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 …
The completion of satellite missions is something that is marked like the death of an old friend among space techs. The Galileo probe, which has travelled around Jupiter for more than ten years and contributed huge amounts of knowledge about the planet is about to be sent plunging into Jupiter’s atmosphere. THis itself isn’t news perhaps, but what really caught my eye about this story was the consideration and planning that went into HOW to destroy Galileo. As quoted in this article, NASA has decided to burn up Galileo to protect life that may exist on one of it’s moons: …
I’ve been suffering from a tension headache over the last few days. Headaches are not something I usually get, so it’s been a little unusual to have one. In searching out some of the causes of headache pain, I discovered that human beings seems to take great pleasure in representing headaches visually. There is a whole sub-genre of visual art produced by migraine sufferers that is some of the most harrowing and despair filled imagery you will see anywhere. How headaches are represented is fascinating. Headache art and graphics combine a number of elements to give one the sense of …