And…it’s literally six seconds of pixelated blob. But before you laugh, know this: Capturing that planetary transit you just witnessed was no easy task.
You’re looking at Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant ten to twelve times the mass of Jupiter that orbits a star over 60 light years away. That’s 3.527 × 1014 miles from us, and we’re actually able to see it! If you’re still not impressed, try this on for size: Beta Pictoris b is roughly a million times dimmer than its parent star.
The dimensionless aspect, since it has no dimensions, is outside of space and time. This is the key aspect to existence: an aspect outside of space and time perpetually interacting dialectically with an aspect inside space and time. All of the weird and wonderful phenomena of the universe are the products of this ultimate dichotomy.
Does this sound crazy? Then consider the evidence provided by black holes.
The R = 0 Universe.
Black holes are objects where gravity is so strong that light itself cannot escape the gravitational pull. They are the most mysterious objects in the universe and hold the key to the nature of reality. They open the door to understanding the fundamental composition of the universe.
Their hypothetical existence was first predicted in Einstein’s famous theory of General Relativity, but Einstein himself believed it was impossible for them to become real objects in the universe. The reason for that is that they exhibit a feature that physics cannot cope with or comprehend.
Einstein’s equations contain a term that involves dividing the mass of the black hole by the distance “r” from the black hole. The question is what happens when r=0? Division by zero gives a result of infinity. To physicists, it is impossible for infinity to appear in the real world, so they consider r = 0 to be the point at which physics breaks down. At r = 0, the centre of a black hole, gravity is infinite and time itself stops: all of the mass of the black hole is contained within an infinitely small point where the concept of space no longer makes any sense. The point takes up precisely no space at all. Since this point is outside space and time, it is dimensionless. The physical universe collapses into an ineffable twilight state at this point. This apparently impossible object of infinite density and infinite gravity is known as the singularity. No predictions can be made about it, or about what might emerge from it. At the singularity, physicists’ understanding of nature fails completely. Therefore, they believe that there is a fatal flaw in the formulation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, despite its immense success.
The one thing no physicist has ever contemplated is this: there is no flaw whatsoever. The reason why physics seems to disintegrate at r = 0 is for the extremely simple reason that r = 0 is not in the physical universe. It is in the mental universe, the universe of mind, as we have described in the previous section.
They may not look like it, but each of these photos from Rosetta is of the same site on Comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko, within just six short weeks. Something big is happening up there—but what is it?
This particular comet site has been steadily monitored by the ESA since August of 2014, and nothing has been happening. Literally. Viewed in detail of up to 1/10 of a meter, the site had stayed exactly the same. Until late May, when suddenly everything started changing again and again and again.
Some land features disappeared, others were added. Some were temporary, some stayed. What’s happening there and why? Scientists still aren’t sure, but they’ve come up with a few theories:
PASADENA, Calif. — A new way to harvest asteroid resources is being eyed as a possible game changer for space exploration.
The patent-pending innovation, called “optical mining,” could allow huge amounts of asteroid water to be tapped, advocates say. This water, in turn, could provide relatively cheap and accessible propellant for voyaging spacecraft, lowering the cost of spaceflight significantly.
Development of the optical-mining idea has been funded by a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) fellowship and grant, along with a small business contract. The concept — which is also known as the Asteroid Provided In-Situ Supplies plan, or Apis — was detailed here during a special NIAC session held on Sept. 2 during the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ (AIAA) Space 2015 meeting. [How Asteroid Mining Could Work (Infographic)].
Boeing has announced that the ABS–3A, the world’s first all-electric propulsion satellite, has commenced its tour of duty.
The communications satellite is being operated by ABS, a Bermuda-based satellite network that provides TV, Internet, and cellular services across the world. Unlike conventional satellites, which have mostly used propellant systems that burn chemicals of one kind or another to get about the place, the ABS–3A makes use of a xenon-ion propulsion system to achieve thrust.
Specifically, the all-electric propulsion system uses electron bombardment to create xenon ions, which are then expelled by the spacecraft, producing thrust in the opposite direction.
An amazing new antenna prototype from UCLA has the potential to make Mars missions a whole lot easier to run.
We’ve known there is water on Enceladus for a while now, but NASA has just confirmed a more recent theory about the icy moon of Saturn: it has a subsurface ocean that spans the entire globe. The news comes just a handful of months after the agency discovered evidence of hydrothermal vents, which are believed to be integral to the formation of life here on Earth.
The confirmation was made using research from Cassini — a spacecraft that arrived at Saturn in 2004 and has spent the last decade studying the planet and its many moons. (It was launched in 1997.) The researchers used Cassini to measure the wobble in Enceladus’ orbit of Saturn, something that “can only be accounted for if its outer ice shell is not frozen solid to its interior.”
Researchers from Queen Mary University of London and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have developed a model that applies ideas from the theory of complex networks, such as the brain or the Internet, to the fundamental quantum geometry of space-time.
The research is published in Scientific Reports with the title “Complex Quantum Network Manifolds in Dimension d > 2 are Scale-Free.” The research paper is freely available online.
“We hope that by applying our understanding of complex networks to one of the fundamental questions in physics we might be able to help explain how discrete quantum spaces emerge,” said author Ginestra Bianconi.
The dimensionless aspect, since it has no dimensions, is outside of space and time. This is the key aspect to existence: an aspect outside of space and time perpetually interacting dialectically with an aspect inside space and time. All of the weird and wonderful phenomena of the universe are the products of this ultimate dichotomy.
