The shape of the Milky Way, usually pictured as a flat spiral, may actually be more like a warped and twisted disk. That's according to a new study of 1,339 stars whose distances could be measured with great accuracy. The resulting map reveals a tipped, uneven disk of material different from our standard picture.
Mapping Pulsating Stars
The 1,339 stars are all Cepheid variables, a type of pulsating star whose intrinsic brightness depends on how long it takes to vary from bright to ...read more
Gazing up at the sky, it's hard not to imagine the sun, moon, stars, and planets as part of an inverted bowl over our heads, even if we know that's an antiquated way of viewing the heavens. These days, we understand it’s the Earth that’s spinning, spinning daily like a ballerina while also circling the sun on its yearly journey. But the bowl imagery was and remains a reasonable way of envisioning how the skies appear to revolve around us, and when certain stars appear or disappear wi ...read more
NASA is often viewed as the epitome of big ideas and extreme planning. But sometimes even they go above and beyond, either with incredible improvised fixes, or missions that survived the test of time and then some.
Hubble Got Glasses
The greatest space telescope astronomers have was almost a giant flop. When the telescope launched in 1991, the pictures it sent back were muddled and far below the predicted quality. It turned out a mirror had been ground to the wrong specifications, leav ...read more
A new paper offers a broad challenge to a certain kind of 'grand theory' about the brain. According to the authors, Federico E. Turkheimer and colleagues, it is problematic to build models of brain function that rely on 'strong emergence'.
Two popular theories, the Free Energy Principle aka Bayesian Brain and the Integrated Information Theory model, are singled out as examples of strong emergence-based work.
Emergence refers to the idea that a system can exhibit behavior or propert ...read more
Massive volumes of water circulate throughout the Atlantic Ocean and serve as the central drivers of Earth’s climate. Now researchers have discovered that the heart of this circulation is not where they suspected.
“The general understanding has been [that it’s] in the Labrador Sea, which sits between the Canadian coast and the west side of Greenland,” said Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who led the new research. &ldqu ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine