Modern furniture designs have always given the art-deco and the Victorian styles a tough fight. While the latter two represent aristocracy and high-end fashion, modern defines a trendy yet comfortable style quotient and are very progressive in nature.
White is a fresh look, it's also a fabulous backdrop for mixing stronger colors when it comes to choosing your scatter cushions and throws. Don't forget that not everything has to be matched either, a statement chair in a contrasting color will have far more visual effect than a traditional, single toned, three piece suite. The heavy shapes of yesterday are also out of the window with the introduction of sweeping silhouettes and curves, even boxier designs have been slimmed down and streamlined to create a more dynamic look for the modern home.
Clean design lines add a sense of serenity and calmness to the beige, brown and white color furniture. Throw in a bright colored rug or a lamp and your room will come alive with personality of its own.
As the largest piece of furniture you are likely to buy for your living, we are taking a look at sofas, and how they fit into modern spaces. This collection is a menagerie of contemporary shapes and colors to inspire your next decorating scheme.
In the high desert of northern Chile, a new telescope with a revolutionary design is coming online – ready to probe deep into space. It will explore places beyond imagination – the distant birthplaces of planets, stars and galaxies century – to help us understand our place in the cosmos. Astronomers call this new telescope ALMA, which is the Spanish word for soul.
According to the scientists, one nation alone couldn’t build ALMA, whose official name is the Atacoma Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array. Working with the host country Chile, some of the largest observatories in the world joined together for ALMA. These include the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in North America, the European Southern Observatory and observatories in Japan, Brazil and throughout Latin America.
Sixty-six large radio dishes connect together to form ALMA. These dishes are located 30 minutes by car from the town of San Pedro de Attacoma in Chile – at the top of the world – at an altitude of 16,500 feet.
At that height and in the desert, there is little water vapor in the air. Those conditions are perfect for ALMA because water in the air blocks starlight in the portion of the “electromagnetic spectrum” that scientists want to study.
ALMA will observe starlight at wavelengths invisible to your eye – the long infrared wavelengths of starlight. Space observatories, like the Hubble Space Telescope, orbit high above the blanket of Earth’s atmosphere to see the universe at these wavelengths. Astronomers hope that ALMA will be even better than space telescopes at exploring the infrared universe – because they can build it much larger on land than they can in space today.
They hope to learn the details of where stars like our sun and planets like our Earth come from. Today, the process of star and planet formation is poorly understood. The ALMA array – with its ability to see in at infrared wavelengths – will help us probe the vast clouds of dust surrounding new stars and planets.
Farther away in space, and farther back in time, are very distant galaxies – believed to have undergone an extreme burst of star formation long ago, as the universe evolved toward its present state. Astronomers want to use ALMA to learn how this burst of star formation began, how long it lasted, and what it may mean for the part of the universe we inhabit today.
Antennae Galaxies, two galaxies in the process of colliding. The ALMA telescope found signs of gas clouds crashing into each other in these galaxies, in places where new stars are forming. That discovery verified astronomers’ theories that a shock wave from a colossal collision might initiate star formation.
ALMA has already verified astronomical theory stating that star formation heightens when galaxies collide. In 2011, as the dishes of ALMA began to come online, astronomers used them to look at the Antennae Galaxies – two large spiral galaxies like our Milky Way – known to be undergoing a vast cosmic collision.
It’s a glimpse of a violent past for our universe that might provide clues to how ordinary stars like our sun – and planets like our Earth – came to be.
