April 24, 2008: Astronomy textbooks typically present galaxies as staid, solitary, and majestic island worlds of glittering stars. But galaxies have a dynamical side. They have close encounters that sometimes end in grand mergers and overflowing sites of new star birth as the colliding galaxies morph into wondrous new shapes.

 
http://bigpondnews.com/articles/Technology/2010/02/05/US_telescope_sees_Pluto_changing_color_425194.html

 Pluto is changing its looks, donning more rouge in its complexion and altering its iceball surface.
Newly released US Hubble Space Telescope photos show the distant one-time planet - demoted to 'dwarf planet' status in 2006 - is changing colour and its ice sheets are shifting.
The photos, released by NASA on Thursday, paint a Pluto that is significantly redder than it had been for the past several decades.
To the layman, it has a yellow-orange hue, but astronomers say it has about 20 per cent more red than it used to have.
The pictures show icy frozen nitrogen on Pluto's surface growing and shrinking, brightening in the north and darkening in the south.
Astronomers say Pluto's surface is changing more than the surfaces of other bodies in the solar system. That is unexpected because a season lasts 120 years in some regions of Pluto.
'It's a little bit of a surprise to see these changes happening so big and so fast,' said astronomer Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute.
'This is unprecedented.'
From 1954 to 2000, Pluto did not change in colour when it was photographed from Earth. But after that, it did.
The red levels increased by 20 per cent, maybe up to 30 per cent, and stabilised from about 2000 to 2002, Buie said.
It's not as red as Mars, however, Buie said.
Buie said he can explain the redness, but not why it changed so dramatically and so recently.
The planet has a lot of methane, which contains carbon and hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen gets stripped off by solar winds and other factors, leaving carbon-rich areas on the surface, which tend to be red and dark.
The Hubble photos were taken in 2002 and the analysis took a few years. But why Pluto changed so quickly was such a mystery that Buie held off for years on announcing what he had found, worried that he might be wrong.
However, since Pluto's moon Charon had not changed colour in the same telescope images, he decided the Pluto findings were not an instrument mistake.
His analysis also found that nitrogen ice was shifting in size and density in surprising ways. It's horribly cold on Pluto with, paradoxically, the bright spots being the coldest at about -230C.
Astronomers are still arguing about the temperatures of the warm dark spots, which Buie believes may be 17C warmer than the darker areas.
Part of the difficulty in figuring out what is going on with Pluto is that it takes the dwarf planet 248 years to circle the sun, so astronomers don't know what conditions are like when it's is farthest from the sun.
The last time Pluto was at its farthest point was in 1870, which was decades before Pluto was discovered. Unlike Earth, Pluto's four seasons are not equal lengths of time.
Buie's explanation makes sense, said retired NASA astronomer Stephen Maran, co-author of a book on Pluto.
'Pluto is interesting and poorly understood, whether it qualifies as a planet or not,' he said.
Pluto is changing its looks, donning more rouge in its complexion and altering its iceball surface.
Newly released US Hubble Space Telescope photos show the distant one-time planet - demoted to 'dwarf planet' status in 2006 - is changing colour and its ice sheets are shifting.
The photos, released by NASA on Thursday, paint a Pluto that is significantly redder than it had been for the past several decades.
To the layman, it has a yellow-orange hue, but astronomers say it has about 20 per cent more red than it used to have.
The pictures show icy frozen nitrogen on Pluto's surface growing and shrinking, brightening in the north and darkening in the south.
Astronomers say Pluto's surface is changing more than the surfaces of other bodies in the solar system. That is unexpected because a season lasts 120 years in some regions of Pluto.
'It's a little bit of a surprise to see these changes happening so big and so fast,' said astronomer Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute.
'This is unprecedented.'
From 1954 to 2000, Pluto did not change in colour when it was photographed from Earth. But after that, it did.
The red levels increased by 20 per cent, maybe up to 30 per cent, and stabilised from about 2000 to 2002, Buie said.
It's not as red as Mars, however, Buie said.
Buie said he can explain the redness, but not why it changed so dramatically and so recently.
The planet has a lot of methane, which contains carbon and hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen gets stripped off by solar winds and other factors, leaving carbon-rich areas on the surface, which tend to be red and dark.
The Hubble photos were taken in 2002 and the analysis took a few years. But why Pluto changed so quickly was such a mystery that Buie held off for years on announcing what he had found, worried that he might be wrong.
However, since Pluto's moon Charon had not changed colour in the same telescope images, he decided the Pluto findings were not an instrument mistake.
His analysis also found that nitrogen ice was shifting in size and density in surprising ways. It's horribly cold on Pluto with, paradoxically, the bright spots being the coldest at about -230C.
Astronomers are still arguing about the temperatures of the warm dark spots, which Buie believes may be 17C warmer than the darker areas.
Part of the difficulty in figuring out what is going on with Pluto is that it takes the dwarf planet 248 years to circle the sun, so astronomers don't know what conditions are like when it's is farthest from the sun.
The last time Pluto was at its farthest point was in 1870, which was decades before Pluto was discovered. Unlike Earth, Pluto's four seasons are not equal lengths of time.
Buie's explanation makes sense, said retired NASA astronomer Stephen Maran, co-author of a book on Pluto.
'Pluto is interesting and poorly understood, whether it qualifies as a planet or not,' he said.
Friday, February 05, 2010 » 09:07am

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100204/ap_on_sc/us_sci_pluto

WASHINGTON – Spurned Pluto is changing its looks, donning more rouge in its complexion and altering its iceball surface here and there.
Color astronomers surprised.
Newly released Hubble Space Telescope photos show the distant one-time planet — demoted to "dwarf planet" status in 2006 — is changing color and its ice sheets are shifting.
The photos, released by NASA Thursday, paint a Pluto that is significantly redder than it had been for the past several decades. To the layman, it has a yellow-orange hue, but astronomers say it has about 20 percent more red than it used to have.
The pictures show icy frozen nitrogen on Pluto's surface growing and shrinking, brightening in the north and darkening in the south. Astronomers say Pluto's surface is changing more than the surfaces of other bodies in the solar system. That's unexpected because a season lasts 120 years in some regions of Pluto.
"It's a little bit of a surprise to see these changes happening so big and so fast," said astronomer Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "This is unprecedented."
From 1954 to 2000, Pluto didn't change in color when it was photographed from Earth. But after that, it did. The red levels increased by 20 percent, maybe up to 30 percent, and stabilized from about 2000 to 2002, Buie said. It's not as red as Mars, however, Buie said.
Buie said he can explain the redness, but not why it changed so dramatically and so recently. The planet has a lot of methane, which contains carbon and hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen gets stripped off by solar winds and other factors, leaving carbon-rich areas on the surface, which tend to be red and dark.
The Hubble photos were taken in 2002 and the analysis took a few years. But why Pluto changed so quickly was such a mystery that Buie held off for years on announcing what he had found, worried that he might be wrong. However, since Pluto's moon Charon hadn't changed color in the same telescope images, he decided the Pluto findings weren't an instrument mistake.
His analysis also found that nitrogen ice was shifting in size and density in surprising ways. It's horribly cold on Pluto with, paradoxically, the bright spots being the coldest at about -382 degrees Fahrenheit. Astronomers are still arguing about the temperatures of the warm dark spots, which Buie believes may be 30 degrees warmer than the darker areas.
Part of the difficulty in figuring out what is going on with Pluto is that it takes the dwarf planet 248 years to circle the sun, so astronomers don't know what conditions are like when it's is farthest from the sun. The last time Pluto was at its farthest point was in 1870, which was decades before Pluto was discovered. Unlike Earth, Pluto's four seasons aren't equal lengths of time.
Buie's explanation makes sense, said retired NASA astronomer Stephen Maran, co-author of a book on Pluto. "Pluto is interesting and poorly understood, whether it qualifies as a planet or not," he said
Thu Feb 4



by Mitch Battros - Earth Changes Media

September 23, 2009

http://www.earthchangesmedia.com
 
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has uncovered a dramatic find as it captures a new vision of the Galactic Center disclosing a complex and hostile environment. An area known as "Sagittarius A," contains several mysterious X-ray filaments. Some of these likely represent huge magnetic structures interacting with streams of very energetic electrons produced by rapidly spinning neutron stars or perhaps by a gigantic analog of a solar flare.
Is there a connection, or perhaps a revolutionary find which supports Mayan prophecy of the coming Galactic Alignment, 2012, and Cycle 24's apex (or maximum)? A picture comes together further bringing modern science and ancient text ever more united. As the galaxy's center comes closer to its alignment with our solar system, could this bring with it continued escalation in earth changes events?
A collection of Chandra pointings has created a single snap-shot of galactic evolution. Surrounding a massive central black hole, we find bright young stars housed in a hostile environment. Scattered throughout the region are thousands of point-like X-ray sources. These are produced by dense remains of stars that have reached the end of their evolutionary trail which end up as white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes."

http://bigpondnews.com/articles/Technology/2009/12/20/Evidence_of_dark_matter_detected_408509.html

A long-elusive key to understanding the universe may have been discovered nearly a kilometre underground in the US state of Minnesota.
Scientists announced this week they believe they've detected evidence of dark matter in data collected at the Soudan underground physics lab.
Dark matter most likely accounts for most of the universe's total matter, but its existence has never been proven. If it ever is, it could unlock mysteries about the behaviour of stars and galaxies.
According to the US Department of Energy's Fermilab, which is conducting the search for dark matter at the Soudan lab, 'judging by the way galaxies rotate, scientists have known for 70 years that the matter we can see does not provide enough gravitational pull to hold the galaxies together. There must exist some form of matter that does not emit or reflect light.'
In the announcement, the lab said the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment has 'detected two events that have characteristics consistent with the particles that physicists believe make up dark matter'.
But, it cautioned, there is 'a chance' that the events could be the signatures of background particles that merely mimic the signals of dark matter.
According to Fermilab, dark matter 'may have provided the gravitational scaffolding that allowed normal matter to coalesce into the galaxies we see today. In particular, scientists think our own galaxy is embedded within an enormous cloud of dark matter. As our solar system rotates around the galaxy, it moves through this cloud.'
Particle physics theories suggest that dark matter is composed of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). WIMPs would rarely interact with normal matter, but may occasionally bounce off, or scatter from, an atomic nucleus like billiard balls, leaving a small amount of energy that is detectable under the right conditions.
The Soudan lab has been searching for WIMPs since 2003. It uses 30 detectors cooled to nearly absolute zero in an attempt to detect WIMP scatters.
'This is a very intriguing results we really don't know if this is a background or a signal,' said Lauren Hsu, a researcher at Fermilab who announced the experiment's results. 'As an experimenter you always wish you had more data.'
Researchers and physicists at the University of Minnesota, one of nine universities conducting the research, plan to hold a seminar on the experiment.
Sunday, December 20, 2009 » 11:00am





Some interesting thoughts on Expansion of Consciousness by pushing it into Static Universes and making them more Dynamic (from"The Universe and Multiple Reality" by M. R. Franks)
www.manyuniverses.com
P. 14
"The mind is one of the lasting mysteries of the universe. It is not the slayer of the real, as some Hindu traditions maintain. It is the creator of the real. Whatever we know, we know through the agency of the mind.. The mystery of the mind is thus doubly profound: not only is it an extraordinary creation of nature- exquisite and puzzling in its own right; it is also the shaper and creator of reality. On the way the mind works depends the nature of our knowledge, and (a step further) the shape of the external world. What the mind cannot render (present for consideration), the world cannot bear. And what the world bears is exactly what the mind renders..."

P. 20
"Talbot tells us that many neurophysiologists now take the fact that memories are not destroyed when a part of the brain is damaged as proving that the functions of memory are not located in any specific place in the brain, “but are distributed over the brain as a whole in much the same way that the image of a hologram is enfolded in all of its parts.”

P. 21-23
"The pioneers of the many-worlds hypothesis do not see it this way. Just as they envision multiple worlds that are dynamic and not static, so too do they envision multiple consciousnesses. Paul Davies tell us:
Not only our bodies, but our brains and, presumably, our consciousness is being repeatedly multiplied, each copy becoming a thinking, feeling human being inhabiting another universe much like the one we see around us.
The idea of one’s own body and consciousness being split into billions upon billions of copies is somewhat startling to say the least, yet the proponents of this theory have argued that the splitting process is quite unobservable, because the replicated consciousness cannot communicate in any way with its siblings (Alters). In fact the separate worlds of superspace are all completely disconnected from each other as far as communication is concerned..."
"...So what starts out at birth as one consciousness multiplies countless billionfolds by death."

"David Deutsch writes in The fabric of Reality that “each copy of us can directly perceive only one universe.”
Wheeler also envisages the multiple splitting of consciousness itself. Wheeler, Everett and DeWitt are brilliant scientists who deserve much credit for the many-universes hypothesis and the idea of a superuniverse- they call it multiverse. It is easy to understand their view that reality consists of a multiplicity of dynamic universes, and they ought not be faulted for the greatness of what they did achieve. It is easy to understand their blindness to the obvious possibility that parallel universes are static, that time and motion are but illusions, and that it is mind traversing the frames in rapid sequence that gives rise to perceived reality and to time and motion itself."
"What seems apparent, that consciousness moves through a labyrinth of static universes, is perhaps more difficult for the scientific mind to accept than for the general public..."

(C.Castaneda describes us moving through static universes in his books a lot, LM).

"These scientists are the same people who for years accepted only the tenets of materialism, thinking more in terms of “brain” than “mind” and virtually denying the existence of “mind” altogether. Consciousness, we were told, is a transitory phenomenon, a “strange loop” of the brain that probably dies when the body dies. No immortality here.
Michael Talbot uses these words:
The standard answer of science is, of course, that there is no ultimate distinction between mind and body. Consciousness is synonymous with the brain, and when the brain dies all of those things that we associate with consciousness - self-awareness, perception, acts of understanding, and so on - die with it. The opposing point of view is that we are more than the sum of our parts    and when we die some aspect of our consciousness survives and goes on. If we accept this point of view, the question then becomes, what is the something that survives?"

P. 23
"What will be the reaction of followers of Everett, DeWitt, Wheeler and Davies when they realize that it is indeed consciousness that moves through a series of static universes, rather than dynamic universes themselves splitting and consciousness splitting with the splitting universes? We must assume that as scientists they will welcome this additional insight and refinement of their original, bold concepts."

P. 25
"...all matter has consciousness. Every atomic particle exists in hidden dimensions in its own imaginary microuniverse, has consciousness, appears biologically as a point in our own universe, according to Charon.
The idea of an intelligent universe directing events is not limited to Hoyle and Charon. Rupert Sheldrake has proposed some radical ideas on this, according to Talbot.
Sheldrake posits that there exists a force or field connecting all members of any species, including those in the past. Sheldrake claims that each species of animal, humans included, have a “group mind” that he claims may explain certain psychic phenomena. Talbot claims that when nature does something, that even causes nature to want to repeat the event and the more the event is regurgitated the stronger the “M-field” becomes."
Morphogenic Field is not R.Monroe's (M) Field-Mind Field, LM.

P. 30
"But consciousness apparently is not free to move haphazardly through the lattice, but seems to be pushed through. This push is the force we think of as “time,” and this unseen force usually compels us to move through the lattice primarily in one general direction (from one or more “past” frames to one or more “future” frames). Still, there is great room for variable paths, as every quantum event is a fork in the road at which the mind still can go in any one of several different “future” directions."

P. 34-36
"Ts’ui Pen... He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times..."
"...We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden have found me dead. In yet another, I say these words, but am an error, a phantom...
.... Time is forever dividing itself towards innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy.....
....“Parallel universes” is a misnomer (an error). Rather, consciousness merely enters one of numerous contiguous (touching)) static universes....
...In their original concept, the universe actually divides into two copies of itself at every quantum transaction. Each observer divides, and presumably is conscious, real and moving in each division. Each copy of this observer after being so divided is unaware of the other.
Many-universe advocates agree that it is equally plausible (logical) for Everett's "branching" to work backward in time as well as forward. Thus, in their view, different universes from the past are constantly fusing into the present.
...An excellent example of such fusing of multiple pasts into a changing present, of altering history as it were by weaving different paths from the past into one changed present, is the excellent film Frequency which starred Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel. Past events can be altered.
Hollywood rarely gets the science right in “time warp” movies. This time, however, Hollywood hit the quantum nail right on the head. Nothing that happened in Frequency is theoretically impossible. Just as Schrodinger’s cat can divide and take multiple paths into the future, multiple strands from different pasts can weave into one present.
Such “fusion” of different universes from the past might explain why different individuals coming to a transaction sometimes have radically different memories of the “same” past event."

P. 38
"John Archibald Wheeler tells us: The universe does not exist “out there” independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are not only observers ( and perceivers, LM). We are participators. In some strange sense this is a participatory universe."

Glossary:
"Entropy- a measure of the unavailable heat in any closed system (here is the entire universe). See Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Multiverse- a term in conventional quantum physics describing the collection of all parallel universes. Hugh Everett's "Many worlds" hypothesis posits the existence of a multiverse. That multiverse, however, consists of a multiplicity of dynamic universes. Compare with superuniverse.
Noncontiguous- said of two things not directly touching one another.
Superuniverse- the grand universe composed of all imaginable parallel universes. It exists in hyperspace. The superuniverse posited by the author differs from the multiverse of conventional quantum physics in that here each parallel universe is absolutely still, static, frozen, not moving and dynamic."



 The building and operating CERN Hadron Collider on the border between Switzerland and France is a bit of a puzzle. Would the created mini Black Holes suck out the energy of those in 3rd D, who decided not to evolve or it's a tool for Creation of an Anti-verse? Here are some extracts printed in the news :

Sunday, November 08, 2009 » 09:24am
http://bigpondnews.com/articles/OddSpot/2009/11/08/Crumb_causes_major_scientific_setback_391532.html

The massive machine at the centre of the world's biggest scientific experiment has malfunctioned again - derailed by a bit of bread dropped by a bird.
The Hadron Collider, buried 100m under the ground near Geneva, Switzerland, is supposed to recreate conditions seen after the Big Bang.
It is hoped the $7.97 billion machine will shed light on the event that many scientists believe gave birth to the universe around 14 billion years ago, but the project has suffered a series of setbacks.
The latest saw a 'bit of baguette', thought to have been dropped by a bird, fall onto machinery, causing a fault.
Sections of the machine, which fires protons round a 17-mile-long tunnel at close to the speed of light in order to smash them in to each other, then overheated.
Members of the public who had been looking at data published online noticed the temperature changes and contacted journalists at The Register.
They alerted those in charge of the project at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern).
According to scientists, had the Collider been in operation at the time it would have shut down automatically, avoiding the damage of last September when a large amount of helium leaked into the tunnel.
But the difficulties faced by those working on the project have prompted some members of the scientific community to speculate, in all seriousness, that the machine is sabotaging itself - from the future.
The theory is that the particle that physicists hope to produce might be 'abhorrent to nature', so that once created it would work backwards through time to put a stop to whatever created it.
However Dr Mike Lamont, who works at the Cern control centre, said that the nature of the experiment meant that glitches were inevitable.
'This thing is so complicated and so big, it's bound to have problems sometimes,' he said."


"The experiment has triggered a number of wild theories, with speculation that it could create a black hole of intense gravity which could suck in Europe and perhaps the whole planet.
Others have claimed that it could allow beings from another universe to invade through a hole in the space-time continuum..."
"...Another possible discovery from the firing up of the large hadron collider could be dark matter.
When we look at the universe and calculate the movements of stars and galaxies, the mathematical models tell us that there is a massive amount of our universe that we cannot see.
In fact physicists think we can only detect 5 per cent of what is out there. This is dark matter...
It is possible the machine could generate extremely small black holes. Some fear these mini-black holes could merge and become one big black hole that would swallow up the earth and perhaps our solar system..."

The latest announcement was that after a couple of weeks of running Hadron Collider , it was shut down till next year.
I, personally, doubt very much that it would be shut down. Reminds me the Moon program in 1960's, which was officially shut down, but unofficially was never stopped. More info on Parallel Universes and Time Travels link.

This info is about the connection between magnets/magnetic fields and an Anti-verse, PN stands for Preston Nichols,
DC stands for Duncan Cameron:

SS: We’ve heard of putting magnets on your body to increase the energy. Are there ways to do this by magnetics besides by using electronic devices?
PN: Well the thing you can say about magnetic fields is that a magnetic field is the portal or window into the shell function or the anti-matter world. So a magnet definitely is a multidimensional window. Magnetic fields are pure potential energy, they’re a pure potential structure. Unless you move them, they don’t do any work. If you move them they do work. This of course is normal physics at this point...magnets have a tendency to drag down instead of build up. SS: Someone we know experienced that. He was unknowingly sleeping beside some heavy magnets and woke up drained of energy. Perhaps the magnets were facing the wrong way, if there’s a difference.
PN: Yes, there is a difference. There’s also another kind of ray that comes off the sides of the magnet between the north and south pole. It’s almost like a ray emanating into a black hole, is the only way I can think to express it.
DC: It’s something that we’ve recently been exposed to by a fellow named Jerry in Staton Island, New York.
PN: He’s a psychic that sees magnetic fields. Those plates we put in the Biosonde yesterday were from Jerry. There is a coating of, in black point, of magnetic powders that somehow he’s witnessing to the Earth through the telluric field of the earth. And all it’s doing was transducing the orgone field of the earth into the room. That’s why you got the cool breeze going through the room. And that’s tied directly into magnetism."  
More on that see  Montauk Project info

This is an interesting information about the planet Jupiter (also a sun on the 5th Density) being used by us as a vehicle which moved us from the 5th Density to the 3rd Density to play the game and that we are going back to the 5th D the same way: through Jupiter as a potential Black Hole. This info is from "Defending the Sacred Ground" by Alex Collier:

AC: But, there's a much higher agenda here. It obviously involves us as souls, but it also has to do with something that is very strategic about this solar system. I will tell you why so many people are interested in this solar system. We have some strange planets here. Not only is Earth unique because of all the life forms here, but according to Moraney, when we as Paa Tal came down from a higher density to inhabit these bodies in third density, we used a type of vehicle to travel from where we were to where we are now. A type of vehicle. They say that the planet Jupiter was the vehicle we used.
Val: Which is also now a sun on fifth density.
AC: Yes.
Val: So, we brought our own potential black hole along with us.
AC: Our own escape hatch. Richard Hoagland is on to the hyperdimensional
bizarreness of Jupiter, but he will never figure it out because he doesn't think along
the lines of spirit, really.
AC: Well, he has set it up so that he has an academic position to defend. The credibility gap. I guess everybody has their niche. Yes. We're going to go through some stuff, and I don't know how its exactly going to play out, but they have said on more than one occasion that they are very proud of us in the end, as a race.
Val: The end. Of the third density experiment?
AC: Yes.
Val: Which will be in linear terms?
AC: They told me that it would be on December 3, 2013.
Val: Tell me more about your understanding of dimensions.
AC: ...Fifth density has a frequency scale of 214 colors, as opposed to the 73 color frequency spectrum we have here in third density..."

More info on  Alex Collier info

Researchers have long known that the Earth and sun must be connected. Earth's magnetosphere (the magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet) is filled with particles from the sun that arrive via the solar wind and penetrate the planet's magnetic defenses. They enter by following magnetic field lines that can be traced from terra firma all the way back to the sun's atmosphere.
We used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active," says Sibeck. "We were wrong. The connections are not steady at all. They are often brief, bursty and very dynamic.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/30oct_ftes.htm

An artist's concept of Earth's magnetic field connecting to the sun's--a.k.a. a "flux transfer event"--with a spacecraft on hand to measure particles and fields.


Oct. 30, 2008: During the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn't believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page
"It's called a flux transfer event or 'FTE,'" says space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn't exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible."
Indeed, today Sibeck is telling an international assembly of space physicists at the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Alabama, that FTEs are not just common, but possibly twice as common as anyone had ever imagined.
Right: An artist's concept of Earth's magnetic field connecting to the sun's--a.k.a. a "flux transfer event"--with a spacecraft on hand to measure particles and fields. 
Researchers have long known that the Earth and sun must be connected. Earth's magnetosphere (the magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet) is filled with particles from the sun that arrive via the solar wind and penetrate the planet's magnetic defenses. They enter by following magnetic field lines that can be traced from terra firma all the way back to the sun's atmosphere.
We used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active," says Sibeck. "We were wrong. The connections are not steady at all. They are often brief, bursty and very dynamic.
Several speakers at the Workshop have outlined how FTEs form: On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth's magnetic field presses against the sun's magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or "reconnect," forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth. The European Space Agency's fleet of four Cluster spacecraft and NASA's five THEMIS probes have flown through and surrounded these cylinders, measuring their dimensions and sensing the particles that shoot through. "They're real," says Sibeck.
Now that Cluster and THEMIS have directly sampled FTEs, theorists can use those measurements to simulate FTEs in their computers and predict how they might behave. Space physicist Jimmy Raeder of the University of New Hampshire presented one such simulation at the Workshop. He told his colleagues that the cylindrical portals tend to form above Earth's equator and then roll over Earth's winter pole. In December, FTEs roll over the north pole; in July they roll over the south pole.
Sibeck believes this is happening twice as often as previously thought. "I think there are two varieties of FTEs: active and passive." Active FTEs are magnetic cylinders that allow particles to flow through rather easily; they are important conduits of energy for Earth's magnetosphere. Passive FTEs are magnetic cylinders that offer more resistance; their internal structure does not admit such an easy flow of particles and fields. (For experts: Active FTEs form at equatorial latitudes when the IMF tips south; passive FTEs form at higher latitudes when the IMF tips north.) Sibeck has calculated the properties of passive FTEs and he is encouraging his colleagues to hunt for signs of them in data from THEMIS and Cluster. "Passive FTEs may not be very important, but until we know more about them we can't be sure."
There are many unanswered questions: Why do the portals form every 8 minutes? How do magnetic fields inside the cylinder twist and coil? "We're doing some heavy thinking about this at the Workshop," says Sibeck.
Meanwhile, high above your head, a new portal is opening, connecting your planet to the sun.

A "magnetic portal" or FTE mapped in cross-section by NASA's fleet of THEMIS spacecraft.

Two decades ago, astronomers spotted one of the brightest exploding stars in more than 400 years: a doomed star, called Supernova 1987A. This image shows the entire region around the supernova. The most prominent feature in the image is a ring with dozens of bright spots. A shock wave of material unleashed by the stellar blast is slamming into regions along the ring's inner regions, heating them up, and causing them to glow. The ring, about a light-year across, was probably shed by the star about 20,000 years before it exploded. In the next few years, the entire ring will be ablaze as it absorbs the full force of the crash. The glowing ring is expected to become bright enough to illuminate the star's surroundings, providing astronomers with new information on how the star expelled material before the explosion. The image was taken in December 2006 with Hubble's

A non-typical galaxy of the type known as a ring galaxy, the appearance of Hoag's Object has interested amateur astronomers as much as its uncommon structure has fascinated professionals. Is this one galaxy or two? This question came to light in 1950 when astronomer Art Hoag chanced upon this unusual extragalactic object. On the outside is a ring dominated by bright blue stars, while near the center lies a ball of much redder stars that are likely much older. Between the two is a gap that appears almost completely dark. How Hoag's Object formed remains unknown, although similar objects have now been identified and collectively labeled as a form of ring galaxy. Genesis hypotheses include a galaxy collision billions of years ago and perturbative gravitational interactions involving an unusually shaped core. The above photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in July 2001 reveals unprecedented details of Hoag's Object and may yield a better understanding. Hoag's Object spans about 100,000 light years and lies about 600 million light years away toward the constellation of Serpens. Coincidentally, visible in the gap is yet another ring galaxy that likely lies far in the distance."

http://www.physorg.com/news141489744.html

September 24, 2008  
Space & Earth science / Astronomy

(PhysOrg.com) -- The stars are in motion, and on a much larger scale than can be explained with current theories, according to astronomers at NASA, the University of Hawaii and UC Davis. The finding could improve our understanding of events in the first moments after the birth of the universe. The researchers found an unexpected motion, or "flow," of galaxy clusters across a wide patch of the sky up to at least a billion light years away.

Local flows of galaxies and galaxy clusters are well-known, said Dale Kocevski, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis who was part of the team. For instance, our own Milky Way galaxy is moving toward the Andromeda galaxy, and the galaxy group that includes both Andromeda and the Milky Way is moving at about 600 kilometers a second. These motions happen because matter -- both stars, dust and gas and the more abundant but invisible "dark matter" -- is distributed in uneven clumps, and gravity pulls galaxy clusters toward those clumps. Astronomers call these clumps "anisotropies."

But the newly detected motion is over far too large an area to be explained in that way, say Kocevski and colleagues Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; Fernando Atrio-Barandela of the University of Salamanca, Spain; and Harald Ebeling of the University of Hawaii.

"It's too big an effect to be due to anisotropies in matter or dark matter," Kocevski said. Because the force of gravity decreases with the inverse square of distance, an effect over such a wide area would require far more mass than can actually exist there, he said.

The astronomers found the effect by using a catalog of 700 galaxy clusters observed with X-ray astronomy, and NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which shows tiny variations in the microwave background radiation of the universe left over from the Big Bang.
Hot X-ray-emitting gas in a galaxy cluster scatters photons from the cosmic microwave background. The wavelengths of these scattered photons change in a way that reflects each cluster's individual motion. This results in a minute shift of the microwave background's temperature in the cluster's direction. In 2000, Kashlinsky and Atrio-Barandela found a way to amplify this effect and employ it to measure the motion of distant galaxy clusters.

Big Bang models that include a feature called inflation offer a possible explanation for the flow. Inflation is the idea that shortly after the Big Bang, the universe expanded extremely rapidly. If inflation did occur, then the universe we can see is only a small portion of the whole cosmos.

There may have been a "tilt" to the universe, or motion already in progress, before inflation occurred, Kocevski said. Or, the clusters could be responding to the gravitational attraction of matter that was pushed far beyond the observable universe by inflation.

"This measurement may give us a way to explore the state of the cosmos before inflation occurred," Kashlinsky said.                      
A paper describing the results was published online in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters on Sept. 24.
These are interesting thoughts:

How to Make a Universe - Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Hgaa6wlNs&feature=related


How to Make a Universe - Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDN6F6j_rQY&feature=related


How to Make a Universe - Part 3A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-gWJkyzpyo&feature=related

http://bigpondnews.com/articles/TopStories/2009/02/20/Biggest-ever_space_gamma-ray_blast_304705.html

Friday, February 20, 2009 » 11:22am
The US Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected.
The spectacular blast, which occurred in the Carina constellation, produced energy ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said.
'Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts,' astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP.
'If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything - they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances,' Reddy said.
Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions, which astronomers believe occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel.
As a star's core collapses into a black hole, jets of material powered by processes not yet fully understood blast outward.
The jets bore through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star, generating bright afterglows that fade with time.
Using the Gamma-Ray Burst Optical/Near-Infrared Detector (GROND) on a telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, a team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics determined that the huge gamma-ray burst occurred 12.2 billion light years away.
The sun, by comparison, is eight light minutes from earth.
With the extraordinary distance taken into account, scientists worked out that the blast exceeded the power of nearly 9,000 ordinary supernovae, some of the most energetic explosions known, which occur at the end of a star's life time.
The gas jets emitting the initial gamma rays moved at one-ten-thousandth of a percentage point less than the speed of light, the scientists said.
'This burst's tremendous power and speed make it the most extreme recorded to date,' a statement issued by the US Department of Energy said."

http://www.aztecfx.co.uk/aa/igor/select.html

Egor, Russian peace poet
mig@technoserv.ru
The scientific report below is so strange that I was not prepared to believe it or send it out to you until I contacted my old friend, peace poet, writer and translator, Igor Mikhailusenko in Moscow to find out if the scientist named below is a respected individual or just some kind of a kook. I can't really investigate the science but the least I can do is ascertain the reliability of the scientist.
Igor reports that the man is well-known and respected among Russian scientists and therefore I pass on the very interesting report below. We have always looked on the sun as very permanent and unchanging. But in fact we have recently been reading American scientists' reports of much larger
magnetic storms on the sun than ever before. Sunspots have become larger or more numerous or the like, but no explanation has been offered. Now we may have it. I've not followed solar activity much but left it to others, not understanding that it could affect our real world situations.
Now it seems that what may really be happening is larger than just sun spot changes. It may actually be as Dr. Dmitriev seems to suggest that the entire solar system is moving into a new area of the heavens where things are indeed different.
We've always known that just as our planet revolves around the sun and in doing that passes through different areas so there are more meteorites at certain seasons than at others, so also the sun itself with the entire solar system around it has an orbit of its own. Orbit ? That would suggest a center around which it revolves. I'm not sure of that, but it is clear that the entire solar system is not fixed in space. It must at least move with what some refer to as an "expanding universe".
So as it moves there is no reason to think that it cannot move into areas of different kinds of energy.


Hold onto your hats! Here goes:

This is the Russian perspective on earth changes. Hard facts that are going unreported in America. The atmospheres of the planets are changing. Dr. Dmitriev's work shows that the planets themselves are changing. They are undergoing changes in their atmospheres. For example the Martian atmosphere is getting sizably thicker than it was before. The Mars observer probe in 1997 lost one of its mirrors, which caused it to crash, because the atmosphere was about twice as dense as they calculated, and basically the wind on that little mirror was so high that it blew it right off the device.
Earth's moon is growing an atmosphere Also, the moon is growing an atmosphere that's made up of a compound Dmitriev refers to as ''Natrium.'' Dmitriev says that, around the moon, there is this 6,000-kilometer-deep layer of Natrium that wasn't there before.
And we're having this kind of change in Earth's atmosphere in the upper levels, where HO gas is forming that wasn't there before; it simply did not exist in the quantity that it does now. It's not related to global warming and it's not related to CFCs or fluorocarbon emissions or any of that stuff. It's just showing up.
Magnetic fields and brightness of the planets are changing. The planets are experiencing sizable changes in their overall brightness. Venus, for example, is showing us marked increases in its
overall brightness. Jupiter has gotten to have such a high energetic charge that there is actually a visible tube of ionizing radiation that's formed between its moon, Io. You can actually see the
luminous energy tube in photographs that have been taken more recently..
And the planets are having a change in their fields. The magnetic fields are becoming stronger. Jupiter's magnetic field has more than doubled. Uranus's magnetic field is changing. Neptune's magnetic field is increasing. These planets are becoming brighter. Their magnetic field strength is getting higher. Their atmospheric qualities are changing.
Uranus and Neptune appear to have had recent pole shifts. When the Voyager 2 space probe flew past Uranus and Neptune, the apparent north and south magnetic poles were sizably offset from
where the rotational pole was. In one case, it was 50 degrees off, and in the other case the difference was around 40 degrees, both of which are pretty big changes.
The overall changes could essentially be broken down intothree categories: Energy field changes, luminosity changes,and atmospheric changes.
Overall volcanic activity has increased 500 percent since 1975. On the Earth, we're seeing the changes even more completely.
For example, Michael Mandeville has done research that has shown that the overall volcanic activity on the Earth since 1875 has increased by roughly 500 percent. The overall earthquake activity has increased by 400 percent just since 1973.
Natural disasters increased 410 percent between 1963 and 1993! Dr. Dmitriev did a very elaborate calculation of natural disasters. He showed that if you compare the years 1963 through 1993, the overall amount of natural disasters of all different kinds - whether you are talking hurricanes, typhoons, mud slides, tidal waves, you name it - have increased by 410 percent.
The Sun's magnetic field increased by 230 percent since 1901.
There's a study by Dr. Mike Lockwood from Rutherford Appleton National Laboratories in California, who has been investigating the Sun. He has discovered that since 1901, the overall magnetic field of
the Sun has become 230 percent stronger than it was before.
More than just Earth Changes
So, all in all, what we're seeing is a lot more than just what they call Earth Changes. Some people get into the idea that there is an interaction between the Earth and the Sun that's going on here. Very, very few people are aware of the work that is being done in the Russian National Academy of Sciences in Siberia, specifically in Novosibirsk, where they are doing this research. They've come to the conclusion that the only possible thing that could be causing this energetic change all throughout the Solar System is that we are moving into an area of energy that is different - that is higher.
The glowing plasma at the leading edge of our Solar System has recently increased 1000 percent Now, check this out. The Sun itself has a magnetic field, of course, and that magnetic field creates an egg around the Solar System, which is known as the heliosphere. The heliosphere is shaped like a teardrop, with the long and thin end of the drop pointing in the opposite direction from the direction that we're traveling. It's just like a comet, where the tail is always pointing away from the Sun.
The Russians have looked at the leading edge of this heliosphere, and they have observed glowing, excited plasma energy there. This plasma energy used to be 10 astronomical units deep (an astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, 93,000,000 miles). So ten astronomical units represents the normal thickness of this glowing energy that we used to see at the front end of the Solar System.
Today, that glowing plasma has gone to 100 astronomical units deep. Although Dmitriev's paper does not give an exact timeline, we can assume that this increase happened in the same 1963 to 1993 period as the increase he found in natural disasters. Whenever it happened, that's a 1,000 percent increase in the overall brightness of the energy at the front end of the Solar System.
And this means that the Solar System itself is moving into an area where the energy is more highly charged. That higher-charged energy is in turn exciting the plasma and causing more of it to form, so you see more luminosity, more brightness. This energy is then flowing into the Sun, which in turn emits the energy and spreads it out along its equatorial plane, which is called the Ecliptic.
This in turn is saturating interplanetary space, which causes the solar emissions to travel more quickly and charge up the energy on the planets.
And this is conscious energy that is changing how the planet works, how it functions, and what kind of life it supports. The harmonics of the DNA spiral itself are altering. That's the real, hidden cause of spontaneous mass evolutions in previous epochs of time.
All this is happening all at the same time, and it's all working up to a crescendo where there is going to be a sudden shift.
In other words, we will get to the point where we are so far into the new level of energy that there will be a sudden expansion of the basic harmonic wavelengths that the Sun emits as it radiates energy
out of itself. This increase in energy emission will change the basic nature of all matter in the Solar System. The planets are pushed slightly farther away from the Sun and the atoms and molecules that
make them up actually expand in terms of their physical size."