Brown Dwarfs: Strange Failed Stars of the Universe Explained
(Infographic) by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist   |  January 29, 2014 01:00pm ET

Brown dwarfs started out the same as ordinary stars, collapsing from giant nebulas of dust and gas. Most brown dwarfs are not quite massive enough to sustain a nuclear fusion reaction at their cores. Brown dwarfs, therefore, are transitional objects, standing between stars and giant gas planets. The mass of a brown dwarf can range from 13 to 90 times the mass of the planet Jupiter, or up to about a tenth the mass of the sun.

Brown Dwarf Photos: Failed Stars and Stellar Misfits Revealed

Brown dwarfs are classified according to the spectrum of the light detected from them. M-class stars are the coolest stars that can burn successfully, and are the most common stars in the universe (about 75 percent of the stars in the sun’s neighborhood). Many M-stars are red dwarfs, but some are brown dwarfs.

L-class brown dwarfs are cooler than M stars. Some L stars can support hydrogen fusion, but most do not. T-class brown dwarfs have surface temperatures in the range of 800 to 1,880 degrees Fahrenheit (430 to 1,030 degrees Celsius). T dwarfs are largely composed of methane.


Top 10 Star Mysteries

Y-class brown dwarfs are the coolest of the dwarfs. Their temperature may be as low as that of a household oven, or even the temperature of a human body.

Some brown dwarfs are orbited by planets, or sometimes discs of matter similar to those in developing solar systems (artist’s rendering, inset). Astronomers have found microscopic particles of the mineral olivine orbiting in the dust disc. Olivine crystals are thought to be the initial stage of the process that builds rocky planets such as Earth. 

In 2014, astronomers were able to map features in the atmosphere of T-class brown dwarf Luhman-16B. The “clouds” are believed to be droplets of molten iron and minerals, floating in an atmosphere of hydrogen at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius).

GRAV WAVE TSUNAMI boffinry BONANZA – the aftershock of the universe's Big Bang Landmark discovery backs Einstein and shows inflation is as old as time
By Iain Thomson, 17 Mar 2014

Pics A team of astrophysicists has announced a sighting of gravitational waves – formed in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the universe as we know it blinked into existence.

The breakthrough discovery throws enormous weight behind the famous Big Bang theory. The boffins must be expecting a call from the Nobel Prize panel in Sweden.

Surf the light fantastic ... Gravitational waves from inflation create distinctive patterns in the cosmic microwave background, observed by the team's equipment

"This is something that's not just a home run, but a grand slam," said Marc Kamionkowski, professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, in Maryland, US, today. He was speaking at a press conference to announce his team's results: "It's the smoking gun for [the universe's] inflation and it's the first detection of gravitational waves."

The waves, first predicted by Albert Einstein 99 years ago as a key tenet of his theory of General Relativity, are formed in the cosmic microwave background when massive objects like stars and black holes interact.

The biggest gravitational wave, now observed, was formed 13.8 billion years ago as the universe suddenly snapped into being – a smoking gun for the Big Bang, the cosmic birth of reality as we know it.

The team's work also supports the theory that in the instant after that moment, the expansion of space briefly exceeded the speed of light – the aforementioned inflation – and this caused ripples in the first light energy to exist. The inflationary theory of creation helps explain why we have detected temperature differences across the universe.

The signal indicating the presence of gravitational waves is much stronger than expected, too. The boffins' evidence and papers on the discovery can be found here.

“This has been like looking for a needle in a haystack, but instead we found a crowbar,” said co-leader Clem Pryke, the British-born associate professor at the University of Minnesota.

Mapping out Earth's place in the universe among 'Council of Giants'      Posted March 12, 2014 - 04:00 
We live in a galaxy known as the Milky Way – a vast conglomeration of 300 billion stars, planets whizzing around them, and clouds of gas and dust floating in between.

Though it has long been known that the Milky Way and its orbiting companion Andromeda are the dominant members of a small group of galaxies, the Local Group, which is about 3 million light years across, much less was known about our immediate neighbourhood in the universe.

Now, a new paper by York University Physics & Astronomy Professor Marshall McCall, published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, maps out bright galaxies within 35-million light years of the Earth, offering up an expanded picture of what lies beyond our doorstep.

"All bright galaxies within 20 million light years, including us, are organized in a 'Local Sheet' 34-million light years across and only 1.5-million light years thick," says McCall. "The Milky Way and Andromeda are encircled by twelve large galaxies arranged in a ring about 24-million light years across – this 'Council of Giants' stands in gravitational judgment of the Local Group by restricting its range of influence."

McCall says twelve of the fourteen giants in the Local Sheet, including the Milky Way and Andromeda, are "spiral galaxies" which have highly flattened disks in which stars are forming. The remaining two are more puffy "elliptical galaxies", whose stellar bulks were laid down long ago. Intriguingly, the two ellipticals sit on opposite sides of the Council. Winds expelled in the earliest phases of their development might have shepherded gas towards the Local Group, thereby helping to build the disks of the Milky Way and Andromeda.

What Really Killed Jesus?          By: Melody Crombie

After seeing, "The Passion of the Christ,"  ten years ago, my husband refused to go to another emotionally charged cry-fest with me; so I rounded up a couple of the kids (and several packs of Kleenex) and saw, "Son of God" tonight.

I like watching different versions of the life and times of Jesus as well as viewing various artistic renderings, (see the "Pictures and Quotes" section).  It is helpful for opening up discussions about the accuracy of the film when cross referenced with scripture and historical documents.

If you've spent any time in the church pews you should know exactly why Jesus came and died (if not, then please read the Book of John and Hebrews) but after spending time out in the world you may be confused about the precise way Jesus died, especially when different theories are repeatedly thrown around.

One can only inwardly quake in horror at the brutality of Jesus' death when you see in cinematic detail the punishment we deserve (Isaiah 53:5) being inflicted on him. 

The following list (from "Free Christian Teaching") describes in detail how Jesus ultimately died:

Squeezing light into metals: Engineers control conductivity with inkjet printer    Date:March 7, 2014    Source:University of Utah
 
Using an inexpensive inkjet printer, University of Utah electrical engineers produced microscopic structures that use light in metals to carry information. This new technique, which controls electrical conductivity within such microstructures, could be used to rapidly fabricate superfast components in electronic devices, make wireless technology faster or print magnetic materials.

High-speed Internet and other data-transfer techniques rely on light transported through optical fibers with very high bandwidth, which is a measure of how fast data can be transferred. Shrinking these fibers allows more data to be packed into less space, but there's a catch: optical fibers hit a limit on how much data they can carry as light is squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces.

In contrast, electronic circuits can be fashioned at much smaller sizes on silicon wafers. However, electronic data transfer operates at frequencies with much lower bandwidth, reducing the amount of data that can be carried.

A recently discovered technology called plasmonics marries the best aspects of optical and electronic data transfer. By crowding light into metal structures with dimensions far smaller than its wavelength, data can be transmitted at much higher frequencies such as terahertz frequencies, which lie between microwaves and infrared light on the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that also includes everything from X-rays to visible light to gamma rays. Metals such as silver and gold are particularly promising plasmonic materials because they enhance this crowding effect. "Very little well-developed technology exists to create terahertz plasmonic devices, which have the potential to make wireless devices such as Bluetooth -- which operates at 2.4 gigahertz frequency -- 1,000 times faster than they are today," says Ajay Nahata, a University of Utah professor of electrical and computer engineering and senior author of the new study.

Power-packed Bacterial Spores Generate Electricity by Beth Mole 10:11am, March 3, 2014

With mighty bursts of rehydration, bacterial spores offer a new source of renewable energy.

Bacillus spores quickly shrivel in dry times and bloat with a blast of humidity. The transitions, which take about half a second, pack a powerful punch that biophysicist Ozgur Sahin at Columbia University realized could translate to usable energy. By smearing spores onto a flat piece of rubber about the length of a human hand, Sahin and his colleagues developed a spore-powered generator. In arid conditions, parched spores pull the rubber into a curve, while wafts of wet air plump up spores and spring it flat again.

The team linked the rubber to an electromagnetic generator, so that every flex produced an electric current. By weight, spore power rivaled the juice in a car battery, Sahin and colleagues report January 26 in Nature Nanotechnology. Since the spores tote such a high energy potential—more than 1,000 times that of mammalian muscle—Sahin and colleagues say energy-harvesting devices based on the dormant dynamos could be linked into municipal grids to contribute a power boost to homes and cities.

EXPAND AND FLEX Energy can be captured from bacterial spores with an absorbent cortex layer (left) that swells when wet. Researchers spread spores on pieces of latex (above) and harnessed energy from the motion created as spores shriveled and expanded.">

A Powerful New Way to Edit DNA
By ANDREW POLLACK  MARCH 3, 2014

  In the late 1980s, scientists at Osaka University in Japan noticed unusual repeated DNA sequences next to a gene they were studying in a common bacterium. They mentioned them in the final paragraph of a paper: “The biological significance of these sequences is not known.”

Now their significance is known, and it has set off a scientific frenzy.

The sequences, it turns out, are part of a sophisticated immune system that bacteria use to fight viruses. And that system, whose very existence was unknown until about seven years ago, may provide scientists with unprecedented power to rewrite the code of life.

In the past year or so, researchers have discovered that the bacterial system can be harnessed to make precise changes to the DNA of humans, as well as other animals and plants.

This means a genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors. It allows “customizing the genome of any cell or any species at will,” said Charles Gersbach, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University.