#astrophyics

Me, a noted bisexual: B**bs.

Rock star / astrophysicist Brian May is having the best first week of 2019.  On New Year’s Day he celebrated with the New Horizons team as they flew by Ultima Thule, the farthest body yet visited in our solar system.  Five days later, he celebrated with the cast and crew of Bohemian Rhapsody as they won the Golden Globe for Best Picture. #dontstopmenow

Image Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

The universe won’t ever “stop” existing, but will eventually die. What scientists think will happen is that the universe will keep expanding, and eventually everything will cool off and the universe will be cold, dead, and empty as entropy wins. No new stars are formed (no more gas available), old stars die (run out of fuel) and cool off, and galaxies dim and go out. This is what we call the “heat death” of the universe and it’s kinda bleak, but it’s better than the big crunch (the universe recollapses and everything in the universe rushes in together to form a black hole) or the big rip (the universe’s expansion rate increases faster and faster until it overcomes gravity and other forces, ripping apart galaxies, stars, planets, and finally atoms until the entire universe disintegrates). If it makes you feel better, the universe is almost definitely heading for the “heat death” option. But, after trillions of years there won’t be any free // available energy to power life or, well, anything because the universe will have such a high amount of entropy.

Since 1995, Ghez, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has used the W.M. Keck telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to see fine details at the center of the galaxy. The observations that Ghez has made of stars racing around the Milky Way’s core (alongside those of rival Reinhard Genzel, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany) have proven to most astronomers that the central object can be nothing but a black hole. But to be able to see these fine details, Ghez had to become a pioneering user of adaptive optics, a technology that measures distortions in the atmosphere and then adjusts the telescope in real time to cancel out those fluctuations.

Exploring the secrets and techniques of the Universe so far as physics can go, and even past.. Together with its Vedantic integration.Verses from the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads outlining cosmology in Vedanta, plus in-depth exploration of Avyakta – the hidden...

“Three and a half billion light years away in the Virgo constellation, two supermassive black holes are on the verge of smacking into one another. In 100,000 years, their cosmic collision will send ripples across the fabric of spacetime. Merging black holes wield some of the most powerful forces in the universe, and they may hold the key to observing the gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago. But these formidable collisions have proven extraordinarily difficult to detect. Now, using a simple optical trick, a team of astronomers finds strong evidence to support the existence of a black hole pair whose members are only a light-week apart — nearly a thousand times closer than any other pair of black holes we know of.“

Funny how both create the same feelings,... :D