ronko Posted January 20, 2014 Hmmmm http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread993773/pg1 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
BaguaKicksAss Posted January 21, 2014 Looks like qi 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Nungali Posted January 21, 2014 Looks like neurons and brain matter ! Hmmmmm ... 4 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ronko Posted January 21, 2014 Exactly to both ! how cool is that ! hehe 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Marblehead Posted January 21, 2014 That knowledge became available after the first attempt to map the entire universe. A second mapping has been done with much better equipment and this second mapping made this even more clear. Some have compared it to the human brain. I think that was a bad comparison. (So many reasons for my thought.) Gravity is a wonderful thing. It works on the smallest of things and also on the largest of things. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
joeblast Posted January 21, 2014 how new is that image, I remember seeing that 7, 8 years ago 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
thelerner Posted January 21, 2014 It'd be nice to have a astronomer explain the picture and say exactly it's showing and what the actual scale is. Often beautiful astronomical pictures are colored in or showing aspects not in our visual field. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
joeblast Posted January 21, 2014 It'd be nice to have a astronomer explain the picture and say exactly it's showing and what the actual scale is. Often beautiful astronomical pictures are colored in or showing aspects not in our visual field. To find this strand of gas, astronomers where able to take advantage of an extremely bright mass of energy and light known as a quasar. The light from a quasar located 10 billion light-years-away acted like a "flashlight" to make the surrounding gas glow, researchers report Jan. 19 in the journal Nature. This boosted the Lyman alpha radiation that hydrogen gas emits to detectable levels over a huge swath of the region. ..... The researchers were able to figure out the wavelength of the Lyman alpha radiation emitted by the gas and used the Keck telescope in Hawaii to get an image at that wavelength. What they were able to see is a cloud of gas extending two million light years across intergalactic space Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Brian Posted January 21, 2014 (edited) joeblast's quote is very helpful but may be obtuse for some... The majority of interstellar gasses is hydrogen. When an atom absorbs a photon, an electron is "bumped" into a more energetic orbit. Later, when that atom loses that gained energy, it emits a photon as an electron drops back to a lower-level state. In the photo presented, the atoms are the interstellar hydrogen -- a distant quasar pouring enormous amounts of energy in all directions energizes the hydrogen atoms and then they "relax" and give off photons. The Lyman-alpha energy transition is the absorption by a hydrogen atom elevating an electron from the atom's very lowest state to the next-to-the-lowest state, and then releasing an identical photon when it relaxes. Essentially, when a cloud of hydrogen is "lit up" by a distant quasar, it glows a particular ultraviolet color. This photo is a colorized image showing the density distribution of interstellar hydrogen on a very large scale, based on the observation of that particular band of UV light. What scale? Well, the little box in the big picture from which the blown-up detail is abstracted is labeled "10 Mly" -- or 10 million light-years. So it would take 10 million years at the speed of light to transverse that little box. (For those who don't like that unit, 10 Mly would be 58,786,253,731,836,080,000 miles or 94607304725808000000 kilometers...) Edited January 21, 2014 by Brian 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
