hellosybil

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A Black Hole is an extraordinarily massive, improbably dense knot of spacetime that makes a living swallowing or slinging away any morsel of energy that strays too close to its dark, twisted core. Anyone fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to directly observe one of these beasts in the wild would immediately notice the way its colossal gravitational field warps all of the light from the stars and galaxies behind it, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.

Thanks to the power of supercomputers, a curious observer no longer has to venture into outer space to see such a sight. A team of astronomers has released their first simulated images of the lensing effects of not just one, but two black holes, trapped in orbit by each other’s gravity and ultimately doomed to merge as one.

http://www.universetoday.com/116500/new-simulation-offers-stunning-images-of-black-hole-merger/?

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Siwa Oasis, Egypt. The 95% salt concentration increases the density of water and buoyancy, making it so you can’t sink | source                         

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 Liber Incantationum, excorcismorum et fascinationum variarum

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holy SHIT please read the whole thread and many more of these images right here, this artist put together an updated Opabinia reconstruction where every single one of these minute details (except coloration, obviously) are fully sourced making this most likely the first depiction factoring in 100% of current knowledge about it. Even I didn’t know it had little feet like a velvet worm and could have walked around on them! I never knew exactly how the trunk is oriented or how many “teeth” it is! I especially didn’t know the mouth was that weird! And I kind of assumed this since it’s a lobopod and all, but the whole animal was soft and squishy except for the eyes and the teeth. It did not have armor plates or a jointed exoskeleton like a lot of people portray. This also means all five of the eyes would have been able to bend and look around independently! The eye structure in fossils also indicates that they would have PSEUDOPUPILS! That’s the pupil-like dot in the eyes of insects like mantises!

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This article is available for free to read online; just search for it:

Laura Rademaker. “60,000 Years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.

But if you were specifically interested in reading more about songspirals and Aboriginal conceptions of time, better to read the words of the Yolngu women themselves. The article here references their 2019/2020 book:

Song Spirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country through Songlines.

The book was written by the Gay’wu Group of Women and discusses time/temporality and human relationships with other-than-human creatures from a Yolngu perspective.

If you cannot find the book, that’s OK, because Yolngu women and scholars put together a couple of articles describing the same subjects, which you can read online. I recommend:

“Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Authored by Bawaka Country including, S. Wright, S. Suchet-Pearson, K. Lloyd, L. Burarrwanga, R. Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, D. Maymuru. Published in the journal Geoforum in January 2020.

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Down below, I’ve included an excerpt from their article.

But first, here’s a short re-post of an excerpt from the Rademaker article, for comparison/contrast or whatever:

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Aboriginal people, in many cases, have resisted and rejected the uniformity of times that are celebrated by the supposed ‘time revolutions’ and instead, pointed to their own dynamic and enduring temporalities. […] By the nineteenth century, however, ‘secular time’ became for many ‘just time, period’: the ‘empty time’ of Walter Benjamin. […] The European discovery of ‘deep time’ hastened this shift. As Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, in the ‘modern historical consciousness’ ‘time is empty because it acts as a bottomless sack: any number of events can be put inside it’. […] Historicism views the past as developments, trends, eras and epochs. It assumes a homogenous, calendrical time through which a universal story of all peoples (no matter their cosmology or temporality) might be told. […]

Many of the Traditional Owners of Willandra Lakes expressed frustration that their temporalities were overlooked by researchers. Datings of tens of thousands of years were not ‘revolutionary’ for those who know they had ‘always’ been here. McGrath describes how, to Traditional Owners, Mungo Lady is not ‘“gone” in any final sense; she is active in the landscape today’. ‘This lady who lived 40,000 years ago,’ she observes, ‘is treated like an aunty who died only yesterday’. For Traditional Owners, the scientists’ ‘obsession’ with dates is a source of frustration. These tensions are more than disputes over time’s scale, questions of 40,000 years versus ‘infinity’. Rather, they reflect a deeper mismatch between linear, homogenous, quantifiable time and many Aboriginal people’s often unacknowledged temporalities. For Indigenous peoples, time is not necessarily homogenous or universal container for events. It can be ‘plural’. […]

For many Australian Aboriginal people, time is neither exclusively linear nor cyclical, it can be always, everywhen. Australian Indigenous embodied practices for knowing, remembering and re-enacting the past in the present blur the distinctions of linear time, making all time ‘now’. […] Riratjingu elder, Wandjuk Marika, for example, explained that while ‘scientists can give you a small story of our origins possibly 40,000 years ago’, Aboriginal people ‘can tell you many more’. As Nganyinytia Ilyatjari explains, ‘Tjukurpa iriti ngaringi munu kuwari wanka nyinyangi.’ That is, ‘Tjukurpa [often translated “Dreaming”] has existed from a long time ago and is alive today.’ The power and presence of the Creative Beings continue to work in the landscape and creatures they formed. The Burarrwana collective of Yolngu women writes that ‘songspirals’ (often called ‘songlines’ or ‘Dreamings’) ‘have been here a long time’. But they did not simply create the land, ‘they keep on creating it, and us’. They are ‘ancient but fresh’ and ‘always in emergence’. The women are emphatic that time is not simply linear ‘clock time’. Times are interwoven and interconnected. Time is co-existing. We are with them. They are in their time. You are in your time. We are in time together. […] Aboriginal temporalities might weave together what, from a white settler perspective, might be temporally distant events. In Yolngu cosmologies, the closeness of events is determined more by their location, power and significance than their temporal distance. […] Yet the dominating times of settler colonialism erase the possibility of these temporalities. That is, they deny Indigenous ‘temporal sovereignty’. Under settler-colonialism, settler time is set as ‘the baseline for the unfolding of time itself’; as if white settlers’ times were the only times. So Indigenous claims become inconceivable and unrecognizable, being grounded in different experiences of time.

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Now, an excerpt from the Yolngu collective’s “Gathering of the Clouds …”:

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Ada Smailbegovic talks of starfish time (2015). Starfish may seem to be still, but longer attention, through time-lapse photography for example, shows them moving, changing. Smailbegovic also talks of larval time, the time it takes for eggs to develop and hatch, a time that is a compound entity of other variables, longer in the cold, or sped up with increasing temperature. Larval time is the right time for eggs to hatch, a deeply relational and contingent time. As she points out, “many of the temporalities that are relevant for developing a politics of time in the Anthropocene – such as minute and incrementally   accumulating processes of change, or the long duration of geological time, rock time, or the temporal rhythms of non-human organisms – are beyond the human sensorium” (2015: 97). For by attending to more-than-human agencies of time and weather, diverse multiplicities emerge even as they are beyond human   understanding. This is the seasonal time of clouds gathering. It is also the time of hydrological cycles, of water moving through aquifers for thousands of years, of transpiration and growth. And short spirals, of the flash of lightning, claps of thunder, of traveling sound and light. Then there are beings that experience hundreds, thousands of generations within a human lifetime. For such beings, the memories, learnings and modes of passing on experience are, it almost goes without saying (yet it must be said as it is so often not), radically different from any human’s in terms of the ways they experience change. The immensity of the alterity is, literally, incomprehensible to humans. We can’t know how and what these beings know. But we can be aware that they have knowledges and experiences beyond us. For many people, coming from  different cultural and ontological positions, not knowing does not mean  not connecting or not respecting. For it would seem that there are things that humans cannot and should not know. We don’t need to know what starfish know. But we should know they live and experience and think beyond us. We should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled, how we co-become. […] These are  place-based, pluralist, more-than-Western/colonial/white, more-than-human co-becomings. Weather - the sun, the clouds, the clans that gather, the starfish as it moves and the eggs as they develop and   hatch - tell us that time does not exist separately from more-than-human relationships and more-than-human worlds. It does not order worlds in a  strict and linear, universalized sequence. It is not abstract, or  empty. It is not separate from humans. This is a “transcorporeal collaboration” […] that make and weather a season’s change, a collaboration within  which bodies are not discrete entities whose borders may stand or be breached, but are themselves always more than human.

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The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the earliest known black hole in the universe, and astronomers think even earlier ones could have swarmed the young cosmos.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), whose powerful cameras allow it to peer back in time to the earliest stages of the universe, discovered the supermassive black hole, which has a mass of 10 million times that of the sun, at the center of a baby galaxy 570 million years after the universe began.

The cosmic monster could be just one of countless black holes that gorged themselves to ever-larger sizes during the cosmic dawn — the period starting about 100 million years after the Big Bang when the young universe glowed for a billion years. Astronomers aren’t sure why there were so many of these black holes or how they got so big. The researchers who found the latest black hole published their findings March 15 on the preprint server arXiv, but the research has not been peer-reviewed yet.

“This is the first one that we’re finding at this redshift [point in time after the Big Bang], but there should be many of them,” lead study author Rebecca Larson, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science. “We do expect that this black hole didn’t just form [recently], so there should be more that are younger and existed earlier on in the universe. We’re just starting to be able to study this time in cosmic history this way with the JWST, and I’m excited for us to find more of them.”

Continue Reading

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Webb Reveals Never-Before-Seen Details in Cassiopeia A

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The Lively Center of the Lagoon Nebula : The center of the Lagoon Nebula is a whirlwind of spectacular star formation. Visible near the image center, at least two long funnel-shaped clouds, each roughly half a light-year long, have been formed by extreme stellar winds and intense energetic starlight. A tremendously bright nearby star, Herschel 36, lights the area. Vast walls of dust hide and redden other hot young stars. As energy from these stars pours into the cool dust and gas, large temperature differences in adjoining regions can be created generating shearing winds which may cause the funnels. This picture, spanning about 10 light years, combines images taken in six colors by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. The Lagoon Nebula, also known as M8, lies about 5000 light years distant toward the constellation of the Archer (Sagittarius). via NASA

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The Nephilim Clowns/Clown Dimension

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvlHGyJ0JEwDPbEFPNH9dQwFEFaIeKRVd

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Successful Ocean-Monitoring Satellite Mission Ends

The Jason-2/Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM), the third in a U.S.-European series of satellite missions designed to measure sea surface height, successfully ended its science mission on Oct. 1. NASA and its mission partners made the decision to end the mission after detecting deterioration in the spacecraft’s power system.

Jason-2/OSTM, a joint NASA mission with the French space agency Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), launched in June 2008. The mission extended the long-term record of sea surface height measurements started by the NASA-CNES TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason-1 missions. Jason-2/OSTM’s 11-year lifetime well exceeded its three-year design life. These measurements are being continued by its successor, Jason-3, launched in 2016.

“Today we celebrate the end of this resoundingly successful international mission,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Jason-2/OSTM has provided unique insight into ocean currents and sea level rise with tangible benefits to marine forecasting, meteorology and our understanding of climate change.”

Since its launch, Jason-2/OSTM charted nearly 2 inches (5 centimeters) of global sea level rise, a critical measure of climate change. The mission has also resulted in the distribution of over a million data products and the publication of more than 2,100 science papers.

“Jason-2/OSTM was a high point of operational satellite oceanography as the first Jason mission to formally include EUMETSAT and NOAA as partners,” said Steve Volz, assistant administrator of NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service. “During its 11-year run, Jason-2/OSTM helped improve NOAA’s hurricane intensity forecasts and provided important observations of marine winds and waves and in doing so has anchored these essential ocean altimetry observations in NOAA’s operational observing system requirements.”

With the recent degradation of the spacecraft’s power system, mission partners decided to end the mission to decrease risks to other satellites and future altimetry missions, and to comply with French space law. Final decommissioning operations for Jason-2/OSTM are scheduled to be completed by CNES on Oct. 10.

“With the involvement of EUMETSAT and NOAA, Jason-2 brought high precision monitoring of ocean surface topography and mean sea level to operational status,” said Alain Ratier, EUMETSAT’s director general. “Its 11-year lifetime in orbit was rewarding for the four program partners and the ocean and climate user community.”

Jason-2/OSTM’s mission might have ended earlier if not for the ingenuity of its mission teams. In July 2017, the degradation of critical onboard components and control systems required that Jason-2/OSTM move from its original science orbit, deplete excess propellant reserves, and be maneuvered into a slightly lower orbit, away from functioning satellites. In close collaboration with the Ocean Surface Topography Science Team, mission partners identified an orbit that would allow for the continuation of the Jason-2/OSTM measurements while still being compatible with orbital-debris mitigation constraints and of scientific benefit.

This new orbit resulted in less frequent observations of the same location on Earth, but overall resolution of the data improved because the ground tracks of the observations were closer together. This improved resolution is extremely useful for marine gravity studies and the mapping of seafloor topography. It also allowed for valuable operational oceanographic and science observations.

“Not only did Jason-2 extend the precise climate record established by TOPEX/Poseidon and continued by Jason-1, it also made invaluable observations for small- to medium-scale ocean studies in its second, interleaved orbit,” said CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall. “Even when moved to the ‘graveyard’ orbit, Jason-2 continued to make unprecedented new observations of the Earth’s gravity field, with precise measurements right until the end.”

The technological advancements proven on Jason-1, Jason-2/OSTM and Jason-3 will be put to use well into future decades. Following Jason-3 will be two future Sentinel-6/Jason-CS satellites, planned for launch in 2020 and 2025.

TOP IMAGE….The Jason-2/OSTM satellite provided insights into ocean currents and sea level rise with tangible benefits to marine forecasting, meteorology and understanding of climate change. These observations are being continued by its successor, Jason-3. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

CENTRE IMAGE….Jason-2/OSTM contributed to a long-term record of global sea levels. This image shows areas in the Pacific Ocean where sea levels were lower (blues) or higher (reds) than normal during the first week of January 2018. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

LOWER IMAGE….Global sea level has shown a steady rise since the early 1990s to present as measured by Jason-2/OSTM and its predecessors and successor from the early 1990s to present day. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech