Facts about cats

Whether your kitty meows or roars, it is a descendant of the Felis silvestris species, which is divided into the African wildcat, European wildcat and Steppe wildcat.
The smallest of the descendants is the rusty-spotted cat found in Sri Lanka. It is about half the size of the domestic cat.
The largest is the tiger. The male Siberian or Amur Tiger has a total body length in excess of 3m (10 ft) and weighs up to 300kg (660 lb).
The lion is the king of the cats. It stands out from the other cats, not just in its distinctive appearance but also in being the only felid that lives in organized social groups. Adult male lions weigh up to 225kg (500 lb) and grow up to 3m (10 ft) in body length.
The fastest cat, the cheetah, is also the fastest land animal. It can reach 95 km/h (60 mph) over short distances. Unlike other big cats it does not roar – it makes high pitched yelps, barks and chirruping sounds. And like your kitty, it does purr.

Meow!
Domestic cats purr at about 26 cycles per second, the same frequency as an idling diesel engine. A domestic cat hears frequencies up to about 65 kHz, humans up to 20 kHz. Its sense of smell is about 14 times stronger than that of humans.
In the rear of a cat’s eye is a light-reflecting layer called the tapetum lucidum, which causes cats’ eyes to glow at night. This reflecting layer absorbs light 6 times more effectively than human eyes do, allowing a cat to see better than humans at night.
There are more than 3000 types of domestic cats, but only 8% are pedigree. And, unlike other cats, they are found all over the world… in abundance. In the US, there are more cats than dogs, and people annually spend more on cat food than on baby food.
Domestic cats – or any other cats – do not have nine lives. They also do not always land on their feet. It is said that a cat that falls out of a 20-story building has a better chance of surviving than when falling out of a 7-story building because it takes a cat at least 7 stories to co-ordinate itself to land on its feet.
Cats step with both left legs, then both right legs when they walk or run. The only other animals to do this are the giraffe, camel and the maned wolf.
The tails of wild cats almost never lift higher than their backs.
Cats cannot see directly below their heads that is why they do not see the food when you put it under their nose. Keep this in mind when you’re feeding your kitty.

African wildcat – the Felis silvestris species from which domestic cats are descendants.

Meow or roar, the cat is a hunter

All cats are direct descendants of the wildcat – even your kitty. This is Simba, a purebred Maine Coon from Germany.

Of the 36 species of wild cats, the tiger is the largest, weighing up to 300kg (660 lb).

King of the beasts – respected and famous even before there were movies.

The cheetah – the fastest land animal. It also is the only cat that cannot retract its claws.

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Oldest Object in Universe Found

A collection of galaxies is seen in this Hubble Ultra Deep Field image


Homing in on an object found during the Hubble Space Telescope's long, deep stare into the distant past, astronomers have fished out a galaxy whose light has traveled more than 13 billion light-years to get here, making it the oldest astronomical object found so far.
The universe's most senior citizen is called UDFy-38135539, but scientists suspect its title as record-holder -- previously held by a gamma-ray burst -- will not last.
"I don't think this is the limit, perhaps not even that close to it," lead researcher Matthew Lehnert, with France's Observatoire de Paris, told Discovery News.
Measurements taken of UDFy-38135539 by Lehnert and colleagues confirm it formed within 600 million years of the universe's creation. Theoretical models and computer simulations suggest that the first galaxies could have formed as early as 200 million years after the Big Bang event.
Lehnert says it will be increasingly more difficult to find these objects, since they would be extremely faint and have much fewer stars and gas to make their presence known.
"UDFy-38135539 was already a challenge and perhaps we won't be able to do much better than it for a while yet," Lehnert said, adding that it took about four years of work to make the jump from the 2006 detection of the previously known most distant galaxy, which existed about 750 million years after the Big Bang (a distance referred to in scientific parlance as a redshift of 6.96)  to confirmation of UDFy-38135539 at a redshift of 8.6.
Redshift refers to what happens when light seen coming from an object is proportionally shifted to appear more red. It is similar to how the sound of a train's whistle seems to shift as it recedes into the distance. The universe as it appears today is redshift 0. Redshift 1 refers to when the universe was half its present age.
"Redshift 8.6 is likely to be about as high as we can reach with the current generation of telescopes,"  astrophysicist Michele Trenti, with the University of Colorado in Boulder, told Discovery News. "With the Hubble Space Telescope it might be possible to find some galaxies up to redshift 10, but these objects are expected to be very rare and extremely faint."
Confirmation of a galaxy within 600 million light-years of the Big Bang is particularly interesting to scientists because it is during this time that  radiation from the first objects in the universe is believed to have stripped off electrons from hydrogen atoms created during the Big Bang, added Trenti,.
"It's quite amazing to me that humble, small galaxies -- the ones that likely existed at this high redshifts, early in the history of the universe -- could literally change its overall state," Lehnert said.
What is clear is that UDFy-38135539 couldn't have ionized the gas on its own.
"It raises the question what are these other sources and are they like UDFy-38135539 or not?  We know from the (Hubble Ultra Deep Field) images that whatever they are, they are not detected in those images.  We need more data and much deeper data," Lehnert said.

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Biggest Galaxy Gang From Young Universe Seen

A massive galaxy cluster located 7 billion light-years from Earth. This cluster weighs as much as 800 trillion suns. Galaxies with "old" stellar populations, are circled in yellow; galaxies with "young" stellar populations, are circled in blue.



Astronomers on the hunt for the biggest, most distant gangs of galaxies have landed a prize catch, a behemoth of a cluster 800 trillion times more massive than the sun ferreted out by a new cosmic fishing net from when the universe was half its present age.
The galaxy cluster, known as SPT-CL J0546-5345, is so far away that its glow takes 7 billion light-years to reach us.
Astronomers like these oddball giants because they show what happens in the most richly dense parts of the universe. That information interests cosmologists trying to work out how the universe came to exist and the role of dark energy in fueling its growth, as well as to observational astronomers studying how galaxies formed.
So while some researchers are delving into the contents and geometry of SPT-CL J0546-5345, others are still fishing, especially since the new technique that netted the über-cluster proved so successful.
Credit for the catch goes to the South Pole Telescope, one of three observatories designed to detect distortions in the ubiquitous shimmer of radiation emanating from the Big Bang creation event. The telescopes sift through the background cosmic radiation to find spots where it has been slightly perturbed as it passes through extremely hot gas, a hallmark characteristic of galaxy clusters.
"The cosmic microwave background has been our most important source of information about the geometry and contents of the universe," astronomer Charles Lawrence, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News.
X-ray telescopes can detect this gas, but finding targets has been a hit-or-miss proposition. Sky surveys under way by the South Pole Telescope, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile and the Planck space observatory, all of which mine the cosmic background rays, are changing the paradigm.
The discovery of SPT-CL J0546-5345 and its confirmation as the most massive galaxy cluster ever found at 7 billion light-years -- a time/distance boundary known in scientific parlance as "redshift 1" -- shows that these new types of surveys are successful, says astronomer Mark Brodwin, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
"Really massive clusters are really, really rare, so you have to cover a lot of area of the sky if you want to find some," Brodwin told Discovery News. "These surveys are really working, they really find clusters above redshift of one,  and they find super interesting clusters. We've never found something this massive before."
In studies of galaxies, size matters.
"The mass of the cluster is a very important factor in how galaxies evolved and you want to find the most massive ones to see the most extreme ends of that relationship," Brodwin said.
The number and size of super-massive galaxy clusters also will be used to refine theoretical understanding of how the universe formed.
"It's fun to go and actually measure how many we find that are that massive and make a comparison because we might learn something about our theory. We might find that it doesn't agree. We find maybe more than you'd expect to find," Brodwin said.
Theoreticians will soon have much more observational evidence to work with. In addition to partial-sky surveys by the South Pole Telescope and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, the Planck space observatory is undertaking a full-sky survey, with the first results due to be reported in January, said Lawrence, who oversees a NASA team working with the European Planck spacecraft.
Brodwin's research appears in the current issue of Astrophysical Journal.

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