ytellioglu:

Ancient Chinese map of planet Earth’s northern sky is part of the Dunhuang Star Atlas, one of the most impressive documents in the history of astronomy. The oldest complete star atlas known, it dates to the years 649 to 684, discovered at the Silk Road town of Dunhuang

discardingimages:

constellation Cetus 

Cicero’s Aratea with Hyginus’s Astronomica, Reims(?) ca. 820-850.

 

British Library, Harley 647, fol. 10r

mirabilia-provocateur:

Les Etoiles et les Curiosités du Ciel

(Source: mventus)

thenewenlightenmentage:

Probing Extreme Matter Through Observations of Neutron Stars

Mar. 6, 2013 — Neutron stars, the ultra-dense cores left behind after massive stars collapse, contain the densest matter known in the Universe outside of a black hole. New results from Chandra and other X-ray telescopes have provided one of the most reliable determinations yet of the relation between the radius of a neutron star and its mass. These results constrain how nuclear matter — protons and neutrons, and their constituent quarks — interact under the extreme conditions found in neutron stars.

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The European Space Agency released the most accurate and detailed map of the oldest light in the Universe. The radiation originally formed about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when all matter was created some 13.82 billion years ago.

• The images, released on Thursday (March 21 2013), suggest that at 13.84 billion years the universe is older than previously thought - albeit by only 48 million years.
• They also suggest it contains slightly more matter than expected and a little less “dark energy”, the mysterious force which is believed to drive the expansion of the universe.

• Although the measurements made by Planck match the theoretical predictions of what the Universe should look like, there are some important differences, such as a notable asymmetry between the opposite hemispheres of the sky and a “cold spot” that extends over a much larger patch of the sky than expected.

  “The fact that Planck has made such a significant detection of these anomalies erases any doubts about their reality; it can no longer be said that they are artefacts of the measurements. They are real and we have to look for a credible explanation,” said Paolo Natoli of Ferrara University in Italy.

  Sources: The Independent and The Telegraph

thescienceofreality:

Spin up of a Supermassive Black Hole 

Illustration Credit: Robert Hurt, NASA/JPL-Caltech

“How fast can a black hole spin? If any object made of regular matter spins too fast — it breaks apart. But a black hole might not be able to break apart — and its maximum spin rate is really unknown. Theorists usually model rapidly rotating black holes with the Kerr solution to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which predicts several amazing and unusual things. Perhaps its most easily testable prediction, though, is that matter entering a maximally rotating black hole should be last seen orbiting at near the speed of light, as seen from far away. This prediction was tested recently by NASA’s NuSTAR and ESA’s XMM satellites by observing the supermassive black hole at the center of spiral galaxy NGC 1365. The near light-speed limit was confirmed by measuring the heating andspectral line broadening of nuclear emissions at the inner edge of the surrounding accretion disk. Pictured above is an artist’s illustration depicting an accretion disk of normal matter swirling around a black hole, with a jet emanating from the top. Since matter randomly falling into the black hole should not spin up a black hole this much, the NuSTAR and XMM measurements also validate the existence of the surrounding accretion disk.”

the-eldest-woman-on:

Comet C/2012 F6 (Lemmon) Taken by James Tse on March 13, 2013 @ Christchurch, New Zealand

ponhouse:

Pan-STARRS Comet