# The Astronomy Thread



## xsited1

Post all things Astronomy whether political or not.

I'll start.

Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, sometimes has open nights for the public.  Back in the 90s, I once saw Saturn through their main telescope, the 24" Alvan Clark Refracting Telescope.  The view was breathtaking.






Lowell Observatory


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## American Horse

Collisions of stars are incredibly unlikely; they occupy such a relatively miniscule volume of space, that even when a pair of galaxies collide, few if any of their constituent stars crash into each other.

Objects in space like planets are much more likely to collide if they orbit each other or orbit  a common primary object.  In our own solar system Venus doesn&#8217;t deserve to smash into anything, since it&#8217;s orbit is so perfectly circular.  
But Mercury is not so well behaved.  Its orbit &#8211; already the most lopsided &#8211; wildly changes shape.  Influences from faraway Jupiter will eventually make its path so elliptical that it will swing out to Venus.  Then those two worlds MAY collide.  

Here's a fair approximation of what that might look like.
Mercury's diameter is 40 percent that of Venus


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## Trajan

American Horse said:


> Collisions of stars are incredibly unlikely; they occupy such a relatively miniscule volume of space, that even when a pair of galaxies collide, few if any of their constituent stars crash into each other.
> 
> Objects in space like planets are much more likely to collide if they orbit each other or orbit  a common primary object.  In our own solar system Venus doesnt deserve to smash into anything, since its orbit is so perfectly circular.
> But Mercury is not so well behaved.  Its orbit  already the most lopsided  wildly changes shape.  Influences from faraway Jupiter will eventually make its path so elliptical that it will swing out to Venus.  Then those two worlds MAY collide.
> 
> Here's a fair approximation of what that might look like.
> Mercury's diameter is 40 percent that of Venus



interesting..what the timeline on that?


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## Trajan

the Egyptians figured out the circumference of the Earth by using a known height,a ruler and  digging a hole...anyone ( minus google) know how?


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## American Horse

Trajan said:


> American Horse said:
> 
> 
> 
> Objects in space like planets are much more likely to collide if they orbit each other or orbit  a common primary object.  In our own solar system Venus doesnt deserve to smash into anything, since its orbit is so perfectly circular.
> But Mercury is not so well behaved.  Its orbit  already the most lopsided  wildly changes shape.  Influences from faraway Jupiter will eventually make its path so elliptical that it will swing out to Venus.  Then those two worlds MAY collide.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> interesting..what the timeline on that?
Click to expand...

It's indefinite because Mercury's orbital plane wobbles taking it both N & S of the orbital plane of Venus. It could even miss Venus and approach a collision with Earth instead. If that path is followed and  there's near-hit versus a direct hit with Earth, it could even be ejected by the slingshot effect from the solar system, that being the remotest likelihood.

Edit:  I can see how Earth's diameter can be determined by those tools by taking measurements in two locations a known distance apart if they lay on a north/south line but I don't see the need for digging a hole in the ground unless it be to produce a leveling method for measuring a shadow on a plane.


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## Mr. H.

Trajan said:


> the Egyptians figured out the circumference of the Earth by using a known height,a ruler and  digging a hole...anyone ( minus google) know how?



They dug the hole to the center of the earth, measured it and multiplied by 2. The result was then multiplied by pi. 

Hey-  here's a nifty site: a new astro pic every day. 

Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive


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## xsited1

During the years from 1758 to 1782 Charles Messier, a French astronomer (1730 - 1817), compiled a list of approximately 100 diffuse objects that were difficult to distinguish from comets through the telescopes of the day. Discovering comets was the way to make a name for yourself in astronomy in the 18th century -- Messier's first aim was to catalog the objects that were often mistaken for comets. 

Fortunately for us, the Messier Catalog became well known for a much higher purpose, as a collection of the most beautiful objects in the sky including nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies.

SEDS Messier Database

Here's M42 in the constellation Orion:



Messier


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## American Horse

Here's a "free copy" of a Tool -  the SimSolar - Solar System Simulator - with a visual of the positions of all the planets, earth/moon on the current date or any date between 2/23/1915 and 2/25/2086

here's a small gif image of what it looks like elliptically; 
it can expand to a full overhead computer screen view


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## asterism

Trajan said:


> the Egyptians figured out the circumference of the Earth by using a known height,a ruler and  digging a hole...anyone ( minus google) know how?



I thought it was actually two holes (wells) and Eratosthenes new the distance between them.


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## asterism

Stellarium, and awesome (and free) program for just about all platforms.

Stellarium

It's a personal planetarium with the ability to see what the sky looks like at any time and location on the planet.


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## asterism

A tool to show the positions of Jupiter's moons:

SkyandTelescope.com

(free registration required, use Mailinator - Let Them Eat Spam! for disposable email addresses)


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## xsited1

*The Bucket List for Backyard Stargazers*


A Supernova
The Great Orion Nebula
A Bright Comet
The Southern Sky
A Meteor Storm
The Transit of Venus
The Green Flash
Total Solar Eclipse
Sunrise on the Moon
The Omega Centauri Star Cluster

The Bucket List for Backyard Stargazers | One-Minute Astronomer

I have not seen a supernova, but I did see a nova that was visible to the naked eye when I was very young:



> V1500 Cygni or Nova Cygni 1975 was a bright nova occurring in 1975 in the constellation Cygnus.
> 
> Nova Cygni 1975 | StarDate Online


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## Trajan

American Horse said:


> Trajan said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> American Horse said:
> 
> 
> 
> Objects in space like planets are much more likely to collide if they orbit each other or orbit  a common primary object.  In our own solar system Venus doesn&#8217;t deserve to smash into anything, since it&#8217;s orbit is so perfectly circular.
> But Mercury is not so well behaved.  Its orbit &#8211; already the most lopsided &#8211; wildly changes shape.  Influences from faraway Jupiter will eventually make its path so elliptical that it will swing out to Venus.  Then those two worlds MAY collide.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> interesting..what the timeline on that?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> It's indefinite because Mercury's orbital plane wobbles taking it both N & S of the orbital plane of Venus. It could even miss Venus and approach a collision with Earth instead. If that path is followed and  there's near-hit versus a direct hit with Earth, it could even be ejected by the slingshot effect from the solar system, that being the remotest likelihood.
> 
> Edit:  I can see how Earth's diameter can be determined by those tools by taking measurements in two locations a known distance apart if they lay on a north/south line but I don't see the need for digging a hole in the ground unless it be to produce a leveling method for measuring a shadow on a plane.
Click to expand...


well done you're close. they dug a measured hole, put a measured height at the lip,some think a truncated  obelisk ( Mastaba?), the translation I saw surmised that anyway, they  marked the time the hole swallowed its shadow, marked time,  then marked the moment it swallowed its shadow again. The extrapolation from there is relatively simple. 

I'd like to meet the man or woman who thought of the method. Sounds trivial now, but, then? It was genius. 

I am something of a pyramidiot ( lol) I have been to I think 18. I happen to agree with the theory that the Great Pyramid was an all in one  marker that encompasses or that is encompassed measurements that expressed everything they knew of the heavens the earth and mathematics incl. the closest they could get to the value of pi  etc. The Greeks merely rediscovered what they already knew.


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## Trajan

Love this story- Galileo discovered the isochronism of the pendulum by watching a lamp swing on a nail in the Tower of Pisa by measuring its  oscillation in amplitude by heart beat. He figured out that the time of each swing no matter how high you started the swing or low, the time was exactly the same. unreal.


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## syrenn

xsited1 said:


> *The Bucket List for Backyard Stargazers*
> 
> 
> A Supernova
> The Great Orion Nebula
> A Bright Comet
> The Southern Sky
> A Meteor Storm
> The Transit of Venus
> The Green Flash
> Total Solar Eclipse
> Sunrise on the Moon
> The Omega Centauri Star Cluster
> 
> The Bucket List for Backyard Stargazers | One-Minute Astronomer
> 
> I have not seen a supernova, but I did see a nova that was visible to the naked eye when I was very young:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> V1500 Cygni or Nova Cygni 1975 was a bright nova occurring in 1975 in the constellation Cygnus.
> 
> Nova Cygni 1975 | StarDate Online
Click to expand...




LOL, not sure if the green flash would be under astronomy. Its on my list too.


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## Mini 14

Thierry Legault - International Space Station and Discovery before docking

Now this is truly amazing....video of an astronaut space-walking, from an amateur, land-based telescope!

About 12 years ago, my friend and I spent 3 years trying to get good quality video of the shuttle through a 10" LX-200 and NO CCD.

Out of about 200 hours of effort, we wound up with 40 seconds of a blob that *might* look triangular.....at 4am.....in bitter cold.......if you'd been sipping Old Forester and coffee for 8 hours, non-stop.


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## xsited1

syrenn said:


> xsited1 said:
> 
> 
> 
> *The Bucket List for Backyard Stargazers*
> 
> 
> A Supernova
> The Great Orion Nebula
> A Bright Comet
> The Southern Sky
> A Meteor Storm
> The Transit of Venus
> The Green Flash
> Total Solar Eclipse
> Sunrise on the Moon
> The Omega Centauri Star Cluster
> 
> The Bucket List for Backyard Stargazers | One-Minute Astronomer
> 
> I have not seen a supernova, but I did see a nova that was visible to the naked eye when I was very young:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> V1500 Cygni or Nova Cygni 1975 was a bright nova occurring in 1975 in the constellation Cygnus.
> 
> Nova Cygni 1975 | StarDate Online
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> LOL, not sure if the green flash would be under astronomy. Its on my list too.
Click to expand...




I have never observed the green flash phenomenon, most likely because I am red-green colorblind, although I have seen the zodiacal light several times.  You need to have an unobstructed view of the horizon and I usually don't, but I'm going on a cruise this Summer so I'll be looking for it.  Here's more information:



> The green flash is an atmospheric refractive phenomenon that occurs shortly after sunset or before sunrise where the top edge of the Sun will momentarily turn green. It is seen rarely by the naked eye, primarily because it requires specific conditions to occur, but also because it requires the observer to know what to look for. Despite the name, there is no "flash"; the event only lasts from a fraction of a second to at the longest, a few seconds.
> 
> Mount Wilson Observatory


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## Old Rocks

Season 22, Episode 11 | Oregon Field Guide | PBS Video


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## xsited1

My youngest told me today that he has trouble making out the constellations.  Here's one he's just about got memorized:

View attachment $orion.bmp

The easiest way to find it is to look for the short diagonal line of three stars.  That's Orion's belt.  Just below them you'll see another, fainter line of stars that forms Orion's sword.  One of the objects in Orion's sword isn't a star at all. It's a nebula  a cloud of gas and dust that's like a giant fluorescent bulb. Hot young stars inside the nebula pump energy into its gas, causing the gas to glow.  The is the Orion Nebula.  Grab a pair of binoculars and check it out.

Orion Nebula - Messier Object 42

Have fun!


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## waltky

Big ol' full moon comin'...

*Will March 19 'Supermoon' Trigger Natural Disasters?*
_Thu Mar 10, 11 - On March 19, the moon will swing around Earth more closely than it has in the past 18 years, lighting up the night sky from just 221,567 miles (356,577 kilometers) away. On top of that, it will be full. And one astrologer believes it could inflict massive damage on the planet._


> Richard Nolle, a noted astrologer who runs the website astropro.com, has famously termed the upcoming full moon at lunar perigee (the closest approach during its orbit) an "extreme supermoon." When the moon goes super-extreme, Nolle says, chaos will ensue: Huge storms, earthquakes, volcanoes and other natural disasters can be expected to wreak havoc on Earth. (It should be noted that astrology is not a real science, but merely makes connections between astronomical and mystical events.) But do we really need to start stocking survival shelters in preparation for the supermoon?
> 
> The question is not actually so crazy. In fact scientists have studied related scenarios for decades. Even under normal conditions, the moon is close enough to Earth to make its weighty presence felt: It causes the ebb and flow of the ocean tides. The moon's gravity can even cause small but measureable ebbs and flows in the continents, called "land tides" or "solid Earth tides," too. The tides are greatest during full and new moons, when the sun and moon are aligned either on the same or opposite sides of the Earth.
> 
> According to John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, particularly dramatic land and ocean tides do trigger earthquakes. "Both the moon and sun do stress the Earth a tiny bit, and when we look hard we can see a very small increase in tectonic activity when they're aligned," Vidale told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com. At times of full and new moons, "you see a less-than-1-percent increase in earthquake activity, and a slightly higher response in volcanoes."
> 
> The effect of tides on seismic activity is greatest in subduction zones such as the Pacific Northwest, where one tectonic plate is sliding under another. William Wilcock, another seismologist at the University of Washington, explained: "When you have a low tide, there's less water, so the pressure on the seafloor is smaller. That pressure is clamping the fault together, so when it's not there, it makes it easier for the fault to slip."
> 
> According to Wilcock, earthquake activity in subduction zones at low tides is 10 percent higher than at other times of the day, but he hasn't observed any correlations between earthquake activity and especially low tides at new and full moons. Vidale has observed only a very small correlation. What about during a lunar perigee? Can we expect more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions on March 19, when the full moon will be so close?
> 
> MORE


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## American Horse

There are two critical things which affect our ability to see astronomical events.  They are   timing (day lit sky versus night) and weather or cloud cover, (not to mention local light pollution. And both of those are determined by location. 

At about 6:45 this evening EST (7:45 EDT), there will be a naked eye occultation of a 2.9 magnitude star (Mu Geminorum aka TEJAT aka ZC976).  

Even an ordinary event in which the star disappears behind the dark limb of the moon is worth watching, but those events in which your view is along the grazing path are thrilling.  A view along the grazing path will show the star blinking and reappearing from behind hills and mountains on the moon.  In the more ordinary event, as this one will be, the bright star will disappear behind the dark edge of the moon, and an hour and some 20 minutes later it reappears on the other side.

The disappearance in Baltimore, Md. as an example on the east coast, will begin with disappearance at (23h 54m 36s UT) 7:54 pm EDT, and end with Tejats reappearance at (01h 16m 39s UT) 9:16 pm EDT.
Heres  Website called The International Occultation Timing Association  with a CHART giving times at locations in the US which can observe this evenings occultation.  

Further west in Chicago, it will begin in daylight, with Tejats disappearance at 6:33 pm CDT, with reappearance at 7:58 pm CDT, an hour after local sunset.

These are always more fun to watch with a good set of binoculars.  The moon will be just east of its highest point or the zenith.

Below is a map of the viewing path of the occultation


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## jasonmorston

like the neat solar system model. i say we add the solar plasma though. the body of the heliosphere.
ever notice all depictions of the solar system portray balls spinning in empty space? not very accurate. that space is full of high energy hydrogen and helium particles, gamma rays, xrays and plasma here is a cool link with info on taking power from the solar wind (you can use magnetohydrodynamics!)
Cosmic Electrodynamics


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## American Horse

jasonmorston said:


> like the neat solar system model. i say we add the solar plasma though. the body of the heliosphere.
> ever notice all depictions of the solar system portray balls spinning in empty space? not very accurate. that space is full of high energy hydrogen and helium particles, gamma rays, xrays and plasma here is a cool link with info on taking power from the solar wind (you can use magnetohydrodynamics!)
> Cosmic Electrodynamics



There's a lot of stuff out there we can't see "visually" so when we make visual representations if makes sense we would not show stuff we can't see.  I don't doubt that our scientists do visualize those forces and radiation.

Space, even out in interstellar space is a lot more crowded and risky for space travel than we have been led to believe.  To reflect on the fact that two galaxies can collide and no two stars within those colliding galaxies will likewise collide is to miss the extent of the dangers.  

A large part of the matter in the universe or more specifically our own galaxy is already coalesced into unified objects like stars, planets, planetesimals, comets, etc.  But the remainder, that which has not coalesced into those large easily seen objects (some not so easily seen) is spread out, and can be anywhere.  

We see dark areas in front of fields of stars that diminish the starlight measurably and those are the denser areas that we can see.  Giant molecular clouds are compressed by gravity waves on the leading edges of galactic spiral arms, and show up as glowing brilliantly from the star formation.  That's a lot of previously "dark matter" being pushed, pulled, and compressed into gravitational collapse to form those stars.  Consider how much interstellar material" goes into forming a single star, and then all of it that is still at large.

Because of that space travel at velocities approaching large fractions of the speed of light are going to be very dangerous.  I remember that the first interstellar space craft theorized were prudently designed to have "dusters" out in front (way away out in front) to neutralize any dust or gas before it was impacted by the craft.

Maybe our cosmologists and astronomers can come up with a Grand Unified Theory (of everything) that will provide us with the answers that will make space travel possible between the stars.


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## xsited1

*House-Sized Asteroid Buzzes By Earth*



> It passed the planet at a distance of about 203,000 miles at about 5:49 pm.
> 
> NASA announced the flyby on Twitter.
> 
> _Although large, the rock in space would have burned up in the atmosphere before doing damage._
> 
> House-Sized Asteroid Buzzes By Earth | Gather


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## American Horse

Mercury will reach it's greatest eastern elongation in the sky March 22, which happens to be today's date.

Mercury never gets far enough away from the sun to be seen in a totally dark sky.  Being at its greatest eastern elongation means that it is visually as far from the sun as we can usually expect to see. 
Look in the southwest just after sunset.  At magnitude &#8211;0.3 Mercury will be the brightest object in this region of the sky, since Jupiter will have sunk deep into the twilight glow from the sun since the middle of the month.

It will be a little less than half lit as seen through a good set of binoculars.


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## pAr

The Crab Supernova was recorded by Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Native Americans, and Persian/Arab astronomers as being bright enough to see in daylight for 23 days in 1054 AD.

SN 1054 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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## American Horse

<<THE SUMMER SKY>>  A FULL PANORAMIC VIEW OF THE NIGHT SKY as seen from Utah (of all places I personally like to see it from!)


Theres a tool for showing the constellations and cardinal directions.

Before you click on it you might want to press F-11 to clear your screen of tool-bars (hit again when done to undo)


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## xsited1

Technology News: Space: Brown Dwarf Star Is as Cool as They Come



> A brown dwarf star about 75 light years from Earth has been identified as the coldest star ever observed. It runs at a temperature of about *100 degrees Celsius *-- just enough to boil water but far colder than the blazing temperature of a normal star. It's not an example of a star that burned bright for some time before running out of gas; astronomers say it was never very hot to begin with.



Now that's cool!


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## xsited1

Here's a picture of Comet Hyakutake that I took with a basic 35mm camera at the Grand Canyon in April of 1996.  Bright comets likes these don't come around too often.



(click image for bigger picture)

Comet Hyakutake Home Page (JPL)
Comet Hyakutake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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## xsited1

--> Historic Photos Reveal a Mercury Never Seen Before



> NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft on Tuesday and Wednesday captured and delivered to Earth the first photographs of Mercury ever taken from within the planet's orbit.


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## xsited1

Boeing 747-based observatory studies star formation | Boeing and Aerospace News - seattlepi.com








> The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, is the worlds only operational airborne observatory, flying at 39,000 to 45,000 feet to get above atmospheric water vapor that blocks most infrared radiation from celestial sources.



NASA - SOFIA

Pictures --> NASA - SOFIA Image Gallery


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## Ernie S.

Both Venus and Jupiter can be seen in daylight with the naked eye, at least for an hour or so after sunrise if they are high in the sky or to the west.
Get to your observing site before dawn and follow  your object's movement. It's easier if you sit under a tree in winter when there are no leaves so you can use a branch as reference as the sky brightens. I've managed seeing Jupiter for a little over an hour after dawn.
I've found both Venus and Jupiter at mid day with 10x50 binolulars

The OP mentions the 24" Clark at Lowell. I've been fortunate to use the 20" Clark at  Van Vleck. I actually owned a 4" Clark for a few days maybe 20 years ago. I gave $200 for it at a tag sale in New Cannan CT. I sold it to a fellow Astronomical Society member for 4 grand


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## xsited1

Ernie S. said:


> Both Venus and Jupiter can be seen in daylight with the naked eye, at least for an hour or so after sunrise if they are high in the sky or to the west.
> Get to your observing site before dawn and follow  your object's movement. It's easier if you sit under a tree in winter when there are no leaves so you can use a branch as reference as the sky brightens. I've managed seeing Jupiter for a little over an hour after dawn.
> I've found both Venus and Jupiter at mid day with 10x50 binolulars
> 
> The OP mentions the 24" Clark at Lowell. I've been fortunate to use the 20" Clark at  Van Vleck. *I actually owned a 4" Clark for a few days maybe 20 years ago. I gave $200 for it at a tag sale in New Cannan CT. I sold it to a fellow Astronomical Society member for 4 grand*



Now this is an amazing story.  Somebody was selling a Clark Refractor in CT for $200?  That just blows my mind.  For more information about them, check this out:



> *Alvan Clark and Sons*
> 
> The Clark family built their first telescope in 1844 when the eldest son George brought home a broken dinner bell from school, and melted the metal down to create a mirror for a reflecting telescope. His father, Alvan, became so interested in the project that telescope creation became a hobby that within two years evolved into a family business that endurd for nearly a hundred years.
> 
> Clark refractors


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## Old Rocks

An interesting site to explore;

Zooniverse - Real Science Online


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## waltky

Mebbe the good Lord sewed the universe together...

*Did the universe begin as a slender thread?*
_April 22, 2011 - A new framework for the universe's formation suggests that it began as a single thready line, then evolved into a plane, and only then the three-dimensional space we now inhabit. This could simplify sticky cosmological questions, including dark matter and gravity waves._


> A universe expanding faster than it ought to be? What's up with that?  To Dejan Stojkovic, the phenomenon astrophysicists discovered in 1998 and labeled "dark energy" may not be as complicated a puzzle as many scientists make it out to be.  Instead, he suggests, it's the signal that a fourth dimension  beyond the height, width, and depth humans are geared to experience  has opened up in a universe that is adding physical dimensions as it evolves.  This possible explanation for dark energy results from applying a new "framework" for looking at the evolution of the universe that he and colleagues have developed over the past two years. Working backwards in time, the concept also implies that the universe did not begin its existence in a three-dimensional form, but as a one-dimensional structure that added dimensions as it evolved.
> 
> Some support for this may be found in high-energy cosmic rays, according to Dr. Stojkovic, a physicist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who along with colleagues first proposed the idea last year.  In a paper published recently in Physics Review Letters, Stojkcovic and colleague Jonas Mureika of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles write that further tests of the framework's validity could come from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva as well as from planned space missions to detect gravity waves thought to be rippling through the cosmos.
> 
> If he and his colleagues are correct, Stojkovic says, their work could help break a 30-year logjam in efforts to demonstrate that the four fundamental forces in nature  electromagnetism, the weak force (governing radioactive decay), the strong force (binding atomic nuclei), and gravity  are low-energy relics of one unified force that briefly held sway over the cosmos during the first, tiniest fractions of a second after the big bang.  The big bang is a sudden release of an enormous amount of energy that physicists and cosmologists credit with giving birth to the universe some 13.8 billion years ago.
> 
> Gravity remains the stubborn hold-out in this grand-unification effort. It's the only one of the four forces that has defied an explanation within the so-called standard model of physics. As the decades have passed, many researchers have developed ever more complicated ideas to fit gravity into the quantum-physics world inhabited by the rest of the forces and their associated subatomic particles. Scientists' calculations suggest that the solution may lie in "new physics"  beyond the standard model.  Stojkovic is part of a subgroup of physicists collectively tapping their "new physics" colleagues on the shoulder and saying: The solution many not require new physics at all, but merely a new way of looking at the standard model.
> 
> MORE


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## Mr. H.

Six Planets Now Aligned in the Dawn Sky - Yahoo! News

_If you get up any morning for the next few weeks, you&#8217;ll be treated to the sight of all the planets except Saturn arrayed along the ecliptic, the path of the sun through the sky.

For the last two months, almost all the planets have been hiding behind the sun, but this week they all emerge and are arrayed in a grand line above the rising sun. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter are visible, and you can add Uranus and Neptune to your count if you have binoculars or a small telescope._


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## asterism

Saturn tonight.

It's blue because my version of Avidemux does that sometimes.  Not sure why.






Reprocessed without Avidemux.


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## waltky

Looks like a cowpie to Granny...

*4.5 billion-year-old meteorite yields new mineral*
_5/6/2011 : Krotite was formed when solar system was in its infancy, scientists say_


> A 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite from northwest Africa has yielded one of the earliest minerals of the solar system.  Officially called krotite, the mineral had never been found in nature before, though it is a human-made constituent of some high-temperature concrete, according to study researcher Anthony Kampf, curator of Mineral Sciences at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.  "This is one that simply was not known in nature until we found it here," Kampf told LiveScience. "That's pretty dramatic."
> 
> The meteorite containing krotite is called NWA 1934 CV3 carbonaceous chondrite. Chondrites are primitive meteorites that scientists think were remnants shed from the original building blocks of planets. Most meteorites found on Earth fit into this group.  The mineral, a compound of calcium, aluminum and oxygen, needs temperatures of 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius) to form, supporting the idea that it was created as the solar nebula condensed and the planets, including Earth, were formed, the researchers say.  The tiny mineral sample  just 0.2 inches (4 millimeters) long  came from a grain in the meteorite dubbed "cracked egg" for its appearance. In addition to krotite, the cracked egg grain contains at least eight other minerals, one of which is new to science, the researchers say.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Studying this mineral and other components of the ancient meteorite is essential for understanding the origins of the solar system, the scientists say.  When meteors hit the ground they are called meteorites. Most are fragments of asteroids (space rocks that travel through the solar system), and others are mere cosmic dust shed by comets. Rare meteorites are impact debris from the surfaces of the moon and Mars.
> 
> Another ancient meteorite, this one discovered in Antarctica, also recently yielded a new mineral called Wassonite.  The fact that krotite forms at such high temperatures and low pressure make it likely it is one of the first minerals formed in the solar system.  The mineral is named after Alexander N. Krot, a cosmochemist at the University of Hawaii, in recognition of his significant contributions to the understanding of early solar-system processes.   The finding is detailed in the May-June issue of the journal American Mineralogist.
> 
> 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite yields new mineral - Technology & science - Science - LiveScience - msnbc.com


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## waltky

Cosmic wind blows galaxies apart...

*Cosmic Storm Gives Astronomers New Insight Into Galaxy Formation*
_May 10, 2011 - The European Space Agency (ESA) says it has observed fast-moving cosmic storms of star-forming gases that will help scientists unravel some of the mysteries of how galaxies and stars form and continue to evolve._


> ESAs Herschel space telescope detected the unique galactic phenomenon.
> 
> Scientists working on the project say the fastest gas and dust outflows gust at an estimated 1,000 kilometers per second, 10,000 times faster than the winds in a hurricane on earth. The storms could rob a galaxy of its star-forming matter in less than 10 million years.
> 
> The Herschel telescope observation is important because it is the first time scientists have witnessed high-velocity storms clearing out the molecular raw materials from which stars form.
> 
> Source


----------



## waltky

Granny says it gonna wreck havoc with the tides anna mighty Mississippi gonna be flowin' backwards...

*Six Planets Will Be Aligning, but the Earth Will Not End*
_11 May`11 - Good thing President Obama released his long-form birth certificate. Now we can all go back to worrying about an even greater threat than the possibility that the President is a Kenyan double agent: the much buzzed-about reports that the world is going to end in 2012._


> It was the Mayans - or maybe the Romans or the Greeks or the Sumerians - who called the shot this time, evidently on a day Nostradamus phoned in sick. Apparently, a rogue planet named Nibiru (which frankly sounds more like a new Honda than a new world) is headed our way, with a cosmic crack-up set for next year. No matter who's behind the current prediction, there are enough people ready to spread and believe in this kind of end-of-the-world hooey that you have to wonder if the earth isn't starting to take things personally.
> 
> Regrettably, the Nibiru yarn got a boost in recent days with the very real announcement that an alignment of several of the very real planets will be taking place this month, offering a fleeting treat for stargazers willing to get up before sunrise and take a look. Even this genuine cosmic phenomenon, however, may be a bit less than it appears.
> 
> Beginning today and lasting for a few weeks, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Mars will be visible in the early morning sky, aligned roughly along the ecliptic - or the path the sun travels throughout the day. Uranus and Neptune, much fainter but there all the same, should be visible through binoculars. What gives the end-of-the-worlders shivers is that just such a configuration is supposed to occur on Dec. 21, 2012, and contribute in some unspecified way to the demolition of the planet. But what makes that especially nonsensical - apart from the fact that it's, you know, nonsense - is that astronomers say no remotely similar alignment will occur next year.
> 
> "Nothing bad will happen to the earth in 2012," NASA explains patiently - if wearily - on its website. "Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012."
> 
> MORE



See also:

*Crab Nebula's gamma-ray flare mystifies astronomers*
_11 May 2011 : The Crab Nebula has shocked astronomers by emitting an unprecedented blast of gamma rays, the highest-energy light in the Universe._


> The cause of the 12 April gamma-ray flare, described at the Third Fermi Symposium in Rome, is a total mystery.  It seems to have come from a small area of the famous nebula, which is the wreckage from an exploded star.  The object has long been considered a steady source of light, but the Fermi telescope hints at greater activity.  The gamma-ray emission lasted for some six days, hitting levels 30 times higher than normal and varying at times from hour to hour.
> 
> While the sky abounds with light across all parts of the spectrum, Nasa's Fermi space observatory is designed to measure only the most energetic light: gamma rays.  These emanate from the Universe's most extreme environments and violent processes.  The Crab Nebula is composed mainly of the remnant of a supernova, which was seen on Earth to rip itself apart in the year 1054.  At the heart of the brilliantly coloured gas cloud we can see in visible light, there is a pulsar - a rapidly spinning neutron star that emits radio waves which sweep past the Earth 30 times per second.
> 
> But so far none of the nebula's known components can explain the signal Fermi sees, said Roger Blandford, director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, US.  "The origin of these high-energy gamma rays has to be some other source," he told BBC News.  "It takes about six years for light to cross the nebula, so it must be a very compact region in comparison to the size of the nebula that's producing these outbursts on the time scales of hours."
> 
> Since its launch nearly three years ago, Fermi has spotted three such outbursts, with the first two reported earlier this year at the American Astronomical Society meeting.  These events are unleashing gamma rays with energies of more than 100 million electron-volts - that is, each packet of light, or photon, carries tens of millions of times more energy than the light we can see.  But the Crab's recent outburst is more than five times more intense than any yet observed.
> 
> *'Big puzzle'*


----------



## xsited1

Stunning Video: Comet Collides With the Sun - FoxNews.com









> NASA's solar observatory captured a stunning video of a comet streaking towards the sun between Tuesday and Wednesday -- and the aftermath when it collided with the tremendous ball of plasma.
> 
> The video, captured by NASA's Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), appears to show a fireball jet out following the collision. That's not quite what happened, NASA explained. Instead, a coronal mass ejection coincidentally blasted out to the right just as the comet approaches and is vaporized by the sun.


----------



## freedombecki

xsited1 said:


> Stunning Video: Comet Collides With the Sun - FoxNews.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> NASA's solar observatory captured a stunning video of a comet streaking towards the sun between Tuesday and Wednesday -- and the aftermath when it collided with the tremendous ball of plasma.
> 
> The video, captured by NASA's Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), appears to show a fireball jet out following the collision. That's not quite what happened, NASA explained. Instead, a coronal mass ejection coincidentally blasted out to the right just as the comet approaches and is vaporized by the sun.
Click to expand...


That's sun defense if I do say so.


----------



## freedombecki

xsited1 said:


> Post all things Astronomy whether political or not.
> 
> I'll start.
> 
> Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, sometimes has open nights for the public.  Back in the 90s, I once saw Saturn through their main telescope, the 24" Alvan Clark Refracting Telescope.  The view was breathtaking.
> 
> View attachment 12977
> 
> View attachment 12978
> 
> Lowell Observatory



I was following the Casini probe of Saturn's rings, a couple of years back. It was truly a magnificent series of up close and personal looks the rings and moons of Saturn. I found this at the NASA APOD website.

If the Saturn flyby does not show up below (I've never done an embedded code before and am just guessing, click on "this" in the paragraph above for an amazing show of the Casini flyby from 2007 to 2010. You should because if you are an American taxpayer, you paid for it! 



		Code:
	

http://vimeo.com/11386048


(hoping it takes)

Well, nothing I did worked. I expanded the link to include "This at the NASA APOD website." So sorry. Maybe a kindly administrator will someday drop by and fix it. It's terrific.


----------



## freedombecki

Okay, here's a simpler one...from March 8, 2011 and shows Saturn, the moon, Titan, and rings from Cassini: (rolling up sleeves)






> How thin are the rings of Saturn? Brightness measurements from different angles have shown Saturn's rings to be about one kilometer thick, making them many times thinner, in relative proportion, than a razor blade. This thinness sometimes appears in dramatic fashion during an image taken nearly along the ring plane. The robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn has now captured another shot that dramatically highlights the ring's thinness.​



All credits here: APOD: 2011 March 8 - Titan, Rings, and Saturn from Cassini


----------



## waltky

Granny says its a sign of the end times - all dem lefty lib'rals better repent an' get right with Jesus...

*Three eclipses start with midnight eclipse of the sun*
_June 1, 2011 - Three eclipses will happen over the next month. As rare as that is, it all starts with another rarity - a midnight eclipse of the sun._


> Over the next month, the world will experience three eclipses: two partial solar eclipses a month apart and one total lunar eclipse exactly in between, and it all starts with a so-called "midnight" eclipse of the sun.  A solar eclipse at midnight? How is such a thing possible?  It can happen near midsummer in the high Arctic, the land of the midnight sun. And it will happen this week on June 1 and 2, visible in the northernmost reaches of North America, Europe, and Asia.  These two solar eclipse sky maps available here detail what observers could see during some of the upcoming eclipses of the sun and moon in June.
> 
> 'Midnight' solar eclipse of June 2
> 
> The eclipse begins on Thursday, June 2, at dawn in northern China and Siberia, then moves across the Arctic, crossing the International Date Line and ending in the early evening of Wednesday, June 1, in northeastern Canada.  Thats right: The eclipse begins on Thursday and ends on Wednesday because of the International Date Line. Because observers in northern Russia and Scandinavia will be observing it over the North Pole, they will actually see it in what is, for them, the middle of the night of June 1 and 2.
> 
> Solar eclipse no one will see on July 1
> 
> Exactly a month later, on Friday, July 1, an equally bizarre eclipse will occur in the Antarctic.  Because this is the southern winter, the sun will be below the horizon for almost all of Antarctica, except for a small uninhabited stretch of coast due south of Madagascar. The only place the eclipse will clear the horizon will be in a small area of the Southern Ocean, far to the south of South Africa.  Chances are that this eclipse will be witnessed only by penguins and sea birds.
> 
> Lunar Eclipse of June 15
> 
> Exactly halfway in between these two partial solar eclipses, there will be a total eclipse of the moon on Wednesday, June 15.  The eclipse will be visible for millions of people in Africa, the Middle East and southwestern Asia. It will be visible as the moon rises in the early evening in South America and Europe, and as the moon sets before dawn in eastern Asia and Australia.  Unfortunately, it will not be visible anywhere at all in North America.
> 
> Source


----------



## preciseenergy

Hey this is actually cool...


----------



## freedombecki

waltky said:


> Granny says its a sign of the end times - all dem lefty lib'rals better repent an' get right with Jesus...
> 
> *Three eclipses start with midnight eclipse of the sun*
> _June 1, 2011 - Three eclipses will happen over the next month. As rare as that is, it all starts with another rarity - a midnight eclipse of the sun._
> 
> 
> 
> Over the next month, the world will experience three eclipses: two partial solar eclipses a month apart and one total lunar eclipse exactly in between, and it all starts with a so-called "midnight" eclipse of the sun.  A solar eclipse at midnight? How is such a thing possible?  It can happen near midsummer in the high Arctic, the land of the midnight sun. And it will happen this week on June 1 and 2, visible in the northernmost reaches of North America, Europe, and Asia.  These two solar eclipse sky maps available here detail what observers could see during some of the upcoming eclipses of the sun and moon in June.
> 
> 'Midnight' solar eclipse of June 2
> 
> The eclipse begins on Thursday, June 2, at dawn in northern China and Siberia, then moves across the Arctic, crossing the International Date Line and ending in the early evening of Wednesday, June 1, in northeastern Canada.  Thats right: The eclipse begins on Thursday and ends on Wednesday because of the International Date Line. Because observers in northern Russia and Scandinavia will be observing it over the North Pole, they will actually see it in what is, for them, the middle of the night of June 1 and 2.
> 
> Solar eclipse no one will see on July 1
> 
> Exactly a month later, on Friday, July 1, an equally bizarre eclipse will occur in the Antarctic.  Because this is the southern winter, the sun will be below the horizon for almost all of Antarctica, except for a small uninhabited stretch of coast due south of Madagascar. The only place the eclipse will clear the horizon will be in a small area of the Southern Ocean, far to the south of South Africa.  Chances are that this eclipse will be witnessed only by penguins and sea birds.
> 
> Lunar Eclipse of June 15
> 
> Exactly halfway in between these two partial solar eclipses, there will be a total eclipse of the moon on Wednesday, June 15.  The eclipse will be visible for millions of people in Africa, the Middle East and southwestern Asia. It will be visible as the moon rises in the early evening in South America and Europe, and as the moon sets before dawn in eastern Asia and Australia.  Unfortunately, it will not be visible anywhere at all in North America.
> 
> Source
Click to expand...


Thanks, Walt. It's nice to know when and where eclipses are taking place. Three this close seems uncommon to me.


----------



## freedombecki

preciseenergy said:


> Hey this is actually cool...



Welcome to USMB, preciseenergy. I was wondering if there was an Astronomy thread for all things in the heavens so I searched and found this one. I followed the Cassini probe for several years at other places where I started Astronomy threads. I don't even own a telescope, but I learned so much just by going to APOD on a daily basis for years. This thread feels like home. Science has made giant leaps since I was in high school.

I was thinking about space travel that started back when I was in High School with Russians and Americans competing in the race for space, and wound up reading Neil Armstrong's bio. It's a terrific read.

We've learned so much about space with Rover, Cassini, and many other NASA endeavors, not to mention all the sharing going on between the various observatories, worldwide. Some of them are built in 4 locations to get a more comprehensive picture of the distant stars and galaxies.

Thanks, xsited-1, for starting this thread.


----------



## waltky

Truck-size asteroid zips close to Earth...

*Asteroid zips close to Earth*
_6/2/2011 : Truck-size space rock will hang around a while but shouldn't pose threat, astronomers say_


> An asteroid the size of a small motorhome zoomed near Earth on Wednesday night, coming closer to us than the moon ever does.  The 23-foot-long (7-meter) space rock, named 2009 BD, came within 215,000 miles (346,000 kilometers) of Earth at around 8:51 p.m. ET. The moon's average distance from us is about 239,000 miles (385,000 kilometers).  2009 BD never threatened to hit Earth on this pass, researchers said. But even if the asteroid had slammed into us, it wouldn't have been a big deal.
> 
> "2009 BD is a small object, 7 meters, and poses no threat," scientists with NASA's Asteroid Watch program tweeted yesterday. "Rocky objects this size would break apart in our atmosphere and cause no damage." [ Photos of Asteroids in Deep Space ]  The asteroid's small size also made it a tough target for skywatchers. A large telescope was necessary to see it on Wednesday night, researchers said.
> 
> Sticking around for a while
> 
> After the close pass, 2009 BD didn't recede into the depths of space, like most asteroids do after such encounters. Rather, it is continuing to stick close to Earth, stalking our planet on its trip around the sun. In fact, the space rock will remain within 10 lunar distances of us for the next month or so, researchers said.  That's because 2009 BD is no ordinary asteroid. It's what astronomers call a "co-orbital object," meaning its path around the sun roughly parallels that of Earth. Just where such objects come from is an intriguing question, with some researchers speculating that they may be pieces ejected from the moon.
> 
> More Truck-size asteroid zips close to Earth - Technology & science - Space - Space.com - msnbc.com


----------



## freedombecki

Waltky, here's a photo of the midnight eclipse you mentioned above at Nasa's APOD:

June 3, 2011



Explanation: On June 1, the shadow of the New Moon was cast across a land of the midnight Sun in this year's second partial solar eclipse. 

Credits and continuation of article here: Midnight's Solar Eclipse

I hadn't seen it elsewhere.


----------



## xsited1

Dark-matter hunters share $500,000 prize



> Dark matter is thought to be all around us, yet scientists can't see it, touch it, or even figure out what it is.
> 
> Now four astronomers who helped befuddle the world by discovering evidence for dark matter have won a prestigious cosmology prize. Scientists infer the existence of dark matter by its gravitational influence on the regular, visible matter around it.
> 
> The scientists will share the $500,000 purse that comes with the 2011 Cosmology Prize of the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation.








A ghostly ring of dark matter floating in the galaxy cluster ZwCl0024+1652, one of the strongest pieces of evidence to date for the existence of dark matter.​


Click this link-->  http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/C...logy_Science/Space/Dark-matter/darkmatter.swf


----------



## freedombecki

xsited1 said:


> Dark-matter hunters share $500,000 prize
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dark matter is thought to be all around us, yet scientists can't see it, touch it, or even figure out what it is.
> 
> Now four astronomers who helped befuddle the world by discovering evidence for dark matter have won a prestigious cosmology prize. Scientists infer the existence of dark matter by its gravitational influence on the regular, visible matter around it.
> 
> The scientists will share the $500,000 purse that comes with the 2011 Cosmology Prize of the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A ghostly ring of dark matter floating in the galaxy cluster ZwCl0024+1652, one of the strongest pieces of evidence to date for the existence of dark matter.​
> Click this link-->  http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/C...logy_Science/Space/Dark-matter/darkmatter.swf
Click to expand...


Great post, xsited1.

I got to looking around by googling "what is dark matter?" and came up with this 'less-is-known-than-is' gem:



> What Is Dark Matter?
> 
> By fitting a theoretical model of the composition of the Universe to the combined set of cosmological observations, scientists have come up with the composition that we described above, ~70% dark energy, ~25% dark matter, ~5% normal matter. What is dark matter?
> 
> We are much more certain what dark matter is not than we are what it is. First, it is dark, meaning that it is not in the form of stars and planets that we see. Observations show that there is far too little visible matter in the Universe to make up the 25% required by the observations. Second, it is not in the form of dark clouds of normal matter, matter made up of particles called baryons. We know this because we would be able to detect baryonic clouds by their absorption of radiation passing through them. Third, dark matter is not antimatter, because we do not see the unique gamma rays that are produced when antimatter annihilates with matter. Finally, we can rule out large galaxy-sized black holes on the basis of how many gravitational lenses we see. High concentrations of matter bend light passing near them from objects further away, but we do not see enough lensing events to suggest that such objects to make up the required 25% dark matter contribution.
> 
> However, at this point, there are still a few dark matter possibilities that are viable. Baryonic matter could still make up the dark matter if it were all tied up in brown dwarfs or in small, dense chunks of heavy elements. These possibilities are known as massive compact halo objects, or "MACHOs". But the most common view is that dark matter is not baryonic at all, but that it is made up of other, more exotic particles like axions or WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles).



Credits: Dark Energy, Dark Matter

You picked a great topic of many in contemporary space knowledge, and I enjoyed the read.


----------



## Missourian

xsited1 said:


> *The &#8220;Bucket List&#8221; for Backyard Stargazers*
> 
> 
> A Supernova
> The Great Orion Nebula
> A Bright Comet
> The Southern Sky
> A Meteor Storm
> *The Transit of Venus*
> The Green Flash
> Total Solar Eclipse
> Sunrise on the Moon
> The Omega Centauri Star Cluster
> 
> The &#8220;Bucket List&#8221; for Backyard Stargazers | One-Minute Astronomer
> 
> I have not seen a supernova, but I did see a nova that was visible to the naked eye when I was very young:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> V1500 Cygni or Nova Cygni 1975 was a bright nova occurring in 1975 in the constellation Cygnus.
> 
> Nova Cygni 1975 | StarDate Online
Click to expand...



Miss the transit of Venus *one year from today*,  you won't get another chance in your lifetime...so mark your calenders.


----------



## xsited1

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJt0LJZG2k]Bio Station Alpha on Mars. The latest discovery by David Martines. Original Video [/ame]


----------



## freedombecki

Explanation: One of the brightest supernovas in recent years has just been recorded in the nearby Whirlpool galaxy (M51). Surprisingly, a seemingly similar supernova was recorded in M51 during 2005, following yet another one that occurred in 1994. Three supernovas in 17 years is a lot for single galaxy, and reasons for the supernova surge in M51 are being debated. Pictured above are two images of M51 taken with a small telescope: one taken on May 30 that does not show the supernova, and one taken on June 2 which does. The June 2 image is one of the first images reported to contain the supernova. The images are blinked to show the location of the exploded star. Although most supernovas follow classic brightness patterns, the precise brightening and dimming pattern of this or any supernova is hard to predict in advance and can tell astronomers much about what is happening. Currently, the M51 supernova, designated SN 2011dh, is still bright enough to follow with a small telescope. Therefore, sky enthusiasts are encouraged to image the Whirlpool galaxy as often as possible to fill in time gaps left by intermittent observations made by the world's most powerful telescopes. Views of the developing supernova are being uploaded here.​
Credits

Starship Asterisk says M31 is 31 million light-years away from the earth, and for those with telescopes, that "the face-on Whirlpool is currently high in the northern evening sky and well placed for viewing. SN 2011dh's J2000 coordinates (in Canes Venatici, near Ursa Major) are right ascension 13h 30m 5.1s, declination +47° 10&#8242; 11&#8243;. It's positioned 2.3 arcminutes east and 1.5 arcminutes south of the galaxy's center, roughly midway between a pair of comparably bright field stars, and should remain visible for a few weeks.".

What is a light-year?

A light-year, also light year or lightyear (symbol: ly) is a unit of length, equal to just under 10 trillion kilometres (1016 metres, 10 petametres or about 6 trillion miles). As defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a light-year is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year.[1]

The light-year is often used to measure distances to stars and other distances on a galactic scale, especially in non-specialist and popular science publications. The preferred unit in astrometry is the parsec, because it can be more easily derived from, and compared with, observational data. The parsec is defined as the distance at which an object will appear to move one arcsecond of parallax when the observer moves one astronomical unit perpendicular to the line of sight to the observer, and is equal to approximately 3.26 light-years.[1]​
Thirty-one million light years is 31,000,000 times more distant that one light year.

I've been following APOD for years, and I am fascinated by how far a light year is and how far away we're now able to see with advanced technologies.


----------



## freedombecki

xsited1 said:


> Bio Station Alpha on Mars. The latest discovery by David Martines. Original Video



xsited1, I was looking for something else when I ran into this bit of information that could help your U-Tube bud see better, but he will have to share his findings with the Canadians who may already know what that is on your linked exploration of Mars, if it is on the up-and-up, that is: 



> Quebec was also a strategic choice for the establishment of the Canadian Space Agency. A total of three Quebeckers have been in space since the creation of the CSA: Marc Garneau, Julie Payette and Guy Laliberté. Quebec has also contributed to the creation of some Canadian artificial satellites including SCISAT-1, ISIS, Radarsat-1 and Radarsat-2.[62][63][64] The province is one of the world leaders in the field of space science and contributed to important discoveries in this field.[65] One of the most recent is the discovery of the complex extrasolar planets system HR 8799. HR 8799 is the first direct observation of an exoplanet in history.[66][67] *Olivier Daigle and Claude Carignan, astrophysicists from Université de Montréal have invented the most sensitive astronomical camera in the world.[68][69][70] This new sensitive camera is 500 times more powerful than those currently on the markets*.[71] The Mont Mégantic Observatory was recently equipped with this powerful camera.[72]


 Quebec, Wikipedia

I was actually looking for this: The Manacouagan Impact Crater, Quebec, Canada





Credits


----------



## Missourian

Clear Sky Astronomy Forecasts for your location.

Clear Sky Chart Homepage​


----------



## Sheldon

Hold on to your butts... then end is coming!



> Nature News Blog: Huge solar flare races towards Earth
> 
> The flare, which is moving towards Earth at some 1,400 kilometres per second, is expected to cause a storm in our planets magnetic field within the next 24 hours. NASA says it is unlikely that there will be major disruptions to satellite and communication systems or power grids.
> 
> *However, if you live at a high-enough latitude watch out tonight for what should be spectacular Northern lights* (Aurora Borealis).


----------



## freedombecki

Sheldon said:


> Hold on to your butts... then end is coming!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Nature News Blog: Huge solar flare races towards Earth
> 
> The flare, which is moving towards Earth at some 1,400 kilometres per second, is expected to cause a storm in our planets magnetic field within the next 24 hours. NASA says it is unlikely that there will be major disruptions to satellite and communication systems or power grids.
> 
> *However, if you live at a high-enough latitude watch out tonight for what should be spectacular Northern lights* (Aurora Borealis).
Click to expand...



Massive Solar Flare Misses Earth, but Are We Ready for the Big One? | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

Hopefully, we will weather this. Seems there are times of solar flares historically.


----------



## freedombecki

Explanation: If you travel several kilometers off a main highway through Wyoming, you may see an unusual sight. In particular, near Buford, Wyoming, USA, you could run across the geometric Ames Monument, visible on the right, built to commemorate the financiers of a historic transcontinental railroad across North America. The above spectacular wide field mosaic, however, has also captured other geometric designs, many of them far in the distance. On the far left, for example, is a lunar halo surrounding by a lunar corona surrounding the setting Moon. On the right, however, is the arch of the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy surrounding the pyramidal structure. Illuminating the horizon to the right of the monument are the city lights of Cheyenne. The menagerie of images used to create this 360-degree composite were all taken during a single night last month. Still, the digital stitching of images taken over such a long period of time has led to a few unnatural land and sky justapositions. Can you identify any? 

Credits


----------



## waltky

possum's hair standin' on end `cause Uncle Ferd told him dats when the Voodoo Chiles come out...

*Lunar eclipse Wednesday to last 100 minutes &#8211; longest in 11 years*
_June 13, 2011 - Skywatchers in North America will miss this lunar eclipse, but a second one this year will be visible in December, especially in western portions of the continent._


> Skywatchers across much of the world are getting set for a total lunar eclipse June 15 that promises to shroud the moon in the darkest part of Earth's shadow for 100 minutes &#8211; the longest stretch of deep dimming in 11 years.  This eclipse of the moon will not be visible in North America. But people across a broad swath of the planet &#8211; from Europe east and south to eastern Australia and New Zealand &#8211; will be able to catch at least the darkest phase of the eclipse, weather permitting.
> 
> The moon's brightness will take a decided dive during the height of the event, potentially providing skywatchers with good views of features in the night sky they might not otherwise be able to see.  During a 1982 total eclipse that traced a path across the same part of the sky as the June 15 eclipse of the moon, "I was amazed at how brilliantly the summer Milky Way glowed, because it was all but invisible" during the portions of the eclipse when the moon was passing through lighter portions of Earth's shadow, according to Fred Espenak, an astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., in an ecplise forecast he posted on the center's web site.
> 
> Total eclipses occur when the moon passes through a dunce-cap shaped shadow Earth casts into space on its night side. The shadow has two main portions &#8211; an outer portion, or penumbra, which begins the dimming process, and the umbra, the inner, darkest part of the shadow.  The eclipse is set to begin at about 1:24 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, with the total eclipse beginning two hours later. The moon will be at its darkest at about 4:12 p.m. EDT.
> 
> The total portion of the eclipse will last for 100 minutes on Wednesday night because the moon will be crossing through the shadow close to an imaginary line stretching from the peak of the dunce cap through the center of the Earth. This represents the thickest part of the umbra at any given distance from Earth.  During this time, spectators will see the moon shift from its bright white before the eclipse to varying shades of orange to deep orange or even red when it passes through the umbra.
> 
> MORE



See also:

*Magnetic Bubbles Detected at Edge of Solar System*
_June 13, 2011 - The latest data from the twin Voyager spacecrafts suggest the outer edge of the solar system is not smooth but filled with giant magnetic bubbles.  Scientists say the turbulent bubbles are the result of the interaction between the Sun&#8217;s magnetic field and material expelled from other stars in the galaxy._


> If you could see the bubbles contained in the invisible magnetic field, scientists say they would look like giant sausages, approximately 160 million kilometers across.  Detected by an instrument on board the Voyager space probes that measures energetic particles, scientists say the bubbles are formed when the so-called solar wind, a stream of charged particles from the Sun, trails outward to the edge of the solar system and twists as a result of the Sun&#8217;s rotation, interacting with material from stars on the other side of the divide.
> 
> Using a new computer model to analyze the data, astronomers say the solar magnetic field is broken up at the boundary with intergalactic space into the turbulent, bubble-like structures.  Astronomer James Drake of the University of Maryland likened the foamy bubbles to water coming out of the jets of a Jacuzzi tub.  &#8220;Those jets are very bubbly," said Drake. "Well, this thing is very bubbly.  Like the most bubbly parts of your Jacuzzi.  So, it&#8217;s very bubbly indeed as far as we can tell.&#8221;
> 
> But experts say the Sun&#8217;s magnetic field is very weak at the edge of the solar system and the bubbles are not so turbulent as to disrupt the Voyager spacecrafts which entered the final layer of the solar system, called the heliosphere, in 2007 and 2008.    Launched in 1977, the 33-year-old space probes are now more than 14 billion kilometers from home, traveling a distance of approximately 450 million kilometers per year at different locations inside the heliosheath, the outer ring of the immense magnetic bubble in the solar system created by the Sun&#8217;s magnetic field.
> 
> NASA scientists say the twin space probes, the most distant observatories operated by the space agency, are good for at least another five years.  Boston University astronomer Merav Opher says scientists are now trying to figure out what&#8217;s on the other side of the heliopause, the boundary between our solar system and intergalactic space.  &#8220;This is a complete new area," said Opher. "We have never been near the heliopause before.  And now it will be complicated because you have an interspace full of your bubbles and you are going towards the other side.  So how this interface will be we don&#8217;t really know.&#8221;  The article describing the discovery of magnetic space bubbles by the Viking spacecrafts is published this week in the Astrophysical Journal.
> 
> Source


----------



## xsited1

Sun's Fading Spots Signal Big Drop in Solar Activity | Sunspots, Solar Weather & Solar Storms | Solar Cycle | Space.com



> Sunspots are temporary patches on the surface of the sun that are caused by intense magnetic activity. These structures sometimes erupt into energetic solar storms that send streams of charged particles into space.
> 
> Since powerful charged particles from solar storms can occasionally wreak havoc on Earth's magnetic field by knocking out power grids or disrupting satellites in orbit, a calmer solar cycle could have its advantages.


----------



## freedombecki

From the earliest times, people have observed the spacious skies, watched patterns of falling stars, observed visible patterns and noticed their positions at different times and seasons, and enjoyed the nights lit up with lights from the moon and stars before campfires, candles, kerosene lamps, incandescent, neon, and solar night lights came to be. Keen eyes saw mother and baby bear trampling out the north sky; Orion the hunter, and many, many more imaginings we now call Constellations. We may not know their names, but gifts from their ghosts laid the foundation for modern astronomers to map skies as seen from this terrestrial orb, planet earth.

I'm going to deliver some maps from Illinois University, and there is plenty of material--BELOW--at the NASA APOD (A Picture of the Day) website to show peculiarities of these stars, the Milky Way, and countless galaxies all around Big Bang country.

Map I: The North Polar Constellations







Image Credits​
NASA APOD, A PICTURE OF THE DAY ARCHIVES, JUNE 16, 1995 - YESTERDAY


----------



## freedombecki

Map 2: The Constellations of Northern Autumn, Southern Spring






Credits to my husband's Alma Mater in the Great State of Illinois​
Hmm, the Swan, a Winged Horse, Fish, a Water Bearer, what man didn't see in the alive, twinkling, magical skies of darkness' cool.

Best online location (imho) to find current info on the stars, space, space probes, etc: NASA APOD, A PICTURE OF THE DAY ARCHIVES, JUNE 16, 1995 - YESTERDAY


----------



## freedombecki

Map 3: The Constellations of Northern Winter, Southern Summer






Credits, U of I​
This time we see Perseus, Andromeda, and my personal fave, Orion on those fabulous summer evenings and early mornings.


----------



## freedombecki

Map 4: The Constellations of Northern Spring, Southern Autumn






From the University of Illinois​
This time, a Sextant, the Southern Cross, Big Bear, Big Dog, Hydra, a Virgin, and more.


----------



## manifold

[youtube]5V7KPZtcOVQ[/youtube]


----------



## freedombecki

Map 5: The Constellations of Northern Summer, Southern Winter






Credits: UofI​
Two circles of light--Borealis and Australis, Hercules, a book, a Scorpion, a Serpent, and a Centaur, as if there weren't already enough things going !bump! in the night.


----------



## freedombecki

Map 6: The South Polar Constellations






Univ of Illinois​
Hmm, Constellations Music and Gold, and I'm really enjoying some delightful night music from manifold's stellar contribution of YouTube's "Astronomy, Blue Oyster Cult" from n2nascar.

Thanks, manifold.


----------



## freedombecki

Explanation and credits


----------



## waltky

Uncle Ferd gonna get out with his binoculars an' try to see it...

*Close encounter with asteroid on Monday*
_June 25, 2011 - NASA says a newly discovered asteroid will have a close encounter with Earth on Monday, but there's no need to worry._


> The space agency's Near-Earth Object Program Office says the small space rock - dubbed 2011 MD - will pass 12,000km above Earth's surface over the southern Atlantic Ocean at about 6.30am local time (11.30pm AEST).
> 
> Though it will come close, it's not a distance record holder. Earlier this year, a tiny asteroid flew by even closer - within 5500km.
> 
> The latest asteroid is 10 metres long and was discovered this week by telescopes in New Mexico. Scientists say asteroids this size sail past Earth every six years.
> 
> The asteroid will briefly be bright enough that medium-size telescopes may be able to spot it.
> 
> Source


----------



## Trajan

I have an Ipad, and they have an app. that is boffo, astronomy lessons for the lazy so to speak.....

Its called Go Sky Watch, you enter your location and hold it up and its displays all of the constellations, planets etc. as you move it it tracks your movement and moves the display of stars etc. ,  names, rendering outlines of the constellations, magnitudes ambient light as to time of day etc etc... etc....


----------



## freedombecki

waltky said:


> Uncle Ferd gonna get out with his binoculars an' try to see it...
> 
> *Close encounter with asteroid on Monday*
> _June 25, 2011 - NASA says a newly discovered asteroid will have a close encounter with Earth on Monday, but there's no need to worry._
> 
> 
> 
> The space agency's Near-Earth Object Program Office says the small space rock - dubbed 2011 MD - will pass 12,000km above Earth's surface over the southern Atlantic Ocean at about 6.30am local time (11.30pm AEST).
> 
> Though it will come close, it's not a distance record holder. Earlier this year, a tiny asteroid flew by even closer - within 5500km.
> 
> The latest asteroid is 10 metres long and was discovered this week by telescopes in New Mexico. Scientists say asteroids this size sail past Earth every six years.
> 
> The asteroid will briefly be bright enough that medium-size telescopes may be able to spot it.
> 
> Source
Click to expand...


Any way you could photograph through your binoculars? And send a copy here for us to see, Walt? I'd love it.


----------



## freedombecki

Trajan said:


> I have an Ipad, and they have an app. that is boffo, astronomy lessons for the lazy so to speak.....
> 
> Its called Go Sky Watch, you enter your location and hold it up and its displays all of the constellations, planets etc. as you move it it tracks your movement and moves the display of stars etc. ,  names, rendering outlines of the constellations, magnitudes ambient light as to time of day etc etc... etc....



Wow, Trajan, I checked it out here. Their page is like a wonderful shockwave of viewing the night sky.

Does an "Ipad" function as a phone as well as a special internet? I've been thinking about getting a cell, but wasn't interested until seeing your post with the sky on it. That is truly amazing. Who makes "Ipad?"


----------



## freedombecki

Ipad? Oh, no, I just bought an Ipod!


----------



## freedombecki

Well, maybe it'll be okay... ipod Go Sky Watch

Does anyone know for sure? I bought a used Ipod on ebay, 5th generation. Do you think Trajan's stuff will work on such a small screen as that?


----------



## American Horse

freedombecki said:


> Well, maybe it'll be okay... ipod Go Sky Watch
> 
> Does anyone know for sure? I bought a used Ipod on ebay, 5th generation. Do you think Trajan's stuff will work on such a small screen as that?



I have the astronomy APP, "Sky Safari," (by Carina Software) for I-phone and the small screen is not problem at all.  Sky Safari "lite" APP was $1.98, and is the scaled back version, but it does a lot; for instance I can bring up Jupiter and more than the the Galilean moons, but not sure how far down the list I can reach.  You can scroll in on Mars and locate Phobos & Deimos and determine which face is oriented to Earth observors at any given moment in time, past present or future.  It accommodates all the calendar changes, so I could scroll back to the Ides of March (15) 44BC, and see what planets and phase of the moon Mercury or Venus was in the sky that night.


----------



## xsited1

Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Press Releases



> NASA has ended operational planning activities for the Mars rover Spirit and transitioned the Mars Exploration Rover Project to a single-rover operation focused on Spirit's still-active twin, Opportunity.
> 
> This marks the completion of one of the most successful missions of interplanetary exploration ever launched.



The launch patch for Spirit, featuring Marvin the Martian:






Martian sunset by Spirit at Gusev crater, May 19, 2005:

Hi-res image:  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/MarsSunset.jpg


----------



## freedombecki

VAR!
2011 July 1
NASA, A Picture Of the Day (APOD)





Description​
In the 1920s, examining photographic plates from the Mt. Wilson Observatory's 100 inch telescope, Edwin Hubble determined the distance to the Andromeda Nebula, decisively demonstrating the existence of other galaxies far beyond the Milky Way . His notations are evident on the historic plate image inset at the lower right, shown in context with ground based and Hubble Space Telescope images of the region made nearly 90 years later. By intercomparing different plates, Hubble searched for novae, stars which underwent a sudden increase in brightness. He found several on this plate, indicating their position with lines and an "N". Later, discovering that the one near the upper right corner was actually a type of variable star known as a cepheid, he crossed out the "N" and wrote "VAR!". Thanks to the work of Harvard astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, cepheids, regularly varying pulsating stars, could be used as standard candle distance indicators. Identifying such a star allowed Hubble to show that Andromeda was not a small cluster of stars and gas within our own galaxy, but a large galaxy in its own right at a substantial distance from the Milky Way. Hubble's discovery is responsible for establishing our modern concept of a Universe filled with galaxies. Credits

This episode in the life of Edwin Hubble just caught my imagination this evening, and I wanted to share NASA's . His determination of what he was seeing (not to mention the equipment named after him) have seriously altered mankind's understanding of the space frontier.


----------



## percysunshine

freedombecki said:


> VAR!
> 2011 July 1
> NASA, A Picture Of the Day (APOD)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Description​
> This episode in the life of Edwin Hubble just caught my imagination this evening, and I wanted to share NASA's . His determination of what he was seeing (not to mention the equipment named after him) have seriously altered mankind's understanding of the space frontier.




Must be hotter than hell in the center of a galaxy.


----------



## freedombecki

percysunshine said:


> freedombecki said:
> 
> 
> 
> VAR!
> 2011 July 1
> NASA, A Picture Of the Day (APOD)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Description​
> This episode in the life of Edwin Hubble just caught my imagination this evening, and I wanted to share NASA's . His determination of what he was seeing (not to mention the equipment named after him) have seriously altered mankind's understanding of the space frontier.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Must be hotter than hell in the center of a galaxy.
Click to expand...


Hello, percysunshine.

The stars there are so close together, there probably isn't a planet in the system with a weed on it, although what would I know? When I went to grade school, the study of stars seems so advanced that it was the dark ages compared to what children and young astronomers are learning right now. I've been enjoying Nasa's picture of the day website for many years.


----------



## percysunshine

freedombecki said:


> percysunshine said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> freedombecki said:
> 
> 
> 
> VAR!
> 2011 July 1
> NASA, A Picture Of the Day (APOD)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Description​
> This episode in the life of Edwin Hubble just caught my imagination this evening, and I wanted to share NASA's . His determination of what he was seeing (not to mention the equipment named after him) have seriously altered mankind's understanding of the space frontier.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Must be hotter than hell in the center of a galaxy.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Hello, percysunshine.
> 
> The stars there are so close together, there probably isn't a planet in the system with a weed on it, although what would I know? When I went to grade school, the study of stars seems so advanced that it was the dark ages compared to what children and young astronomers are learning right now. I've been enjoying Nasa's picture of the day website for many years.
Click to expand...


So I would guess that the suns orbit the black hole like planets orbit suns. Slowly they spiral in and then...whamo! ...slurp....belch...digest.


----------



## freedombecki

percysunshine said:


> freedombecki said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> percysunshine said:
> 
> 
> 
> Must be hotter than hell in the center of a galaxy.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Hello, percysunshine.
> 
> The stars there are so close together, there probably isn't a planet in the system with a weed on it, although what would I know? When I went to grade school, the study of stars seems so advanced that it was the dark ages compared to what children and young astronomers are learning right now. I've been enjoying Nasa's picture of the day website for many years.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> So I would guess that the suns orbit the black hole like planets orbit suns. Slowly they spiral in and then...whamo! ...slurp....belch...digest.
Click to expand...


How long do you think they have?


----------



## waltky

Now we know where the water came from...

*Astronomers spot cosmic reservoir of water*
_July 22, 2011 -- Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology say they have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe._


> The researchers have found a mass of water vapor that's at least 140 trillion times that of all the water in all the Earth's oceans in a quasar -- one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos -- 30 billion trillion miles away, a Caltech release said Friday.
> 
> "The environment around this quasar is unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water," says Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a visiting associate at Caltech. "It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times."
> 
> Because light from the distant quasar has taken 12 billion years to reach Earth, the observations reveal a time when the universe was just 1.6 billion years old.  A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole steadily consuming a surrounding disk of gas and dust and spewing out huge amounts of energy.
> 
> In this particular quasar, the water vapor is distributed around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light-years, astronomers said.  Measurements of the water vapor and of other molecules, such as carbon monoxide, suggest there is enough gas to feed the black hole until it grows to about six times its current size.
> 
> Read more: Astronomers spot cosmic reservoir of water - UPI.com


----------



## American Horse

Warm-Season Flows on Slope in Newton Crater - seasonal time lapse video 

... These images come from observations of Newton crater, at 41.6 degrees south latitude, 202.3 degrees east longitude, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In time, the series spans from early spring of one Mars year to mid-summer of the following year ...

These times and places have peak surface temperatures from about 10 degrees below zero Fahrenheit to 80 degree above zero Fahrenheit (about 250 to 300 Kelvin). Liquid brines near the surface might explain this activity, but the exact mechanism and source of the water are not understood.


----------



## freedombecki

Thanks for interesting link, American Horse.


----------



## American Horse

freedombecki said:


> Thanks for interesting link, American Horse.


Notice those balmy 80 degree temperatures at nearly 42 degrees S. Lattitude.  That's about the same lattitude as Chicago from the equator.

And very interesting ephemeral effects of summer time temperatures in the water flows


----------



## freedombecki

The temperature would seemingly sustain grass and human life, one would think. Maybe the atmosphere is toxic or the "water" is not water as life on earth has it. Maybe the minerals are not conducive to producing chlorophyll plants, or that water is so scarce life as we know it is not possible. There's a chink in the chain missing somewhere. If scientists found out what it was, it could be turned around unless solar active years destroy all that is started there at periodic intervals that are closer than a millenia or two considering Mars' closer proximity to the sun being unfriendly to sustainable life. I'm just making guesses.


----------



## freedombecki

Perhaps the Martian planet helps our planet Earth to maintain an appropriate distance from the sun to have oceans and environments that do sustain human life.


----------



## American Horse

I played a little imagination mind game, thinking about what a Martian summer would be like in the conditions in the photo.  The surface would be perhaps 80 F. but only a foot or two above the surface, beyond the immediate radiated heat, the air would be very cold. That's because the atmosphere there is only about 1% of Earth's; earth's air pressure is about 14.6 psi at sea level, and on one of the lowest elevations on Mars, where the atmosphere is densest, it's about .19 psi. 
That would compare with being at a very high elevation on Earth.  There are warm winds moving from the equator toward the poles, but the "air" is about 96+ pct carbon dioxide.

Mars orbits on average about 143 million miles and the Earth about 93 million miles from the sun, so it's on average 50 million miles further from the sun's source of heat and energy.


----------



## midcan5

Never say political to mc5. 


My last meeting with a martian was just before the last election. http://www.usmessageboard.com/congress/63125-a-martian-votes-on-tuesday.html

Back OT: Stumble upon is a fascinating way to follow a bunch of topics. I use it for photography among other topics. See: StumbleUpon.com: Discover the Best of the Web

A few links that are on topic.  The first is fascinating. 

The Size Of Our World

Hubble's Best Photos : Discovery News

Janus Patrols Saturn's Rings : Big Pic : Discovery News

Hubble Heritage Gallery of Images

UDF SkyWalker V1.0

BBC News - Audio slideshow: Hubble's first 20 years

Space: 3 Questions: Exoplanets : Video : Discovery News

cspan indepth
In Depth - In Depth: Michio Kaku - Book TV


----------



## American Horse

An interesting significant detail about the size of Mars re Earth.
The Martian surface is about equal to the land area of Earth, that is Earth without the oceans being counted.


----------



## Missourian

Man Jupiter is bright tonight...even with the full moon.

Snuck out with the binoculars for a peek.  Only saw Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto to the North.

Cool Sky and Telescope Utility for Jupiter and the Galilean moons:

Jupiter's Moons Javascript Utility - Planets - SkyandTelescope.com​


----------



## freedombecki

Missourian said:


> Man Jupiter is bright tonight...even with the full moon.
> 
> Snuck out with the binoculars for a peek.  Only saw Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto to the North.
> 
> Cool Sky and Telescope Utility for Jupiter and the Galilean moons:
> 
> Jupiter's Moons Javascript Utility - Planets - SkyandTelescope.com​


That must be some pair of binoculars combined with discerning eyesight, Missourian.


----------



## Missourian

freedombecki said:


> Missourian said:
> 
> 
> 
> Man Jupiter is bright tonight...even with the full moon.
> 
> Snuck out with the binoculars for a peek.  Only saw Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto to the North.
> 
> Cool Sky and Telescope Utility for Jupiter and the Galilean moons:
> 
> Jupiter's Moons Javascript Utility - Planets - SkyandTelescope.com​
> 
> 
> 
> That must be some pair of binoculars combined with discerning eyesight, Missourian.
Click to expand...



Nah,  a pair of Nikon 7x50's 

This is an image of Jupiter and it's Galilean moons through 7x35 binoculars:




They are tiny and dim,  but a little indirect viewing and you'll pick them out.

P.S. - ISS flyby here in MO in 12 minutes.  NNW to NNE for 2 minutes.


----------



## freedombecki

Photo Credits​
(Reuters) -  Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of  diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.
  The new planet is far denser  than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it  is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a  large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.
"The  evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it  is comprised of carbon -- i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star  every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun,"  said Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
Lying  4,000 light years away, or around an eighth of the way toward the  center of the Milky Way from the Earth, the planet is probably the  remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers to the  so-called pulsar star it orbits.
Pulsars  are tiny, dead neutron stars that are only around 20 kilometers (12.4  miles) in diameter and spin hundreds of times a second, emitting beams  of radiation.
In the case of pulsar J1719-1438, the beams regularly sweep the Earth and have been monitored by telescopes in Australia, Britain and Hawaii, allowing astronomers to detect modulations due to the gravitational pull of its unseen companion planet.
The  measurements suggest the planet, which orbits its star every two hours  and 10 minutes, has slightly more mass than Jupiter but is 20 times as  dense, Bailes and colleagues reported in the journal Science on  Thursday.
In addition to carbon,  the new planet is also likely to contain oxygen, which may be more  prevalent at the surface and is probably increasingly rare toward the  carbon-rich center.
Its high  density suggests the lighter elements of hydrogen and helium, which are  the main constituents of gas giants like Jupiter, are not present.
Just what this weird diamond world is actually like close up, however, is a mystery.
"In  terms of what it would look like, I don't know I could even speculate,"  said Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester. "I don't imagine  that a picture of a very shiny object is what we're looking at here." article credits


----------



## OohPooPahDoo

American Horse said:


> Collisions of stars are incredibly unlikely; they occupy such a relatively miniscule volume of space, that even when a pair of galaxies collide, few if any of their constituent stars crash into each other.
> 
> Objects in space like planets are much more likely to collide if they orbit each other or orbit  a common primary object.  In our own solar system Venus doesnt deserve to smash into anything, since its orbit is so perfectly circular.
> But Mercury is not so well behaved.  Its orbit  already the most lopsided  wildly changes shape.  Influences from faraway Jupiter will eventually make its path so elliptical that it will swing out to Venus.  Then those two worlds MAY collide.
> 
> Here's a fair approximation of what that might look like.
> Mercury's diameter is 40 percent that of Venus




In globular clusters star collisions do happen.


----------



## percysunshine

Lucy in the sky with....


----------



## American Horse

OohPooPahDoo said:


> American Horse said:
> 
> 
> 
> Collisions of stars are incredibly unlikely; they occupy such a relatively miniscule volume of space, that even when a pair of galaxies collide, few if any of their constituent stars crash into each other.
> 
> Objects in space like planets are much more likely to collide if they orbit each other or orbit  a common primary object.  In our own solar system Venus doesnt deserve to smash into anything, since its orbit is so perfectly circular.
> But Mercury is not so well behaved.  Its orbit  already the most lopsided  wildly changes shape.  Influences from faraway Jupiter will eventually make its path so elliptical that it will swing out to Venus.  Then those two worlds MAY collide.
> 
> Here's a fair approximation of what that might look like.
> Mercury's diameter is 40 percent that of Venus
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In globular clusters star collisions do happen.
Click to expand...


It's believed that the number of collisions that occur in globular clusters is approximated by the relatively rare "blue straggler" stars that are theoretically produced by those collisions.


----------



## Missourian

Anyone see Progress 43P dock with the ISS?

Cloud cover here.


----------



## Missourian

Missourian said:


> Anyone see Progress 43P dock with the ISS?
> 
> Cloud cover here.




Too low in the sky tonight...13 degrees.


----------



## Missourian

No joy last night either...only 4 days left to see Progress 43p before it is scheduled to burn up upon re-entery on September 1st over the Pacific Ocean.


----------



## Missourian

Space Shuttle Discovery 360 degree VR cockpit simulation:

Space Shuttle Discovery - 360VR Images


----------



## waltky

Uncle Ferd wearin' his tin-foil hat in case it givin' off any supernova waves...

*Supernova 'of a generation': how you can see it with binoculars*
_September 7, 2011 - A supernova in the nearby Pinwheel Galaxy is the closest supernova in 25 years. Situated near the Big Dipper, the SN 2011fe supernova can be seen with binoculars this week._


> If youve got a decent pair of binoculars and clear skies, youll have a good view Wednesday night of the closest and brightest supernova display of the past 25 years.  The supernova, named SN 2011fe, is the 136th seen by astronomers this year, but its proximity makes it significant not only for stargazers but to the scientific community.  The event was first observed on Aug. 24, only hours after it first became visible from Earth. Located within the Pinwheel Galaxy, the explosion happened 21 million light-years away  a relatively small distance by astronomical standards.  On the scale of astronomical magnitude, in which brighter objects have lower numbers, it was a 17.2  about 1 million times too dim to be seen by the naked eye.
> 
> Since then, the supernova of a generation, has been brightening by the minute and will hit its peak this week, said Joshua Bloom, assistant professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, in a press release.  By Friday, the supernova could hit magnitude 10, still below the 6.5-magnitude threshold to be seen with the naked eye, but visible with binoculars.  The supernova was a Type Ia event, which means a white dwarf star began to siphon material from a nearby star until it became so massive that it exploded. These types of supernovae, in particular, are important to scientists because they are immensely bright, and so act as cosmic mile markers, helping astronomers calculate distances in space and the expansion of the universe.
> 
> Its relative nearness to Earth makes SN 2011fe doubly important. Its discoverers have predicted the supernova could become one of the most-studied in history.  The last Type Ia supernova that occurred this close was in 1986, but it was obscured by dust, said Peter Nugent, an astrophysicist at the the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the team that located the event, in the press release.  The last supernova that could be so well observed was in 1972. That occurred in the NGC 5253 galaxy and reached a magnitude of 8.5.  By contrast, the last known supernovae within our galaxy, the Milky Way, were seen centuries ago, dating to 1604, 1572, and 1054. These objects were visible to the naked eye, with the most recent, known as Kepler's Supernova, reaching a magnitude of minus 2.5, meaning it was visible even in daytime.
> 
> SN 2011fe is located in the constellation Ursa Major, better known as the Big Dipper. "The easiest way to find it is to take the last two stars in the handle of the Big Dipper, form an equilateral triangle heading north and bang, youll find the Pinwheel Galaxy, said Nugent.  He said a pair of 80 mm binoculars would suffice to view the display, but a telescope with a lens measuring greater than three inches would be better.  The supernova will begin to fade by the end of the week.
> 
> Source


----------



## freedombecki

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOXVZo7KikE&feature=player_detailpage]NASA | X-Class: A Guide to Solar Flares - YouTube[/ame]​


----------



## freedombecki

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgg2tpUVbXQ&feature=player_detailpage"]Hubble Deep Field: The Most Imp. Image Ever Taken (Redux) - YouTube[/ame]​


----------



## waltky

'Invisible' Planet Discovered...

*'Invisible' planet discovered with new technique*
_9/8/2011 - Kepler probe detects alien world by its gravitational influence on a neighbor_


> For the first time, scientists have definitively discovered an "invisible" alien planet by noticing how its gravity affects the orbit of a neighboring world, a new study reports.  NASA's Kepler space telescope detected both alien planets, which are known as Kepler-19b and Kepler-19c. Kepler spotted 19b as it passed in front of, or transited, its host star. Researchers then inferred the existence of 19c after observing that 19b's transits periodically came a little later or earlier than expected. The gravity of 19c tugs on 19b, changing its orbit.
> 
> The discovery of Kepler-19c marks the first time this method  known as transit timing variation, or TTV  has robustly found an exoplanet, researchers said. But it almost certainly won't be the last.  "My expectation is that this method will be applied dozens of times, if not more, for other candidates in the Kepler mission," said study lead author Sarah Ballard of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
> 
> Finding two new planets
> 
> The Kepler spacecraft launched in March 2009. It typically hunts for alien worlds by measuring the telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet crosses the star's face from the telescope's perspective, blocking some of its light.  Kepler has been incredibly successful using this so-called transit method, spotting 1,235 candidate alien planets in its first four months of operation. That's the way it detected Kepler-19b, a world 650 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Lyra.
> 
> Kepler-19b has a diameter about 2.2 times that of Earth, researchers said, and orbits 8.4 million miles (13.5 million kilometers) from its parent star. The planet likely has a surface temperature around 900 degrees Fahrenheit (482 degrees Celsius).  Kepler-19b transits its host star once every nine days and seven hours. But that number isn't constant, Ballard and her team found; transits can occur up to five minutes early or five minutes late. That variation told them another planet was tugging on 19b, alternately speeding it up and slowing it down.
> 
> MORE


----------



## Missourian

Track Juno's flight path using JPL Simulator.





​ 

^^^ Juno's position 9/11/11 relative to Earth as viewed from Pioneer 11,  .2 degree field of view.





​ 

^^^ Juno's position 9/11/11 relative to the inner planet and the Sun as viewed from Pioneer 11, 2 degree field of view.


You can also track all the planets and moons and the Voyager, Pioneer, New Horizon, and other spacecraft,  plus the comet Vesta positions at any date and time.



Here is the link :NASA/JPL Solar System Simulator​


----------



## waltky

Granny says we don't need to be spendin' money for a new rocket in this economy...

*Future NASA rocket to be most powerful ever built*
_14 Sept.`11  WASHINGTON  To soar far away from Earth and even on to Mars, NASA has dreamed up the world's most powerful rocket, a behemoth that borrows from the workhorse liquid-fuel rockets that sent Apollo missions into space four decades ago._


> But with a price tag that some estimate at $35 billion, it may not fly with Congress.  NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and several members of Congress on Wednesday unveiled the Obama administration's much-delayed general plans for its rocket design, called the Space Launch System. The multibillion-dollar program would carry astronauts in a capsule on top, and the first mission would be 10 years off if all goes as planned. Unmanned test launches are expected from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in six years.
> 
> Calling it the "largest, most powerful rocket built," NASA's exploration and operations chief, William Gerstenmaier, said the rocket will be tough to construct. But when NASA does it, "we'll have a capability to go beyond low-Earth orbit like no other nation does here on Earth," he said in a telephone briefing Wednesday.  The rocket resembles those NASA relied on before the space shuttle, but even its smallest early prototype will have 10 percent more thrust than the Saturn V that propelled Apollo astronauts to the moon. When it is built to its fuller size, it will be 20 percent more powerful, Gerstenmaier said. That bigger version will have the horsepower of 208,000 Corvette engines.
> 
> NASA is trying to remain flexible on where it wants to go and when. The space agency is aiming for a nearby asteroid around 2025 and then on to Mars in the 2030s. There could even be a short hop to the moon, but not as a main goal. All those targets require lots of brute force to escape Earth's orbit, something astronauts have not done since 1972.  The far-from-finalized price tag may be too steep given federal budget constraints.  "Will it be tough times going forward? Of course it is," Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said in a separate news conference. "We are in an era in which we have to do more with less  all across the board  and the competition for the available dollars will be fierce. But what we have here now are the realistic costs" verified by independent experts.
> 
> Although five senators of both parties who are leaders in science issues praised the plan in a joint press release, outside experts are skeptical that Congress will agree to such a big spending project.  "In the current political environment, new spending is probably the most taboo thing in politics," said Stan Collender, a former Democratic congressional budget analyst. He put the odds of this getting congressional approval at "no better than 50-50 this year. There are going to be a lot of questions asking what kind of commitment we're going to be making here. You can find yourself with a rocket that no one wants to fire."
> 
> MORE


----------



## ScienceRocks

It is TIME to mine the MOON, Astroids and Mars for resources...It is insanity to remain on this one planet. 

There is unlimited resources out there!!! Fearing about running out of resources on earth? Well there is your answer!

We don't have to worry NO more about being wiped out as a species as we will not have our egg's in one basket. 

The knowledge we would gain from it would make it worth it alone. 

Lets pull out of the middle east and close down those worthless bases...Lets put the money into something worth while. FUCK fighting the third world.


----------



## American Horse

waltky said:


> 'Invisible' Planet Discovered...
> 
> *'Invisible' planet discovered with new technique*
> _9/8/2011 - Kepler probe detects alien world by its gravitational influence on a neighbor_
> 
> 
> 
> For the first time, scientists have definitively discovered an "invisible" alien planet by noticing how its gravity affects the orbit of a neighboring world, a new study reports.  NASA's Kepler space telescope detected both alien planets, which are known as Kepler-19b and Kepler-19c. Kepler spotted 19b as it passed in front of, or transited, its host star. Researchers then inferred the existence of 19c after observing that 19b's transits periodically came a little later or earlier than expected. The gravity of 19c tugs on 19b, changing its orbit.
> 
> The discovery of Kepler-19c marks the first time this method &#8212; known as transit timing variation, or TTV &#8212; has robustly found an exoplanet, researchers said. But it almost certainly won't be the last.  "My expectation is that this method will be applied dozens of times, if not more, for other candidates in the Kepler mission," said study lead author Sarah Ballard of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
> 
> Finding two new planets
> 
> The Kepler spacecraft launched in March 2009. It typically hunts for alien worlds by measuring the telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet crosses the star's face from the telescope's perspective, blocking some of its light.  Kepler has been incredibly successful using this so-called transit method, spotting 1,235 candidate alien planets in its first four months of operation. That's the way it detected Kepler-19b, a world 650 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Lyra.
> 
> Kepler-19b has a diameter about 2.2 times that of Earth, researchers said, and orbits 8.4 million miles (13.5 million kilometers) from its parent star. The planet likely has a surface temperature around 900 degrees Fahrenheit (482 degrees Celsius).  Kepler-19b transits its host star once every nine days and seven hours. But that number isn't constant, Ballard and her team found; transits can occur up to five minutes early or five minutes late. That variation told them another planet was tugging on 19b, alternately speeding it up and slowing it down.
> 
> MORE
Click to expand...


This is scientifically interesting but only works in the cases of large Jupiter sized planets in close proximity to their suns where fast orbits yield quick results when other close-in planets are perturbed.


----------



## Mr. H.

This is a big deal -

In Chile desert, huge telescope begins galaxy probe - Yahoo! News


----------



## Mr. H.

Cool photo. Full size here:  http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1110/fourmoons_cassini_1004.jpg


----------



## American Horse

It's interesting, but it is a picture of what?

Here's the Answer

Explanation: A fourth moon is visible on the above image if you look hard enough. First -- and furthest in the background -- is Titan, the largest moon of Saturn and one of the larger moons in the Solar System. The dark feature across the top of this perpetually cloudy world is the north polar hood. The next most obvious moon is bright Dione, visible in the foreground, complete with craters and long ice cliffs. Jutting in from the left are several of Saturn's expansive rings, including Saturn's A ring featuring the dark Encke Gap. On the far right, just outside the rings, is Pandora, a moon only 80-kilometers across that helps shepherd Saturn's F ring. The fourth moon? If you look closely in the Encke Gap you'll find a speck that is actually Pan. Although one of Saturn's smallest moons at 35-kilometers across, Pan is massive enough to help keep the Encke gap relatively free of ring particles.


----------



## waltky

Granny says, "Dat's right - we all gonna die...

... get ready to bend over...

... an' kiss yer butt goo'bye...

*Huge black hole eating worlds in Milky Way*
_November 05, 2011 - A supernova within the galaxy M100, that may contain the youngest known black hole in our cosmic neighborhood._


> A supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is gradually destroying entire worlds on a daily basis, a new study has claimed. The study led by Dr Kastytis Zubovas from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, said Sagittarius A, a giant black hole 26,000 light-years from Earth, flares up in spectacular daily displays of x-rays and infrared radiation after the cosmic cannibal.  Writing on the pre-press website ArXiv.org, Zubovas and colleagues propose Sagittarius A, which is 4,000,000 times the mass of the Sun, is destroying planets and asteroids that have formed in a torus of dust and gas around the black hole, ABC Science reported.
> 
> They claim these clouds are a mixture of primordial chemicals and the remains of stars that have already been shredded by the black hole.  Thats a similar environment to the proto-planetary disks around stars in which planets form.  This hypothesis has raised the possibility that planetary systems could be evolving around the Milky Ways central black hole in the same way that they would around a star.
> 
> While this region may be conducive to the formation of planets and asteroids, Zubovas and colleagues point out that its also an area where these bodies are destroyed as they move too close to the central black hole.  When this happens, a burst of x-rays and infrared radiation a hundred times greater than normal background energy is detected coming from Sagittarius A, they report.  But the radiation released as the planets and asteroids are destroyed is just a tiny fraction of the levels released when a star falls into the black hole, an event which is estimated to happen once every 100,000 years.
> 
> Source


----------



## American Horse

> ...the radiation released as the planets and asteroids are destroyed is just a tiny fraction of the levels released when a star falls into the black hole, an event which is estimated to happen once every 100,000 years.


it is a fascinating concept to consider for an exotic and bizarre environment for planetary development and evolution. 

The "death spiral" is exceedingly slow considering the millions of stars there in the most populous region of the galaxy. Condidering that massive number,, on average, billions of years might easily pass before a planetary system was devoured. At that rate of destruction, life, even advanced life and civilizations might develop into foreordained destruction.


----------



## freedombecki

NASA Credit for image​



> Nasa says Curiosity rover is 'Locked and loaded' for Saturday launch - on mission to hunt down life on Mars
> 
> 
> 
> Part of $2,500,000,000 Mars science mission
> 500-ton rocket to carry car-sized rover to Mars
> 6-wheel vehicle to descend by parachute
> Landing site in clay-rich crater where life may once have thrived
> 10 sensors including X-Ray readers and robot arm for sampling soil
> NASA describes its Mars Rover vehicle as "locked and loaded" in preparation for its Saturday lift-off, when a 500-ton Atlas rocket will carry the
> 
> 
> Read more: NASA Curiosity rover to roam Mars to discover if life ever existed on the red planet | Mail Online​



Go, NASA!


----------



## waltky

Granny says smokin' dem space crystals is what makes Uncle Ferd think he's in luv with dem fat girls...

*Impossible crystals are 'from space'*
_3 January 2012 - The minerals were the first reported naturally-occurring quasicrystals_


> Examples of a crystal previously thought to be impossible in nature may have come from space, a study shows.  Quasicrystals have an unusual structure - in between those of crystals and glasses.  Until two years ago, quasicrystals had only been created in the lab - then geologists found them in rocks from Russia's Koryak mountains.  In PNAS journal, a team says the chemistry of the Russian crystals suggests they arrived in meteorites.  Quasicrystals were first described in the 1980s by Israeli researcher Daniel Schechtman, who was awarded last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery.  Schechtman's ideas were initially treated with doubt or scorn by some of his peers, who thought the structures were "impossible".
> 
> Rule breaker
> 
> Quasicrystals break some of the rules of symmetry that apply to conventional crystalline structures. They also exhibit different physical and electrical properties.  In 2009, Luca Bindi, from the University of Florence, Italy, and his colleagues reported finding quasicrystals in mineral samples from the Koryak mountains in Russia's far east.  The mineral - an alloy of aluminium, copper, and iron - showed that quasicrystals could form and remain stable under natural conditions. But the natural process that created the structures remained an open question.  Now, Dr Bindi, Paul Steinhardt from Princeton University and others claim that tests point to an extra-terrestrial origin for the Russian minerals.
> 
> They used the technique of mass spectrometry to measure different forms - or isotopes - of the element oxygen contained in parts of the rock sample.  The pattern of oxygen isotopes was unlike any known minerals that originated on Earth. It was instead closer to that sometimes found in a type of meteorite known as a carbonaceous chondrite.  The samples also contained a type of silica which only forms at very high pressures. This suggests it either formed in the Earth's mantle, or was formed in a high-velocity impact, such as that which occurs when a meteorite hits the Earth's surface.  "Our evidence indicates that quasicrystals can form naturally under astrophysical conditions and remain stable over cosmic timescales," the team writes in PNAS.
> 
> BBC News - Impossible crystals are 'from space'


----------



## waltky

Guess this supports the collision theory of the origin of the moon...

*Scientists find lunar mineral in Western Australia*
_Fri, Jan 06, 2012 - A mineral brought back to Earth by the first men on the moon and long thought to be unique to the lunar surface has been found in Australian rocks more than 1 billion years old, scientists said yesterday._


> Named after Apollo 11s 1969 landing site at the Sea of Tranquility, tranquillityite was one of three minerals first discovered in rocks from the moon and the only one not to be found, in subsequent years, on Earth.  Australian scientist Birger Rasmussen said that tranquillityite had long been considered as the moons own mineral until geologists discovered it, by chance, in rock from resources-rich Western Australia.  In over 40 years it hadnt been found in any terrestrial samples, said Rasmussen, from Curtin University.
> 
> When the moon samples first came back Rasmussen said they were considered to be extremely precious and had been subjected to intense, detailed study when  ironically  their contents were right here all the time.  They were always part of Earth, they havent come from the moon, he said of his work on the discovery, published in the journal Geology.  It tells you that broadly overall you have similar chemistries and similar processes operating on the moon as on Earth, he said.
> 
> As well as being quirky and surprising, Rasmussen said the discovery also had important practical applications, with the mineral proving to be an excellent dating tool which had allowed scientists to pin down the rocks age.  We used this mineral ... to date the dolerite which has previously been undated, so that helped us understand the geological history, he said.  They were 1.07 billion years old, more ancient than rocks in the area had previously been thought to be, and Rasmussen said tranquillityite would be useful in dating similar rocks in the future.  I think it will be a lot more widespread than just the six locations weve found it so far, he said of the rare mineral.
> 
> Scientists find ?lunar? mineral in Western Australia - Taipei Times


----------



## American Horse

NASA Radar Finds Ice Deposits at Moon's North Pole Additional evidence of water activity on moon


Mini-SAR map of the Circular Polarization Ratio (CPR) of the north pole of the Moon. Fresh, &#8220;normal&#8221; craters (red circles) show high values of CPR inside and outside their rims. This is consistent with the distribution of rocks and ejected blocks around fresh impact features, indicating that the high CPR here is surface scattering. The &#8220;anomalous&#8221; craters (green circles) have high CPR within, but not outside their rims. Their interiors are also in permanent sun shadow. These relations are consistent with the high CPR in this case being caused by water ice, which is only stable in the polar dark cold traps. We estimate over 600 million cubic meters (1 cubic meter = 1 metric ton) of water in these features. Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon's north pole. NASA's Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.

 Click to view a Larger version of the CPR Map of the North Pole of the Moon (1.4MB).


----------



## Ringel05

Oh lookie!!  Stars!!!







Looks kinda congested, does anyone up there provide traffic reports?


----------



## American Horse

Ringel05 said:


> Oh lookie!!  Stars!!!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Looks kinda congested, does anyone up there provide traffic reports?



That region is flush with interesting star loops, snakes, and crown configs of stars.  The bright star is Aldebaran, and the bright grouping upper right is the Pleiades aka "seven sisters' 
The angular seperation between those two is about 14 degrees, the swatch is about 14 x 20 degrees, and represents about 1.1 percent of the sky, which partly accounts for how crowded it appears.


----------



## Mr. H.

Holy Chit!


----------



## Ringel05

American Horse said:


> Ringel05 said:
> 
> 
> 
> Oh lookie!!  Stars!!!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Looks kinda congested, does anyone up there provide traffic reports?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> That region is flush with interesting star loops, snakes, and crown configs of stars.  The bright star is Aldebaran, and the bright grouping upper right is the Pleiades aka "seven sisters'
> The angular seperation between those two is about 14 degrees, the swatch is about 14 x 20 degrees, and represents about 1.1 percent of the sky, which partly accounts for how crowded it appears.
Click to expand...


So that's what they call 'downtown' up there.........


----------



## waltky

Uncle Ferd wearin' his tin-foil lined jockey strap so' it don't fry the family jewels...

*After solar flare, massive storm speeds Earthward*
_January 23, 2012 - A solar flare Sunday triggered an outburst of solar material that should hit Earth Tuesday. The disturbance could lead to voltage swings on some power lines, as well as stronger northern lights._


> An outburst from the sun late Sunday night is bathing Earth in the most powerful solar-radiation storm in six years.  The radiation storm is the first act of an event that will crescendo Tuesday, when the brunt of the outburst &#8211; called a coronal-mass ejection &#8211; arrives at Earth. It could trigger a disturbance of Earth's magnetic field, leading to voltage swings in long-distance power transmission lines as well as the appearance of the northern lights as far south as New York.  The current radiation storm &#8211; rated an S3, or strong, on a scale of 1 to 5 &#8211; could damage satellite hardware and present an increased risk of radiation exposure to passengers flying at high altitudes across polar routes, say space-weather specialists. These risks, however, are expected to be manageable.
> 
> The outburst, which occurred at 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time Sunday, marks the second major solar eruption in three days.  Sunday's event began with a moderate solar flare that was "nothing special" on its own, says Doug Biesecker, a solar physicist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo.  But the flare triggered the release of billions of tons of energetic particles from the sun's atmosphere. This coronal-mass ejection (CME) is hurtling toward Earth at 4 million miles an hour, "by far the fastest CME directed at the Earth during the current solar cycle," Dr. Biesecker says.
> 
> CMEs are vast clouds of protons, electrons, as well as heavy atomic nuclei formed in the nuclear fusion reactions that power the sun.  This CME's unusually high speed is accelerating some of its protons to nearly the speed of light, and they are arriving in quantities not seen since May 2005.  The resulting radiation storm could cause some hardware or onboard software glitches for satellite operators. And radio communications at high latitudes, as well as navigation-satellite accuracy for high-precision uses, could suffer some degradation for the duration of the radiation storm.  A geomagnetic storm Tuesday could further affect satellites.
> 
> For satellite operators, geomagnetic storms have a Janus-like quality. If strong enough, they can produce voltages on a satellite's exterior that can be powerful enough to arc and cause damage. And the storms can increase the atmosphere's drag on satellites, causing them to lose altitude.  But such storms also can increase drag on space junk that can pose a risk to satellites, sending more of it to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.  This week's geomagnetic storm also could bring auroras to viewers farther south than usual.  Biesecker says the storm may reach a level that could render auroras visible as far south as Idaho and New York, and perhaps even Illinois and Oregon if the CME's intensity is large than estimated.
> 
> Source



See also:

*Solar storm buffets Earth: How protected is the US power grid?*
_January 24, 2012 - Peak impact of the solar storm was expected Tuesday. Only a few of the strongest storms have a serious impact, but modern society is more dependent on power grids than ever._


> Power-grid operators nationwide are on high alert Tuesday as gale-force geomagnetic winds from a solar storm sweep across the Earth &#8211; creating potentially dangerous electrical currents that, if severe enough, could damage the US power grid.  The impact of this solar geomagnetic storm &#8211; called a &#8220;coronal mass ejection&#8221; by scientists &#8211; is being measured by satellites orbiting the Earth. It is the strongest such storm to hit Earth since 2005.
> 
> Still, it was expected to be moderate in intensity, compared with more severe events in the past, with only mild impacts on the power grid, solar storm experts said. Peak impact was expected Tuesday between morning and late in the day, solar weather experts said.  After the flare showed up on satellite sensors Sunday, solar storm advisories were sent by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the nation&#8217;s independent system operators that oversee regional grid reliability in the nation 10 big power markets.
> 
> Solar flares and Northern lights
> 
> Beyond problems with satellites and radio communications, power generators and transmission line operators were advised to put the portions of the grid they control in a more defensive, robust posture. The idea is to gird for the impact of billions of tons of charged solar particles striking the Earth's magnetic field at two million miles per hour.  &#8220;We do not expect an impact to the bulk power system, however utilities are monitoring their facilities, as usual, for any abnormal energy flows and are prepared to take all appropriate actions to maintain reliability of the bulk power system,&#8221; writes Kimberly Mielcarek, spokesman for the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) in an e-mail. &#8220;We&#8217;re conferring with NOAA counterparts as needed, and sharing information with the North American bulk power system reliability coordinators.&#8221;
> 
> Intense debate has swirled over the issue of solar geomagnetic storms &#8211; and what, if anything, to do about these infrequent events beyond reactive, defensive actions. Most such storms have little impact on the Earth. Only a handful have had any serious impact over the past century. Still, the US and other modern societies are more dependent on power grids than ever &#8211; and damage to the grid could be severe in some cases.  The power grid is 10 times larger than it was in 1921, when the last solar super storm hit, effectively making it a giant new antenna for geomagnetic current. A far stronger solar outburst could overload and wreck hundreds of critical high-voltage transformers nationwide, blacking out 130 million people for months and costing as much as $2 trillion, according to a 2010 Oak Ridge National Laboratory study.
> 
> MORE


----------



## waltky

Granny been wonderin' if dat why it been warmer than usual `round here lately...

*Solar storm was stronger than predicted*
_Jan. 25, 2012 WASHINGTON, Jan. 25,`12 (UPI) -- The solar storm that caused several days of intense geomagnetic activity in Earth's atmosphere was even stronger than originally predicted, U.S. officials said._


> "Earlier, it was stated that the current Solar Radiation Storm was the largest since May 2005," an announcement from a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration division said.  "After the arrival of the CME [coronal mass ejection] earlier today ... this is now the largest Solar Radiation Storm since October 2003 (The Halloween Storms)," NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center said on its Facebook page.
> 
> On Sunday, a cluster of sunspots in an active region of the sun blasted a bubble of energized plasma -- composed mainly of high-energy protons -- in the general direction of Earth.  The blast -- known as a coronal mass ejection -- interacted with the Earth's magnetosphere beginning Tuesday, sparking a global geomagnetic storm.
> 
> Such storm can cause problems with satellite operation and radio communications, experts said.  "High latitude [radio] communications can be impacted," NASA solar physicist C. Alex Young told Discovery News.  "I have heard from colleagues that airlines have already had to reroute polar flights for up to two days because of communication blackouts at the poles."
> 
> Read more: Solar storm was stronger than predicted - UPI.com


----------



## waltky

Mystery of vanishing ions solved...

*Solar Storms Blasting Electrons from Earth's Van Allen Belts*
_January 31, 2012 - Scientists say they have solved the mystery of why electrically-charged particles trapped in radiation belts thousands of kilometers above the Earth suddenly vanish and then reappear during periods of heightened solar activity._


> NASA-funded researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) tracked the electrons using data collected simultaneously with 11 different spacecraft.     Their findings show that when bursts of solar energy released by storms on the sun strike Earth&#8217;s magnetic field, they send electrons in the so-called Van Allen radiation belts hurtling into outer space.   Within a few days, the depleted radiation rings once again swell with a whole new crop of the sun&#8217;s highly-charged electrons, which are so energetic that they move at almost the speed of light.
> 
> The UCLA researchers note that the highly charged particles that escape the Van Allen belts always stream outward, rather than raining down into Earth&#8217;s atmosphere as some theories suggest.  Understanding how solar energy moves in and out of the Van Allen radiation belts has been a critical part of developing accurate space weather forecasts.   Radiation from solar storms can pose a life-threatening danger to the crew of the International Space Station, but it also can damage orbiting satellites, silence ground communications and knock out electric power grids.  The new NASA-UCLA study is published on the Internet in the journal, Nature Physics.
> 
> The Van Allen belts are a system of bubble-shaped rings of radiation that encircle the planet.  Earth's protective magnetic field holds the Van Allen belts in their position several tens of thousands of kilometers above its surface, and protects the planet from deadly solar, cosmic and other types of space radiation.  The Van Allen belts are named after late NASA astrophysicist James Van Allen, who confirmed presence of the radiation rings in 1958.  The pioneering scientist died in 2006 at the age of 91.
> 
> Source



See also:

*Scientists intrigued by atoms from beyond the solar system*
_January 31, 2012 - NASA's IBEX spacecraft has snagged atoms that came from outside our solar system. Interstellar space includes the raw material that becomes new stars, planets, and organic life._


> A NASA satellite orbiting Earth has captured "aliens" from interstellar space &#8211; but with names like hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and neon, these are outsiders are actually quite welcome.  By snagging these different elements at the same time, NASA&#8217;s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is for the first time allowing astronomers to compare how elements are distributed in interstellar space versus within our own solar system.  The composition of interstellar space is of particular interest to scientists because stars seed it with a range of elements &#8211; including nitrogen, oxygen, iron &#8211; when they end their lives. Once part of the interstellar medium, these elements become the raw material available for recycling into new stars, as well as planets, plants, and animals.  The new data are already helping scientists gain a fuller understanding of the corner of the Milky Way in which our solar system currently finds itself.
> 
> IBEX is designed to study the boundary between interstellar space and the heliosphere &#8211; the region of space influenced by the charged particles of the solar wind and the sun's magnetic field. Cosmic radiation, which consists of charged particles, is mostly deflected by the heliosphere. But neutral atoms, which carry no electrical charge, can penetrate the sun&#8217;s protective shield. Tuesday&#8217;s IBEX report focuses on these neutral atoms.  IBEX's sampling of neutral atoms has revealed intriguing differences in composition between the material in the solar system and in the interstellar cloud the solar system is passing through. IBEX found that for every 20 neon atoms reaching its detectors from the interstellar medium, it also was detecting 74 oxygen atoms. The solar system is richer in oxygen, with 111 oxygen atoms for each 20 neon atoms.
> 
> That points to two possibilities, says David McComas, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, and the mission's lead scientist. Either the sun formed in a different part of the interstellar cloud it now occupies, where oxygen was more plentiful, or the missing oxygen is cradled in dust and ice in the cloud.  If the differences are intriguing now, wait another 100 to 3,000 years or so. That's when the solar system is expected to exit the cloud it's now crossing into far different surroundings, the IBEX researchers say.  In its current surroundings, the solar system is encountering a weaker interstellar headwind than previous estimates suggested, the IBEX team reports. Measurements from the European Space Agency's now-defunct Ulysses solar observatory indicated that helium was entering the solar system at 59,000 miles an hour. IBEX's more-precise measurements put the speed at 52,000 miles an hour.
> 
> This reduction in speed means that the heliosphere sports a different shape than previously estimated, notes Dr. McComas. Currently, that is most important to modelers trying to map the various forces at play in the solar system.  &#8220;Frankly, all the modelers now have to go back and try to get their models to work with a very different balance&#8221; between the pressure the heliosphere is encountering from the headwind and the interplay between the heliosphere's magnetic field and the galactic magnetic field, he says. Both affect the shape of the heliosphere.  Understanding the shape of the heliosphere could be more broadly important if the solar system heads into quarters of the galaxy with much greater headwinds. In principle, those headwinds could push the leading edge of the heliosphere closer to the sun &#8211; to the point that some planets could spend part of their orbit outside the sun&#8217;s protective envelope.    The IBEX results appear in a special February supplement to the Astrophysical Journal.
> 
> Source


----------



## Trajan

New alien planet is perfect for life, scientists say

By Denise Chow

Published February 02, 2012

| Space.com

A potentially habitable alien planet &#8212; one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface &#8212; has been found around a nearby star.

The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface.


"It's the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it's not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze," Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told SPACE.com. "It's right smack in the habitable zone &#8212; there's no question or discussion about it. It's not on the edge, it's right in there."

Vogt is one of the authors of the new study, which was led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a private, nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C.

"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," Anglada-Escudé said in a statement.

An alien super-Earth

The researchers estimate that the planet, called GJ 667Cc, is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth, which makes it a so-called super-Earth. It takes roughly 28 days to make one orbital lap around its parent star, which is located a mere 22 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion).

"This is basically our next-door neighbor," Vogt said. "It's very nearby. There are only about 100 stars closer to us than this one."

Interestingly enough, the host star, GJ 667C, is a member of a triple-star system. GJ 667C is an M-class dwarf star that is about a third of the mass of the sun, and while it is faint, it can be seen by ground-based telescopes, Vogt said. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

"The planet is around one star in a triple-star system," Vogt explained. "The other stars are pretty far away, but they would look pretty nice in the sky."

Read more: New Alien Planet Is Perfect For Life, Scientists Say | Fox News


----------



## waltky

The better to see E.T. with...

*Four telescope link-up creates world's largest mirror*
_3 February 2012 : The combination of four units of the Very Large Telescopes creates a virtual 130m-mirror_


> Astronomers have created the world's largest virtual optical telescope linking four telescopes in Chile, so that they operate as a single device.  The telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal observatory form a virtual mirror of 130 metres in diameter.  A previous attempt to link the telescopes last March failed.  Thursday's link-up was the system's scientific verification - the final step before scientific work starts.  Linking all four units of the VLT will give scientists a much more detailed look at the universe than previous experiments using just two or three telescopes to create a virtual mirror.
> 
> The process that links separate telescopes together is known as interferometry.  In this mode, the VLT becomes the biggest ground-based optical telescope on earth.  Besides creating a gigantic virtual mirror, interferometry also greatly improves the telescope's spatial resolution and zooming capabilities.  The VLT is one of several telescopes in the Atacama Desert, set up by the European Southern Observatory (Eso).  Eso is an international research organisation headquartered in Munich, Germany, and sponsored by 15 member countries.
> 
> Vital milestone
> 
> Even prior to the start of the operation, as the domes of the four VLT units opened on a desert mountaintop in Chile, excitement filled the Paranal observatory's tiny control room.  t was going to be a special night, said one of the astronomers.  The head of instrumentation at Paranal, Frederic Gonte, called the event a "milestone in our quest for uncovering secrets of the universe".  "It's an extremely important step because now we know that we're ready to do real science," he said.  "From now on we'll be able to observe things we were not able to observe before."  To link the VLT units, the team of international astronomers and engineers used an instrument called Pionier, which replaces a multitude of mirrors with a single optical microchip.
> 
> Although the first attempt to combine the four telescopes happened in March 2011, it did not really work, said Jean-Philippe Berger, a French astronomer involved in the project.  But this time, it was already pretty clear that all the instruments were working correctly, he added.  "Last time, the atmospheric conditions and vibrations in the system were so bad that the data was just worthless, we stopped after half an hour knowing that it wouldn't improve," he said.  "So this attempt is a real first one to carry out observations for several hours straight to test the system in different conditions."  From now on, the system will be offered to the astronomical community, he added - any astronomer working at Paranal or visiting it will be able to use it.
> 
> *Gigantic mirror*


----------



## rdean

450 million years after the big bang.

http://www.psc.edu/science/2006/blackhole/


----------



## percysunshine

Ok, reality check. 

No one was around to see the big bang. If a lawyer tried to prosecute a black hole, he would be sucked into a judicial singularity. 

These are all hypothetical models.


----------



## American Horse

To be precise the animation covers a time frame from .2b to about 5.2b years after the big bang.  The filamental cobweb structure at the end of the animations hows a universe that has coelescesced into strings of galaxies and represents about a million galaxies grouped into giant clusters in the brightest regions. Those caoncentrations are connected by filaments made up of less concentrated outlying  populations of galaxies more representative of our own local group. 

The distance spanned in the animation frame is almost 110 million light years, a large enough sample to be representative of the universe.  By comparison our own galaxy (the Milky Way) and the Andromeda galaxy are seperated by about 2.54 million light years, or a region about 5/100 of one percent of the frame.

Percysunshine, how the the universe got to the state it is in is hypothetical, but its structure is well known, and has been since the 80's through observation.  These scientists are creating computer models that mathematically evolve into the known structure in an attempt to get from a diffuse homogenous state to what it is today.


----------



## percysunshine

American Horse said:


> To be precise the animation covers a time frame from .2b to about 5.2b years after the big bang.  The filamental cobweb structure at the end of the animations hows a universe that has coelescesced into strings of galaxies and represents about a million galaxies grouped into giant clusters in the brightest regions. Those caoncentrations are connected by filaments made up of less concentrated outlying  populations of galaxies more representative of our own local group.
> 
> The distance spanned in the animation frame is almost 110 million light years, a large enough sample to be representative of the universe.  By comparison our own galaxy (the Milky Way) and the Andromeda galaxy are seperated by about 2.54 million light years, or a region about 5/100 of one percent of the frame.
> 
> Percysunshine, how the the universe got to the state it is in is hypothetical, but its structure is well known, and has been since the 80's through observation.  These scientists are creating computer models that mathematically evolve into the known structure in an attempt to get from a diffuse homogenous state to what it is today.




It is called extrapolation.

Not to be confused with the evil twin sibling called interpolation.


----------



## American Horse

Hey Percy, since astronomers/cosmologist believe they know the physical makeup of the universe just after the moment of the big bang, and know what its structure has evolved to at the present moment in time (as well as when it was 5.2b years old), wouldn't the deductions of the interim processes actually be inferential interpolations?


----------



## RevBig

As a serious amateur astronomer I spend a lot of time in deep thought  thinking about what caused the big bang to 'bang', or what caused the BB itself to exist. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing existed before the BB, not time, not an quark of matter, not gravity nor light  existed prior to the B*! We can only go back in time with our mathematical models to just a few nanoseconds after the BB. Our physics fail us.  "The First Three Minutes" by Steven Weinberg while dated is still accurate. For the reason that "The First Three Minutes" centers on the very early development of the Universe, literally the first 190 seconds, however a reader with little or no knowledge of Cosmology might find it difficult. Anyway we must use other tools rather than conventional science to to explore what happened to produce the big bang. 

* that is according to mainstream scientific thinking. Of course secular and atheist physicists and theoretical mathematicians are doing their absolute best to eliminate the BB. I believe that is because theologians began referencing the BB shortly after its discovery and confirmation showing that it's existence also  supported Gods existence! Not good for atheist and secular science!  (end of note)

I subscribe to a mix of observational science, philosophy, metaphysics and other disciplines for discovery. To be more precise I feel that the KCA best describes the events leading up to the Big Bang and the creation of our universe as we know it. As a Christian the KCA dovetails in with the bibles description that the Universe was create, and was not static and eternal as Einstein and other 20th century scientist etc argued. I also use other ontological arguments such as Godels (Kurt) to undermine atheist presumptions of how the universe began. Anyway if you are unaware of what the KCA is and the other things that I have touched on entail go to (below) to get started.  

Reasonable Faith: One Minute Apologist - What is the Kalam Cosmological Argument?

Reva


----------



## RevBig

rdean said:


> 450 million years after the big bang. Projects in Scientific Computing 2006 (PSC)



Beautiful CFI! Thanks for the link as well!

Reva


----------



## cooky

Ocean-like water in the Jupiter-family comet 103P/Hartley 2 : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

The discovery that extraterrestrial deuterium to hydrogen ratios mirror those on Earth is a significant and fascinating revelation. There seems to be a growing body of evidence that suggests that much if not all of the H20 arrived from outerspace after the planet had formed is incredible as are its implications for the origin of life.


----------



## American Horse

RevBig said:


> As a serious amateur astronomer I spend a lot of time in deep thought  thinking about what caused the big bang to 'bang', or what caused the BB itself to exist. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing existed before the BB, not time, not an quark of matter, not gravity nor light  existed prior to the B*! We can only go back in time with our mathematical models to just a few nanoseconds after the BB. Our physics fail us.  "The First Three Minutes" by Steven Weinberg while dated is still accurate. For the reason that "The First Three Minutes" centers on the very early development of the Universe, literally the first 190 seconds, however a reader with little or no knowledge of Cosmology might find it difficult. Anyway we must use other tools rather than conventional science to to explore what happened to produce the big bang.
> 
> * that is according to mainstream scientific thinking. Of course secular and atheist physicists and theoretical mathematicians are doing their absolute best to eliminate the BB. I believe that is because theologians began referencing the BB shortly after its discovery and confirmation showing that it's existence also  supported Gods existence! Not good for atheist and secular science!  (end of note)
> 
> I subscribe to a mix of observational science, philosophy, metaphysics and other disciplines for discovery. To be more precise I feel that the KCA best describes the events leading up to the Big Bang and the creation of our universe as we know it. As a Christian the KCA dovetails in with the bibles description that the Universe was create, and was not static and eternal as Einstein and other 20th century scientist etc argued. I also use other ontological arguments such as Godels (Kurt) to undermine atheist presumptions of how the universe began. Anyway if you are unaware of what the KCA is and the other things that I have touched on entail go to (below) to get started.
> 
> Reasonable Faith: One Minute Apologist - What is the Kalam Cosmological Argument?
> 
> Reva



The KCA concept relies on a causal effect; nothing happens without a cause. 
_If there was no universe and out of nothing it began to exist (the BB) then the agent of cause preceded it; therefore a God._

But, as an alternative explanation; if the universe always existed, and the current ephemeris only exploded after a collapse of an earlier cycle, then that god effect is not needed.


----------



## RevBig

American Horse said:


> The KCA concept relies on a causal effect; nothing happens without a cause. _If there was no universe and out of nothing it began to exist (the BB) then the agent of cause preceded it; therefore a God._



Well, I must disagree. Of course causality exists in temporal (time dependent) systems. Remember time was created just after t-0 of the big bang according to current theory. (although as I have said secular and I must say atheist astronomers, cosmologists etc including the brilliant atheist Hawking seem to have an agenda against the traditional  big bang theory and are working to eliminate a beginning point for our universe. If one can remove that point they can also eliminate a creating agent as well! Quantum gravity and modifying inflationary theory, is their MO...b but I am getting off your specific claim. Anyway lets go to the first premise of the KCA which actually supports causality. Anyway I will assume you are well versed in the intricacies of the (Classical argument) KCA, and only explain why cause and effect are a moot point, at least before  T-0, ie time zero of the BB. God or GID (a word I aspire to trademark) which means God the Intelligent Designer are eternal agents. Being nothing known to science ie not energy not matter etc it seems plausible, and by the logic of deduction it is the best and nearly only answer. When combined with the logical syllogism of the KCA (when its joined with its supporting premises), the argument is both rational and appeals to logic. In fact the KCA could not exist without the process of logic! 

 In other words infinite regression is barred by the eternity of Gods existence. As for the believability of a domain where time does not exist, its very believable. it&#8217;s a FACT!  We do not have to go outside our universe to find it either! Think the interior of black holes, and you will be there, time does not exist according to 99% of the theoretical physicists you might want to ask!   



> But, as an alternative explanation; if the universe always existed, and the current ephemeris only exploded after a collapse of an earlier cycle, then that god effect is not needed.



That would be sweet, however the empirical and observational evidence rebuts that scenario soundly. The universe began to exist according to most astronomers and physicists about 14b years ago. A cyclic universe isn&#8217;t possible at this time because there is not nearly enough mass to cause a rebound and a crunch. Of course as I said that fact does not stop many secular atheist astronomers feverishly developing quantum gravity models that tweak the inflationary period/event to the breaking point. Maybe one day if the evidence is there I would reconsider. However as of feb 7.3 2012 the traditional bb hot model/theory remains the overwhelmingly accepted explaination of our universe's origins. 

Rev.b


----------



## waltky

Granny says when Uncle Ferd passes gas, dat oughta qualify as cosmic wind...

*Astronomers Measure Record Cosmic Winds Near Small Black Hole*
_February 23, 2012 - The U.S. space agency says cosmic winds generated by a disk of cosmic gas spinning around a small-scale type of black hole are the fastest ever recorded near such an object._


> NASA researchers say they clocked wind speeds of 32 million kilometers per hour - about 3 percent of the speed of light - using instruments aboard the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory.  Such tremendous cosmic wind speeds were previously thought to occur only near the largest black holes in the universe.  Black holes are the densest, heaviest objects in the universe.  Their powerful gravitational fields create vortexes that pull in gas and debris from millions of kilometers around and capture even light in their grip.
> 
> The largest such objects - known as supermassive black holes - are thought to be at the center of most large galaxies, including our own, the Milky Way.  They can be millions, or even billions of times more massive than our sun.  But stellar-mass black holes are tiny by comparison, with masses just five to 10 times that of the sun.
> 
> The Earth-orbiting Chandra probe shows that the little stellar-mass black hole powering the record-breaking winds orbits a sun-like star in a binary system 28,000 light years from Earth.  NASA says the Chandra measurements and data shed important light on the behavior of smaller black holes, and their effect on nearby matter.
> 
> Gas disks like the one observed in the study are composed of the sub-atomic remains of material captured by the black holes powerful gravitational vortex, which spins the particles around at nearly light speeds.  The energy generated during this process creates cosmic winds.  The new study is published in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
> 
> Source



See also:

*Astronomers Say Galaxy May Be Awash with Homeless Planets*
_February 24, 2012 - Astronomers say the Milky Way may be swarming with nomad planets wandering through space instead of orbiting a host star, and that the galaxy may have a greater number of unmoored planets than stars._


> Last year, astronomers detected about a dozen nomad planets wandering about the galaxy, using a technique called gravitational microlensing, in which the light of stars is momentarily refocused, and brightened, by the gravity of passing planets.  At that time, scientists estimated there could be two Jupiter-sized nomad planets for every typical star with orbiting planets in the Milky Way.  Jupiter, a gas giant, is the largest planet in the solar system.  A new analysis by researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University in California now estimates there could be 100,000 times more homeless planets than stars.
> 
> Louis Strigari, a research scientist at Kavli, led the study that calculated the gravitational pull of the Milky Way galaxy and the amount of cosmic matter, or material, available to form nomad planets.  "We imagined that the population of a dozen or so Jupiter-mass wandering or nomadic objects is just the tip of the iceberg relative to whats really out there in terms of our galaxy," said Strigari.  "So, if one makes assumptions about how many there are below the mass below Jupiter, then one can obtain a bound [an estimate] on how many of these actually exist.
> 
> While they might seem to be unlikely candidates for life as we know it, StrIgari says it is possible some of these wandering planets could harbor forms of bacterial life, even if they do not enjoy the heat of a sun.  If the object has a thick enough atmosphere and say theres tectonic activity or radioactivity going on, on the surface of the planet, the heat could get trapped by the thick atmosphere and could potentially be hospitable to microbial life, said the research scientist.
> 
> Strigari also says there is a slight chance that two nomad planets could collide, flinging bacterial debris into other solar systems.  Astronomers hope to confirm the number of wandering planets in the next decade, when a newer generation of larger, more powerful telescopes - including the space-based Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope and the ground-based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope proposed by the U.S. space agency (NASA) - begins operating.  An article by Louis Strigari and colleagues on nomadic planets is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
> 
> Source


----------



## Mr. H.

Take what I say in a differnt way, and it's easy to say that this is all... confusion.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTjbWL6XYoU]Yes - Starship Trooper - YouTube[/ame]


----------



## PublicMan

American Horse said:


> Objects in space like planets are much more likely to collide if they orbit each other or orbit  a common primary object.  In our own solar system Venus doesnt deserve to smash into anything, since its orbit is so perfectly circular.
> But Mercury is not so well behaved.  Its orbit  already the most lopsided  wildly changes shape.  Influences from faraway Jupiter will eventually make its path so elliptical that it will swing out to Venus.  Then those two worlds MAY collide.



Mercury-Jupiter resonance makes the movement of mercury a theoretical possibility but it is unlikely in the extreme.  I am unable to send a link but google "mercury jupiter resonance site:nature.com" for an excellent article by Greg Laughlin on the subject.


----------



## waltky

Strong solar storm to hit Earth ...

*Fears of disruption as big solar storm set to hit Earth*
_7 March 2012 - A strong solar storm is expected to hit Earth shortly, and experts warn it could disrupt power grids, satellite navigations systems and plane routes._


> The storm - the largest in five years - will unleash a torrent of charged particles between 06:00 GMT and 10:00 GMT, US weather specialists say.  They say it was triggered by a pair of massive solar flares earlier this week.  It means there is a good chance of seeing the northern lights at higher latitudes, if the skies are clear.  The effects will be most intense in polar regions, and aircraft may be advised to change their routings to avoid these areas.  In the UK, the best chance to see them will be on Thursday night, the British Geological Survey says.
> 
> Complex network
> 
> "It's hitting us right in the nose," said Joseph Kunches, an expert at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).  He described the storm as the Sun's version of Super Tuesday - in a reference to the US Republican primaries and caucuses in 10 states.  "Space weather has gotten very interesting over the past 24 hours," Mr Kunches added.
> 
> The charged particles are expected to hit Earth at 4,000,000 mph (6,400,000 km/h), and Noaa predicts the storm will last until Friday morning.  Images of from the Sun's region where the flares happened show a complex network of sunspots indicating a large amount of stored magnetic energy.  Other solar magnetic storms have been observed in recent decades.  One huge solar flare in 1972 cut off long-distance telephone communication in the US state of Illinois.
> 
> BBC News - Fears of disruption as big solar storm set to hit Earth


----------



## freedombecki

waltky said:


> Strong solar storm to hit Earth ...
> 
> *Fears of disruption as big solar storm set to hit Earth*
> _7 March 2012 - A strong solar storm is expected to hit Earth shortly, and experts warn it could disrupt power grids, satellite navigations systems and plane routes._
> 
> 
> 
> The storm - the largest in five years - will unleash a torrent of charged particles between 06:00 GMT and 10:00 GMT, US weather specialists say.  They say it was triggered by a pair of massive solar flares earlier this week.  It means there is a good chance of seeing the northern lights at higher latitudes, if the skies are clear.  The effects will be most intense in polar regions, and aircraft may be advised to change their routings to avoid these areas.  In the UK, the best chance to see them will be on Thursday night, the British Geological Survey says.
> 
> Complex network
> 
> "It's hitting us right in the nose," said Joseph Kunches, an expert at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).  He described the storm as the Sun's version of Super Tuesday - in a reference to the US Republican primaries and caucuses in 10 states.  "Space weather has gotten very interesting over the past 24 hours," Mr Kunches added.
> 
> The charged particles are expected to hit Earth at 4,000,000 mph (6,400,000 km/h), and Noaa predicts the storm will last until Friday morning.  Images of from the Sun's region where the flares happened show a complex network of sunspots indicating a large amount of stored magnetic energy.  Other solar magnetic storms have been observed in recent decades.  One huge solar flare in 1972 cut off long-distance telephone communication in the US state of Illinois.
> 
> BBC News - Fears of disruption as big solar storm set to hit Earth
Click to expand...

We lost power here a couple of hours ago, but it was after dark. I wonder whether it is related to your post, waltky.


----------



## ScreamingEagle

freedombecki said:


> waltky said:
> 
> 
> 
> Strong solar storm to hit Earth ...
> 
> *Fears of disruption as big solar storm set to hit Earth*
> _7 March 2012 - A strong solar storm is expected to hit Earth shortly, and experts warn it could disrupt power grids, satellite navigations systems and plane routes._
> 
> 
> 
> The storm - the largest in five years - will unleash a torrent of charged particles between 06:00 GMT and 10:00 GMT, US weather specialists say.  They say it was triggered by a pair of massive solar flares earlier this week.  It means there is a good chance of seeing the northern lights at higher latitudes, if the skies are clear.  The effects will be most intense in polar regions, and aircraft may be advised to change their routings to avoid these areas.  In the UK, the best chance to see them will be on Thursday night, the British Geological Survey says.
> 
> Complex network
> 
> "It's hitting us right in the nose," said Joseph Kunches, an expert at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).  He described the storm as the Sun's version of Super Tuesday - in a reference to the US Republican primaries and caucuses in 10 states.  "Space weather has gotten very interesting over the past 24 hours," Mr Kunches added.
> 
> The charged particles are expected to hit Earth at 4,000,000 mph (6,400,000 km/h), and Noaa predicts the storm will last until Friday morning.  Images of from the Sun's region where the flares happened show a complex network of sunspots indicating a large amount of stored magnetic energy.  Other solar magnetic storms have been observed in recent decades.  One huge solar flare in 1972 cut off long-distance telephone communication in the US state of Illinois.
> 
> BBC News - Fears of disruption as big solar storm set to hit Earth
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> We lost power here a couple of hours ago, but it was after dark. I wonder whether it is related to your post, waltky.
Click to expand...


Grids were A-OK as of about 10:45 a.m. Eastern (7:45 a.m. Pacific), according to Kimberly Mielcarek, spokeswoman for the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which monitors the nation's major power grids.

The solar storm "has had no impact on the bulk power system," she said in an interview with The Times on Thursday morning. But utilities "continue their normal monitoring pattern ... for any abnormal energy flows."

Alex Young, a solar physicist at NASA Goddard, told The Times on Thursday morning that the storm was low level.  It did, however, create some great auroras -- those gorgeous light displays in the sky -- as far south as the Great Lakes region, he said.

Although this solar storm fell short of predictions, you may want to brace yourself for the years ahead.

Solar flare activity and its fallout on Earth are expected to heat up. We're only about four years into the current 11-year solar cycle.

Young said that, around 2013, solar activity is expected to peak with a couple of CMEs a day. Thats coronal mass ejection  the mass of magnetized material that the sun hurls out after a flare. But they have to be pointed at Earth. ... We would expect a couple a week to reach the Earth.

These are unlikely to be massive geomagnetic storms. The colossal storms are expected farther into the cycle, perhaps in 2014, Young said. Large flares and their storms tend to happen as a solar cycle wanes.

Google News


----------



## xsited1

2012 winners : Astronomy Photographer of the Year : Exhibitions : Visit : RMG

What a great picture:


----------



## American Horse

Beautiful!  Here's another titled: 
Star Icefall






Notice the pattern of star strings right of Orion's belt; they are remeniscent of the strings I captured from a Hubble image for my avatar.


----------



## asterism

xsited1 said:


> 2012 winners : Astronomy Photographer of the Year : Exhibitions : Visit : RMG
> 
> What a great picture:





American Horse said:


> Beautiful!  Here's another titled:
> Star Icefall
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Notice the pattern of star strings right of Orion's belt; they are remeniscent of the strings I captured from a Hubble image for my avatar.



I love how prevalent amateur astrophotography is.  I won some local accolades for this image:


----------



## asterism

My latest Saturn.


----------



## American Horse

Tell us your equipment for those two photo's please...


----------



## eots

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSBSd_z9lmY]Operation Elevation...The Space elevator..music by eots - YouTube[/ame]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHlB9d11vtg]Dark Star Rising 2012 countdown...by eots - YouTube[/ame]


----------



## waltky

Surprise in the skies...

*Galaxy study finds unexpected patterns*
_Oct. 19 (UPI) -- A study of hundreds of galaxies found an unexpected pattern of change going back 8 billion years, more than half the age of the universe, U.S. astronomers say._


> "Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into their present form by about 8 billion years ago, with little additional development since," Susan Kassin at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said.
> 
> "The trend we've observed instead shows the opposite, that galaxies were steadily changing over this time period," she said.
> 
> Most galaxies go through a rough-and-tumble disorganized evolution before they settle into the rotating disk form seen in our Milky Way and other mature galaxies, astronomers said.
> 
> "Previous studies removed galaxies that did not look like the well-ordered rotating disks now common in the universe today," said co-author Benjamin Weiner, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
> 
> Read more: "Exciting" early years of galaxies described - UPI.com



See also:

*Earth-sized Planet Discovered*
_ October 17, 2012 - Astronomers in Europe have discovered the first-ever planet with a mass similar to Earth and orbiting a star like the Sun. And, in galactic terms, it&#8217;s right next door._


> The unnamed planet is in the Alpha Centauri star system, the nearest system to Earth, according to the European Southern Observatory (ESO).  &#8220;This result represents a major step towards the detection of a twin Earth in the immediate vicinity of the Sun. We live in exciting times!&#8221; said Xavier Dumusque of the Geneva Observatory and Centro de Astrofisica da Universidade do Porto in Portugal in a press release on the discovery.
> 
> Despite the excitement, scientists say the new planet&#8217;s climate likely would not be nearly as hospitable as Earth.  &#8220;Its orbit is very close to its star and it must be much too hot for life as we know it,&#8221; said Stéphane Udry of the Geneva Observatory and a co-author of the paper about the discovery.  The newly discovered planet orbits a mere six million kilometers from its star, much closer than Mercury is to the Sun.
> 
> Alpha Centauri is the nearest stellar system to the earth&#8217;s solar system at only 4.3 light-years, making it one of the brightest objects in the southern skies. It is actually a three-star system made up of two stars similar to the Sun orbiting close to each other, Alpha Centauri A and B, and a more distant and faint red star known as Proxima Centauri.
> 
> MORE


----------



## waltky

Granny wonderin' how dey s'posed to find it if ya can't see it?...

*Quasars illustrate dark energy's roller coaster ride*
_13 November 2012 - BOSS data is acquired by the 2.5m Sloan telescope at Apache Point Observatory in the US_


> Scientists have used a novel technique to probe the nature of dark energy some 10 billion years into the past.  They hope it will bring them closer to an explanation for the strange force that appears to be driving the Universe apart at an accelerating rate.  The method relies on bright but distant objects known as quasars to map the spread of hydrogen gas clouds in space.  The 3D distribution of these clouds can be used as a tracer for the influence of dark energy through time.  A scholarly paper describing the approach has been submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and posted on the arXiv.org preprint site.  It is authored by the BOSS (Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) team, which uses the 2.5m Sloan Foundation Telescope in New Mexico, US, to make its observations of the sky.
> 
> The international group's new data is said to be a very neat fit with theory, confirming ideas that dark energy did not have a dominant role in the nascent Universe. Back then, gravity actually held sway, decelerating cosmic expansion. Only later did dark energy come to the fore.  "We know very little about dark energy but one of our ideas is that it is a property of space itself - when you have more space, you have more energy," explained Dr Matthew Pieri, a BOSS team-member.   "So, dark energy is something that increases with time. As the Universe expands, it gives us more space and therefore more energy, and at some point dark energy takes over from gravity to end the deceleration and drive an acceleration," the Portsmouth University, UK, researcher told BBC News.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The BOSS team used 48,000 distant quasars to "back-light" and map the distribution of clouds of hydrogen gas in the early Universe
> 
> The discovery that everything in the cosmos is now moving apart at a faster and faster rate was one of the major breakthroughs of the 20th Century. But scientists have found themselves grasping for new physics to try to explain this extraordinary phenomenon.  A number of techniques are being deployed to try to get some insight. One concerns so-called baryon acoustic oscillations.  These refer to the pressure-driven waves that passed through the post-Big-Bang Universe and which subsequently became frozen into the distribution of matter once it had cooled to a sufficient level.  Today, those oscillations show themselves as a "preferred scale" in the spread of galaxies - a slight excess in the numbers of such objects with separations of 500 million light-years.
> 
> It is an observation that can be used as a kind of standard ruler to measure the geometry of the cosmos.  The BOSS team has already done this using a large volume of galaxies that stretch some six billion light-years from Earth. But at greater distances - and hence deeper in cosmic time - these standard galaxies are simply too faint for the Sloan telescope to see.  Instead, the BOSS team has used quasars (quasi-stellar radio sources) to help it map the cosmos.  Quasars are far flung galaxies where a massive central black hole is driving the emission of huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation. These are visible to Sloan.
> 
> More BBC News - Quasars illustrate dark energy's roller coaster ride


----------



## waltky

Astronomers Predict Big Discovery In 2013...

*First 'Alien Earth' Will Be Found in 2013, Experts Say*
_Thu, Dec 27, 2012 -  The first truly Earth-like alien planet is likely to be spotted next year, an epic discovery that would cause humanity to reassess its place in the universe._


> While astronomers have found a number of exoplanets over the last few years that share one or two key traits with our own world  such as size or inferred surface temperature  they have yet to bag a bona fide "alien Earth." But that should change in 2013, scientists say.  "I'm very positive that the first Earth twin will be discovered next year," said Abel Mendez, who runs the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo.
> 
> Planets piling up
> 
> Astronomers discovered the first exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star in 1995. Since they, they've spotted more than 800 worlds beyond our own solar system, and many more candidates await confirmation by follow-up observations.  NASA's prolific Kepler Space Telescope, for example, has flagged more than 2,300 potential planets since its March 2009 launch. Only 100 or so have been confirmed to date, but mission scientists estimate that at least 80 percent will end up being the real deal.
> 
> The first exoplanet finds were scorching-hot Jupiter-like worlds that orbit close to their parent stars, because they were the easiest to detect. But over time, new instruments came online and planet hunters honed their techniques, enabling the discovery of smaller and more distantly orbiting planets  places more like Earth.  Last December, for instance, Kepler found a planet 2.4 times larger than Earth orbiting in its star's habitable zone  that just-right range of distances where liquid water, and perhaps life as we know it, can exist.
> 
> The Kepler team and other research groups have detected several other worlds like that one (which is known as Kepler-22b), bringing the current tally of potentially habitable exoplanets to nine by Mendez' reckoning.
> 
> *Zeroing in on Earth's twin*


http://news.yahoo.com/first-alien-earth-found-2013-experts-170808230.html


----------



## waltky

Granny already knows Martian secrets - dat's how she makes her special brownies...

*Martian meteorite could uncover planet&#8217;s secrets*
_Sat, Jan 05, 2013 - A Martian meteorite containing 10 times more water than average could unlock clues to the Red Planet&#8217;s evolution from a warm, wet past to its current cold and dry state, scientists said on Thursday._


> Unlike most Martian meteorites, NWA 7034, a dark, fist-sized rock that landed in the Sahara Desert in 2011, is thought to be from the planet&#8217;s surface, not deeper inside, and to date from a crucial time in its evolution.  &#8220;Many scientists think that Mars was warm and wet in its early history, but the planet&#8217;s climate changed over time,&#8221; lead author Carl Agee, whose study was published in the US journal Science Express, told space.com.
> 
> Scientists believe NWA 7034 was formed from lava from a volcanic eruption on Mars around 2.1 billion years ago that cooled and hardened on the surface of the planet, possibly with the help of water.  &#8220;Perhaps most exciting is that the high water content could mean there was an interaction of the rocks with surface water either from volcanic magma, or from fluids from impacting comets during that time,&#8221; co-author Andrew Steele said.  &#8220;It is the richest Martian meteorite geochemically and further analyses are bound to unleash more surprises,&#8221; he said.
> 
> It took scientists several months to ascertain that the meteorite was indeed dislodged from Mars and not a space rock from the asteroid belt or from another planet.  &#8220;The chemistry is consistent with a surface origin and an interaction with the Martian atmosphere,&#8221; Agee said.
> 
> The abundance of water molecules in the rock &#8212; about 6,000 parts per million, 10 times more than other known meteorites &#8212; suggest water activity persisted on the Martian surface during the time, known as the Amazonian epoch.  &#8220;Our analysis of the oxygen isotopes shows that NWA 7034 is not like any other meteorites or planetary samples,&#8221; Agee said.  More than 100 Martian meteorites have been discovered on Earth to date.
> 
> Martian meteorite could uncover planet?s secrets - Taipei Times



See also:

*Milky Way Could Contain 100 Billion Planets*
_ January 04, 2013 - It seems like hardly a week goes by without another planet being discovered in some far off stellar system, but a new study, released by the California Institute of Technology, indicates there will likely be many, many more such discoveries._


> The Caltech team made this conclusion based on analyzing the planets orbiting the Kepler-32 star, which contains five planets and which the scientists say is representative of the vast majority of stars in our galaxy. Kepler-32 is classified as an M dwarf, and scientists say three out of every four stars in the galaxy are M dwarfs, also known as red dwarfs.  "There's at least 100 billion planets in the galaxy&#8212;just our galaxy," says John Johnson, assistant professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech and coauthor of the study, which was recently accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. "That's mind-boggling."  Scientists say their estimate of 100 billion stars is conservative because it doesn&#8217;t take into account planets which may be orbiting further away from M dwarfs or planets orbiting other types of stars.
> 
> According to the scientists, Kepler-32&#8217;s five planets, which were detected by the Kepler space telescope, are similar in size to Earth. They are also similar to other planets discovered around other M dwarf stars. They all orbit very close to their star, no further than one-third the distance Mercury orbits our Sun. This is typical of M dwarf systems, Johnson said.  While the planets may resemble Earth in size, the Kepler-32 system differs from the Solar System. The star is much cooler than the sun, has only five percent of its brightness and is only half the size.  Johnson said an alternate headline for the discovery is just how much of a &#8220;weirdo&#8221; our own solar system is compared to the vast majority of systems in the galaxy.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A section of the Milky Way as seen by the Kepler telescope.
> 
> Still, the Kepler-32 star system does have what is called a &#8220;habitable zone,&#8221; where liquid water could exist. In the Kepler-32 system, only the outermost planet is in that zone,  but Johnson said it likely resembles Neptune and would likely not support life.  Because of its orientation, Kepler-32 presents itself as a great opportunity to study as all the planets&#8217; orbits are in a plane and can be viewed edge-on as they briefly block the light from the star. These small changes in light allow scientists to determine the planets&#8217; characteristics such as size and orbital speed.  "I usually try not to call things 'Rosetta stones,' but this is as close to a Rosetta stone as anything I've seen," Johnson says. "It's like unlocking a language that we're trying to understand&#8212;the language of planet formation."
> 
> Johnson said the next big question would be if any of the planets in the habitable zones around M dwarf stars could support life.  &#8220;There are 20 different factors on Earth, and we don&#8217;t know how to rank them,&#8221; Johnson said. &#8220;Do we need a moon? It&#8217;s important. How critical? Do you have to have plate tectonics?&#8221;  Johnson said those questions are best suited for climate scientists and geologists.  &#8220;Until we have the ability to study those things, we won&#8217;t know if they&#8217;re hospitable,&#8221; he said. &#8220;If you were looking at our Solar System from an alien world, you might write a press release saying you&#8217;d discovered two planets in the habitable zone. Venus is in the habitable zone, but it&#8217;s not a good vacation spot.&#8221;
> 
> http://www.voanews.com/content/galaxy-100-billion-planets-caltech/1577962.html


----------



## asterism

American Horse said:


> Tell us your equipment for those two photo's please...



Celestron C6-SGT

Canon EOS Rebel T3 for the M42 picture.

NexImage webcam for Saturn


----------



## ScienceRocks

*NASA says NGC 6872 is the largest spiral galaxy ever discovered*




> Located about 212 million light-years from Earth, the massive spiral galaxy NGC 6872 has been known to astronomers for decades. But it wasn't until a recent survey of nearby star-forming regions that NASA scientists realized just how big it truly is. New data shows that, from tip-to-tip across its two outsized spiral arms, this galaxy measures a whopping 522,000 light-years across &#8212; making it more than five times the size of the Milky Way. NASA now says it's the largest spiral galaxy that has ever been discovered.
> 
> Astronomers were able to award NGC 6872 with this distinction by analyzing data acquired from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission, which is now located at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
> 
> While scanning the area around the galaxy, NASA scientists were taken aback at the volume of ultraviolet light coming from its younger stars &#8212; an indication that there was more to this galaxy than initially met the eye.


NASA says NGC 6872 is the largest spiral galaxy ever discovered


----------



## waltky

Milky Way's backbone & deep space exocomets...

*Scientists Find Milky Ways Spine*
_ January 12, 2013 - The Milky Ways 'backbone' structure contains about 100,000 stars' worth of gas and dust._


> Scientists have announced the discovery of a spine-like structure within the Milky Way that might help explain the dynamics of galactic formation. The Milky Way is the spiral galaxy we live in and is one of billions of such vast pinwheel-like formations scattered throughout the universe, each containing hundreds of billions of stars.  Harvard University astronomy professor Alyssa Goodman is an expert on star formation. Not long ago, she and her colleagues at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics were reviewing data of a dense cosmic cloud nicknamed Nessie by the scientist who first described it. Goodmans team saw a new feature, a long tendril of dust and gas, eight times longer, about 1,000 light years longer, than it was thought to be before.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Since we live inside the Milky Way, it can be difficult for us to determine its exact structure. Goodman says this is the first time that scientists have seen such a delicate piece of the galactic skeleton. What weve added to this is the idea that there might be these very sharp, dense features that we can pick out of the data and that that will just add another tool to the arsenal of trying to figure out the structure of the galaxy we live in.  Computer simulations of galaxy formation show webs of filaments within spiral disks.  It is very likely that the newly discovered Milky Way feature is one of these skeletal filaments. If we combine this information in a statistical way, we can probably build a pretty good 3-dimentional model of the galaxy, Goodman says. The new filament is likely made from high density gas, the type that forms stars.
> 
> The discovery is an interesting demonstration of whats called open science. Goodman and nine collaborators are writing the paper on the find, which the public can review as it evolves online at authorea.com. That means that as we work on the paper, which is about 90 percent done at this point, the whole world can see it. They can watch us work on it.  Goodman presented her work at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, California.
> 
> Source



See also:

*Comets Discovered Around Distant Solar Systems*
_ January 11, 2013 - A team of scientists has discovered six exocomets outside our solar system._


> Research astronomer Barry Welsh at the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory looks for these comets spinning in elliptical orbits around distant stars, leaving their trademark trails of star-lit gas and debris.  The icy dirt balls - between just five kilometers and 20 kilometers across - emerge from massive discs of gas and dust around the stars, the raw material for new planets. Welsh said the exocomets are formed from these scraps left over from planet formation.  This is like the missing link, the missing piece in the puzzle. And it reinforces all the planetary formation theories because all the planetary formation theories say you should end up with left-over comets and left-over big hunks of rock, asteroids, and that sort of thing, he said.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> This view of comet Hartley 2 was taken by NASA's EPOXI mission during its flyby of the comet and was captured by the spacecraft's Medium-Resolution Instrument, November 4, 2010.
> 
> At the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Long Beach, California, Welsh reported that he and his colleagues found spectrographic signatures of the six new exocomets orbiting six very young type-A stars, which are only about 5 million years old.  Although not all the stars harbor exoplanets, the debris disk means they could be present. Welsh said it suggests that across the universe, exoplanets and exocomets co-exist, as they do in our own solar system. It looks as though they are quite common things.
> 
> Welsh said that if, as experts theorize, comets could have seeded the primordial earth with organic carbon material and water, then comets also may be the key to life elsewhere in the universe. If comets are universally distributed around, then you could say that the incidence of life could be higher on other planets than we ever thought.  Back in our own solar system, comets continue to put on celestial shows for Earth-bound observers. People in the northern hemisphere will be able to see an unusual comet in late November of this year, with the highly anticipated appearance of Comet ISON. The newly-discovered comet is predicted to shine as brightly in the night sky as the full moon.
> 
> Source


----------



## freedombecki

The Orion Bullets


> Explanation:Cosmic bullets pierce the outskirts of the Orion Nebula,  some 1500 light-years distant in this infrared close-up.  Blasted out by energetic massive star formation the bullets, relatively dense, hot gas clouds about  ten times the size of Pluto's orbit, are blue in the false color image.  Glowing with the light of ionized iron atoms they travel at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second, their passage traced by yellowish trails of the nebula's shock-heated hydrogen gas.  The cone-shaped wakes are up to a fifth of a light-year long.  The detailed image was created using the 8.1 meter Gemini South telescope in Chile with a newly commissioned adaptive optics system (GeMS).  Achieving a larger field of view than previous generation adaptive optics, GeMS uses five laser-generated guide stars to help compensate for the blurring effects of planet Earth's atmosphere.



NASA APOD, January 10, 2013

I just like Orion, because I can see it almost every night here.


----------



## waltky

Granny says dey got dey's own lil' GPS system...

*Dung beetles guided by Milky Way*
_24 January 2013 - They may be down in the dirt but it seems dung beetles also have their eyes on the stars._


> Scientists have shown how the insects will use the Milky Way to orientate themselves as they roll their balls of muck along the ground.  Humans, birds and seals are all known to navigate by the stars. But this could be the first example of an insect doing so.  The study by Marie Dacke is reported in the journal Current Biology.  "The dung beetles are not necessarily rolling with the Milky Way or 90 degrees to it; they can go at any angle to this band of light in the sky. They use it as a reference," the Lund University, Sweden, researcher told BBC News.  Dung beetles like to run in straight lines. When they find a pile of droppings, they shape a small ball and start pushing it away to a safe distance where they can eat it, usually underground.
> 
> Getting a good bearing is important because unless the insect rolls a direct course, it risks turning back towards the dung pile where another beetle will almost certainly try to steal its prized ball.  Dr Dacke had previously shown that dung beetles were able to keep a straight line by taking cues from the Sun, the Moon, and even the pattern of polarised light formed around these light sources.  But it was the animals' capacity to maintain course even on clear Moonless nights that intrigued the researcher.  So the native South African took the insects (Scarabaeus satyrus) into the Johannesburg planetarium where she could control the type of star fields a beetle might see overhead.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dung beetles manage to maintain straight roll paths even on moonless nights
> 
> Importantly, she put the beetles in a container with blackened walls to be sure the animals were not using information from landmarks on the horizon, which in the wild might be trees, for example.  The beetles performed best when confronted with a perfect starry sky projected on to the planetarium dome, but coped just as well when shown only the diffuse bar of light that is the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy.  Dr Dacke thinks it is the bar more than the points of light that is important.  "These beetles have compound eyes," she told the BBC. "It's known that crabs, which also have compound eyes, can see a few of the brightest stars in the sky. Maybe the beetles can do this as well, but we don't know that yet; it's something we're looking at. However, when we show them just the bright stars in the sky, they get lost. So it's not them that the beetles are using to orientate themselves."
> 
> And indeed, in the field, Dr Dacke has seen beetles run in to trouble when the Milky Way briefly lies flat on the horizon at particular times of the year.  The question is how many other animals might use similar night-time navigation.  It has been suggested some frogs and even spiders are using stars for orientation. The Lund researcher is sure there will be many more creatures out there doing it; scientists just need to go look.  "I think night-flying moths and night-flying locusts could benefit from using a star compass similar to the one that the dung beetles are using," she said.  But for the time being, Dr Dacke is concentrating on the dung beetle. She is investigating the strange dance the creature does on top of its ball of muck. The hypothesis is that this behaviour marks the moment the beetle takes its bearings.
> 
> BBC News - Dung beetles guided by Milky Way


----------



## waltky

Granny says, "Dat's right - dems the space aliens dats been flingin' dem meteors at us...

*Mini planet found far beyond Earth's solar system*
_21 Feb.`13 -- Astronomers have found a mini planet beyond our solar system that is the smallest of more than 800 extra-solar planets discovered, scientists said on Wednesday._


> The planet, known as Kepler-37b, is one of three circling a yellow star similar to the sun that is located in the constellation Lyra, about 210 light years away. One light year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).  "We see very large planets and they're uncommon. Earth-sized planets seen to be pretty common, so our guess is that small planets must be even more common," said Thomas Barclay, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.  The smaller the planet, the more difficult it is to find.  Kepler-37b, as well as two sibling planets, were discovered with a NASA space telescope of the same name, which studies light from about 150,000 sun-like stars.  The Kepler telescope works by detecting slight dips in the amount of light coming from target stars caused by orbiting planets passing by, or transiting, relative to the observatory's line of sight. The smaller the planet, the less pronounced the dip.
> 
> Of the 833 confirmed planets found beyond the solar system, 114 were discovered by the Kepler science team, according to the project's website. Nearly 3,000 more Kepler candidate planets are being analyzed.  Planets located in "habitable zones" around their host stars, where water can exist on their surfaces, are of particular interest. Water is believed to be necessary for life.  A planet positioned about where Earth orbits the sun would take a year to fly around its parent star. At least two, and preferably three or more, orbits are needed to confirm that a transit spotted by the Kepler telescope is indeed a planet and not a star flare or some other phenomenon.
> 
> Kepler-37b flies about 10 times closer to its star than Earth circles the sun, which gives it a surface temperature of about 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 degrees Celsius).  "This particular one is nowhere near habitable," University of Florida astronomer Eric Ford said.  Mercury is the closet planet to the sun in our solar system, so scientists compared Kepler-37b to a mini Mercury.  The little planet, which is slightly larger than Earth's moon, has two somewhat larger siblings. Kepler-37c, which is slightly smaller than Venus, circles the trio's parent star in 21 days and Kepler-37d, about twice the size of Earth, orbits in 40 days.
> 
> The whole system would fit within the orbit of Mercury, which circles the sun in 88 days.  "When we first found exo-planets, they were all much larger than anything we have in the inner solar system. We didn't know of anything that was smaller. This is the first time we've been able to probe the smallest range, smaller than anything we have in our solar system," Barclay said.  The research was published in this week's Nature.
> 
> http://news.yahoo.com/mini-planet-found-far-beyond-earths-solar-system-222303598.html


----------



## Mr. H.

Cool video of the asteroid fly-by last Fri-day...

APOD: 2013 February 17 - Asteroid 2012 DA14 Passes the Earth


----------



## Mr. H.

'Comet of the Century': Comet ISON Stars in Mother's Day Webcast Today

30 minute webcast begins in a half hour from now...

_You can watch the Mother's Day Comet ISON webcast live on SPACE.com, courtesy of Slooh Space Camera. [See the latest amazing photos of Comet ISON]_

Happy Day, mothers.


----------



## Mr. H.

Big-ass asteroid in the neighborhood.

Live telescope webcast today at 12:30 pm Central time.

Huge Asteroid 1998 QE2 Sails By Earth on Friday


----------



## Mr. H.

Too cloudy for live broadcast, so they're replaying recorded video from yesterday...


----------



## Mr. H.

First image from Gaia star surveyor looks into the starry depths of the Milky Way | The Verge

_The European Space Agency's star surveyor Gaia has finally sent some photos home from its trip. It captured a gorgeous image of a cluster of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, on its journey to create the most accurate map of our galaxy._


----------



## jamesdeny

Nice Post


----------



## Mr. H.

Stunning Hubble Telescope View Reveals Deep View of Universe (Video, Image)


----------



## Mr. H.

Milky Way's Structure Mapped in Unprecedented Detail

Milky Way's Structure Mapped in Unprecedented Detail


----------



## waltky

Mebbe its a possum sized black hole...

*NASA says they found smallest known galaxy with a black hole*
_Sept. 18, 2014 | NASA said the Hubble Space Telescope has helped them find a monster black hole._


> NASA made a big announcement on Wednesday: the Hubble Space Telescope has found the smallest galaxy ever known.  But that wasn't the big news. It was what astronomers found inside of the galaxy that has them excited: a monster black hole right in the middle of the galaxy.
> 
> In a news release, NASA said the black hole is "five times the mass of the one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy."  The black hole was found inside the dwarf galaxy M60-UCD1. That galaxy is what's called a dwarf galaxy -- 140 million stars are crammed within a diameter of about 300 light-years.
> 
> NASA said if we lived inside of a dwarf galaxy you could see one million stars with the naked eye. We can see about 4,000 stars in our nighttime sky.
> 
> Latest News - Science News Environment Space Exploration - UPI.com


----------



## waltky

That far from it's sun, I wonder why it hasn't gravitated toward another solar system?...

*Astronomers Discover ‘Widest’ Solar System*
_ January 27, 2016 - Astronomers have discovered the largest solar system found so far._


> A team of American, British and Australian astronomers says a planet known as 2MASS J212, once thought to be a “free-floating” or “lonely" planet, is actually in orbit about 1 trillion kilometers from its star.  That is about 7,000 times farther than the Earth is from the sun, and 140 times larger than the orbit of dwarf planet Pluto.  "The planet is not quite as lonely as we first thought, but it's certainly in a very long-distance relationship," said lead author Niall Deacon of the University of Hertfordshire in England.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> An artist's impression of 2MASS J2126.​
> At that distance, the planet orbits its star about once every 900,000 years, according to the astronomers.  While it’s highly doubtful the planet hosts life, if it did, the residents would see their sun as just a “bright star” and “might not even imagine they were connected to it at all,” Deacon said.
> 
> First impression
> 
> 2MASS J2126 was found eight years ago by U.S. researchers in an infrared sky survey, which caused them to classify it as young and likely of a relatively low mass.  Later, Canadian researchers discovered the planet was “a possible member of a 45 million-year-old group of stars and brown dwarfs known as the Tucana Horologium Association.”
> 
> With this information, the astronomers were able to calculate that the planet had a mass of between 12 and 15 times that of Jupiter.  “This is the widest planet system found so far, and both the members of it have been known for eight years,” Deacon said. “But nobody had made the link between the objects before.”  While 2MASS J212 is not a lonely planet, several have been found in recent years. Most of them are gas giants like Jupiter that are just not massive enough to have ignited into shiny stars.  The paper appears in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
> 
> Astronomers Discover ‘Widest’ Solar System


----------



## SixFoot

Trajan said:


> American Horse said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Trajan said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> American Horse said:
> 
> 
> 
> Objects in space like planets are much more likely to collide if they orbit each other or orbit  a common primary object.  In our own solar system Venus doesn&#8217;t deserve to smash into anything, since it&#8217;s orbit is so perfectly circular.
> But Mercury is not so well behaved.  Its orbit &#8211; already the most lopsided &#8211; wildly changes shape.  Influences from faraway Jupiter will eventually make its path so elliptical that it will swing out to Venus.  Then those two worlds MAY collide.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> interesting..what the timeline on that?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> It's indefinite because Mercury's orbital plane wobbles taking it both N & S of the orbital plane of Venus. It could even miss Venus and approach a collision with Earth instead. If that path is followed and  there's near-hit versus a direct hit with Earth, it could even be ejected by the slingshot effect from the solar system, that being the remotest likelihood.
> 
> Edit:  I can see how Earth's diameter can be determined by those tools by taking measurements in two locations a known distance apart if they lay on a north/south line but I don't see the need for digging a hole in the ground unless it be to produce a leveling method for measuring a shadow on a plane.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> well done you're close. they dug a measured hole, put a measured height at the lip,some think a truncated  obelisk ( Mastaba?), the translation I saw surmised that anyway, they  marked the time the hole swallowed its shadow, marked time,  then marked the moment it swallowed its shadow again. The extrapolation from there is relatively simple.
> 
> I'd like to meet the man or woman who thought of the method. Sounds trivial now, but, then? It was genius.
> 
> I am something of a pyramidiot ( lol) I have been to I think 18. I happen to agree with the theory that the Great Pyramid was an all in one  marker that encompasses or that is encompassed measurements that expressed everything they knew of the heavens the earth and mathematics incl. the closest they could get to the value of pi  etc. The Greeks merely rediscovered what they already knew.
Click to expand...


What are your thoughts regarding the theory of the pyramids being used as water pumps to irrigate the desert?

I'm told ancient texts describe Egypt as being much much greener back then.


----------



## American Horse

waltky said:


> That far from it's sun, I wonder why it hasn't gravitated toward another solar system?...
> 
> *Astronomers Discover ‘Widest’ Solar System*
> _ January 27, 2016 - Astronomers have discovered the largest solar system found so far._
> 
> 
> 
> A team of American, British and Australian astronomers says a planet known as 2MASS J212, once thought to be a “free-floating” or “lonely" planet, is actually in orbit about 1 trillion kilometers from its star.  That is about 7,000 times farther than the Earth is from the sun, and 140 times larger than the orbit of dwarf planet Pluto.  "The planet is not quite as lonely as we first thought, but it's certainly in a very long-distance relationship," said lead author Niall Deacon of the University of Hertfordshire in England.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> An artist's impression of 2MASS J2126.​
> At that distance, the planet orbits its star about once every 900,000 years, according to the astronomers.  While it’s highly doubtful the planet hosts life, if it did, the residents would see their sun as just a “bright star” and “might not even imagine they were connected to it at all,” Deacon said.
> 
> First impression
> 
> 2MASS J2126 was found eight years ago by U.S. researchers in an infrared sky survey, which caused them to classify it as young and likely of a relatively low mass.  Later, Canadian researchers discovered the planet was “a possible member of a 45 million-year-old group of stars and brown dwarfs known as the Tucana Horologium Association.”
> 
> With this information, the astronomers were able to calculate that the planet had a mass of between 12 and 15 times that of Jupiter.  “This is the widest planet system found so far, and both the members of it have been known for eight years,” Deacon said. “But nobody had made the link between the objects before.”  While 2MASS J212 is not a lonely planet, several have been found in recent years. Most of them are gas giants like Jupiter that are just not massive enough to have ignited into shiny stars.  The paper appears in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
> 
> Astronomers Discover ‘Widest’ Solar System
Click to expand...

Some quick calculations show that its speed in orbital velocity is about 1,160 fps or only 790 mph.  By comparison earth's orbital velocity is 97,240 fps (18.4 mps) or 66,300 mph.

Which refers back to your comment: Its surprising that a passing star hasn't, in it's lifetime, perturbed it out of orbit around it's primary object.

The answer may lie in the relative youth of it's primary object out-lined in the following quote:
_"The team then looked at the spectrum – the dispersed light – of the star to measure the strength of a feature caused by the element lithium. This is destroyed early on in a star's life so the more lithium it has, the younger it is. TYC 9486-927-1 has stronger signatures of lithium than a group of 45 million-year-old stars (the Tucana Horologium Association) but weaker signatures than a group of 10 million-year-old stars, implying an age between the two."_

One could assume that in its case, a probable lifetime of less than 45 million years has been insufficient for that to have taken place.


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## waltky

So whacha sayin'?

Dey's lithium battery is keepin' it in place?


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## beautress

​
For the past two weeks NASA scientists and satellite data analysts have been working every day producing maps and damage assessments that can be used by disaster managers battling the Woolsey Fire near Los Angeles and the Camp Fire in Northern California. The agency-wide effort also deployed a research aircraft over the Woolsey Fire on Nov. 15 to identify burned areas at risk of mudslides in advance of winter rains expected in the area.

Spearheaded by NASA's Disasters Program in the Earth Science Division, the team produces a variety of data products largely derived from satellite observations, including maps showing the locations of active fires, damage caused by fires, and burned areas that are susceptible to landslides and mudslides.

These products are distributed to agencies working on the ground in California, including the state National Guard, Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), the Governor's Office of Emergency Services, the California Earthquake Clearinghouse and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

More pictures of the story: NASA Mobilizes to Aid California Fires Response​


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## beautress

Here's an updated map:





And there's a lot more to the story here: Updated NASA Damage Map of Camp Fire from Space​


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## beautress

There will be a report on Sunday, November 25, 2018 about the landing on Mars scheduled for Monday, November 26. More information here: National Aeronautics and Space Administration


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## frigidweirdo

waltky said:


> That far from it's sun, I wonder why it hasn't gravitated toward another solar system?...
> 
> *Astronomers Discover ‘Widest’ Solar System*
> _ January 27, 2016 - Astronomers have discovered the largest solar system found so far._
> 
> 
> 
> A team of American, British and Australian astronomers says a planet known as 2MASS J212, once thought to be a “free-floating” or “lonely" planet, is actually in orbit about 1 trillion kilometers from its star.  That is about 7,000 times farther than the Earth is from the sun, and 140 times larger than the orbit of dwarf planet Pluto.  "The planet is not quite as lonely as we first thought, but it's certainly in a very long-distance relationship," said lead author Niall Deacon of the University of Hertfordshire in England.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> An artist's impression of 2MASS J2126.​
> At that distance, the planet orbits its star about once every 900,000 years, according to the astronomers.  While it’s highly doubtful the planet hosts life, if it did, the residents would see their sun as just a “bright star” and “might not even imagine they were connected to it at all,” Deacon said.
> 
> First impression
> 
> 2MASS J2126 was found eight years ago by U.S. researchers in an infrared sky survey, which caused them to classify it as young and likely of a relatively low mass.  Later, Canadian researchers discovered the planet was “a possible member of a 45 million-year-old group of stars and brown dwarfs known as the Tucana Horologium Association.”
> 
> With this information, the astronomers were able to calculate that the planet had a mass of between 12 and 15 times that of Jupiter.  “This is the widest planet system found so far, and both the members of it have been known for eight years,” Deacon said. “But nobody had made the link between the objects before.”  While 2MASS J212 is not a lonely planet, several have been found in recent years. Most of them are gas giants like Jupiter that are just not massive enough to have ignited into shiny stars.  The paper appears in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
> 
> Astronomers Discover ‘Widest’ Solar System
Click to expand...


Maybe there isn't anything else there. Also the power of the sun it revolves around might have something to do with it. 

It orbits TYC 9486-927-1 TYC 9486-927-1 - Wikipedia

I don't really understand the mass and velocity at these high figures. Here's the sun if you want to see whether this Red Dwarf is much stronger than the sun or not. 

Sun - Wikipedia


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## frigidweirdo

SixFoot said:


> Trajan said:
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> American Horse said:
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> Trajan said:
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> American Horse said:
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> Objects in space like planets are much more likely to collide if they orbit each other or orbit  a common primary object.  In our own solar system Venus doesn&#8217;t deserve to smash into anything, since it&#8217;s orbit is so perfectly circular.
> But Mercury is not so well behaved.  Its orbit &#8211; already the most lopsided &#8211; wildly changes shape.  Influences from faraway Jupiter will eventually make its path so elliptical that it will swing out to Venus.  Then those two worlds MAY collide.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> interesting..what the timeline on that?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> It's indefinite because Mercury's orbital plane wobbles taking it both N & S of the orbital plane of Venus. It could even miss Venus and approach a collision with Earth instead. If that path is followed and  there's near-hit versus a direct hit with Earth, it could even be ejected by the slingshot effect from the solar system, that being the remotest likelihood.
> 
> Edit:  I can see how Earth's diameter can be determined by those tools by taking measurements in two locations a known distance apart if they lay on a north/south line but I don't see the need for digging a hole in the ground unless it be to produce a leveling method for measuring a shadow on a plane.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> well done you're close. they dug a measured hole, put a measured height at the lip,some think a truncated  obelisk ( Mastaba?), the translation I saw surmised that anyway, they  marked the time the hole swallowed its shadow, marked time,  then marked the moment it swallowed its shadow again. The extrapolation from there is relatively simple.
> 
> I'd like to meet the man or woman who thought of the method. Sounds trivial now, but, then? It was genius.
> 
> I am something of a pyramidiot ( lol) I have been to I think 18. I happen to agree with the theory that the Great Pyramid was an all in one  marker that encompasses or that is encompassed measurements that expressed everything they knew of the heavens the earth and mathematics incl. the closest they could get to the value of pi  etc. The Greeks merely rediscovered what they already knew.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> What are your thoughts regarding the theory of the pyramids being used as water pumps to irrigate the desert?
> 
> I'm told ancient texts describe Egypt as being much much greener back then.
Click to expand...


Well, the Earth was probably colder back then, so more water would have stayed in the ground rather than burning up. I went to Egypt in April one year and threw up one morning from dehydration. Simply it's so hot even at night that you can dehydrate without enough water. (To put this into context I didn't throw up again for 17 years until I went to India and ate something bad). 

That the most powerful countries on the planet now are more or less on a level with northern Europe, is hardly surprising. Back then northern Europe was cold and miserable. Spain, Portugal, before that the Romans, before that the Greeks and Egyptians. Going further south with time.


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