The Full Rotation Of The Moon As Seen By NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Our Galaxy’s Magnetic Field from Planck https://go.nasa.gov/2quwDLs

Hubble Image Captures Collision of Two Spiral Galaxies

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/hubble-collision-two-spiral-galaxies-04839.html

Photograph of the May 1919 solar eclipse captured by Arthur Eddington, which proved Einstein’s theory of general relativity. 

Credit: SSPL/Getty Images

The Meteor Shower Of 1833

“Sketching Fractals” by Music: Fractals are a treat for your eyes, but what about your ears?

Fractals are geometric constructs that exhibit similar or identical characteristics at every level of magnitude. They provide new tools for geometers to describe objects of extreme intricacy, such as clouds, ferns, snowflakes, mountain ranges, stock-market fluctuations, the human circulatory and nervous system, etc.. The geometry of Fractals brings us a new appreciation for the natural world and the beauty of mathematics. Some of the most popular examples are: The Sierpinski triangle  and the Von Koch snowflake.

Fractals are a treat for your eyes, but what about your ears?. Dmitry Kormann, a composer/keyboardist from São Paulo, Brazil, explains how he brings fractal-like patterns to the very structure of his music, to obtain beautiful results. See more at:  [http://plus.maths.org/issue55/features/Kormann]

Images: Snow winter at Datspiff on Tumblr & Snowflakes and snow crystals on Flickr.

References:

[Fractal Dimensions of Geometric Objects on Fractalfoundation.org]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal]

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Double triangle sawtooth by Miguel Angel Blanco Muñoz. I have liked how time seemed to slow down, folding the grid.

Hubble Views The Final Frontier For Dark Matter

“This phenomenon of gravitational lensing stretches galaxies into streaks and arcs, magnifying them, and creating multiple images. It also enables us to reconstruct the mass distribution of the cluster, revealing that it’s mostly due to dark matter.”

When you look out at the distant Universe, you can see all sorts of things: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, going as far back into the distant past as our telescopes can image. But where you have the greatest concentrations of mass, an extreme phenomenon emerges: that of gravitational lensing. Any foreground objects lying behind that mass will have their light stretched, magnified and distorted by the intervening matter. Recently, as part of the Hubble Frontier Fields program, the telescope followed-up on galaxy cluster Abell 370, and revealed the most spectacular gravitational lensing signal ever seen in a galaxy cluster. Most importantly, it provides some very strong evidence not only for dark matter’s existence, but for its presence distinct from any galaxies at all.

Come get the full story in images, videos, and no more than 200 words on this edition of Mostly Mute Monday!