Nature is filled with threes. Land, sea, and air. People propagate many plants by three chief methods. These methods are: (1) cuttage, (2) grafting, and (3) layering. Forests a catagirized into three major groups: (1) coniferous forests, (2) temperate deciduous forests, and (3) tropical rain forests.
In the Center of the Trifid Nebula Image Credit: Subaru Telescope (NAOJ), Hubble Space Telescope, Martin Pugh; Processing: Robert Gendler
What’s happening at the center of the Trifid Nebula? Three prominent dust lanes that give the Trifid its name all come together. Mountains of opaque dust appear near the bottom, while other dark filaments of dust are visible threaded throughout the nebula. A single massive star visible near the center causes much of the Trifid’s glow. The Trifid, cataloged as M20, is only about 300,000 years old, making it among the youngest emission nebulas known. The star forming nebula lies about 9,000 light years away toward the constellation of the Archer (Sagittarius). The region pictured here spans about 10 light years. The featured image is a composite with luminance taken from an image by the 8.2-m ground-based Subaru Telescope, detail provided by the 2.4-m orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, color data provided by Martin Pugh and image
Image Credit & Copyright: Grand Mesa Observatory, Terry Hancock / Tom
Masterson
Closest to the Sun on March 1, and closest to planet Earth on April 23, this Comet ATLAS (C/2020 R4) shows a faint greenish coma and short tail in this pretty, telescopic field of view. Captured at its position on May 5, the comet was within the boundaries of northern constellation Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs), and near the line-of-sight to intriguing background galaxies popularly known as the Whale and the Hockey Stick. Cetacean in appearance but Milky Way sized, NGC 4631 is a spiral galaxy seen edge-on at the top right, some 25 million light-years away. NGC 4656/7 sports the bent-stick shape of interacting galaxies below and left of NGC 4631.
The rule of three has become something akin to a social law of gravity — as if the number is behind everything.
Three groups of experimentalists have independently observed a strange state of matter that forms from three particles of any type and at any scale, from practically infinitesimal to infinite.
Forget pairs. They’re old pat. And 42? We still don’t know the question.
Three rings to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them … apologies to Lord Of The Rings purists.
Comedians insist three is the best pattern to exploit perceptions and deliver punchlines; three features prominently in titles, such as The Three Little Pigs, Three Musketeers, Goldilocks and the Three Bears; even the Romans believed three was the ultimate number: “Omne trium perfectum” was their mantra — everything that comes in threes is perfect.
Now, it seems Mother Nature may also think in threes. Especially at the very edge of physics — quantum mechanics.
A Soviet nuclear physicist first proposed the idea back in the 1970s — and was met with derision.
For 45 years number-crunchers around the world have been attempting to topple Vitaly Efimov’s idea and prove his equations wrong.
Shih-Kuang Tung of the University of Chicago holding Borromean rings, which have often been used as a symbol of unity. If one ring is removed, all three fall apart.
They’ve failed; and his “outlandish” theory is now on the point of being proven.
Most importantly, Efimov felt that sets of three particles could arrange themselves in an infinite, layered pattern. What form these layers take helps determine the makeup of matter itself.
Jump forward four decades, and technological advances now allow his groups of three quantum particles to be studied and manipulated.
The quantum condition — now known as Efimov’s state — is visible only under supremely cold conditions. Matter, when chilled to a few billionths of a degree above Absolute Zero, does strange things …
