More Slinky Art

More photos from my iphone. Slinkys nested together make a great model for nesting tori. Torus is another word for donut. Aren't these lovely?

nested slinkys; cyd ropp

nested slinkys; cyd ropp

nested slinkys; cyd ropp

nested slinkys; cyd ropp

nested slinkys; cyd ropp

Yeah, that's me with the art on my head. I call it "Toroids on the brain."

Simple Explanation of Alignment of Quasar Polarization with Large Scale Structures

As reported in Science News November 20, 2014, "Galaxies may be aligned across 1 billion light-years," raising questions about the formation of large scale structures in the universe. 

ESO/M. KORNMESSER

Here is their report:

The cores of several distant galaxies, spread out across roughly 1 billion light-years, appear to mysteriously align with one another. If confirmed, the new observations could be a hint of some unknown mechanism that shapes the largest structures in the universe.

Damien Hutsemékers, an astrophysicist at the University of Liège in Belgium, and colleagues used the Very Large Telescope in northern Chile to measure the orientations of 19 quasars, blazing disks of gas that swirl around supermassive black holes in the centers of some galaxies. Each of the quasars lives in one of four groups that are about 13 billion light-years away and centered on the constellation Leo. Within the groups, powerful jets of charged particles that spew from the quasars seem to point in nearly the same direction, the researchers report November 19 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The conclusions are on shaky ground, says Mike DiPompeo, an astrophysicist at the University of Wyoming. With only 19 quasars, the alignments could be just a coincidence. But even with a small sample, he finds the results intriguing and worthy of further investigation. It would be surprising, he says, if quasars knew how their neighbors were aligned. 

Citations:  D. Hutsemékers et al. Alignment of quasar polarizations with large-scale structures. Astronomy & Astrophysics. Published online November 19, 2014. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/201424631.

For my own Simple Explanation of a toroidal mechanism that can explain this alignment of quasars, please read my article concerning a similar puzzling alignment of planetary nebulae in our own galaxy.

A Simple Explanation of Starless Galaxies

I have thought for some time that “empty” space is actually populated by a matrix of dark-energy vortices scattered throughout our universe. These dark energy vortices have weak gravitational fields that can attract ordinary interstellar material. Sometimes these vortices and their associated toroidal bubbles remain small and dark. Other times the dark-energy bubbles grow into gigantic proto-galaxies of weakly captured intergalactic dust which eventually form standard galaxies once the matter redistributes itself into stars and their satellites, in accordance with ordinary gravitational laws and fluid dynamics. 

The nearly starless galaxies referred to in the following article could be these very proto-galaxies observed during the process of formation. This observation is more evidence for my hypothesis.

Here is a reprint of an article published this week in Science News.

BARELY THERE  A faint galaxy, seen in the center of a Hubble Space Telescope image, is about the same size as the Milky Way but has relatively few stars. K. Cook et al., NASA, ESA

News

Astronomy

Nearly starless galaxies found in nearby cluster

New class of galaxy could lead to better understanding of dark matter

By Christopher Crockett

1:24pm, November 5, 2014

Not all galaxies are filled with stars. Astronomers have discovered a horde of nearly starless galaxies each about the size of the Milky Way. How they formed is a mystery, and they imply that there are more ways for a galaxy to evolve than previously imagined.

Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomer at Yale University, and colleagues stumbled across 47 galaxies that stopped forming stars long ago. The stars in each galaxy that remain— about 0.1 percent of the number in the Milky Way — are spread throughout a sphere roughly the size of a typical spiral galaxy. A stargazer living in one of these galaxies might see only a few stars at night, says van Dokkum. “You need something unusual to create a galaxy like this.”

read original article here

Fractal Cloud of Monarch Butterflies

A massive cloud of monarch butterflies heading south for winter through St. Louis, Missouri, looks like a giant butterfly. A nice example of nature replicating patterns up and down scale. The small white lines on the chart indicate counties. This butterfly cloud is huge.

Gigantic cloud of monarch butterflies crossing Missouri.

In fractal terms, you could say the cloud is a fractal iteration upscale of the butterfly. The wings are obvious, and it even replicated the antennae and body! In the third panel where you can barely see the cloud, the butterflies are probably wings down in unison flapping and not reflecting the radar.

Laniakea Supercluster New Home for Milky Way

Look at how beautiful this imagery is for the latest ginormous bubble discovered in our neck of the universe. Looks a lot like a giant breast with milk ducts, doesn't it? Gives another meaning to "milky way."

According to the Simple Explanation's story of creation, there are torus-shaped eddies of gravity and energy scattered throughout the universe, ranging in size from tiny to gigantic. This Laniakea would be one such example of a giant vortex that grabbed interstellar particles from the earliest expansion and pulled them into this local system. The toroidal vortex for this large system can be seen on the surface.

Here's a short animation of the cluster provided by nature video. It's stunning!

Below is a graph of the stellar material distributed throughout Laniakea. Now you can see how the matter was attracted to this region by the gravity well at the middle of its torus shape. There are also other gravity vortices scattered throughout, which cause galaxies to form.

According to James Cave's article in Huffington Post (9/5/14), 

"Until now, the Milky Way was believed to be one galaxy in the 2,000 that make up what's known as the Virgo "supercluster." But as the new map shows, the Milky Way's 100 billion stars are actually part of something 100 times bigger: a supercluster of galaxies astronomers have christened Laniakea, meaning "immense heavens" in the Hawaiian language.

Laniakea spans some 520 million light-years across. As you might imagine, all those stars contain a lot of mass. In fact, astronomers say the supercluster is as massive as 100 million billion suns.

How was this supercluster discovered? Researchers used an algorithm to translate the velocities of 8,000 galaxies that surround the Milky Way to show where they are in relation to one another and also how gravity from areas of dark matter causes them to move."

Simple Explanation Blog About to Hit Stats Milestone

It looks as though the Simple Explanation blog is about to pass the 100,000 hits mark. Thank you all.

Stay tuned for more frequent articles before too long. Our bed and breakfast has sold and so I will have more time available for writing very soon.

Simple Explanation Videos

I was just noticing that there are a lot of Simple Explanation videos over at youtube that don't show up here on the blog's index. So, let me pull some of them into this one article for you, so you can jump into them more easily.


Here's the longest and most comprehensive video. It's called "A Simple Fractal Model of the Conscious Universe." The talk takes 10 minutes, with 10 minutes of questions and answers.

This next video is a short parable I call the Miracle of the Spinach Leaf.

Whenever I walk in the woods with my dogs, I am happy to observe the way the trees grow. Consequently, I've recorded a series of videos that are parables/metaphors for human lives, as seen in the growth patterns of trees.

Here's episode 1:

Episode 2 of Life of Trees--another parable from trees about life course corrections.

Here's another short video talking from the Lessons of Trees series about a madrone tree's early life giving strength for later struggle and growth.

This next video is about how watching a waterfall reminds me of the way that material instantiates into our universe out of the zero point field.

The next video is about how my kitchen blender is another great metaphor for material instantiation, but this time with a focus on the vortex that falls into the singularity at the center.

Lastly, here's a little cooking demonstration that lasts about twelve minutes.
This isn't about the Simple Explanation in particular, but it was during this fruit salad preparation process that the Simple Explanation occurred to me.

Process Note: The Albion Inn is in escrow

Our bed and breakfast here in Ashland, Oregon, has found a buyer and entered escrow. If the deal continues forward, we'll be vacating here October 15th. 

Our first plan is to travel around a bit in the motorhome with the husband, dogs, and cats, stopping at bookstores along the way. I'm working on a lecture series of The Simple Explanation and hope to expound upon it to anyone who will listen. Stay tuned for further developments. Meanwhile, if your bookstore or group would like to invite me to speak, I'm ready.

Torus Videos from Cyd's Kitchen

The fruit and vegetables are great examples of toruses and toroidal flow. Here are a couple of short videos I shot in the kitchen this week. Enjoy!

A Simple Explanation of the "Hot Bubble" Around Our Galaxy

The galactic X-ray background is superimposed on an image of infrared sources in this image. The X-rays (white contour lines) were detected by NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer. White knots show very bright X-ray sources, mostly from black hole and neutron stars. | NASA/RXTE-COBE/Revnivtsev et al  

I've been developing the Simple Explanation's cosmology for five years now, here at the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog. I'm happy to report to you that the various assertions made by the Simple Explanation continue to be upheld by recent scientific discoveries. Now and then I pass these along to you so you can see the Simple Explanation's utility in understanding science.

The image above is a side view of the Milky Way galaxy, showing the galactic X-ray background in red and a number of bright, white X-ray knots. The accompanying article, reprinted below, describes how the red bubble surrounding the plane of the Milky Way was recently proven to exist. 

The Simple Explanation not only predicted this bubble, but further claims there is a bubble surrounding every object in the universe. Conventional astronomers believe the galaxy predated the bubble and that the bubble was created from an extremely powerful explosion near the center of the Milky Way. The Simple Explanation, on the other hand, thinks they've gotten the cart before the horse. According to the Simple Explanation, since its inception, the universe has been riddled with toroidal-shaped vortices of electromagnetic energy. It is the pre-existing torus that pulls particles together to form galaxies, stars, planets, and you-name-it. The gravitational disturbances predate the celestial bodies, they are not the result or by-product of the bodies, but the other way around.

I'd be surprised if astronomers don't find these bubbles everywhere they look, once they begin looking for them. I'll further predict for you right now that the bubbles will be found to be associated with the strange alignment of galactic axes already noted throughout the universe. 

Here's the reprint from today's Huffington Post Science blog, by Joseph Castro:

There's an eerie glow that fills the sky but is visible only to X-ray detectors, and now, scientists have discovered the sources of it.

About 60 percent of the mysterious glow, called the "diffuse X-ray background," comes from X-ray-emitting hot gas located within a large cavity of space that extends out more than 300 light-years from the sun, new research shows. The rest of the glow comes from phenomena within the solar system.

The finding may help scientists better understand the local environment around the sun, researchers say.

Scientists discovered the diffuse X-ray background more than 50 years ago. They later determined that the high-energy X-rays with energies higher than 1 kiloelectronvolt (keV) come from the active cores of other galaxies, but the origin of the low-energy X-rays (0.25 keV) has long been debated. [Strange & Shining: Photos of Mysterious Night Lights]

Initially, astronomers thought the low-energy X-rays in the sky must originate outside the solar system, from a very hot cavity of gas dubbed the "local hot bubble," which likely formed from a supernova explosion that occurred 10 million to 20 million years ago. But in the late 1990s, researchers discovered a phenomenon called the solar-wind charge exchange, which produces 0.25 keV X-rays within the solar system.

Many scientists believed this new X-ray source could explain all of the diffuse X-ray background, thus casting doubt on whether the local hot bubble really exists. "Whether the sun is surrounded by a big bubble or not makes a big difference for our understanding of the structure of the local region of our galaxy," said Massimiliano Galeazzi, a physicist at the University of Miami and lead author of the new study, published yesterday (July 27) in the journal Nature.

Galeazzi and his colleagues set out to see if the sky's low-energy X-rays came from sources inside or outside of the solar system. "Basically, what we needed to find was a way to identify one source from the other," Galeazzi told Live Science. "What is something that is particular to the solar-wind charge exchange to separate it from the local bubble emission?"

The sun produces a continuous stream of charged particles called the solar wind. When these particles collide with hydrogen and helium atoms in the solar system, the atoms absorb the electrons and release X-rays — this is the solar-wind charge exchange. But unlike with the local hot bubble, there is a seasonal variation to the X-rays produced from the solar-wind charge exchange.

As the sun moves through the galaxy, hydrogen and helium atoms from the interstellar medium — the region of space between star systems — enter the solar system. The helium atoms form a kind of high-density tail, or trailing cone behind the sun, from the movement. This results in a correspondingly higher X-ray production from the solar wind. During December, Earth is downstream of this tail; by analyzing the X-ray production of the cone, scientists can determine how much the solar-wind charge exchange contributes to the overall diffuse X-ray background that's recorded by an all-sky survey of X-rays.

To analyze the signature of the tail, Galeazzi needed a special X-ray detector not used in traditional satellites. He and his colleagues refurbished and modernized a detector last used in the 1970s to map the soft X-ray sky, and used a rocket to launch it into Earth's atmosphere for 5 minutes.

They compared their data with old readings from the now-defunct ROSAT satellite, which produced an all-sky map of 0.25 keV X-rays in the 1990s. They found that the solar-wind charge exchange contributed about 40 percent of the X-rays in the ROSAT survey.

"The rest must come from the local bubble," Galeazzi said. "What is important is that we now know that within the galaxy, these bubbles exist, and they contribute to the structure of our local region in the galaxy."