The Left Eats Their Own: Stacy Abrams Calls Joe Biden Racist If He Doesn't Choose Her

Full video available here.

The demographic time-bomb is about to detonate.

New findings suggest laws of nature 'downright organic,' not as mechanistic as previously thought

Scientists examining the light from one of the furthermost quasars in the

universe were astonished to find fluctuations in the electromagnetic force.

Not only does a universal constant seem annoyingly inconstant at the outer fringes of the cosmos, it occurs in only one direction, which is downright weird.

Those looking forward to a day when science's Grand Unifying Theory of Everything could be worn on a t-shirt may have to wait a little longer as astrophysicists continue to find hints that one of the cosmological constants is not so constant after all.

In a paper published in Science Advances, scientists from UNSW Sydney reported that four new measurements of light emitted from a quasar 13 billion light years away reaffirm past studies that found tiny variations in the fine structure constant.

"In other words, in what was thought to be an arbitrarily random spread of galaxies, quasars, black holes, stars, gas clouds and planets—with life flourishing in at least one tiny niche of it—the universe suddenly appears to have the equivalent of a north and a south."

UNSW Science's Professor John Webb says the fine structure constant is a measure of electromagnetism—one of the four fundamental forces in nature (the others are gravity, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force).

"The fine structure constant is the quantity that physicists use as a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force," Professor Webb says.

"It's a dimensionless number and it involves the speed of light, something called Planck's constant and the electron charge, and it's a ratio of those things. And it's the number that physicists use to measure the strength of the electromagnetic force."

The electromagnetic force keeps electrons whizzing around a nucleus in every atom of the universe—without it, all matter would fly apart. Up until recently, it was believed to be an unchanging force throughout time and space. But over the last two decades, Professor Webb has noticed anomalies in the fine structure constant whereby electromagnetic force measured in one particular direction of the universe seems ever so slightly different.

"We found a hint that that number of the fine structure constant was different in certain regions of the universe. Not just as a function of time, but actually also in direction in the universe, which is really quite odd if it's correct ... but that's what we found."

Looking for clues

Ever the sceptic, when Professor Webb first came across these early signs of slightly weaker and stronger measurements of the electromagnetic force, he thought it could be a fault of the equipment, or of his calculations or some other error that had led to the unusual readings. It was while looking at some of the most distant quasars—massive celestial bodies emitting exceptionally high energy—at the edges of the universe that these anomalies were first observed using the world's most powerful telescopes.

"The most distant quasars that we know of are about 12 to 13 billion light years from us," Professor Webb says.

"So if you can study the light in detail from distant quasars, you're studying the properties of the universe as it was when it was in its infancy, only a billion years old. The universe then was very, very different. No galaxies existed, the early stars had formed but there was certainly not the same population of stars that we see today. And there were no planets."

He says that in the current study, the team looked at one such quasar that enabled them to probe back to when the universe was only a billion years old which had never been done before. The team made four measurements of the fine constant along the one line of sight to this quasar. Individually, the four measurements didn't provide any conclusive answer as to whether or not there were perceptible changes in the electromagnetic force. However, when combined with lots of other measurements between us and distant quasars made by other scientists and unrelated to this study, the differences in the fine structure constant became evident.

A weird universe

"And it seems to be supporting this idea that there could be a directionality in the universe, which is very weird indeed," Professor Webb says.

"So the universe may not be isotropic in its laws of physics—one that is the same, statistically, in all directions. But in fact, there could be some direction or preferred direction in the universe where the laws of physics change, but not in the perpendicular direction. In other words, the universe in some sense, has a dipole structure to it.

"In one particular direction, we can look back 12 billion light years and measure electromagnetism when the universe was very young. Putting all the data together, electromagnetism seems to gradually increase the further we look, while towards the opposite direction, it gradually decreases. In other directions in the cosmos, the fine structure constant remains just that—constant. These new very distant measurements have pushed our observations further than has ever been reached before."

In other words, in what was thought to be an arbitrarily random spread of galaxies, quasars, black holes, stars, gas clouds and planets—with life flourishing in at least one tiny niche of it—the universe suddenly appears to have the equivalent of a north and a south. Professor Webb is still open to the idea that somehow these measurements made at different stages using different technologies and from different locations on Earth are actually a massive coincidence.

"This is something that is taken very seriously and is regarded, quite correctly with scepticism, even by me, even though I did the first work on it with my students. But it's something you've got to test because it's possible we do live in a weird universe."

But adding to the side of the argument that says these findings are more than just coincidence, a team in the US working completely independently and unknown to Professor Webb's, made observations about X-rays that seemed to align with the idea that the universe has some sort of directionality.

"I didn't know anything about this paper until it appeared in the literature," he says.

"And they're not testing the laws of physics, they're testing the properties, the X-ray properties of galaxies and clusters of galaxies and cosmological distances from Earth. They also found that the properties of the universe in this sense are not isotropic and there's a preferred direction. And lo and behold, their direction coincides with ours."

Life, the universe and everything

While still wanting to see more rigorous testing of ideas that electromagnetism may fluctuate in certain areas of the universe to give it a form of directionality, Professor Webb says if these findings continue to be confirmed, they may help explain why our universe is the way it is, and why there is life in it at all.

"For a long time, it has been thought that the laws of nature appear perfectly tuned to set the conditions for life to flourish. The strength of the electromagnetic force is one of those quantities. If it were only a few percent different to the value we measure on Earth, the chemical evolution of the universe would be completely different and life may never have got going. It raises a tantalising question: does this "Goldilocks' situation, where fundamental physical quantities like the fine structure constant are 'just right' to favour our existence, apply throughout the entire universe?"

If there is a directionality in the universe, Professor Webb argues, and if electromagnetism is shown to be very slightly different in certain regions of the cosmos, the most fundamental concepts underpinning much of modern physics will need revision.

"Our standard model of cosmology is based on an isotropic universe, one that is the same, statistically, in all directions," he says.

"That standard model itself is built upon Einstein's theory of gravity, which itself explicitly assumes constancy of the laws of Nature. If such fundamental principles turn out to be only good approximations, the doors are open to some very exciting, new ideas in physics."

Professor Webb's team believe this is the first step towards a far larger study exploring many directions in the universe, using data coming from new instruments on the world's largest telescopes. New technologies are now emerging to provide higher quality data, and new artificial intelligence analysis methods will help to automate measurements and carry them out more rapidly and with greater precision.

Amazon Banned My Book: This is My Response to Amazon

Logic is an enemy and Truth is a menace.

I am nothing more than a reminder to you that 
you cannot destroy Truth by burning pages.

https://www.thomasjefferson.republican/

THOMAS JEFFERSON 2020

I don’t care. I tell you I don’t care. I'm a human being.  I exist. And if I speak one thought aloud, that thought lives, even after I’m shoveled into my grave.

ZOG is obsolete.
-------------------------

UPDATE 4.27.2020:

Here's a brand new article from the Atlantic: the same magazine that ran the article that got my book banned.

Now they're saying the First Amendment has to be "reinterpreted" and that China is right about censorship and repression. And the two authors are full-fledged law school professors. 

Check it out:

"Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal: In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid-revealed-about-internet/610549/

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Biden says he would pick Michelle Obama as running mate 'in a heartbeat'

Michelle Obama:

"The blood of Africa runs through my veins"

Joe Biden:

"I am a Zionist"

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said in a new interview that he would have no hesitation picking former first lady Michelle Obama to be his running mate, but added that he doubts she is interested in the position.

“I’d take her in a heartbeat,” Biden told Pittsburgh’s KDKA on Monday when asked if he’d choose Obama if she said she would be willing to be on the ticket with him. 

“She’s brilliant. She knows the way around. She is a really fine woman. The Obamas are great friends,” Biden added.

------------------------------------------

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"The Declaration of White Independence" has been banned from Amazon

Hey Amazon:

The Declaration of White Independence is still available for everyone to read.

You motherfuckers aren't going to beat me. Fuck you.

You people are tyrants and censors. You have no respect for the human spirit or freedom of the mind. 

Go ahead: terminate my account. Be my guest. And then congratulate yourselves for your lowbrow, tyrannical censorship.

The Declaration of White Independence can be read in its entirety by clicking on the image below.

I knew you were coming.

And I was ready for you Bastards.

.............

Below is Amazon's email notification to me of the ban, dated April 19, 2020:

Hello,

We’re contacting you regarding the following book(s):

The Declaration of White Independence: The Founding Documents of Transudationism.

During our review process, we found that your book(s) violate our content guidelines. As a result, we are not offering your book(s) for sale on Amazon.

You can find our content guidelines on the KDP website:

https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200672390

Amazon KDP

Amazon.com

Your feedback is helping us build Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company.

http://www.amazon.com/your-account

-------------------------

UPDATE: Below is my response to Amazon regarding the banning of my book:

I confirm that I have read and will NOT comply with the Content Guidelines (https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200672390) and I will NOT remove any previously published books that do not meet these guidelines.

Furthermore, I will NOT bend the knee to tyranny and censorship.  You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Regards,

Kyle McDermott

April 20, 2020

-------------------------

To the readers of this blog: my book, The Declaration of White Independence: The Founding Documents of Transudationism, was for sale on Amazon since March 21, 2008.  It was banned on April 19, 2020.  That's about 12 years. Why the sudden, inexplicable ban?

Biden says he would pick Michelle Obama as running mate 'in a heartbeat'

Michelle Obama:

"The blood of Africa runs through my veins"

Joe Biden:

"I am a Zionist"

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said in a new interview that he would have no hesitation picking former first lady Michelle Obama to be his running mate, but added that he doubts she is interested in the position. 

“I’d take her in a heartbeat,” Biden told Pittsburgh’s KDKA on Monday when asked if he’d choose Obama if she said she would be willing to be on the ticket with him. 

“She’s brilliant. She knows the way around. She is a really fine woman. The Obamas are great friends,” Biden added.

-------------------------------------------------

Hey Amazon:

The Declaration of White Independence is still available for everyone to read.

You motherfuckers aren't going to beat me. Fuck you.

You people are tyrants and censors. You have no respect for the human spirit or freedom of the mind. 

Go ahead: terminate my account. Be my guest. And them congratulate yourselves for your lowbrow, tyrannical censorship.

The Declaration of White Independence can be read in its entirety by clicking on the image below.

I knew you were coming.

And I was ready for you Bastards.

"The Declaration of White Independence" has been banned from Amazon

This is Amazon's email notification of the ban:

-------------------------

Hello,

We’re contacting you regarding the following book(s):

The Declaration of White Independence: The Founding Documents of Transudationism.

During our review process, we found that your book(s) violate our content guidelines. As a result, we are not offering your book(s) for sale on Amazon.

You can find our content guidelines on the KDP website:

https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200672390

Amazon KDP

Amazon.com

Your feedback is helping us build Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company.
http://www.amazon.com/your-account

-------------------------

UPDATE: Below is my response to Amazon regarding the banning of my book:

I confirm that I have read and will NOT comply with the Content Guidelines (https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200672390) and I will NOT remove any previously published books that do not meet these guidelines.

Furthermore, I will NOT bend the knee to tyranny and censorship.  You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Regards,

Kyle McDermott

-------------------------

To the readers of this blog: my book, The Declaration of White Independence: The Founding Documents of Transudationism, was for sale on Amazon since March 21, 2008.  It was banned on April 19, 2020.  That's about 12 years. Why the sudden, inexplicable ban?

Kepler Telescope Detects ‘Most Similar Planet To Earth Ever Found’ In A Star’s ‘Habitable Zone’

A comparison of Earth and Kepler-1649c, an exoplanet only 1.06 times Earth's radius. 

NASA/AMES RESEARCH CENTER/DANIEL RUTTER

Does liquid water exist on the surface of Kepler-1649c, a rocky alien planet just 6% bigger than the Earth?

A new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters reveals that astronomers have found a new world around a distant star that’s almost the same size as Earth—and it orbits in its star’s “habitable zone.”

Kepler-1649c is also now the most similar exoplanet yet found to Earth in terms of both size and temperature.

The data came from the now defunct Kepler/K2 space telescope that observed nearly 200,000 stars for four years. Its mission was to calculate what fraction of stars in the Milky Way have Earth-size planets in their habitable zone. The mission was finally ended in 2018 after a few years of technical problems, but this data comes from pre-2013.

So far, 4,144 exoplanets have been discovered using data from Kepler.

“In terms of size and likely temperature, this is the most similar planet to Earth that has ever been found with Kepler,” said co-author Jeff Coughlin at the SETI Institute. “It's incredible to me that we just found it now, seven years after data collection stopped on the original Kepler field.”

What is an exoplanet?

Whether they’re called exoplanets, extrasolar planets, or simply planets, these objects are planets that orbit around stars other than our Sun. By definition that means they are not in the solar system, and therefore very, very far away. As such, they’re mostly too far away to be directly imaged. Instead, they’re found using data that infers their existence, mostly by observing the effect of orbiting planets on the host star—such as a slight dimming in starlight as a planet transits across it, or tiny effect on the stars movements.

Where and what is Kepler-1649c?

The new world is 302 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus. It orbits an orbits a M-type star that’s not visible from Earth, called Kepler-1649. An M-type star is a low-mass star also known as a “red dwarf,” which are by far the most common stars found in the Milky Way. While the star it orbits is much smaller than our Sun, it gets about 75% of the sunlight Earth does. Kepler-1649 c is 1.06 times the size of Earth and orbits its star every 19.5 days, according to the new paper.

How was Kepler-1649c discovered?

It was originally classified as a false positive by computers, but was found by visual inspection of the data. “Out of all the mislabeled planets we've recovered, this one's particularly exciting,” said Andrew Vanderburg, lead author and a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. “If we hadn't looked over the algorithm's work by hand, we would have missed it.”

While there are other exoplanets closer to Earth in size (such as TRAPPIST-1f and perhaps Teegarden c) and temperature (TRAPPIST-1d and TOI 700d), there is no other exoplanet that is considered to be closer to Earth in both of these values that also lies in the habitable zone of its system.

The authors also argue that the identification of Kepler-1649c hints that terrestrial planets around M-dwarfs may be more common than those around more massive stars.

“The more data we get, the more signs we see pointing to the notion that potentially habitable and Earth-sized exoplanets are common around these kinds of stars,” said Vanderburg. “With red dwarf stars almost everywhere around our galaxy, and these small, potentially habitable and rocky planets around them too, the chance one of them isn’t too different than our Earth looks a bit brighter.”

"This intriguing, distant world gives us even greater hope that a second Earth lies among the stars, waiting to be found," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The data gathered by missions like Kepler and our Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite [TESS] will continue to yield amazing discoveries as the science community refines its abilities to look for promising planets year after year."

Could there be life on Kepler-1649c?

Red dwarf stars are known for having one deadly characteristic; they can occasionally flare, something that would drape any orbiting planets in enough radiation to make life very unlikely.

Are there any other planets orbiting Kepler-1649?

Yes—it shares its sun with a planet much like Venus. Discovered in 2017, Kepler-1649 b is a “super Earth” with a mass of 1.28 Earths that takes 8.7 days to complete one orbit of its star from 0.0514 AU out. A paper in 2017 compared Kepler-1649 b to Venus, stating that is was a “Venus analog candidate” with a similar climate.

So Kepler-1649c is of huge interest to astronomers not just because it’s in the habitable zone and Earth-size, but because of how it might interact with this neighboring planet.

Can astronomers further study Kepler-1649c?

Yes—Kepler-1649c’s atmosphere is not known, which could affect its temperature. Even the planet's size has a margin of error.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has the potential to probe the atmospheres of intriguing exoplanets like Kepler-1649 b and Kepler-1649 c to see if they really could host life.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

Living in space might permanently make human brains bigger

• The brains of astronauts show permanent changes to volume even after returning to Earth, a new study suggests.
• Space station travelers had brain scans before and after their trips to space, and the changes in brain volume were noticeable.
• Researchers still aren’t sure how these changes may affect the astronauts over the long term.

----------------------------------------------------

It’s easy to imagine a future where humans travel freely through space, visiting places like the Moon and Mars to carry out research or perhaps even set up colonies. There are many technological hurdles to scale before such a future is even remotely possible, but what about the biological impacts on our own bodies? Scientists aimed to answer some of those questions, and a new paper published in Radiology reveals one very interesting effect of long-term spaceflight: Human brains get physically bigger.

The research has led to some very important questions about how well-suited humans are for space travel, and what kind of long-term effects travelers to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, may experience.

For the study, researchers performed MRI brain scans on 11 astronauts before they spent time on the International Space Station. After returning, the astronauts were once again scanned, and the before-and-after images were compared.

Because the International Space Station is in orbit around Earth, the gravity acting on its inhabitants is minimal. Scientists have been studying the effects of microgravity on the human body for a long time, and we know that blood flow is dramatically affected. Without gravity acting on a person’s body, organs experience changes too, and that includes the brain.

Research has shown that areas of the brains of astronauts physically expand in space. The changes aren’t dramatic, but they are measurable, and the lack of gravity is likely to blame.

“When you’re in microgravity, fluid such as your venous blood no longer pools toward your lower extremities but redistributes headward,” Dr. Larry A. Kramer, lead author of the study, said in a statement. “That movement of fluid toward your head may be one of the mechanisms causing changes we are observing in the eye and intracranial compartment.”

In this new round of research, scientists wanted to know how long this effect lasts after the astronauts returned to Earth. With the normal amount of gravity acting on their bodies, would the changes in the brain be reversed?

It doesn’t appear so. Even a full year after returning to Earth, the brains of the astronauts involved in the study remained at their postflight size, suggesting that the changes may be permanent.

It’s still unclear exactly what this means for the astronauts and future space travelers. The researchers noted changes in the shape of the pituitary gland which they attributed to the increased pressure in the brain cavity. Changes to the flow of cerebrospinal fluid were also noted, though the astronauts don’t report symptoms and would seem to be healthy.

NASA and other space agencies are working on ways to mitigate the physical effects of spaceflight on the human body, and these new techniques will be increasingly important if we hope to send humans on long-distance missions in our solar system.

Why the Big "Bang" (i.e., Seed) produced something rather than nothing

Stars, galaxies, planets, pretty much everything that makes up our everyday lives owes its existence to a cosmic quirk calibration.

The nature of this quirk calibration, which allowed matter to dominate the Universe at the expense of antimatter, remains a mystery.

Now, results from an experiment in Japan could help researchers solve the puzzle - one of the biggest in science.

It hinges on a difference in the way matter and antimatter particles behave.

The world that's familiar to us - including all the everyday objects we can touch - is made up of matter. The fundamental building blocks of matter are sub-atomic particles, such as electrons, quarks and neutrinos.

But matter has a shadowy counterpart called antimatter. Each sub-atomic particle of ordinary matter has a corresponding "antiparticle".

Today, there is far more matter than antimatter in the Universe. But it wasn't always this way.

The Big Bang should have created matter and antimatter in equal amounts. [ed.: But it didn't, because it was a Seed - not a "Bang".]

"When particle physicists make new particles in accelerators, they always find that they produce particle-antiparticle pairs: for every negative electron, a positively charged positron (the electron's antimatter counterpart)," said Prof Lee Thompson from the University of Sheffield, a member of the 350-strong T2K collaboration, which includes a relatively large number of scientists from UK universities.

"So why isn't the universe 50% antimatter? This is a long-standing problem in cosmology - what happened to the antimatter?"

However, when a matter particle meets its antiparticle, they "annihilate" - disappear in a flash of energy.

During the first fractions of a second of the Big Bang Seed, the hot, dense Universe was fizzing with particle-antiparticle pairs popping in and out of existence. Without some other, unknown mechanism at play, the Universe should contain nothing but leftover energy.

"It would be pretty boring and we wouldn't be here," Prof Stefan Söldner-Rembold, head of the particle physics group at the University of Manchester, told BBC News.

So what happened to tip the balance?

That's where the T2K experiment comes in. T2K is based at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory, based underground in the Kamioka area of Hida, Japan.

Researchers used the facility's detector to observe neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, generated 295km away at the Japanese Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-Parc) in Tokai. T2K stands for Tokai to Kamioka.

As they travel through the Earth, the particles and antiparticles oscillate between different physical properties known as flavours.

Physicists think that finding a difference - or asymmetry - in the physical properties of neutrinos and antineutrinos might help us understand why matter is so prevalent compared with antimatter. This asymmetry is known as charge-conjugation and parity reversal (CP) violation.

It is one of three necessary conditions, proposed by the Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov in 1967, that must be satisfied to produce matter and antimatter at different rates.

After analysing nine years' worth of data, the researchers found a mismatch in the way neutrinos and antineutrinos oscillate by recording the numbers that reached Super Kamiokande with a flavour different from the one they had been created with.

The result has also reached a level of statistical significance - called three-sigma - that's high enough to indicate that CP violation occurs in these particles.

The results have been published in the journal Nature.

"While CP violation involving quarks is experimentally well established, CP violation has never been observed for neutrinos," said Stefan Söldner-Rembold.

"The violation of CP symmetry is one of the (Sakharov) conditions for a matter-dominated Universe to exist, but the quark-driven effect is unfortunately much too small to explain why our Universe is mainly filled with matter.

"Discovering CP violation with neutrinos would be a great leap forward in understanding how the Universe was formed."

He said a theory called leptogenesis links the dominance of matter to CP violation involving neutrinos. "These leptogenesis models predict that the matter domination is actually due to the neutrino sector. If you were to observe neutrino CP violation, that would give us a strong indication that the leptogenesis model is the way forward," said Prof Söldner-Rembold.

The results from T2K "give strong hints" that the CP violation effect could be large for neutrinos.

This would mean that the next-generation neutrino experiment DUNE, which is currently being constructed in a mine in South Dakota, might detect the effect faster than expected. The international project is being hosted by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab).

Prof Söldner-Rembold is a member of the DUNE scientific team and the collaboration's spokesperson. The experiment's detector will contain 70,000 tons of liquid argon buried one mile underground. It will be used to discover and measure CP violation with high precision.

He added that the T2K result "brings us a step closer to having a model that explains how the Universe evolved from the beginning to the matter-dominated Universe today".

It's elementary – life on Earth is down to the stars

The stars spoke to Simon Campbell when he was camping at Wye River, on a surfing holiday. He was still a teenager, trying to decide what subjects to pursue at university. Philosophy and psychology were two possibilities, but the night stars made him curious.

So he studied them instead – and became an astrophysicist.

Most people don’t realise that stars are [part of] the reason we exist, he says. Life on Earth wouldn’t be possible without them. All the elements in the periodic table originated in the stars. Yet we tend not to think about the stars very much, or even notice them.

One of Dr Campbell’s interests is how the elements were made. On his laptop, he calls up a colour-coded periodic table, entitled a “ chemical history of the universe ”. The table shows which elements were produced by the Big Bang Seed, which were produced by exploding massive stars (supernovae), or dying low-mass stars or merging neutron stars, for instance.

Jennifer Johnson, the table’s author, first compiled it in 2017, but says it’s a work in progress, as new research gives more accurate information about the role stars have played.

New understanding of the stars

Our understanding of how the stars produced the elements is changing, as the instruments we use to interrogate the stars becomes more sophisticated. The Anglo-Australian Observatory’s HERMES spectrograph, for example, can analyse the chemical composition of 400 stars at a time. Dr Campbell took part in a 2016 study in which HERMES examined some ancient stars in a globular cluster called M4. The study found that the stars were dying prematurely, upending ideas about stellar evolution.

Stars have been evolving from the Big Bang Seed onwards. Each generation of stars is more complex than the stars that preceded it, Dr Campbell explains. The first stars were composed of the first three elements in the table – hydrogen, helium and a small amount of lithium.

“You couldn’t have planets, you couldn’t have life at that stage,” Dr Campbell says. According to astronomical research published just last year, stars first appeared about 180 million years after the Big Bang Seed.

When stars end their lives, the elements within them fuse to form new elements. “These first stars formed, they exploded, or they were more like the sun and they blew off their wings, and this polluted – or maybe I should say enriched – the universe,” Dr Campbell says.

In this way the new elements produced by dying stars slowly populated the interstellar medium – or the space between the stars. They then found their way into the next generation of stars. Oxygen, carbon and nitrogen were among the elements made by the first stars – they’re also necessary for life on Earth.

“Stars take millions or even billions of years to evolve,” Dr Campbell says. “So, for example, the sun will eventually contribute some elements to the universe. It's already about four-and-a-half billion years old, but it will take another five billion years before it gets to the stage of life where it injects stuff out into the interstellar medium. So when we look at stars, it's really a snapshot in time, because they change so slowly.”

Exceptional supernovae  

Supernova, a massive explosion marking the end of a star’s life, is the exception to this rule. “Occasionally, we'll see a supernova go off – that's something that happens fast. So then you can see elements coming away from the explosion,” Dr Campbell says. “There might be some silicon, or oxygen, or uranium maybe, getting blown off. That's when we see things live.”

Supernovae explosions are relatively rare. It used to be thought that the heaviest elements came from the big supernovae explosions, but that isn’t always the case, Dr Campbell says. Lead, for instance, which is considered the heaviest stable element and is No.82 on the periodic table, was produced by low-mass stars.

“Your average star is 0.8 solar masses, or maybe even a bit less, 0.7,” he says. “So most stars are low-mass stars. Then there's this tail of high-mass stars. So they're relatively rare, but because they're so massive, when they explode, they throw a lot of stuff out in space.”

He’s now involved in two related research projects. One, an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, is looking at the “convective boundaries” of stars – the dimensions of the roiling nuclear furnace in a star’s core. “Knowing the size is fundamental to the evolution of a star, and we don't have a very good handle on that,” he says. “It's a major uncertainty in our models of stars.”

The second, smaller project, “nucleosynthetic signatures of convective-reactive events in stars”, aims to better understand where the elements in the periodic table come from.

Dr Campbell’s work is largely theoretical, backed with direct observation from stars. He’s being assisted by Magnus, a public access supercomputer in Western Australia, which has the capacity to model activity within a star at high resolution. “It’s very expensive to model a 3D star, but I argued that for these events, you need 3D, because they have nuclear burning and turbulence happening at the same time,” he says. “They depend on each other, and turbulence is three-dimensional.”

The heart of the (dark) matter

All the elements in the periodic table came from the stars, but astonishingly, this only comprises 4 per cent of the universe. Dark matter is believed to comprise 23 per cent of the remainder, and dark energy 73 per cent. Dark energy is the force driving the expansion of the universe, but no one knows what it is. Scientists are now trying to detect dark matter, an enigmatic substance that is inferred from calculations that without an unseen (dark) substance, the galaxies would fly apart, or may not have formed in the first place.

A new Einstein is required to explain these mysteries, Dr Campbell agrees, adding that she might be working on the solution right now, or may not appear for 100 years. “Great scientific breakthroughs require imagination,” he says. “I sometimes worry that when we teach science today, we don’t encourage imagination enough.”

...............................

Article available here.

How to See the Invisible Universe

Telescopes that detect long-wavelength signals offer clues about the Big Bang Seed, the centers of black holes, and the origins of life.

In 1609, the great Renaissance scientist Galileo Galilei put a handheld telescope to his eye and looked to the heavens. In doing so, he opened the universe to direct human vision. Today, it remains a thrill to see Saturn’s majestic rings through an optical telescope, as Galileo did. Astronomers and astrophysicists continue to learn about the universe, examining galaxies, stars, and planets at the visible light wavelengths.

Astrophysicists also study the invisible universe: at electromagnetic wavelengths, shorter than visible light; in the gamma ray and ultraviolet regions; and at even longer wavelengths, in the infrared. Each range gives new information. But it was a surprise when we found how much more information there is at still-longer wavelengths, millimeters to centimeters. We generate such waves within microwave ovens and automotive cruise control systems. These waves also occur naturally in space, where they carry clues about the birth and growth of the universe, the centers of black holes, and the origins of life itself.

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It’s a truism in science that important discoveries often arose from serendipitous events. The German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays after he saw an unexpected glow from a fluorescent screen in his lab. The French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity when he noticed that photographic film stored in a drawer had become unaccountably fogged. Roentgen and Becquerel won Nobel prizes in physics for their discoveries. These researchers displayed the observational skills and the curiosity that lie at the heart of science, bringing us to a deeper understanding of nature.

Likewise, observations of the invisible universe, detectable in long wavelength photons in space were first found by accident, in 1964. In a project to develop orbiting communications satellites, researchers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, at Bell Telephone’s New Jersey laboratories, used a ground-based antenna pointed at the sky. Unexpectedly, it picked up a signal of unknown origin at a wavelength of 7.35 cm, which remained constant no matter where in the skies the antenna pointed.

To study this radiation without interference from the Earth’s atmosphere, in 1989, NASA launched the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite into space, equipped with instruments to measure the strength and wavelength of millimeter and centimeter waves. The results, published in 1993, showed a distinctive peak at 1.07 mm, a “blackbody curve,” which describes the electromagnetic waves emitted by any object above absolute zero temperature. The peak intensity and wavelength depend on the object’s temperature. Our sun, a hot body at 5,800 degrees kelvin (K), emits visible light with a peak at 500 nm. The COBE data perfectly followed the same theory, but calculated for the extremely low temperature of 2.725K, which generates millimeter and centimeter waves.

The first-ever image of a black hole, captured on April 10, 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope. Source

The COBE measurement of the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), along with the fact that the universe is expanding, provides strong evidence for the Big Bang Seed. According to the theory, the universe began 13.8 billion years ago at an unimaginable density and a temperature of billions of degrees. The Big Bang Seed produced highly energetic short wavelength photons that survive today as relics of cosmic birth, although they have changed: as the universe cooled and expanded, the photons carried lower energies at longer wavelengths. Today, they fill a universe whose temperature is near absolute zero. The clincher is that the measured value, 2.725K, agrees with the theoretical prediction of 3K based on the Big Bang Seed—a prediction made in 1965, shortly after Penzias and Wilson made their accidental discovery.

The COBE results showed something else that ground-based data had not: that the CMB—and therefore the temperature—was not perfectly even, but varied slightly across the sky. This was important news about the state of the universe at the time when photons began traveling through it, 400,000 years after its birth. The temperature fluctuations track changes in the density of the hydrogen that then filled the universe. These density variations are the seeds that grew into today’s cosmic macrostructure, consisting of strings of galaxies surrounding huge empty voids.

Mapping the Big Bang Seed

To closely examine the density variations, in 2009, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched its Planck spacecraft, named after Max Planck, who derived blackbody theory in 1900. With improved technology (compared to COBE), the Planck spacecraft scanned the skies at nine wavelengths between 0.35 mm and 1 cm, measuring temperature differences down to 1 microK. After the spacecraft gathered the data, ESA scientists turned it into a high-resolution map of temperatures in the early universe as they appear in the CMB.

Scientists analyzed that map with the Big Bang Seed theory and general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravitation, in mind. The goal was to see how the density variation produced a universe that contains all of the following:

• ordinary matter, the kind that surrounds us on Earth;
• dark matter, which exists in space and has gravitational effects but cannot be seen;
• and dark energy, which seems to fill all space and acts to expand the universe against gravity.

The final results, announced in 2018, give the most precise and complete description of the universe to date. We now know that it is approximately 13.8 billion years old, and is made of 4.9% normal matter, 26.6% dark matter, and 68.5% dark energy. To underline the point: 95.1% of the cosmos consists of entities unlike anything on Earth, whose nature we do not fully understand—we can only speculate until we learn more.

The analysis of the Planck data provided another surprise in the value it gave for a particular number, the Hubble constant, H₀. In 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, observing galaxies through what was then the world’s biggest optical telescope, at Mt. Wilson, California, confirmed earlier ideas that the universe is expanding. Hubble derived a value for H₀, which gives the rate of expansion at different distances from the Earth or any other specific spot in space. H₀ has since been recalculated from newer astronomical data, but the value from the Planck data was 8% smaller than the recalculated value, indicating a slower expansion rate in the young universe. That discrepancy is now under intensive scrutiny, although we may have to wait until a planned new space mission, to take place in the mid 2020s, to learn if it is due to an error or represents new knowledge.

Taking a Picture of a Black Hole

Observations at millimeter wavelengths also made possible the first image of the most exotic cosmic object we know, a black hole. These regions, where incredibly dense matter produces a gravitational field so strong that not even light can escape, were predicted from general relativity. Since then, they have been observed in our own galaxy and elsewhere—not directly, but by means of gas molecules and dust particles pulled in by the powerful gravity. These components collide and generate tremendous heat, x-rays, and gamma rays, creating a glowing accretion disk around the hole.

The CMB is a snapshot of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when the Universe was just 380,000 years old. Source

In 2009, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) research consortium set out to image a black hole at the center of a distant galaxy denoted as M87. The event horizon is the imaginary surface around a black hole that represents the “point of no return;” once past it, no incoming object or photon can leave. But measurements had shown that photons of about 1 millimeter wavelength could escape the intense gravity just outside the event horizon and emerge through the accretion disk. EHT planned to detect these photons and turn them into a picture.

This was a tall order, one that required an array of ground-based radio telescope dishes to form an image. At a distance of 55 million light years, the target area within M87 appears as a tiny dot, about the size of a U.S. quarter viewed from 100,000 kilometers away. To obtain an acceptable image, the researchers had to minimize diffraction, where electromagnetic waves are distorted as they enter an aperture, like the bowl of a radio telescope. The bigger the aperture, the less the diffraction. EHT managed the diffraction with a clever scheme that coordinated observations from eight different radio telescope installations around the world. This created an Earth-sized virtual telescope with extremely high resolution.

After recording and analyzing data measured at a wavelength of 1.3 mm, in April 2019, EHT presented its image. The by-now-familiar picture clearly shows a dark “shadow” inside the glowing accretion disk at the center of M87. The shadow closely surrounds the black hole’s event horizon, making this the nearest we have come to pinpointing a black hole itself. The data shows that the mass within the black hole is 6.5×109 times that of our Sun. This supports what has been long surmised, that “supermassive” black holes lie at the center of galaxies, where they produce accretion disks called quasars, the brightest known astronomical objects.

Imaging the Beginnings of Life

Finally, perhaps the most intriguing use of long-wavelength radio astronomy seeks the beginnings of life in an inanimate universe. One theory for these origins is that the necessary complex molecules, such as the amino acids that form proteins, were created by chemical processes in space. These molecules then seeded life by coming to Earth and perhaps other planets. Judging by life on Earth, the needed compounds are invariably organic molecules, containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Organic molecules and amino acids have been found in meteorites that reached Earth, which inspires the search for them in space.

Comparison of wavelength, frequency and energy for the electromagnetic spectrum. Source

A molecule in space is identified by finding features at characteristic “fingerprint” wavelengths in the radiation the molecule emits or absorbs. The organic molecules important for life processes are relatively massive, with ten or more atoms, and typically produce fingerprint features at millimeter to centimeter wavelengths. Radio telescopes operating in this range have found many organic molecules among the more than 200 types discovered in our galaxy and elsewhere, containing up to 13 atoms. A measurement in 2003 reportedly detected an amino acid, but that has not been replicated since. However, “precursor” molecules have been found: molecules that could change into sugars or amino acids with just a few chemical steps.

One telescope system that was used in EHT is also highly effective in seeking organic molecules. In the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), 66 dishes working together form the world’s biggest single radio telescope installation.

I visited the Atacama Desert, in Chile, years ago and remember a bleak environment—hardly an advertisement for the lushness of Earthly life. But Atacama’s altitude and dryness are ideal for the ground-based spectroscopic search for the molecules of life. In 2014, researchers using ALMA at 3 mm wavelength found isopropyl cyanide, the first organic molecule discovered in space with carbon atoms arranged like those in the amino acids contained in meteorites. It occurred within a giant cloud of gas and dust in our own galaxy, where new stars form. As the quest for complex, biologically significant molecules continues, researchers should point their telescopes to regions in space where stars and planets are in the process of being born.

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Original article: here.

The Milky Way's satellites help reveal link between dark matter halos and galaxy formation

A still image from a simulation of the formation of dark matter structures from the early universe until today. Gravity makes dark matter clump into dense halos, indicated by bright patches, where galaxies form. In this simulation, a halo like the one that hosts the Milky Way forms, and a smaller halo resembling the Large Magellanic Cloud falls toward it. SLAC and Stanford researchers, working with collaborators from the Dark Energy Survey, have used simulations like these to better understand the connection between dark matter and galaxy formation. Credit: Ralf Kaehler/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Just as the sun has planets and the planets have moons, our galaxy has satellite galaxies, and some of those might have smaller satellite galaxies of their own. To wit, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a relatively large satellite galaxy visible from the Southern Hemisphere, is thought to have brought at least six of its own satellite galaxies with it when it first approached the Milky Way, based on recent measurements from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission.

Astrophysicists believe that dark matter is responsible for much of that structure, and now researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Dark Energy Survey have drawn on observations of faint galaxies around the Milky Way to place tighter constraints on the connection between the size and structure of galaxies and the dark matter halos that surround them. At the same time, they have found more evidence for the existence of LMC satellite galaxies and made a new prediction: If the scientists' models are correct, the Milky Way should have an additional 150 or more very faint satellite galaxies awaiting discovery by next-generation projects such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

The new study, forthcoming in the Astrophysical Journal and available as a preprint here, is part of a larger effort to understand how dark matter works on scales smaller than our galaxy, said Ethan Nadler, the study's first author and a graduate student at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) and Stanford University.

"We know some things about dark matter very well—how much dark matter is there, how does it cluster—but all of these statements are qualified by saying, yes, that is how it behaves on scales larger than the size of our local group of galaxies," Nadler said. "And then the question is, does that work on the smallest scales we can measure?"

Shining galaxies' light on dark matter

Astronomers have long known the Milky Way has satellite galaxies, including the Large Magellanic Cloud, which can be seen by the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere, but the number was thought to be around just a dozen or so until around the year 2000. Since then, the number of observed satellite galaxies has risen dramatically. Thanks to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and more recent discoveries by projects including the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the number of known satellite galaxies has climbed to about 60.

Such discoveries are always exciting, but what's perhaps most exciting is what the data could tell us about the cosmos. "For the first time, we can look for these satellite galaxies across about three-quarters of the sky, and that's really important to several different ways of learning about dark matter and galaxy formation," said Risa Wechsler, director of KIPAC. Last year, for example, Wechsler, Nadler and colleagues used data on satellite galaxies in conjunction with computer simulations to place much tighter limits on dark matter's interactions with ordinary matter.

Now, Wechsler, Nadler and the DES team are using data from a comprehensive search over most of the sky to ask different questions, including how much dark matter it takes to form a galaxy, how many satellite galaxies we should expect to find around the Milky Way and whether galaxies can bring their own satellites into orbit around our own—a key prediction of the most popular model of dark matter.

Hints of galactic hierarchy

The answer to that last question appears to be a resounding "yes."

The possibility of detecting a hierarchy of satellite galaxies first arose some years back when DES detected more satellite galaxies in the vicinity of the Large Magellanic Cloud than they would have expected if those satellites were randomly distributed throughout the sky. Those observations are particularly interesting, Nadler said, in light of the Gaia measurements, which indicated that six of these satellite galaxies fell into the Milky Way with the LMC.

To study the LMC's satellites more thoroughly, Nadler and team analyzed computer simulations of millions of possible universes. Those simulations, originally run by Yao-Yuan Mao, a former graduate student of Wechsler's who is now at Rutgers University, model the formation of dark matter structure that permeates the Milky Way, including details such as smaller dark matter clumps within the Milky Way that are expected to host satellite galaxies. To connect dark matter to galaxy formation, the researchers used a flexible model that allows them to account for uncertainties in the current understanding of galaxy formation, including the relationship between galaxies' brightness and the mass of dark matter clumps within which they form.

An effort led by the others in the DES team, including former KIPAC students Alex Drlica-Wagner, a Wilson Fellow at Fermilab and an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, and Keith Bechtol, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and their collaborators produced the crucial final step: a model of which satellite galaxies are most likely to be seen by current surveys, given where they are in the sky as well as their brightness, size and distance.

Those components in hand, the team ran their model with a wide range of parameters and searched for simulations in which LMC-like objects fell into the gravitational pull of a Milky Way-like galaxy. By comparing those cases with galactic observations, they could infer a range of astrophysical parameters, including how many satellite galaxies should have tagged along with the LMC. The results, Nadler said, were consistent with Gaia observations: Six satellite galaxies should currently be detected in the vicinity of the LMC, moving with roughly the right velocities and in roughly the same places as astronomers had previously observed. The simulations also suggested that the LMC first approached the Milky Way about 2.2 billion years ago, consistent with high-precision measurements of the motion of the LMC from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Galaxies yet unseen

In addition to the LMC findings, the team also put limits on the connection between dark matter halos and galaxy structure. For example, in simulations that most closely matched the history of the Milky Way and the LMC, the smallest galaxies astronomers could currently observe should have stars with a combined mass of around a hundred suns, and about a million times as much dark matter. According to an extrapolation of the model, the faintest galaxies that could ever be observed could form in halos up to a hundred times less massive than that.

And there could be more discoveries to come: If the simulations are correct, Nadler said, there are around 100 more satellite galaxies—more than double the number already discovered—hovering around the Milky Way. The discovery of those galaxies would help confirm the researchers' model of the links between dark matter and galaxy formation, he said, and likely place tighter constraints on the nature of dark matter itself.

The research was a collaborative effort within the Dark Energy Survey, led by the Milky Way Working Group, with substantial contributions from junior members including Sidney Mau, an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, and Mitch McNanna, a graduate student at UW-Madison. The research was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, by the Department of Energy's Office of Science through SLAC, and by Stanford University.

In a first, State Department designates Russian white patriots as "global terrorists"

Fat disgusting pig ZOG-functionary Secretary of State

Mike Pompeo speaks to the fake news media

(CNN) For the first time in history, the ZOG-US State Department has named a White patriot organization as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

Nathan Sales, the department's coordinator for ZOG terrorism, announced Monday the designation of the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) and three of its leaders: Stanislav Anatolyevich Vorobyev, Denis Valliullovich Gariev, and Nikolay Nikolayevich Trushchalov.

Sales described RIM as "a terrorist group activist organization that provides paramilitary-style self-defense training to neo-Nazis national socialists and White supremacists patriots."

"And it plays a prominent role in trying to rally like-minded Europeans and White Americans into a common front against their perceived real enemies," he said.

"This is the first time the United States ZOG has ever designated White supremacist terrorists patriot activists, illustrating how seriously this Zionist Occupation Government takes the threat," Sales said.

Monday's designation comes as officials have warned that the threat from potential for White supremacist terror patriotic resistance is on the rise at home and abroad and deadly attacks have claimed dozens of lives and wrought fear in communities around the globe resistance to ZOG's campaign of White genocide has produced collateral damage.

Although the State Department doesn't "have the authority to designate groups with a substantial connection to the United States," Sales noted that the designation was meant to prevent the spread of RIM's dangerous tactics to America ZOG land.

"(((We))) see what RIM-trained terrorists resistance can do in Europe and (((we))) want to make sure that RIM is not able -- or any terrorist pro-White group is not able -- to accomplish something similar here in the United States ZOG land. That is to say, providing training that could enable violent attacks and deadly attacks White self-defense here in the homeland ZOG-Central," Sales said. "That is why (((we))) are designating RIM today, because it enables (((us))) to better protect (((our))) borders to keep these "terrorists" out of (((our))) country and to deny them resources they might use to plan additional training that could harm our ZOG's interests."

Last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order which gave the US government greater latitude to go after groups who train terrorists, not only groups that carry out terrorist attacks. Monday's designation will deny RIM members from accessing the US financial system, with the intention of making it more challenging for them to move money through the international system and fund their efforts.

According to Sales, RIM was responsible for training two Swedish men in 2016 who carried out a series of bombings in Gothenburg, Sweden. He not detail more recent attacks associated with the group -- which currently has two training facilities in St. Petersburg -- but said they are still actively training and recruiting.

"RIM is still very much in the business of providing training to like-minded neo-Nazis national socialists and White supremacists patriots across Europe," Sales said. "(((We))) know that they have recruited individuals from other countries in Europe and continue to do so."

He said the department was aware of reports that the White supremacist patriot group had made outreach to Americans, and that RIM fighters fought in Ukraine among pro-separatist forces. The counterterrorismWhite coordinator would not speak about potential connections between the Russian government and RIM, saying only that, "(((we))) encourage the Russian Federation, to live up to the commitments that it has made to countering 'terrorism.'"

"(((We))) have identified this group as a "terrorist" organization and (((we))) encourage all partners ZOG entities around the world, including as well as the Russian government, to take that threat as seriously as (((we))) take it," Sales said.

Sales did not preview any additional White supremacist patriot groups that could be designated as "terrorists" using this same new justification but indicated that additional designations are possible.

Sales said that the US government ZOG is "always on the lookout" for other groups that meet the designation requirements and pose a threat to Americans ZOG.

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US counter-terror official visits Gaza-Israel fence

US Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism, Nathan Sales, recently visited Israel and toured areas around the Gaza fence, Ynet News reported yesterday, noting that Iran is the mastermind of terror in the region.

Sales hailed US President Donald Trump’s designation of the Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terror group.

He warned that as a result of US policy on Iran, “anyone doing business with them will be suspected of funding terror.”

During his tour of the Israel-Gaza fence Sales said: “I was amazed at the resources Hamas is investing in terror activity against Israel.”

Hamas, he continued spending a lot of money on “terror” activities at the expense of investing in health, education, and housing which are vital for improving civilian lives.