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Δευτέρα 7 Μαΐου 2012
Κυριακή 6 Μαΐου 2012
Mysteries of a Dark Universe
Watch this and other space videos at http://SpaceRip.com
DARK ENERGY in Full HD 1080p. Cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, has been turned on its head by a stunning discovery that the universe is flying apart in all directions at an ever-increasing rate.
Is the universe bursting at the seams? Or is nature somehow fooling us?
The astronomers whose data revealed this accelerating universe have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.
And yet, since 1998, when the discovery was first announced, scientists have struggled to come to grips with a mysterious presence that now appears to control the future of the cosmos: dark energy.
On remote mountaintops around the world, major astronomical centers hum along, with state of the art digital sensors, computers, air conditioning, infrastructure, and motors to turn the giant telescopes.
Deep in Chile's Atacama desert, the Paranal Observatory is an astronomical Mecca.
This facility draws two megawatts of power, enough for around two thousand homes.
What astronomers get for all this is photons, tiny mass-less particles of light. They stream in from across time and space by the trillions from nearby sources, down to one or two per second from objects at the edge of the visible universe.
In this age of precision astronomy, observers have been studying the properties of these particles, to find clues to how stars live and die, how galaxies form, how black holes grow, and more.
But for all we've learned, we are finding out just how much still eludes our grasp, how short our efforts to understand the workings of the universe still fall.
A hundred years ago, most astronomers believed the universe consisted of a grand disk, the Milky Way. They saw stars, like our own sun, moving around it amid giant regions of dust and luminous gas.
The overall size and shape of this "island universe" appeared static and unchanging.
That view posed a challenge to Albert Einstein, who sought to explore the role that gravity, a dynamic force, plays in the universe as a whole.
There is a now legendary story in which Einstein tried to show why the gravity of all the stars and gas out there didn't simply cause the universe to collapse into a heap.
He reasoned that there must be some repulsive force that countered gravity and held the Universe up.
He called this force the "cosmological constant." Represented in his equations by the Greek letter Lambda, it's often referred to as a fudge factor.
In 1916, the idea seemed reasonable. The Dutch physicist Willem de Sitter solved Einstein's equations with a cosmological constant, lending support to the idea of a static universe.
Now enter the American astronomer, Vesto Slipher.
Working at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, he examined a series of fuzzy patches in the sky called spiral nebulae, what we know as galaxies. He found that their light was slightly shifted in color.
It's similar to the way a siren distorts, as an ambulance races past us.
If an object is moving toward Earth, the wavelength of its light is compressed, making it bluer. If it's moving away, the light gets stretched out, making it redder.
12 of the 15 nebulae that Slipher examined were red-shifted, a sign they are racing away from us.
Edwin Hubble, a young astronomer, went in for a closer look. Using the giant new Hooker telescope in Southern California, he scoured the nebulae for a type of pulsating star, called a Cepheid. The rate at which their light rises and falls is an indicator of their intrinsic brightness.
By measuring their apparent brightness, Hubble could calculate the distance to their host galaxies.
Combining distances with redshifts, he found that the farther away these spirals are, the faster they are moving away from us. This relationship, called the Hubble Constant, showed that the universe is not static, but expanding.
Einstein acknowledged the breakthrough, and admitted that his famous fudge factor was the greatest blunder of his career.
DARK ENERGY in Full HD 1080p. Cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, has been turned on its head by a stunning discovery that the universe is flying apart in all directions at an ever-increasing rate.
Is the universe bursting at the seams? Or is nature somehow fooling us?
The astronomers whose data revealed this accelerating universe have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.
And yet, since 1998, when the discovery was first announced, scientists have struggled to come to grips with a mysterious presence that now appears to control the future of the cosmos: dark energy.
On remote mountaintops around the world, major astronomical centers hum along, with state of the art digital sensors, computers, air conditioning, infrastructure, and motors to turn the giant telescopes.
Deep in Chile's Atacama desert, the Paranal Observatory is an astronomical Mecca.
This facility draws two megawatts of power, enough for around two thousand homes.
What astronomers get for all this is photons, tiny mass-less particles of light. They stream in from across time and space by the trillions from nearby sources, down to one or two per second from objects at the edge of the visible universe.
In this age of precision astronomy, observers have been studying the properties of these particles, to find clues to how stars live and die, how galaxies form, how black holes grow, and more.
But for all we've learned, we are finding out just how much still eludes our grasp, how short our efforts to understand the workings of the universe still fall.
A hundred years ago, most astronomers believed the universe consisted of a grand disk, the Milky Way. They saw stars, like our own sun, moving around it amid giant regions of dust and luminous gas.
The overall size and shape of this "island universe" appeared static and unchanging.
That view posed a challenge to Albert Einstein, who sought to explore the role that gravity, a dynamic force, plays in the universe as a whole.
There is a now legendary story in which Einstein tried to show why the gravity of all the stars and gas out there didn't simply cause the universe to collapse into a heap.
He reasoned that there must be some repulsive force that countered gravity and held the Universe up.
He called this force the "cosmological constant." Represented in his equations by the Greek letter Lambda, it's often referred to as a fudge factor.
In 1916, the idea seemed reasonable. The Dutch physicist Willem de Sitter solved Einstein's equations with a cosmological constant, lending support to the idea of a static universe.
Now enter the American astronomer, Vesto Slipher.
Working at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, he examined a series of fuzzy patches in the sky called spiral nebulae, what we know as galaxies. He found that their light was slightly shifted in color.
It's similar to the way a siren distorts, as an ambulance races past us.
If an object is moving toward Earth, the wavelength of its light is compressed, making it bluer. If it's moving away, the light gets stretched out, making it redder.
12 of the 15 nebulae that Slipher examined were red-shifted, a sign they are racing away from us.
Edwin Hubble, a young astronomer, went in for a closer look. Using the giant new Hooker telescope in Southern California, he scoured the nebulae for a type of pulsating star, called a Cepheid. The rate at which their light rises and falls is an indicator of their intrinsic brightness.
By measuring their apparent brightness, Hubble could calculate the distance to their host galaxies.
Combining distances with redshifts, he found that the farther away these spirals are, the faster they are moving away from us. This relationship, called the Hubble Constant, showed that the universe is not static, but expanding.
Einstein acknowledged the breakthrough, and admitted that his famous fudge factor was the greatest blunder of his career.
Σάββατο 5 Μαΐου 2012
Πέμπτη 3 Μαΐου 2012
Obama's speech to the troops in Afghanistan,
This is the complete video of President Obama's speech to the troops in Afghanistan, and also a pre-recorded message to the american people that was aired tonight (but recorded before). All together only here.
Τετάρτη 2 Μαΐου 2012
Monster Black Hole Caught Swallowing Unlucky Star
Monster Black Hole Caught Swallowing Unlucky Star
by Charles Q. Choi, SPACE.com Contributor
Date: 02 May 2012 Time: 01:01 PM ET
Call it a Cosmic Scene Investigation: For the first time, scientists have identified a stellar victim of a giant black hole — an unlucky star whose death may ultimately provide more clues on the inner workings of the enigmatic gravitational monster that devoured it.
Supermassive black holes are objects millions to billions times the sun's mass that lurk in the hearts of most galaxies. They lay quietly until victims, such as stars, wander close enough to get shredded apart by their extraordinarily powerful gravitational pull.
Scientists first caught a black hole red-handed in a stellar murder last year. Now researchers have determined not only the culprit in a similar cosmic homicide but the casualty as well: a star rich in helium gas.
"This is the first time we've actually been able to pinpoint what kind of star was disrupted," study lead author Suvi Gezari, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, told SPACE.com. [Photos: Black Holes of the Universe]
Hungry black holes
Astronomers say supermassive black holes rip apart stars very rarely, maybe just once every 10,000 years per galaxy. To detect one such event, Gezari and her colleagues monitored hundreds of thousands of galaxies in ultraviolet light with the space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) and in visible light with the Hawaii-based Pan-STARRS telescope.
In June 2010, the researchers spotted a bright flare from the previously dormant black hole at the center of a galaxy approximately 2.7 billion light-years away.
"When the star is ripped apart by the gravitational forces of the black hole, some part of the star's remains falls into the black hole while the rest is ejected at high speeds," Gezari said. "We are seeing the glow from the stellar gas falling into the black hole over time."
The flare of light reached peak brightness a month after it was detected, then slowly faded over the next 12 months. By measuring the rise of the flare's brightness, the scientists calculated the rate at which the star's gas was getting sucked into the black hole. This in turn helped reveal at what point and time the black hole had begun disrupting the star, revealing how powerful its gravitational field was and thus its mass.
The astronomers estimate the black hole's mass to be 3 million suns, comparable to our Milky Way's central black hole.
"These spectacular events provide a glimpse into otherwise unobservable black holes, telling us about their masses," Gezari said. "We know that there are strong connections between black holes and the galaxies they reside in, and it turns out that somehow the mass of the black hole and the mass of a galaxy influence each other, so we want to better know what's going on there. Also, people want to understand the physics of black holes and how they affect the geometry of space-time around them. We need to know its mass to help pinpoint a lot of those details.
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Ἀνακομιδὴ Τιμίων Λειψάνων Ἁγίου Ἀθανασίου τοῦ Μεγάλου
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Ἡ μνήμη τοῦ Ἁγίου Ἀθανασίου τοῦ Μεγάλου, Πατριάρχου Ἀλεξανδρείας τιμᾶται ἀπὸ τὴν Ἐκκλησία στὶς 18 Ἰανουαρίου, ὅπου καὶ ὁ Βίος του.Δὲν ἔχουμε λεπτομέρειες γιὰ τὸ γεγονὸς τῆς ἀνακομιδῆς τῶν ἱερῶν λειψάνων τοῦ Ἁγίου.
Ἀπολυτίκιον. Ἦχος γ’. Θείας πίστεως.Στῦλος γέγονας, Ὀρθοδοξίας, θείοις δόγμασιν, ὑποστηρίζων, τὴν Ἐκκλησίαν, Ἱεράρχα Ἀθανάσιε· τῷ γὰρ Πατρὶ τὸν Υἱὸν ὁμοούσιον, ἀνακηρύξας κατῄσχυνας Ἄρειον. Πάτερ Ὅσιε, Χριστὸν τὸν θεὸν ἱκέτευε, δωρήσασθαι ἡμῖν τὸ μέγα ἔλεος.
Κοντάκιον. Ἦχος β’. Τοῖς τῶν αἱμάτων σου.Ὀρθοδοξίας φυτεύσας τὰ δόγματα, κακοδοξίας ἀκάνθας ἐξέτεμες, πληθύνας τὸν σπόρον τῆς πίστεως, τῇ ἐπομβρίᾳ τοῦ Πνεύματος Ὅσιε· διό σε ὑμνοῦμεν Ἀθανάσιε.
Μεγαλυνάριον.Τῆς Ὀρθοδοξίας σάλπιγξ χρυσῆ, ὤφθης Ἱεράρχα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί, τὸν Υἱὸν κηρύττων, καὶ Πνεύματι Ἁγίῳ· διό σε Ἀθανάσιε μεγαλύνομεν.
Οἱ Ἅγιοι Ἕσπερος καὶ Ζωὴ οἱ Μάρτυρες καὶ τὰ τέκνα αὐτῶν Κυριάκος καὶ Θεόδουλος
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Switzerland
Switzerland
In June 2011, we spent a week in Switzerland, flying into Geneva, with an initial stop in Montreux, followed by a picturesque stay in Wengen, located above the Lauterbrunnen valley. The alps provided a stunning backdrop to explore the area. During our stay in Wengen, a small village that is accessible by train or foot, the main sound heard was cow bells. We took day trips and hikes in the Interlaken area of central Switzerland.
The village of Wengen where we stayed in an alpine chalet/hotel, above the Lauterbrunnen valley.
Lauterbrunnen below, with its iconic waterfall. The valley reminds me of Yosemite, with a small village in it.
The train system in Switzerland is excellent. Above, a cog train that takes passengers towards the Eiger.
The train to Jungfrau.
In the village of Lauterbrunnen.
Another scene from Lauterbrunnen.
Alpine cable cars rise into the fog above Wengen.
The lakeshore village of Brienz.
Brienz.
Lucerne.
Alpine village of Murren.
Artist H.R. Giger, who won an Oscar for his design work on the movie "Alien", created a bar in the same motif.
Besides cows, goats and sheep tend to be outfitted with bells.
A cog train at Kleine Scheidegg.
Riding the train from Kleine Scheidegg back to Wengen offered stunning valley views.
The Swiss version of "Zip Line" takes you up to 75 MPH for almost a 1/2 mile.
Risking myself and a DSLR camera, I had no choice but to zip down to get this picture.
Relaxing with a plate of charcuterie under Mt. Eiger.
June brings out alpine flowers during my hike.
It seems many lower peaks in Switerland have huts that serve food and beer, my goal can be seen above.
A one hour uphill hike is required to enjoy this beer garden deck propped over glaciers.
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