go outside — “There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He...

NGC 1579: Trifid of the North 

Colorful NGC 1579 resembles the better known Trifid Nebula, but lies much farther north in planet Earth’s sky, in the heroic constellation Perseus. About 2,100 light-years away and 3 light-years across, NGC 1579 is, like the Trifid, a study in contrasting blue and red colors, with dark dust lanes prominent in the nebula’s central regions. In both, dust reflects starlight to produce beautiful blue reflection nebulae. But unlike the Trifid, in NGC 1579 the reddish glow is not emission from clouds of glowing hydrogen gas excited by ultraviolet light from a nearby hot star. Instead, the dust in NGC 1579 drastically diminishes, reddens, and scatters the light from an embedded, extremely young, massive star, itself a strong emitter of the characteristic red hydrogen alpha light.

Hints of New Dark Force Seen in Galactic Smash-ups

Colliding clusters of galaxies may hold clues to a mysterious dark force at work in the universe. This force would act only on invisible dark matter, the enigmatic stuff that makes up 86 per cent of the mass in the universe.

Dark matter famously refuses to interact with ordinary matter except via gravity, so theorists had assumed that its particles would be just as aloof with each other. But new observations suggest that dark matter interacts significantly with itself, while leaving regular matter out of the conversation.

“There could be a whole class of dark particles that don’t interact with normal matter but do interact with themselves,” says James Bullock of the University of California, Irvine. “Dark matter could be doing all sorts of interesting things, and we’d never know.”

Some of the best evidence for dark matter’s existence came from the Bullet cluster, a smash-up in which a small galaxy cluster plunged through a larger one about 100 million years ago. Separated by hundreds of light years, the individual galaxies sailed right past each other, and the two clusters parted ways. But intergalactic gas collided and pooled on the trailing ends of each cluster.

Mass maps of the Bullet cluster showed that dark matter stayed in line with the galaxies instead of pooling with the gas, proving that it can separate from ordinary matter. This also hinted that dark matter wasn’t interacting with itself, and was affected by gravity alone.

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This is a triggered lightning experiment conducted in Florida by researchers looking into how, when and where lightning forms. The blue-green light in the centre of the image is formed by a copper triggering wire that has been heated to the point of radiating light. The bright white streaks of lightning are separated by a strong wind blowing between them.

Read more: http://bit.ly/17KYO9N

Image: Doug Jordan and Martin Uman/International Center for Lightning Research and Testing

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This Is Where You Feel Your Feels

Are our emotions universal, across borders of culture and language? Is my happy the same as your happy? Do I experience anger in precisely the same way that you do?

Psychologically speaking, that’s a difficult question to answer. But according to a new study on the physiological experience of emotions, our bodies respond in very particular ways to a range of feelings.

Hundreds of people were presented with various images designed to cause an emotional response. The participants then indicated where on their bodies they felt increased (orange and yellow, above) or decreased (blue, above) sensation, essentially drawing a kind of atlas of emotional response.

The results are pretty interesting, and nice to look at as well. I have to wonder why contempt causes that very specific lack of sensation south of the border, though.

More at Discover Magazine.