A Special Astrophysics Documentary About Space, Time & Our Universe.

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.

Spleens are strange organs, located on the upper-left side of the abdomen behind the stomach. They’re about the size and shape of an orange wedge, if the orange was squishy and full of blood. They’re relatively fragile, and because they contain so much blood, injuries can become serious.

A very informal poll of NPR employees, friends and random Uber drivers reveals that most people don’t have any idea what spleens are for. If they did know anything about spleens, it was this: You don’t need one to live.

The deep red, squishy spleen has been relegated to the organ bargain-basement, something to be cut out and discarded along with the appendix and wisdom teeth. But the spleen is seriously underrated, and we would like to give it a chance to redeem itself.

Meet The Spleen, The Strange Little Organ That Can Multiply

Image: Science Source

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.

Throwback Thursday: Do you really love science?

“That’s okay, because you’re a scientist! Your old theory — or way of making sense of the world — now gets revised, and replaced with a new one that’s even better at describing the full suite of phenomena you’re aware of.”

When you first venture out into the world, you’re armed, as a human being, with an incredible intelligence, but with no experience. All sorts of basic things must be learned, often the hard way: hot things will burn you, hot things that don’t look hot will also burn you, and that even very cold things will burn you, too. Figuring those things out – and the process by which you learn them – is science, in and of itself. But to move forward requires that we understand why, and that’s where scientific theories, leaps and even revolutions come into play. Don’t let bad science reporting take you away from what science is really all about: the knowledge and joy of figuring out how the world and Universe really works.

A new study of fossilized dinosaur embryos suggests that the young of these prehistoric animals were slow to develop, with some spending up to sixth months inside their eggs before hatching. Detailed in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this drawn-out development cycle not only surprised scientists—it may have contributed to the downfall of the dinosaurs.

“We know very little about dinosaur embryology, yet it relates to so many aspects of development, life history, and evolution,” said study co-author Mark Norell, Macaulay Curator of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. “This work is a great example of how new technology and new ideas can be brought to old problems.”

Using a combination of computed tomography (CT) scanning and powerful microscopes, Norell and colleagues from the University of Calgary and Florida State University examined the teeth of fossilized dinosaur embryos in unprecedented detail, shining new light on specimens about which not much is known.

Read more about this new research on the blog. 

Record-Breaking Space Discoveries of 2016!

2016 was a lot of things, but for astronomers, it meant the discovery of some of the farthest, faintest, and youngest objects in the universe we’ve seen yet.

A galaxy cluster or cluster of galaxies is a structure that consists of anywhere from hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity.[1] They are the largest known gravitationally bound structures in the universe and were the largest known structures in the universe until the 1980s when superclusters were discovered.[2] One of the key features of clusters is the intracluster medium or ICM. The ICM consists of heated gas between the galaxies and has a temperature on the order of 7-9 keV. Galaxy clusters should not be confused with star clusters such as open clusters, which are structures of stars within galaxies, as well as globular clusters, which typically orbit galaxies. Small aggregates of galaxies are referred to as groups of galaxies rather than clusters of galaxies. The groups and clusters can themselves cluster together to formsuperclusters.

Is Everything We Know About Universe Wrong?