So, I’m going to need a more comfy chair to read all of that.
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Thank you!!
Check out book by Hugh Ross: hidden treasures in the book of Job, how the oldest book in the Bible answers today’s scientific questions
Basically God posed approximately 80 questions to Job. I’m the last thirty years we can now, finally, answer about 10-13 of them
Meaning? These questions had to be originated by someone who was or knew of the ability to create and fine tune the universe
The first four chargers are more about the primary focus of why would a good God allow sufferingnnboth sides of good and bad….
Then it gets into the science!!
The author is a physicist scientist that believes I’m a Crestor…
I got hooked on reading it as the promo went into the question asked “do you know where I put the dark?” Here dark is a noun…. So it has to be somewhere if God is real. He goes into the fact we now have three variations of knowledge dark matter in the universe or the fact is not empty space the whole universe may be soaking in a universal sea of dark matter(s)…
funny you hit me up the this as I am still reading it
lol! Did not realize it was quite that long…
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I will take his word for it! (assuming that Crestor is an exciting new type of alien visitation, not a typo).
In all honesty, I am open to the concept that the universe exists as some type of expression of intent. I am much more skeptical of any human being’s claims to personal knowledge of that intent—much less predictions about the future!
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Yep
This thread used to be cool
Oh well
OK Davicus…
The Exposed Cranium Nebula
The Exposed Cranium Nebula, officially known as PMR 1. It is a planetary nebula located approximately 5,000 light-years away from Earth. This photo was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope using its NIRCam. The nebula earned its nickname because it bears an uncanny resemblance to a human brain inside a transparent skull. A distinct dark lane between two cosmic clouds creates the appearance of cerebral hemisphere.
PMR 1 is formed by gases and dust expelled by a dying star in its final stage. Webb’s high resolution reveals unprecedented details of the inner gases the brain surrounded by a thin outer shell composed mostly of hydrogen.
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That’s what my wife says about me.
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Scientists have captured the exact moment a supernova’s shockwave burst through the surface of a dying star — a stage of stellar death that astronomers had predicted for decades but had never clearly seen before. 
The event occurred in a galaxy about 22 million light years away, where astronomers managed to observe the explosion just hours after the star began to collapse. This is extremely rare, since most supernovae are discovered days after the explosion, when the brightest phase has already begun.
For the first time, telescopes recorded the “shock breakout”, the instant when a powerful shockwave created by the collapsing core races outward and blasts through the star’s outer layers.
Surprisingly, the data showed that the shockwave expanded in a smooth and symmetrical pattern, something scientists did not expect, since supernova explosions are often thought to be chaotic.
These early moments are incredibly important because they reveal how massive stars collapse and explode, and how the heavy elements that build planets and life are spread across the universe.
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Welcome to Hubble’s Messier Marathon 2026!
This annual stargazing event encourages astronomers to target cosmic objects from the Messier catalog, compiled by French astronomer Charles Messier in the 1700s.
No telescope? No problem. Follow along with Hubble, which took a look at several Messier objects. We’re sharing new images through next weekend.
First up: Messier 10!
M10 is a globular cluster, which is a roughly spherical grouping of stars held together by their mutual gravity.
This cluster is about 15,000 light-years away, and can be found in the constellation Ophiuchus: https://go.nasa.gov/4lnvdve
Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Piotto (Universita degli Studi di Padova); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
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These fast spinning, magnetic neutron stars may power some of the brightest supernovae in the cosmos. Andrew Paul Published Mar 11, 2026 4:30 PM EDT
Artist’s conception of a magnetar surrounded by an accretion disk that is wobbling, or precessing, because of the effects of general relativity. Some models of magnetars suggest that high-speed jets of charged particles emanate from the magnetar along its rotation axis.
Credit: Joseph Farah / Curtis McCully / Las Cumbres Observatory
In December 2024, astronomers watched a star around 25 times the mass of our sun die in a blaze of glory. Located one billion light-years from Earth, SN 2024afav was a prime example of a superluminous supernova—an event that’s at least 10 times brighter than a large star’s explosion. Researchers around the world used the Las Cumbres Observatory’s global network of 27 telescopes to document the spectacle for more than 200 days.
While the supernova’s brightness peaked at around Day 50, astronomers noticed something strange. Instead of slowly fading as expected, the luminosity oscillated downward while the time between each fluctuation shortened. Past examples of superluminous supernovae exhibited one or two bumps, but SN 2024afav displayed four of them.
After months of calculations—as well as some help from Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity—researchers believe they have an explanation. For the first time ever, astronomers witnessed the birth of a magnetar—a fast spinning, immensely magnetized neutron star. The ramifications, detailed in a study published today in the journal Nature, imply that such cosmic powerhouses are fueling some of the universe’s most explosive supernovae.
The role of the magnetar
The findings confirm a theory first proposed 16 years ago by University of California, Berkeley theoretical astrophysicist Dan Kasen. Kasen and his colleagues hypothesized that at least some superluminous supernovae got their juice from magnetars—just one of many possible outcomes during stellar demise.
A star’s mass dictates the end of its life. If it isn’t quite massive enough to collapse into a black hole, it will crush into a neutron star. However, stars that had a strong magnetic field over their lifetime don’t lose it. They become magnetars instead with fields between 100 and 1,000 times stronger than spinning neutron stars, or pulsars. Both magnetars and pulsars are only around 10 miles in diameter, but they’ll start out spinning more than 1,000 times per second.
Kasen’s team theorized that a spinning magnetar will accelerate charged particles so fast that they collide with the expanding supernova’s debris. According to the team, this is what makes some supernovae much brighter than others.
“For years the magnetar idea has felt almost like a theorist’s magic trick—hiding a powerful engine behind layers of supernova debris,” Kasen, who was not involved in the new study, said in a statement. “It was a natural explanation for the extraordinary brightness of these explosions, but we couldn’t see it directly.”
The latest study from a team including UC Santa Barbara astrophysicist Joseph Farah finally explains the magic trick, but it took some trial-and-error to get there.
“We tested several ideas, including purely Newtonian effects,” Farah explained.
Wobbly disks
The solution came not from Newtonian physics, but general relativity. Farah’s model for SN 2024afav involves material from the explosion falling inward toward the magnetar and forming what’s known as an accretion disk. This debris field in the disk is almost certainly asymmetrical, meaning the spin axis of both the accretion disk and magnetar are misaligned. General relativity says that a spinning object drags space-time as it twirls. When applied to a magnetar, the spinning would hypothetically create something called a Lense-Thirring precession.
To put it (very) simply: the misaligned accretion disk starts to wobble. When it does, it may occasionally block and reflect a magnetar’s light like a blinking turn signal. As the disk moves closer to the magnetar, its radius decreases and makes it wobble faster. Taken altogether, this explains the decrease in time between SN 2024afav’s luminosity oscillations and confirms Kasen’s magnetar theory. “It is the first time general relativity has been needed to describe the mechanics of a supernova,” said Farah.
“I think Joseph has found the smoking gun,” said Andy Howell, a senior scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory, UCSB physicist, and study coauthor. “He’s tied the bumps into the magnetar model and explained everything with the best-tested theory in astrophysics—general relativity. It is incredibly elegant.”
‘The science I dreamed of as a kid’
A magnetar still is not a one-size-fits-all explanation for superluminous supernovae. Another theory proposes an exploding star’s shockwave may sometimes smack into nearby material and increase its brightness. Kasen has also suggested that a newly formed black hole with a misaligned accretion disk may also briefly fuel a bright supernova.
But even if magnetars power a small percentage of superluminous supernovae, it marks a major moment in both astronomy and general relativity.
“This is the most exciting thing I have ever had the privilege to be a part of,” said Farah. “This is the science I dreamed of as a kid.”
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The Nobel Prize winning scientist who helped discover dark energy now thinks something might be wrong.
In 1998, astronomer Adam Riess and his colleagues made one of the most shocking discoveries in modern cosmology. By measuring the distances to faraway exploding stars called supernovae, they found that the universe is not just expanding. It is expanding faster and faster.
The discovery earned Riess a share of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics and reshaped our understanding of the cosmos. To explain the accelerating expansion, scientists proposed the existence of dark energy, a mysterious force that fills empty space and pushes galaxies apart.
Today, dark energy is thought to make up about 68 percent of the entire universe.
But decades after the discovery, new observations are raising difficult questions. Riess and other astronomers have been measuring the universe’s expansion rate using increasingly precise methods, including distant supernovae and a class of stars called Cepheid variables.
Those measurements suggest the universe is expanding faster than our best cosmological models predict. This discrepancy is known as the Hubble tension, and it has become one of the biggest puzzles in modern physics.
If the measurements are correct, it could mean our standard model of cosmology is incomplete. Some researchers propose that dark energy may change over time. Others suggest new particles, unknown forces, or revisions to our understanding of gravity itself.
For now, the universe is forcing cosmologists to confront an uncomfortable possibility that one of the most important discoveries in modern astronomy may not tell the whole story.
Learn more:
“The Nobel Prize winner who thinks we have the universe all wrong.” The Atlantic, 2025
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I feel like this is happening more and more. Maybe its just because we have ring cameras everywhere and better detection
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Discovered in 1779 by French astronomer Charles Messier, the galaxy Messier 58 was one of the first galaxies recognized to have a spiral shape. It’s also the most distant of the cosmic objects included in Messier’s stargazing catalog, at a distance of 62 million light-years!
The data in this new Hubble image of M58 includes infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light. This broad range of wavelengths allows astronomers to study the galaxy’s star forming regions, new stars, and the gas and dust that form them: https://go.nasa.gov/4sPbG9C
Welcome to Hubble’s Messier Marathon: 2026 Edition! We’re sharing new Hubble images of cosmic objects from the Messier catalog, compiled by French astronomer Charles Messier in the 1700s.
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Looks like a cheese danish. Great now I’m hungry.
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Going to see Neil Degrasse Tyson speak tomorrow night in Columbus. Looking forward to it.
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Ask him why he sucks at Jeopardy.
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In 2022 and 2024, physicists successfully created lab-grown black hole analogs that confirmed Stephen Hawking’s 1974 prediction of “Hawking radiation.” By using a chain of atoms to simulate an event horizon, researchers from the University of Amsterdam observed a faint thermal glow escaping the boundary. This experimental “glow” matched Hawking’s mathematical theory that black holes are not completely black but actually emit particles due to quantum fluctuations.
This discovery is a major breakthrough because it provides a rare bridge between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, two fields of physics that are usually difficult to reconcile. Because real Hawking radiation in deep space is too faint to detect against the universe’s background noise, these lab simulations allow scientists to study the thermodynamics of black holes right on Earth. The successful experiment proves that black holes can eventually “evaporate” over vast amounts of time, just as Hawking famously calculated.
Blackholes are by far the most fascinating thing out there.
Nothing not even light can escape. Yet they give off energy and radiation.
Meaning they can eventually burn themselves out.
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