone imagined possible and is beyond the present understanding of cosmology. What could cause such a gaping hole? One team of physicists has a breathtaking explanation: "It is the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own," says Laura Mersini-Houghton of...

Mankind 'shortening the universe's life' By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 21/11/2007 Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: our activities may be shortening the life of the universe too. The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the...

HAVE we hastened the demise of the universe by looking at it? That’s the startling question posed by a pair of physicists, who suggest that we may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, which is thought to be speeding up cosmic expansion. Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and colleague James Dent suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the universe to revert to a state similar to early in its history, when it was more likely to end. “Incredible as it seems, our...

To the ancients, exploding stars were bad news. To astronomer Adam Riess, poring over data from a telescope in Chile, it looked like supernovas were still cursed. He and his colleagues were measuring the brightness and distance of supernovas in order to figure out the little matter of whether the universe would end in fire or in ice. Would it halt its expansion and collapse back on itself in a gnab gib (that's the reverse of the big bang, and passes for humor among astronomers) or expand forever, its light and warmth fading into eternal cold and darkness? But when...

WASHINGTON - Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That's got them scratching their heads about what's just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday. Astronomers have known for many years that there are patches in the universe where nobody's home. In fact, one such place is practically a neighbor, a mere 2 million light years...

For a long time, Itzhak Bars has been studying time. More than a decade ago, the USC College physicist began pondering the role time plays in the basic laws of physics — the equations describing matter, gravity and the other forces of nature.Those laws are exquisitely accurate. Einstein mastered gravity with his theory of general relativity, and the equations of quantum theory capture every nuance of matter and other forces, from the attractive power of magnets to the subatomic glue that holds an atom’s nucleus together. But the laws can’t be complete. Einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum theory don’t...

Long before our solar system formed and even before the Milky Way assumed its final spiral shape, a star slightly smaller than the Sun blazed into life in our galaxy, formed from the newly scattered remains of the first stars in the universe. Employing techniques similar to those used to date archeological remains here on Earth, scientists have learned that a metal-poor star in our Milky Way called HE 1523 is 13.2 billion years old-just slightly younger than 13.7 billion year age of the universe. Our solar system is estimated to be only about 4.6 billion years old. The findings...

MISS Mexico is redesigning her Miss Universe pageant dress - because it is too violent. The floor-length dress, belted by bullets and including sketches of hangings and firing squads from Mexico's 1920s Catholic uprising, during which tens of thousands died, has outraged Mexicans.

Roger Highfield describes a heroic mathematical enterprise that could lay bare the fundamentals of the cosmosMathematicians have successfully scaled their equivalent of Mount Everest. Today they unveil the answer to a problem that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. At the most basic level, the calculation is an arcane investigation of symmetry – in this case of an object that is 57 dimensional, rather than the usual three dimensional ones that we are familiar with. Although this object was first discovered in the 19th century. there is evidence that it could contain...

Last night, nearly 3,000 people received a mini lesson on the origin of the universe from perhaps the world’s most famous cosmologist, Stephen Hawking. Hawking spoke to a packed audience in Zellerbach Hall about how Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum theory explained the creation of the universe. ... His lecture, which touched upon subjects such as black holes and spacetime, was peppered with quips that drew laughs from the audience. “If one believed that the universe had a beginning, the obvious question was, what happened before the beginning,” Hawking said. “What was God doing before He made...

Germany's Muslim population is becoming more religious and more conservative. Islamic associations are fostering the trend, particularly through their work with the young -- accelerating the drift towards a parallel Muslim society. A member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in Berlin. It's the silence that visitors notice first. No children's laughter, no chatter, no pop music. A Protestant minister familiar with the noise level in children's homes describes the atmosphere as "very spooky." This Friday, at the end of Ramadan, it is especially hushed in the green house on Hochfeldstrasse in Duisburg, a city near Düsseldorf. Quietly, the boys remove...

Our place in the cosmos has been a source of fascination since the first human looked up at the splendor of the night sky.  Every culture has reacted to the spectacle of the heavens with various sorts of religious awe.  Babylonians watched the stars for omens, as did the Chinese.  Petroglyphs in North America record novas.  Greek gods are bound up with the constellations.  Vanished cultures erected immense monuments like Stonehenge with an eye on the movements of the heavens.  Egypt was rocked by a religious reform movement led by Akhenaten, who worshiped one god: the Sun.The sense of wonder...

Astronomers have proposed an improved method of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life using instruments like one now under construction in Australia. The Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), a facility for radio astronomy, theoretically could detect Earth-like civilizations around any of the 1,000 nearest stars. "Soon, we may be eavesdropping on signals from Galactic civilizations," says theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "This is the first time in history that humans will be capable of finding a civilization like ours among the stars." Loeb will present his findings on Wednesday, January 10,...

Is this a joke? No, say a bunch of physicists. One day, it may be possible for a person to create a universe! This is not going to happen tomorrow. Not even close. But according to Columbia University physics professor Brian Greene, it is theoretically not impossible (which is his way of saying the possibilities are not zero) that one day, a person could build a universe. The very idea is so startling it's hard to know what this means. Think about it this way: One day (far off, no doubt), it may be possible to go into a laboratory...

This thread is a continuation of the first thread "Questions For Atheists & Non-Atheists" Some points were brought up that I wish to address here. I look forward to the responses. Taken from one of my dictionaries in my personal library: "Occam's Razor. A principle devised by the English philospher William of Occam, which states that entities must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary. In a scientific context, Occam's Razor is the choice of the simplest theory from among the theories which fit what we know. In logic, Occam's Razor is the statement of an argument in its essential...

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - The newly discovered collision of two galaxies millions of years ago, which sparked rings of fire that are still expanding, may offer new clues on the origins of the universe, astronomers said on Wednesday. New images of the Andromeda Galaxy were captured by an infrared camera aboard the Spitzer Space Telescope and are described in the science journal 'Nature'. The pictures offer fresh insight into the ever-changing nature of galaxies, said Harvard University astrophysicist Giovanni Fazio. Fazio, the mastermind behind the Spitzer, is considered one of the world's top space pioneers. "We thought it was a plain,...

Early Large Spiral Galaxy Resembles Milky Way    08/18/2006   Astronomers using adaptive optics at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Paranal, Chile took spectra of a galaxy at red-shift 2.38 described as an “early young galaxy” that must have, according to current theory, formed very rapidly, because it looks like the Milky Way.  The observations by Genzel et al., published in Nature,1 were described by Robert C. Kennicutt (editor of Astrophysical Journal) in the same issue of Nature2 this way: On page 786 of this issue1, Genzel et al. present remarkable observations of what appears to be a...

A project aiming to create an easier way to measure cosmic distances has instead turned up surprising evidence that our large and ancient universe might be even bigger and older than previously thought. If accurate, the finding would be difficult to mesh with current thinking about how the universe evolved, one scientist said. A research team led by Alceste Bonanos at the Carnegie Institution of Washington has found that the Triangulum Galaxy, also known as M33, is about 15 percent farther away from our own Milky Way than previously calculated. The finding, which will be detailed in an upcoming issue...

A handful of researchers posit an alternative theory of origin — the universe has no beginning Many, if not most, people assume that certain aspects of nature’s workings are absolutely known. Outside of intelligent design circles, no modern biologist doubts the theory of evolution by natural selection; it is too well established by harmonious data across a multiplicity of fields. No credible doctor questions the germ theory of disease. And, one might think, no serious cosmologist disagrees with the standard cosmological model. The SCM is the official designation of what is informally called “the big bang�: that relatively recent but...

LOS ANGELES - Peace reigns at least at the Miss Universe 2006 contest, where beauties Miss Lebanon and Miss Israel are the "best of friends" despite the bloody fighting between the two countries back home, their companions said. Even as Israel has bombarded Lebanon in the wake of a missile barrage by the Hezbollah militia in the country's south, the two women -- Gabrielle Bou Rached of Lebanon and Israel's Anastacia Entin -- have struck up a friendship ahead of Sunday's tough competition to see who is named the world's most beautiful woman. "I think the perpetrators of the current...

An exotic theory, which attempts to unify the laws of physics by proposing the existence of an extra fourth spatial dimension, could be tested using a satellite to be launched in 2007. Such theories are notoriously difficult to test. But a new study suggests that such hidden dimensions could give rise to thousands of mini-black holes within our own solar system – and the theory could be tested within Pluto’s orbit in just a few years. Black holes of various masses are thought to have sprung into existence within 1 second of the big bang, as elementary particles clumped together...

Scientists use quantum gravity to describe the universe before the Big Bang.Scientists may finally have an answer to a "big" question: If the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, what could have caused it to happen? Using a theory called "loop quantum gravity," a group led by Penn State professor Abhay Ashtekar has shown that just before the Big Bang occurred, another universe very similar to ours may have been contracting. According to the group's findings, this previous universe eventually became so dense that a normally negligible repulsive component of the gravitational force overpowered the attractive component, causing...

Roman Catholic priest Fr. Georges Lemaître, working off Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, first proposed the “Big Bang” explanation of the universe’s origin in 1927. It took decades for the theory to win general acceptance. Einstein himself opposed it bitterly for years, in what he would later call “the biggest mistake of my life.” The theory was finally proved experimentally only in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson. For their pains, they were awarded the Nobel Prize. Fr. Lemaître, on the other hand, never received the public recognition that was his due. Nevertheless, in the 1970s several apparent problems with the...

Dear Sirs. sub: Theory of everything What we want ultimately know is that who am I and from where we came and where to go, and what is this universe, how it works, how it was before the Big Bang, and what will happen after the present expansion; who is God or Creator, how he created the creations; and what are the relations between the creator and the creations, and further more what is the evolution and how it was evoluted and by whom, and the relation between the evolutions and nature; and also the latest topics of intelligent design...

Astronomers have detected the most distant -- and therefore oldest -- gamma-ray burst ever. The burst, called GRB 050904, was observed last September and is thought to have come from an explosion that happened around 12.8 billion years ago, when the universe was just 7% of its current age. The explosion released an intense flash of gamma rays that has been measured by three independent teams of astronomers from the US, Italy and Japan. The results -- reported in three papers in this week's Nature -- could help shed more light on the dynamics of the early universe. Gamma-ray bursts...

By the faint cosmic glow of the oldest known light, physicists say they have found evidence that the universe grew to astounding proportions in less than the blink of an eye. In that trillionth of a second after the big bang, the universe expanded from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space through a process they call inflation. At the same time, the seeds were planted for the formation of stars, galaxies, planets and every other object in the universe. “It's giving us our first clues about how inflation took place,” said Michael...

Grey Hautaluoma Headquarters, Washington (202) 358-0668 Susan Hendrix Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. (301) 286-7745 March 16, 2006 RELEASE: 06-097 NASA Satellite Glimpses Universe's First Trillionth of a Second Scientists peering back to the oldest light in the universe have new evidence to support the concept of inflation. The concept poses the universe expanded many trillion times its size in less than a trillionth of a second at the outset of the big bang. This finding, made with NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), is based on three years of continuous observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the...

Scientists announced today new evidence supporting the theory that the infant universe expanded from subatomic to astronomical size in a fraction of a second after its birth. The finding is based on new results from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, launched in 2001 to measure the temperature of radiant heat left over from the Big Bang, which is the theoretical beginning to the universe. This radiation is known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and it is the oldest light in the universe. Using WMAP data, researchers announced in 2003 that they had pieced together a very detailed...

The stars run in their courses, in billions of galaxies, orbited by planets which are orbited by moons, and if they did not do so in ways which are predictable -- that is with many recurring similarities -- science would not exist. Predictability to some degree or other is the foundation of science. Those italics emphasize an extension of previous demands by science, which insisted on absolutes. Quantum physics took that down, and in the process angered Albert Einstein. But, still and all, even in the subatomic world one can safely play the odds. You cannot predict what any given...

Vatican's Evolutionists By Rafael Brom Catholics should wonder why Vatican constanly issuing a stout defence of Charles Darwin's Fraudulent Communist Religion "Theory of Evolution". Now we have Vatican's high ranked Cardinal claiming that the Genesis description of how God created the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution were "perfectly compatible" if the Bible were read correctly. Looks like that 150 million martyrs who were tortured and killed by communists since 1917 in the name of "Theory of Evolution" did not read their Bible correctly. I am sure that Vatican's Evolutionists will one day declare St. Peter as the First Communist...

I just heard on the Bakersfield News channel that the folks pushing for "intelligent design" folded like a house of cards and the group wanting to promote the Religious teachings of creationism prevailed. .......breaking news....more to come.

I am not a trekkie, but I do remember a Star Trek episode in which several members of the crew of the starship Enterprise entered an alternative universe. That universe was the mirror image of the “normal” universe, that is, it was exactly like the normal universe, but everyone in it had the exact opposite character of the people in the normal universe We have entered that alternative universe in California. I know that term limits and the recall have substantially diminished the experience in Sacramento, but anyone paying even the smallest attention to history can tell that Gray Davis...

View From a Parallel Universe . . . ''So It Goes With Empires'' Terror - Islam Friday, November 25, 2005 Jack Kinsella - Omega Letter Editor I remember a television program from a few years ago whose plot centered around a group of people who would make a weekly jump from parallel universe to parallel universe. Each jump would put them in a new universe where everybody's destiny was different than that of last week's universe. Because everybody had a different individual destiny, each parallel world was different; sometimes America was a totalitarian dictatorship, sometimes a benevolent democracy, sometimes a...

Cursed 'Einstein Gap' turns son against father BY DAVE BARRY (This classic Dave Barry column was originally published on Jan. 9, 2000) Recently, I received a phone call from my son, Rob. It was a phone call that every parent dreads. That's right: My son told me that the universe does not exist. Or at least it does not in any way resemble my concept of it. According to Rob, I understand the universe about as well as a barnacle understands a nuclear aircraft carrier. I blame college. That's where Rob is getting these ideas, which have to do with...

Quantum fluctuation. Inflation. Expansion. Strong nuclear interaction. Particle-antiparticle annihilation. Deuterium and helium production. Density perturbations. Recombination. Blackbody radiation. Local contraction. Cluster formation. Reionization? Violent relaxation. Virialization. Biased galaxy formation? Turbulent fragmentation. Contraction. Ionization. Compression. Opaque hydrogen. Massive star formation. Deuterium ignition. Hydrogen fusion. Hydrogen depletion. Core contraction. Envelope expansion. Helium fusion. Carbon, oxygen, and silicon fusion. Iron production. Implosion. Supernova explosion. Metals injection. Star formation. Supernova explosions. Star formation. Condensation. Planetesimal accretion. Planetary differentiation. Crust solidification. Volatile gas expulsion. Water condensation. Water dissociation. Ozone production. Ultraviolet absorption. Photosynthetic unicellular organisms. Oxidation. Mutation. Natural selection and evolution. Respiration. Cell differentiation. Sexual...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Galaxy-gazing scientists surely wonder about what kind of impact finding life or intelligent beings on another planet would have on the world. But what sort of effect would it have on Catholic beliefs? Would Christian theology be rocked to the core if science someday found a distant orb teeming with little green men, women or other intelligent forms of alien life? Would the church send missionaries to spread the Gospel to aliens? Could aliens even be baptized? Or would they have had their own version of Jesus and have already experienced his universal or galactic plan...

LOS ANGELES - Astronomers say the mysterious, massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way helped give birth to new stars, challenging earlier theories that black holes are solely destructive forces [end] Scientists peering through NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory found that disks of gas near the black hole actually helped spawn a new generation of stars. Their observations, announced Thursday, will be published in a future issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "Massive black holes are usually known for violence and destruction," said Sergei Nayakshin of the University of Leicester in England, who made...

My "Swirl Theory"We hear of string theory, the Big Bang and many other ideas.I have come up with this idea over the past several days. Katrina and Rita has turned my attention towards this as I have discovered a new theory as of late that black holes may be present at the center of each galaxy.Using the theory that a black hole could have possibly been created in space by gases which collapsed into itself churning and sucking gasses and space debris around it into a swirling vortex. This swirling vortex of gas eventually condensed into planets and solar systems.Here...

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - A NASA telescope has spotted galaxies that hold the ingredients for life dating back to when the universe was very young. Using the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists at the California Institute of Technology detected organic molecules in galaxies when the universe was a quarter of its current age of 14 billion years old, NASA said Thursday. These complex molecules, composed of carbon and hydrogen, are commonly found on Earth and are thought to be responsible for planet and star formation. Spitzer scientists found the organic building blocks in galaxies where intense star formation took place...

The article follows... Hi everybody. Have been following the Commercial art=Bad art thread for a couple of days and wanted to throw in my two cents. On the topic of 'commercial illustration=bad art' and Rockwell, Parrish, and N. C. Wyeth, et al. be damned: I can't say I agree. If one has to say that the damning detail of the art was the fact that Rockwell had to accept guidelines as to what he was to paint (i.e. paint Santa having milk and cookies for our December issue of The Saturday Evening Post) so then his art isn't art, but...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Hollywood actor Tom Cruise not only battles creatures from outer space in his latest film "War of the Worlds," he also believes aliens exist, he told a German newspaper on Wednesday. Asked in an interview with the tabloid daily Bild if he believed in aliens, Cruise said: "Yes, of course. Are you really so arrogant as to believe we are alone in this universe? "Millions of stars, and we're supposed to be the only living creatures? No, there are many things out there, we just don't know," Cruise, 42, said in the interview published in German. Cruise...

Am I the only one who marvels at the futility of Man as he tries to explain the origin of the universe? The time and effort expended upon this pursuit could be far better spent upon issues that actually lack an answer. Trying to find a new explanation for the cosmos via science is like trying to reinvent the wheel. For the sake of argument let’s assume that the universe happened by accident just as many so-called scientists claim. With this as a starting point we can make the assumption that there was a source of crude matter from which...

A good description of the state of Dark Matter - perfect daytime TV.