Name: Norman Anthony Aguero
Currently a student at FIU. My major is chemistry and my minor is physics. My goal is to hopefully earn a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry.
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Prog rock went New wave, circa 1980. Yes went almost punk. I had a hard time with that.
From the Ashes of the First Stars
What did the first quasars look like? The nearest quasars are now known to be supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. Gas and dust that falls toward a quasar glows brightly, sometimes outglowing the entire home galaxy. The quasars that formed in the first billion years of the universe are more mysterious, though, with even the nature of the surrounding gas still unknown.
Exacting observations of three distant quasars now indicate emission of very specific colors of the element iron. These Hubble Space Telescope observations, which bolster recent results from the WMAP mission, indicate that a whole complete cycle of stars was born, created this iron, and died within the first few hundred million years of the universe.
Image credit: NASA/ESA/ESO/Wolfram Freudling et al. (STECF)
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Saturn: Lord of the Rings
This image of Saturn's main rings was made by combining data from multiple star occultations using Cassini's ultraviolet imaging spectrograph. An occultation occurs when one celestial body passes in front of another, thus hiding the other from view.
During occultations, scientists observe the brightness of a star as the rings pass in front of it. This provides a measurement of the amount of ring material between the spacecraft and the star.
Cassini has given scientists the most detailed view yet of Saturn's densely packed B ring, which is densely packed with clumps, called self-gravity wakes, separated by nearly empty gaps. These clumps in Saturn's B ring are neatly organized and constantly colliding, which surprised scientists.
The clumps in Saturn's B ring, 30 to 50 meters (100 to 160 feet) across, are too small to be seen directly. However, scientists can map the distribution, shape and orientation of the clumps. Colors in this image indicate the orientation of clumps, and brightness indicates the density of ring particles. The formation of wakes is strongest in the bluer regions, where ring particles clump together in tilted wakes. Particles in the central yellow regions are too densely packed for any starlight to pass through it.
The ultraviolet imaging spectrograph measured the flickering of the star Alpha Arae as it passed by the rings Nov. 9 and 10, 2006.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Colorado
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For Mafidl:
I was born and raised in the Upper West Side of New York City. I lived these songs. The area that the film took place in was around midtown, between West 55 to 57th. street or so. Now, it is the present site of the Lincoln Center. Those tennemants had only 1 bathroom per floor. They had awfull living conditions. My mother is Puerto Rican, and I remember the prejudice hurled upon us.
The Seven Sisters
The Seven Sisters, also known as the Pleiades, seem to float on a bed of feathers in a new infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Clouds of dust sweep around the stars, swaddling them in a cushiony veil.
The view is quite different from the usual observation of these stars in the western sky. Right now, the famous family of stars is "stepping out" in the evening skies with a very bright and dazzling Venus. During the period from around April 10 to 13, the Pleiades shine like a cluster of diamonds just above Venus. On April 19, the crescent moon will join the party, sliding between Venus and the Pleiades for a special viewing.
For more information, read The Seven Sisters Pose for Spitzer - and for You!
Image credit: NASA
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Reflecting Merope
In the famous Pleiades star cluster, a star's light slowly destroys a passing cloud of gas and dust. The star, Merope, lies just off the upper right edge of this image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The cloud, known as IC 349, and the star have been in existence for millions of years. In the past 100,000 years, however, part of the cloud has by chance moved so close to the star - only 3,500 times the Earth-Sun distance - that the star's light affects the cloud's dust in an unusual manner.
Pressure of the star's light significantly repels the dust in the reflection nebula with smaller dust particles being repelled more strongly. Eventually parts of the dust cloud have become stratified and point toward Merope, with the closest particles being the most massive and so the least affected by the radiation pressure. A longer term result is the general destruction of the dust by the energetic starlight.
Image credit: NASA/STScI/George H. Herbig and Theodore Simon (IfA, U. Hawaii)
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Crescent Rhea Occults Crescent Saturn
Soft hues, partially lit orbs, a thin trace of the ring and slight shadows highlight this understated view of the majestic surroundings of the giant planet Saturn. Looking nearly back toward the sun, the Cassini spacecraft captured the crescent phases of Saturn and its moon Rhea in color a few months ago.
As striking as the above image is, it is but a single frame from a recently released 60-frame silent movie where Rhea can be seen gliding in front of its parent world. Since Cassini was nearly in the plane of Saturn's rings, the normally impressive rings are visible here only as a thin line across the image center. Cassini has now passed the official half-way mark of its mission around Saturn, but is well situated to complete another two years investigating this complex and surprising system.
Image credit: NASA/ESA/JPL/SSI
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Me and Jazz guitar. WTF?t's summer.
Fourth dimension
There are three conventional spatial dimensions: length (or depth), width, and height, often expressed as x, y and z. x and y axes appear on a plane Cartesian graph and z is found in functions such as a "z-buffer" in computer graphics, for processing "depth" in imagery. The fourth dimension is often identified with time, and as such is used to explain space-time in Einstein's theories of special relativity and general relativity. When a reference is used to four-dimensional co-ordinates, it is likely that what is referred to is the three spatial dimensions plus a time-line. If four (or more) spatial dimensions are referred to, this should be stated at the outset, to avoid confusion with the more common notion that time is the Einsteinian fourth dimension.
If time is the "fourth dimension", an additional spatial dimension would be referred to as the fifth dimension. The implications of another spatial dimension are now discussed. This would be orthogonal to the other three spatial dimensions. The cardinal directions in the three known dimensions may be referred to as up/down (altitude), north/south (latitude), and east/west (longitude). When speaking of the fourth spatial dimension, an additional pair of terms is needed. Attested terms include ana/kata (sometimes called spissitude or spassitude), vinn/vout (used by Rudy Rucker), and upsilon/delta.
Geometry with four spatial dimensions
In four spatial dimensions, Euclidean geometry provides for a greater variety of shapes to exist than in three dimensions. Just as three-dimensional polyhedrons are spatial enclosures made out of connected two-dimensional faces, the four-dimensional polychorons are enclosures of four-dimensional space made out of three-dimensional cells. Where in three dimensions there are exactly five regular polyhedrons, or Platonic solids, that can exist, six regular polychorons exist in four dimensions. Five of the six can be interpreted as natural extensions of the Platonic solids, just as the cube, itself a Platonic solid, is a natural extension of the two-dimensional square.
The pentachoron is constructed out of 5 tetrahedrons for cells and 10 triangular faces, and is the four-dimensional analogue of the tetrahedron. The tesseract, or hypercube, is made out of 8 cubic cells and 24 squares, and is the four-dimensional hypercube. The tesseract's dual, the 16-cell, is the equivalent of the octahedron, as they are both cross-polytopes.
The 120-cell and 600-cell are duals of each other, and are analogous to the dodecahedron and icosahedron, respectively. The 24-cell is the unique regular polychoron in that it has no three-dimensional equivalent.
There are also a large set of semiregular polychora, called convex uniform polychoron, most of which can be derived from the 6 regular forms above.
Just as the sphere, or 2-sphere, is a curved two-dimensional surface made up of all points equidistant from a given central point in three-dimensional space, the 3-sphere, a kind of hypersphere, is the space containing all points equidistant to a given central point in four-dimensional space. Every three-dimensional cross section of a 3-sphere is a 2-sphere.
The man that influence me the most.
I think a lot like him......
Blue Expanse
The Cassini spacecraft surveys Saturn's outstretched ring system from a vantage point high above the planet's northern latitudes. Nearly the full expanse of the main rings is visible here -- from the C ring to the outer edge of the A ring (in the upper left corner).
Ring shadows are visible on the planet at lower left, and two large storms swirl near center.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 52 degrees above the ringplane.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 (red channel), 890 (blue channel) and 728 (green channel) nanometers. The view was acquired on April 5, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 81 kilometers (51 miles) per pixel.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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Ever wonder what 'they' look like without clothes?
Smile of the Beyond. (So, I feel this way lately.)
The dialect, I think is Catalan, the language of Catalonia, at the north- eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula, and some other places. I can decipher most of it. Give it a try. At least it gives us a clue how the English tongue came about. I'm sure that we, who speak spanish, will have no trouble with this video.
Bebop rears its ugly head.
Dark Matter
How do we know that dark matter isn't just normal matter exhibiting strange gravity? A new observation of gravitationally magnified faint galaxies far in the distance behind a massive cluster of galaxies is shedding new dark on the subject. This image from the Hubble Space Telescope indicates that a huge ring of dark matter likely exists surrounding the center of CL0024+17 that has no normal matter counterpart.
What is visible in the above image, first and foremost, are many spectacular galaxies that are part of CL0024+17 itself, typically appearing tan in color. Next, a close inspection of the cluster center shows several unusual and repeated galaxy shapes, typically more blue. These are multiple images of a few distant galaxies, showing that the cluster is a strong gravitational lens. The relatively weak distortions of the many distant faint blue galaxies all over the image, however, indicates the existence of the dark matter ring. The computationally modeled dark matter ring spans about five million light years and has been digitally superimposed to the image in diffuse blue.
A hypothesis for the formation of the huge dark matter ring holds that it is a transient feature formed when galaxy cluster CL0024+17 collided with another cluster of galaxies about one billion years ago, leaving a ring similar to when a rock is thrown in a pond.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. J. Jee and H. Ford et al. (Johns Hopkins Univ.)
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My right brain decided to post this stuff.
Les Paul Documentary for JVC JazzFest 2005
Dusty Stellar Nursery Revealed
How can something as big as a star go undetected? The answer is dust. The stellar nursery DR21 is shrouded in so much space dust that no visible light escapes it. By seeing in the infrared, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has managed to pull this veil aside. The new observations reveal a firework-like display of massive stars surrounded by a stormy cloud of gas and dust. The biggest star is estimated to be 100,000 times as bright as our own Sun.
Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech
Cool Honda Commercial
The Mineral Moon
Even if the moon really were made of green cheese it probably wouldn't look this bizarre. Still, this mosaic of 53 images was recorded by the Jupiter-bound Galileo spacecraft as it passed near our own large natural satellite in 1992. The pictures were recorded through three spectral filters and combined in an exaggerated false-color scheme to explore the composition of the lunar surface as changes in mineral content produce subtle color differences in reflected light.
Image credit: NASA/JPL
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Robot Plays Air Hockey
And I thought Gray's anatomy was pulling my leg. Recall the episode aired a few weeks ago.
My white bicycle, my white bicycle
Riding all around the street
Four o'clock and they're all asleep
I'm not tired and it's so late
Moving fast everything looks great.
My white bicycle, my white bicycle
See that man, he's all alone
Looks so happy but he's far from home
Ring my bell, smile at him
Better kick over his garbage bin
My white bicycle, my white bicycle
The rain comes down but I don't care
The wind is blowing in my hair
Seagulls flying in the air
My white bicycle
Policeman shouts but I don't see him
They're one thing I dont believe in
Find some judge, but its not leavin'
Lift both hands, his head in disgrace
Shines no light upon my face
Through the darkness, we still speed
My white bicycle and me
My white bicycle, my white bicycle
Rubens Tube physics experiment
X-Ray Mystery
A mere 6,000 light-years distant and sailing through the constellation Vela, star cluster RCW 38 is full of powerful stars. It's no surprise that these stars, only a million years young with hot outer atmospheres, appear as point-like sources dotting this x-ray image from the orbiting Chandra Observatory.
But the diffuse cloud of x-rays surrounding them is a bit mysterious. The image is color coded by x-ray energy, with high energies in blue, medium in green and low energy x-rays in red. Just a few light-years across, the cloud, which pervades the cluster, has colors suggesting that the x-rays are produced by high energy electrons moving through magnetic fields. Yet a source of energetic electrons, such as shockwaves from exploding stars (supernova remnants) or rotating neutron stars (pulsars), is not apparent in the Chandra data. Whatever their origins, the energetic particles could leave an imprint on planetary systems forming in young star clusters, just as nearby energetic events seem to have affected the chemistry and isotopes found in our own solar system.
Image credit: NASA
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Stardust Space Craft
