The other day I blogged that the Hubble photo was a glimpse into the suburbs of the universe. Of course this isn’t true at all. In fact we live on the edge of the universe. Every moment, as the universe keeps expanding, we get further and futher away from the Big Bang. So any photograph that sees 12 billion years into the past is actually looking towards the centre of the universe, or downtown. In 1964, the echoes of the bigbang were discovered. The entire universe is bathed in cosmic background radiation which is essentially the sound of the Big …
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More from the deep dark suburbs of the universe… A massive cluster of yellowish galaxies, seemingly caught in a red and blue spider web of eerily distorted background galaxies, makes for a spellbinding picture from the new Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. To make this unprecedented image of the cosmos, Hubble peered straight through the center of one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, called Abell 1689. The gravity of the cluster’s trillion stars � plus dark matter � acts as a 2-million-light-year-wide “lens” in space. This “gravitational lens” bends and magnifies the light of …
A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope is an example of ‘painting with light’. Astronomers use the separated colours produced by oxygen and hydrogen to investigate star-forming processes in the nebula NGC 2080. The colours explain much about the nature of such nebulae. –from the European Space Agency
Ideas, on CBC Radio is running a five part series on Simone Weil. It features one episode on her life and then four on her political and mystical thought. Weil was a French Jew who became a Christian mystic and died in 1943. She was an anarchist, and her writings were championed by the likes of Andre Gide, Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot, George Grant and Czeslaw Milosz. She wrote on affliction, suffering, sanctity, theology and philospophy. She identified with the working class, and styled herself as a slave. On sanctity she wrote: Today it is not nearly enough merely to …