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Unusual, Offbeat and Amazing Stories as well as Weird News From

Around The World







Thursday, April 1, 2010

Totally Amazing and Unusual Giant Space Smokestacks Plumes

If our eyes could see radio waves, the nearby galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A) would be one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. What we can't see when looking at the galaxy in visible light is that it lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting gas plumes ejected by its supersized black hole. Each plume is nearly a million light-years long.

Amazing Photo Image

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Unusual Dark Matter in NASA's Amazing 3D Map

March 26, 2010 -- Dark matter makes up the majority of mass in our universe. However, we cannot directly measure the stuff as it doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation (i.e. it doesn't emit or reflect any light), but we can indirectly observe its presence.








In this beautiful multicolored Hubble Space Telescope image, the distribution of mostly dark matter has been calculated and mapped. Basically, the location and density of anything with mass has been plotted in a 3D representation of the cosmos.






But if the majority of matter (i.e. dark matter) cannot be seen, how did Hubble work out its location?







SLIDE SHOW: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has snapped images from the far corners of the known universe. Take a look at our favorite Hubble images of 2009.







Hubble is making use of a characteristic of space-time as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Matter bends space-time -- much like a bowling ball will warp a suspended rubber sheet because it's heavy -- and as light travels through this bent space-time, the light's path will be deflected. This deflection can be directly observed.







For example, if a distant galaxy emits light in our direction, it may be diverted slightly in its otherwise straight path. Like a glass lens being placed in front of a lightbulb, the galactic light will distort from our viewpoint -- the heavier the mass, the greater the distortion.







This distortion is known as "gravitational lensing" and it can be used as a tool to detect things like galaxies, black holes and, you guessed it, dark matter.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

For One Amazing Hour The EARTH Went Dark

LONDON — Europe’s best known landmarks — including the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and Rome’s Colosseum — fell dark Saturday, following Sydney’s Opera House and Beijing’s Forbidden City in joining a global climate change protest, as lights were switched off across the world to mark the Earth Hour event.




In the United States, the lights went out at the Empire State Building in New York, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, among many other sites in the Eastern time zone.



Millions were expected to turn off lights and appliances for an hour from 8:30 p.m. in a gesture to highlight environmental concerns and to call for a binding pact to cut greenhouse gas emissions. This year’s was the fourth annual Earth Hour, organized by the World Wildlife Fund.



“I think it’s great to see that hundreds of millions of people share this common value of lowering our carbon footprint,” said Dan Forman, a spokesman for WWF in Washington.



Some 4,000 cities in more than 120 countries — starting with the remote Chatham Islands off the coast of New Zealand — voluntarily switched off Saturday to reduce energy consumption, though traffic lights and other safety features were unaffected, organizers said.



“We have everyone from Casablanca to the safari camps of Namibia and Tanzania taking part,” said Greg Bourne, CEO of WWF in Australia, which started Earth Hour in 2007 in Sydney before it spread to every continent.
By DAVID STRINGER, The Associated Press

Really Amazing!
New York, London and Paris