Today’s astronomy photo of the day: Orion
M78 and Reflecting Dust Clouds in Orion
Credit & Copyright: Martin Pugh
Explanation: An eerie blue glow and ominous columns of dark dust highlight M78 and other bright reflection nebula in the constellation of Orion. The dark filamentary dust not only absorbs light, but also reflects the light of several bright blue stars that formed recently in the nebula. Of the two reflection nebulas pictured above, the more famous nebula is M78, on the upper right, while NGC 2071 can be seen to its lower left. The same type of scattering that colors the daytime sky further enhances the blue color. M78 is about five light-years across and visible through a small telescope. M78 appears above only as it was 1600 years ago, however, because that is how long it takes light to go from there to here. M78 belongs to the larger Orion Molecular Cloud Complex that contains the Great Nebula in Orion and the Horsehead Nebula.
Front page
Beauty abounds on every scale
A cell:
Multiply stained germinal epithelial cell cultured from the ovary of a Himalayan Tahr, a sort of goat. The blue lines delineate the filamentous actin network, the nucleus is red and the green cloud is the Golgi Structure. (HJ1.OV line established by The Naval Biosciences Laboratory located in Oakland, California)
What a blessed relief from the ugliness now being exposed by all sides in this primary campaign.
Beauty is "scale free"!
Maybe.
See e.g.
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
you want beauty? here:
phila’s nudis have always moved me. seriously. there are times when i understand worship; at certain moments beauty overwhelms us and compels our adulation.
if i had a religion, it’d be nature worship with animal deities. i think Bast or di/n/ger-Mush(7) would be my primaries.
Keats nailed it
The beauty = truth thing. It is the best test, the sharpest differentiator between true and false, good and bad, right and wrong, at any scale.
It appears, really appears, as though we may have a handle on the structure of the universe, a coherent connection between the forces from which it is all composed, a unified theory of everything. Other theories have been proposed but they have all come up short, most recently string theory; an ugly thing, all bits and pieces sticking out and holes everywhere.
This new one, long story short, was recently stumbled upon in the finest tradition of serendipity and is still being chewed over by the smart kids, but physicists and mathematicians alike are pretty excited. These are early days, it will take another few years of sorting it out and there may well be shortcomings, but at first blush it looks very promising – not least because it is beautiful.
This is a 2-D representation of one element of a 248-dimensional structure first described in 1887 by the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie, called E8. All of the universe and everything in it is composed of structured networks, relationships that both create and are constrained by what we call physics. These relationships, that tie together everything from the subtleties at the center of atoms to light and gravity and the arch of the cosmos, all appear to be described within the singular E8 mathematical construct.
Beauty is not limited by scale, or anything else; it is intrinsic to all that is:
(Hand drawing of E8 Gossett polytope 421 by Peter McMullen, computer regenerated by John Stembridge)
Nudibranchs, and those who worship them