11 Photos That Show Why The SR-71 'Blackbird' Is One Of The Greatest Planes Ever Flown

When it comes to curb appeal, few airplanes can match the look of the SR-71 “Blackbird.” And nothing in the Air Force’s inventory — past or present — can beat its signature performance characteristics. 
Here are 11 photos that show why the Blackbird remains the standard of aviation cool.

The SR-71 Blackbird was a high-speed, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft developed by Lockheed’s legendary “Skunk Works” team in the 1960s.

NASAA NASA SR-71 on its first flight on Oct 31, 1997 at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.

The Blackbird was capable of speeds exceeding Mach 3 (2,200 mph). The fuselage was designed to expand at high speeds, which caused the plane to leak fuel on the ground because the panels fit very loosely when the jet was parked.

US Air Force

The Blackbird’s service ceiling (max altitude) was 85,000 feet, which forced crews to wear pressure suits and astronaut-type helmets.

US Air ForceSR-71 pilot Col. ‘Buz’ Carpenter.

SR-71s were manned by two aviators: a pilot and a reconnaissance systems officer, who monitored systems from the rear cockpit.

US Air Force

Only 32 Blackbirds were manufactured, and they were in service from 1964 to 1998. Despite over 4,000 combat sorties, none of the planes were lost because of enemy fire. But 12 were destroyed in accidents.

NASA

Claustrophobic types need not apply. The narrow space between canopy rails didn’t give crews much room to move around. The outer windscreen of the cockpit was made of quartz and was fused ultrasonically to the titanium frame. The temperature of the exterior of the windscreen reached 600 F during a mission.

US Air ForceA pilot mans the brakes as the SR-71 is towed out of the hangar.

There's nothing glass about the Blackbird's cockpit. The SR-71 presented the pilot with a dizzying array of steam gauges and switches. And visibility out the front wasn’t the greatest.

US Air Force

Although not technically a stealth aircraft, the SR-71 was hard for enemy SAM systems to spot because it was designed with a low radar cross section in mind.

US Air Force

Because of its high approach speed, the Blackbird used a drag chute to slow down on the runway after touchdown.

US Air Force

Aerial refueling capability allowed the SR-71 to perform long-range, high-endurance missions.

US Air Force

The Blackbird still holds the record for fastest air-breathing manned aircraft (a record it broke in 1976).

Although the SR-71 is no longer in service, the legend lives on.

US Air Force
Article from Yahoo.
Hillary Maruwa; 23rd January, 2015.

 

 

Google Patents Contact Lenses That Contain Microcameras

Add this one to the list of unbelievably cool things Google has in the works: It has patented a contact lens system that would include built-in cameras. 

The technology could potentially allow Google to shrink its wearable face computer — known as Google Glass — into the size of a single contact lens. Rather than be controlled by voice, those wearing the contacts would command their device through, as Patent Bolt analyzes it, “a sophisticated system” of “unique blinking patterns.” In other words, people wearing these contacts may look even weirder than people in Google Glass.

News of Google’s patent filing comes just a few months after the company revealed a prototype contact lens that monitors glucose levels. The invention, which was developed in the company’s secretive Google X Labs, could be a major aid for the millions of diabetics who must measure their blood sugar by drawing blood from their fingers.

Google’s latest breakthrough in contact lens technology could potentially grant the blind the ability to see certain things, according to Patent Bolt’s close reading of the patent application.

“For example, a blind person wearing Google’s contact lens with a built-in camera may be walking on a sidewalk and approaching an intersection. The analysis component of the contact lens can process the raw image data of the camera to determine … that there is a car approaching the intersection.” 

Sounds rad. Let’s just hope it doesn’t spawn a whole new population of Glassholes. 

Article from Yahoo

Hillary Maruwa 15th April, 2014

Hyperloop Transport System

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California billionaire Elon Musk took the wraps off his vision of a futuristic "Hyperloop" transport system on Monday, proposing to build a solar-powered network of crash-proof capsules that would whisk people from San Francisco to Los Angeles in half an hour.

In a blog post, Musk, the chief executive of electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc described in detail a system that, if successful, would do nothing short of revolutionizing intercity transportation. But first the plan would have to overcome questions about its safety and financing.

The Hyperloop, which Musk previously described as a cross between a Concorde, rail gun and air-hockey table, would cost an estimated $6 billion to build and construction would take 7 to 10 years. Eventually, according to the plan, it would jettison more than 7 million people a year along one of the U.S. West Coast's busiest traffic corridors.

As many as 28 passengers could ride in each pod and the system could even transport vehicles, according to the 57-page design plan.

Musk, who in the past has hinted at the hopes of building such a system, proposed the Hyperloop as an alternative to a $68 billion high-speed rail project that's a major priority of California Governor Jerry Brown. It would be safer, faster, less expensive and more convenient, Musk said in the blog post.

But not everyone is convinced the project is a good idea.

Jim Powell, a co-inventor of the bullet train and director of Maglev 2000, which develops high-speed transport systems using magnetic levitation, said the system would be highly vulnerable to a terrorist attack or accident.

"The biggest overall problem is the idea of the low pressure tube from a terrorist standpoint," he told Reuters after taking an initial look at Musk's specifications. "All a terrorist driving along the highway has to do is pull over, toss a net of explosives at it, and then everyone in the tube dies," he said.

Musk said that since the tube will be low- but not zero-pressure, standard air pumps could easily overcome an air leak. He also said the transport pods could handle variable air densities.

Musk may also have neglected to factor in a few costs. Powell said that since an extensive monitoring system would be needed to keep track of the tube's pressure, the cost of the project could double Musk's estimate, coming closer to $12 billion.

QUESTIONS STILL

Musk, who made his name as a PayPal founding member before going on to start SpaceX and Tesla, envisions capsules departing every 30 seconds at peak times and traversing the roughly 400 miles between Los Angeles and San Francisco along an elevated tube erected along the I-5 interstate highway.

The capsules ride an air cushion blasted from "skis" beneath, propelled via a magnetic linear accelerator.

The expected half-hour travel time for Hyperloop passengers compares with current travel times of an hour and 15 minutes by jet, about 5 and a half hours by car, as well as about 2 hours and 40 minutes via California's planned high-speed rail.

Other major questions remain, notably whether the California state government will ever approve the massive project, and whether any private companies are willing to step in and build it. The design remains theoretical and has yet to be tested in the field.

Musk has said he is too busy running electric car company Tesla and rocket manufacturer SpaceX to build the Hyperloop himself. He said the design plans were open-source, meaning others can build on them.

On Monday, however, he told reporters on a conference call he could kick off the project.

"I've come around a little bit on my thinking here," he said. "Maybe I could do the beginning bit... and then hand it over to somebody else."

He said he would be willing to put some of his personal fortune toward the project but stressed that building the Hyperloop was a low priority for him as he continues to focus primarily on SpaceX and Tesla.

He also asked the public for help to improve the design. Corporations have resorted in the past to public assistance on their products. In 2009, Netflix Inc awarded a cash prize to a team that succeeded in improving by 10 percent the accuracy of its system for movie recommendations.

Article from Yahoo.

Hillary Maruwa 13th August, 2013

The Cassini spacecraft has made its lowest pass yet over the south pole of Enceladus, an active moon of Saturn which may harbour a liquid water ocean.

The flyby, at an altitude of 74km (46mi), allowed Cassini to "taste" the jets of ice and water vapour that gush from the moon's polar region.

Several lines of evidence suggest these jets are fed by a liquid water ocean beneath Enceladus' outer icy shell.

The spacecraft's closest approach took place at 1930 GMT on Tuesday.

The scientists are using Cassini's Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer instrument to learn more about the composition, density and variability of the plumes from Enceladus.

Scientists previously detected salts in these jets, which suggested the sub-surface liquid water ocean was probably in contact with Enceladus' rocky core.

This makes Enceladus an even more important target in the search for life elsewhere in the Solar System, as rocks could furnish the ocean with the chemical ingredients thought essential for life.

The plumes erupt from fissures at the south pole known as "tiger stripes".

Last week, scientists presented evidence of a connection between the jet activity on Enceladus and the way Saturn's gravity stretches and stresses the fissures.

Theresults were outlinedby Terry Hurford, from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), at theLunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC)in The Woodlands, Texas.

However, about 35% of the observations could not be explained by tension in the jets' source regions.

Enceladus moves around Saturn in a distorted, oval-shaped orbit rather than a circular one. This causes the moon to be pulled and squeezed by Saturn's gravity, inducing the heat that enables geological activity on the icy moon.

Article From BBC.

Hillary Maruwa 9Th July, 2012

Stunning Barred Spiral Galaxy Image

 

Hubble snaps stunning barred spiral galaxy image

 
 The Hubble space telescope has captured an image of a "barred spiral" galaxy that could help us better understand our own Milky Way.
Most of the known spiral galaxies fall into this "barred" category - which are defined by the pronounced bar structure across their centres.
The presence of this structure may be an indication of a galaxy's age.
Two-thirds of nearby, younger galaxies have the bar, while only a fifth of older, more distant spirals have it.
The new picture also continues the Hubble space telescope's long heritage of striking astronomical images.
In the upper left of the image is a cluster showing recent star formation that is just visible to Hubble's cameras.
But it is a bright source in X-ray light; astronomers believe that this IXO-5 X-ray source is actually a "binary" system comprising a star and a black hole in mutual orbit.

Article From BBC,
Hillary Maruwa, 3rd February, 2012.

Mysterious Symbols in China Desert

Mysterious Symbols in China Desert Are Spy Satellite Targets, Expert Says

A strange zigzag pattern in the Gobi Desert in China. Coordinates: 40.452107,93.742118. CREDIT: Copyright 2011 Google - Imagery copyright Cnes/Spot Image, DigitalGlobe, GeoEye View full size image

Newfound Google Maps images have revealed an array of mysterious structures and patterns etched into the surface of China's Gobi Desert. The media — from mainstream to fringe — has wildly speculated that they might be Chinese weapons-testing sites, satellite calibration targets, street maps of Washington, D.C., and New York City, or even messages to (or from) aliens.
It turns out that they are almost definitely used to calibrate China's spy satellites.
So says Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, which operates many of the cameras used during NASA's Mars missions. Hill works with images of the Martian surface taken by rovers and satellites, as well as data from Earth-orbiting NASA instruments.
The grids of zigzagging white lines seen in two of the images — the strangest of the various desert structures — are spy satellite calibration targets. Satellite cameras focus on the grids, which measure approximately 0.65 miles wide by 1.15 miles long, and use them to orient themselves in space. [Gallery: Mysterious Structures In China's Gobi Desert]

The existence of these calibration targets may seem suspicious or revelatory, but Hill said it really isn't; China was already known to operate spy satellites, and many other countries (including the United States) do so as well. In fact, the U.S. also uses calibration targets. "An example I found just now is a calibration target for the Corona spy satellites, built back in the 1960s, down in Casa Grande, Ariz., [at coordinates] 32° 48' 24.74" N, 111° 43' 21.30" W," Hill told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.
The 65-foot-wide white lines that make up China's grids are not made of reflective metal as many news sites have suggested. "They have gaps in them where they cross little natural drainage channels and the lines themselves are not perfectly filled in, with lots of little streaks and uneven coverage. I think it's safe to say these are some kind of paint," Hill said, noting that if they were made of white dust or chalk, the wind would have caused them to streak visibly.
The calibration targets are larger than might have been expected, he said, suggesting that the satellite cameras they are being used to calibrate have surprisingly poor ground resolution.
Another strange image taken not far away shows a Stonehenge-like arrangement of objects radiating outward, with fighter jets parked at its center. "This is almost certainly a calibration/test target for orbital radar instruments," Hill said. "Since a significant amount of radar return is due to differences in surface roughness, they're probably testing ways of making the areas around planes 'bumpy' enough that the planes are partially masked."
In other words, the Chinese military probably uses radar instruments to send signals down at the target from above, and determine how much radar bounces back to the instruments from the fighter jets, and how much gets scattered by the Stonehenge-like arrangement of bumps surrounding them. From this, the country's radar experts can learn how best to hide China's military operations from other countries' satellites, and possibly get clues for how to find carefully hidden objects in other countries. However, the fact that the planes are made out of metal will increase their radar return and make it very hard to completely mask them, Hill said.
Since the initial reports of these structures became widespread, industrious readers of the gadget blog Gizmodo have spotted a few more interesting structures in China. One, Hill said, appears to be a weapons testing zone, perhaps for evaluating explosives. Elsewhere, a giant grid resembles a Yagi antenna array. Instruments like this can be used for any number of things, such as weather tracking, space weather tracking and high-altitude atmospheric research.
Hill noted that most of these structures are quite closer to each other. "I think we're seeing some sort of military zone/test range, which explains the large amount of equipment and technology in an otherwise remote area," he said. "Sometimes the truth can be just as interesting, if not more so, than the conspiracies that people come up with."

Article from Livescience.
Hillary Maruwa 24th November, 2011

Einstein's Brain on Display

Pieces of Einstein's Brain Go On Display For First Time

A box of 46 ultra-thin slices of Einstein's brain is only display in Philadelphia. CREDIT: Evi Numen, 2011, for the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. View full size image

If you've ever wondered what the brain of a genius looks like, make your way to Philadelphia. There, the public can view for the first time 46 slivers of the brain of Albert Einstein, the theoretical physicist who developed the Theory of General Relativity.
The brain is on display at Philadelphia's Mütter Museum and Historical Medical Library, in a whirlwind exhibit built in about nine working days, according to museum curator Anna Dhody. Visitors can view 45 of the brain slides as-is, and see one magnified under a lens.
"He was a unique individual, and to have the organ that's most associated with intelligence of this great man is a wonderful opportunity," Dhody told Livescience. "What we're hoping to do is to showcase this and to really talk about the brain and the physiology."
Hand-me-down brain

The brain slices have had a strange journey since Einstein's death in 1955 at age 76 from an abdominal aneurism. The pathologist who completed Einstein's autopsy, a man named Thomas Harvey, removed Einstein's brain as part of standard autopsy procedure — and then failed to put it back. Harvey later said that Einstein's son had given him permission to take the scientist's brain, but the Einstein family disputed that claim.
Harvey lost his job over the Einstein scandal, but he kept the brain. Over the years, he would send portions to neuroscientists trying to understand if something about the man's brain structure made him so brilliant. It's some of these hair-thin sections that are now on display at Philadelphia's Mütter Museum and the Historical Medical Library. [Inside the Brain: A Journey Through Time]
"Dr. Harvey had done some of his training in Philadelphia, and he came back to Philadelphia and asked specifically for one of his slide technicians," Dhody said. "All the boxes and all the series of slides were done in Philadelphia."

A close-up scan of one of a slide of Albert Einstein's brain.
CREDIT: Evi Numen, 2011, for the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

View full size image

As a "thank you" to the Philadelphia pathologist who allowed the slides to be made in his lab, Harvey gifted him a box of 46 slides of ultra-thin brain slices, each just 20 to 50 microns thick. (For comparison, an average human hair is about 100 microns in diameter.)
When that pathologist, William Ehrich, died in 1967, his widow passed the slides to another local doctor, Allen Steinberg, who, in turn, gave the slides to Lucy Rorke-Adams, the senior neuropathologist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Rorke-Adams recently decided to donate the slides to the Mütter Museum, which is run by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
"I think the time has come to turn them over to the College and the Mütter Museum as they are a part of medical history," Rorke-Adams said in a statement.
Brain and genius
Einstein's brain will be in good company at the museum, which also boasts displays of a tumor from President Glover Cleveland and neck tissue from John Wilkes Booth. The goal, Dhody said, is to let visitors see what the brain of a genius looks like, while emphasizing that no one really knows if anything about Einstein's brain structure made him great.
Various researchers have uncovered out-of-the-ordinary features in the brain, including extra support cells called glial cells in some regions involved in complex thinking. But human anatomy is notoriously individualistic, and it's tough to say whether any given aspect of Einstein's brain structure made him a genius, was the result of his genius, or was just a quirk. [Life's Extremes: Smart vs. Dumb]
According to Rorke-Adams, Einstein's brain does look unusually young on a microscopic level. He lacks a build-up of lipofuscin, cellular waste associated with aging. His blood vessels are also in remarkably good shape.
"He died at the age of 76, so he was an older individual," Dhody said. "But Dr. Rorke-Adams said looking at his brain, you would think it was the brain of a younger person."
The brain will stay on display for the foreseeable future at the museum, Dhody said, and the museum may consider loaning out slides for future neuroscience research. In the meantime, the museum staff hopes to expand the exhibit with micro-level photographs of the slides.
"It's Einstein's brain!" Dhody said. "It's one of the greatest minds of the 20th century in our museum. What more can you ask for?"

Article from Livescience.
Hillary Maruwa 24th November, 2011

Want to find Aliens?

Want to Find Aliens? Look for More than Just Earth-Like Planets

An artist's concept of an Earth-like planet orbiting another star. CREDIT: NASA/JPL View full size image

When searching for alien planets that could host extraterrestrial life, scientists should broaden their minds beyond "Earth-like planets," researchers say.
To date, more than 700 alien planets have been discovered beyond our solar system, and scientists are eager to know if any of them harbor life. In a new study, astrobiologists propose two new planetary rating systems that could make it easier to denote potentially habitable worlds.
One of the new scales, called the Earth Similarity Index (ESI), would take the traditional tack and categorize a planet's likeness to our own. This makes sense, the researchers say, because Earth is still the only known planet to host life, so other worlds that resemble Earth are good bets in the search for extraterrestrials.
"As a practical matter, interest in exoplanets is going to focus initially on the search for terrestrial, Earth-like planets," explained study leader, Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University, in a statement. "With that in mind, we propose an Earth Similarity Index which provides a quick screening tool with which to detect exoplanets most similar to Earth."

 But the researchers also propose a second scale, called the Planetary Habitability Index (PHI), which would take into account a range of chemical and physical parameters thought to be conducive to life in more extreme conditions not found on Earth.
"Our proposed PHI is informed by chemical and physical parameters that are conducive to life in general," Schulze-Makuch and his colleagues write in a paper published in the journal Astrobiology. "It relies on factors that, in principle, could be detected at the distance of exoplanets from Earth, given currently planned future (space) instrumentation.”
Limiting the search for life to planets that share a lot in common with Earth potentially restricts the field too narrowly, the researchers argue.
"Habitability in a wider sense is not necessarily restricted to water as a solvent or to a planet circling a star," the paper’s authors write. "For example, the hydrocarbon lakes on Titan could host a different form of life. Analog studies in hydrocarbon environments on Earth, in fact, clearly indicate that these environments are habitable in principle. Orphan planets wandering free of any central star could likewise conceivably feature conditions suitable for some form of life."

Article from Live Science
Hillary Maruwa 24th November, 2011

Andy Rooney ends '60 Minutes' run of 33 years

AP

In this Aug. 23, 2011 image taken from video and provided by CBS, Andy Rooney tapes his last regular appearance on “60 Minutes” in New York. Rooney, 92, who delivered regular essays on the broadcast since 1978, will have his last spot aired on the Oct. 2, “60 Minutes” broadcast. Rooney will also sit for an interview by "60 Minutes” correspondent Morley Safer.

 

 

NEW YORK — Andy Rooney insisted he's not retiring. He's a writer, and a writer never stops being a writer.

Even so, he delivered his final weekly essay on "60 Minutes" Sunday night, his last in his 33 years with the newsmagazine. It was a moment, he said he has dreaded.

"I wish I could do this forever. I can't, though," he said.

CBS News announced last week that the 92-year-old Rooney would be stepping down from his well-entrenched berth on "60 Minutes" after delivering his 1,097th commentary.

"I probably haven't said anything here that you didn't already know or have already thought," he said. "That's what a writer does. A writer's job is to tell the truth."

Rooney began his long career by writing the words for people to say who were on TV or radio. Then when he began his weekly "A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney" in 1978, he began saying them on camera himself, though not as a television personality, but as "a writer who reads what he's written."

Rooney said in his farewell piece that he has lived a lucky life, luckier than most. But befitting his trademark crotchety nature, he voiced one parting complaint: He doesn't like being famous, nor does he like being bothered by fans.

"I spent my first 50 years trying to become well known as a writer, and the next 30 trying to avoid being famous," he said. "I walk down the street now or go to a football game and people shout, 'Hey, Andy!' And I hate that."

So if you see him in a restaurant, Rooney said as he signed off, "please, just let me eat my dinner."

Article from CBC News.

Hillary Maruwa 3rd October, 2011

Einstein's General Relativity Confirmed

Proof Is in the Cosmos: Einstein's General Relativity Confirmed

Composite image of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, also known as Pandora's Cluster, taken by the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes and the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Hot intracluster gas is shown in pink, and the blue overlay maps the location of dark matter. CREDIT: NASA, ESA, ESO, CXC, and D. Coe (STScI)/J. Merten (Heidelberg/Bologna) View full size image

Albert Einstein wins again. His general theory of relativity has proved accurate in predicting how light travels from some of the most distant galaxy clusters in the universe, according to new measurements.

However, the findings still do not disprove an alternative theory of gravity invented to undo the need for dark energy, which is thought to be causing the accelerated expansion of the universe.

The new findings come from a study of light from hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies. General relativity predicts that the wavelength of this light will be shifted by a small amount due to the galaxies' mass, in an effect called gravitational redshift.

The effect is very difficult to measure, because it is the smallest of the three types of redshift, with redshift also being caused by the movement of the galaxies and the expansion of the universe as a whole. To disentangle the three sources of redshift, the researchers relied on the vast number of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey sample, which allowed them to perform a statistical analysis. [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings]

The amount of redshift they found that appeared to be caused by gravity agreed exactly with the predictions of general relativity.

"We have independent measurements of the cluster masses, so we can calculate what the expectation for gravitational redshift based on general relativity is," said University of Copenhagen astrophysicist Rados?aw Wojtak. "It agrees exactly with the measurements of this effect."

Wojtak is lead author of a paper reporting the results in tomorrow's (Sept. 29) issue of the journal Nature.

Warped space-time

General relativity, proposed by Einstein in 1916, revolutionized the way physicists think about space and time. Specifically, it united the two concepts, which were thought to be independent, into one entity. And mass, Einstein showed, affects space-time profoundly, by warping it.

Where you have a large mass like a galaxy cluster, there is strong gravity and space-time is severely warped, causing time to move more quickly. Light emitted in this environment will have a certain frequency, which is related to the time scale (or the gravity strength) of the environment. When that light travels to a new environment, say to a telescope on Earth, where there is comparatively lower gravity, and time moves more slowly, the light's frequency will decrease. A decreased frequency is equivalent to a longer, or redder, wavelength. This is gravitational redshift.

It took physicists 43 years to detect evidence of gravitational redshift. This discovery came in 1959, when researchers measured the gravitational redshift in gamma-ray light emitted in a lab here on Earth.

"This was a groundbreaking experiment," Wojtak said.

Other studies confirmed the effect in the sun and in small nearby stars called white dwarfs. Yet no one had managed to detect a proof of this prediction of general relativity on the cosmic scale, until now.

"In our work we present for the first time the same effect but on a scale which is many orders of magnitude larger," Wojtak told LiveScience. "This is the only general relativistic effect which has been observed and confirmed locally on the Earth and on the scale corresponding to the universe. We have a link between our local scale of the Earth and galaxy clusters."

Alternative theories

The findings further support the already well-entrenched general theory of relativity, which has been successful in predicting many cosmic phenomena observed throughout the universe.

Yet there are still competing theories that have been proposed in recent years to accommodate the strange discovery that the universe seems to contain much more mass than simply the visible matter we can see, and that the cosmos seems to be accelerating in its expansion, propelled by an unknown force.

Within the framework of general relativity, scientists have invented concepts called dark matter and dark energy, respectively, to deal with these problems. But some researchers say these bizarre inventions aren't necessary if we simply tweak general relativity itself.

One such competing theory is called the f(R) theory. This model, too, agrees with Wojtak and his colleagues' new measurements. However, another alternative theory, called Tensor–vector–scalar gravity (TeVeS), does conflict with the new findings. To preserve the theory, physicists would have to make some changes. [Video: Dark Matter in 3-D]

Ultimately, as more data is gathered about distant galaxies, such cosmic measurements should become even more accurate, and physicists may be able to distinguish better between the competing models.

"Discussions of gravity's properties will continue, but Wojtak and colleagues' pioneering work gives a glimpse of the potential of new cosmological tests for achieving higher precision when millions of galaxy redshifts, from which gravitational redshifts can be extracted, become available in the future," physicist Gary Wegner of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, who was not involved in the new research, wrote in an accompanying essay in the same issue of Nature.

Article from Livescience.

Hillary Maruwa; September 29th, 2011