Read more at Science News
When this spin speeds up, something very interesting can happen. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, mass is a function of speed, with the speed of light as an upper boundary. Why is the speed of light an upper boundary? Because as anything approaches the speed of light, its mass increases to infinity
Read more at Plantaryphilosophy
 |
The idea that, if you zoom in far enough, you’ll eventually encounter a structure that repeats the initial pattern you saw on larger scales, is mathematically realized in the concept of a fractal. When similar patterns repeatedly emerge at smaller and smaller scales, we can analyze them mathematically and see if they have the same statistical characteristics as the larger structures; if they do, it’s fractal-like in nature. So, is the Universe itself a fractal?
The answer appears to be almost, but not quite. Here’s the science behind why.
Astronauts describe the emptiness and darkness of space far from Earth as a startling experience. So did the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in a poem e-mailed to me by writer Dror Burstein. Without ever having ventured into space (obviously), Rilke wrote a century ago: “Night, shuddering in my regard, but in yourself so steady; inexhaustible creation, enduring beyond the fate of earth.”
Is there a modern scientific interpretation to Rilke’s poem?
The reality is that space in neither empty nor dark. Even outside galaxies, an astronaut could find at least one proton, on average, in every cubic meter. Also, one electron and half a billion photons and neutrinos, all left over from the big bang. Still, one might naively imagine that the space in between these particles is empty. Indeed, the early atomists in ancient Greece thought that the vacuum is literally nothing.
Read more at Scientific America
Benoit Mandelbrot, who pretty much everyone agrees introduced the modern concept of fractals into the world (and even coined the term), was the first to wonder if our universe might be in the form of a fractal. At the time, astronomers had just begun constructing extensive deep-space catalogs of galaxies, and were just beginning to piece together the large-scale structure of the universe.
Since fractals are everywhere, maybe everywhere is a fractal. Maybe when you zoom out and see a particular pattern of galaxies, you can zoom out even further and find the same pattern repeated. And so on and so on, all the way to infinity.
If this finding can be validated, it will explain how the cluster came to be the way it is - with its stars spaced light-years apart, smearing out into a stellar stream stretching across 30,000 light-years.
The star cluster in question is called Palomar 5, located around 80,000 light-years away. Such globular clusters are often considered 'fossils' of the early Universe. They're very dense and spherical, typically containing roughly 100,000 to 1 million very old stars; some, like NGC 6397, are nearly as old as the Universe itself.
Read more at Science Alert.com
