my witness is the empty sky.

fyeahuniverse:
Study revisited: the dark matter was there after all
Last month a study was published showing that the dark matter needed to hold the galaxy together doesn’t actually exist. This dampened the spirits of some dark matter fans, but a reanalysis of the data has given a complete about turn. The dark matter existed after all.
When the team measured the motions of over 400 stars in order to estimate the amount of matter, the sound that the mass could be explained by visible matter without dark matter. However, they made an error:
“By assuming that stars rotate at the same velocity no matter at what distance they are from the centre of the Galaxy, they underestimated the total amount of matter in the solar neighbourhood and they concluded that there was no room for dark matter,” - Jo Bovy, of the Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton, New Jersey.
(Image credit: Kerry-Ann Lecky Hepburn)

discoverynews:

Building Converted Into Giant Tetris Game
Every year, students at MIT pull a prank to show their engineering prowess.
keep reading

sciatic:

Born on the island of Moloka`i, Zoe is the only known captive white (golden) zebra in existence. You can read more about her here.

"She did the Secretary of State job, she was a G, she held it down, she didn’t cry." by

Ice-T, on why Hillary Clinton will be the first female president

—The best part about this story is that the Huffington Post decided to explain to us what a “G” is. In case you didn’t know — it’s “the hip-hop term for gangster (a positive thing)”.

(via newsweek)

(Source: jessbennett, via discoverynews)

discoverynews:

NASA’s Kepler telescope finds 26 new planets
Kepler, NASA’s planet-hunting space telescope, has found 11 new planetary systems, including one with five planets all orbiting closer to their parent star than Mercury circles the Sun, scientists said on Thursday.

The discoveries boost the list of confirmed planets outside the Earth’s solar system to 729, including 60 found by the Kepler team. The telescope, launched in space in March 2009, can detect slight but regular dips in the amount of light coming from stars. Scientists can then determine if the changes are caused by orbiting planets passing by, relative to Kepler’s view.

Kepler scientists have another 2,300 candidate planets awaiting additional confirmation. (Photos/illustrations by NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech; University of Toulouse; Reuters/AFP/Getty Images)

WEEEEEEEEEEE MORE SPACE :)

(Source: nationalpost)

crookedindifference:

Watch our expanding universe

Australian Ph.D. student Florian Beutler has created the most accurate measurement yet of how fast the universe is expanding. Working at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), he used the Hubble constant and data from the 6dF Galaxy Survey, the most ambitious survey to date of over 120,000 galaxies across the southern sky, collected between 2001 and 2005. The result is a remarkable map of the expansion of universe, animated here to unfold before your very eyes.

See the video of the animation here.

Hubble Serves Up a Holiday Snow Angel - Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) (via reject-the-null)

our-cosmos:
HH 47: A Young Star Jet Expands Image Credit: NASA, ESA, & P. Haritgan (Rice U.)
Explanation: Stars remain where they are. Nebulas appear the same. Day after day. Year after year. Given the vast distances in astronomy, even fast moving objects will not appear to change their appearance in a human lifetime. Typically. A recent spectacular exception to this, however, is the supersonic jet in the star forming Herbig Haro 47. HH 47 is so close — and the jets are moving so fast — that images from the Hubble Space Telescope from 1994 to 2008 have been combined into a time-lapse movie that actually shows a powerful jet expanding. Visible above, jets of plasma extending over 10,000 times the Earth-Sun distance shoot out from a forming star at speeds in excess of 150 kilometers per second. Studying how these jets evolve gives clues not only to how the star in HH 47 is forming, but how stars like our Sun formed billions of years ago. HH 47 is located about 1,500 light years away toward the constellation of Sails of a Ship (Vela).