Some notes from the morning’s readings, they all pop in new windows. Is that a distraction for some? (Not me, I tab.)
The big bang sounded more like the THX theme on quaaludes. (link links to wav file)
Cramer bases his model on temperature data sent by a NASA satellite, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).
His calculation is based on the frequencies that rampaged through the Universe during its first 760,000 years, when it was a cosmic stripling measuring just 18 million light years across.
The frequencies would have been too low to be heard by the human ear, so Cramer has scaled them up 100,000 billion billion times to give an approximation.
Progress in teleportation (via Instapundit). I haven’t a great understanding of the concept, but it sounds like the transfer of information about the quantum state of matter. This is neat — and could have some interesting applications in computing — but we’re not making Earl Grey tea on demand. Yet.
Ultrafast star escapes black hole.
Galactic nuclei are the cores of galaxies, groups of thousands to millions of stars that are held together by gravity. As stars in the nucleus are so close together, interactions readily occur. If ultraheavy black holes (black holes several million times heavier than the sun) are also involved, stars can be slung out of the galaxy (for example the Milky Way) at speeds of more than one thousand kilometres per second. The astrophysical reasons for this are simple but can only be demonstrated with detailed calculations on specially developed computers.
Two things I’ve learned reading this press release (three if I was going to be snarky about press release writing): 1) There are ultrafast stars out there; 2) Blackholes can slingshot stars out of the galaxy, which is neat unless they’re aiming at you.
That’s it for now. For some reason, I’ve been reading a lot of physics news lately.