en.wikipedia.org →

[What came to my head when I read about this: I have this feeling like maybe that tool was hidden from the religious elites. That a group of scientists during that time were on to something way before historical checkpoints in technology started happening, when Astronomy was heresy and Astrology was the light. Remember Religion at that time must have been so mainstream and thriving with serious belief that society deemed it right to execute those who did not believe in a god and people who did think scientifically and created tools and technology to aid them in their research hid it from the rest (The rest being any religious person with power over people) To avoid death/heracy/ all the bad shit that came with being logical]

The Antikythera Mechanism

It was found at the bottom of the sea aboard an ancient Greek ship. Its seeming complexity has prompted decades of study, although some of its functions remained unknown. Recent X-rays of the device have now confirmed the nature of the Antikythera mechanism, and discovered several surprising functions. The Antikythera mechanism has been discovered to be a mechanical computer of an accuracy thought impossible in 80 BC, when the ship that carried it sunk. Such sophisticated technology was not thought to be developed by humanity for another 1,000 years. Its wheels and gears create a portable orrery of the sky that predicted star and planet locations as well as lunar and solar eclipses. The Antikythera mechanism, shown above, is 33 centimeters high and similar in size to a large book.

Credit & Copyright: Wikipedia

emilivanov.com →

NGC 2392 (The Eskimo Nebula)

Copyright: Niki Petrov, Yanko Nikolov, Emil Ivanov

A Sun Halo Beyond Stockholm

What’s happened to the Sun? Sometimes it looks like the Sun is being viewed through a large lens. In the above case, however, there are actually millions of lenses: ice crystals. As water freezes in the upper atmosphere, small, flat, six-sided, ice crystals might be formed. As these crystals flutter to the ground, much time is spent with their faces flat, parallel to the ground. An observer may pass through the same plane as many of the falling ice crystals near sunrise or sunset. During this alignment, each crystal can act like a miniature lens, refracting sunlight into our view and creating phenomena like parhelia, the technical term for sundogs. The above image was taken last year in Stockholm, Sweden. Visible in the image center is the Sun, while two bright sundogs glow prominently from both the left and the right. Also visible is the bright 22 degree halo — as well as the rarer and much fainter 46 degree halo — also created by sunlight reflecting off of atmospheric ice crystals.

Credit & Copyright: Peter Rosén

New Evidence Shows Black Hole Growth Preceding Galactic Formation

An accidental find in a star-forming dwarf galaxy shows that black holes may mature early in galaxy evolution

The co-evolution of black holes, almost unfathomable in their bulk, and the even more massive galaxies that host them remains poorly understood—a kind of chicken-and-egg problem on mammoth scales. Do black holes, such as the lunker in our own Milky Way Galaxy, which contains the mass of four million suns (that’s about eight undecillion, or 8 x 10^36 kilograms), drive the evolution of galaxies around them; or do galaxies naturally nurture the gravitational gobblers at their centers; or perhaps do they come into being together, as a matched pair?

A serendipitous discovery in a relatively close-by dwarf galaxy may help answer that question. Amy Reines, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Virginia (U.V.A.), was looking at bursts of star formation in a galaxy known as Henize 2-10, which serves as a kind of observational proxy for galaxies that existed in the early universe. She noticed a suspicious radio wave source coming from a small region of the galaxy, a good distance removed from the active stellar nurseries. A comparison with archival data showed x-ray radiation from the same location within Henize 2-10; the balance of radiation levels in different wavelengths pointed to the presence of a giant black hole accreting material from its surroundings.

NASA Research Team Reveals Moon Has Earth-Like Core

State-of-the-art seismological techniques applied to Apollo-era data suggest our moon has a core similar to Earth’s.

caelumobservtory.com →

The Little Flame: IC 2087
Copyright: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona