The gentle hum of galaxies

I mean, Carl, just what are you saying. It was Carl Sagan himself who supressed and heavily criticised Velikovsky and his electric universe idea. It is said the scientific establishment held an “open forum” for Velikovsky, but in fact it was much orchestrated… And after his meticulous scientific critique, Sagan’s career sky-rocketed.

Oh well, I vented. Yes, I dislike Carl Sagan. I do love some of what he said, but after learning about this whole Velikovsky affair, I became luke-warm towards Carl.

May I only mention that I await with great anticipation the day when science acknowledges spiritual, and the religious acknowledges scientific, and the spiritual. I pray for open-mindedness and for forgivness on all fronts.

On a lighter note, as I was writing the chapter about robots for my work, I’ve read that Japanese scientists voyaged to Vatican to inquire whether their creation of an android and further pursuits of it are fine and they assured they don’t mean to play God. The Vatican said that if they created such an android, then it must have been God who made them do this. Logical, my dear Watson.

ikenbot:

When Supermassive Supergiants Go Superboom

Article by Phil Plait via Slate

I have long been fascinated by gamma-ray bursts (or GRBs). These are incredibly violent events: It’s like taking the Sun’s entire lifetime energy output and cramming into a single event that lasts for mere seconds! The energy emitted is so intense, so bright, we can see GRBs from a distance of billions of light years.

Gamma rays themselves are just a form of light, like the kind we see, but with huge energy; each photon is packed with millions or billions of times the energy in a single photon of visible light. Only the most energetic events in the Universe can make them, so if we detect a burst of them coming from the sky, we know something literally disastrous has happened.

We know GRBs come in many flavors. Some last literally for milliseconds, while others stretch on for minutes. We also know different events can cause them, too. Short ones seem to come from merging neutron stars, ultra dense compact objects left over after stars explode. The longer ones occur when massive stars explode, leaving their cores to collapse. In both cases, the huge blast of high-energy gamma rays signals the birth of a black hole.

But astronomers were recently surprised to find a third type of GRB, one that lasts not for minutes, but for hours. Whatever these objects are, they don’t just flash with light, they linger, blasting out far, far more gamma rays for far, far longer than was previously thought. What could do such a thing?

Several ideas were put forth, but new observations provided the linchpin: an ultra-long-duration GRB occurred on Christmas Day in 2010, and its distance was found to be a soul-crushing 7 billion light years away, about halfway across the visible Universe! This left only one possible candidate for the progenitor: a hugely massive star, one so big it dwarfs the Sun into insignificance.

Continue to Full Article..

the-science-llama:

Which house do you belong to?

iffranco:

Tatiana Plakhova, Chaos and Structure.

“I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars” - Neil deGrasse Tyson