‘fairest And Fallen, Greetings And Defiance’ Is Still The Best Stock Greeting For Our Ancient Enemy

New Galactic Supercluster Map Shows Milky Way’s ‘Heavenly’ Home

A new cosmic map is giving scientists an unprecedented look at the boundaries for the giant supercluster that is home to Earth’s own Milky Way galaxy and many others. Scientists even have a name for the colossal galactic group: Laniakea, Hawaiian for “immeasurable heaven.”

Image 1: Scientists have created the first map of a colossal supercluster of galaxies known as Laniakea, the home of Earth’s Milky Way galaxy and many other. This computer simulation, a still from a Nature journal video, depicts the giant supercluster, with the Milky Way’s location shown as a red dot. Credit: [Nature Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENyyRwxpHo)

Image 2: This computer-generated depiction of the Laniakea Supercluster of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way galaxy containing Earth’s solar system, shows a view of the supercluster as seen from the supergalactic equatorial plane. Credit: SDvision interactive visualization software by DP at CEA/Saclay, France

The scientists responsible for the new 3D map suggest that the newfound Laniakea supercluster of galaxies may even be part of a still-larger structure they have not fully defined yet.

"We live in something called ‘the cosmic web,’ where galaxies are connected in tendrils separated by giant voids," said lead study author Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Honolulu.

Galactic structures in space

Galaxies are not spread randomly throughout the universe. Instead, they clump in groups, such as the one Earth is in, the Local Group, which contains dozens of galaxies. In turn, these groups are part of massive clusters made up of hundreds of galaxies, all interconnected in a web of filaments in which galaxies are strung like pearls. The colossal structures known as superclusters form at the intersections of filaments.

The giant structures making up the universe often have unclear boundaries. To better define these structures, astronomers examined Cosmicflows-2, the largest-ever catalog of the motions of galaxies, reasoning that each galaxy belongs to the structure whose gravity is making it flow toward.

"We have a new way of defining large-scale structures from the velocities of galaxies rather than just looking at their distribution in the sky," Tully said.

"With!!"

“With!”

The New Horizons spacecraft just woke up from a nine year nap. It’s three billion miles away from home, and it’s about to fly within a few thousand miles of Pluto, giving humans their first up close view of the dwarf planet.

(MIKE FUCK OFF WE’VE BEEN OVER THIS ALREADY I H8 U NO LOVE)

im cryin this is what im doing with my life wowowow a ma zing !!

The galaxy sings in B flat. Fifty-seven octaves below middle C, hundreds of thousands of tiny stars with little worlds trailing atmospheres in elliptical orbits. Double-star systems, triple-star, more; planets, civilisations, dark matter, tangible matter, all circling, swarming, humming together in one enormous note, not bumping together but carrying a wave from the centre of their island universe, expanding out into space… Sound cannot exist in a vacuum. This is a widely known fact. And space is a vacuum, sure. But only when you look at it from here, from our tiny little world. Close your eyes, zoom out, and look at the celestial spheres from their view; and space isn’t so thin after all. Close your eyes, zoom in, and even our dense atmosphere is just atoms in a vacuum of their own. Sound as we know it, sure, that doesn’t exist outside our little stardust orb. It’s too small, too fragile. Too like ourselves. But where there’s movement and things to move, there’s sound. Sound waves can be small, only a few thousand nanometres trough-to-crest. And they can be massive, playing the celestial music of the spheres. Because in all that movement, the pulses of our discs and and lights and gravity wells, the stars dance. We are sound, the particles that carry a wave thousands of light-years across. We are the music of the celestial spheres. The galaxy sings in B flat.

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anexpansionlikegold

NATASHA I DEMAND YOU HAVE THESE FEELS WITH ME

(via reconfemmandoforares)

dear universe;

hello. i am writing to let you know you did good job on the stars, and also on dogs.

yours respectfully, me

I had to do a "home budget" project in econ during high school, and we had to "buy a car" as part of our budget planning and so I used a listing for one of these as my "purchase" because I am nothing if not a massive nerd. It still delights me to think about. ^__^

I'm desperately trying to look for the specific model of Lotus that you referenced in the first of the Young Wizard series. I've been wanting to draw a storyboard for a long while for it and for some reason Google is useless.

It's this one: the Lotus Turbo Esprit. Lovely, lovely thing that it was...

(Sorry, the YouTube video seems to have failed to insert correctly. But check it out:  https://youtu.be/CQnOusKNDKs)

...Later in the eighties they softened its lines down. But this is the one that made me stop and stare when I passed by the Lotus showroom in Manhattan in ‘81...

PART TWO AT LAST

okay y’all, you can click through the image on a blog, or click here to find my powerpoint on google drive. feel free to look through it, talk to me about it, talk to each other about it, whatever.

i have not edited this in the slightest, so take it all with a grain of salt. do have a look at the “notes” field for most of the slides; that’s where i wrote out (in varying degrees of detail/clarity) my thoughts on the subject at hand, but YMMV with that.

all that said please do credit me if you use this stuff for anything. and if you find any of my sources in the presentation lacking in citations, let me know!

feel free to join in the conversations over on slack (link is for signup, then find the #linguistics channel), or on tumblr! do also keep this post and other posts that involve speculation with respect to the Speech tagged with #not you DD, so that everybody’s butts are covered on that front.

thanks, cousins!

Most Amazing Exoplanets

The term ‘exoplanet’ applies to any planet outside of our solar system. At last count, we have identified 3,538.

Out of the thousands of planets we know about, some of them are incredibly bizarre compared to what we are used to seeing in our own solar system. Here are some exoplanets with very unique characteristics:

Kepler-78b

The most astounding fact about Kepler-78b is that it shouldn’t even exist, according to our current knowledge of planetary formation. It is extremely close to its star at only 550,000 miles (900,000 kilometers). As a comparison, Mercury only gets within 28.5 million miles (45.9 million kilometers) of the sun in the nearest point of orbit. With that proximity, it isn’t clear how the planet could have formed as the star was much larger when the planet formed. With its current distance, that would mean it formed inside the star, which is impossible as far as we know. 

The planet itself is only slightly larger than Earth, though surface conditions are markedly different. The temperature on the surface is estimated to be 4300° F (2400° C), which is nearly nine times as hot as the temperature on Venus. Unfortunately for Kepler-78b, it is likely that the star’s gravitational pull will gradually bring the star closer and totally consume it in the next 3 billion years.

WASP-12b

While Kepler-78b still has about 3 billion more years before getting consumed by its star, the process is well underway for WASP-12b. This exoplanet is actively getting pulled apart by its parent star, much to the delight of astronomers who can watch the process unfold. So much material has been pulled away from the planet, it has been pulled into an oblong football shape. Astronomers have estimated that WASP-12b has about 10 million more years until it is completely pulled apart by the star.

The planet is described as a “hot Jupiter” as it is a gas planet that is about 40 percent larger than Jupiter. It is currently so close to its star that it only takes 1.1 Earth days for the planet to complete a full orbit. The star, WASP-12, is G-type main sequence star, just like our own sun. It is located about 800 lightyears away in the Auriga constellation.

TrES-2b

TrES-2b has been dubbed the “dark planet” because it does not reflect light. If we were able to view it directly, it would likely just look like a coal-black ball of gas. At 1800°F (1000°C) the planet is way too hot for clouds, which would help reflect the star’s light. The red tinges are areas of superheated gas. Other darker planets only reflect about 10% of the star’s light, but TrES-2b only reflects about 1%, making it the darkest planet ever discovered.

Why is TrES-2b so dark? Scientists aren’t quite sure. Right now, the best guess is that the majority of the planet’s composition is something like sodium or potassium which absorbs light. This dark world is located about 750 lightyears away in the Draco constellation. 

HD 189773b

HD 189773b is pretty exciting. It is relatively close, at only 63 lightyears away. It is also the first planet to have its color determined and it turned out to be a pretty blue planet, just like Earth. Unlike Earth, however, HD 189773b is a gas giant with a temperature that reaches a sweltering 1800°F (1000°C). The weather gets more extreme, because intense pressure and temperature turns silicate particles in the atmosphere into glass, which then rains down. As if that doesn’t sound dangerous enough, the winds have been estimated to gust at 4,000 mph (7,000 km/h) which really whips those glass particles around. 

55 Cancri e

55 Cancri e is twice the size of Earth but is nearly 8 times more massive and twice as dense. Last fall, researchers deduced that the mass of the planet was largely carbon. Due to the pressure and surface temperature of 4892°F (2700°C) it very well could have formed diamond. It is so close to its parent star it takes a mere 18 hours for the planet to complete a full orbit.

55 Cancri e is only about 40 light-years away from us in the Cancer constellation. The parent star is much more carbon than our own sun, so it might be too surprising that planet e is also carbon-rich. From there, it isn’t much of a stretch to assume that the other four known planets in the system would also have a high carbon content.

Because of these extreme conditions, astronomers don’t believe that 55 Cancri e has an atmosphere, making it a poor candidate for the possibility for life. However, it is close enough for astronomers to use it to test hypotheses about planetary formation.

PSR B1620-26b

Nicknamed “Methuselah,” PSR B1620-26b is the oldest known exoplanet. The planetary system formed approximately 12.7 billion years ago, when the Milky Way galaxy was in its infancy. It is located in the Scorpius constellation about 12,400 lightyears away. 

Methuselah orbits binary stars and goes around them in a circumbinary orbit. As if Methuselah’s age isn’t interesting enough, the fact that it orbits two mismatched dead stars is quite unusual. One of the stars is a pulsar and the other is a white dwarf. Since Methuselah is found in a dense star cluster, astronomers initially thought it could be a star as well, and would be considered a brown dwarf. Measurements from the Hubble would confirm that Methuselah is a planet, and it remains the oldest one we’ve ever discovered.

TrES-4

Located 1,400 lightyears away in the Hercules constellation, TrES-4 is the largest exoplanet we have discovered so far. Though it is over 1.7 times the size of Jupiter, it has an extremely low density and is categorized as a “puffy” planet. The planet’s density is about the same as cork, which came as quite a shock. Astronomers attribute this to extreme heat of 2,300° F (1,260° C) due to is proximity to the star. At only 4.5 million miles (7.2 million kilometers) away from its sun, TrES-4 is able to complete an orbit in three Earth days.

Gliese 436 b

30 lightyears away in the constellation Leo, Gliese 436 b is a planet that is about as massive as Neptune. The planet also happens to be covered in burning ice - though the ice isn’t anything like what we’re used to. The extreme pressure of the planet forces the water to stay in solid form, even though the temperature exceeds 570° F (300° C). The outer layer of the solid water is superheated and comes off as vapor. Water has over 10 solid states, not including common ice.

In its present position, the water would not have been able to condense down into a solid, indicating that it migrated toward its sun after it formed.

Sharks may not be as solitary as originally thought. Researchers have discovered the fish congregating and interacting with others of their own species in ways that suggest they have long-lasting friendships.

PHOTOGRAPH BY TANYA HOUPPERMANS