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POPS50 Billion Suns! -The Biggest Single Object in the Universe Based on this self-regulating maximum rate, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts, and the European Southern Observatory, Chile, have calculated an upper limit for these mega-mammoth masses. Fifty billion suns, that's 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 kg, otherwise known as "ridiculously stupidly big" and triple the size of the largest observed black hole, OJ 287.
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POPS10 Strategies for dealing with negative people My favorite is #3: “Now tell me something positive.” I'm going to try to use this one--on other people and on myself. "Right after they've finished telling you some tragic story, say to them, "now tell me a positive story". Some people have no idea how negative they’ve become. That's what they're surrounded by day in and day out so it’s just become a way of life for them. By being given the reminder, they may actually realize that being negative isn't the kind of person they want to be and may start to work on becoming more positive. Or, they may decide it's not worth telling you their horror stories because you'll ask them to think of something positive. Sob sisters (always whining, feel the world is against them, feel they're victims) will probably not find you very attractive anymore."
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POPSThe Simulated Universe ... In this article, I provide an exposition of the Simulated Universe argument and explain why some philosophers believe that there is a high possibility that we exist in a simulation. I will then discuss the type of evidence that we would need to determine whether we exist in a simulation. Finally, I will describe two objections to the argument before concluding that while interesting, we should reject the Simulated Universe argument. This article is a critique on Nick Bostroms article Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?
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POPSIs our universe fine-tuned for life? Claims of fine-tuning have generally been based on what happens when you vary a single characteristic of the universe, say the strength of gravity, while holding all others constant. That, says Adams, is too artificial a scenario to tell you anything about whether there are other universes that can support life. "The right way to do the problem is to start from scratch," he says. "You have to turn all the knobs and find out what happens."
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POPSTime to test time Yet if Hogan's ideas are right, noise associated with this fundamental fuzziness should be prominent at GEO600, a joint British and German machine operating near Hannover, Germany, that is searching for gravitational waves. These waves are thought to arise during events such as the massive cosmic collisions of black holes and neutron stars. Confirmation of the idea — which could come as experimental upgrades to GEO600 are put in place over the coming year — would be a big step towards a verifiable quantum theory of gravity, a long-sought unification of quantum mechanics (the physics of the very small) with general relativity (the physics of the very big). Hogan outlines his predictions in a paper published on 30 October in Physical Review D1.
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POPSThe World's Worst Web Censors - Reporters Without Borders the last 6 countries in order of pics are: Saudi Arabia, Turkemenistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Syria, Uzbekistan. in source you can slide on, every pic got a short story on this specific state & it`s specific policy of internet censorship. Reporters without Borders Unite !! new kind of union?.. ))
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POPSIs our universe fine-tuned for life? The Anthropic Principle Under Scrutiny Adams selected a range of possible values for each of these constants, then put them into a computer model that created a multitude of universes, or a virtual "multiverse". Each universe within the multiverse used different values for the three constants and was subject to slightly different laws of physics. About a quarter of the resulting universes turned out to be populated by energy-generating stars. "You can change alpha or the gravitational constant by a factor of 100 and stars still form," Adams says, suggesting that stars can exist in universes in which at least some fundamental constants are wildly different than in our universe.
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POPSForget black holes, could the LHC trigger a “Bose supernova”? Nobody is exactly sure how these explosions proceed which is a tad worrying for the following reason: some clever clogs has pointed out that superfluid helium is a BEC and that the LHC is swimming in 700,000 litres of the stuff. Not only that but the entire thing is bathed in some of the most powerful magnetic fields on the planet. If not for anything else, the LHC has become a modern doom spelling myth. The universe is about to punish us for prying on its privacy... These modern myths are truly fascinating. After Bose Nova? Bose Supernova! :-)
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POPSScientist reveals clue to wormholes Wormholes would have to be kept open by a so-far unidentified material with bizarre properties. This substance, known as "phantom matter", would have negative energy and negative mass, causing it to exert a repulsive effect. Dr Shatskiy's calculations indicate that as well as "opening the door" phantom matter would deflect light, providing a useful wormhole signature.
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POPSQuiet Explosion: Object Intermediate Between Normal Supernovae And Gamma-ray Bursts Found Stars that were at birth more massive than about 8 times the mass of our Sun end their relatively short life in a cosmic, cataclysmic firework lighting up the Universe. The outcome is the formation of the densest objects that exist, neutron stars and black holes. When exploding, some of the most massive stars emit a short cry of agony, in the form of a burst of very energetic light, X- or gamma-rays.
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POPSThe Great RIP in the Sky, Shine On, Wish You Were Here 5 of my favorite songs from Pink Floyd in honor of the death of Richard Wright (keyboard). One of the most amazing bands of the last century. The Great Gig in the Sky Shine On You Crazy Diamond Wish You Were Here Dogs of War One of These Days
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POPSLARGE HADRON COLLIDER. Will it destroy the universe? The idea dates back to Einstein's explanation that spacetime can be deformed by large energies or masses. Since the Large Hadron Collider is a twenty-six kilometer ring of superconducting magnets designed to do nothing but give a particle as large an energy as possible, that sounds like it could be an issue. Small deformations in spacetime (like Earth) give us the force of gravity, severe deformations give the cosmological trash compacting black holes, and an extreme case could cause a wormhole - a link between two points as spacetime folds over to touch itself (no sniggering).
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POPSSupermassive black hole says sayonara "In their study, Stefanie Komossa and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, examined the spectrum of light from a quasar, a brilliant beacon with the unwieldy name SDSS J092712.65+294344.0. Quasars, which lie at the center of galaxies, are fueled by black holes. An analysis of the quasar spectrum reveals a pattern of light emission that matches that expected from a supermassive black hole shot out of the galaxy’s center, the team reports in the May 10 Astrophysical Journal Letters."
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POPSHow to Survive In a Black Hole... ...or, more precisely: How to squeeze out a few more hours during which to contemplate the highs and lows of your life and what you could have done differently to avoid having it end in the middle of a damn black hole. :) The analysis is usually done by thinking about a person who falls into the black hole starting from a state of rest at the event horizon.... But in general a person falling past the horizon won't have zero velocity to begin with. Then the situation is different — in fact it's worse. So firing the rocket for a short time can push the astronaut back on to the best-case scenario: the trajectory followed by free fall from rest.
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