A huge invisible mass could be the reason the Milky Way’s disk is warped and twisted.
A new study shows that a tilted, misaligned dark halo – the large blob of dark matter that wraps around and permeates our home galaxy – is the only explanation to date that explains all the features of the shape of the Milky Way.
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A new measurement of the Universe has confirmed dark energy makes up close to 69 percent of the sum of everything.
That leaves the remaining 31 percent to matter; both of the normal variety – that’s the particles and forces making up everything we can see – and dark matter, the mysterious gravitational poltergeist responsible for movements and effects that can’t currently be explained any other way.
The James Webb Space Telescope has measured the expansion rate of the Universe, and the results are not great news for the biggest crisis in cosmology.
The finding is in agreement with measurements made by the Hubble Space Telescope. This means that there’s no error in the Hubble data, and we’re still at an impasse.
“My heart has been pruned and its flower has appeared, and so goodness has sprouted up in it, and my heart has borne fruit for the Lord.
“For the Most High had pruned around me through His Holy Spirit, and so laid open toward Him my innermost being, and so filled me with His deep affection.
“And so His pruning around me became my salvation; and I made my way quickly in His peace, along the Way of True Realization.
“From the beginning to the end, I received His knowledge,
and I was established solidly on the rock of True Reality, the solid rock where He had set me up;
“and speaking waters touched my lips from the spring of the Lord, which does not hold back,
and I drank and became drunk from the Living Water That Does Not Die.
“And my drunkenness was not the kind that does not lead to knowledge. Did I not leave behind useless things?
And I turned back toward the Most High, my God, and I was made rich by His gift of goodness.
“And I left behind the foolishness that is broadcast upon the Earth, and then I took it off and cast it away from me.
And the Lord renewed me with His raiment, and so acquired me with His Light;
“and from above He revived me with what cannot be corrupted, and so I became like a land that blossoms and laughs in its fruits,
and the Lord became like the Sun upon the face of the land.
“My eyes lit up, and my countenance collected the dew,
and my breath laughed with the sweet fragrance of the Lord.
“And He led me away into His paradise, where is the wealth of the Lord’s delight.
And I revered the Lord because of His glorious radiance.
And I said, “They are good, O Lord, are they not, those who are planted in Your land, and have a place in Your paradise,
and who sprout up in Your trees’ sprouting growth, and have transformed from Darkness to Light?
“See, all Your laborers are beautiful, they who work good works, and turn away from what is useless toward Your sweetness.
“And by themselves the trees have changed from bitterness, once they were planted in Your land;
and they all exist as a remnant of You, and an eternal remembrance of Your faithful servants.
“How great is the space in Your paradise! And what place in it lies idle? Is it not all filled with fruit?
“Radiant splendor is Yours, O God, the everlasting delight of paradise!”
Hallelujah
-From the Forgotten Books of Eden, Translation by RF Robert Petrovich
The Odes of Solomon describe one person’s journey of Spiritual Enlightenment. Like most scripture and other books of such information, it is written in mostly allegorical language. A real spiritual student will make sense of the allegories, whereas most others will not. Here, the writer is not talking about a literal pruning, nor about the physical heart. He is talking about a cleansing of the soul and mind, removing anger, jealousy, and all other negativity, leaving behind, love, tolerance, peace, and humility. God does this, the quote says, through His Holy Spirit, Which is another way of saying through His Light and Knowledge that is sent to us through Divine Light.
When you have received God’s gift of Knowledge, the kind of true Knowledge that the Gnostics call Gnosis, you are on an allegorical Rock of Reality because you know that this knowledge is real, true, with no opinions, speculations, or theories. It’s Truth in its purest form. It reveals the true Reality of Heaven and Earth to us.
This allegory refers to the Divine Light that “flows” to us from God through the intermediary of the sun. The Fountain of Youth is another reference to this Light.
A person who becomes spiritually enlightened is like a land of blossoming flowers. We blossom with love, peace, and joy when we are enlightened. Like some rare flowers, we may take many years to blossom, but the effort required is worth it.
Again we see God being described with words that relate to Light because Light is the true face of God, the true image of God. We were once beings of Light also and we can become such beings again.
The ode says that Paradise is a great space, which it is because it is unlimited by space and time being spirit, not matter. It adds that it is filled with fruit and no part of it is idle. Heaven is not a place of idleness, but one of motion, and the “fruit” found there is the souls of those who have achieved complete enlightenment, awakened their Christ Consciousness, and now dwell in Heaven with God and the Angels.
Galaxies come in many shapes and sizes, from giant, slowly rotating ovals and fast-whirling spiral disks to faint ball-shaped blobs and dwarf irregulars. Most large, bright galaxies — including our own Milky Way — are orbited by a gang of much smaller dwarf galaxies.
Most of this we know from optical images, whether taken with small backyard telescopes or much bigger dedicated ground- and space-based telescopes that reveal the light from billions of distant suns. However, as we are discovering, what happens beyond the bright disk of stars may be even more interesting.
Did the James Webb Space Telescope spot signs of life on a distant planet? On September 11, 2023, NASA announced that Webb made some exciting discoveries while observing an exoplanet called K2-18 b. They said the planet has methane and carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, which indicates it might be a Hycean world, one with a deep hydrogen atmosphere and global water ocean. But the extraordinary news is that Webb found hints of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). On Earth, only life produces dimethyl sulfide, such as bacteria and phytoplankton in oceans.
“Here we are on the verge of that great self-merging act which is the essence of pure love: which Reality has sought of us, and we have unknowingly desired of it. Here contemplation and union are one. ‘Thus do we grow,’ says Ruysbroeck, ‘and, carried above ourselves, above reason, into the very heart of love, there do we feed according to the Spirit, and taking flight for the Godhead by naked love, we go to the encounter of the Bridegroom, to the encounter of His Spirit, which is His Love; and thus we are brought forth by God, out of our selfhood, into the immersion of love, in which we possess blessedness and are one with God.’
“The beginning of this process of introversion, will not merely be the yielding to an instinct; it will be a voluntary and purposeful undertaking. Like conversion, it entails a break with the obvious, which must, of necessity, involve and affect the whole normal consciousness. It will be evoked by the mystic’s love, and directed by his reason, but can only be accomplished by the strenuous exercise of his will. … There must be a deliberate act of attention, a deliberate expelling of all discordant images from the consciousness.”
-Evelyn Underhill
Self-Merging is something that happens on two levels. First, there is the personal self-merging in which your individual body, mind, and spirit merge into a fully integrated being. Second, is the Self-Merging with God and the All. Both are part of what Ms. Underhill is describing.
It should be understood that contemplation doesn’t mean basic forms of meditation that so many practice today without getting any significant spiritual development from it. Contemplation here means more like thinking about what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve when you practice spiritual development techniques. That could mean anything from concentrating on sending light to your weakest energy centers to thinking about the ultimate goal of self-merging with God.
The idea that if you just wait around for it, spiritual enlightenment will come to you eventually. That’s like relying on a big lottery win to provide your retirement income. You can buy a lottery ticket and hope for the best, but you don’t rely on that money for anything. So the best way to grow spiritually is to voluntarily and purposefully practice spiritual development techniques. Why voluntarily? Because if someone is forcing you to do it, you won’t have the right mental attitude and you will accomplish very little. Underhill says it is accomplished by “strenuous exercise of his will,” but I don’t think that is all there is to it. You do have to use your will, but also your intuition. And you have to practice with love and humility.
Ms. Underhill also says we need to expel discordant images to gain that state of self-merging. That might work, but is not so easy to do. It’s like the old story of telling people to close their eyes and don’t think about an elephant. The first thing that pops into their head when someone says that is an image of an elephant. A better approach is to try and put a better image into your mind, such as our Community Cross. That is why you learn in the basic techniques to form the image of the cross around and over the sun.
This striking image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures the interacting galaxy pair known as Arp-Madore 2339-661. The Arp-Madore catalog is a collection of peculiar galaxies, and this group’s particular peculiarity might be odder than first meets the eye, as there are three galaxies interacting here, not just two.
The two clearly defined galaxies are NGC 7733 (smaller, lower right) and NGC 7734 (larger, upper left). The third galaxy is currently referred to as NGC 7733N and is visible if you look carefully at the upper arm of NGC 7733.
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Imagine you could go back in time 4.6 billion years and take a picture of our Sun just as it was being born. What would it look like?
Well, you can get a clue from this glorious new image acquired by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Towards the centre of this object, called HH212, is a star coming into existence that is probably no more than 50,000 years old.
The scene would have looked much the same when our Sun was a similar age.
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Link contributed by Gene Savoy, Jr.