Is Everything We Know About Universe Wrong?

Record-Breaking Space Discoveries of 2016!

2016 was a lot of things, but for astronomers, it meant the discovery of some of the farthest, faintest, and youngest objects in the universe we’ve seen yet.

If you can dream it, you can do it

Walt Disney (1901- 1966)

A special Astrophysics Documentary about Space, Time & our Universe.

Stephen Hawking: 'If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.'

All is not lost if you fall into a black hole – you could simply pop up in another universe, according to Stephen Hawking.

The celebrated physicist has a new theory about where lost information ends up after being sucked into a black hole, a place where gravity compresses matter to a point where the usual laws of physics break down.

In a public lecture in Stockholm, Sweden, Prof Hawking said: “If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.” He said he had discovered a mechanism “by which information is returned out of the black hole”.

He was speaking at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) is hosting the Hawking Radiation Conference dedicated to examining the mystery of the “information paradox” – a conundrum concerning what happens to things swallowed by black holes.

Information about the physical state of something disappearing into a black hole appears to be completely lost. But according to the way the universe works, this should be impossible. Even information falling into a black hole ought to end up somewhere.

According to Hawking, it does – in one of two ways. Either it is translated into a kind of “hologram” on the edge of the black hole, or it breaks out into an alternative universe.

In his lecture, reported in a blog from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, he said: “The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible. The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe. But you couldn’t come back to our universe. So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that.

“The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.”

Hawking is director of research at Cambridge University’s department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.

• This article was amended on 27 August 2015. An earlier version said the KTH Royal Institute of Technology was hosting the conference.

The Andromeda Galaxy (/ænˈdrɒmɨdə/), also known as Messier 31, M31, or NGC 224, is a spiral galaxy approximately 780 kiloparsecs (2.5 million light-years) from Earth.[4] It is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way and was often referred to as the Great Andromeda Nebula in older texts. It received its name from the area of the sky in which it appears, the constellation of Andromeda, which was named after the mythological princess Andromeda. Being approximately 220,000 light years across, it is the largest galaxy of the Local Group, which also contains the Milky Way, the Triangulum Galaxy, and about 44 other smaller galaxies.

The Andromeda Galaxy is the most massive galaxy in the Local Group as well.[7] Despite earlier findings that suggested that the Milky Way contains more dark matter and could be the most massive in the grouping,[12] the 2006 observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that Andromeda contains one trillion (1012) stars:[9] at least twice the number of stars in the Milky Way, which is estimated to be 200–400 billion.[13]

The Andromeda Galaxy is estimated to be 1.5×1012 solar masses,[7] while the mass of the Milky Way is estimated to be 8.5×1011 solar masses. In comparison, a 2009 study estimated that the Milky Way and M31 are about equal in mass,[14] while a 2006 study put the mass of the Milky Way at ~80% of the mass of the Andromeda Galaxy. The Milky Way and Andromeda are expected to collide in 3.75 billion years, eventually merging to form a giant elliptical galaxy [15] or perhaps a large disk galaxy.[16]

At 3.4, the apparent magnitude of the Andromeda Galaxy is one of the brightest of any Messier objects,[17] making it visible to the naked eye on moonless nights even when viewed from areas with moderate light pollution. Although it appears more than six times as wide as the full Moon when photographed through a larger telescope, only the brighter central region is visible to the naked eye or when viewed using binoculars or a small telescope.

10 things you should know about black holes

“At this point in time, we are certain that black holes exist, we know where they are, how they form, and how they’ll eventually, on timescales of 10^67 years and up, cease to exist. But the details of where the information that went into them goes are still up for grabs, and that’s one of the problems unique to black holes among all objects in the Universe.”

Earlier this week, Stephen Hawking shook up the world when he announced that he had uncovered the solution to the black hole information paradox at a conference in Stockholm. When particles fall into (or create) a black hole, information is encoded on the black hole’s surface, but when the black hole decays into radiation, that information appears to be lost, as the radiation is thermal. But perhaps the information is stored on the event horizon, and can be encoded into the outgoing radiation thanks to the interplay of gravitation and matter. Details should be forthcoming in a paper to be released next month by Hawking, Malcom Perry and Andrew Strominger.

A nebula (Latin for "cloud";[2] pl. nebulae, nebulæ, or nebulas) is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases. Originally, nebula was a name for any diffuse astronomical object, including galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The Andromeda Galaxy, for instance, was referred to as the Andromeda Nebula (and spiral galaxies in general as "spiral nebulae") before the true nature of galaxies was confirmed in the early 20th century by Vesto Slipher, Edwin Hubble and others.

Most nebulae are of vast size, even hundreds of light years in diameter.[3] Although denser than the space surrounding them, most nebulae are far less dense than any vacuum created in an Earthen environment - a nebular cloud the size of the Earth would have a total mass of only a few kilograms. Nebulae are often star-forming regions, such as in the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula. In these regions the formations of gas, dust, and other materials "clump" together to form larger masses, which attract further matter, and eventually will become massive enough to form stars. The remaining materials are then believed to form planets and other planetary system objects.

Spleens are strange organs, located on the upper-left side of the abdomen behind the stomach. They’re about the size and shape of an orange wedge, if the orange was squishy and full of blood. They’re relatively fragile, and because they contain so much blood, injuries can become serious.

A very informal poll of NPR employees, friends and random Uber drivers reveals that most people don’t have any idea what spleens are for. If they did know anything about spleens, it was this: You don’t need one to live.

The deep red, squishy spleen has been relegated to the organ bargain-basement, something to be cut out and discarded along with the appendix and wisdom teeth. But the spleen is seriously underrated, and we would like to give it a chance to redeem itself.

Meet The Spleen, The Strange Little Organ That Can Multiply

Image: Science Source

Throwback Thursday: Do you really love science?

“That’s okay, because you’re a scientist! Your old theory — or way of making sense of the world — now gets revised, and replaced with a new one that’s even better at describing the full suite of phenomena you’re aware of.”

When you first venture out into the world, you’re armed, as a human being, with an incredible intelligence, but with no experience. All sorts of basic things must be learned, often the hard way: hot things will burn you, hot things that don’t look hot will also burn you, and that even very cold things will burn you, too. Figuring those things out – and the process by which you learn them – is science, in and of itself. But to move forward requires that we understand why, and that’s where scientific theories, leaps and even revolutions come into play. Don’t let bad science reporting take you away from what science is really all about: the knowledge and joy of figuring out how the world and Universe really works.