This is the animation of the final stages of a merger between two black holes. What is particularly interesting about this animation is that it highlights a phenomenon known as Gravitational Lensing.
Mass bends Light. What?
Yeah, mass can bend Light. The gravitational field of a really massive object is super strong. And this causes light rays passing close to that object to be bent and refocused somewhere else.
The more massive the object, the stronger its gravitational field and hence the greater the bending of light rays - just like using denser materials to make optical lenses results in a greater amount of refraction.
Here’s an animation showing a black hole going past a background galaxy.
This effect is one of the predictions of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity
PC: cfhtlens, Urbane Legend
see-linewoman
by Jerrod La Rue
fav japanese vine so far
Global temperatures are running far above last year’s record-setting level, all but guaranteeing that 2015 will be the hottest year in the historical record — and undermining political claims that global warming had somehow stopped.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the American agency that tracks worldwide temperatures, announced Wednesday that last month had been the hottest September on record, and in fact took the biggest leap above the previous September that any month has displayed since 1880, when tracking began at a global scale. The agency also announced that the January-to-September period had been the hottest such span on the books.
The extreme heat and related climate disturbances mean that delegates to a global climate conference scheduled for Paris in early December will almost certainly be convening as weather-related disasters are unfolding around the world, putting them under greater political pressure to reach an ambitious deal to limit future emissions and slow the temperature increase.
The immediate cause of the record-breaking warmth is a strong El Niño weather pattern, in which the ocean releases immense amounts of heat into the atmosphere. But temperatures are running so far ahead of those during the last strong El Niño, in 1997 and 1998, that scientists said the records would not be occurring without an underlying trend caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
“The bottom line is that the world is warming,” said Jessica Blunden, a climate scientist with NOAA, in Asheville, N.C. Source: NYTimes
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A recent cartoon for New Scientist.
I know we can’t build anything just by sitting in the dark together, but I am so fond of you it sounds like something a person would lie about.
Anna Meister, “Not Yr Cornfield,” published in Moonsick Magazine (via bostonpoetryslam)
This is a model of how many Earth’s can fit inside the sun.
"To awaken my spirit through hard work and dedicate my life to knowledge... What do you seek?"
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