Or be very waif and have bird-like hollow 'bones'. It's 17 times the mass, so it would have ~3 times the gravity because of it's diameter.

Could we see a dominant life form in a similar manor as our flat worms. Over eons developing higher levels of brain functions and evolving into sentient beings? I say flat worms do to the high gravity.

Our amazing skies: Beautiful pictures show astronomy photography at its finest as competition attracts record number of entries

These are some of the stunning images of the heavens submitted by astrophotographers looking to win the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2014.







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Intriguing X-Ray Signal Might be Dark Matter Candidate
Could a strange X-ray signal coming from the Perseus galaxy cluster be a hint of the elusive dark matter in our Universe?

Using archival data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the XMM-Newton mission, astronomers found an unidentified X-ray emission line, or a spike of intensity at a very specific wavelength of X-ray light. This spike was also found in 73 other galaxy clusters in XMM-Newton data.

The scientists propose that one intriguing possibility is that the X-rays are produced by the decay of sterile neutrinos, a hypothetical type of neutrino that has been proposed as a candidate for dark matter and is predicted to interact with normal matter only via gravity.

“We know that the dark matter explanation is a long shot, but the pay-off would be huge if we’re right,” said Esra Bulbul of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study. “So we’re going to keep testing this interpretation and see where it takes us.”

Astronomer estimate that roughly 85 percent of all matter in the Universe is dark matter, invisible to even the most powerful telescopes, but detectable by its gravitational pull.

Galaxy clusters are good places to look for dark matter. They contain hundreds of galaxies as well as a huge amount of hot gas filling the space between them. But measurements of the gravitational influence of galaxy clusters show that the galaxies and gas make up only about one-fifth of the total mass. The rest is thought to be dark matter.

NASA built a crazy rover prototype that can drive on the underside of ice
Watch the rover cling to the underside of a frozen Alaskan lake. One day it may be deployed in the search for life

For the first time ever, NASA remotely piloted a rover under a frozen. The rover, which in tests clung to the underside of the thick ice of Alaska’s Sukok Lake, could potentially probe for life on Jupiter’s moon Europa or one of Saturn’s liquid-harboring moons, according to National Geographic.

The rovers name is BRUIE (Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration), and it is also being used to study the water it is being tested in, including temperature and salt content.

Current rovers, like Curiosity, are more suited for Earth-like environments like Mars. But this rover could expand the search for life to other celestial bodies and surfaces. Watch the video below:

First Evidence Of A Correction To The Speed of Light

When astronomers first observed light from a supernova arriving 7.7 hours after the neutrinos from the same event, they ignored the evidence. Now one physicist says the speed of light must be slower than Einstein predicted and has developed a theory that explains why

In the early hours of the morning on 24 February 1987, a neutrino detector deep beneath Mont Blanc in northern Italy picked up a sudden burst of neutrinos. Three hours later, neutrino detectors at two other locations picked up a similar burst.

Some 4.7 hours after this, astronomers studying the Large Magellanic cloud that orbits our galaxy, noticed the tell-tale brightening of a blue supergiant star called Sanduleak -69 202, as it became a supernova. Since then, SN 1987a, as it was designated, has become one of the most widely studied supernovas in history (see animation above).

But even today, there is a significant mystery associated with this SN 1987a that astrophysicists have brushed under the carpet. The event consisted of two bursts of neutrinos separated by three hours followed by the first optical signals 4.7 hours later.

Neutrinos and photons both travel at the speed of light and should therefore arrive simultaneously, all else being equal. The mystery is what caused this huge delay of 7.7 hours between the first burst of neutrinos and the arrival of the optical photons.

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of James Franson at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. Franson has used the laws of quantum mechanics to calculate the speed of light travelling through a gravitational potential related to the mass of the Milky Way.

Because all previous speed-of-light calculations have relied only on general relativity, they do not take into account the tiny effects of quantum mechanics. But these effects are significant over such long distances and through such a large mass as the Milky Way, says Franson.

He says that quantum mechanical effects should slow down light in these kinds of circumstances and calculates that this more or less exactly accounts for the observed delay.

First, some background about the mechanism behind the supernova. A supernova begins with the collapse of a star’s core, generating both neutrinos and optical photons. However, the density of the core delays the emergence of the photons by about 3 hours. By contrast, the neutrinos interact less strongly with matter and so emerge unscathed more or less immediately.

Many astrophysicists believe that supernovas can also undergo a second collapse, generating an additional burst of neutrinos. That’s why the detectors on Earth spotted two bursts.

But the timing is still a puzzle. The optical photons should have arrived about 3 hours after the first burst of neutrinos rather than 4.7 hours after the second burst.

In the absence of any explanation, astrophysicists have simply ignored this burst, saying that it cannot have been associated with the supernova and must have been a flukish coincidence. That’s despite the chances of such a coincidence being something like 1 in 10,000.

Franson comes to this problem from a different angle as a leading thinker on interferometry and quantum mechanics. He points out that physicists have had to consider the effects of the gravitational potential on the quantum behaviour of atoms in matter interferometry experiments for some time. So it’s not such a stretch to think that the gravitational potential might also have an effect on photons.

His thinking goes like this. As a photon travels through space, there is a finite chance that it will form an electron-positron pair. This pair exists for only a brief period of time and then goes on to recombine creating another photon which continues along the same path. This is a well-known process called vacuum polarisation.

Franson’s idea is that the gravitational potential must influence the electron-positron pair because they have mass. “Roughly speaking, the gravitational potential changes the energy of a virtual electron-positron pair, which in turn produces a small change in the energy of a photon,” he says. “This results in a small correction to the angular frequency of a photon and thus its velocity.”

By contrast, neutrinos are not influenced in the same way. Their interaction with virtual particles comes about through the weak force and this is negligible in comparison. Therefore, neutrinos travel at the unperturbed speed of light. “The analogous effects for neutrinos involve the weak interaction and they are negligibly small in comparison,” he says.

Franson goes on to calculate the magnitude of this effect over the intergalactic distances between here and SN1987a. That involves including a term for the gravitational potential in the quantum electrodynamical description of the photons, a process that essentially combines quantum theory and general relativity.

The results are eye-opening. The calculations suggest that photons are delayed by a factor that is proportional to the fine structure constant. When putting the relevant numbers into the equations, Franson concludes that the new effect can easily account for the observed delay of 4.7 hours. “The predictions of this model are in reasonable agreement with the experimental observations from Supernova 1987a, in which the first neutrinos arrived 7.7 hours before the first photons,” he says.

That’s an interesting piece of work. A correction to the speed of light over these kinds of astrophysical distances is a big result. And it has other implications. Franson says that this kind of thinking would result in a small correction to the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron and to the decay rate of orthopositronium (the name for an electron and a positron orbiting each other). However, these corrections are some two orders of magnitude smaller than physicists are currently able to measure.

. . .

That actually makes sense. I've seen experiments where they were actually able to slow a light photon. I think we're talking about millionths of a second, at least, but it has been done in a lab.

I'll believe in dark matter when I see it.