Astronomy & Space Exploration
- Thread starter MrMarcello
- Start date
Alien search detects radio signals from dwarf galaxy 3bn light years from Earth
Stephen Hawking’s Breakthrough Listen project picks up radio pulses that could be from black holes, neutron stars or, some speculate – UFO beacons
https://www.theguardian.com/science...-from-dwarf-galaxy-3bn-light-years-from-earth
Stephen Hawking’s Breakthrough Listen project picks up radio pulses that could be from black holes, neutron stars or, some speculate – UFO beacons
https://www.theguardian.com/science...-from-dwarf-galaxy-3bn-light-years-from-earth
We got them! Team Bacon!
It's nearly over.
20 years since launch!
If moving at speed of light, it would have taken 3 years to complete the 4.9 billion miles.
how long till we crack the warp drive?
If moving at speed of light, it would have taken 3 years to complete the 4.9 billion miles.
how long till we crack the warp drive?
In some ways it is fitting that Cassini will add its being to the gases of Saturn, yet with what remains to be learned we ought to have a replacement already on its way.
At 03:31 EDT, we'll begin to enter the atmosphere.
At 03:31 EDT, we'll begin to enter the atmosphere.
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Those calculations seem a bit off, mate. You would need only ~440 minutes to travel 4.9 billion miles at light speed.
i should have used the scientific calculator...Grand finale broadcast fromJPL:
Really interesting!
Some amazingly beautiful images in here.
http://www.shainblumphoto.com/project/milky-way-photography/
My fav
http://www.shainblumphoto.com/project/milky-way-photography/
My fav
No one talking about the Mars news that SpaceX are going to be live streaming in 6 hours?
Why's no one talking about this?
SpaceX plan to have people on Mars by 2024, using the Big fecking Rocket.
They want to send three, two of which would hold people (up to 100!).
SpaceX plan to have people on Mars by 2024, using the Big fecking Rocket.
They want to send three, two of which would hold people (up to 100!).
I guess it's just cause it's the same stuff as last year, just on a smaller scale. Big deal that they're ending Falcon production so soon though, and think they can fund it all in house. I never really thought ITS as presented last year would ever lift off just due to the economics of it, so it's a good step forward to my eyes.
Skeptical of those manned landing dates still! Even late 20s would be amazing though.
Not seen the Mars prsentation yet, but just caught this. Looks fecking nuts.
Gotta hand it to Elon. He doesn't think small.
Excellent segment on 60 Minutes covering Hubble and space. Best vid is labelled "Vast."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whats-next-for-the-worlds-greatest-telescope/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whats-next-for-the-worlds-greatest-telescope/
Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish win Nobel for gravitational waves discovery - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-41476648
Read Thorne's book giving the background on the the science behind Interstellar a couple of years back, before the first discovery was made, and he was like "yeah, we'll find these waves pretty soon", nonchalant as you like.
Read Thorne's book giving the background on the the science behind Interstellar a couple of years back, before the first discovery was made, and he was like "yeah, we'll find these waves pretty soon", nonchalant as you like.
Dark Energy and the arrow of time
https://futurism.com/new-research-suggests-dark-energy-might-be-the-reason-for-times-arrow/
https://futurism.com/new-research-suggests-dark-energy-might-be-the-reason-for-times-arrow/
Sputnik is a name ill always remember.
When i was a kid, maybe 6-9 years old, late 80's, we used to go with my mom and dad to a German cafe, and my favourite dessert was called Sputnik. A chocolate replicate of the satellite.
When i was a kid, maybe 6-9 years old, late 80's, we used to go with my mom and dad to a German cafe, and my favourite dessert was called Sputnik. A chocolate replicate of the satellite.
Isn't time just a human construct though? Based upon arbitrary things like the planets rotation and orbit around the sun, and mainly used to live our day to day lives around?
Would other intelligent species even have "time" as we know it?
I suppose if we think time is a human construct then we could make the claim that everything is a human construct, since its human brain that makes the measurement. In such a case, space, time, and reality itself would be a shared construct of the current evolutionary threshold of the human brain.
Only if the entire Universe is a construct, since change is its fundamental reality.
Everything exists in time unless it's moving at the speed of light. A quantum particle, created at the beginning of the Universe and travelling through space for the next 13.7 billion years to be destroyed by an impact with an atom in the Earth's atmosphere, has no knowledge of time. From its point of view, it's birth and death were simultaneous, and it travelled nowhere.
Another 10 iridium satellites, another booster landed safely. SpaceX make it look easy
This part...
reminded me of a rather unsettling DeepSkyVideos clip on magnetars in general, and more specifically, a magnetar in the Sagittarius constellation - which is 45,000-55,000 light-years away, on the far side of the Milky Way:
4 minutes and 19 seconds in in the really disturbing part - and this thing has a diameter of less than 20K.
Wonder what we'll be let down with this time.
https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann17071/
Groundbreaking observations of an astronomical phenomenon that has never been witnessed before!!
https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann17071/
Groundbreaking observations of an astronomical phenomenon that has never been witnessed before!!
If anyone's interested, Musk is doing a BFR AMA right now.
The time (on your watch), is a human construct. But the current scientific understanding of time suggests in only goes in direction (i.e, we can't travel to the time of the dinosaurs). But I fear people with thousands of posts on football forum don't read enough physics publications to give you a good answer.
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this thread is awesome. Thank you guys for always posting interesting stuff.
I don't care we are in a simulation, awesome still.
I don't care we are in a simulation, awesome still.
Tonight is the Orionid Meteors shower if interested, with peak during the early morning hours. Some meteors can be seen through 7 November but one can see up to 20 meteors per hour 20-21 October.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...ill-peak-overnight-with-best-show-before-dawn
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...ill-peak-overnight-with-best-show-before-dawn
Stumbled across the Bootes Void. Anyone heard of this?
Fascinating.
Fascinating.
Yep, it's morbidly fascinating. Thought this was an interesting Podcast on the Boötes (among other things): https://app.stitcher.com/splayer/f/62564/49427069. Just to put its massiveness into context in more standardized human-scale units, the void is like 1,800,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles across according to the most popular measurement: which is more than 3,000 times the size of the Milky Way, and more than half the size of our entire Laniakea supercluster - which contains almost 100,000 galaxies.
Imagine finding yourself in the middle of that vast expanse of nothingness.
The origins of the void are intriguing, too, because no one really knows how it grew to such an incredible size. Normal voids are formed when the gravitational forces between galaxies pull them closer - leaving an empty space behind. But this one is too big to be formed by such a process given the age of the universe. Maybe it's the remnant of an anomalous bubble that formed when the universe was the size of a football and expanded to its current scale on the basis of the standard inflation model?
As an aside, but on a related note, the newly discovered CMB Cold Spot (apparent radius of 1.8 billion light years - which is approximately 12x the radius of Boötes) is even more spooky:
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the fingerprint of the Big Bang. This remnant radiation occurs throughout the sky, with a temperature 2.73 degrees above absolute zero (about -454 degrees Fahrenheit, or -270 Celsius). While the CMB is fairly uniform, it does have some (very small) fluctuations. These fluctuations hold the key to details about both the Big Bang and the very early lifetime of the universe. Now, researchers have determined that a Cold Spot, an area of the CMB 0.00015 degrees below its surroundings, isn’t due to a lack of matter in the area, as previously thought. Ruling out this mundane possibility leaves open the door for more exotic explanations of the Cold Spot.
In a study led by Ruari Mackenzi and Tom Shanks at Durham University's Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy and published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the group explores the possibility that a “supervoid” of space — an area lacking a significant number of galaxies and other matter — is responsible for the Cold Spot. Both regular matter and dark matter tend to clump together in space, forming structures such as clusters and walls in some areas, while leaving voids without much material in others. This effect is exacerbated by the expansion of the universe, and causes the CMB coming from the direction of a void to look different than CMB radiation that must travel through areas of space more densely populated on its way to Earth.
Previous studies used a technique called photometric redshift to measure the distance of galaxies in the direction of the Cold Spot. This technique uses a galaxy’s perceived colors to estimate how far away it is, because more distant galaxies appear redder than their nearby counterparts. However, photometric redshifts often have significant uncertainties. Mackenzi and Shanks’ team instead used spectroscopic redshifts, which break apart the light from an object and are much more accurate, to determine the distance to 7,000 galaxies in the direction of the Cold Spot with data from the Anglo-Australian Telescope.
The more accurate data revealed, however, that there is no supervoid in the direction of the Cold Spot. Instead, that area of the sky looks much like the rest, with clusters of galaxies and smaller voids between them. When the sky in the direction of the Cold Spot was compared with another area of the sky without a cooler CMB behind it, no significant difference was found. “The voids we have detected cannot explain the Cold Spot under standard cosmology,” said MacKenzie in a press release detailing the results.
What does this mean? Standard cosmology is the model we currently use to describe the universe around us. Observations that challenge this model must be examined carefully, but can be used to further refine our model to ensure it’s correct.
Even without a supervoid in the way, the team estimates a likelihood that the Cold Spot appeared by random chance as 1 in 50. According to Shanks, “This means we can't entirely rule out that the Spot is caused by an unlikely fluctuation explained by the standard model. But if that isn't the answer, then there are more exotic explanations.”
Such exotic explanations, he says, include “a collision between our universe and another bubble universe. If further, more detailed, analysis of CMB data proves this to be the case then the Cold Spot might be taken as the first evidence for the multiverse – and billions of other universes may exist like our own.”
The multiverse describes a set of infinite universes, which includes the one in which we live. To date, no evidence has been found that the multiverse is more than science fiction, but researchers are continually pushing the boundaries of the observable universe to determine whether this concept is fact or fiction. While at the moment the Cold Spot is certainly not definitive evidence of a multiverse, it does indicate a problem in our standard cosmological model that may need addressing if the cause of the temperature fluctuation in this area remains unclear.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/14/opinions/what-explains-the-universes-cold-spot-lincoln/index.html
PBS Space Time made a decent, if clickbaity, video on the implications of the paradoxical Cold Spot:
Imagine finding yourself in the middle of that vast expanse of nothingness.
The origins of the void are intriguing, too, because no one really knows how it grew to such an incredible size. Normal voids are formed when the gravitational forces between galaxies pull them closer - leaving an empty space behind. But this one is too big to be formed by such a process given the age of the universe. Maybe it's the remnant of an anomalous bubble that formed when the universe was the size of a football and expanded to its current scale on the basis of the standard inflation model?
As an aside, but on a related note, the newly discovered CMB Cold Spot (apparent radius of 1.8 billion light years - which is approximately 12x the radius of Boötes) is even more spooky:
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the fingerprint of the Big Bang. This remnant radiation occurs throughout the sky, with a temperature 2.73 degrees above absolute zero (about -454 degrees Fahrenheit, or -270 Celsius). While the CMB is fairly uniform, it does have some (very small) fluctuations. These fluctuations hold the key to details about both the Big Bang and the very early lifetime of the universe. Now, researchers have determined that a Cold Spot, an area of the CMB 0.00015 degrees below its surroundings, isn’t due to a lack of matter in the area, as previously thought. Ruling out this mundane possibility leaves open the door for more exotic explanations of the Cold Spot.
In a study led by Ruari Mackenzi and Tom Shanks at Durham University's Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy and published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the group explores the possibility that a “supervoid” of space — an area lacking a significant number of galaxies and other matter — is responsible for the Cold Spot. Both regular matter and dark matter tend to clump together in space, forming structures such as clusters and walls in some areas, while leaving voids without much material in others. This effect is exacerbated by the expansion of the universe, and causes the CMB coming from the direction of a void to look different than CMB radiation that must travel through areas of space more densely populated on its way to Earth.
Previous studies used a technique called photometric redshift to measure the distance of galaxies in the direction of the Cold Spot. This technique uses a galaxy’s perceived colors to estimate how far away it is, because more distant galaxies appear redder than their nearby counterparts. However, photometric redshifts often have significant uncertainties. Mackenzi and Shanks’ team instead used spectroscopic redshifts, which break apart the light from an object and are much more accurate, to determine the distance to 7,000 galaxies in the direction of the Cold Spot with data from the Anglo-Australian Telescope.
The more accurate data revealed, however, that there is no supervoid in the direction of the Cold Spot. Instead, that area of the sky looks much like the rest, with clusters of galaxies and smaller voids between them. When the sky in the direction of the Cold Spot was compared with another area of the sky without a cooler CMB behind it, no significant difference was found. “The voids we have detected cannot explain the Cold Spot under standard cosmology,” said MacKenzie in a press release detailing the results.
What does this mean? Standard cosmology is the model we currently use to describe the universe around us. Observations that challenge this model must be examined carefully, but can be used to further refine our model to ensure it’s correct.
Even without a supervoid in the way, the team estimates a likelihood that the Cold Spot appeared by random chance as 1 in 50. According to Shanks, “This means we can't entirely rule out that the Spot is caused by an unlikely fluctuation explained by the standard model. But if that isn't the answer, then there are more exotic explanations.”
Such exotic explanations, he says, include “a collision between our universe and another bubble universe. If further, more detailed, analysis of CMB data proves this to be the case then the Cold Spot might be taken as the first evidence for the multiverse – and billions of other universes may exist like our own.”
The multiverse describes a set of infinite universes, which includes the one in which we live. To date, no evidence has been found that the multiverse is more than science fiction, but researchers are continually pushing the boundaries of the observable universe to determine whether this concept is fact or fiction. While at the moment the Cold Spot is certainly not definitive evidence of a multiverse, it does indicate a problem in our standard cosmological model that may need addressing if the cause of the temperature fluctuation in this area remains unclear.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/14/opinions/what-explains-the-universes-cold-spot-lincoln/index.html
PBS Space Time made a decent, if clickbaity, video on the implications of the paradoxical Cold Spot: