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CHICAGO (AFP) – Astronomers who have long used supernovas as cosmic mile markers to help measure the expansion of the universe now have an answer to the nagging question of what sparks the massive stellar explosions. "These are such critical objects in understanding the universe," lead author Marat Gilfanov of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany said Wednesday in describing his team's study. "It was a major embarrassment that we did not know how they worked. Now we are beginning to understand what lights the fuse of these explosions." Most scientists say Type 1a supernovae are formed when...

C. Gate #3: Self-Righteousness Arrogance. 1. Introduction. a. Self-righteousness means to be righteous in one's own esteem; in fact, to be Pharisaical. Our Lord condemned self-righteousness in His great dissertation of Matt 23, which begins: "Woe unto you, scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites." b. Self-righteousness is generally associated with arrogance. It is the arrogant reliance on one's own assumed, inconsistent, and hypocritical righteousness. c. Self-righteousness is the arrogant conviction that one's own righteousness is superior to that of all others. It is the conclusion that one's own righteousness is so great that intolerance of all others becomes the modus operandi of blind...

A. Gate #1: Motivational Arrogance. 1. Definition and Description. a. All arrogance starts with thinking, moves into motivation, and from there moves into decisions and actions. b. By definition, motivational arrogance is a complex of mental attitude sins, all of which are related to arrogance or have their foundation in the basic concept of the sin of pride. c. Pride is defined as inordinate self-esteem, unreasonable conceit, preoccupation with self, insolence, rejection of authority, vanity, self-justification, an inflated concept of self, and the exaggeration of one's own self-importance. d. The complex of sins in motivational arrogance includes pride, jealousy, bitterness,...

Are cosmic rays revealing the quantum nature of spacetime? Could theories of (not) everything help solve the puzzle of quantum gravity? The architect of doubly special relativity thinks so.In his youth, there were two things that regularly competed for Giovanni Amelino-Camelia’s attention: his favorite soccer team, Napoli, and "anything that came close to being scientific." And since Napoli was struggling in the Italian soccer league in the summer of 1978, Amelino-Camelia found himself watching a series of programs on special relativity instead of soccer. "That was really the point of no return for me," he remembers. "Although I was 13-years...

Washington, June 28: The sun, a star at the centre of the solar system, is known to provide ideal conditions for life to thrive on Earth. But, astronomers have claimed that it also leaves the planet wide open to harmful cosmic rays. A joint team from University of Arizona and University of Texas in the US has found that the sun periodically leaves Earth open to assaults from interstellar nasties in a way that most stars do not. The sun protects humans from cosmic rays and dust from beyond the solar system by enveloping in the heliosphere -- a bubble...

Data from several different space and ground based observatories imply the presence of a nearby object that is beaming cosmic rays our way. Scientists with the Fermi Space Telescope say an unknown pulsar may be close by, sending electrons and positrons towards Earth. Or another more exotic explanation is that the particles could come from the annihilation of dark matter. But whatever it is, the source is relatively close, surely in our galaxy. “If these particles were emitted far away, they’d have lost a lot of their energy by the time they reached us,” said Luca Baldini, a Fermi collaborator....

This image of the Himiko object is a composite and in false color. The bar at the lower right represents 10,000 light years. Credit: M. Ouchi et al. This mysterious, giant object existed at a time when the universe was only about 800 million years old. It stretches for 55 thousand light years, a record for that early point in time. Its length is comparable to the radius of the Milky Way’s disk. Besides being a great candidate for a future “Where in the Universe Challenge,” what is it? In general, objects such as this one are dubbed extended...

To commemorate almost two decades of photographing the wonders of the universe, the Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a peculiar group of interacting galaxies that contains a "cosmic fountain" of stars, gas and dust that stretches about 100,000 light years. Over the past 19 years, Hubble has taken many images of galactic collisions and close encounters. The new image of a trio of galaxies, called Arp 194, looks as if of the galaxies has sprung a leak. The bright blue streamer seen in the image is really a stretched spiral arm full of newborn blue stars. This stellar...

Astronauts returning to the moon could be threatened by cosmic rays as a result of the sun becoming less active, scientists have said. The sun's ability to shield the solar system from harmful radiation could falter in the early 2020s, research from the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology claimed.At about the same time, the American space agency Nasa plans to send astronauts back to the moon.

Star watch - Archaeologists discover a “cosmic clock” Overcrowded in their lower reaches they might be, but the Canary Islands still possess some solitary mountain wilder-nesses, places little visited thanks to their rugged inaccessibility, and which have hardly changed since they were frequented by the pre-colonial aboriginal islanders. And traces of their presence are still turning up, often in the form of petroglyphs, enigmatic scratched marks on rocks and boulders which held some special significance about which we can only guess today. The latest find is, say archaeologists, one of the most exciting. They are calling it a cosmic clock,...

Astronomers have found a piece of the universe's puzzle that's been missing for awhile: a type of extremely hot, dense matter that is all but invisible to us. Engaging in something like cosmic accounting, astronomers have tried to balance the scant amount of matter that has been directly observed with the vast amount that remains unobserved directly. The latter constitutes about 90 percent of the universe's matter. Galaxies, the stars within them, the planet we live on and the chairs we sit on are made up of normal matter — the protons, electrons and neutrons that are collectively called baryons....

Universe's most energetic particles point to huge black holesThe most energetic particles in the universe – ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays – likely come from supermassive black holes in the hearts of nearby active galaxies, says a study by scientists from nearly 90 research institutions worldwide, including the University of Utah. “We discovered the sources of the highest energy particles in the universe,” says Miguel Mostafa, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Utah and one of 370 scientists and engineers belonging to a 17-nation collaboration that operates the $54 million Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina. “The sources are the...

Black holes often are thought of as just endless pits in space and time that destroy everything they pull toward them. But new findings confirm the reverse is true, too: Black holes can drive extraordinarily powerful winds that push out and force star formation and shape the fate of a galaxy. Supermassive black holes are suspected to lurk in the hearts of many—if not all—large galaxies. These holes drag gas inward, which accrues in rapidly spinning, glowing disks. Astronomers have long thought that such "accretion disks" give off mighty winds that shape the host galaxies, profoundly influencing how they grow....

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...

Astronomers just got their most detailed look yet at supersonic 'bullets' of gas piercing through dense clouds of hydrogen gas in the Orion Nebula. Each bullet [image] is about ten times the size of Pluto's orbit around the Sun and travels through the clouds at up to 250 miles (400 kilometers) per second-or about a thousand times faster than the speed of sound. The bulk of both the bullets and the surrounding gas cloud [image] consists of molecular hydrogen. The tip of each bullet is packed with iron atoms that are heated by friction and glow bright blue in the...

Cosmic rays blamed for global warming By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 1:08am GMT 11/02/2007 Man-made climate change may be happening at a far slower rate than has been claimed, according to controversial new research. Scientists say that cosmic rays from outer space play a far greater role in changing the Earth's climate than global warming experts previously thought. In a book, to be published this week, they claim that fluctuations in the number of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere directly alter the amount of cloud covering the planet. High levels of cloud cover blankets the Earth...

PARIS (AFP) - Astronomers in Europe and the United States have detected the remnants of two exploding stars that could lead to a rethink about supernovae, the European Space Agency said. The team examined X-ray data from the embers of two supernovae, DEM L238 and DEM L249, which were stars that had exploded in a nearby galaxy. Most supernovae occur when a very massive star runs out of fuel, its core collapses and then explodes, leaving behind a neutron star or a black hole. But there is also a rarer supernova, called Type 1a, which starts with a binary system...

Cosmic rays may solve global warming problem By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 04/10/2006) Cosmic events could help soften the impact of global warming by triggering cloud formations, suggests research published yesterday. A team of Danish scientists concluded in the Proceedings of the Royal Society that making clouds is plausible, using the Sun's magnetic field. The Sun has been at its strongest for more than 60 years and a period of high solar activity could be approaching its end. "This would produce a cooling effect that could counter part of the global warming predicted for the next century," said Dr...

Recent images from the depths of cosmos show more than 500 galaxies in the early universe, scientists reported today. The galaxies—viewed with the Hubble Space Telescope—existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang, the purported birth of our universe, and flourished when the cosmos was less than 7 percent of its current age. They are smaller than most of today's giant galaxies and sport a blue shade, a signature of blazing star births. The blue light, which took almost 13 billion years to arrive on Earth, was shifted to a red color because the expansion of space stretches...

SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) - A honeycomb cluster of cells on NASA's Stardust spacecraft captured thousands of samples of interstellar and comet dust that scientists said Thursday could give them the first definitive evidence about how the solar system formed. "Its cargo was an ancient, cosmic treasure from the very edge of the solar system - a treasure that formed when the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago," said Donald Brownlee, a University of Washington scientist who worked on the Stardust mission managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Some of the samples collected during the seven-year,...