One day, perhaps in our lifetimes, perhaps 100,000 years from now, the red giant Betelgeuse will dim a little--and then explode. The supernova will rival the full Moon in the night skies of Earth and cast shadows after dark. This month, Betelgeuse has dimmed a little. So far it has not exploded. Alan Dyer photographed the star rising as usual with the rest of Orion on Dec. 21st:

"This is Orion rising over my home in Alberta, Canada, on a partly cloudy and foggy night," says Dyer. "Yellow-red Betelgeuse is shining at upper left, reportedly dimmer than usual."
Betelgeuse caused a sensation among professional astronomers earlier this month when Edward Guinan of Villanova University and colleagues reported a significant "fainting" of the star. "[Betelgeuse] has been declining in brightness since October 2019, now reaching a modern all-time low of V = +1.12 mag on 07 December 2019 UT," they wrote. "Currently this is the faintest the star has been during our 25+ years of continuous monitoring."
Astronomers have long known that Betelgeuse is on the precipice of an energy crisis. It's about to run out of fuel in its core. When that happens, the star will collapse and rebound explosively, producing the first known supernova in the Milky Way since 1604. Experts in stellar evolution believe Betelgeuse could die at any time during the next 100,000 years--a blink of an eye on time scales of astronomy.
The current dimming did not herald that final blast. Betelgeuse is also a slow variable star, and this seems to be no more than an episode of slightly deeper-than-usual dimming.  Orion remains intact ... for now.
www.spaceweather.com

The Holographic Fractal Universe concept and the 'Black Whole' view, promulgated by Physicists Nassim Haramein and Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher.

NASA has clocked up numerous amazing technological feats of engineering and ingenuity for decades, but a recent video from the space agency shows just how much work they have cut out for them.

In just the last few years, NASA has provided some incredible perspectives on our own planet, including stunning images of some of the Earth's most majestic natural phenomena.

Not content with studying our own backyard, the agency has beamed back photos and videos from Mars thanks to its now-deceased rover, not to mention orbiting far-flung asteroids to try and understand the origins of the universe itself.

In an attempt to explain the vastness of their field of study, NASA helpfully put together a short explainer video showcasing the mindblowing scale of the Milky Way galaxy.

Well, bang go those theories. Astrophysicists have identified a neutron star that overturns not one but three well supported hypotheses.

The star, known as NGC 5907 ULX, is emitting far more x-rays than any other ever observed.  So huge is the output that it has been classified as an "ultraluminous x-ray source" (ULX). It is by no means the first ULX to be recorded in nearby galaxies, but all the others are confidently predicted to be generated by black holes - this is the first one that uses star-power.

So there goes the first theory.

But there are still more baffling elements to the discovery, made by a team led by Gianluca Israel from the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome, Italy, and reported in Science.

For a start, until now it was thought that there was a physical constraint that prevented a neutron glowing as brightly as NGC 5907 ULX. It's called the Eddington limit, which describes the theoretical maximum set by the balance between the force of radiation acting outward and the gravitational force acting inward.

This star exceeds the Eddington limit by 1,000 times - which shouldn't be possible, but evidently is. So there goes theory number two.

The third theory that has taken a battering is one that is familiar to every primary school pupil: magnets, planets and stars have two poles. Ordinary stars do, of course, but NGC 5907 ULX is far from ordinary.

Israel and colleagues contend that the only way the star could achieve such an extremely high output is by having multiple magnetic poles.

"Such high luminosities are often displayed by many ULXs that have previously been classified as accreting black holes," they write.  "A multicomponent strong magnetic field is necessary to account for the properties of NGC 5907 ULX."

Anyone wondering why the sun has been so quiet lately? The reason is shown in the graph below. The 11-year sunspot cycle is crashing:

For the past two years, the sunspot number has been dropping as the sun transitions from Solar Max to Solar Min. Fewer sunspots means there are fewer solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). As the explosions subside, we deem the sun "quiet."

But how quiet is it, really? A widely-held misconception is that space weather stalls and becomes uninteresting during periods of low sunspot number. In fact, by turning the solar cycle sideways, we see that Solar Minimum brings many interesting changes. For instance, the upper atmosphere of Earth collapses, allowing space junk to accumulate around our planet. The heliosphere shrinks, bringing interstellar space closer to Earth. And galactic cosmic rays penetrate the inner solar system with relative ease. Indeed, a cosmic ray surge is already underway. (Bringing higher vibrational energy.  Messenger Spirit)
www.spaceweather.com

On Sept. 1st, astrophotographer Yuri Beletsky hiked into the Atacama Desert of Chile for a deep exposure of the Milky Way. He got that and much more. "There was a stunning display of red airglow," he says. It surrounded the [centre of the] Milky Way like a celestial bulls-eye:

Airglow is aurora-like phenomenon caused by chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere. Human eyes seldom notice the faint glow, but It can be photographed on almost any clear dark night, anywhere in the world.

The curious thing about Beletsky's photo is not the presence of airglow, but rather its color--red. Airglow is usually green, the color of light from oxygen atoms some 90 km to 100 km above Earth's surface. Where does the red come from? Instead of oxygen, OH can produce the required color. These neutral molecules (not to be confused with the OH- ion found in aqueous solutions) exist in a thin layer 85 km high where gravity waves impress the red glow with a dramatic rippling structure.

"It was a truly special night," says Beletsky. "Pure tranquility."
www.spaceweather.com

nature video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENyyRwxpHo

Also see article : http://www.ascensionnow.co.uk/laniakea-our-home-supercluster.html

The discovery that many small galaxies throughout the universe do not 'swarm' around larger ones like bees do, but 'dance' in orderly disc-shaped orbits is a challenge to our understanding of how the universe formed and evolved.

The finding, by an international team of astronomers, including Professor Geraint Lewis from the University of Sydney's School of Physics, is announced today in Nature.  "Early in 2013 we announced our startling discovery that half of the dwarf galaxies surrounding the Andromeda Galaxy are orbiting it in an immense plane" said Professor Lewis. "This plane is more than a million light years in diameter, but is very thin, with a width of only 300 000 light years."

The universe contains billions of galaxies. Some, such as the Milky Way, are immense, containing hundreds of billions of stars. Most galaxies, however, are dwarfs, much smaller and with only a few billion stars.  For decades astronomers have used computer models to predict how these dwarf galaxies should orbit large galaxies. They had always found that they should be scattered randomly.  "Our Andromeda discovery did not agree with expectations, and we felt compelled to explore if it was true of other galaxies throughout the universe," said Professor Lewis.

Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a remarkable resource of colour images and 3-D maps covering more than a third of the sky, the researchers dissected the properties of thousands of nearby galaxies.

"We were surprised to find that a large proportion of pairs of satellite galaxies have oppositely directed velocities if they are situated on opposite sides of their giant galaxy hosts", said lead author Neil Ibata of the Lycée International in Strasbourg, France.  Everywhere we looked we saw this strangely coherent co-ordinated motion of dwarf galaxies. From this we can extrapolate that these circular planes of dancing dwarfs are universal, seen in about 50 percent of galaxies," said Professor Geraint Lewis.  This is a big problem that contradicts our standard cosmological models. It challenges our understanding of how the universe works including the nature of dark matter."

The researchers believe the answer may be hidden in some currently unknown physical process that governs how gas flows in the universe, although, as yet, there is no obvious mechanism that can guide dwarf galaxies into narrow planes.

Some experts, however, have made more radical suggestions, including bending and twisting the laws of gravity and motion. "Throwing out seemingly established laws of physics is unpalatable," said Professor Lewis, "but if our observations of nature are pointing us in this direction, we have to keep an open mind. That's what science is all about."
 

Kryon:

“Everything your scientists have seen in physics happens in pairs. At the moment, there are four laws of physics in your three-dimensional paradigm. They represent two pairs of energy types. Eventually there will be six. At the center of your galaxy is what you call a black hole, but it is not a single thing. It is a duality. There is no such thing as "singularity". You might say it's one energy with two parts - a weak and a strong quantum [multidimensional] force.

The entire [Milky Way] galaxy revolves as one plate, in a very counter-intuitive way. The stars and the constellations do not orbit within the rules of Newtonian physics that you are used to seeing all around you in your own solar system. For the stars and clusters in your galaxy, distance from the center does not matter. All the stars rotate as one.

The astronomers can look into the cosmos and they will discover different physics in different galaxies.

Physics is supposed to be random, following rules that are random. Yet it didn't happen that way. The better the instruments got of the astronomer, the more they realized there had to be intelligence in the design.  You think physics is simply the rules of the way things work? Let me ask you a question: How do you explain what astronomers have named "intelligent design"?

Against all odds, the Universe was created for life.”

Phys Org :  Wed, 11 Jun 2014

© NASA, Holland Ford (JHU), the ACS Science Team and ESA

Material stripped from a galaxy during its collision with a smaller galaxy (seen in the upper left corner of the larger interaction partner) forms a long tidal tail. Young blue stars, star clusters and tidal dwarf galaxies are born in these tidal debris. These objects move in a common direction within a plane defined by the orientation and motion of their tidal tail. A similar galaxy interaction might have occurred in the Local Group in the past, which could explain the distribution of dwarf galaxies in co-rotating planes.

Satellite dwarf galaxies at the edges of the Milky Way and neighboring Andromeda defy the accepted model of galaxy formation, and recent attempts to pigeon-hole them into the model are flawed, an international team of scientists reports.

The mismatch raises questions about the accuracy of the standard model of cosmology, which is the widely accepted paradigm for the origin and evolution of the universe, the astrophysicists say.

A preprint of the research paper, accepted for publication by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is online here.

The standard model, also called the "lambda cold dark matter model," says that satellite dwarf galaxies in the Milky Way and Andromeda are expected to behave a certain way: The galaxies would form in halos of dark matter, be widely distributed and would have to move in random directions, said Marcel Pawlowski, a postdoctoral researcher in the astronomy department at Case Western Reserve University and lead author of the new study.

"But what astronomers see is different," Pawlowski said. "We see the satellite galaxies are in a huge disk and moving in the same direction within this disk, like the planets in our solar system moving in a thin plane in one direction around the sun. That's unexpected and could be a real problem."

"There's a very serious conflict, and the repercussion is we do not seem to have the correct theory of gravity" said Pavel Kroupa, a co-author of the study and a professor at the University of Bonn in Germany.

Read more at : http://www.sott.net/article/280362-We-do-not-seem-to-have-the-correct-theory-of-gravity-says-professor

Shannon Hall;  Universe Today;  Tue, 06 May 2014 16:26 CDT

© NASA/Swift/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith and John Jones
This artist’s impression shows a gamma-ray burst with two intense beams of relativistic matter emitted by the black hole.

Roughly once a day the sky is lit up by a mysterious torrent of energy. These events - known as gamma-ray bursts - represent the most powerful explosions in the cosmos, sending out as much energy in a fraction of a second as our Sun will give off during its entire lifespan.  
Yet no one has ever witnessed a gamma-ray burst directly. Instead astronomers are left to study their fading light.

New research from an international team of astronomers has discovered a puzzling feature within one Gamma-ray burst, suggesting that these objects may behave differently than previously thought.

These powerful explosions are thought to be triggered when dying stars collapse into jet-spewing black holes. While this stage only lasts a few minutes, its afterglow - slowly fading emission that can be seen at all wavelengths (including visible light) - will last for a few days to weeks. It is from this afterglow that astronomers meticulously try to understand these enigmatic explosions.

The afterglow emission is formed when the jets collide with the material surrounding the dying star. They cause a shockwave, moving at high velocities, in which electrons are being accelerated to tremendous energies. However, this acceleration process is still poorly understood. The key is in detecting the afterglow's polarization - the fraction of light waves that move with a preferred plane of vibration.

"Different theories for electron acceleration and light emission within the afterglow all predict different levels of linear polarization, but theories all agreed that there should be no circular polarization in visible light," said lead author Klaas Wiersema in a press release.   "This is where we came in: we decided to test this by carefully measuring both the linear and circular polarization of one afterglow, of GRB 121024A, detected by the Swift satellite."

And to their surprise, the team detected circular polarization, meaning that the light waves are moving together in a uniform, spiral motion as they travel. The gamma-ray burst was 1000 times more polarized than expected. "It is a very nice example of observations ruling out most of the existing theoretical predictions," said Wiersema.   The detection shows that current theories need to be re-examined. Scientists expected any circular polarization to be washed out. The radiation of so many electrons travelings billions of light-years would erase any signal. But the new discovery suggests that there could be some sort of order in the way these electrons travel.

Of course the possibility remains that this particular afterglow was simply an oddball and not all afterglows behave like this. 
Nonetheless "extreme shocks like the ones in GRB afterglows are great natural laboratories to push our understanding of physics beyond the ranges that can be explored in laboratories," said Wiersema.  ( The paper has been published in Nature. )