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NASA's WISE Mission Releases Medley of First Images

This infrared image taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows a star-forming cloud teeming with gas, dust and massive newborn stars. The inset reveals the very center of the cloud, a cluster of stars called NGC 3603. It was taken in visible light by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

WISE, which is surveying the whole sky in infrared light, is particularly sensitive to the warm dust that permeates star-forming clouds like this one. In this way, WISE complements visible-light observations.

The mission also complements Hubble and other telescopes by showing the 'big picture," providing context for more detailed observations. For example, the WISE picture here is 2,500 times larger than the Hubble inset. While the Hubble view shows the details of the hot young star cluster, the WISE picture shows the effects that this stellar powerhouse has on its neighborhood."

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/images20100216.html

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/427018main_pia12831-b.jpg

An experimental physicist performs an experiment involving two cats, and an inclined tin roof.

The two cats are very nearly identical; same sex, age, weight, breed, eye and hair color.

The physicist places both cats on the roof at the same height and lets them both go at the same time. One of the cats fall off the roof first so obviously there is some difference between the two cats.

What is the difference?

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One cat has a greater mew.

In my dreams I was



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Missing cat

If you watch the movie `Jaws' backwards, it's a movie about a shark that keeps throwing up people until they have to open a beach.



I wish the same would apply for my mirror, and for some other things too.

"If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell "friend," I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend."

http://arbesman.net/milkyway/

Computational sociology student Samuel Arbesman from Harvard University has created a "route map" of the Milky Way based on the London Underground subway map. By simplifying the "vast and complex interconnections" of the Milky Way, the map is "an attempt to approach our galaxy with a bit more familiarity than usual".

On his schematic representation, each line corresponds to an arm of the galaxy, and the "stations", which are thousands of light years apart, show important "destinations" such as stars, nebulae and other astronomical objects. Samuel has purposely omitted the Earth to show that we "aren't the centre of the universe".

The map is not intended to be accurate: Arbesman sees it as a "useful shorthand for our place in the Milky Way, [making] the important sights and inconceivable distances a bit less daunting".

(Image: NTI Media/TRex Features)