NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Reveals Astounding, Unprecedented Views Of The Universe

Powehi: black hole gets a name meaning 'the adorned fathomless dark creation'

Language professor in Hawaii comes up with name welcomed by scientists who captured first image of galactic phenomenon

Powehi means “the adorned fathomless dark creation” or “embellished dark source of unending creation” and comes from the Kumulipo, an 18th century Hawaiian creation chant. Po is a profound dark source of unending creation, while wehi, meaning honoured with embellishments, is one of the chant’s descriptions of po, the newspaper reported.

The Great Conjunction: Jupiter and Saturn 🌌.

New type of star system? Mysterious radio signal puzzles astronomers

by Laura Nicole Driessen

Meerkat telescope. Sotiris Sanidas, Author provided

After observing a part of the sky near the Southern Constellation of Ara for about two months using MeerKAT, a radio telescope based in the Karoo desert in South Africa, our team of scientists noticed something strange. The radio emission of an object brightened by a factor of three over roughly three weeks.

Intrigued, we continued watching the object and followed this up with observations from other telescopes. We discovered that the unusual flare came from a binary star system – two stars orbiting each other – in our own galaxy. The finding, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, has, however, turned out to be very difficult to explain.

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seeing the photos from Webb up against photos from Hubble just makes me… I don’t even know like, wow! Look at that!

Hubble fortuitously discovers a new galaxy in the cosmic neighborhood

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study some of the oldest and faintest stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752 have made an unexpected finding. They discovered a dwarf galaxy in our cosmic backyard, only 30 million light-years away. The finding is reported in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.

An international team of astronomers recently used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study white dwarf stars within the globular cluster NGC 6752. The aim of their observations was to use these stars to measure the age of the globular cluster, but in the process they made an unexpected discovery.

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TRAILER: “TIME MASTERS (LES MAÎTRES DU TEMPS)” (1982)

This animated science fiction feature film was directed by René Laloux and Tibor Hernádi but most notably - designed by the artist Mœbius. It is based on Stefan Wul’s 1958 science fiction novel L'Orphelin de Perdide (The Orphan of Perdide).

It’s about a boy, Piel, who is stranded on the desert planet Perdide, where giant killer hornets live. He awaits rescue by the space pilot Jaffar, the exiled prince Matton, his sister Belle and Jaffar’s old friend Silbad - who are all trying to reach Perdide and save Piel before it is too late.

If you’ve seen this film,  you’ve probably seen the English language dubs by the BBC in 1987 or 1991 called Time Masters.

This is a super rare film that you can find on DVD, but usually used, and pretty expensive.

翼善冠yi-shan-guan, a type of hat in Chinese hanfu for ancient emperors and kings.

The term first appeared in Tang Dynasty and invented by Emperor Taizong of Tang. Quotes according to the official records of Tang, Song and Ming Dynasty. “唐贞观中，太宗采古制为翼善冠，自服之。朔望视朝，以常服及帛练裙襦通着之。若服袴褶，又与平巾帻通用。见宋王溥《唐会要．舆服上》﹑《旧唐书．舆服志》。明永乐三年，定皇帝常服冠以乌纱覆之，折角向上，亦名翼善冠。见《明史．舆服志二》。” 

The yishanguan also has a corresponding hat of very similar shape in the official class and the commoner class, called wushamao乌纱帽, and in fact the yishanguan can be considered a variant of wushamao.

Actually yishanguan does have another name, called wu-sha-zhe-shang-jin乌纱折上巾, which means a hat made of black gauze with folded wings upward, and that’s what distinguishes it from an ordinary wushamao.

As for the origin of wushamao, it is futou幞头 in the Tang Dynasty. Futou in the Tang Dynasty originates from fujin幅巾 in the Han Dynasty. In the Han Dynasty, people wrapped their heads in a whole pair of soft cloth, so it was called fujin幅巾(It literally means a whole piece of cloth).

Some wushamao without wings, worn by officials, are similar in shape to the Yishanguan worn by the emperor. In Chinese historical dramas and costume dramas, jin-yi-wei锦衣卫, the imperial guards of secret service agent in the emperor’s court often wore this kind of wushamao without wings. And most wushamao have flush, long oval wings. There is a type of wushamao with particularly slender wings that is inherited from the Song Dynasty and is considered more formal.

The pictures below are ancient wushamao from the museums’ collection, as well as portraits of Ming Dynasty officials.

Because jinyiwei锦衣卫 resembles ancient agents, it is very popular among Chinese artists, who often draw characters wearing jinyiwei-style hanfu.

Then again, the following pictures are of Ming emperors wearing yishanguan. These pictures are accurate for reference.

Animated version drawn by 燕王WF

There are some ancient paintings from the Song and Ming dynasties, on which people are wearing various kinds of wushamao.

The above is the brief introduction about yishanguan and wushamao, after that I will also introduce more other types of hanfu hats.

Black holes ruled out as universe's missing dark matter

For one brief shining moment after the 2015 detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, astronomers held out hope that the universe’s mysterious dark matter might consist of a plenitude of black holes sprinkled throughout the universe.

University of California, Berkeley, physicists have dashed those hopes.

Based on a statistical analysis of 740 of the brightest supernovas discovered as of 2014, and the fact that none of them appear to be magnified or brightened by hidden black hole “gravitational lenses,” the researchers concluded that primordial black holes can make up no more than about 40 percent of the dark matter in the universe. Primordial black holes could only have been created within the first milliseconds of the Big Bang as regions of the universe with a concentrated mass tens or hundreds of times that of the sun collapsed into objects a hundred kilometers across.

The results suggest that none of the universe’s dark matter consists of heavy black holes, or any similar object, including massive compact halo objects, so-called MACHOs.

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Washington State University Physicists create 'negative mass'

Washington State University physicists have created a fluid with negative mass, which is exactly what it sounds like. Push it, and unlike every physical object in the world we know, it doesn’t accelerate in the direction it was pushed. It accelerates backwards.

The phenomenon is rarely created in laboratory conditions and can be used to explore some of the more challenging concepts of the cosmos, said Michael Forbes, a WSU assistant professor of physics and astronomy and an affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington. The research appears today in the journal Physical Review Letters, where it is featured as an “Editor’s Suggestion.”

Hypothetically, matter can have negative mass in the same sense that an electric charge can be either negative or positive. People rarely think in these terms, and our everyday world sees only the positive aspects of Isaac Newton’s Second Law of Motion, in which a force is equal to the mass of an object times its acceleration, or F=ma. In other words, if you push an object, it will accelerate in the direction you’re pushing it. Mass will accelerate in the direction of the force.

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Gobble Up These Black (Hole) Friday Deals!

Welcome to our 6th annual annual Black Hole Friday! Check out these black hole deals from the past year as you prepare to head out for a shopping spree or hunker down at home to avoid the crowds.

First things first, black holes have one basic rule: They are so incredibly dense that to escape their surface you’d have to travel faster than light. But light speed is the cosmic speed limit … so nothing can escape a black hole’s surface!

Black hole birth announcements

Some black holes form when a very large star dies in a supernova explosion and collapses into a superdense object. This is even more jam-packed than the crowds at your local mall — imagine an object 10 times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere with the diameter of New York City!

Some of these collapsing stars also signal their destruction with a huge burst of gamma rays. Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory continuously seek out the signals of these gamma ray bursts — black hole birth announcements that come to us from across the universe.

NICER black holes

There are loads of stellar mass black holes, which are just a few 10s of times the Sun’s mass, in our home galaxy alone — maybe even hundreds of millions of them! Our Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER for short, experiment on the International Space Station has been studying some of those relatively nearby black holes.

Near one black hole called GRS 1915+105, NICER found disk winds — fast streams of gas created by heat or pressure. Scientists are still figuring out some puzzles about these types of wind. Where do they come from, for example? And do they change the way material falls into the black hole? Every new example of these disk winds helps astronomers get closer to answering those questions.

Merging monster black holes

But stellar mass black holes aren’t the only ones out there. At the center of nearly every large galaxy lies a supermassive black hole — one with the mass of millions or billions of Suns smooshed into a region no bigger than our solar system.

There’s still some debate about how these monsters form, but astronomers agree that they certainly can collide and combine when their host galaxies collide and combine. Those black holes will have a lot of gas and dust around them. As that material is pulled into the black hole it will heat up due to friction and other forces, causing it to emit light.  A group of scientists wondered what light it would produce and created this mesmerizing visualization showing that most of the light produced around these two black holes is UV or X-ray light. We can’t see those wavelengths with our own eyes, but many telescopes can. Models like this could help scientists know what to look for to spot a merger.

Black holes power bright gamma ray lights

It also turns out that these supermassive black holes are the source of some of the brightest objects in the gamma ray sky! In a type of galaxy called active galactic nuclei (also called “AGN” for short) the central black hole is surrounded by a disk of gas and dust that’s constantly falling into the black hole.

But not only that, some of those AGN have jets of energetic particles that are shooting out from near the black hole at nearly the speed of light! Scientists are studying these jets to try to understand how black holes — which pull everything in with their huge amounts of gravity — provide the energy needed to propel the particles in these jets. If that jet is pointed directly at us, it can appear super-bright in gamma rays and we call it a blazar. These blazars make up more than half of the sources our Fermi space telescope sees.

Catching particles from near a black hole

Sometimes scientists get a two-for-one kind of deal when they’re looking for black holes. Our colleagues at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory actually caught a particle from a blazar 4 billion light-years away. IceCube lies a mile under the ice in Antarctica and uses the ice itself to detect neutrinos, tiny speedy particles that weigh almost nothing and rarely interact with anything. When IceCube caught a super-high-energy neutrino and traced its origin to a specific area of the sky, they turned to the astronomical community to pinpoint the source.

Our Fermi spacecraft scans the entire sky about every three hours and for months it had observed a blazar producing more gamma rays than usual. Flaring is a common characteristic in blazars, so this didn’t attract special attention. But when the alert from IceCube came through, scientists realized the neutrino and the gamma rays came from the same patch of sky! This method of using two or more kinds of signals to learn about one event or object is called multimessenger astronomy, and it’s helping us learn a lot about the universe.

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