Watching The Clouds Go By On #Mars. Check Out These Atmospheric Ripples!

Hubble Views The Final Frontier For Dark Matter

“This phenomenon of gravitational lensing stretches galaxies into streaks and arcs, magnifying them, and creating multiple images. It also enables us to reconstruct the mass distribution of the cluster, revealing that it’s mostly due to dark matter.”

When you look out at the distant Universe, you can see all sorts of things: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, going as far back into the distant past as our telescopes can image. But where you have the greatest concentrations of mass, an extreme phenomenon emerges: that of gravitational lensing. Any foreground objects lying behind that mass will have their light stretched, magnified and distorted by the intervening matter. Recently, as part of the Hubble Frontier Fields program, the telescope followed-up on galaxy cluster Abell 370, and revealed the most spectacular gravitational lensing signal ever seen in a galaxy cluster. Most importantly, it provides some very strong evidence not only for dark matter’s existence, but for its presence distinct from any galaxies at all.

Come get the full story in images, videos, and no more than 200 words on this edition of Mostly Mute Monday!

Sand and water make a remarkable team when it comes to building. But the substrate – the surface you build on – makes a big difference as well. Take a syringe of wet sand and drip it onto a waterproof surface (bottom right), and you’ll get a wet heap that flows like a viscous liquid. Drop the same wet sand onto a surface covered in dry sand (bottom left), and the drops pile up into a tower. Watch the sand drop tower closely, and you’ll see how new drops first glisten with moisture and then lose their shine. The excess water in each drop is being drawn downward and into the surrounding sand through capillary action. This lets the sand grains settle against one another instead of sliding past, giving the sand pile the strength to hold its weight upright. (Video and image credit: amàco et al.)

slope point, the southernmost tip on new zealand’s south island, is hit with such persistently violent southern antarctic winds that trees grow in the leeward direction. (click pic or link for credit x, x, x, x, x, x)

Orion

Photograph of the May 1919 solar eclipse captured by Arthur Eddington, which proved Einstein’s theory of general relativity. 

Credit: SSPL/Getty Images

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A movie showing the dynamics of the inner part of the Crab Nebula made using the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Credit: NASA/CXC/ASU/J.Hester et al.

Manganese Dendrites on Limestone

Locality: Solnhofen, Bavaria, Germany

Scientists Have Set a Limit For Quantum Entanglement - And It's Really Freaking Powerful

Unbreakable at 30 times Earth's acceleration.

For the first time, scientists have subjected quantum entanglement to extreme levels of acceleration, and there’s nothing fragile about this “spooky action at a distance”- it’s way more robust than we thought.

In recent experiments, entangled particles held firm even while being accelerated to 30g - 30 times Earth’s acceleration - and the results could have a big impact on our search for a unified theory of modern physics.

“These experiments shall help [us] unify the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity,” says one of the team, Rupert Ursin, from the University of Vienna, Austria.

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