With a flawlessly symmetrical ring encircling a red sphere of stars, Hoag’s object is one of the most stunning mysteries in the universe.

If you look closely at the serpent constellation in the northern sky, you might notice a galaxy within a galaxy within a galaxy.

This cosmic turducken is known as Hoag’s object, and it has baffled astronomers since astronomer Arthur Hoag found it in 1950.

The object under consideration is a one-of-a-kind, ring-shaped galaxy 100,000 light-years across (slightly larger than the Milky Way) and 600 million light-years away from Earth.

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While walking and talking with a friend who was a mechanical engineer, he asked me, what is science? Great question, which eventually led us to talking about what is lacking in today’s science. I proposed that when an astronomer looks at a beautiful nebula, the first question should be, what is the function of that?

View the video here.

Watch the video here.

The ripples in space-time generated by colliding black holes have taught us a lot aboυt these enigmatic objects.
These gravitational waves encode information about black holes: their masses, the shape of their inward spiral towards each other, their spins, and their orientations.
From this, scientists ascertained that most of the collisions we’ve seen have been between black holes in binary systems. The two black holes started as a binary of massive stars that tυrned into black holes together, then spiraled in and merged.
Of the 90 or so mergers detected so far, however, one stands out as very pecυliar. Detected in May 2019, GW19052 emitted space-time ripples like no other.

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The rotation of Earth’s inner core may have paused and it could even go into reverse, new research suggests.

The Earth is formed of the crust, the mantle and the inner and outer cores. The solid inner core is situated about 3,200 miles below the Earth’s crust and is separated from the semi-solid mantle by the liquid outer core, which allows the inner core to rotate at a different speed from the rotation of the Earth itself.

With a radius of almost 2,200 miles, Earth’s core is about the size of Mars. It consists mostly of iron and nickel, and contains about about one-third of Earth’s mass.

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Not everyone agrees with what this article says. Here are some comments and links from Cosolargy member, Dr. Stephan Fuelling (physicist).

Very interesting! I also read that the Earth’s spin slowed down but very, very little. It could be that these two events are coupled together. If that happened 70 years ago, we didn’t have the technology back then to notice it.

I hope the following will never happen with Earth:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU

I think that the mass distribution of the Earth is not uniform enough for this to happen. But here is someone who modeled it with an Earth model with exaggerated difference in the mass distribution. And it flips maybe every 100 days. So obviously this doesn’t happen. I am not sure if our Moon stabilizes the Earth so that this doesn’t happen.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J-l-SbCFhL0

Here is an answer that I found on Quora:

“ No, the conditions for this effect simply don’t apply. Rotations around the first and third principal axis are stable. Now, I am not sure whether Earth’s axis of rotation will count as the “first” or “third” principal axis; I’ll leave it for you to investigate the details. But the point is, rotation around one of them results in the largest moment of inertia, and rotation around the other one results in the smallest moment of inertia – and both of these are stable.

Since Earth is squashed at the poles, its actual rotation is such that the moment of inertia is largest.”

And on Research Gate I found this (see attached). The are some ancient references to the sun rising in the west!

 

Astronomers might have solved the mystery behind an unusually brightening star.

University of Washington doctoral student Anastasios Tzanidakis and research assistant professor of astronomy James Davenport were searching for “stars behaving strangely” when they received an alert about a potential stellar oddity from the Gaia spacecraft.

The space observatory, launched by the European Space Agency in 2013, is on a mission to create the most precise 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy to date. The astronomers focused on Gaia17bpp, a star that had gradually increased in luminosity over a 2.5-year period.

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Link submitted by Gene Savoy Jr.

Black holes are the cosmic gluttons, consuming anything that approaches too closely, even light.  Now, a team of worldwide researchers has identified a supermassive black hole that devours the mass of one Earth every second.

By observing other light objects billions of years old, the scientists determined that the newly found behemoth was the brightest and fastest-growing supermassive black hole of the previous nine billion years (that we know of).

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Some regions near the moon’s poles never see sunlight. They are permanently in shadow. It’s been difficult – so far – to glimpse anything inside them. But they’re known to contain water ice, and so might be valuable for our human exploration of the moon and beyond. And now NASA’s ShadowCam instrument, on South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter, has sent back its 1st image of one of these permanently shadowed regions on the moon.

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Do you want to see a star cluster? Then just look for nighttime’s brightest star, Sirius, in the constellation Canis Major the Greater Dog. A lovely star cluster – called Messier 41 or M41 – lies near Sirius. If you can’t see the star cluster, it’s probably because your sky isn’t dark enough. So try aiming your binoculars at bright Sirius. You might glimpse the little star cluster in the same binocular field.

Sirius is easy to spot. It’s bright, brighter than any other star you’ll see in the evening sky now. You can be sure you’re looking at Sirius if Orion’s Belt – three stars in a short, straight row in the constellation Orion the Hunter – are pointing to it.

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How is it that depictions of the Anunnaki from thousands of years ago show the gods holding a perplexing bag? In contrast, depictions from ancient Mesoamerican cultures halfway around the planet reveal the same thing. The enigmatic “handbag” of the Gods, as depicted by the prehistoric Sumerian images of the Anunnaki, is visible in a number of ancient American civilizations and even at the world’s oldest megalithic structure – Göbekli Tepe. Can this be a coincidence?

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link submitted by Harold Boulette