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Joined: Thu January 10, 2013 2:19 am Posts: 8892 Location: SOUTH PORTLAND
stip wrote:
turned2black wrote:
stip wrote:
where did the 4 dimensional star that caused the black hole come from? I'm not sure the inability to explain the singularity is a problem with that theory. If this explains other elements of our universe than great.
Why did it need to come from anywhere? Why can't the universe have always existed? Singularity and first cause are really just religious dogma at this point. If someone thinks a creator made the universe, then who created the creator? If the answer is the creator has always existed, then why the hell can't the universe have always existed? It's an endless cycle.
where did the 4 dimensional star that caused the black hole come from? I'm not sure the inability to explain the singularity is a problem with that theory. If this explains other elements of our universe than great.
Why did it need to come from anywhere? Why can't the universe have always existed? Singularity and first cause are really just religious dogma at this point. If someone thinks a creator made the universe, then who created the creator? If the answer is the creator has always existed, then why the hell can't the universe have always existed? It's an endless cycle.
Exoplanet tally soars above 1,000 Rich exoplanet system discovered Astronomers may have identified one of the richest planetary systems yet.
The discovery of a seventh planet around the dwarf star KIC 11442793 could be a record, according to two separate teams of researchers.
The system bears some similarities to our own, but all seven planets orbit much closer to their host star, which lies some 2,500 light-years from Earth.
The crowded solar system is described in two papers published on the pre-print server Arxiv.org.
Continue reading the main story “ Start Quote
We keep finding, in these niche cases, in these odd cases, in these complicated cases that humans can beat the computers”
Dr Chris Lintott University of Oxford One of the identifications was made by volunteers using the Planet Hunters website. The site was set up to allow volunteers to sift through the public data from Nasa's Kepler space telescope - which was launched to search for so-called exoplanets - worlds orbiting distant stars.
Kepler uses the transit method to discover new planets, which entails looking for the dip in light as an alien world passes in front of its host star. But there is simply too much data for mission scientists to examine every light curve, so they developed computer programmes to search for the signature of a planetary transit.
"This is the first seven-planet system from Kepler, using a transiting search. We think [the identification] is very secure," said Chris Lintott, from the University of Oxford, co-author on the Planet Hunters paper.
"With a transiting system, once you get multiple planets, the odds of them being false positives are very small."
Continue reading the main story Exoplanets
An exoplanet exists outside our Solar System Many of those found so far are large planets believed to resemble Jupiter or Neptune The first exoplanet was discovered in 1992, orbiting a pulsar A few years later, the planet 51 Pegasi B was found orbiting a star similar to the Sun Hundreds of extrasolar planets have been confirmed since, and thousands more "candidates" await confirmation Dr Lintott's team has submitted their research to the Astronomical Journal for peer review. Another team of astronomers from several European countries has submitted a separate paper outlining their independent discovery of the seventh planet to the Astrophysical Journal.
The new planet is the fifth furthest from its parent star, orbiting with a period of nearly 125 days.
With a radius of 2.8 times that of the Earth, it fits into a family that now includes two roughly Earth sized worlds, three "super-Earths" and two larger bodies.
"It actually looks like our Solar System in one sense, with all the small planets on the inside and the big planets on the outside. And that's not necessarily what we always see," said co-author Robert Simpson, also from Oxford University.
While there might be resemblances to our Solar System, all seven planets are closer to their host star. In fact they would all fit within the Earth's distance from the Sun, making this a very crowded neighbourhood.
"This is one of the reasons they are easy to see, because the closer they are to their sun, the more frequently they go around it," said Dr Simpson.
However, the Planet Hunters team carried out simulations showing that the planetary system should be a stable one.
Dr Lintott, who co-presents the BBC's Sky at Night programme and helped found Planet Hunters, added: "Everything we know about this system tells us [the seventh planet] should have been found using the automatic detection routines. But it wasn't."
"A seven-planet system is very complicated so you get a sense of why the automatic routine might have missed out - it gets confused by the presence of the other transits.
"Looking for these transits seems like a task that's perfectly designed for computers. But we keep finding, in these niche cases, in these odd cases, in these complicated cases that humans can beat the computers."
Another star, HD 10180, has been claimed to have either seven, or nine planetary signals. A distant sun called GJ 887C may also have a family of seven planets.
Commenting on the paper by the Planet Hunters team, Andrew Collier Cameron, professor of astronomy at the University of St Andrews, said: "It's intriguing that a system as well-studied as KOI-351 can still harbour hidden surprises that can only be winkled out by human eyes."
He added: "This is a perennial problem in transit hunting, of which we are only too acutely aware in our own ground-based searches.
"The best transit signal-detection algorithms developed to date still come a very poor second to the human visual system when it comes to pattern recognition. Still, we have to rely on machines, because of the sheer volume of data produced by enterprises like transit searches."
Global Effort Needed to Defend Earth from Asteroids, Astronauts Tell UN
By Laura Poppick Staff Writer
NEW YORK — Members of the United Nations met with distinguished astronauts and cosmonauts this week in New York to begin implementing the first-ever international contingency plan for defending Earth against catastrophic asteroid strikes.
Six of the space travelers involved in these U.N. discussions discussed the asteroid defense effort Friday (Oct. 25) in a news conference hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson at the American Museum of Natural History. Their goal: to drive home the very-real threats posed by near-Earth objects (NEOs), or asteroids traveling within the radius of Earth's orbit with the sun.
Scientists estimate that there are roughly 1 million near-Earth asteroids that could potentially pose a threat to the planet, but only a small fraction of these have actually been detected by telescopes. There are about 100 times more asteroids lurking in space than have ever been located, said Edward Lu, a former NASA astronaut and co-founder of the non-profit B612 Foundation advocating asteroid defense strategies. "Our challenge is to find these asteroids first, before they find us," Lu said.
To help achieve this goal, Lu co-founded an organization called the B612 Foundation in 2002. Today, the group is developing a privately built infrared space telescope — called the Sentinel Space Telescope — with the sole purpose of locating threatening asteroids. The foundation hopes to launch the telescope by 2018.
The Sentinel telescope will help space agencies identify threatening NEOs years before they hit Earth, providing governments and space agencies with enough time to take action, Lu and his colleagues said. Such action would entail deploying a spacecraft — or multiple spacecrafts, depending on the size of the space rock — toward the asteroid in order to smack it off course.
The technology and funds to deflect an asteroid in this way already exist, the panel explained, but the Association of Space Explorers, a group that includes active and retired astronauts, decided to involve the United Nations in their decision-making efforts to avoid nationally biased action in the event of an emergency.
"The question is, which way do you move [the asteroid]?" former NASA astronaut and B612 co-founder Russell Schweickart said in the news conference. "If something goes wrong in the middle of the deflection, you have now caused havoc in some other nation that was not at risk. And, therefore, this decision of what to do, how to do it and what systems to use have to be coordinated internationally. That's why we took this to the United Nations."
The panel hopes that the discussions with the United Nations this week —which extend from discussions dating back to 2008, when the panel presented the United Nations with the first draft of a report titled "Asteroid Threats: A Call for Global Response" —will improve public awareness of the threats at hand, and encourage policymakers to develop plans and appoint leaders to deal with threats in a timely manner.
The explosion of a truck-size asteroid over Chelyabinsk, Russia, this past February —which blew out windows throughout the entire city and injured more than 1,000 people —helped draw public attention to what the panelists described as the often-overlooked and underappreciated threat to the planet.
"It did make a difference in policymakers realizing that this is not just a science-fiction concept, or something that will happen in 100 or 500 years in the future," Thomas Jones, former NASA astronaut and senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, told SPACE.com at the news conference. "The fact that it happened right now, I think, enforced the reality."
The recommendations that the group presented to the United Nations this week provide an outline of what governments will ultimately implement in the event of an emergency. However, the details of these recommendations are still in the works, Schweickart said.
'Dramatic' Partial Solar Eclipse Could Wow U.S. East Coast Sunday
By Mike Wall Senior Writer
An amazing partial solar eclipse will be visible across much of Eastern Seaboard as the sun rises on Sunday (Nov. 3), but only if Mother Nature allows, skywatching experts say.
The celestial event is known as a hybrid solar eclipse, a rare event in which the moon blocks most of the sun for some regions on Earth, but covers the star entirely from others. Along the east coast of North America, only a partial solar eclipse will be visible, weather permitting.
"It'll be a weird and dramatic spectacle, if your east horizon is clear," Robert Naeye, editor in chief of Sky & Telescope magazine, said in a statement.
Solar eclipses occur when the new moon lines up directly between the sun and Earth, appearing to cover the disk of the sun as seen from the planet's surface. Because the moon's orbit is tilted, it does not always line up perfectly, which is why there is not a total solar eclipse every month. Partial alignments allow for partial solar eclipses, and when the moon is too close to Earth to block the entire sun it creates a "ring of fire" eclipse, or annular eclipse.
Sunday's solar eclipse will begin as annular eclipse and transition to a total eclipse for observers in Africa. The sun will appear totally obscured for viewers along the path of totality in parts of equatorial Africa. A partial phase of the eclipse, meanwhile, will be visible across most of Africa, the Middle East, southernmost Europe, northern South America and the Caribbean. Observers on the East Coast will be treated to an amazing photographic and skywatching opportunity, provided they have proper solar filters and eclipse glasses for safe viewing.
Cartographer Michael Zeiler of Eclipse-Maps.com has created a series of amazing maps chronicling the entire timeline of Sunday's solar eclipse. You can see those maps at his Nov. 3 eclipse website here.
Experts at Sky & Telescope magazine say early risers looking for the partial solar eclipse in the eastern United States and Canada should get to a place as far east as possible with an open view of the eastern horizon. There, they should be able to see the sun rise — at about 6:30 a.m. local time — while partially blocked by the silhouette of the new moon.
From Boston and New York, the sun will seem to be more than 50 percent covered by the moon, while from Miami and Washington, D.C., our nearest star will appear 47 percent obscured.
The partial solar eclipse will only be visible for about 45 minutes in most places, fading as the sun climbs higher into the morning sky.
"I'll be out bright and early," Alan MacRobert, a senior editor of Sky & Telescope in Cambridge, Mass., said in a statement. "I've got a hillside scouted out with a good view of where the sun comes up."
Editor's note: If you snap an amazing photo of Sunday's solar eclipse or any other celestial sight that you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please contact managing editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.
Joined: Tue January 01, 2013 2:04 pm Posts: 37156 Location: September 2020 Poster of the Month
Jupiter's Triple Shadow Transit
Explanation: This webcam and telescope image of banded gas giant Jupiter shows the transit of three shadows cast by Jupiter's moons in progress, captured in Belgian skies on October 12 at 0528 UT. Such a three shadow transit is a relatively rare event, even for a large planet with many moons. Visible in the frame are the three Galilean moons responsible, Callisto at the far left edge, Io closest to Jupiter's disk, and Europa below and just left of Io. Of their shadows on the sunlit Jovian cloud tops, Callisto casts the most elongated one near the planet's south polar region at the bottom. Io's shadow is above and right of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Of course viewed from Jupiter's perspective, these shadow crossings could be seen as solar eclipses, analogous to the Moon's shadow crossing the sunlit face of planet Earth.
An enigma of a man shaped hole in the wall between reality and the soul of the devil.
Joined: Tue January 01, 2013 5:13 pm Posts: 39764 Location: 6000 feet beyond man and time.
turned2black wrote:
stip wrote:
turned2black wrote:
stip wrote:
where did the 4 dimensional star that caused the black hole come from? I'm not sure the inability to explain the singularity is a problem with that theory. If this explains other elements of our universe than great.
Why did it need to come from anywhere? Why can't the universe have always existed? Singularity and first cause are really just religious dogma at this point. If someone thinks a creator made the universe, then who created the creator? If the answer is the creator has always existed, then why the hell can't the universe have always existed? It's an endless cycle.
Totally agree. That was kind of my point
The Big Bang would really just be the state of the universe however many billions of years ago (though the nature of time is confusing to me.). It could be the beginning of our universe, if our universe is only one of many among the multiverse. Maybe we are in a bubble universe inside of another? Its enough to make my brain explode.
I don't see why its religious dogma. The best facts we can gather point to something like that. Its constantly being revised.
I caught just a bit of the eclipse this morning, we have some mountains/hills that caused me to miss about 25 minutes of it, so when the sun did make it over them there was only a small part of the bottom of it eclipsed. Still pretty cool
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