A New Study Publishing This Week In The Astrophysical Journal By Gary Prézeau Of NASA’s Jet Propulsion

Geometric Animations / 170402

Chalcedony - Mamuju Area, Sulawesi Barat Province, Sulawesi Island, Indonesia

Interlocked Coins Form Complex Geometric Sculptures

David Spriggs, Dark Matter. 

Hubble Views The Final Frontier For Dark Matter

“This phenomenon of gravitational lensing stretches galaxies into streaks and arcs, magnifying them, and creating multiple images. It also enables us to reconstruct the mass distribution of the cluster, revealing that it’s mostly due to dark matter.”

When you look out at the distant Universe, you can see all sorts of things: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, going as far back into the distant past as our telescopes can image. But where you have the greatest concentrations of mass, an extreme phenomenon emerges: that of gravitational lensing. Any foreground objects lying behind that mass will have their light stretched, magnified and distorted by the intervening matter. Recently, as part of the Hubble Frontier Fields program, the telescope followed-up on galaxy cluster Abell 370, and revealed the most spectacular gravitational lensing signal ever seen in a galaxy cluster. Most importantly, it provides some very strong evidence not only for dark matter’s existence, but for its presence distinct from any galaxies at all.

Come get the full story in images, videos, and no more than 200 words on this edition of Mostly Mute Monday!

Physicists discover hidden aspects of electrodynamics

Radio waves, microwaves and even light itself are all made of electric and magnetic fields. The classical theory of electromagnetism was completed in the 1860s by James Clerk Maxwell. At the time, Maxwell’s theory was revolutionary, and provided a unified framework to understand electricity, magnetism and optics.

Now, new research led by LSU Department of Physics and Astronomy Assistant Professor Ivan Agullo, with colleagues from the Universidad de Valencia, Spain, advances knowledge of this theory. Their recent discoveries have been published in Physical Review Letters.

Maxwell’s theory displays a remarkable feature: it remains unaltered under the interchange of the electric and magnetic fields, when charges and currents are not present. This symmetry is called the electric-magnetic duality.

However, while electric charges exist, magnetic charges have never been observed in nature. If magnetic charges do not exist, the symmetry also cannot exist. This mystery has motivated physicists to search for magnetic charges, or magnetic monopoles. However, no one has been successful. Agullo and his colleagues may have discovered why.

Read more ~ SpaceDaily

Another Ferrofluid representation