Cosmic Pollen?

Nope! This is actually the Tycho Supernova Remnant. It was first discovered by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1572 during the peak of its intrinsic brightness. It was so bright in fact that it could be seen during daylight hours with the naked eye that year. Though this is quite a rare stellar treat, another super nova is expected to occur within the next million years that will rival the brightness of our moon. Where should you begin looking for this potentially soon cosmic event? Keep your eyes on the Orion constellation; the red blip Beetlejuice is a super red giant nearing it's eminent demise.

As for the formation of this bizarre 'cosmic pollen grain', scientists postulate it was  one of the two similar methods, both involving a binary star system. The first is known as the Single-degenerative theory. This involves a white dwarf stealing gas from a larger companion star until it reaches approximately 1.4 times the size of the sun. Immense pressure within the thieving white dwarf builds tremendously before erupting into what classifies this as a type 1a supernova. 

The alternate scenario, the double-degenerative theory, results from a violent collision between two white dwarfs. Since merging the mass of these two white dwarfs would also exceed the Chandrasekhar limit (or 1.4 solar masses), a type 1a supernova would be inevitable. 

Space Mirage

What you see here is actually a galaxy and a quasar, one behind the other, in direct line of sight from our vantage point here on earth. The Galaxy Huchra’s Lens in the foreground is creating a gravitational lensing effect that is bending the light and creating a sort of ‘space mirage’. Though it was first postulated by Einstein with the General Theory of Relativity, there was no observational proof until Hubble found what we now call Einstein’s Cross pictured above. This effect is caused by the gravity from the closer galaxy (400 million light years from Earth) bending the light emitted by quasar (8 billion light years from Earth) behind it resulting in four mirrored images. 

Pondering the 4th Spatial Dimension

This is a tesseract, an object from 4th dimensional space undergoing a simple rotation. The tesseract was developed from an idea that was derived from the following:

Imagine a one dimensional being viewing its world from a 1 dimensional perspective. The entirety of his universe would entail lengthy lines with no width and no lines visibly intersecting. In the 2nd dimension, an entity would perceive its world with objects that are flat but have length and height while being able to see all the vertices of the 1st dimension. Now moving to the 3rd dimension, our universe, all objects we perceive have length, height, width, and we can see all the vertices of the second dimension. Now when I say 'we can see all the vertices of the 2nd dimension', I am implying that in our 3D world, we view everything as if it were a 2D shape. When we view an object, we can only perceive the side facing us and nothing more. Imagine a floating sphere. The only way that we can identify that it is a sphere is due to the fact that light is reflecting off of it and creating a variation of hues on its surface. Now visualize that it is hovering way from you, you can sense that it is receding into the distance since it appears to be getting smaller. From here, think about the sphere moving away from you while growing in size at perfect equilibrium, preventing you from seeing that it is actually moving away as it grows. In other words, it appears to be at a stand still. This is because we can only detect 2 dimensions from our 3rd dimensional point of view. The same rules would apply for the 4th dimension. In this universe, all the vertices of a 3D object would be viewable, allowing a 4th dimensional being to see the entirety of anything in our universe. This implies that it would be able to see all around us and inside us at the same time. The example above provides some insight as to what a 4th dimensional object is comprised of but since we are in 3 dimensional space, we will never be able to fully comprehend a 4th dimensional view of an object. 

Galactic Merger

Given the chance to travel forward far into earth's future, the sky you would gaze upon would be hardly recognizable relative to what you know now. The surreal image before you is a very real conception of our night sky in about 3.75 billion years.  After doing numerous calculations via super computer and observing the path of the Andromeda Galaxy for several years, scientists have concluded that our Galaxy is on a collision course with our closest neighbor of the Galaxy kind; Andromeda or M31. The epic merger of galaxies will take an additional 2 billion years from this projected view point to fully combine and take on the shape of an elliptical galaxy. As you can see from the images below, Earth's sky will be painted with a plethora of cosmic debris throughout the duration of the ensuing merger. Once the transformation is complete, the denser galactic bulge will nearly banish the  rest of the universe from piercing through. 

Universe Plural?

According to the mathematics derived from String Theory, the Universe we live in could be apart of an infinite expanse of a ‘swiss cheese' reality. This would result in a finite number of arrangements that all the particles in our universe can be positioned (10^10^122 alternations).Inevitably, forms will begin to repeat themselves. Let’s attempt to put this in a perspective relative to us. Assuming the theory is correct, this implies that there are an infinite amount of ‘you’ in existence. Variations would range from  moderate to severe. These ‘copies’ may be making slightly to radically different decisions therefore, every decision you’ve ever made may have been approached differently in every possible way by infinite forms of yourself. As you are reading this, they could doing the same but maybe a few have grown weary of the subject and moved on to something else. Perhaps others have come to a forcible halt due to an astroid impact ending the world as they/you know it. Literally, every single possibility could be happening to some form of you. 

Now earlier I mentioned that we may be living in a swiss cheese reality; this is merely a metaphor (obviously.. right?). The theory postulates that a Higgs field enshrouds the entirety of the multiverse with the higher density areas being the ‘cheese’ and the lower density areas being Universe's or ‘air pockets’. This qualitative view may seem wildly impossible but highly technical mathematics recently provided the insight and scientists may soon have a way to provide some hard evidence. In order to acquire this proof, the Large Hadron Collider (where the Higgs Boson or God Particle was essentially proven to exist) in Geneva will need to hurl particles at incredible speeds to create debris from colliding into one another. If energy is lost in the process, this will indicate that this energy must have been pushed into a neighboring universe via extra dimensional pathways of some sort. So what do you think? Are we living in a universe among many universes or is the notion far too impractical to even consider? 

The Implications of Light Speed

Essentially, we and all things are moving through the spatial dimensions as well as the dimension of time cumulatively at the speed of light. Moving through time takes up the majority of this energy which is why we as humans aren’t perceiving ourselves as hurdling through space at near light speeds. A massless photon however has all of its energy devoted to movement through space at 180,000 miles per second. This leaves none of its energy available to allow photons to move through time thus, light never ages. Remarkably, light originating from the big bang is perpetually the same age as it was 13.7 billion years ago.

All other matter with mass, at an absolute state of rest, will be channeling its energy entirely to the flow of time. Once a particle begins to move through space, that energy begins to flow less through time and more through space. This means that the particle, being, or what have you, will begin to age less relative to other stationary objects. Light speed (671 million MPH) is the cosmic speed limit due to the fact that energy equals mass times the speed of light (E=MC^2). Theoretically,in order for an object with mass to move through space at the speed of light, its energy would have to be infinite.

So what can we derive from all this? The possibility of time travel; let’s take it to the extreme. Say you decide to venture out to the closest black hole to our galaxy, V4641 Sgr  located in the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way. With the immense amount of mass and gravitational strain placed on anything within the black hole’s vicinity, time is virtually brought to a standstill. If you were to hover at a ‘safe’ distance near the event horizon for about an hour relative to you, upon returning to Earth you’d find that millennia had passed during your hour long rendezvous with V4642 Sgr. As far as modern day cosmology goes, this would be a one way trip. There is no known way to travel backwards in time. Your only hope of returning would be banking on the research of future physicists leading them to a way to send you back. Would you be willing to take the risk?

A Barrier of Time

Over the past few centuries, humankind has made great strides in science to help us better understand the universe around us. Our idea of the world went from flat to round about 500 years ago. More recently, the universe went from the size of merely the solar system to what today we believe is 82 billion lightyears across if you take into account cosmic inflation after 13.7 billion years. Even now, we are expanding our minds eye of the universe by stumbling upon theories that could actually bring us to the realization that we are quite literally part of a multiverse. Just one universe floating in the midst of countless others. Yet, we as humans have such a struggle to grasp one of the most prevalent elements of the universe; time. It’s something that surrounds us, guides us, controls us. We know enough about time to function with it but we have no real understanding of the deep inter-workings of time. We can’t harness it and control it, yet we are all moving through it at the speed of light minus the amount of energy diverted to our movement through space. Time is the same for all of us, yet every single form of matter, large and small, perceives it differently. What moves faster through space, moves slower in time and vice versa. If all of our energy that is flowing through time were to theoretically be diverted to movement through space, our movement through time would be halted and we in a sense would become eternal.

So what does the size of an object have to do with ones perception of time? Something with less mass experiences time ‘slower’ than one who owns a greater amount of mass in the same space. Imagine a human swatting a fly for a moment. To the human, this action takes place rather quickly.  So quickly in fact he seems to be unable to fathom how the fly was able to react so quickly and remove itself from harms way. Yet from the fly’s perspective, it took your arm a considerable amount of time to reach him, as if the speed of your arm matched the velocity of a drifting feather.

Between two relatively similar sized creatures (relative to the size of the universe of course), this variation in perceptions of time is quite remarkable. What if we delve into the quantum universe, the movement of plank sized particles is absolutely inconceivable. Though we currently do not possess instruments powerful enough to analyze objects to that scale, we can discern from theory and slightly larger objects the phenomenal movement of these particles. From our perspective, these particles move at a rate completely incompatible with the laws of the universe that function so well on an astronomical scale (The general theory of relativity for example). These laws simply break down and fall apart when applied to quantum mechanics and vice versa.

Ultimately, I believe that once we attain a better understanding of the flow of time relative to an objects mass, we will finally be able make it over this cosmological speed bump and develop a stronger (and most importantly; proven) unified theory. Until then, we will remain stricken by barriers of ineptitude before our race can truly become ‘Masters of the Universe’.