The mind-blowing answer comes from a theory describing the birth of the universe in the first instant of time. The universe has long captivated us with its immense scales of distance and time. How far does it stretch? Where does it end... and what lies beyond its star fields... and streams of galaxies extending as far as telescopes can see? These questions are beginning to yield to a series of extraordinary new lines of investigation... and technologies that are letting us to peer into the most distant realms of the cosmos... But also at the behavior of matter and energy on the smallest of scales. Remarkably, our growing understanding of this kingdom of the ultra-tiny, inside the nuclei of atoms, permits us to glimpse the largest vistas of space and time. In ancient times, most observers saw the stars as a sphere surrounding the earth, often the home of deities. The Greeks were the first to see celestial events as phenomena, subject to human investigation... rather than the fickle whims of the Gods. One sky-watcher, for example, suggested that meteors are made of materials found on Earth... and might have even come from the Earth. Those early astronomers built the foundations of modern science. But they would be shocked to see the discoveries made by their counterparts today. The stars and planets that once harbored the gods are now seen as infinitesimal parts of a vast scaffolding of matter and energy extending far out into space. Just how far... began to emerge in the 1920s. Working at the huge new 100-inch Hooker Telescope on California's Mt. Wilson, astronomer Edwin Hubble, along with his assistant named Milt Humason, analyzed the light of fuzzy patches of sky... known then as nebulae. They showed that these were actually distant galaxies far beyond our own. Hubble and Humason discovered that most of them are moving away from us. The farther out they looked, the faster they were receding. This fact, now known as Hubble's law, suggests that there must have been a time when the matter in all these galaxies was together in one place. That time... when our universe sprung forth... has come to be called the Big Bang. How large the cosmos has gotten since then depends on how long its been growing... and its expansion rate. Recent precision measurements gathered by the Hubble space telescope and other instruments have brought a consensus... That the universe dates back 13.7 billion years. Its radius, then, is the distance a beam of light would have traveled in that time ... 13.7 billion light years. That works out to about 1.3 quadrillion kilometers. In fact, it's even bigger.... Much bigger. How it got so large, so fast, was until recently a deep mystery. That the universe could expand had been predicted back in 1917 by Albert Einstein, except that Einstein himself didn't believe it... until he saw Hubble and Humason's evidence. Einstein's general theory of relativity suggested that galaxies could be moving apart because space itself is expanding. So when a photon gets blasted out from a distant star, it moves through a cosmic landscape that is getting larger and larger, increasing the distance it must travel to reach us. In 1995, the orbiting telescope named for Edwin Hubble began to take the measure of the universe... by looking for the most distant galaxies it could see. Taking the expansion of the universe into account, the space telescope found galaxies that are now almost 46 billion light years away from us in each direction... and almost 92 billion light years from each other. And that would be the whole universe... according to a straightforward model of the big bang. But remarkably, that might be a mere speck within the universe as a whole, according to a dramatic new theory that describes the origins of the cosmos. It's based on the discovery that energy is constantly welling up from the vacuum of space in the form of particles of opposite charge... matter and anti-matter.
black
holes
supernova
space
universe
stars
solar
system
comets
asteroids
cosmos
cosmic
galaxies
planets
mars
sun
moon
earth
nasa
hubble
cern
lhc
inflationary
theory
alan
guth
cobe
wmap
documentary
conspiracy
ufo
nature
environment
science
spirituality
commentary
Channels:
Astronomy And Space
Added: 598 days ago by
ishare
Runtime: 01:00 |
Views: 111 |
Comments: 0
Not yet rated
Total Solar Eclipse - Live from Turkey 2006
In 2006 we sent a crew to Side Turkey to share the total solar eclipse live with the world over the Internet. While we wont be traveling to webcast the eclipse in 2009, we plan to cover the total solar eclipse in July 2010. For this year, were providing links to other eclipse Web sites, and well direct you to live Webcasts or broadcasts of the eclipse at http://www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/2009/
astronomy
earth
eclipse
exploratorium
moon
science
sky
solar
sun
Turkey
webcast
Channels:
Astronomy And Space
Added: 721 days ago by
poker1
Runtime: 02:22 |
Views: 70 |
Comments: 0
Not yet rated
Realtime video with closeups of the totality from Aspendos Theatre/Turkey.
Channels:
Astronomy And Space
Added: 721 days ago by
poker1
Runtime: 06:32 |
Views: 65 |
Comments: 0
Not yet rated
Solar Eclipse 2009 Tell us what you know bout this INCREDIBLE PHENOMENA, ending of the earth!!??
http://tiny.cc/Discovery_Channel http://tiny.cc/money_chaser There are four types of solar eclipses: A total eclipse occurs when the Sun is completely obscured by the Moon. The intensely bright disk of the Sun is replaced by the dark silhouette of the Moon, and the much fainter corona is visible. During any one eclipse, totality is visible only from at most a narrow track on the surface of the Earth. An annular eclipse occurs when the Sun and Moon are exactly in line, but the apparent size of the Moon is smaller than that of the Sun. Hence the Sun appears as a very bright ring, or annulus, surrounding the outline of the Moon. A hybrid eclipse is intermediate between a total and annular eclipse. At some points on the surface of the Earth it is visible as a total eclipse, whereas at others it is annular. Hybrid eclipses are rather rare. A partial eclipse occurs when the Sun and Moon are not exactly in line, and the Moon only partially obscures the Sun. This phenomenon can usually be seen from a large part of the Earth outside of the track of an annular or total eclipse. However, some eclipses can only be seen as a partial eclipse, because the umbra never intersects the Earth's surface. The match between the apparent sizes of the Sun and Moon during a total eclipse is a coincidence. The Sun's distance from the Earth is about 400 times the Moon's distance, and the Sun's diameter is about 400 times the Moon's diameter. Because these ratios are approximately the same, the sizes of the Sun and the Moon as seen from Earth appear to be approximately the same: about 0.5 degree of arc in angular measure. Because the Moon's orbit around the Earth is an ellipse, as is the Earth's orbit around the Sun, the apparent sizes of the Sun and Moon vary.[1][2] The magnitude of an eclipse is the ratio of the apparent size of the Moon to the apparent size of the Sun during an eclipse. An eclipse when the Moon is near its closest distance from the Earth (i.e., near its perigee) can be a total eclipse because the Moon will appear to be large enough to cover completely the Sun's bright disk, or photosphere; a total eclipse has a magnitude greater than 1. Conversely, an eclipse when the Moon is near its farthest distance from the Earth (i.e., near its apogee) can only be an annular eclipse because the Moon will appear to be slightly smaller than the Sun; the magnitude of an annular eclipse is less than 1. Slightly more solar eclipses are annular than total because, on average, the Moon lies too far from Earth to cover the Sun completely. A hybrid eclipse occurs when the magnitude of an eclipse is very close to 1: the eclipse will appear to be total at some locations on Earth and annular at other locations.[3] The Earth's orbit around the Sun is also elliptical, so the Earth's distance from the Sun varies throughout the year. This also affects the apparent sizes of the Sun and Moon, but not so much as the Moon's varying distance from the Earth. When the Earth approaches its farthest distance from the Sun (the aphelion) in July, this tends to favor a total eclipse. As the Earth approaches its closest distance from the Sun (the perihelion) in January, this tends to favor an annular eclipse.
Mum
should
help
children
this
kind
of
info-Earth
Fenomena-How
the
Solar
Eclipse
happen
Channels:
Astronomy And Space
Added: 721 days ago by
poker1
Runtime: 03:16 |
Views: 71 |
Comments: 0
Not yet rated
The Largest Black Holes in the Universe
We've never seen them directly, yet we know they are there, lurking within dense star clusters or wandering the dust lanes of the galaxy, where they prey on stars, or swallow planets whole. Our Milky Way may harbor millions of these black holes, the ultra dense remnants of dead stars. But now, in the universe far beyond our galaxy, there's evidence of something even more ominous: a breed of black holes that have reached incomprehensible size and destructive power. How big can they get? What's the largest so far detected? Where does an 18 billion solar mass black hole hide?
black
holes
hole
supernova
supermassive
universe
time
travel
stars
galaxies
planets
space
hubble
nasa
mars
solar
system
astronauts
einstein
hawking
cern
lhc
galaxy
milky
way
singularity
event
horizon
Channels:
Astronomy And Space
Added: 721 days ago by
poker1
Runtime: 18:48 |
Views: 100 |
Comments: 0
Not yet rated
Apollo 11 on the Sea of Tranquility
Breathtaking ultra high resolution photos of mankind's historic first steps on the Moon... on the lunar Sea of Tranquility. Monday July 20th is the 40th anniversary of this first moonwalk. Music is Chopin's Trois Nouvelles Etudes, 2nd in A flat major.
moon
apollo
11
astronauts
nasa
neil
armstrong
space
saturn
rocket
giant
leap
for
mankind
solar
system
orbit
eva
hoax
cell
mortgage
phone
credit
Channels:
American History
Astronomy And Space
Added: 727 days ago by
poker1
Runtime: 03:11 |
Views: 100 |
Comments: 0
Not yet rated