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Episode 25 — Getting To Know Andromeda, Our Grand Spiral Neighbor

This is the episode for anyone who’s interested in learning more about our grand spiral neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. Join my guest Lowell Observatory, astronomer Phil Massey as we discuss how our beguiling behemoth of a neighbor helped shape contemporary astronomy.


First cataloged by Al Sufi as a mere optical smudge high in the winter sky, the Andromeda Galaxy has lately been a cornerstone of everything we know about contemporary astronomy and the cosmos as a whole. Join Lowell Observatory astronomer Philip Massey as he outlines how this grand spiral neighbor changed what we know about cosmology. And if you happen to be in the Northern hemisphere, by the end of the episode, you may be ready to try and spot the galaxy with just your naked eyes.

Dark Matter Candidate Could Generate String-Like Entities in Exotic Materials

Calculations show how theoretical ‘axionic strings’ could create odd behavior if produced in exotic materials in the lab.

A hypothetical particle that could solve one of the biggest puzzles in cosmology just got a little less mysterious. A RIKEN physicist and two colleagues have revealed the mathematical underpinnings that could explain how so-called axions might generate string-like entities that create a strange voltage in lab materials.

Axions were first proposed in the 1970s by physicists studying the theory of quantum chromodynamics, which describes how some elementary particles are held together within the atomic nucleus. The trouble was that this theory predicted some bizarre properties for known particles that are not observed. To fix this, physicists posited a new particle—later dubbed the axion, after a brand of laundry detergent, because it helped clean up a mess in the theory.

Researchers have succeeded in directly observing the formation and interaction of highly ionized krypton plasma

The last decade has been marked by a series of remarkable discoveries identifying how the universe is composed. It is understood that the mysterious substance dark matter makes up 85% of the matter in the universe. Observable matter in the universe consists of ionized particles. Thus, a profound understanding of ionized matter and its interaction with light, could lead to a deeper understanding of the relationships at play that formed the universe. While ionized matter, or plasma, is relatively easy to generate in the lab, studying it is extremely challenging as methods that can capture ionization states and density are virtually non-existant.

In a new paper published in Light Science & Application, a team of scientists has succeeded in directly observing the formation and interaction of highly ionized krypton plasma using femtosecond coherent ultraviolet light and a novel four-dimensional model.

Particle Physicists Continue Empty Promises

The CERN in Geneva has become a sink for public money.

At the same time there’s a lack of funding in other research areas, that would be much more urgent!


In this video I explain why building a next larger particle collider will most likely not tell us anything about dark matter and why, therefore, claims by prominent particle physicists that dark matter would be a “guaranteed result” are misleading.

The piece that I quote in the beginning is this:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01054-6

“Phantom Star of the Blue Ring Nebula” –Mystery Solved

“We were in the middle of observing one night, with a new spectrograph that we had recently built, when we received a message from our colleagues about a peculiar object composed of a nebulous gas expanding rapidly away from a central star,” said Princeton University astronomer Guðmundur Stefánsson, a member of the team that discovered a mysterious object in 2004 using NASA’s space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX). “How did it form? What are the properties of the central star? We were immediately excited to help solve the mystery!”

A 16-Year-Old Mystery

NASA announced today that it has solved the 16-year-old mystery of the object –similar in size that of a supernova remnant–unlike any they’d seen before in our Milky Way galaxy: a large, faint blue cloud of gas in space with a living star at its center. Subsequent observations revealed a thick ring structure within it, leading to the object being named the Blue Ring Nebula.

Ontological Holism: The Ultimate Reality of Self-Simulating Universe, or Why We All Are One

When we apprehend reality as the entirety of everything that exists including all dimensionality, all events and entities in their respective timelines, then by definition nothing exists outside of reality, not even “nothing.” It means that the first cause for reality’s existence must lie within ontological reality itself, since there is nothing outside of it. This self-causation of reality is perhaps best understood in relation to the existence of your own mind. Self-simulated reality transpires as self-evident when you relate to the notion that a phenomenal mind, which is a web of patterns, conceives a certain novel pattern and simultaneously perceives it. Furthermore, the imminent natural God of Spinoza, or Absolute Consciousness, becomes intelligible by applying a scientific tool of extrapolation to the meta-systemic phenomenon of radical emergence and treating consciousness as a primary ontological mover, the Source if you will, not a by-product of material interactions.

#OntologicalHolism #ontology #holism #cosmology #phenomenology #consciousness #mind #evolution

Unexpectedly, The Universe Is Getting Hotter And Hotter as It Expands

So the Universe is getting hotter? 😃


For almost a century, astronomers have understood that the Universe is in a state of expansion. Since the 1990s, they have come to understand that as of 4 billion years ago, the rate of expansion has been speeding up.

As this progresses, and the galaxy clusters and filaments of the Universe move farther apart, scientists theorize that the mean temperature of the Universe will gradually decline.

But according to new research led by the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics (CCAPP) at Ohio State University, it appears that the Universe is actually getting hotter as time goes on.

CERN Physicists Find First Evidence for Production of Top Quarks in Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions

New results from the CMS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider demonstrate for the first time that top quarks are produced in nucleus-nucleus collisions. The results open the path to study in a new and unique way the extreme state of matter that is thought to have existed shortly after the Big Bang.

First observed in proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron collider 25 years ago, this particle is also a unique and potentially very powerful tool to understand the inner content of nuclear matter.

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