The Coma galaxy cluster is unique among known clusters because it contains two giant elliptical galaxies at its center. And recent news shows that this cluster may have other features we don’t see elsewhere.

Galaxy clusters, collections of galaxies bound together by gravity, occur throughout the Universe, and as clusters go, the Coma cluster is one of the largest. It contains over 1,000 galaxies, with more to be identified!

All these galaxies reside inside a giant cloud of hot, energetic gas. Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton to observe Coma discovered huge arms of hot gas over half a million light years long.

Using the speed of sound in hot gas and the gas arms’ length, astronomers calculated the gas to be over 300 million years old! Oddly, the gas in the Coma cluster has a smooth profile, without the lumpiness astronomers expect to see in an active galactic environment. Usually galactic mergers generate significant turbulence that stirs up local gas, but this cluster seems to exist in a relatively calm environment.

This new finding, published in the journal Science, offers insight into how the Coma cluster grew from the mergers of smaller groups of galaxies. As the galaxy groups move through space, head wind strips their gas away, which later forms the giant gas arms we see now.

The multimillion-degree X-ray emission shows that the arms appear to be connected to galaxies far from Coma’s center. At least one of these arms also appears to be connected to a larger structure 1.5 million light years away. It seems that Coma’s tentacles reach for into the cosmos.

Clues hidden in the gas will tell us more about this one-of-a-kind cluster, so stay tuned!

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: NASA/CXC/MPE/J.Sanders et al, Optical: SDSS

Recently, the search for extrasolar planets (a.k.a. exoplanets) has centered around finding an Earth-like world, a place where life as we know it could exist. After all, wouldn’t it be exciting to discover extraterrestrials—or at least a new place humans could inhabit? Problematically, these small, potentially inhabitable planets are terribly challenging to detect. Twenty years of searching has yielded 941 (and counting) confirmed planets, but none very much like Earth… Although we are well on our way to finding such a “Goldilocks” world (not too hot, not too cold, but juuuust right), other, often larger exoplanets are proving easier to find and uniquely interesting.

A significant percentage of the exoplanets uncovered so far are “hot Jupiters”—colossal gas giant worlds that equal or surpass the mass of Jupiter and orbit very close to their parent stars, creating high surface temperatures as a result. One particularly interesting giant is HD 189733b, a massive world a mere 63 light years away. Though discovered in 2005, its proximity to our solar system makes it a good exoplanet to examine.

Some of the more interesting recent studies of this exoplanet leave behind the question of habitability to examine different planetary characteristics. In 2008, astrophysicists used polarimetry to detect and monitor the planet in visible light and determined an overall color of the world as it would appear to us. A second set of independent tests came back just this last month with the same result. The planet, as we would perceive it, is cobalt blue!

The discovery of another blue marble in the Milky Way is enticing. But this blue color is obviously not due to liquid oceans covering its surface. So where is the color coming from? It could be caused by a slow shower of molten glass. Observations have shown the likely presence of silicate particles in the lower atmosphere. This would scatter light in such a ways as to appear blue in the visible spectrum. Silicate is a component of glass which has lead some researchers to suspect the atmosphere might rain intensely heated bits of molten glass. Certainly not a storm you would want to be caught in!

Looking closer at the planet, all similarities to Earth continue to sizzle away. Orbiting 30 times closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun (which works out to about 13 times closer to its star than Mercury is from the Sun), this planet definitely qualifies as a HOT Jupiter: 1,200°F (650°C) on the night side to 1,700°F (930°C) on the day side with winds as fast as 6,000 miles per hour (nearly a thousand kilometers per hour). This is not a life-friendly place. In fact, Scott Wolk of the Center for Astrophysics estimates the atmosphere of the planet is boiling away at about 660,000 to 100 million tons of mass per second.

HD 189733b is a fantastic example of the surprises that continue to amaze us as we learn more about our universe. Hot Jupiters are not places we study in the hopes of finding life. Rather, we explore these fascinating places so different from our own world to learn about the diversity of planetary systems in our galaxy. They help us uncover more about the evolution of planets and allow us to probe the conditions that came together to form the immense diversity of worlds that we see. They provide clues and contrasts to our own planet, where the processes of life were able to take hold and evolve.

Could Earth have once been a hot Jupiter instead? Quite unlikely. Can HD 189733b ever be the next Earth? Not likely. But these bizarre and far-off worlds are certainly engaging in their own right.

Elise Ricard holds a master’s degree in museum education and is a presenter at Morrison Planetarium.

Images: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/K. Poppenhaeger et al; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss

This past Thursday at Nightlife, Dan Brady presented Colors of the Cosmos in the Morrison Planetarium. We thought we’d also share it with our Science Today readers. Click through the links to see the colorful images and enjoy!

The phrase “Colors of the Cosmos” makes for a catchy title, but real scientific value lies behind those alliterative words. Generally, we can divide our exploration of space pantones into two groups: the kind we see directly with our eyes, and the kind we use special instruments to reveal. This article is brimming with visual aids, so be sure to click on all the links below to appreciate the full beauty of this topic.

Just looking at the night sky reveals some subtle variations that are often obscured by San Francisco’s city lights and persistent fog. Orion occasionally shines through these obstacles, revealing some noticable color differences. Contrast the red of Betelgeuse with the blue of Rigel down below. Or on either side of Orion, the white Sirius with Taurus’s bloodshot eye, Aldebaran. These are subjective experiences: visible for all of human history, they’ve inspired myths and curiosity, but in the last few centuries, we’ve been able to focus some questions into answers.

In fact, most of what we know about the Universe comes from studying light from far away destinations. Not all of it is directly visible, however: either because our eyes are not sensitive to it (think radio waves, x-rays, and infrared), or because our atmosphere has shielded us from detecting the subtleties. Color, or the colors we see with our eyes, offer important clues to understanding the Universe, but from now on we may also use some representative colors to help us visualize the stuff beyond our normal perception.

The way we observe star clusters is a great example of how our digital telescopes can objectively quantify light in brand new ways. NGC2547 lies in the constellation Vela (not visible to us in the Northern Hemisphere) and while this photo is full of color, it is actually a composite of several black and white images. Just like the pixels in your phone or TV, the light we see is a combination of red, green, and blue wavelengths. Telescopes don’t work this way: they have to take photos of red, green, and blue light one at a time, with filters covering their digital sensors. These give us raw, black and white images—but the information is separated into the three primary colors of light. Look closely, and you’ll notice significant differences between each of these three filtered images. Then we add the appropriate colors, merge the images, and, voila: a complete, color image of a nearby group of stars.

Astronomers are interested in the individual wavelengths as well as the combined color image: the various stars in NGC2547 can emit very different wavelengths of light from even their closest neighbors. By measuring and comparing the difference in light output in different colors, astronomers can quantify the stars’ colors and even determine the age of a star cluster. (NGC2547 turns out to be between 20 and 35 million years old, BTW.)

At this point, it’s fair to ask yourself, “So what?” Colors sure are pretty, and astronomers can turn colors into numbers, but how important are they? Well, are you in your work place?  Look up. What kind of lights do you see?  Fluorescent? Incandescent? Halogen? We all know these lights shine with different colors. Neon signs are the clearest example—so, okay, maybe I should have had you imagine Las Vegas. Apologies. We can compare this everyday light sources to more distant examples…

Take a look at these different images from the Orion Nebula (pictured, above right). Light bulbs shine in different colors because there are different elemental gases inside them. And the same thing goes on with these formative stars: the colors (or wavelengths of light) that we don’t see tell us what gases and elements are inside, because their atoms absorb specific wavelengths as they pass through. The red stuff is hydrogen, seventy five percent of our visible universe by mass. The rest are elements that make up you and me: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and all the others in the periodic table.

In stars, colors reveal something even more meaningful: temperature. We know that some things burn red or white hot, but more specifically, we know that anything in the Universe of a certain temperature glows most brightly at a specific color (or wavelength of light). Knowing how color relates to temperature allowed us to calculate the ages of stars in NGC2547, but we use this relationship to pin down temperatures of much cooler objects as well. Information like this has been hidden to us until very recently—and one sky survey, called 2MASS, has revealed that there are many more light sources than we imagined hanging out in the infrared spectrum. And stars aren’t the only bright things out there: even the dust in our galaxy glows dimly in the spaces between the stars.

Asking “why is the sky blue?” even fits in here: when the white light of our sun hits our atmosphere, shorter-wavelength (blue) light scatters more than longer-wavelength (red or green) light. This basic childhood mystery turns out to have serious implications when we look at exoplanets orbiting other stars. Just in the past few months, astronomers have announced the colors of some of these distant planets—and they provide clues as to what’s on the surface. We’re not quite at the stage where we can see what’s fashionable in alien clothing trends or whether the leaves on their trees are green or purple, but we’re getting closer with each new generation of telescope.

Okay, the briefest of reviews: colors are everywhere in the cosmos; we quantify them using scientific instruments; different colors mean different temperatures or different energetic molecules emitting light; and a lot of the colors (or wavelengths of light) in the Universe are invisible to us humans.

Now it’s time to look at the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum… The wavelengths of light we cannot see!

Gamma rays are the most energetic waves in physics—carrying around a billion times more energy than visible light—so they usually come from the most powerful things in the Universe. In this map from the FERMI sky survey, the brightest sources lie along the galactic plane, where there’s the most stuff close to our telescopes. But other sources include pulsars and supernovae: collapsed or exploded stars that shoot x- and gamma-rays deep into the night sky. These sources show up as bright spots away from the streak of our Milky Way.

But the biggest questions in cosmology today come from radiation that is all but invisible to most of us, although it permeates every inch of the Universe. And to see it, we zoom way out: past our local group of galaxies, through the brightly colored galaxies of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Two Degree Field Survey, and even past the oldest primordial stars known as quasars. It’s here that we can finally see the oldest image of the entire Universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

In the image of the CMB taken by the Planck space telescope, the colors represent variations in the temperature and density of the early Universe: blue-black corresponds to the coolest, densest parts of the image, and red marks the hottest, least dense regions. The midpoint of this color representation, the bright green, has a temperature associated with it: 2.7 Kelvins above absolute zero, the current average temperature of the cosmos. Amazingly, the difference between the hottest part of the image and the coolest works out to only one part in a hundred thousand! The darkest blue is only one-one-hundred-thousandth cooler than the reddest red.

This remarkable cosmic observation also has some fans on the Internet, most famously Randall Munroe of the webcomic xkcd—you can even buy t-shirts on his website to express how warmly you feel about this discovery. The overall shape of the curve in the xkcd comic tells us the temperature (the aforementioned 2.7 Kelvins), and the tiny variations indicate the temperature above and below that average.

This temperature map is the oldest image of the Universe because it’s the farthest back we can look back in time. Before this time, three hundred and eighty thousand years after the Big Bang, the Universe was so hot and dense that light couldn’t even travel through: this image dates from the precise moment when the Universe was cool enough to let electrons and protons come together to form the first hydrogen atoms.

The Planck CMB is as far back and as far out as we can go, so let’s head back home, diving in through the quasars, distant galaxies, towards our local group and the Milky Way. The colors we’ve explored have ranged from the extremely hot, where energetic gases form new stars or signal the death of the old; to the frigid, blackness of space, where temperatures hover near absolute zero and shelter secrets from the origins of the Universe. We’ve seen the visible colors of nebulae and distant planets, and the false colors of the Milky Way using x-rays, infrared, and microwaves. All these colors are visible only with the collaboration of astronomers all around the world. Their hard work has revealed a Universe that has been hidden until very recently—but here all along.

Dan Brady is a planetarium presenter at the California Academy of Sciences. He earned his BS in Physics from UCLA and has taught science since 2008.

Ryan Wyatt is the director of the Morrison Planetarium and Science Visualization at the California Academy of Sciences.

Space gold is even rarer than Earth gold, which makes the precious metal special—on our planet and in the Universe at large.

A team of astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) observed a special gamma-ray burst last month; these powerful phenomena appear to originate in cataclysmic events… and in this case it was likely the collision of two neutron stars.

Neutron stars are the dense remains of imploded stars: they are up to three times the mass of the Sun, condensed into the area of San Francisco.

Deep in their cores, regular stars create elements that are eventually spewed into space when the stars explode. Chris Impey, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, explains, “We know that stars make heavy elements, and late in their lives, they eject gas into the medium between stars so it can be part of subsequent stars and planets (and people).” Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and a host of other elements—even nickel and iron—all originate within different types of stars.

But it takes a collision between two neutron stars to create rare elements such as gold. The lead author of a recent paper, Edo Berger, describes the phenomenon by paraphrasing one of Carl Sagan’s famous quotes, “We are all star stuff, and our jewelry is colliding-star stuff.” And it makes sense—gold requires 79 protons, 79 electrons and 118 neutrons, a concoction only a dense neutron star would have the atomic supplies to produce.

When two particular neutron stars collided about 3.9 billion light years away from Earth, astronomers named the resulting gamma-ray burst GRB 130603B. Although the burst lasted only two-tenths of a second, a slowly fading infrared glow told the Harvard research team that the burst was particularly valuable.

“We estimate that the amount of gold produced and ejected during the merger of the two neutron stars may be as large as 10 moon masses—quite a lot of bling!” says Berger.

At today’s prices, the explosion would produce the equivalent of  $10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 octillion dollars). But don’t get too excited: these types of explosions happen in our galaxy only once every 10,000 years, and you might find it difficult to go and collect the loot.

This is big money, but there are additional implications of the neutron star collision.

“We’ve been looking for a ‘smoking gun’ to link a short gamma-ray burst with a neutron star collision. The radioactive glow from GRB 130603B may be that smoking gun,” explains Wen-fai Fong, a graduate student and a co-author of the paper.

Now that we have better evidence linking gamma-ray bursts and neutron star collisions, perhaps we can gain insight into the mystery radio bursts found outside our galaxy!

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Credit: NASA/Dana Berry

The newest cosmic mystery: four distinct high-energy flashes! (Is the Universe trying to get our attention?) Astronomers are calling them Fast Radio Bursts, but we have yet to determine their origins.

Radio astronomers detected the first burst about six years ago, but it seemed so strange that many people thought it was a fluke. Dan Thornton, a PhD student at England’s University of Manchester and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, decided to investigate. He spent the next six years looking for these strange flashes.

So far Thornton and his team have found four radio bursts. Astonishingly, the flashes—taken from only a small section of the sky—indicate that there should be one of these signals going off every ten seconds.

“The bursts last only a tenth of the blink of an eye,” explained Max-Planck Institute Director and Manchester professor, Michael Kramer. “With current telescopes we need to be lucky to look at the right spot at the right time. But if we could view the sky with ‘radio eyes’ there would be flashes going off all over the sky every day.”

Astronomers have ruled out terrestrial sources for the Fast Radio Bursts and the origins in the high galactic latitudes suggest that they originate from beyond the Milky Way.

The brightness and distance of the mysterious flashes also hint that they originated when the Universe was about half its current age. “They have come such a long way that by the time they reach the Earth, the Parkes telescope would have to operate for one million years to collect enough to have the equivalent energy of a flying mosquito,” said Thornton.

Co-author Professor Matthew Bailes, from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, thinks that burst energies indicate that they come from events involving relativistic objects—maybe even from a type of neutron star called a magnetar. “Magnetars can give off more energy in a millisecond than our Sun does in 300,000 years and are a leading candidate for the burst.”

Astronomers have a lot more research to do before we can solve the radio burst puzzle, but the findings may also help crack some other astronomical mysteries. “We are still not sure about what makes up the space between galaxies, so we will be able to use these radio bursts like probes in order to understand more about some of the missing matter in the Universe,” said Ben Stappers, from Manchester’s School of Physics and Astronomy.

So these Fast Radio Bursts could even speed up cosmic discovery!

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: Diceman Stephen West

We have peered far into the Universe and vastly expanded our knowledge of distant realms. But interestingly enough, we are still refining our understanding of our own place within our galaxy, the Milky Way. Research into this question follows in the footsteps of many great names in astronomy: from Herschel to Hubble, and from Kapteyn to Kant, generations of astronomers helped to establish our understanding of our place in space.

Imagine, if you will, trying to take a picture of the United States from somewhere close to the center of it. (That’s right. Lots of corn fields.) You would have no way to observe the entire country at the same time. Astronomers face a similar challenge in observing our home galaxy: we live within the disc of the Milky Way, a long way from the center (about 7,600 parsecs or 25,000 light years) and only a small distance from the middle of the plane (27 parsecs or close to 88 light years), with thick lanes of gas and dust blocking our view. We can see other more distant galaxies and have discovered many shapes and types, so comparing ourselves to them can help us determine the approximate shape and layout of the Milky Way.

Dr. Alyssa Goodman and her team recently realized that a dark cool cloud dubbed “Nessie” in the constellation Ara might have some secrets to tell about the Milky Way. We have seen similar features in other spiral galaxies: slightly denser tubes of material that define long spiral arms. By studying this “bone” of our galaxy, we may soon be able to refine our map of home to an even greater degree. We reside just far enough from the plane of the Milky Way’s disc that we could perhaps one day find the rest of these bones and create an even better layout of our place in space.

This concept and more appear in Goodman’s Authorea paper, currently in development now for later publication. Amazingly, you can to read the paper online while the authors finalize it! Talk about science in action…

Josh Roberts is a program presenter and astronomer at the California Academy of Sciences. He also contributes content to Morrison Planetarium productions.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)

The galaxy, dubbed with the melodic name MACS 1149-JD, was spotted using  the combined power of NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes as well as the phenomenon of gravitational lensing – using the gravity of nearer massive galaxies to bend and magnify the light of more distant ones behind them, which would otherwise remain invisible.

Small and compact, the galaxy appears to contain the equivalent of only about 1 percent of the Milky Way’s mass. The galaxy is quite young, only about 200 million years old, but we see it far back in time, when the Universe was quite young. (Imagine looking at an old photograph of your great grandparents: an old image showing a perhaps quite young couple.)  Light from the young galaxy captured by the orbiting observatories shone forth when the 13.7-billion-year-old Universe was just 500 million years old.

MACS 1149-JD existed during an important era when the Universe began to emerge from the cosmic Dark Ages. During this period, the Universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. The discovery of the faint, small galaxy opens up a window into the deepest, remotest periods of cosmic history.

“This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence,” says Wei Zheng, lead researcher on a paper appearing in Nature this week. “Future work involving this galaxy—as well as others like it that we hope to find—will allow us to study the universe’s earliest objects and how the Dark Ages ended.”

According to leading cosmological theories, the first galaxies should have started out tiny like MACS 1149-JD. They then progressively merged, eventually accumulating into the sizable galaxies of the more modern universe.

These first galaxies likely played the dominant role in the “epoch of reionization,” the event that signaled the demise of the universe’s dark ages. This epoch began about 400,000 years after the Big Bang when neutral hydrogen gas formed from cooling particles. The first luminous stars and their host galaxies emerged a few hundred million years later. The energy released by these earliest galaxies is thought to have caused the neutral hydrogen strewn throughout the Universe to ionize, or lose an electron, a state that the gas has remained in since that time.

Astronomers plan to study the rise of the first stars and galaxies and the epoch of reionization with the successor to both Hubble and Spitzer, NASA’s James Webb Telescope, which is scheduled for launch in 2018. The newly described distant galaxy likely will be a prime target.

Image: NASA/ESA/STScI/JHU

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia

(The swiss cheese analogy is courtesy of Brian Greene from a Radiolab episode from 2008. Go ahead, let your mind be further blown and listen to the whole thing.)

In today’s edition of Physics Letters B, theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski of Indiana University suggests that our universe could be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe.

Huh?

A wormhole is a shortcut through spacetime (and also what Jodie Foster travels through near the end of the movie Contact). So Universe Today puts it this way, “A wormhole is a hypothetical ‘tunnel’ connecting two different points in spacetime, and in theory, at each end of the wormhole there could be two universes.”

One headline about this research compares these universes to Russian nesting dolls. The paper suggests that all black holes may have wormholes, each with a new universe inside that formed simultaneously with the black hole. According to Poplawski, “From that it follows that our universe could have itself formed from inside a black hole existing inside another universe.”

Got it?

It’s very a cool, mind-blowing theory. And the trick with any multiverse theory, according to a great New Scientist article last month, is that while it may be probable, it is essentially untestable. Unless you pull a Jodie Foster and travel through the wormhole yourself. Bon voyage.

Creative Commons image by AllenMcC