Milky Way- An Elusive Road For Science

Hubble Space Telescope picture in first 20 years

2010-08-04T00:04:00.001-07:00

20 years earlier pic taken by Hubble Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope was started on April 24, 1990. To rejoice its 20th anniversary, NASA has put on the rampage this image of chaotic action atop a three-light-year-tall support of gas and filth that is being eaten away by the luminous light from close by bright stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen watercourse from towering crests. This chaotic cosmic pinnacle lies within a stormy stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, situated 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina

Get Pleasure from Milky Way

2010-07-21T06:29:00.000-07:00

"Escape from Plato’s Cave: The Milky Way and the Galactic Coordinate" is the area under discussion of this month’s Estes Valley Astronomical Society (EVAS) gathering. EVAS, in combination with The Estes Park Memorial Observatory, is presenting a free of charge public open house/star night on Thursday, July 22. The doors will unlock at 7 p.m. and the conference will start at 7:30 p.m.

The visitor orator this month is Bill Tschumy, energetic in amateur astronomy for more than 25 years. He in recent times moved to Longmont, Colo., as of Austin, Teaxs, where he survived for the past 16 years. He was a great deal concerned in the Austin Astronomical Society for the duration of that time. Public star parties are a much loved of his and he loves to share his awareness of the sky with others.

He has written "Where is M13?" a free of charge software application that illustrate the 3-D locations and corporal properties of deep-sky objects in and around our galaxy. He has also worked with Carina Software to co-author their well-liked iPhone apps SkyVoyager and SkyGazer.

The majority amateur astronomers can discover their favorite objects in the night sky. On the other hand, when asked where those objects are situated in and around the galaxy, they are normally stumped. Tschumy will investigate why that is and afford an understanding of the 3-D nature of our galaxy and where our preferred objects actually lie.

A few prehistoric Stars in Milky Way Were Born Elsewhere

2010-07-19T00:34:00.000-07:00

Our Milky Way galaxy snatched up lots of its most prehistoric stars as of smaller galaxies that frayed each other in aggressive collisions, new studies propose.

By means of new supercomputer simulations, researchers establish that some ancient Milky Way stars did not structure natively with the rest of the galaxy regarding 10 billion years ago. As an alternative, they are in reality the leftovers from other galaxies that collided about 5 billion years ago.

Researches said "These stars structure some of the inhabitants in the Milky Way's stellar halo, which extends above and below the spiral galaxy's major disk."

How the universe would look like from inside a black hole

2010-07-16T03:52:00.000-07:00

Worldwide snap shows light as of Big Bang

2010-07-12T03:37:00.000-07:00

A new-fangled satellite has produced the first inclusive picture of the oldest thing ever seen by human eyes: the prehistoric "first light" of conception itself.

The compound image was generated by the R5-billion Planck Satellite and brought together over six months by scientists at the European Space Agency.

Regardless of the spectacular blue line and bands in the centre of the picture - representing the Milky Way galaxy - global frequencies to confine the image. The cameras are so responsive that the satellite on which they were build up was "parked" almost four times further away as of the earth than scientists were this week attached to the mottled red and yellow at the top and underneath of the image, which is the decomposed light formed near the beginning of time, 13.7 billion years ago.

The scientists will be spending the subsequent few months digitally banding the blue whirl as of the image so they can see beyond the Milky Way.

The satellite required cameras operating at nine different the moon. This was to evade the interference of the minute quantity of heat leaking from the earth.

Galactic watercolors: eye-catching image of cloud of new-fangled stars in Milky Way

2010-07-07T03:33:00.000-07:00

In a cloud of amazing shades of blue, this picture shows the very feeling of a close by region of the galaxy where new stars are being produced.

The R Coronae Australis star lies at the spirit of a nearby star-forming area and is enclosed by a fragile bluish reflection nebula entrenched in a vast dust cloud.

It is one of several stars in this province that fit in to the class of very juvenile stars that differ in brightness and are still enclosed by the clouds of gas and dust from which they created.

The light blue colour is typically due to the reflection of starlight off minute dust particles.

This eye-catching image produced by the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

The image is a mixture of twelve split pictures taken all the way through red, green and blue filters.

It shows a part of sky that spans generally the width of the full Moon and is situated some 420 light-years away in the minute constellation of Corona Australis (the Southern Crown).

The concentrated radiation specified off by these burning young stars interacts with the gas adjoining them and is either reflected or re-emitted at a diverse wavelength.

Birth Of A Star Part 1 and Part 2

2010-07-02T05:13:00.000-07:00

Birth Of a Star Part 1:

Birth Of a Star Part 2:

Stunning Space Bubble, perceived by Hubble

2010-06-30T04:52:00.000-07:00

An extravagant new photo from the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a dazzling space bubble filled with baby stars.

The new space bubble image highlights a region called N11 – an intricate network of gas clouds and star bunches within our adjacent galaxy, the huge Magellanic Cloud.

This lively star-forming region is the subsequent largest known to date, and one of the most energetic in our galactic neighbor.

Water on Mars proclaim 10 years ago

2010-06-25T00:16:00.000-07:00

Past 10 years ago this week, news from Mars made a vast splash on Earth — water may still stream on the surface of the red planet. That information, announced by NASA, hinged on photos of brand new gullies imprinted across the Martian surface, and a decade of other water-on-Mars discoveries result. Until now even 10 years later ultimate evidence of flowing Mars water remnants intangible.

The mission to discover facts of liquid water on Mars, and the disclosures that have turned up all along the way, have altered our outlook of the red planet from a dry and dead planet to one where life might perhaps have flourished and even live still.

"We are positively on the path to exploring the habitability of Mars — what it's been similar in the history and even potentially at the present," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program.

The Theoretical foundation of stars

2010-06-22T02:33:00.000-07:00

Twinkle twinkle little star

There aren't many kindergarten rhymes concerning astronomy. Although 'twinkle twinkle little star' builds constructive point. We are able to tell which lights in the night sky are stars since they emerge to twinkle. Planets, on the other side, don't, they stand out progressively in the sky.

Stars twinkle since they are very distant away, and so come into sight as minute points of light in our night sky. Some of this light is engrossed by moving air in the Earth's atmosphere, making the star appear to sparkle.

Planets, like Saturn or Jupiter, don't glitter. This is because they are a much closer to the Earth and so they seem to be bigger in our sky than stars.

NASA find out Doctor Who’s crack in the center of the Milky Way

2010-06-17T01:56:00.000-07:00

Daily Galaxy's image of the day disclose the massive MacGuffin in space.

On behalf of those of you following this year's season of Doctor Who, this image of the day builds for a few rather disturbing viewing. It comes into view that the constellation Sagittarius is featuring a gigantic stellar crumb of graffiti.

And it seems to be rather like the fracture in the Universe that’s been following Matt Smith and Karen Gillan in the region of this year's story.

So what is this fracture? It's "the center of a thick, sooty cloud huge enough to gulp down dozens of solar systems and might be harboring revolting stars in the progression of forming."

That’s threatening – a star devouring break in the center of the night sky… someone better call for The Doctor!

Hubble grab hold of star devouring planet in Milky Way

2010-06-09T05:45:00.000-07:00

A PLANET in the course of action of being devoured by the star trapped live by the Hubble telescope. The planet, names WASP-12b has maximum known surface temperature of roughly 1500 degree C of any planet in Milky Way.

By means of the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph the researchers experimental hoe planet was whipped into an extended shape by gravitational forces. In this progression the planet might be enveloped by its own parent star over the ten million year.

Carole Haswell, researcher with the group said, “We see an enormous cloud of material, which is evading and will be captured by the star. We have recognized chemical elements by no means before seen on planets outside our own solar system.”

WASP-12b, revealed in 2008, is situated about 600 light years as of earth in the Auriga Constellation and is more than 300 times bigger than earth and 40 percent greater than Jupiter. It is so close to star that it orbits the star in little more than 24 hours.

It is the first time Astronomers the occasion so closely, even though they knew the star will gulp down a planet that comes near it.

The Hubble Space Telescope, HST, named after American astronomer Edwin Hubble, is in action since April 1990.

Milky Way mislay two arms

2010-05-19T03:23:00.000-07:00

On the left-hand side is an artist's interpretation of the revised structure of the Milky Way galaxy; on the right-hand side is a former sketches, displaying the four-armed structure. Since 1950s, scientists have sustained to revise their models of the Milky Way.

By means of new infrared imaging from the Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA scientists declare our spiraled Milky Way galaxy is in reality made up of just two main arms. For Past years, astronomers have mapped out the galaxy with four crucial arms. The two arms on the chopping block--Norma and Sagittarius--haven't departed completely; they've now been demoted to the humble status of minor arm, according to NASA.

Scientists have studied parts and divisions of the galaxy for many years, but they speak telescopes tuned to sense infrared light provide them the best picture of its outline since they can make a way through dust. Infrared images taken in the 1990s led them to determine the huge bar of creamy nougat stars in the center of the galaxy. Spitzer's new-fangled infrared shots, joined with software that calculates stellar density, designate that Norma and Sagittarius aren't as thick as astronomers had thought.

"They will keep revising the picture in the similar method that early explorers sailing in the region of the globe had to continue revising the maps," said Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, who presented the results at a press conference Tuesday.

Gigantic 'star-quake' rocks Milky Way

2010-05-12T05:29:00.000-07:00

Astronomers state that they have been taken aback by the amount of energy released in a star explosion on the distant side of our galaxy, 50,000 light-years away.

The spark of radiation on 27 December was so dominant that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth's atmosphere.

The explosion occurred on the surface of an exotic kind of star - a super-magnetic neutron star called SGR 1806-20.

If the blast had been within just 10 light-years, Earth might have suffered a mass extinction, it is said.

"They figure that it's probably the biggest explosion observed by humans within our galaxy since Johannes Kepler saw his supernova in 1604," Dr Rob Fender, of Southampton University, UK, told the BBC News website.

One calculation has the giant flare on SGR 1806-20 unleashing about 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime event. We have observed an object only 20km across, on the other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a 10th of a second than the Sun emits in 100,000 years," said Dr Fender.

Milky Way above Ontario

2010-04-26T22:42:00.000-07:00

This astonishing photo of the Milky Way over Binbrook, Ontario, Canada, was taken by Kerry-Ann Lecky Hepburn of Weather and Sky Photography:

We are really lucky watch picture of it that the water was beautiful and still enough so that the stars castled a nice reflection in the water. In this shot you can also see Jupiter, various nebulas in the MilkyWay, Rho Ophiuchus and the light dome from a distant town.

Formation of Milky Way Galaxy

2010-04-19T22:42:00.000-07:00

Hiding at the back of Milky Way

2010-04-15T00:12:00.000-07:00

Stargazers and specialized astronomers have a tough time watching the galaxy through the Milky Way's bright band of stars, dust and gas. WISE's infrared vision cuts all the way through this veil, offering a brittle view.

In a spiral galaxy like IC 342, dust and gas are concerted in the arms. The denser pockets of gas activate the formation of new stars, as represented here in green and yellow. The center, shown in red, is also bursting with young and youthful stars, which are heating up dust. Stars that come out blue be located within our Milky Way, between us and IC 342.

This galaxy has been of great attention to astronomers since it is comparatively close. However, determining its distance from Earth has confirmed complication due to the intervening Milky Way. Astronomer Edwin Hubble first thought the galaxy might fit in to our own Local Group of galaxies, however present estimates now place it farther away, at about 6.6 to 11 million light-years.

This picture was made from observations by all four infrared detectors on board WISE. Blue and cyan stand for infrared light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is principally light from stars. Green and red symbolize light at 12 and 22 microns, which is primarily emission from warm dust.

2 moons Phases -Believe it or not

2010-04-09T21:50:00.000-07:00

Two moons, believe it or not. The moon has been crevice asunder two or two moons in the sky? This image is recorded on 19 February 2010 at 21:00 hours on the beach Mek Mas Kelantan, Malaysia. This image is recorded with the Canon 50D + telephoto lens.

The phase of the moon: 34.9%

Altitude: 33d 11m

Phase angle: 107.54d

Rise: 11:28

Set: 23:58

The Big Bang Process

2010-04-07T06:05:00.000-07:00

The majority astronomers consider the Universe began in a Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. At that point, the complete Universe was within a bubble that was thousands of times lesser than a pinhead. It was hotter and denser than whatever thing we can envisage.

Then it abruptly exploded. The Universe that we are familiar with was born. All the three Time, space and matter began with the Big Bang. In a fraction of a second, the Universe grew from smaller than a solitary atom to bigger than a galaxy. And it kept on rising at a fantastic rate. It is still growing today.

As the Universe prolonged and cooled, energy distorted into particles of matter and antimatter. These two conflicting types of particles mainly smashed each other. But some matter survived. More steady particles called protons and neutrons on track to form when the Universe was one second old.

Over the next three minutes, the temperature dropped underneath 1 billion degrees Celsius. It was currently cool enough for the protons and neutrons to approach together, forming hydrogen and helium nuclei.

Cosmic Dust present Milky Way a flaming Mane

2010-04-01T04:11:00.000-07:00

The Planck space telescope, which is surveying the complete sky in four huge sweeps, has almost completed its first scan.

Revolving in orbit, Planck obtains data of the sky in strips, approximately the reverse of a chef flaking an apple in one long, thin strip.

This image, taken as of the scan, gives you an idea about the structure and form of dust clouds inside about 500 light-years of the sun. The brilliant band in this far-infrared image is the Milky Way’s spiral disk. On top of that, you can see the cold dust arching upwards. The tint palette here is a bit strange: Reddish tones are colder, whereas white tones are warmer.

The Planck task, initiated on May 2009 by the European Space Agency, is creating the best-ever map of the cosmic environment radiation left over from the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

The innovation of galaxy 10bn light years away

2010-03-24T06:09:00.000-07:00

A set of scientists from the UK and the US has discovered a galaxy distant from us which is churning out stars 250 times quicker than our Milky Way. The innovation of the galaxy, about 10 billion light years away as of the earth, will assist researchers know how the Milky Way was created. Galaxy SMM J2135- 0102 has four distinctive star- forming regions, each one of which is 100 times brighter than Milky Way locations such as the Orion Nebula.

The team which discovered the galaxy was led via scientists as of the UK's Durham University.

Link connecting Milky Way Galaxy as well as 2012 Mayan Calendar

2010-03-18T05:56:00.000-07:00

The majority astronomers are now persuaded that at the center of our Galaxy is a massive black hole the inconceivable seize of millions of our suns. This is where Science and Mythology in fact meet. For what the center of our Galaxy might symbolize in terms of energy and the properties of time/space, no one has a hint.

However to the prehistoric Maya the Milky Way Galaxy represented the Great Cosmic Mother on or after which all Life was birthed. They saw our Galactic Mother stretching out transversely the night sky and by some means identify the place where all had come from. And the huge innermost bulge at her center they perceived as the Cosmic Womb. Inside the central bulge there is what looks similar to a dark corridor, identified as the dark rift. To the Maya it was referred to by a lot of names but the most relevant here is their reference to this region as the "birthing place".

Are we commencement to get the picture here?

Taking into consideration then the implication of the 2012 date in the Mayan calendar, it has been exposed that this year specifically points to a period of time when the December Solstice Sun bring into line with and arises out from the background of the dark rift, the "Galactic Birth Canal" in the middle bulge. It's as if the Sun is in fact being birthed anew from the Galactic Womb.

Size Comparison of Star and planets

2010-03-16T03:47:00.000-07:00

Catastrophic incident in premature Universe could have halted development of our Milky Way

2010-03-10T01:35:00.000-08:00

A 'catastrophic incident' halted the delivery of new stars in a newborn galaxy 10 billion years ago, scientists revealed today.

They believe and explain why premature giant galaxies like Milky Way didn’t just keep on growing after they had formed.

The group from Durham University, experiential the huge galaxy, called SMM J1237+6203, as it would have appeared now three billion years following the Big Bang while the Universe was a quarter of its present age.

According to their result the galaxy exploded in a sequence of blasts trillions of times more influential than any caused by an atomic bomb. The scientists said blasts happened each second for millions of years.

The detonation scattered the gas required to form new stars by helping it flee the gravitational pull of the galaxy, efficiently regulating

its growth.

They consider the huge surge of energy was caused by either the outflow of debris from the galaxy's black hole or since powerful winds generated by dying stars called supernovae.

The research, funded by the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, is in print in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Observations of the galaxy, in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major, were carried out by means of the Gemini Observatory here on Earth.

Star confirms- Milky Way ate smaller galaxies

2010-03-08T01:22:00.000-08:00

A lately found star in a remote dwarf galaxy is chemically alike to stars found in our galaxy's "halo," supporting the thought that the Milky Way "ate" other galaxies.

Astronomers said the star, found in the Sculptor galaxy 280,000 light-years away, is extremely low in "metals,”. In astronomy, metals are any elements other than hydrogen and helium.

Such metal-poor stars are considered to be very old, since they were uncommon in the premature universe. Elements heavier than helium are shaped as a result of star evolution processes, such as nuclear fusion, fission and supernovas.

"This star is probably almost as old as the universe itself," said astronomer Anna Frebel of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the paper relating the star in Nature this week.

Frebel and her contemporaries used high-resolution spectroscopy to search the star for 11 diverse chemical elements, and found that its composition is similar to stars found in the Milky Way's "halo."

The halo stars contain metal levels 100,000 times lower than those found in the sun. The star originates in the dwarf galaxy, called S1020549, and has metal levels 4,000 times lesser than the sun, much lower than any other star in a dwarf galaxy.

The spectroscopic results came as of the Magellan-Clay telescope in Las Campanas, Chile.

The finding ropes the theory that the halo produced by the Milky Way gobbling up stars from smaller galaxies, the researchers said.

"The original plan that the halo of the Milky Way was created by destroying a lot of dwarf galaxies does indeed appear to be correct," said Josh Simon, an astronomer at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution, in a declaration.

Enigma - Goodbye Milky way

2010-02-25T05:12:00.001-08:00

Top 10 Facts on the subject of Milky Way Galaxy

2010-02-24T03:59:00.000-08:00

So you’ve lived here the entire your life — in fact, everybody has — but what do you actually know concerning the Milky Way galaxy? Definitely, you know it’s a spiral, and its 100,000 light years crossways. Learn a lot more from here as i have presented only the important things regarding the Milky Way Galaxy.

So let’s see Ten Things about the Milky Way Galaxy

1) It’s a barred spiral:

You may know that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, possibly the most gorgeous galaxy type. But you can be familiar with lot about them. They have an imposing arms sweeping out starting from a central hub or bulge of glowing stars.

2) There’s a super massive black hole at its heart:

At the center point of the Galaxy, right at its very center, lays a huge: a super massive black hole.

3) It’s a cannibal:

Galaxies are large, and contain lots of mass. If another, smaller galaxy passes too near by; the bigger galaxy can split it to shreds and ingest its stars and gas.

4) We live in a nice neighborhood…

The Milky Way is not single-handedly in space. We’re division of a small group of close by galaxies called — get prepared to be shocked — the Local Group. We’re the heaviest guy on the chunk, and the Andromeda galaxy maybe a speck less huge, though it’s really spread out more.

5) … And we’re in the suburbs: The Local Group is minute and warm, and everyone makes sure their lawns are mowed and houses tinted nicely. That’s since if you take the long sight, we live in the outer edge.

6) You can only see 0.000003% percent of it:

When you got away on a dark night, you are able to see thousands of stars. But the Milky Way has two hundred billion stars in it. You’re merely seeing a minute portion of the number of stars tooling in the region of the galaxy.

7) 90% of it is invisible:

When you look at the motions of the stars in our galaxy, you can concern some math and physics and decide how much mass the galaxy is of. You can also add up up the number of stars in the galaxy and outline out how much mass they contain. Problem is the two numbers don’t go with each other: stars make up only 10% of the mass of the galaxy. Where’s the other 90%? It is invisible.

8) Spiral arms are an illusion:

The arms are like space traffic jams, regions where the restricted density is improved.

9) It’s seriously warped:

The Milky Way is a flat disk approximately 100,000 light years transversely and a few thousand light years thick. It has the similar proportion as a heap of four DVDs, if that helps.

10) We’re going to get to know the Andromeda galaxy a lot better:

Coming on the topic of Andromeda, have you ever seen it in the sky? It’s able to be seen to the naked eye on a clear, dark, moonless night. It’s pale, but big; it’s four or more degrees crossways, eight times the evident size of the Moon on the sky.

Black Hole Demolishing A Star

2010-02-19T04:37:00.000-08:00

Watch the video below, it shows how a Black hole destroying a star.......

Sagittarius Star Cloud

2009-07-23T16:43:00.000-07:00

The Sagittarius Star Cloud (also known as Delle Caustiche, Messier 24, IC 4715) is a star cloud in the constellation of Sagittarius, approximately 600 light years wide, which was discovered by Charles Messier in 1764.

The stars, clusters and other objects comprising M24 are part of the Sagittarius or Sagittarius-Carina arms of the Milky Way galaxy. Messier described M24 as a "large nebulosity containing many stars" and gave its dimensions as being some 1.5° across, a description that fits the star cloud rather well. Some sources, improperly, identify M24 as the faint cluster NGC 6603.

M24 fills a space of significant volume to a depth of 10,000 to 16,000 light-years. This is the most dense concentration of individual stars visible using binoculars, with around 1,000 stars visible within a single field of view.

Amazing Milky Way

2009-07-09T08:30:00.000-07:00

The Milky Way band

Image extracted from the amazing ALMA planetarium show, produced by ESO and the Association of French Language Planetariums. The emphasis of the show is the incomparable scientific adventure of the ALMA project. A young female astronomer guides the audience through the story that includes unique animations and footage, leading the viewer from the first observations by Galileo, 400 years ago, to the world of modern astronomy, moving from the visible wavelength domain to explore the millimetre-wave view of the Universe, and leaving light-polluted cities for unique settings in some of the highest and driest places on Earth.

Image from Cosmic Origins

Access Road to the ALMA Site

Acces road to the ALMA site in Chajnantor. The image was taken on December 2004.

Dark matter halo

2009-07-07T17:52:00.000-07:00

The dark matter halo is the hypothetical gravitational core of a galaxy, consisting of dark matter.

The nature of dark matter in the galactic halo of spiral galaxies is still undetermined, but there are two popular theories: either the halo is composed of weakly-interacting elementary particles known as WIMPs, or it is home to large numbers of small, dark bodies known as MACHOs. It seems unlikely that the halo is composed of large quantities of gas and dust, because both ought to be detectable through observations. Searches for gravitational microlensing events in the halo of the Milky Way show that the number of MACHOs is likely not sufficient to account for the required mass.

The dark matter halo is the single largest part of the Galaxy as it covers the space between 100,000 light-years to 300,000 light-years from the galactic center. It is also the most mysterious part of the Galaxy. It is now believed that about 95% of the Galaxy is composed of dark matter, a type of matter that does not seem to interact with the rest of the Galaxy's matter and energy in any way except through gravity. The dark matter halo is the location of nearly all of the Galaxy's dark matter, which is more than ten times as much mass as all of the visible stars, gas, and dust in the rest of the Galaxy. The luminous matter makes up approximately 90,000,000,000 solar masses. The dark matter halo is likely to include around 600,000,000,000 to 3,000,000,000,000 solar masses of dark matter.

Milky seas effect

2009-06-30T12:45:00.000-07:00

Milky seas is a condition on the open ocean where large areas of seawater (up to 6,000 square miles) are filled with bioluminescent bacteria, causing the ocean to uniformly glow an eerie blue at night. The condition has been present in mariner's tales for centuries – notably appearing in chapter 24 of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – but until recently it has not been rigorously documented. There have been 235 documented sightings of milky seas since 1915 - mostly concentrated in the north-western Indian Ocean and near Indonesia.

In 1985 a research vessel in the Arabian Sea took water samples during milky seas. Their conclusions were that the effect was caused by the bacteria Vibrio harveyi.

In 2005, Steven Miller of the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California, was able to match 1995 Satellite images with a first-hand account of a merchant ship. U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program showed the milky area to be approximately 15,400-km² (roughly the size of Connecticut). The luminescent field was observed to glow over three consecutive nights.

While monochromatic photos make this effect appear white, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute scientist Steve Haddock (an author of a milky seas effect study) has commented, "the light produced by the bacteria is actually blue, not white. It is white in the graphic because of the monochromatic sensor we used, and it can appear white to the eye because the rods in our eye (used for night vision) don't discriminate color.

'Wild Rides' Around Ultracool Stars, Outside The Milky Way

2009-06-19T13:50:00.000-07:00

Astronomers have found that stars of a recently discovered type, dubbed ultracool subdwarfs, take some pretty wild rides as they orbit around the Milky Way, following paths that are very different from those of typical stars. One of them may actually be a visitor that originated in another galaxy.
Adam Burgasser and John Bochanski of MIT presented the findings on June 9 at the American Astronomical Society's semi-annual meeting in Pasadena, Calif. The result clarifies the origins of these peculiar, faint stars, and may provide new details on the types of stars the Milky Way has acquired from other galaxies.

Ultracool subdwarfs were first recognized as a unique class of stars in 2003, and are distinguished by their low temperatures ("ultracool") and low concentrations of elements other than hydrogen and helium ("subdwarf"). They sit at the bottom end of the size range for stars, and some are so small that they are closer to the planet-like objects called brown dwarfs. Only a few dozen ultracool subdwarfs are known today, as they are both very faint — up to 10,000 times fainter than the Sun — and extremely rare.

Burgasser, associate professor of physics at MIT and lead author of the study, was intrigued by the fast motions of ultracool subdwarfs, which zip past the Sun at astonishing speeds. "Most nearby stars travel more or less in tandem with the Sun tracing circular orbits around the center of the Milky Way once every 250 million years," he explains. The ultracool subdwarfs, on the other hand, appear to pass us by at very high speeds, up to 500 km/s, or over a million miles per hour.

"If there are interstellar cops out there, these stars would surely lose their driver's licenses," says Burgasser.

Burgasser's team of astronomers assembled measurements of the positions, distances and motions of roughly two dozen of these rare stars. Robyn Sanderson, co-author and MIT graduate student, then used these measurements to calculate the orbits of the subdwarfs using a numerical code developed to study galaxy collisions. Despite doing similar calculations for other types of low-mass stars, "these orbits were like nothing I'd ever seen before," says Sanderson.

Sanderson's calculations showed an unexpected diversity in the ultracool subdwarf orbits. Some plunge deep into the center of the Milky Way on eccentric, comet‐like tracks; others make slow, swooping loops far beyond the Sun's orbit. Unlike the majority of nearby stars, most of the ultracool subdwarfs spend a great deal of time thousands of light‐years above or below the disk of the Milky Way.

"Someone living on a planet around one of these subdwarfs would have an incredible nighttime view of a beautiful spiral galaxy — our Milky Way — spread across the sky," Burgasser speculates.

Sanderson's orbit calculations confirm that all of the ultracool subdwarfs are part of the Milky Way's halo, a widely dispersed population of stars that likely formed in the Milky Way's distant past. However, one of the subdwarfs, a star named 2MASS 1227‐0447 in the constellation Virgo, has an orbit indicating that it might have a very different lineage, possibly extragalactic.

"Our calculations show that this subdwarf travels up to 200,000 light years away from the center of the Galaxy, almost 10 times farther than the Sun," says Bochanski, a postdoctoral researcher in Burgasser's group at MIT. This is farther than many of the Milky Way's nearest galactic neighbors, suggesting that this particular subdwarf may have originated somewhere else.

"Based on the size of its one billion‐year orbit and direction of motion, we speculate that 2MASS 1227‐0447 might have come from another, smaller galaxy that at some point got too close to the Milky Way and was ripped apart by gravitational forces," explains Bochanksi.

Astronomers have previously identified streams of stars in the Milky Way originating from neighboring galaxies, but all have been distant, massive, red giant stars. The ultracool subdwarf identified by Burgasser and his team is the first nearby, low‐mass star to be found on such a trajectory. "If we can identify what stream this star is associated with, or which dwarf galaxy it came from, we could learn more about the types of stars that have built up the Milky Way's halo over the past 10 billion years," says Burgasser.

The results presented at the meeting are based in part on two studies recently published in the Astrophysical Journal by Burgasser and coauthor Michael Cushing, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy.

Other authors of this paper are Andrew West of MIT; Dagny Looper of the University of Hawaii, Manoa; and Jacqueline Faherty of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY.

Mound Erupts Volcano

2009-05-29T17:14:00.000-07:00

Erupts of volcano

Mound of Gravel pieces

2009-05-25T10:26:00.000-07:00

The Gravel is rock that is of a particular particle size range. Specifically, it is any loose rock that is bigger than two millimeters (2mm) in its largest measurement (about 1/12 of an inch) and no more than 64 millimeters (about 2.5 inches). The next smaller size class in geology is sand, which is >0.0625 mm to 2 mm in size. The next larger size is cobble, which is >64 millimeters to 256 millimeters (about 2.5 to 10 inches). Gravel can be sub-categorized into granule (>2-4 mm) and pebble (>4-64 mm). One cubic foot (28.32 dm3) of gravel usually weighs about 100 pounds (45 kg).

Gravel is an important commercial product, with a number of applications. Many roadways are surfaced with gravel, especially in rural areas where there is little traffic. Globally, far more roads are surfaced with gravel than with concrete or tarmac; Russia alone has over 400,000 km of gravel-surfaced roads. Both sand and small gravel are also important for the produce of concrete.

Lava -molten rock expelled volcano

2009-05-04T00:23:00.000-07:00

Lava is molten rock expelled by a volcano during eruption. When first expelled from a volcanic vent, it is a liquid at temperatures from 700 °C to 1,200 °C (1,300 °F to 2,200 °F). Although lava is quite viscous, with about 100,000 times the viscosity of water, it can flow great distances before cooling and solidifying, because of both its thixotropic and shear thinning properties.

A lava flow is a moving outpouring of lava, which is created during a non-explosive effusive eruption. When it has stopped moving, lava solidifies to form igneous rock. The term lava flow is commonly shortened to lava. Explosive eruptions produce a mixture of volcanic ash and other fragments called tephra, rather than lava flows. The word 'lava' comes from Italian, and is probably derived from the Latin word labes which means a fall or slide. The first use in connection with extruded magma (molten rock below the earth's surface) was apparently in a short account written by Francesco Serao on the eruption of Vesuvius between May 14 and June 4, 1737.

described "a flow of fiery lava" as an analogy to the flow of water and mud down the flanks of the volcano following heavy rain. Felsic lava Felsic lavas such as rhyolite and dacite typically form lava spines, lava domes or 'coulees' (which are thick, short lavas) and are associated with pyroclastic (fragmental) deposits. Most felsic lava flows are extremely viscous, and typically fragment as they extrude, producing blocky autobreccias. The high viscosity and strength are the result of their chemistry, which is high in silica, aluminium, potassium, sodium, and calcium, forming a polymerized liquid rich in feldspar and quartz, which thus has a higher viscosity than other magma types. Felsic magmas can erupt at temperatures as low as 650 to 750 °C. Unusually hot (>950 °C) rhyolite lavas, however, may flow for distances of many tens of kilometres, such as in the Snake River Plain of the northwestern United States.

Mafic lava Mafic or basaltic lavas are typified by their high ferromagnesian content, and generally erupt at temperatures in excess of 950 °C. Basaltic magma is high in iron and magnesium, and has relatively lower aluminium and silica, which taken together reduces the degree of polymerization within the melt. Owing to the higher temperatures, viscosities can be relatively low, although still thousands of times more viscous than water. The low degree of polymerization and high temperature favors chemical diffusion, so it is common to see large, well-formed phenocrysts within mafic lavas. Basalt lavas tend to produce low-profile shield volcanoes or 'flood basalt fields', because the fluidal lava flows for long distances from the vent. The thickness of a basalt lava, particularly on a low slope, may be much greater than the thickness of the moving lava flow at any one time, because basalt lavas may 'inflate' by supply of lava beneath a solidified crust. Most basalt lavas are of a'a or 'pahoehoe' types, rather than block lavas. Underwater they can form 'pillow lavas', which are rather similar to entrail-type pahoehoe lavas on land.

Last Days On Earth

2009-04-16T09:05:00.000-07:00

Saturn-moonlets within the rings

2009-04-08T08:47:00.000-07:00

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System, after Jupiter. Saturn, along with Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, is classified as a gas giant. Together, these four planets are sometimes referred to as the Jovian, meaning "Jupiter-like", planets.

Saturn has a prominent system of rings, consisting mostly of ice particles with a smaller amount of rocky debris and dust. Sixty-one known moons orbit the planet, not counting hundreds of "moonlets" within the rings. Titan, Saturn's largest and the Solar System's second largest moon (after Jupiter's Ganymede), is larger than the planet Mercury and is the only moon in the Solar System to possess a significant atmosphere.

Earth the planet from the Sun

2009-04-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

Earth is the third planet from the Sun. Earth is the largest of the terrestrial planets in the Solar System in diameter, mass and density. It is also referred to as the World and Terra.

Earth's outer surface is divided into several rigid segments, or tectonic plates, that gradually migrate across the surface over periods of many millions of years. About 71% of the surface is covered with salt-water oceans, the remainder consisting of continents and islands; liquid water, necessary for all known life, is not known to exist on any other planet's surface.Earth's interior remains active, with a thick layer of relatively solid mantle, a liquid outer core that generates a magnetic field, and a solid iron inner core.

Solar System - creating a bubble

2009-03-25T08:54:00.000-07:00

The Solar System consists of the Sun and those celestial objects bound to it by gravity: the eight planets and five dwarf planets, their 173 known moons,and billions of small bodies. The small bodies include asteroids, icy Kuiper belt objects, comets, meteoroids, and interplanetary dust.

The charted regions of the Solar System comprise the Sun, four terrestrial inner planets, the asteroid belt, four gas giant outer planets, and finally the Kuiper belt and the scattered disc. The hypothetical Oort cloud may also exist at a distance roughly a thousand times beyond these regions.

The solar wind, a flow of plasma from the Sun, permeates the Solar System, creating a bubble in the interstellar medium known as the heliosphere, which extends out to the middle of the scattered disc.

The Realm of the Nebulae

2009-03-18T08:24:00.000-07:00

An elliptical galaxy is a galaxy having an approximately ellipsoidal shape and a smooth, nearly featureless brightness profile. They range in shape from nearly spherical to highly flattened and in size from hundreds of millions to over one trillion stars.

Elliptical galaxies are one of the three main classes of galaxy originally described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work “The Realm of the Nebulae”, along with spiral and lenticular galaxies.

Most elliptical galaxies are composed of older, low-mass stars, with a sparse interstellar medium and minimal star formation activity. They are surrounded by large numbers of globular clusters. Elliptical galaxies are believed to make up approximately 10-15% of galaxies in the local Universe but are the dominant type of galaxy in the universe overall. They are preferentially found close to the centers of galaxy clusters and are less common in the early Universe.

Galactic Center -rotational center of the Milky Way

2009-03-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

The Galactic Center is the rotational center of the Milky Way galaxy. It is located about 7.6 kilo parsecs (25,000 ly) away from the Earth in the direction of the constellations Sagittarius, Ophiuchus, and Scorpius where the Milky Way appears brightest. There is a suspected super massive black hole at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way.

Because of interstellar dust along the line of sight, the Galactic Center cannot be studied at visible, ultraviolet or soft X-ray wavelengths. The available information about the Galactic Center comes from observations at gamma ray, hard X-ray, infrared, sub-millimeter and radio wavelengths.

Coordinates of the Galactic Center were first found by Harlow Shipley in his 1918 study of the distribution of the globular clusters. In the Equatorial coordinate system they are: RA 17h45m40.04s, Dec -29° 00' 28.1" (J2000 epoch).

The complex astronomical radio source Sagittarius A appears to be located almost exactly at the Galactic Center, and contains an intense compact radio source, Sagittarius A*, which coincides with a super massive black hole at the center of our Galaxy. Accretion of gas onto the black hole, probably involving a disk around it, would release energy to power the radio source, itself much larger than the black hole. The latter is too small to see with present instruments.

Our bodies receive-Sunlight Healing

2009-03-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

The human race evolved under the sun and for thousands of years lived in close harmony with its heat and light.The infrared rays originated from the sun are useful in the treatment of neuralgia, neuritis, arthritis, and sinusitis. In treatment of pains, heat plays an effective role. Warmth keeps our body energetic. It also keeps the skin smooth and protected. Plants get food from the sun in the photosynthesis process. The foods we get from plants stored the solar energy in it. Our bodies receive the solar energy from the food in the form of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. The ultraviolet rays are antiseptic in nature. It is capable of killing bacteria, viruses, fungi, yeasts, moulds, and mites in air, water and on surfaces. It also kills germs on our skin. For all types of skin diseases, Sunlight is a very useful treatment.

When ultraviolet rays from the sun comes in contact with ergosterol, a fluid found just under the skin, they convert it to vitamin `D`, which is absorbed into the bloodstream. Ten minutes of daily exposure to sunlight will supply us with the entire vitamin `D` that we need. The principal function of vitamin `D` is to promote calcium absorption in the gut and calcium transfer across cell membranes. This contributes to strong bones and a contented nervous system. Ultraviolet light converts cholesterol in the skin to vitamin `D`. This vitamin is essential for the proper handling of calcium in the body and thus in the prevention of rickets and adult osteomalacia. Interestingly, people cant overdose on natural vitamin `D` from the sun, even with day-after-day exposure, whereas synthetic vitamin `D` supplements can easily cause vitamin `D` toxicity.

Sunlight plays an effective role in regulating almost all our bodily processes. Sunlight has been shown to increase our sense of well-being and to improve sleep. Ultraviolet light coming into our eyes stimulate the pineal gland, which helps to regulate our Circadian Rhythm. It has been said, "Dark nights and bright days will help keep the hormones in the body functioning properly.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey

2009-03-04T14:45:00.000-08:00

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey or SDSS is a major multi-filter imaging and spectroscopic red shift survey using a dedicated 2.5-m wide-angle optical telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. The project was named after the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The surveys were begun in 2000, and aims to map 25% of the sky and obtain observations on around 100 million objects and spectra for 1 million objects. The main galaxy sample has a median redshift of 0.1; there are redshifts for luminous red galaxies as far as z=0.4, for quasars as far as z=5; and the imaging survey has been involved in the detection of quasars beyond a redshift 6.

In the year 2006 the survey entered a new phase, the SDSS-II, by extending the observations to explore the structure and stellar makeup of the Milky Way, the SEGUE and the Sloan Supernova Survey, which watches after supernova Ia events to measure the distances to far objects.

The SDSS telescope uses the drift scanning technique, which lets the telescope fix and makes use of the earth's rotation to record small stripes of the sky. The image of the stars in the focal plane drifts along the CCD chip, instead of staying fixed as in tracked telescopes. This method allows consistent astrometry over the widest possible field and precision remains unaffected by telescope tracking errors. The disadvantages are minor distortion effects and the CCD has to be written and read in the same time.

Moon-largest natural satellite

2009-02-24T11:31:00.000-08:00

The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite and the fifth largest natural satellite in the Solar System.

The average center-to-center distance from the Earth to the Moon is 384,403 km, about thirty times the diameter of the Earth. The Moon's diameter is 3,474 km,[6] a little more than a quarter of that of the Earth. Thus, the Moon's volume is about 2 percent that of Earth; the pull of gravity at its surface is about 17 percent that at the Earth's surface. The Moon makes a complete orbit around the Earth every 27.3 days (the orbital period), and the periodic variations in the geometry of the Earth–Moon–Sun system are responsible for the lunar phases that repeat every 29.5 days.

The Moon is the only celestial body to which humans have traveled and upon which humans have performed a manned landing. The first artificial object to pass near the Moon was the Soviet Union's Luna 1, the first artificial object to impact the lunar surface was Luna 2, and the first photographs of the normally occluded far side of the Moon were made by Luna 3, all in 1959. The first spacecraft to perform a successful lunar soft landing was Luna 9, and the first unmanned vehicle to orbit the Moon was Luna 10, both in 1966.[6] The United States (U.S.) Apollo program achieved the only manned missions to date, resulting in six landings between 1969 and 1972. Human exploration of the Moon ceased with the conclusion of the Apollo program, although a few robotic lander and orbiters have been sent to the Moon since that time. Several countries have announced plans to return humans to the surface of the Moon in the 2020s.

Dark matter

2009-02-18T11:27:00.000-08:00

In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is hypothetical matter that is undetectable by its emitted radiation, but whose presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter. Dark matter is postulated to explain the flat rotation curves of spiral galaxies and other evidence of "missing mass" in the universe. According to present observations of structures larger than galaxies, as well as Big Bang cosmology, dark matter and dark energy account for the vast majority of the mass in the observable universe.

The observed phenomena which imply the presence of dark matter include the rotational speeds of galaxies, orbital velocities of galaxies in clusters, gravitational lensing of background objects by galaxy clusters such as the Bullet Cluster, and the temperature distribution of hot gas in galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Dark matter also plays a central role in structure formation and galaxy evolution, and has measurable effects on the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background.

All these lines of evidence suggest that galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and the universe as a whole contain far more matter than that which interacts with electromagnetic radiation: the remainder is frequently called the "dark matter component," even though there is a small amount of baryonic dark matter.

Declination

2009-02-11T12:07:00.000-08:00

In astronomy, declination (abbrev. dec or δ) is one of the two coordinates of the equatorial coordinate system, the other being either right ascension or hour angle. Dec is comparable to latitude, projected onto the celestial sphere, and is measured in degrees north and south of the celestial equator. Therefore, points north of the celestial equator have positive declinations, while those to the south have negative declinations.

* An object on the celestial equator has a dec of 0°.
* An object at the celestial north pole has a dec of +90°.
* An object at the celestial south pole has a dec of −90°.

The sign is customarily included even if it is positive. Any unit of angle can be used for declination, but it is often expressed in degrees, minutes, and seconds of arc.

A celestial object that passes over zenith, has a declination equal to the observer's latitude, with northern latitudes yielding positive declinations. A pole star therefore has the declination +90° or -90°. Conversely, at northern latitudes φ > 0, celestial objects with a declination greater than 90° - φ, are always visible. Such stars are called circumpolar stars, while the phenomenon of a sun not setting is called midnight sun.

Barred spiral galaxy

2009-02-04T11:50:00.000-08:00

A barred spiral galaxy is a spiral galaxy with a central bar-shaped structure composed of stars. Bars are found in approximately half of all spiral galaxies. Bars generally affect both the motions of stars and interstellar gas within spiral galaxies and can affect spiral arms as well.

Edwin Hubble classified these types of spiral galaxies as "SB" ("Spiral", "Barred") in his Hubble sequence, and arranged them into three sub-categories based on how open the arms of the spiral are. SBa types feature tightly bound arms, while SBc types are at the other extreme and have loosely bound arms. SBb type galaxies lie in between. A fourth type, SBm, was subsequently created to describe somewhat irregular barred spirals, such as the Magellan Cloud galaxies, which were once classified as irregular galaxies, but have since been found to contain barred spiral structures.

Sun's location

2009-01-28T13:38:00.000-08:00

The Sun (and therefore the Earth and Solar System) may be found close to the inner rim of the Galaxy's Orion Arm, in the Local Fluff or the Gould Belt, at a hypothesized distance of 7.62±0.32 kpc (~25,000±1,000 ly) from the Galactic Center. The distance between the local arm and the next arm out, the Peruses Arm, is about 6,500 light-years. The Sun, and thus the Solar System, is found in what scientists call the galactic habitable zone.

The Apex of the Sun's Way, or the solar apex, is the direction that the Sun travels through space in the Milky Way. The general direction of the Sun's galactic motion is towards the star Vega near the constellation of Hercules, at an angle of roughly 60 sky degrees to the direction of the Galactic Center. The Sun's orbit around the Galaxy is expected to be roughly elliptical with the addition of perturbations due to the galactic spiral arms and non-uniform mass distributions. In addition, the Sun oscillates up and down relative to the galactic plane approximately 2.7 times per orbit. This is very similar to how a simple harmonic oscillator works with no drag force (damping) term. These oscillations often coincide with mass extinction periods on Earth; presumably the higher density of stars close to the galactic plane leads to more impact events.

Elliptical

2009-01-21T11:59:00.000-08:00

Elliptical galaxies are actually of ellipsoidal shape, and it is now quite safe from observation that they are usually triaxial (cosmic footballs, as Paul Murdin, David Allen, and David Malian put it). They have little or no global angular momentum, i.e. do not rotate as a whole (of course, the stars still orbit the centers of these galaxies, but the orbits are statistically oriented so that only little net orbital angular momentum sums up). Normally, elliptical galaxies contain very little or no interstellar matter, and consist of old population II stars only: They appear like luminous bulges of spirals, without a disk component.

However, for some elliptical, small disk components have been discovered, so that they may be representatives of one end of a common scheme of galaxy forms which includes the disk galaxies.

Spiral

2009-01-14T11:58:00.000-08:00

Spiral galaxies usually consist of two major components: A flat, large disk which often contains a lot of interstellar matter (visible sometimes as reddish diffuse emission nebulae, or as dark dust clouds) and young (open) star clusters and associations, which have emerged from them (recognizable from the bluish light of their hottest, short-living, most massive stars), often arranged in conspicuous and striking spiral patterns and/or bar structures, and an ellipsoid ally formed bulge component, consisting of an old stellar population without interstellar matter, and often associated with globular clusters.

The young stars in the disk are classified as stellar population I, the old bulge stars as population II. The luminosity and mass relation of these components seem to vary in a wide range, giving rise to a classification scheme. The pattern structures in the disk are most probably transient phenomena only, caused by gravitational interaction with neighboring galaxies.

Melkweg

2009-01-07T15:34:00.001-08:00

The Melkweg (English translation: "Milky Way") is a popular music venue and cultural center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It is located on the Lijnbaansgracht, near the Leidseplein, a prime nightlife center of Amsterdam. It is housed in a former warehouse and is divided into a number of spaces of varying sizes. Besides a large hall for rock and pop music concerts, there are also spaces for dance/theater, cinema, photography and media-art. The Melkweg is run by a non-profit organization that has existed since 1970.

It is referenced in the Cracker song "Euro-Trash Girl", the Lag wagon song "Infectious" and in title of the Half Man Half Biscuit song "Prag Vec at the Melkweg". The title of The Church's song "Under the Milky Way" is also a reference to the Melkweg.

The website Fabchannel.com streams live and on demand concerts from the Melkweg.

Globular cluster

2008-12-31T11:57:00.000-08:00

A globular cluster is a spherical collection of stars that orbits a galactic core as a satellite. Globular clusters are very tightly bound by gravity, which gives them their spherical shapes and relatively high stellar densities toward their centers. The name of this category of star cluster is derived from the Latin globules—a small sphere. A globular cluster is sometimes known more simply as a globular.

Globular clusters, which are found in the halo of a galaxy, contain considerably more stars and are much older than the less dense galactic or open clusters, which are found in the disk. Globular clusters are fairly common; there are about 158 currently known globular clusters in the Milky Way, with perhaps 10–20 more undiscovered. Large galaxies can have more: Andromeda, for instance, may have as many as 500. Some giant elliptical galaxies, such as M87, may have as many as 10,000 globular clusters. These globular clusters orbit the galaxy out to large radii, 40 kilo parsecs (approximately 131 thousand light-years) or more.

Sun's location

2008-12-24T11:56:00.000-08:00

Halo

2008-12-17T11:41:00.000-08:00

The galactic disk is surrounded by a spheroid halo of old stars and globular clusters, of which 90% lie within 100,000 light-years, suggesting a stellar halo diameter of 200,000 light-years. However, a few globular clusters have been found farther, such as PAL 4 and AM1 at more than 200,000 light-years away from the galactic center. While the disk contains gas and dust which obscure the view in some wavelengths, the spheroid component does not. Active star formation takes place in the disk (especially in the spiral arms, which represent areas of high density), but not in the halo. Open clusters also occur primarily in the disk.

Recent discoveries have added dimension to the knowledge of the Milky Way's structure. With the discovery that the disc of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) extends much further than previously thought, the possibility of the disk of our own Galaxy extending further is apparent, and this is supported by evidence of the newly discovered Outer Arm extension of the Cygnus Arm. With the discovery of the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy came the discovery of a ribbon of galactic debris as the polar orbit of Sagittarius and its interaction with the Milky Way tears it apart. Similarly, with the dies.

Milky Way: Spiral arms

2008-12-10T15:27:00.000-08:00

Each spiral arm describes a logarithmic spiral (as do the arms of all spiral galaxies) with a pitch of approximately 12 degrees. There are believed to be four major spiral arms which all start near the Galaxy's center. These are named as follows, according to the image at right. Outside of the major spiral arms is the Outer Ring or Monoceros Ring, a ring of stars around the Milky Way proposed by astronomers Brian Yanny and Heidi Jo Newberg, which consists of gas and stars torn from other galaxies billions of years ago.

As is typical for many galaxies, the distribution of mass in the Milky Way Galaxy is such that the orbital speed of most stars in the Galaxy does not depend strongly on its distance from the center. Away from the central bulge or outer rim, the typical stellar velocity is between 210 and 240 km/s.[24] Hence the orbital period of the typical star is directly proportional only to the length of the path traveled. This is unlike the situation within the Solar System, where two-body gravitational dynamics dominate and different orbits are expected to have significantly different velocities associated with them. This difference is one of the major pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter. Another interesting aspect is the so-called "wind-up problem" of the spiral arms.

If one believes that the inner parts of the arms rotate faster than the outer part, then the Galaxy will wind up so much that the spiral structure will be thinned out. But this is not what is observed in spiral galaxies; instead, astronomers propose that the spiral arms form as a result of a matter-density wave emanating from the galactic center. This can be likened to a moving traffic jam on a highway — the cars are all moving, but there is always a region of slow-moving cars. Thus this results in several spiral arms where there are a lot of stars and gas. This model also agrees with enhanced star formation in or near spiral arms; the compress ional waves increase the density of molecular hydrogen and protostars form as a result.

Artist's conception of the spiral structure of the Milky Way with two major, stellar arms and a bar. Observations presented in 2008 by Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater suggest that the Milky Way possesses only two major stellar arms: the Perseus arm and the Scutum-Centaurus arm. The rest of the arms are minor or adjunct arms.

Galactic coordinate system

2008-11-19T15:11:00.000-08:00

The galactic coordinate system is a celestial coordinate system which is centered on the Sun and is aligned with the apparent center of the Milky Way galaxy. The "equator" is aligned to the galactic plane. Similar to geographic coordinates, positions in the galactic coordinate system have latitudes and longitudes.

Some sources hold that, strictly speaking, the term Milky Way should refer exclusively to the observation of the band of light, while the full name Milky Way Galaxy, or alternatively the Galaxy should be used to describe our galaxy as an astrophysical whole.It is unclear how widespread the usage of this convention is, however, and the term Milky Way is routinely used in either context.

Migraine

2008-11-12T13:43:00.001-08:00

A migraine is a very painful type of headache. People who get migraines often describe the pain as pulsing or throbbing in one area of the head. During migraines, people are very sensitive to light and sound. They may also become nauseated and vomit.

Migraine is three times more common in women than in men. Some people can tell when they are about to have a migraine because they see flashing lights or zigzag lines or they temporarily lose their vision.

Many things can trigger a migraine. These include

* Anxiety
* Stress
* Lack of food or sleep
* Exposure to light
* Hormonal changes (in women)

Doctors used to believe migraines were linked to the opening and narrowing of blood vessels in the head. Now they believe the cause is related to genes that control the activity of some brain cells. Medicines can help prevent migraine attacks or help relieve symptoms of attacks when they happen. For many people, treatments to relieve stress can also help.

Haircoloring Company

2008-11-04T14:27:00.000-08:00

Jcoco is an intimate, relaxed, and friendly space filled with creativity and professionalism. We are temporarily set up within The New Salon Muffie and are looking for the perfect space to call our own in the Reading,Mass area.

Joy, the owner of Jcoco salon, specializes in all types of haircoloring services and brings her 10 years of experience to every client. Joy is also an accomplished haricutter and can expertly style hair for all occasions.

Appointments are made directly with Joy and hours are flexible.
Gift Certificates are available.

Milky Way :Composition and structure

2008-10-15T00:46:00.000-07:00

The Galaxy consists of a bar-shaped core region bounded by a disk of gas, dust and stars form four distinct arm structures spiralling external in a logarithmic spiral shape. The mass distribution within the Galaxy intimately resembles the Sbc Hubble classification, which is a spiral galaxy with moderately loosely-wound arms. Astronomers first began to think that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy in the 1990s rather than a normal spiral galaxy. Their suspicions were inveterate by the Spitzer Space Telescope observations in 2005[17] which showed the Galaxy's inner bar to be larger than before suspected. The Milky Way's mass is consideration to be about 5.8×1011 solar masses comprise 200 to 400 billion stars. Its integrated absolute visual magnitude has been predictable to be 20.9. Most of the mass of the Galaxy is thought to be dark substance, forming a dark matter halo of a probable 600 to 3000 billion which is spread out relatively uniformly.

Age of Milky Way

2008-09-24T02:30:00.000-07:00

It is extremely complex to define the age at which the Milky Way shaped, but the age of the oldest star in the Galaxy yet exposed, HE 1523-0901, is predictable to be about 13.2 billion years, almost as old as the Universe itself.

This estimate is based on examine by a side of astronomers in 2004 using the UV-Visual Echelle Spectrograph of the Very Large Telescope to calculate, for the first time, the beryllium happy of two stars in globular cluster NGC 6397. From this study, the elapsed time among the rise of the first generation of stars in the entire Galaxy and the first creation of stars in the cluster was deduced to be 200 million to 300 million years. By including the predictable age of the stars in the globular cluster, they predictable the age of the oldest stars in the Milky Way at 13.6 ± 0.8 billion years. Based ahead this emerging science, the Galactic thin disk is predictable to have been formed among 6.5 and 10.1 billion being ago.

Size Milky Way

2008-09-17T00:46:00.000-07:00

The stellar disk of the Milky Way galaxy is around 100,000 light-years in diameter, and is supposed to be, on average, about 1,000 ly thick. It is estimated to contain at least 200 billion stars and probably up to 400 billion stars, the exact figure depending on the number of very low-mass stars, which is highly uncertain. Extending past the stellar disk is a much thicker disk of gas. Recent observations designate that the gaseous disk of the Milky Way has a width of around 12,000 ly twice the previously established value. As a guide to the relation physical scale of the Milky Way, if it were condensed to 130 km in width, the Solar System would be a mere 2 mm in width.

The Galactic Halo extend outward, but is limited in size by the orbits of the two Milky Way satellites, the Large and the Small Magellanic Clouds, whose perigalacticon is at 180,000 ly .

Milky Way :View from Earth

2008-09-10T05:56:00.000-07:00

The Milky Way galaxy, as view from the Earth, itself positioned on one of the spiral arms of the galaxy, appear as a hazy band of white glow in the night sky arch across the entire celestial sphere originate from stars and other fabric which lie within the galactic plane. The plane of the Milky Way is tending by about 60° to the ecliptic, with the North Galactic Pole located at right ascension 12h 49m, declination +27.4° near beta Comae Berenices. The South Galactic Pole is close to alpha Sculptoris.

The center of the galaxy is in the way of Sagittarius, and the Milky Way then "passes" through Scorpius, Ara, Norma, Triangulum Australe, Circinus, Centaurus, Musca, Crux, Carina, Vela, Puppis, Canis Major, Monoceros, Orion & Gemini, Taurus, Auriga, Perseus, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Cepheus & Lacerta, Cygnus, Vulpecula, Sagitta, Aquila, Ophiuchus, Scutum, and reverse to Sagittarius.

The Milky Way looks brightest in the way of the constellation of Sagittarius, toward the galactic center. Relative to the space equator, it passes as far north as the group of Cassiopeia and as far south as the constellation of Crux, representing the high inclination of Earth's equatorial plane and the plane of the ecliptic relation to the galactic plane. The fact that the Milky Way divides the night sky into two generally equal hemispheres indicates that our Solar System lies close to the immense plane. The Milky Way has a moderately low surface brightness, making it hard to see from any urban or suburban location suffering from light pollution.

Milky Way

2008-08-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

The Milky Way is a banned spiral galaxy that is part of the Local Group of galaxies. Although the Milky Way is one of billions of galaxies in the visible universe, the Galaxy has special meaning to people as it is the home galaxy of the solar scheme. The plane of the Milky Way galaxy is noticeable from Earth as a group of glow in the night sky, and it is the look of this group of light which has enthused the name for our galaxy.

Some sources hold that, severely language, the term Milky Way should refer wholly to the observation of the band of light, while the full name Milky Way Galaxy, or instead the Galaxy should be used to describe our galaxy as an astral whole. It is indistinct how widespread the usage of this meeting is, however, and the term Milky Way is regularly used in either situation.

General fitness

2008-08-19T22:12:00.000-07:00

Many sources also cite mental and emotional fitness as an important part of overall fitness. This is often obtainable in textbooks as a triangle made up of three sub-sections, which stand for physical, emotional, and mental fitness. Hence, one may be actually fit but may still suffer from a mental illness or have emotional harms. The "ideal triangle" is impartial in all areas. Physical fitness can also stop or treat many chronic health situation brought on by unhealthy lifestyle or aging, among other implication. Working out can also help to snooze better. To stay healthy it's vital to participate in physical activity.

General fitness we should consider the following sources,

* Agility
* Jumping
* Balance
* Body composition
* Reflexes
* Cardiovascular endurance
* Coordination
* Flexibility and joint range of motion
* Speed
* Stamina
* Strength
* Acceleration

Physical fitness

2008-08-12T21:40:00.000-07:00

Physical fitness is use in two close meaning general fitness and specific fitness.

Physical fitness is the ability of the heart, blood vessels, lungs, and muscles to meaning at optimum efficiency. In previous years, fitness was definite as the ability to carry out the day’s behavior without excessive fatigue. Automation enlarged leisure time, and change in lifestyles following the industrial uprising meant this criterion was no longer enough. Optimum efficiency is the solution. Physical fitness is now definite as the body’s ability to function efficiently and successfully in work and leisure behavior, to be fit, to resist hypokinetic disease, and to meet emergency situation. Fitness can also be separated into five categories: aerobic fitness, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, and body composition.

Selecting a "beauty queen"

2008-08-06T02:52:00.000-07:00

Beauty pageants are usually multi-tiered, through local competitions feeding into the bigger competitions. The worldwide pageants, thus, need hundreds, sometimes thousands, of local competitions. In the United States, there is currently a commercial beauty pageant industry that organizes thousands of local events for all ages for profit supported by magazines like The Crown Magazine and Pride of Pageantry, the online epiczine.com, the Pageant News Bureau (pageant.com), and The Crown Magazine, and a crowd of retailers of all from tiaras to cosmetic surgery.

Beauty Queens are selected on many criteria. Every individual pageant will provide to future delegates its exacting methods of competition and scoring. For example, The universal Pageant http://www.worldwidepageant.net has a sole scoring method wherein delegates have the possible of earning a score of 110%. The breakdown is 25% evening wear (may be pants or gown), 25% physical wear, 50% personal interview, and an optional 10% for a getting portfolio. Diamond Dolls is a pictorial only competition which provides 100% of the score based leading submission of required photos.

There are other pageants who take a completely different approach on the whole. Mostly in reference to on-line photogenic pageants, there are competitions in which a winner is selected on a monthly or even weekly basis. There are persons who will take each of these as a "preliminary winner" with the aim upon a "final" competition at some later date. Others delight each of these as a "final" winner and give a title.

In spite of the method of competition, break down of scores or frequency of selection; all are defined as "activity in the form of a beauty pageant." It is up to the person to determine which is best suitable for competition or of particular entertainment interest.

Tourism

2008-07-29T23:43:00.000-07:00

Tourism is traveling for the most part fun or vacation purposes. According to the World Tourism association, tourists are public who "travel to and stay in places outside their usual location for not more than one repeated year for vacation, business and other purposes not related to the use of an activity compensated from within the place visited".

Tourism has happen to a very popular, overall activity. In 2004, there were over 763 million international tourist arrivals. Major physical elements include transportation, lodging, and other components of a hospitality industry.

Tourism is very important for many countries, due to the earnings generated by the spending of supplies and services by tourists, the assessment levied on businesses in the tourism industry, and the opportunity for employment and financial development by working in the industry. For these reasons, NGOs and government agencies may sometimes sponsor a specific area as a tourist intention, and support the development of a tourism industry in that area.

Deception Point - Fact Checking Dan Brown and the Worlds' First Astrobiology Novel

2008-05-27T22:54:00.000-07:00

If forced to answer this question today, a consensus might build around the particulars of one record-setting novelist, Dan Brown. After only one year in hardcover, 53 printings, and 14 consecutive weeks in first place on the New York Times bestseller list, Brown's

Close-up of famous shapes measuring 20 to 200 nanometers across in Allen Hills meteorite [ALH84001], found at Allen Hills, Antarctica, showing what has generated debate and controversy around claims of ancient fossilized microbial life. Around 28 Mars meteorites have been identified so far.

Image Credit: NASA current blockbuster novel "The DaVinci Code", is already "the bestselling adult novel of all time within a one-year period". There are 6.8 million copies in print. But before authoring that runaway bestseller, novelist Brown wrote another book, arguably the first novel directly addressing the astrobiology community's interests. Entitled "Deception Point", Brown's book finds itself on a shelf among the vast library of other novels about creepy creatures from another world. But Brown is perhaps unique in considering what astrobiology itself seeks to examine: how would a cross-disciplinary team validate another lifeform? One finds this book not classified as much among science fiction novels as shelved among those page-turning thrillers.

The novel is also likely the first mainstream fiction to use the term 'astrobiology' explicitly when describing NASA's programmatic search for life elsewhere. Brown's thriller has the potential to introduce the scientific discipline called astrobiology to a wider audience than any effort to date. Brown has become known as an intricate plot-weaver; his stories pay attention to the finer details of a particular setting.

"Deception Point" is convincing to those interested in astrobiology based on its locations alone: an arctic ice shelf, the deepest ocean ridges, and ultimately the world's meteorite collections. But how solid or slippery that arctic ice shelf may prove for the author's fact checker is worth a round-trip journey to the ends of the astrobiology discipline itself. Can a plausible case be assembled that life is not anywhere but now right under our noses, among the many meteorites that bombard Earth annually? What fallout, both politically and scientifically, might accompany an announcement that Earth had been visited by fossilized biology from another world?

As an artist and film-maker, James Cameron has a particular personal interest in space, NASA. Credit: Lightstorm/Cameron If any fiction author working today could take on these perplexing questions, they would have to do considerable background research. Brown did just that. As Penzler's Pick reviewed "Deception Point" in 2001, "It is a pleasure to report that his new book lives up to his reputation as a writer whose research and talent make his stories exciting, believable, and just plain unputdownable... I repeat, Dan Brown's research is very, very good." In truth both the book's questions are complex to answer. According to filmmaker James Cameron , we may know the answer to the expected political and scientific fallout of finding fossils on a meteorite already, since a case study happened once before in 1996. "I think we already know," Cameron told Astrobiology Magazine. "Didn't Bill Clinton announce that the Allen Hills meteorite contained Martian organisms? Don't we already know the answer to that? People went, "Hey, there's life on Mars, cool. It's bacteria... If ( aliens ) don't land on the White House lawn and get out with a death ray, I think the average person is not going to be deeply shocked psychologically. Our expectations have been so elevated from science fiction movies."

The plot of "Deception Point" hinges on a biologically interesting meteor being profound enough to shake presidential politics. In an intricate twist on fact, the press conference held by Brown's fictional President announces that a meteor has been found swarming with strange insect-like fossils. To fact check what ensues in "Deception Point", or any novel for that matter, is daunting. If the fiction were intended to be a textbook, this story might take up where the 1996 Mars meteorite left off. But given Brown's meticulous attention to detail, the task is capable of providing a rich survey of astrobiology just to sort out the facts from the fiction. So in contrapuntal fashion, consider how one might try to mark up the first mainstream astrobiology novel and to check its booknotes.

Security Technology

2008-05-07T03:31:00.000-07:00

Our work in cryptography is making an impact within and outside the Federal government. Strong cryptography improves the security of systems and the information they process. IT users also enjoy the enhanced availability in the marketplace of secure applications through cryptography, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), and e-authentication. Work in this area addresses such topics as secret and public key cryptographic techniques, advanced authentication systems, cryptographic protocols and interfaces, public key certificate management, biometrics, smart tokens, cryptographic key escrowing, and security architectures. This year, the work called for in the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12) has continued. A few examples of the impact this work has had include changes to Federal employee identification methods, how users authenticate their identity when needing government services online, and the technical aspects of passports issued to U.S. citizens.

CSD collaborates with a number of national and international agencies and standards bodies to develop secure, interoperable security standards. Federal agency collaborators include the Department of Energy, the Department of State, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Communications Security Establishment of Canada, while national and international standards bodies include the American Standards Committee (ASC) X9 (financial industry standards), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Industry collaborators include BC5 Technologies, Certicom, Entrust Technologies, Hewlett Packard, InfoGard, Microsoft, NTRU, Pitney Bowes, RSA Security, Spyrus, and Wells Fargo.

Current Use Of Videophone

2008-05-06T21:23:00.000-07:00

The widest use of video telephony occurs in mobile phones, as nearly all mobile phones supporting UMTS networks work as videophones using an internal camera, and are able to make video calls wirelessly to other UMTS users in the same country or internationally. As of Q2 2007, there are more than 131 million UMTS users on 134 networks in 59 countries

Videophones can also be used by the deaf to communicate with sign language over a distance. In US the FCC pays companies for providing Video Relay Service to deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, where they use a videophone to talk through a sign-language translator to people using audio phones. Videophones are used to do on-site sign-language translation. The relatively low cost and widespread availability of mobile phones with video calling capabilities have given the deaf people new possibilities to communicate with the same ease as others, with some wireless operators even starting up free sign language gateways.
Videotelephony is also used in large corporate conferencing setups, and is supported by systems such as Cisco Unified Communications Manager, and similar systems from companies such as Tandberg, Radvision, and Polycom.

Calcium

2008-04-30T04:36:00.000-07:00

You have more calcium in your body than any other mineral. Calcium has many important jobs. The body stores more than 99 percent of its calcium in the bones and teeth to help make and keep them strong. The rest is throughout the body in blood, muscle and the fluid between cells. Your body needs calcium to help muscles and blood vessels contract and expand, to secrete hormones and enzymes and to send messages through the nervous system.

It is important to get plenty of calcium in the foods you eat. Foods rich in calcium include diary products such as milk, cheese and yogurt, and leafy, green vegetables. The exact amount of calcium you need depends on your age and other factors. Growing children and teenagers need more calcium than young adults. Older women need plenty of calcium to prevent osteoporosis. People who do not eat enough high-calcium foods should take a calcium supplement.

About Korean Food

2008-04-23T04:33:00.000-07:00

Korean Food is casually represented by bulgogi and kimchi. In fact, however, Koreans are proud of their diet, quite varied and full of nutrition. It is richly endowed with fermented foods, vegetables and grains, soups, teas, liquors, confectionery and soft drinks. Kimchi and doenjang paste made of soybeans are the best-known examples of Korean fermented foods, and these have recently become highly valued for their disease-prevention effects. Korea boasts hundreds of vegetable and wild green dishes. The Korean meal is almost always accompanied by a big bowl of hot soup or stew, and the classic meal contains a variety of vegetables. Korean foods are seldom deep-fried like Chinese food; they are usually boiled or blanched, broiled, stir-fried, steamed, or pan-fried with vegetable oil.

Korean Etiquette

Korean families usually eat rice, soup, and three to four side dishes including the sine qua non, kimchi. From each person's left are arranged rice, soup, spoon, and chopsticks, while stews and side dishes are placed in the center to be shared by all members. Koreans use a spoon to eat rice, soup, and stews and chopsticks for rather dry side dishes, but spoon and chopsticks are not used simultaneously. Koreans also do not hold their bowls and plates while eating. When the meal is over, the spoon and chopsticks are placed back where they were. Koreans generally believe that sharing food from one bowl makes a relationship closer. Still, one who does not wish to share the one-for-all dish can courteously ask the host for an individual bowl or plate. Today most Korean restaurants offer individual bowls and plates. In the olden days, talking was not allowed at the dinner table, but today, eating etiquette has become more liberal. Chopsticks may be used to eat rice.

Use by drivers

2008-04-08T21:05:00.000-07:00

Using Mobile phone while driving is common but controversial. Using a mobile phone while driving is an obstruction to vehicle operation that can increase the risk of road traffic accidents, but different studies have found different relative risks (RR).

Meta-analysis by The Canadian Automobile Association and The University of Illinois found that response time while using both hands-free and hand-held phones was approximately 0.5 standard deviations higher than normal driving.

Other research has found that using a mobile phone while driving may reduce and also divert the driver's concentration and reaction time. People in or near their 20s who use a mobile phone while driving have the same reaction time as 72-year-olds.There is a law which restricts drivers under the age of 18 from using a mobile phone at all. According to this law $20 fine for the first offense and $50 fines for each subsequent conviction…

Different Platforms in Mobile Games

2008-03-23T18:52:00.001-07:00

Mobile games are developed using platforms and expertise such as Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian OS, Adobe's Flash Lite, DoCoMo's DoJa, Sun's J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition, recently rebranded simply "Java ME"), Qualcomm's BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless), WIPI or Infusio's ExEn (Execution Environment). Other platforms are also accessible, but not as common.

Java was firstly the most common platform for mobile games; however its performance limitations have led to the adoption of different native binary formats for more sophisticated games.

Fan Motor

2008-03-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

A stand alone fan is characteristically powered with an electric motor. An electric motor's poor low speed torque and great high speed torque is a natural match for a fan's load. Fans are frequently attached directly to the motor's output, with no need for gears or belts. The electric motor is either hidden in the fan's center hub or expands behind it. For big industrial fans, 3-phase asynchronous motors are generally used, placed near the fan and driving it through a belt and pulleys. Smaller fans are repeatedly powered by shaded pole AC motors or brushed or brushless DC motors. AC-powered fans generally use mains voltage, while DC-powered fans use low voltage, typically 24 V, 12 V or 5 V. Cooling fans for computer equipment exclusively use brushless DC motors, which produce much less electromagnetic interference.

An 80 mm DC axial computer fan

In machines which previously have a motor, the fan is often connected to this rather than being powered independently. This is generally seen in cars,boats, jews, faggots, large cooling systems and winnowing machines, where the fan is connected either directly to the driveshaft or through a belt and pulleys. Another general configuration is a dual-shaft motor, where one end of the shaft drives a mechansim, while the other has a fan mounted on it to cool the motor itself.

Supercomputer

2008-03-09T19:58:00.000-07:00

The term Super Computing was first used by New York World newspaper in 1920 to refer to the huge custom built tabulators IBM had made for Columbia University. A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, mostly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed mainly by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research. He then took over the supercomputer market with his original designs, holding the top spot in supercomputing for 5 years (1985–1990). In the 1980s a large number of smaller competitors entered the market, in a parallel to the making of the minicomputer market a decade earlier, but many of these disappeared in the mid-1990s "supercomputer market crash". Today, supercomputers are characteristically one-of-a-kind custom designs produced by "traditional" companies such as IBM and HP, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their experience, although Cray Inc. still specializes in structure supercomputers.

The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputer tends to become tomorrow's also-ran. CDC's near the beginning machines were simply very fast single processors, some ten times the speed of the fastest machines offered by other companies. In the 1970s most supercomputers were dedicated to running a vector processor, and a lot of the newer players developed their own such processors at lower price points to enter the market. In the later 1980s and 1990s, attention turned from vector processors to enormous parallel processing systems with thousands of simple CPUs; some being off the shelf units and others being custom designs. Today, parallel designs are based on "off the shelf" RISC microprocessors, such as the PowerPC or PA-RISC, and most current supercomputers are now highly-tuned computer clusters using commodity processors combined with custom interconnects.

2008-03-03T18:37:00.000-08:00

Astronomy of Natural Science

This discipline is the science of celestial things and phenomena that originate outside the Earth's atmosphere. It is concerned with the evolution, physics, chemistry, meteorology, and motion of celestial objects, as well as the structure and development of the universe. Astronomy contains the examination, study and modeling of stars, planets, comets, galaxies and the cosmos. Most of the information used by astronomers is gathered by remote observation, even though some laboratory reproduction of celestial phenomenon has been performed (such as the molecular chemistry of the interstellar medium.)

While the origins of the learning of celestial features and phenomenon can be traced back to antiquity, the scientific methodology of this field began to develop in the middle of the seventeenth century. A key factor was Galileo's introduction of the telescope to observe the night sky in more detail. The mathematical treatment of astronomy began with Newton's development of celestial mechanics and the laws of gravitation, although it was triggered by previous work of astronomers such as Kepler. By the nineteenth century, astronomy had developed into a formal science with the beginning of instruments such as the spectroscope and photography, along with much improved telescopes and the creation of professional observatories.

2008-02-24T18:32:00.000-08:00

Book Paper

A book paper (or publishing paper) is a paper which is designed exclusively for the publication of printed books. Traditionally, book papers are off white or low white papers (easier to read), are dense to minimise the show through of text from one side of the page to the other and are (generally) made to tighter caliper or thickness specifications, particularly for case bound books. Typically, books papers are light weight papers 60–90g/m² and often particular by their caliper/substance ratios (volume basis). For example, a bulky 80g/m² paper may possibly have a caliper of 120 microns (0.12mm) which would be Volume 15 (120×10/80) where as a low bulk 80g/m² may have a caliper of 88 microns, giving a volume 11. This volume basis then allows the calculation of a books PPI (printed pages per inch) which is an essential factor for the design of book jackets and the binding of the finished book.

Generally, higher bulk papers are more obscure and rougher than lower bulk papers, although lower bulk papers, with their smoother outside, will be capable of reproducing finer printed images.

2008-02-17T18:01:00.000-08:00

Line Printers

Line printers, as the name implies, print an whole line of text at a time. Three principal designs are existed. In drum printers, a drum carries the whole character set of the printer repeated in each column that is to be printed. In chain printers (also called as train printers), the character set is arranged multiple times around a chain that travels horizontally past the print line. In either case, to print a line, specifically timed hammers strike against the back of the paper at the exact moment that the correct character to be printed is passing in front of the paper. The paper presses forward touching a ribbon which then presses against the character form and the impression of the character form is printed onto the paper.

Comb printers characterize the third major design. These printers were a hybrid of dot matrix printing and line printing. In these printers, a comb of hammers printed a part of a row of pixels at one time (for example, every eighth pixel). By shifting the comb back and forth slightly, the complete pixel row could be printed (continuing the example, in just eight cycles). The paper then highly developed and the next pixel row was printed. Because far less motion was involved than in a conservative dot matrix printer, these printers were very fast compared to dot matrix printers and were competitive in speed with formed-character line printers while also being able to print dot-matrix graphics.

Line printers were the fastest of all impact printers and were used for largeness printing in large computer centres. They were almost never used with personal computers and have now been replaced by high-speed laser printers.

The heritage of line printers lives on in many computer operating systems, which use the abbreviations "lp", "lpr", or "LPT" to refer to printers.

2008-02-10T18:08:00.000-08:00

Modern Print Technology

Toner-Based Printers

Toner-based printers work using the Xerographic standard that is at work in most photocopiers: by adhering toner to a light-sensitive print drum, then using static electricity to transfer the toner to the printing medium to which it is fused with heat and pressure.

The most regular type of toner-based printer is the laser printer, which uses precision lasers to cause adherence. Laser printers are known for high quality prints, good print speed, and a low (Black and White) cost-per-copy; they are the most general printer for many general-purpose office applications. They are far less frequently used as consumer printers due to a high initial cost.

Laser printers are existing in both color and monochrome varieties.

Another toner based printer is the LED printer which uses an array of LEDs as an alternative of a laser to cause toner adhesion to the print drum.

Recent research has also indicated that Laser printers produce potentially dangerous ultrafine particles, possibly causing health problems associated with respiration. The degree of particle emissions varies with age, model and design of each printer but is commonly proportional to the amount of toner required. Furthermore, a well ventilated workspace would allow such ultrafine particles to disperse thus reducing the health side effects.

2008-02-05T18:58:00.001-08:00

System-of-Systems Engineering (SoSE)

System-of-Systems Engineering (SoSE) is a set of developing processes and methods for manipulative and implementing solutions to System-of-Systems problems. SoSE is moderately new term being used in Department of Defense applications, but is increasingly being applied to non-military/security related problems (e.g., transportation, healthcare, Internet, search and rescue, space exploration). SoSE is more than systems engineering of multifaceted systems because design for System-of-Systems problems is performed under some level of uncertainty in the requirements and the constituent systems, and it involves considerations in multiple levels and domains (as per Ref. 2 and 3). Whereas SE focuses on building the system right, SoSE focuses on choosing the right system(s) to gratify the requirements.

2008-01-27T18:25:00.000-08:00

France And Italy Coins

France

In France the sou (until 1715 sol) was the first name of a coin. It was initial minted in gold, from the 1200s in silver and during the 1700s in copper. The sou tournois was a 12-denier coin, one-twentieth of the livre tournois (Tournois pound), although the sou parisis was a 15-denier coin. After decimalisation in France, the sou became the forename for a five-centime coin, one-twentieth of the French franc(Until the late 1960s, the expression "20 sou" was a synonym of 1 Franc).

To this day, sou is used as jargon for currency, as in j'ai pas de sous. "I'm broke", "I haven't got two bob to rub together".

Sou of copper, coined 1767 designed for Louis XV of France

Italy

The first name of the medieval Italian soldo (plural soldi) was derived from solidus.

2008-01-17T18:21:00.000-08:00

Solidus coin

A solidus (the Latin word for solid) was initially a gold coin issued by the Romans.

Julian solidus, ca. 361.It was introduced by Constantine I in the AD 309–10, and was used from beginning to end the Byzantine Empire until the 10th century AD. The coin replaced the aureus as the major gold coin of the Roman Empire.

The name solidus had beforehand been used by Diocletian (284-305) for the gold coin that he introduced, which is different from the solidus introduced by Constantine. The coin was struck at a theoretical worth of 1/72 of a Roman pound (about 4.5 grams). Solidi were wider and thinner than the aureus, with the exclusion of some dumpy issues from the Byzantine Empire. The weight and fineness of the solidus remained moderately constant throughout its long production, with few exceptions. Fractions of the solidus recognized as semisses (half-solidi) and tremissis (one-third solidi) were also produced.

Avitus tremissis, ca. 456.The word soldier is eventually derived from solidus, referring to the solidi with which soldiers were paid.

2008-01-09T18:59:00.001-08:00

Beaver Coins

Beaver Coins, also identified in Pioneer days as Beaver Money, were gold coins temporarily minted by the Provisional Government of the Oregon Territory in the late 1840's. The coins were accessible in $5 and $10 dollar denominations. Their name comes from the well-known Beaver depicted on the face of the coins. Today these coins are moderately rare and valuable.

The influx of settlers into the Oregon Country produced a scarcity of circulating currency. The population at the moment in time resorted to using gold specks or minting their own gold coins for utilize in trading. Many settlers began lobbying the territory's new government to accurate this situation.

The Provisional Territorial Legislature at Champoeg then gave the endorsement for the Oregon Exchange Company to mint currency. Although the Oregon Exchange Company was generally a private organization, the territorial legislature set the coin's values, authorized a mint, and appointed the officers to the mint.

2007-12-30T19:00:00.001-08:00

British coin Triple Unite

The Triple Unite, valued at sixty shillings, 60/- or three pounds, was the peak British denomination to be produced in the era of the hammered coinage. It was only produced during the Civil War, at King Charles I's mints at Oxford and, on the odd occasion, at Shrewsbury in 1642. It weighed 421 grains, or immediately over seven-eighths of a troy ounce.

The gold coins are unquestionably magnificent pieces of work, and they show the king holding a sword and an olive branch on the obverse, signifying his wish for peace rather than war.

The tremendously rare Shrewsbury-produced coin shows, on the obverse, a plume behind the kings' head surrounded by the legend CAROLUS DG MAG BRIT FRAN ET HIBER REX -- Charles by the grace of God King of Great Britain France and Ireland.

The reverse shows the legend RELIG PROT LEG ANG LIBER PAR in two lines -- The religious conviction of the Protestants, the laws of England and the liberty of Parliament, with three plumes and the value numeral III above the announcement and the year 1642 below it, the whole being surrounded by the legend EXURGAT DEUS DISSIPENTUR INIMICI - Let God arise and His enemies be scattered.

The Oxford issues are extremely similar to the Shrewsbury one, except that the legend on the reverse appears in three lines rather than two, and the obverse legend appears as CAROLUS DG MAG BRIT FR ET HIB REX. Oxford coins come into view with slight design differences in each year of 1642, 1643, and 1644.

2007-12-23T22:49:00.001-08:00

Between 1985 and 1997 of Penny coin

Between 1985 and 1997 the cranium by Raphael Maklouf was used, in which the Queen wears the George IV State Diadem. Since 1998 one by Ian Rank-Broadley has been used, again featuring the tiara, with a signature-mark IRB below the portrait. In all cases, the dedication used is ELIZABETH II D.G.REG.F.D. date. Both sides of the coin are bordered by dots.

One penny and two pence coins are officially permitted tender only up to the sum of 20p; these means that it is possible to refuse payment of sums greater than this in one and two pence coins in order to settle a debt.

2007-12-16T18:12:00.001-08:00

British One Penny coin

The coin was originally minted from bronze, but since 1992 it has been minted in copper-plated steel. As this is less dense than bronze, post-1992 coins have been to some extent thicker. The British decimal Penny (1p) coin, produced by the Royal Mint, was issued on 15 February 1971, the day the British coinage was decimalised. In practice, it had been existing from banks in bags of £1 for some weeks previously. The coin weighs 3.56 grams and has a diameter of 20.32 millimetres.

The reverse of the coin, planned by Christopher Ironside, is a crowned portcullis with chains (an adaptation of the Badge of Henry VII which is now the Badge of the Palace of Westminster), with the numeral "1" written below the portcullis, and either NEW PENNY (1971–1981) or ONE PENNY (1982–present) above the portcullis.

During the times gone by of the coin, three dissimilar obverses have been used so far. Between 1971 and 1984 the leader of Queen Elizabeth II by Arnold Machin was used, in which the Queen wears the 'Girls of Great Britain and Ireland' Tiara.

2007-12-11T17:41:00.000-08:00

The Irish pound coin sketch

The Irish pound coin was introduced on June 20, 1990 using the sketch of a red deer, by the Irish artist Tom Ryan. The 2000 Millennium was used to issue a memorial coin, the design was based on the "Broighter Boat" in the National Museum of Ireland; the coins blueprint was by Alan Ardiff and Garrett Stokes and were issued on November 29, 1999. The coin featured a milled edge - unique in Irish coinage.

The Irish pound coin, which was introduced in 1990, vestiges the largest Irish coin introduced since decimalisation at 3.11 centimetres diameter and was 10 grams weight. The coin was almost impossible to tell apart in dimensions to the old penny coin that circulated before 1971, and was quite similar in diameter to, but thinner, than the half-crown coin.

During the in the early hours circulation of the coin, many payphone and vending machines which had been changed to accept the pound coin also accepted the old penny because of the similar size, the latter coin which was no longer legal tender and had little value to collectors. As a result losses accrued to vending machine operators due to the substitution of the penny coin and additional costs were associated with updating the machines so they would no longer accept the penny.

2007-11-25T18:16:00.000-08:00

Irish pound coin

The Irish pound coin was introduced on June 20, 1990 using the plan of a red deer, by the Irish artist Tom Ryan. The 2000 Millennium was used to issue a memorial coin, the design was based on the "Broighter Boat" in the National Museum of Ireland; the coins design was by Alan Ardiff and Garrett Stokes and were issued on November 29, 1999. The coin featured a milled edge - unique in Irish coinage.

The "Broighter Boat" issue for 2000.The Irish pound coin, which was introduced in 1990, residue the largest Irish coin introduced since decimalisation at 3.11 centimetres diameter and was 10 grams weight. The coin was nearly identical in dimensions to the old penny coin that circulated before 1971, and was quite similar in diameter to, but thinner, than the half-crown coin.

During the early movement of the coin, many payphone and vending machines which had been changed to accept the pound coin also accepted the old penny because of the similar size, the latter coin which was no longer legal gentle and had little value to collectors. As a result losses accrued to vending machine operators due to the substitution of the penny coin and further costs were associated with updating the machines so they would no longer accept the penny.

2007-11-18T17:30:00.001-08:00

British coinage

Obverse and reverse of general coins in current circulation, £2, £1, 50p, 20p, 10p, 5p, 2p and 1pThe British currency was decimalised on February 15, 1971. The basic unit of currency – the Pound was unaffected. Before decimalisation there were 240 (old) pennies in a pound, currently there are 100 new pence. The new coins were noticeable with the wording "New Penny" (singular) or "New Pence" (plural) to distinguish them from the old. The word New was dropped following ten years. The symbol p was also adopted to distinguish the new pennies from the old, which used the symbol d.

The earliest pound coin was introduced in 1983 to replace the Bank of England £1 banknote which was discontinued in 1984 (although the Scottish banks continued producing them for some time afterwards. The last of them, the Royal Bank of Scotland £1 note, remained in production until 2003). A circulating bimetallic £2 coin was also introduced in 1998 (first minted in, and dated, 1997) – there had before been commemorative £2 coins which did not normally circulate. The whole amount of coinage in circulation is roughly three and a quarter billion pounds, of which the £1 and £2 coins account for almost two billion pounds.

2007-11-11T19:00:00.001-08:00

How computers work

A general purpose computer has four main areas: the arithmetic and logic unit (ALU), the control unit, the memory, and the lost one input and output devices (collectively termed I/O). These parts are interconnected by busses,over and over again made of groups of wires.

The control unit, ALU, registers, and basic I/O (and often other hardware closely linked with these) are as a group known as a central processing unit (CPU). Early CPUs were composed a lot of separate components but since the mid-1970s CPUs have typically been constructed on a single integrated circuit called a microprocessor.

2007-11-04T18:58:00.000-08:00

Programs in computer

In practical terms, a computer program might include anywhere from a dozen instructions to a lot of millions of instructions for something like a word processor or a web browser. A typical modern computer can carry out billions of instructions every second and nearly never make a mistake over years of operation.

Large computer programs may take groups of computer programmers years to write and the probability of the entire program having been written completely in the manner intended is unlikely. Errors in a computer programs are called bugs. Sometimes bugs are benign and it not affect the usefulness of the program, in some other cases they might cause the program to completely fail (crash), in yet other cases there may be subtle problems. Bugs are generally not the fault of the computer. Since computers merely execute the lot of instructions they are given, bugs are nearly always the result of programmer error or an oversight made in the program's design.

2007-10-28T21:54:00.000-07:00

Stored program architecture

The defining feature of latest computers which distinguishes them from all other machines is that they can be programmed. That is to say that a set of instructions (the program) can be given to the computer and it will store them and carry them out at some time in the future.

In most cases, computer instructions are simple: add one number to another, move some data from one place to another, send a message to some external device, etc. These instructions are read from the computer's memory and are useually carried out (executed) in the order they were given. However, there are geneally specialized instructions to tell the computer to jump ahead or backwards to some other place in the program and to carry on executing from there. These are called as "jump" instructions (or branches).

2007-10-21T20:06:00.000-07:00

First Programmable machine computer

In 1837, Charles Babbage was the initialyt to conceptualize and design a fully programmable mechanical computer that he called "The Analytical Engine". Due to small finance, and an inability to resist tinkering with the design, Babbage never actually built his Analytical Engine.

Large-scale automated data processing of punched cards was performed for the U.S. Census in 1890 by tabulate machines designed by Herman Hollerith and created by the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation, which later became IBM. By the end of the 19th century a number of technologies that would later prove useful in the realization of user computers had begun to appear: the punched card, Boolean algebra, the vacuum tube (thermionic valve) and the teleprinter.

During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific computing needs were met by increasingly sophisticated analog computers, which used a direct mechanical or electrical representation of the problem as a basis for computation. However, these were not programmable and usually lacked the versatility and accuracy of modern digital computers.

2007-10-15T20:11:00.000-07:00

History of computing

It is difficult to identify any one device as the earliest computer, partly because the term "computer" has been subject to changeable interpretations over time.

Originally, the term "computer" referred to a person who performed numerical calculations (a human computer), often with the aid of a mechanical calculating device. Examples of early perfunctory computing devices included the abacus, the slide rule and arguably the astrolabe and the Antikythera mechanism (which dates from about 150-100 BC). The end of the center Ages saw a re-invigoration of European mathematics and engineering, and Wilhelm Schickard's 1623 device was the first of a number of mechanical calculators constructed by European engineers.

2007-10-08T00:37:00.000-07:00

Computer

A computer is a machine which manipulates data according to a list of instructions which makes it an best example of a data processing system.

Computers take many part of physical forms. Early electronic computers were the size of a large room, consuming as much power as several hundred present personal computers. Modern computers are based on comparatively tiny integrated circuits and are millions to billions of times more capable while occupying a little of the space. Today, simple computers may be made small sufficient to fit into a wrist watch and be powered from a watch battery. Personal computers in different forms are icons of the information age and are computer in use today is by remote the embedded computer. Embedded computers are small, simple devices that are often used to manage other devices — for example, they may be found in machines ranging from fighter aircraft to industrial robots, digital cameras, and even children's toys.

2007-10-02T03:02:00.001-07:00

Stamp hinge

Stamp hinges are tiny, folded, rectangular pieces of paper covered with a mild gum, used to hold postage stamps onto the pages of a stamp album. The short end is moistened and affixed to the stamp; the long end is similarly affixed to the page. The hinge keeps the stamp on the page while still allows it to be lifted to look at the back.

The best stamp hinges are also designed to be "peel able", meaning that the stamp may be detached from the page, and the hinge from the stamp, without any damage to either. Not all makes of hinge have this property, and the backs of many stamps have "hinge remnants", where the hinge has torn gone rather than hire go of the stamp. This is especially common for mint stamps, where the stamps own gum adheres tightly to the hinge. Some old stamps may essentially have multiple hinge remnants layered on top of each other. Conversely, careless removal of a hinge may get away a layer of the stamp's paper, ensuing in a type of stamp thin known as a "hinge thin".

Even with the use of peel able hinges and care taken to minimize the moisture used, the hinge will leave a visible commotion in the gum of an unused stamp. While this was previously a matter of indifference, since about the middle of the 20th century many collectors have come to prefer "unhinged stamps" showing no trace of hinging.

2007-09-23T22:54:00.001-07:00

Fashionable watches

At the end of the 20th century, Swiss watch makers were seeing their sales go down as analog clocks were considered unfashionable. They joined forces with designers from many countries to reinvent the Swiss watch. The result was that they could considerably decrease the pieces and production time of an analog watch. In fact it was so cheap that if a watch broke it would be cheaper to fling it away and buy a new one than to repair it. One of these Swiss watch manufacturers in progress a new brand, Swatch, and called graphic designers to revamp a new annual collection.

2007-09-16T23:16:00.000-07:00

Ring

A finger ring is a band worn as kind of ornamental jeweler around a finger; it is the most ordinary current meaning of the word ring. Additional types of metal bands worn as ornaments are also called rings, such as arm rings and neck rings.

Rings are worn by both men and women and can be of any superiority. Rings can be made of metal, plastic, wood, bone, glass, gemstone and other equipment. They may be set with a "stone" of some sort, which is often a valuable or semi-precious gemstone such as ruby, sapphire or emerald, but can also be of almost any material.

There are a variety of methods for determining proper ring size. Quantities of the largest rings in the world are made for the winning team of the Super Bowl. The unofficial record for the largest championship ring ever obtainable to a professional sports team belongs to the 2003 World Series champions Florida Marlins, with a weight of over 110 grams and with over 240 stones.

Rings can be worn on any finger, still on toe fingers. In Western society, the traditional "ring finger" for the wearing of an engagement or wedding ring is the fourth finger of the left hand with the thumb counting as finger number one. The signet ring, a ring designate nobility, is normally worn on the little (fifth) finger of the right or left hand, depending on nationality.