Tuesday, January 09, 2007

What I did on my holidays.


Hi there peoples! Hope you all had a great xmas/solstice & new year's celebration or whatever... as some of you may know I went away on holiday, for the first time in two years. In short, it was AWESOME. Went to Port Douglas up north of Cairns and I'm now in love with the place, me want to live there!!

Stormi on the beach on Christmas day, with a cute English couple in the background taking photos of themselves (yes, he has a santa hat on).

Ahh, the serenity.. view from Port Douglas market, the Coral Sea, with Daintree Rainforest mountains in the background. Heaven on earth...
... but watch out for the stinging jelly fishes!!
Daintree Rainforest, oldest rainforest on earth. (I'm going to fess-up, I didn't take that great shot).
One of the highlights of this trip was sea-kayaking around Cape Tribulation in a tropical thunderstorm... was awesome, thunder, lightening, rain pelting down on the ocean, what more does a girl need??Gosh, all this holidaying is hard work, hope yours was fabulous! ... ;-)

Dark Matter: moi??

The universe gives up its deepest secret

It is the invisible material that makes up most of the cosmos. Now, scientists have created the first image of dark matter

By Steve Connor, Science Editor, The Independent

Published: 08 January 2007

One of the greatest mysteries of the universe is about to be unravelled with the first detailed, three-dimensional map of dark matter - the invisible material that makes up most of the cosmos.

Astronomers announced yesterday that they have achieved the apparently impossible task of creating a picture of something that has defied every attempt to detect it since its existence was first postulated in 1933.

Scientists have known for many years that there is more to the universe than can be seen or detected through their telescopes but it is only now that they have been able to capture the first significant 3D-image of this otherwise invisible material.

Unlike the ordinary matter of the planets, stars and galaxies, which can be seen through telescopes or detected by scientific instruments, nobody has seen dark matter or knows what it is made of, though calculations suggest that it is at least six times bigger than the rest of the visible universe combined.

A team of 70 astronomers from Europe, America and Japan used the Hubble space telescope to build up a picture of dark matter in a vast region of space where some of the galaxies date back to half the age of the universe - nearly 7 billion years.

They used a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, first predicted by Albert Einstein, to investigate an area of the sky nine times the size of a full moon. Gravitational lensing occurs when light from distant galaxies is bent by the gravitational influence of any matter that it passes on its journey through space.

The scientists were able to exploit the technique by collecting the distorted light from half a million faraway galaxies to reconstruct some of the missing mass of the universe which is otherwise invisible to conventional telescopes.

"We have, for the first time, mapped the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe," said Richard Massey of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, one of the lead scientists in the team. "Dark matter is a mysterious and invisible form of matter, about which we know very little, yet it dominates the mass of the universe."

One of the most important discoveries to emerge from the study is that dark matter appears to form an invisible scaffold or skeleton around which the visible universe has formed.

Although cosmologists have theorised that this would be the case, the findings are dramatic proof that their calculations are correct and that, without dark matter, the known universe that we can see would not be able to exist.

"A filamentary web of dark matter is threaded through the entire universe, and acts as scaffolding within which the ordinary matter - including stars, galaxies and planets - can later be built," Dr Massey said. "The most surprising aspect of our map is how unsurprising it is. Overall, we seem to understand really well what happens during the formation of structure and the evolution of the universe," he said.

The three-dimensional map of dark matter was built up by taking slices through different regions of space much like a medical CT scanner build a 3-D image of the body by taking different X-ray "slices" in two dimensions.

Data from the Hubble telescope was supplemented by measurements from telescopes on the ground, such as the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Chile and the Japanese Subaru telescope in Hawaii.

Details of the dark matter map were released yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle and published online by the journal Nature. The map stretches half way back to the beginning of the universe and shows that dark matter has formed into "clumps" as it collapsed under gravity. Other matter then grouped around these clumps to form the visible stars, galaxies and planets.

"The 3-D information is vital to studying the evolution of the structures over cosmic time," said Jason Rhodes of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Astronomers have compared the task of detecting dark matter to the difficulty of photographing a city at night from the air when only street lights are visible.

Scientists said the new images were equivalent to seeing a city, its suburbs and country roads in daylight for the first time. Major arteries and intersections become evident and a variety of neighbourhoods are revealed.

"Now that we have begun to map out where dark matter is, the next challenge is to determine what it is, and specifically its relationship to normal matter," Dr Massey said. "We have answered the first question about where the dark matter it, but the ultimate goal will be to determine what it is."

Various experiments on Earth are under way to try to find out what dark matter is made of. One theory is that it is composed of mysterious sub-atomic particles that are difficult to detect because they do not interact with ordinary matter and so cannot be picked up and identified by conventional scientific instruments. Comparing the maps of visible matter and dark matter have already pointed to anomalies that could prove critical to the understanding of what constitutes dark matter.

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So I finished reading this article and I thought to myself: ok, so this is all very well & good these scientist-hyper-rational types looking 'out there' and thinking about dark matter, and how it makes up MOST of the known universe and yet we know hardly anything about it blah blah... and I thought, well, we are part of that same universe, so therefore, WE TOO are made up of mostly dark matter too. Freaky stuff. So it's like the most important thing in the universe, and the most important part of ourselves is what we can't see, not what we can see. hmmm..... ;-)


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Friday, January 05, 2007

Introducing the Precious Smeagol

Am graced with being a cat Auntie for the first time.. I WANT ONE TOO!! Thanx to Ms Bloom for these lovely photos of the Precious One.

Testing one two three..

"Hello? Is this thing working? Hello? Testing one two three..."

xxx Thank you MxD for this shot of your beautiful girl.. Aunti Meri Loves You both!! xxx

The World is Burning

Hobart fires in the hills above the city of Hobart, Tasmania.

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