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umbrarchist
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Posted: Sunday April 15th, 2007 21:40 |
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You'll enjoy this. The universe at reducing scale.
OK Watcher, what did you do with Homer?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvc8K0e1wU0
um
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The Watcher
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Posted: Saturday April 21st, 2007 19:23 |
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LOL I wonder which was first?
Anyway check this out. While I was browsing through something about possibilities of terrforming mars [imo none lol!] there came up the obvious problem of long term survival in low gravity. Mars obviously having far less mass than earth.
I found out that people are looking into sending mammals into space, specifically mice. Rotating them in a centrifuge (like in the movie 2001 space odessy) to create artificial Mars gravity and then watching these mice through several generations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Gravity_Biosatellite
I wonder what PETA would say?
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TheDogon
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Posted: Friday April 27th, 2007 18:17 |
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umbrarchist wrote: How weird can the universe get?
There is a hex on this planet. 
Rings and Things!
umbra
Yepper, I am beginning to think that the universe is much more stranger than anything ever written in any science fiction novel.
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most luminous events known in the universe since the Big Bang. They are flashes of gamma rays, coming from seemingly random places in the sky and at random times, that last from milliseconds to many minutes, and are often followed by "afterglow" emission at longer wavelengths (X-ray, UV, optical, IR, and radio). Gamma-ray bursts are currently detected by orbiting satellites about once a day.
The majority of observed GRBs appear to be due to collimated emission (that is, emission in narrow jets) from the core-collapse of a rapidly rotating Wolf-Rayet star into a black hole, but a specific subclass of GRBs (the "short" bursts) appears to be due to another process, possibly the collision of two neutron stars orbiting in a binary. All known GRBs come from outside our own galaxy (though a related class of phenomena, SGR flares, are associated with galactic magnetars), and most come from billions of light years away.
 The image above shows the optical afterglow of gamma ray burst GRB-990123 taken on January 23, 1999. The burst is seen as a bright dot denoted by a square on the left, with an enlarged cutout on the right. The object above it with the finger-like filaments is the originating galaxy. This galaxy seems to be distorted by a collision with another galaxy.
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The Watcher
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Posted: Friday April 27th, 2007 18:23 |
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Anybody heard of Gliese 581 c ??
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TheDogon
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Posted: Friday April 27th, 2007 18:40 |
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The Watcher wrote: Anybody heard of Gliese 581 c ??
Isn't that the system they just found? They think a couple of planets could be habitable in that system. I think it's like 30 ly away. But, I dunno. It's already hard enough to see a star. What can they tell us about the surface other than perhaps an approximate temperature. . .maybe. They can tell us about mass and perhaps an approximation of the metals, minerals, etc., that make up the planet.
They can't even tell us if there is much water on the surface.
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The Watcher
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Posted: Friday April 27th, 2007 18:49 |
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20 light years away... or 120 trillion miles if you like lol
You're right of course, not much can be told so far beyond guesstimates on temperature, mass and size. What has interested astronomers is that it lies within the habitable zone (water can exist as a liquid). It's 7 million miles from the star where earth is 93 million miles but then the star is a red dwarf and a lot colder and smaller than our sun.
I think it's quite exciting.
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Madam Butterfly
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Posted: Friday April 27th, 2007 18:57 |
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it always amuses me when scientists judge whether or not a planet is habitable by whether or not it has water. Yes, humans and other animal species on earth need water to survive, but who says other life forms (if they exist) do
they must really believe this planet is about to implode to be looking a new home for us THAT far afield!! it's hardly as local as, say, the moon is it?! And at least we have checked out that neighbourhood!
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TheDogon
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Posted: Friday April 27th, 2007 19:49 |
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Madam Butterfly wrote: it always amuses me when scientists judge whether or not a planet is habitable by whether or not it has water. Yes, humans and other animal species on earth need water to survive, but who says other life forms (if they exist) do
they must really believe this planet is about to implode to be looking a new home for us THAT far afield!! it's hardly as local as, say, the moon is it?! And at least we have checked out that neighbourhood!
It think the whole search for life is mostly a "White"/Western thing. Even if you look at Western science fiction, life is always predicted as Humanoid. It's similar to when "Whites" first met non-"Whites". They projected their cultural beliefs, etc. onto other peoples.
Western scientists can really only conceive of life in this fashion. Life in other parts of the universe will be much more exotic and/or stranger than we could possibly imagine. It appears as if the rule in the universe is, whereever life can exist, it will. But most scientists still have to make this realization.
Last edited on Thursday May 10th, 2007 15:01 by TheDogon
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Prince Hakeem
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Posted: Wednesday May 16th, 2007 12:35 |
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http://www.saukvalley.com/articles/2007/04/25/news/national/366771231354418.txt
Published on: Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Scientists discover new planet that may sustain human life
BY SETH BORENSTEIN
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON - For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe."
The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.
There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is known about it. And it's worth noting that scientists' requirements for habitability count Mars in that category: a size relatively similar to Earth's with temperatures that would permit liquid water. However, this is the first outside our solar system that meets those standards.
"It's a significant step on the way to finding possible life in the
universe," said University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor, one of 11 European scientists on the team that found the planet. "It's a nice discovery. We still have a lot of questions."
The results of the discovery have not been published but have been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Alan Boss, who works at the Carnegie Institution of Washington where a U.S. team of astronomers competed in the hunt for an Earth-like planet, called it "a major milestone in this business."
The planet was discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile, which has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wave lengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.
What they revealed is a planet circling the red dwarf star, Gliese 581. Red dwarfs are low-energy, tiny stars that give off dim red light and last longer than stars like our sun. Until a few years ago, astronomers didn't consider these stars as possible hosts of planets that might sustain life.
The discovery of the new planet, named 581 c, is sure to fuel studies of planets circling similar dim stars. About 80 percent of the stars near Earth are red dwarfs.
The new planet is about five times heavier than Earth. Its discoverers aren't certain if it is rocky like Earth or if its a frozen ice ball with liquid water on the surface. If it is rocky like Earth, which is what the prevailing theory proposes, it has a diameter about 1 1/2 times bigger than our planet. If it is an iceball, as Mayor suggests, it would be even bigger.
Based on theory, 581 c should have an atmosphere, but what's in that atmosphere is still a mystery and if it's too thick that could make the planet's surface temperature too hot, Mayor said.
However, the research team believes the average temperature to be somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees and that set off celebrations among astronomers.
Until now, all 220 planets astronomers have found outside our solar system have had the "Goldilocks problem." They've been too hot, too cold or just plain too big and gaseous, like uninhabitable Jupiter.
The new planet seems just right - or at least that's what scientists think.
"This could be very important," said NASA astrobiology expert Chris McKay, who was not part of the discovery team. "It doesn't mean there is life, but it means it's an Earth-like planet in terms of potential habitability."
Eventually astronomers will rack up discoveries of dozens, maybe even hundreds of planets considered habitable, the astronomers said. But this one - simply called "c" by its discoverers when they talk among themselves - will go down in cosmic history as No. 1.
Besides having the right temperature, the new planet is probably full of liquid water, hypothesizes Stephane Udry, the discovery team's lead author and another Geneva astronomer. But that is based on theory about how planets form, not on any evidence, he said.
"Liquid water is critical to life as we know it," co-author Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France, said in a statement. "Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."
Other astronomers cautioned it's too early to tell whether there is water.
"You need more work to say it's got water or it doesn't have water," said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, press officer for the American Astronomical Society. "You wouldn't send a crew there assuming that when you get there, they'll have enough water to get back."
The new planet's star system is a mere 20.5 light years away, making Gliese 581 one of the 100 closest stars to Earth. It's so dim, you can't see it without a telescope, but it's somewhere in the constellation Libra, which is low in the southeastern sky during the midevening in the Northern Hemisphere.
"I expect there will be planets like Earth, but whether they have life is another question," said renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in an interview with The Associated Press in Orlando. "We haven't been visited by little green men yet."
Before you book your extrastellar flight to 581 c, a few caveats about how alien that world probably is: Anyone sitting on the planet would get heavier quickly, and birthdays would add up fast since it orbits its star every 13 days.
Gravity is 1.6 times as strong as Earth's so a 150-pound person would feel like 240 pounds.
But oh, the view. The planet is 14 times closer to the star it orbits. Udry figures the red dwarf star would hang in the sky at a size 20 times larger than our moon. And it's likely, but still not known, that the planet doesn't rotate, so one side would always be sunlit and the other dark.
Distance is another problem. "We don't know how to get to those places in a human lifetime," Maran said.
Two teams of astronomers, one in Europe and one in the United States, have been racing to be the first to find a planet like 581 c outside the solar system.
The European team looked at 100 different stars using a tool called HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher) to find this one planet, said Xavier Bonfils of the Lisbon Observatory, one of the co-discoverers.
Much of the effort to find Earth-like planets has focused on stars like our sun with the challenge being to find a planet the right distance from the star it orbits. About 90 percent of the time, the European telescope focused its search more on sun-like stars, Udry said.
A few weeks before the European discovery earlier this month, a scientific paper in the journal Astrobiology theorized a few days that red dwarf stars were good candidates.
"Now we have the possibility to find many more," Bonfils said.
On the Net:
The European Southern Observatory: http://www.eso.org
© Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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TheDogon
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Posted: Wednesday May 16th, 2007 15:44 |
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Well, since almost everyone in the physics world is baffled by Hawking's new theory on black holes. Is there brotha or sista here who has the background to at least enlighten us a bit????
According to Einstein's "Special Relativity", the singularity at the center of a black hole has zero size. Everything that falls into a black hole is eventually crushed out of existence. That includes light, time, matter, etc.
Well, this is supposed to violate one of the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics. That information cannot be lost. In every equation there is always a way find the bits and pieces to put back matter into it's original form. Black holes according to Einstein violate this principle.
Well Hawking 30 years ago, used Einstein's theory to confirm that information was lost. But 3 years ago, he reversed his position. And I don't understand any of this crap.
I understood how String theorists describe a black hole. And that's all cool. All matter is composed of strings and in a black hole matter is at it's primary state. A string.
But this new theory, I can't make heads or tails out of it.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6151
After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape. Hawking will present his latest finding at a conference in Ireland next week.
The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern physics, known as the black hole information paradox.
It was Hawking's own work that created the paradox. In 1976, he calculated that once a black hole forms, it starts losing mass by radiating energy. This "Hawking radiation" contains no information about the matter inside the black hole and once the black hole evaporates, all information is lost.
But this conflicts with the laws of quantum physics, which say that such information can never be completely wiped out. Hawking's argument was that the intense gravitational fields of black holes somehow unravel the laws of quantum physics.
Other physicists have tried to chip away at this paradox. Earlier in 2004, Samir Mathur of Ohio State University in Columbus and his colleagues showed that if a black hole is modelled according to string theory - in which the universe is made of tiny, vibrating strings rather than point-like particles - then the black hole becomes a giant tangle of strings. And the Hawking radiation emitted by this "fuzzball" does contain information about the insides of a black hole (New Scientist print edition, 13 March).
Big reputation
Now, it seems that Hawking too has an answer to the conundrum and the physics community is abuzz with the news. Hawking requested at the last minute that he be allowed to present his findings at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland.
"He sent a note saying 'I have solved the black hole information paradox and I want to talk about it'," says Curt Cutler, a physicist at the Albert Einstein Institute in Golm, Germany, who is chairing the conference's scientific committee. "I haven't seen a preprint [of the paper]. To be quite honest, I went on Hawking's reputation."
Though Hawking has not yet revealed the detailed maths behind his finding, sketchy details have emerged from a seminar Hawking gave at Cambridge. According to Cambridge colleague Gary Gibbons, an expert on the physics of black holes who was at the seminar, Hawking's black holes, unlike classic black holes, do not have a well-defined event horizon that hides everything within them from the outside world.
In essence, his new black holes now never quite become the kind that gobble up everything. Instead, they keep emitting radiation for a long time, and eventually open up to reveal the information within. "It's possible that what he presented in the seminar is a solution," says Gibbons. "But I think you have to say the jury is still out."
Forever hidden
At the conference, Hawking will have an hour on 21 July to make his case. If he succeeds, then, ironically, he will lose a bet that he and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena made with John Preskill, also of Caltech.
They argued that "information swallowed by a black hole is forever hidden, and can never be revealed".
"Since Stephen has changed his view and now believes that black holes do not destroy information, I expect him [and Kip] to concede the bet," Preskill told New Scientist. The duo are expected to present Preskill with an encyclopaedia of his choice "from which information can be recovered at will".
Last edited on Wednesday May 16th, 2007 16:17 by TheDogon
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TheDogon
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Posted: Tuesday June 12th, 2007 17:38 |
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3D picture of the universe. . .
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TheDogon
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Posted: Tuesday June 12th, 2007 17:53 |
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The earliest known pictures of our universe. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Less than a billion years after the Big Bang. . .
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TheDogon
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Posted: Tuesday June 12th, 2007 17:59 |
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The "Hubble Ultra Deep Field", or HUDF, is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, composited from Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a period from September 3, 2003 through January 16, 2004. It is the deepest image of the universe ever taken in visible light, looking back in time more than 13 billion years. The HUDF contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. The patch of sky in which the galaxies reside (just one-tenth the diameter of the full moon as viewed from Earth) was chosen because it had a low density of bright stars in the near-field. Although most of the targets visible in the Hubble image can also be seen at infrared wavelengths by ground-based telescopes, Hubble is the only instrument which can make observations of these distant targets at visible wavelengths. Located southwest of Orion in the Southern-Hemisphere constellation Fornax at right ascension 3h 32m 40.0s, declination -27° 47' 29" (J2000), the image covers 11.5 square arcminutes[1]. This is smaller than a grain of sand held at arm's length, and equal to roughly one thirteen-millionth of the total area of the sky. The image is oriented such that the upper left corner points toward north (-46.4°) on the celestial sphere. The star near the center of the field is USNO-A2.0 0600-01400432 with apparent magnitude of 18.95.
In total, the image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days for the ACS and 4.5 days for the NICMOS.
According to the Big Bang theory, the universe has a finite age, so we might expect very distant (and hence very young) galaxies to look different from the typical older galaxies we see today. This is indeed seen in the HUDF, although some argue that the difference is partly a result of the unusual wavelength used for the HUDF (corresponding to ultraviolet light from the rest-frame of the most distant galaxies). The Hubble Ultra Deep Field also shows more evidence for galaxy formation and merging than in local studies, as expected for the early universe.
This galaxy-studded view represents a "deep" core sample of the universe, cutting across billions of light-years. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies -- the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals -- thrived 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old.
In vibrant contrast to the rich harvest of classic spiral and elliptical galaxies, there is a zoo of oddball galaxies littering the field. Some look like toothpicks; others like links on a bracelet. A few appear to be interacting. These oddball galaxies chronicle a period when the universe was younger and more chaotic. Order and structure were just beginning to emerge.
The Ultra Deep Field observations began Sept. 24, 2003 and continued through Jan. 16, 2004. The telescope's ACS camera, the size of a phone booth, captured ancient photons of light that began traversing the universe even before Earth existed. Photons of light from the very faintest objects arrived at a trickle of one photon per minute, compared with millions of photons per minute from nearer galaxies.
Just like the previous Hubble Deep Fields, the new data are expected to galvanize the astronomical community and lead to dozens of research papers that will offer new insights into the birth and evolution of galaxies.
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