Timeline of the UNIVERSE

Seven years ago Northwestern University physicist Adilson E. Motter conjectured that the expansion of the universe at the time of the big bang was highly chaotic. Now he and a colleague have proven it using rigorous mathematical arguments.
The study, published by the journal Communications in Mathematical Physics, reports not only that chaos is absolute but also the mathematical tools that can be used to detect it. When applied to the most accepted model for the evolution of the universe, these tools demonstrate that the early universe was chaotic.
Certain things are absolute. The speed of light, for example, is the same with respect to any observer in the empty space. Others are relative. Think of the pitch of a siren on an ambulance, which goes from high to low as it passes the observer. A longstanding problem in physics has been to determine whether chaos -- the phenomenon by which tiny events lead to very large changes in the time evolution of a system, such as the universe -- is absolute or relative in systems governed by general relativity, where the time itself is relative.
A concrete aspect of this conundrum concerns one's ability to determine unambiguously whether the universe as a whole has ever behaved chaotically. If chaos is relative, as suggested by some previous studies, this question simply cannot be answered because different observers, moving with respect to each other, could reach opposite conclusions based on the ticks of their own clocks. - ( Science Daily )

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Most Distant Known Object In The Universe

The Universe is a mighty huge place. It is so big as to seem infinite. With human ingenuity we have managed to create telescopes that peer ever farther into deep space. The energy gathered by our telescopes from these objects is as old as it is distant. If we see a galaxy that is 5 billion light years away we are actually seeing the photons that escaped that galaxy 5 billion years ago. It is time travel basically. The farther we look the further back in time we are looking. In deepest space, before the formation of galaxies as we now know them, the things we humans can see are quasars and gamma ray bursts. This is the story of one such gamma ray burst.

On April 23, NASA’s Swift satellite discovered the burst — a 10-second flash of highly energetic radiation believed to mark the explosive collapse of a massive star into a black hole. - ( Science News )

The image above shows the afterglow from the gamma ray burst seen on April 23rd.

Within three hours of Swift’s detection, astronomers recorded the burst’s infrared afterglow using the U.K. Infra-Red Telescope and the Gemini North Telescope, both on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. Those observations, reported online (gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn3_archive.html), suggested that the explosion ignited when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was only about 630 million years old.

This is an amazing find, and much older than the previous record holder, a galaxy about 12.9 billion light years away. Scientists think that this burst was caused by a giant early star collapsing into a super-massive black hole.
It is truly bad-ass the amount of information that can be gathered about the Universe by sentient bags of meat and water residing in a tiny rocky world, on the edges of a nondescript galaxy, floating among the billions and billions of other galaxies in the Universe. -FUPPETS- loves the future.

EINSTEIN RINGS - Man, He Was a Bad Motherfucker

The image above is an example of an Einstein Ring. Physicist and Uber-human Albert Einstein sent a mindfuck wave through the whole of Humanity's collective consciousness that has yet to reach it's peak and crash. One of the many postulates that can be deduced from Einstein's Theory of General Relativity is that, since light itself can and is bent by gravity, very large gravity sources can act as a magnifying "lens" in outer space, showing us the slightly distorted light emanating from behind the large gravity sources. These are called gravitational lenses. They can be created by other galaxies, black holes, and even regions of dark matter in deep space.

The above image shows what scientists call an Einstein Ring. Imagine two galaxies, on every very far away and another halfway to Earth but situated almost directly in the middle of our sightline to the other galaxy. That is what you see above. The faint blue "ring" around the glowing irregular/elliptical galaxy is actually the light from a galaxy itself, having been bent and distorted by the massive gravitational pull of the galaxy in front (the yellow one).

The image above (click to enlarge) collects 8 different Einstein rings. Finding these visual anomalies is extremely difficult and time consuming. For astronomers on Earth though, these lenses can shed new light on deeply mysterious questions about our macroverse and it's life-cycle. They also allow the study of galaxies and inter-stellar matter that would otherwise be invisible to us.

This image is one that completely surprised and excited scientists. What you see above is a DOUBLE Einstein Ring! This is the first one yet discovered. In the case of this image, there are two galaxies situated like beads on a necklace way beyond the gravity source for this lens, an elliptical galaxy. Fucking amazing. Below is a diagram showing the geometry necessary for these Einstein Rings to be visible here on Earth. These are not actual physical rings out in space, remember. They are just optical distortions. (click to enlarge)

Albert Einstein was always a huge fan and supporter of -FUPPETS- and -FUPPETS- would not have it any other way.