Pictorial Essay: 9 Things You Can’t See With Your Naked Eye

There is more to the night sky than just twinkling stars … something your eyes can’t see. Galactic haloes are gas clouds that wrap around each galaxy, almost like an atmosphere. The bubble of our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, was made visible in 2020.

If the simulation were a real thing in nature, somebody walking his dog at night would see a violet glow 100 times bigger than the Moon. But researchers created the halo for reasons other than to make the horizon pretty at night. Of the two galaxies, the Milky Way’s cloud is the harder one to study. Any information gleaned from Andromeda can provide clues about what our halo got up to in the past and how it will evolve in the future. The cloud is enormous, reaching 1.85 million light-years into space.

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In 2015, Canada’s Defense Research and Development agency detonated explosives during a test. Someone at the site took a photo of the fireball and unexpectedly captured the explosion’s shock wave. A shock wave happens when something expands faster than the speed of sound, triggering a sharp change in pressure.

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NGC 4217 is a spiral galaxy that hit the record books when an image of its magnetic field was created in 2020. Almost nothing is known about how galaxies generate their own fields. But sensing their proportions is not a mystery. In order to remove the cloak of invisibility around a galactic magnetic field, scientists simply measure the speed and behavior of cosmic rays in the area.

The magnetic field of NGC 4217 turned out to be colossal, reaching 22,500 light-years into space. It was also X-shaped. The image revealed mysterious phenomena inside the field that had never been seen before. For one, giant gas bubbles bobbed around and they were also magnetic. There was another magnetic field that spiraled upwards. The weirdest discovery were loops that were being thrown outward.

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In 2019, a weather satellite snapped something rippling over Australia …. gravity waves. Seeing gravity waves is incredibly rare.

In this case,  a storm swept cold air into the atmosphere off the northwestern coast. The coolness jostled with the region’s warmer air and produced enough condensation to create curvy clouds. The waves themselves were the result of Earth’s gravity trying to bring balance to the atmosphere after the storm caused a chaotic temperature difference.

Other scientists believe the gravity waves are visible because of Excessive Farting in an area of Australia known as Llpoh-land.

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Dark Matter makes up 85% of the universe … and 95% of Joe Biden’s brain. Problem is, you can’t see it.   The only way scientists know that dark matter exists is the way that its gravity nudges other matter and light.

Researchers recently poured everything they had into a simulation. The Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics based the test on a popular theory (that black matter consists of specks called weakly interacting massive particles). To see if the particles behaved the same no matter the size of their world, the simulation created dark matter on a scale across 30 different magnitudes. Sure enough, the dark matter curled in haloes around galaxies. But more encouragingly, it formed haloes at all the mass scales—even the ones too small to see. Since the same thing happened across the board, the haloes are now recognized as a dark matter feature.

BTW, I have no idea what the hell I just read means.

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A photographer in Barcelona used a video camera to film different species of birds in flight. He then compiled the frames into a single image. The photograph shows each bird’s position advancing, frame-by-frame, to create mesmerizing “tracks” along the paths that birds take.

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SEEING the speed of light. In 2019, researchers created the world’s quickest camera, called the T-Cup. It recorded a laser shooting through a bottle of milk. (Molecules of milk scatter light particles and make them more visible.) The T-Cup captured the event by filming an astounding 100 billion frames per second.

This is a 15 minute video. You only need to watch 1 minute of it. Start at the 4:30 mark. It’s friggin awesome.

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Flowers that emit light!! This one is my favorite.

There is a photographic technique called UVIVF (ultraviolet-induced visible fluorescence photography). It causes stuff to fluoresce, capturing the unseen light that radiates from an object. The results are stunning.

Photographer Craig Burrows used the technique on flowers. The pictures resembled something from another realm. Unusual colors, sparkles, and glittering hues glowed around the plants.

Researchers still cannot crack the riddle of what role ultraviolet fluorescence plays in nature. However, the photographs of the flowers showed that pollen was especially bright. This added more clout to an old theory that flowers use fluorescence to attract pollinators.

It some point in the future I will submit an article titled “Beings Of Light” … after a chapter in the book “The Field: The quest for the secret force of the universe”.

We humans are essentially Light Bearers. Even as you are reading this, you are glowing – weakly, faintly, — but glowing nonetheless emitting particles of photons, elementary particles of light. Our biological glimmer is a thousand times less intense than the sensitivity of the human eye. Nevertheless, we now have sophisticated instruments which can detect it (see pic below). Every cell in our body emits light, and some scientists believe light is how cells ultimately communicate with each other not only within our own bodies, but externally with other beings of light, perhaps even God.

NOTE: The stream of ‘biophotons’ above isn’t just a reflection of body heat. An infrared camera showed that some of the hottest body parts like the side of the neck above the collarbones give off very few photons, and the total light emissions didn’t match variations in body temperature in any meaningful way.

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Seeing an atom. Physicist David Nadlinger trapped an atom between electric fields before stabilizing it inside a vacuum chamber. Two needles, 2mm apart, held the particle between them. A blue-violet laser tinted the atom blue—and made it visible to the naked eye. The image resulted in him winning the top prize in a prestigious UK science competition.

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Author: Stucky

I'm right, you're wrong. Deal with it. View all posts by Stucky