MetaFilter posts tagged with universe and astronomy

The Size of Things

nola — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:13:16 -0800

Welcome to the Universe - III: The Size of Things . . .we take a breif trip through the Solar System and beyond to see the size of the Universe. A youtube video by AndromedasWake about the scale of the Universe.

It's full of stars

Hactar — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:06:50 -0800

One of the hardest things for people to understand about the universe is just how big it is. There are three approaches typically used in describing its size. The first, the song, was pioneered by Monty Python (NSFWish, wireframe of naked woman) and then done just as masterfully by the Animaniacs. The second, the zoom method has been featured twice before here on the blue. The third method is the comparison method (skip to 1:30, unless you like looking at a image of the solar system with terrible distorted orbits), yielding some truly beautiful videos (this one found via the fantastic Bad Astronomy blog). These videos go, at most, as far as looking at the local cluster or the Virgo Supercluster. There are two videos that attempt to show the size of the entire universe, one unsuccessfully (although with great music) and one successfully. (Warning, all links except the first one, are to YT videos). (These links are not YT videos, with the one noted exception) The last video shows the Sloan Great Wall (although it confuses the entire image with just the wall itself, which is only the largest galaxy filament (large mpg of a filament) that we can see in the sky. These filaments create the large scale structure of the universe, resembling a web or a cotton ball. (YT Video) Once one looks larger than the filaments, one hits the "End of Greatness", where the universe appears homogeneous. (This can be seen, more or less, in the first link.) Finally, and perhaps the best link of the bunch, more pictures and videos of similar things from the Max Planck Institute of Astrophysics.

Gamma-Ray Burst

homunculus — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:40:59 -0800

New burst vaporizes cosmic distance record. "NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers have found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or less than five percent of its present age. The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen."

Dark Flow

homunculus — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:28:16 -0800

Mysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space. "As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren't vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered. Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon 'dark flow.' The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude." Here's the paper (subscription required): A Measurement of Large-Scale Peculiar Velocities of Clusters of Galaxies: Results and Cosmological Implications. NASA has preprints you can download: results and implications and technical details (PDFs).

Universe Sandbox

stavrosthewonderchicken — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:44:31 -0800

An Interactive Space Simulator "Smash planets together, introduce rogue stars, and build new worlds from spinning discs of debris. Fire a moon into a planet or destroy everything you've created with a super massive black hole. You can simulate and interact with our solar system: the 8 planets,160+ moons, and hundereds of asteroids, the nearest 1000 stars to our Sun, and our local group of galaxies." [31Mb, Windows only, sorry, but see inside for similar Mac and Linux apps] If you're keen and you're not an XP or Vista user, you'll probably like Stellarium [Linux, Mac or Windows] and Celestia [Linux, Mac or Windows] [previously] as well, which are less physics simulation and more 'fly through the universe' brain food, but heaps of fun, too.

There's a hole in the Universe, dear Martha, dear Martha

scalefree — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 07:16:50 -0800

Astronomers find a giant hole a billion light years across & located 8 billion light years away from us. They believe it could be evidence of another Universe at the edge of ours.

The truth behind the first cheesy special effects

Gyan — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:57:05 -0800

Misconceptions about the Big Bang

The oldest light in the cosmos

ptermit — Tue, 11 Feb 2003 16:30:55 -0800

BAM! The Microwave Anisotropy Probe's long-awaited map of the afterglow of the big bang was released today, and all of a sudden, most of the uncertainty in the concordance model of cosmology has disappeared. We now know, to within 1%, that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. We now know that Hubble constant is 71, plus or minus 4. And though the results agreed stunningly well with the weird picture that cosmologists have about the nature of the cosmos, there was one surprise -- the first stars were born way before expected. Great day for science, and a likely future Nobel.

stuporJIX — Fri, 21 Dec 2001 07:03:04 -0800

So you think the expansion of the universe is accelerating? Think again! (Contains links to full paper in .pdf etc.)

crawdad — Wed, 07 Jun 2000 08:39:07 -0800

Black holes blow as well as suck. It's amazing what we find out about the universe. Imagine what we don't know?