makingwavesnotreally

Home?

Everytime I go Palakkad (my native in Kerala) I have always felt butterflies in my stomach. I get goosebumps travelling there. Well thats the place I have spent the major part of my life in. Thats the place where I grew up, made friends and had fun. But that isnt my home. No it isnt. I know every nook and corner of the town. I know which way to go to and I pretty much know my destinations. I have a part of my family there but it has never been my home. Well where is my home I seriously do not know. Everytime I go there on my vaccations I feel wonderful. A feeling of content strikes me just by the sight of the station. The journey in the autorikshaw from the station to my home brings in an adrenaline rush that I am reaching somewhere I belong. This sunday I am going home. I am more than happy, I am eager, I am excited and anticipating the day to arrive as soon as possible. But then out of no where the question pops whether that I really belong there. Where that is my real home. Whether that is it or my destination named home is far far away and I am yet to find. I do not know and so does the question of home remain unanswered.

How Gravity Warps Light

nasa

Gravity is obviously pretty important. It holds your feet down to Earth so you don’t fly away into space, and (equally important) it keeps your ice cream from floating right out of your cone! We’ve learned a lot about gravity over the past few hundred years, but one of the strangest things we’ve discovered is that most of the gravity in the universe comes from an invisible source called “dark matter.” While our telescopes can’t directly see dark matter, they can help us figure out more about it thanks to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

The Gravity of the Situation

Anything that has mass is called matter, and all matter has gravity. Gravity pulls on everything that has mass and warps space-time, the underlying fabric of the universe. Things like llamas and doughnuts and even paper clips all warp space-time, but only a tiny bit since they aren’t very massive.

But huge clusters of galaxies are so massive that their gravity produces some pretty bizarre effects. Light always travels in a straight line, but sometimes its path is bent. When light passes close to a massive object, space-time is so warped that it curves the path the light must follow. Light that would normally be blocked by the galaxy cluster is bent around it, producing intensified — and sometimes multiple — images of the source. This process, called gravitational lensing, turns galaxy clusters into gigantic, intergalactic magnifying glasses that give us a glimpse of cosmic objects that would normally be too distant and faint for even our biggest telescopes to see.

Hubble “Sees” Dark Matter

Let’s recap — matter warps space-time. The more matter, the stronger the warp and the bigger its gravitational lensing effects. In fact, by studying “lensed” objects, we can map out the quantity and location of the unseen matter causing the distortion!

Thanks to gravitational lensing, scientists have measured the total mass of many galaxy clusters, which revealed that all the matter they can see isn’t enough to create the warping effects they observe. There’s more gravitational pull than there is visible stuff to do the pulling — a lot more! Scientists think dark matter accounts for this difference. It’s invisible to our eyes and telescopes, but it can’t hide its gravity!

The mismatch between what we see and what we know must be there may seem strange, but it’s not hard to imagine. You know that people can’t float in mid-air, so what if you saw a person appearing to do just that? You would know right away that there must be wires holding him up, even if you couldn’t see them.

Our Hubble Space Telescope observations are helping unravel the dark matter mystery. By studying gravitationally lensed galaxy clusters with Hubble, astronomers have figured out how much of the matter in the universe is “normal” and how much is “dark.” Even though normal matter makes up everything from pickles to planets, there’s about five times more dark matter in the universe than all the normal matter combined!

WFIRST Will Escalate the Search

One of our next major space telescopes, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), will take these gravitational lensing observations to the next level. WFIRST will be sensitive enough to use weak gravitational lensing to see how clumps of dark matter warp the appearance of distant galaxies. By observing lensing effects on this small scale, scientists will be able to fill in more of the gaps in our understanding of dark matter.

WFIRST will observe a sky area 100 times larger than Hubble does, but with the same awesome image quality. WFIRST will collect so much data in its first year that it will allow scientists to conduct in-depth studies that would have taken hundreds of years with previous telescopes.

WFIRST’s weak gravitational lensing observations will allow us to peer even further back in time than Hubble is capable of seeing. Scientists believe that the universe’s underlying dark matter structure played a major role in the formation and evolution of galaxies by attracting normal matter. Seeing the universe in its early stages will help scientists unravel how it has evolved over time and possibly provide clues to how it may continue to evolve. We don’t know what the future will hold, but WFIRST will help us find out.

This science is pretty mind-bending, even for scientists. Learn more as our current and future telescopes plan to help unlock these mysteries of the universe…

Hubble: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/index.html
WFIRST: https://wfirst.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

upontheshelfreviews

There’s a hidden level of brilliance in this moment:

Chef Boyardee is known today for his cheap out-of-the-can pasta, but in his native Italy he was a renowned expert chef. He was reduced to the face of microwaveable eateries after his death.

Sound like anyone else from this movie?

ketchuprocket

Chef Ettore Boiardi, known today as Chef Hector Boyardee, was a key player in keeping poverty struck families fed for a low price, before he ever came out with the canned pasta line. He would jar his sauce in milk bottles and provide bags of dry noodles for families in Cleveland, Ohio’s Little Italy sector. It was during the Depression, and pasta could be made in large portions at a low cost. This was the start of his venture.

After years of success, he eventually opened his canning facility, opened his restaurant “Il Giardino d’Italia” in New York, and helped feed the Allies during the war. Everyone always glazes over this part of his life, especially the Cleveland part. He lived here. He DIED here. He’s BURIED HERE. My mother took care of him at the nursing home she worked for in her early 20′s when he was ailing and spoke of nothing but the kindness he and his family radiated when they were there. Chef Boiardi was an immigrant with a dream and was always there to help those in need, because he knew what it was like to be in that position. Never let that go.

jabberwockypie

I had thought he was a fictionalized mascot, like Aunt Jemima or Betty Crocker, but this is really interesting.

“Proud of his Italian heritage, Boiardi sold his products under the brand name Chef Boy-Ar-Dee so that his American customers could pronounce his name properly.“

And if you have a name that isn’t “standard” in America, that is a Mood.