A Galaxy Cluster Or Cluster Of Galaxies Is A Structure That Consists Of Anywhere From Hundreds To Thousands

How Close Are We To Nuclear Fusion?

“Naysayers love to claim that nuclear fusion is always decades away — and always will be — but the reality is we’ve moved ever closer to the breakeven point and solved a large number of technical challenges over the past twenty years. Nuclear fusion, if we ever achieve it on a large scale, will usher in a new era for humanity: one where energy conservation is a thing of the past, as the fuel for our heart’s desires will literally be without limits.”

The ultimate dream when it comes to clean, green, safe, abundant energy is nuclear fusion. The same process that powers the core of the Sun could also power everything on Earth millions of times over, if only we could figure out how to reach that breakeven point. Right now, we have three different candidates for doing so: inertial confinement, magnetic confinement, and magnetized target fusion. Recent advances have all three looking promising in various ways, making one wonder why we don’t spend more resources towards achieving the holy grail of energy.

A wormhole, or Einstein-Rosen Bridge, is a hypothetical topological feature that would fundamentally be a shortcut connecting two separate points in spacetime that could connect extremely far distances such as a billion light years or more, short distances, such as a few feet, different universes, and in theory, different points in time. A wormhole is much like a tunnel with two ends, each in separate points in spacetime.

For a simplified notion of a wormhole, space can be visualized as a two-dimensional (2D) surface. In this case, a wormhole would appear as a hole in that surface, lead into a 3D tube (the inside surface of a cylinder), then re-emerge at another location on the 2D surface with a hole similar to the entrance. An actual wormhole would be analogous to this, but with the spatial dimensions raised by one. For example, instead of circular holes on a 2D plane, the entry and exit points could be visualized as spheres in 3D space.

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

The Quadrantid meteor shower peaked this morning. Here are some fun facts:

1. Where Is Quadrans Muralis?

The radiant of the Quadrantids lies in the demoted constellation Quadrans Muralis.

2. What Is a Mural Quadrant? 

The Mural Quadrant is an angle measuring device mounted on or built into a wall. Quadrans Muralis appears on some 19th-century star atlases between Hercules, Boötes and Draco, and different astronomers changed the stars from time to time.

3. New Constellations

In the early 1920’s, the International Astronomical Union divided up the sky into official constellations for consistency in star naming. 88 constellations remained, but over 30 historical constellations, including Quadrans Muralis, didn’t make the cut.

4. Where Is It Now?

Most of the Quadrans Muralis stars are now within the boundaries of the official constellation Boötes, but the name of the meteor shower did not change.

5. Where Do Meteor Showers Come From?

Meteor showers are usually the residue that collects in the orbits of comets. Unlike most meteor showers’ parent bodies, the Quadrantids are associated with an asteroid—2003 EH1.

Discover the full list of 10 things to know about our solar system this week HERE.

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A special Astrophysics Documentary about Space, Time & our Universe.

Stephen Hawking: 'If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.'

All is not lost if you fall into a black hole – you could simply pop up in another universe, according to Stephen Hawking.

The celebrated physicist has a new theory about where lost information ends up after being sucked into a black hole, a place where gravity compresses matter to a point where the usual laws of physics break down.

In a public lecture in Stockholm, Sweden, Prof Hawking said: “If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.” He said he had discovered a mechanism “by which information is returned out of the black hole”.

He was speaking at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) is hosting the Hawking Radiation Conference dedicated to examining the mystery of the “information paradox” – a conundrum concerning what happens to things swallowed by black holes.

Information about the physical state of something disappearing into a black hole appears to be completely lost. But according to the way the universe works, this should be impossible. Even information falling into a black hole ought to end up somewhere.

According to Hawking, it does – in one of two ways. Either it is translated into a kind of “hologram” on the edge of the black hole, or it breaks out into an alternative universe.

In his lecture, reported in a blog from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, he said: “The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible. The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe. But you couldn’t come back to our universe. So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that.

“The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.”

Hawking is director of research at Cambridge University’s department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.

• This article was amended on 27 August 2015. An earlier version said the KTH Royal Institute of Technology was hosting the conference.

If you can dream it, you can do it

Walt Disney (1901- 1966)

Is Everything We Know About Universe Wrong?

Toshiko Yuasa

Nuclear physicist Toshiko Yuasa was born on December 11, 1909 in Taitō City, Japan. Unable to conduct research on nuclear physics in occupied postwar Japan, Yuasa went to France to do her scientific work. With the use of a Wilson chamber, she did experimental nuclear research in beta-decay. In 1957, she became a chief researcher at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique. Her role as a trailblazer for Japanese women in science has elicited comparisons to Marie Curie, and she actively encouraged young women to study science.

Toshiko Yuasa died in 1980 at the age of 70.

A nebula (Latin for "cloud";[2] pl. nebulae, nebulæ, or nebulas) is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases. Originally, nebula was a name for any diffuse astronomical object, including galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The Andromeda Galaxy, for instance, was referred to as the Andromeda Nebula (and spiral galaxies in general as "spiral nebulae") before the true nature of galaxies was confirmed in the early 20th century by Vesto Slipher, Edwin Hubble and others.

Most nebulae are of vast size, even hundreds of light years in diameter.[3] Although denser than the space surrounding them, most nebulae are far less dense than any vacuum created in an Earthen environment - a nebular cloud the size of the Earth would have a total mass of only a few kilograms. Nebulae are often star-forming regions, such as in the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula. In these regions the formations of gas, dust, and other materials "clump" together to form larger masses, which attract further matter, and eventually will become massive enough to form stars. The remaining materials are then believed to form planets and other planetary system objects.