[BLOG] Five Starts With A Bang links (@startswithabang)

• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at the question of Betelgeuse going supernova, here.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers how black holes might, or might not, spit matter back out, here.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes a report suggesting the local excess of positrons is product not of dark matter but of nearby pulsar Geminga, here.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel lists some of the most distant astronomical objects so far charted in our universe, here.
• The question of whether or not a god did create the universe, Ethan Siegel at Starts With A Bang suggests, remains open.

[BLOG] Five Starts With A Bang links (@startswithabang)

• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains how the images of galaxies grow with the universe, here.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains how we can know the age of the universe, here.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains what an octonion is and what it might show about the universe, here.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains the surprise created by a detailed map of neutron star J0030+0451, here.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel suggests the mysterious near-supernova that Eta Carinae barely survived in the 19th century was actually a stellar collision, here.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Architectuul looks at the winners of an architecture prize based in Piran, here.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes the wind emitted from one distant galaxy’s supermassive black hole is intense enough to trigger star formation in other galaxies.
• Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber pays tribute to Jack Merritt, a young victim of the London Bridge attack who was committed to the cause of prisoner rehabilitation.
• Dangerous Minds looks at the history of French pop group Les Rita Mitsouko.
• Bruce Dorminey reports on the European Space Agency’s belief Earth-observing spacecraft are needed to track ocean acidification.
• The Dragon’s Tales reports on the consensus of the Russian scientific community against human genetic engineering.
• Far Outliers reports on the first ambassador sent from the Barbary States to the United States.
• JSTOR Daily reports on the life of pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas.
• Language Log shares images of a bottle of Tibetan water, bought in Hong Kong, labeled in Tibetan script.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money rightly assigns responsibility for the terrible measles outbreak in Samoa to anti-vaxxers.
• The LRB Blog notes how tree planting is not apolitical, might even not be a good thing to do sometimes.
• Marginal Revolution reports on a paper suggesting that food tends to be better in restaurants located on streets in Manhattan, better than in restaurants located on avenues.
• Justin Petrone at north! shares an account of a trip across Estonia.
• The NYR Daily looks at the photography of Michael Jang.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw continues to report from Armidale, in Australia, shrouded in smoke from wildfires.
• The Planetary Society Blog reports on the early days of the Planetary Society, four decades ago.
• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at how centenarians in Sweden and in Denmark experience different trends in longevity.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel reports on the accidental discovery of the microwave background left by the Big Bang in 1964.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little looks at the increasingly poor treatment of workers by employers such as Amazon through the lens of primitive accumulation.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the small differences separating the Kazakhs from the Kyrgyz.
• Arnold Zwicky shares a dance routine, shown on television in France, against homophobia.

[LINK] “Biggest Thing in Universe Found—Defies Scientific Theory”

I’d like to joke that Andrew Fazekas’ National Geographic News article about the import of the recently-discovered Huge Large Quasar Group doesn’t take into account the possibility that this object, apparently too large to be a natural object according to cosmological theory, might actually be unnatural.

Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an international team of researchers has discovered a record-breaking cluster of quasars—young active galaxies—stretching four billion light-years across.

“This discovery was very much a surprise, since it does break the cosmological record as the largest structure in the known universe,” said study leader Roger Clowes, an astronomer at University of Central Lancashire in England.

For comparison, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is just a hundred thousand light-years across, while the local supercluster of galaxies in which it’s located, the Virgo Cluster, is only a hundred million light-years wide.

Astronomers have known for years that quasars can form immense clusters that stretch to more than 700 million light-years across, said Clowes. But the epic size of this group of 73 quasars, sitting about 9 billion light-years away, has left them scratching their heads.

That’s because current astrophysical models appear to show that the upper size limit for cosmic structures should be no more than 1.2 billion light-years.

“So this represents a challenge to our current understanding and now creates a mystery—rather than solves one,” Clowes said.