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If you attempted to count all the stars in a galaxy at a rate of one every second it would take around 3,000 years to count them all.
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Astronomy and Space Facts!!!!
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Just 20 seconds worth of fuel remained when Apollo 11's lunar module landed on the moon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbjxH05K-GI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbjxH05K-GI
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Muhammad Salih Thattvi headed the task of creating a massive, seamless celestial globe using a secret wax casting method in the Mughal Empire, the famous celestial globe of Muhammad Salih Tahtawi is inscribed with Arabic and Persian inscriptions and was completed in the year 1631
http://www.muslimheritage.com/topics/default.cfm?articleID=832
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Moonset from the space station
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQOjW42Et7E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQOjW42Et7E
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Wormholes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHRtdyW9ong
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jIeHsefCPk
Worm holes are probably the most loved physical phenomena by sci if writers, because they simply are so extremely funky, they could offer time travel, travel into parallel universes, as well as just a short cut to places light years away in our own universe.
Let's talk about the short cuts; when travelling through a worm hole you get from one place to another in a shorter time then it would take you to travell, with the same speed as you travelled trough the wormhole, in 'the normal way'. But when you travel through a worm hole you don't really travel faster then light, since what you really do is to "cheat" space-time, so you're not really travelling through our familiar 3 dimensions but taking a short cut in the fourth dimension called hyperspace.
Imagine a circle and that the outline is the normal three dimensions that we move in. Now if you want to get from one side of the circle to the other and only move in the outline(our three dimensions) you would get to the other side much slower then some one that travelled straight through the circle(through the fourth dimension) and the one that moved through the circle didn't even have to move faster then you! The outline of the circel reprecents space time, which is the thing on which every thing in the universe exists. And it's when you warp this spacetime into little pockets on two different places, the place were you are and the place were you want to go, and then connect those two pockets to create a tunnel between the two different places that you get a wormhole. Also note that the universe doesn't have to be circular in order for wormholes to occur. It could be flat, bent or have any shape it want.
You could say that there's two different 'kinds' of worm holes. It has been suggested that if you fall into a black hole you come out of a white hole. Then there should be a wormhole connecting the black hole to the white hole. However this worm hole would be a oneway street, since you can only fall into a black hole and out of a white hole. They there are worm hole sollutions which work both ways, these are the once you usually talk about when talking about wormholes. And it's those which I will discuss here.
As you can see this means being able to travel to other galaxies which normally would normally take thousands of years even with a space craft moving at the speed of light(note that the crew on such a ship however wouldn't age a bit, but when they returned to earth it would be a couple of thousands of years later. Which isn't very funny if you think about it).
Also travel into other universes. Think of universes as bubbles, and there's no connection between them. So then, you could make a wormhole between them, as a gate from our universe to another. Pretty neat. But the neatest thing of all is the possibility of time travel, this I will discuss later.
The problem with wormholes is that they will collapse so fast that nothing will have time to travel through them. This is because if a body which is bending spacetime is removed, spacetime wont stay that bend anymore. It will smoothen out and become flat again. And the same thing with wormhole, the severe warping which causes them to exist isn't natural and spacetime wants to become flat again, so the wormhole collapse really fast. And if that wasn't enough, as soon as the wormhole opens, radiation will start to travel through it, and the wormholes gravity will accelerate it to very high speeds. And these particles will of course bombard the throat(the throat of the wormhole is the tunnel which you travel through) of the wormhole and make it collapse even faster, not to mention that anyone trying to travel through it will get a hell of a suntan. But there is a way to hold the wormhole open. Normal matter falls downward, then would it be possible to create a type of negative matter which falls upward, matter with anti-gravity? Theoreticly there is something called exotic matter which has this ability, although it has never been seen or created. This matter could be used to hold the wormhole up by pushing outward on the sides of its troat. Thereby keeping it stable. It should be said that energy is a relative thing and it doesn't have to be negative in all reference frames(reference frames is relativity and basically means different observers), it could be positive in some. But as seen from the wormholes reference frame it has to be negative.
So how do you create a wormhole? Well there are a number of ways.
It has been suggested that wormholes occur naturally, but only on very small scales. Normally on our macroscopically scales, space time is flat(if something is not bending it). But if you zoom in on it through the particle level and down to something called the Planck length(10-33cm) spacetime will get more and more severely warped and not smooth at all any more. So at this level were space time warps naturally and in a chaotic fashion, you should be able to find tiny natural wormholes. And then it would be possible to take one of them and enlarge it so that we could travel through.
Another possibility is to bend spacetime our self, already on macroscopically scales. Then move this little pocket which we just created to the place were we want to go, tear a hole into the space time in our pocket and the space time at the place we wanted to go to, and then "sew" the two rips together to create a tunnel(the worm hole). The problem is that the ripping part would create a singularity, and singularities are very nasty things, which have a tendency to first stretch people into spaghetti and then crush them into very small things. So we don't want a singularity but is there a way to create a wormhole without a singularity? Yes there is, the problem being that at the moment it is being created, time has to be distorted in all reference frames. Which means that at that particular moment you would be able to travel both forward and backward in time. So it's not certain that this works. But at least it brings me to my next topic:
for more
http://www.physlib.com/worm_holes.html
http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Wormholes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHRtdyW9ong
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jIeHsefCPk
Worm holes are probably the most loved physical phenomena by sci if writers, because they simply are so extremely funky, they could offer time travel, travel into parallel universes, as well as just a short cut to places light years away in our own universe.
Let's talk about the short cuts; when travelling through a worm hole you get from one place to another in a shorter time then it would take you to travell, with the same speed as you travelled trough the wormhole, in 'the normal way'. But when you travel through a worm hole you don't really travel faster then light, since what you really do is to "cheat" space-time, so you're not really travelling through our familiar 3 dimensions but taking a short cut in the fourth dimension called hyperspace.
Imagine a circle and that the outline is the normal three dimensions that we move in. Now if you want to get from one side of the circle to the other and only move in the outline(our three dimensions) you would get to the other side much slower then some one that travelled straight through the circle(through the fourth dimension) and the one that moved through the circle didn't even have to move faster then you! The outline of the circel reprecents space time, which is the thing on which every thing in the universe exists. And it's when you warp this spacetime into little pockets on two different places, the place were you are and the place were you want to go, and then connect those two pockets to create a tunnel between the two different places that you get a wormhole. Also note that the universe doesn't have to be circular in order for wormholes to occur. It could be flat, bent or have any shape it want.
You could say that there's two different 'kinds' of worm holes. It has been suggested that if you fall into a black hole you come out of a white hole. Then there should be a wormhole connecting the black hole to the white hole. However this worm hole would be a oneway street, since you can only fall into a black hole and out of a white hole. They there are worm hole sollutions which work both ways, these are the once you usually talk about when talking about wormholes. And it's those which I will discuss here.
As you can see this means being able to travel to other galaxies which normally would normally take thousands of years even with a space craft moving at the speed of light(note that the crew on such a ship however wouldn't age a bit, but when they returned to earth it would be a couple of thousands of years later. Which isn't very funny if you think about it).
Also travel into other universes. Think of universes as bubbles, and there's no connection between them. So then, you could make a wormhole between them, as a gate from our universe to another. Pretty neat. But the neatest thing of all is the possibility of time travel, this I will discuss later.
The problem with wormholes is that they will collapse so fast that nothing will have time to travel through them. This is because if a body which is bending spacetime is removed, spacetime wont stay that bend anymore. It will smoothen out and become flat again. And the same thing with wormhole, the severe warping which causes them to exist isn't natural and spacetime wants to become flat again, so the wormhole collapse really fast. And if that wasn't enough, as soon as the wormhole opens, radiation will start to travel through it, and the wormholes gravity will accelerate it to very high speeds. And these particles will of course bombard the throat(the throat of the wormhole is the tunnel which you travel through) of the wormhole and make it collapse even faster, not to mention that anyone trying to travel through it will get a hell of a suntan. But there is a way to hold the wormhole open. Normal matter falls downward, then would it be possible to create a type of negative matter which falls upward, matter with anti-gravity? Theoreticly there is something called exotic matter which has this ability, although it has never been seen or created. This matter could be used to hold the wormhole up by pushing outward on the sides of its troat. Thereby keeping it stable. It should be said that energy is a relative thing and it doesn't have to be negative in all reference frames(reference frames is relativity and basically means different observers), it could be positive in some. But as seen from the wormholes reference frame it has to be negative.
So how do you create a wormhole? Well there are a number of ways.
It has been suggested that wormholes occur naturally, but only on very small scales. Normally on our macroscopically scales, space time is flat(if something is not bending it). But if you zoom in on it through the particle level and down to something called the Planck length(10-33cm) spacetime will get more and more severely warped and not smooth at all any more. So at this level were space time warps naturally and in a chaotic fashion, you should be able to find tiny natural wormholes. And then it would be possible to take one of them and enlarge it so that we could travel through.
Another possibility is to bend spacetime our self, already on macroscopically scales. Then move this little pocket which we just created to the place were we want to go, tear a hole into the space time in our pocket and the space time at the place we wanted to go to, and then "sew" the two rips together to create a tunnel(the worm hole). The problem is that the ripping part would create a singularity, and singularities are very nasty things, which have a tendency to first stretch people into spaghetti and then crush them into very small things. So we don't want a singularity but is there a way to create a wormhole without a singularity? Yes there is, the problem being that at the moment it is being created, time has to be distorted in all reference frames. Which means that at that particular moment you would be able to travel both forward and backward in time. So it's not certain that this works. But at least it brings me to my next topic:
for more
http://www.physlib.com/worm_holes.html
http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Wormholes
Last edited:
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What are Years?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53glKEPzElA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53glKEPzElA
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Why is space dark?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxJ4M7tyLRE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxJ4M7tyLRE
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What Can Frogs See That We Can't?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cztocbHiiqQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cztocbHiiqQ
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Gamma-Ray Bursts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWQP-Sm9rdU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZnHO0B0hfA
About once a day, something remarkable happens: the sky is lit up by a brilliant flash of energy. For a fleeting few seconds, this mysterious burst - coming from a seemingly random direction, different every time - ranks among the brightest objects in the sky.
Yet no one has ever witnessed such a flash directly: the energy comes almost entirely in the form of gamma rays, which human eyes cannot detect. Even if our eyes were sensitive to this extremely energetic form of radiation, gamma rays cannot penetrate the atmosphere. Only via orbiting satellites do we know of the presence of these mysterious blasts.
These events are known as gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs. They represent the most powerful explosions of energy in the cosmos since the Big Bang itself, corresponding to the equivalent of a thousand Earths vaporized into pure energy in a matter of seconds. One of the most enduring mysteries of the universe since their discovery in the 1960s, only recently have they begun to reveal their secrets.
What is a gamma-ray burst?
We define a gamma-ray burst based on its observational properties: an intense flash of gamma rays, lasting anywhere from a fraction of a second to up to a few minutes.
Gamma-ray bursts have a few other common features. We believe them to be beamed - the energy does not escape from the explosion everywhere equally, but is focused into a narrow jet (or more likely, two oppositely-directed jets.) The burst itself is also normally followed by a much longer-lived (but also much fainter) signal, visible at optical and other wavelengths. This so-called "afterglow", discovered only in the 1990s, allows us to pinpoint the origin of the GRB - something not possible from the short-lived gamma-ray signal alone.
The faint, distant galaxy in which a gamma-ray burst exploded in 1997 appears as a faint smudge in the center of this image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Even in images from the Hubble, most gamma-ray bursts originate from so far away that the galaxies in which they occur appear blurry and faint.
Where do gamma-ray bursts come from?
For a long time, it was believed that GRBs must come from within our own Galaxy. It seemed impossible that they could be much more distant: for a gamma-ray burst to have come from a distant galaxy, it would have to be incredibly powerful to explain its observed brightness.
And yet we now know that, except perhaps for a few rare exceptions, most GRBs do indeed come from other galaxies - often from among the most distant galaxies in the known universe! The closest GRB known to date is still over a hundred million light-years away, and most of them come from billions of light years. To outshine our own Galaxy's closest stars in our sky from distances that are literally billions of times further away, stupendous amounts of energy are required.
What makes a gamma-ray burst?
No one knows for sure! Our best theory to date is based upon several observed facts. First, the only way to generate huge quantities is via gravitational collapse, and black holes can be very efficient at turning this energy into explosive power. Second, some of the closest GRBs appear to occur simultaneously with supernovae: explosions of stars at the end of their lives. Finally, almost all GRBs happen in galaxies containing large numbers of very massive stars.
Our conclusion: GRBs happen when an extremely massive star, at the end of its life, runs out of fuel and can no longer support itself. It collapses onto its core, crushing it into a black hole. Matter from the star falls towards the black hole at its center, and before it falls in, some of its energy is focused into powerful jets that pummel out of the north and south poles of the star, making a gamma-ray burst. The rest of the star explodes as a supernova soon afterwards.
Other origins are also possible. For example, some GRBs may be due to two ultra-dense neutron stars smashing into each other; and a small fraction may be magnetic eruptions on neutron stars in very nearby galaxies.
The narrow twin beams of a gamma-ray burst blasts out of a dying star in this artist's conception, just as the star itself begins to explode in a supernova. Both events were triggered by the collapse of the star's core under its own gravity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWQP-Sm9rdU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZnHO0B0hfA
About once a day, something remarkable happens: the sky is lit up by a brilliant flash of energy. For a fleeting few seconds, this mysterious burst - coming from a seemingly random direction, different every time - ranks among the brightest objects in the sky.
Yet no one has ever witnessed such a flash directly: the energy comes almost entirely in the form of gamma rays, which human eyes cannot detect. Even if our eyes were sensitive to this extremely energetic form of radiation, gamma rays cannot penetrate the atmosphere. Only via orbiting satellites do we know of the presence of these mysterious blasts.
These events are known as gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs. They represent the most powerful explosions of energy in the cosmos since the Big Bang itself, corresponding to the equivalent of a thousand Earths vaporized into pure energy in a matter of seconds. One of the most enduring mysteries of the universe since their discovery in the 1960s, only recently have they begun to reveal their secrets.
What is a gamma-ray burst?
We define a gamma-ray burst based on its observational properties: an intense flash of gamma rays, lasting anywhere from a fraction of a second to up to a few minutes.
Gamma-ray bursts have a few other common features. We believe them to be beamed - the energy does not escape from the explosion everywhere equally, but is focused into a narrow jet (or more likely, two oppositely-directed jets.) The burst itself is also normally followed by a much longer-lived (but also much fainter) signal, visible at optical and other wavelengths. This so-called "afterglow", discovered only in the 1990s, allows us to pinpoint the origin of the GRB - something not possible from the short-lived gamma-ray signal alone.
The faint, distant galaxy in which a gamma-ray burst exploded in 1997 appears as a faint smudge in the center of this image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Even in images from the Hubble, most gamma-ray bursts originate from so far away that the galaxies in which they occur appear blurry and faint.
Where do gamma-ray bursts come from?
For a long time, it was believed that GRBs must come from within our own Galaxy. It seemed impossible that they could be much more distant: for a gamma-ray burst to have come from a distant galaxy, it would have to be incredibly powerful to explain its observed brightness.
And yet we now know that, except perhaps for a few rare exceptions, most GRBs do indeed come from other galaxies - often from among the most distant galaxies in the known universe! The closest GRB known to date is still over a hundred million light-years away, and most of them come from billions of light years. To outshine our own Galaxy's closest stars in our sky from distances that are literally billions of times further away, stupendous amounts of energy are required.
What makes a gamma-ray burst?
No one knows for sure! Our best theory to date is based upon several observed facts. First, the only way to generate huge quantities is via gravitational collapse, and black holes can be very efficient at turning this energy into explosive power. Second, some of the closest GRBs appear to occur simultaneously with supernovae: explosions of stars at the end of their lives. Finally, almost all GRBs happen in galaxies containing large numbers of very massive stars.
Our conclusion: GRBs happen when an extremely massive star, at the end of its life, runs out of fuel and can no longer support itself. It collapses onto its core, crushing it into a black hole. Matter from the star falls towards the black hole at its center, and before it falls in, some of its energy is focused into powerful jets that pummel out of the north and south poles of the star, making a gamma-ray burst. The rest of the star explodes as a supernova soon afterwards.
Other origins are also possible. For example, some GRBs may be due to two ultra-dense neutron stars smashing into each other; and a small fraction may be magnetic eruptions on neutron stars in very nearby galaxies.
The narrow twin beams of a gamma-ray burst blasts out of a dying star in this artist's conception, just as the star itself begins to explode in a supernova. Both events were triggered by the collapse of the star's core under its own gravity.
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MRSN
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There is enough energy in one bolt of lightning to power a home for two weeks.
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While in space astronomers can get taller, but at the same time their hearts can get smaller.
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Hipparchus was the first person to measure the distance to the moon in 2nd century BC. He was out by only 16,000 miles.
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The Sun produces so much energy, that every second the core releases the equivalent of 100 billion nuclear bombs.
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There are potentially 17 billion Earth sized planets in the Milky Way
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If all the ice on Mars turned to liquid the planet would be covered in an ocean 80ft deep.
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400 trillion tonnes of water is evaporated every year by the Sun from our planet
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The meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs was thought to have the power of a million 'H' bombs
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4 KB is about the amount of memory the moon landing spaceship computers had.
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The fastest hurricane speed recorded on Earth was about 200 mph. The winds on Saturn's equator are traveling at 640 mph
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A neutron star can spin around some 500 times in 1 second
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1 star day is 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds long. This is how long it takes for the stars to return to their previous position in the sky. Image credit: ESO/A.Santerne
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A comet's tail is made by the solar wind. So a comet moving away from the Sun will have it's tail in front of it! Image by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos
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If two metals touch in space they can strongly stick together. A process known as cold welding.
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it takes 30,000 yrs for the the light from the sun to travel from the core to us but only 8 minutes from the suns surface to earth.
A photon of light only takes about 8 minutes to traverse the distance in space between us and the Sun. However, the photon produced in the Sun's core from the fusion reaction undergoes the "random walk". This is where the photon zigzags as it bumps into other particles in the core. It can be absorbed and emitted many times. Incredibly, the 30,000 years from the photon being made to it reaching us is a conservative estimate. It could well be hundreds or even millions of years. The source if you want to learn more is the History channels series The Universe episode: The Secrets of the Sun.
A photon of light only takes about 8 minutes to traverse the distance in space between us and the Sun. However, the photon produced in the Sun's core from the fusion reaction undergoes the "random walk". This is where the photon zigzags as it bumps into other particles in the core. It can be absorbed and emitted many times. Incredibly, the 30,000 years from the photon being made to it reaching us is a conservative estimate. It could well be hundreds or even millions of years. The source if you want to learn more is the History channels series The Universe episode: The Secrets of the Sun.
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Footprints left by the astronauts on the moon would theoretically last forever due to the lack of wind.
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Venus' surface is so hot you can cook a pizza on it in 9 seconds.
Image by NASA
Image by NASA
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It Rains Diamond On Neptune and Uranus.
Uranus and Neptune may literally rain diamonds, which then pile up miles-thick. And those are not the only diamonds being produced in space. You or may not know that there are some planets covered in diamonds. Well some planetary scientists think we just might have a few of them in this very system.
These scientists believe that Uranus and Neptune might actually rain diamonds to such a degree that they’re piled up miles above ground level. Both of those planets are nearly four times as big as this one, too. How could it happen? Well you probably know diamonds are created due to extreme pressure. The atmospheres of both planets contain methane, which is a hydrocarbon.
The atmospheres, which are extremely dense, have temperatures up to 12,000 degrees fahrenheit and pressures up to 6 million times that of our own atmosphere. Basically all that means is the intense pressure and temperature of the planets turns the methane in the atmosphere to diamonds- raining diamonds from the sky.
Uranus and Neptune may literally rain diamonds, which then pile up miles-thick. And those are not the only diamonds being produced in space. You or may not know that there are some planets covered in diamonds. Well some planetary scientists think we just might have a few of them in this very system.
These scientists believe that Uranus and Neptune might actually rain diamonds to such a degree that they’re piled up miles above ground level. Both of those planets are nearly four times as big as this one, too. How could it happen? Well you probably know diamonds are created due to extreme pressure. The atmospheres of both planets contain methane, which is a hydrocarbon.
The atmospheres, which are extremely dense, have temperatures up to 12,000 degrees fahrenheit and pressures up to 6 million times that of our own atmosphere. Basically all that means is the intense pressure and temperature of the planets turns the methane in the atmosphere to diamonds- raining diamonds from the sky.
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It Rains Diamond On Neptune and Uranus.
Uranus and Neptune may literally rain diamonds, which then pile up miles-thick. And those are not the only diamonds being produced in space. You or may not know that there are some planets covered in diamonds. Well some planetary scientists think we just might have a few of them in this very system.
These scientists believe that Uranus and Neptune might actually rain diamonds to such a degree that they’re piled up miles above ground level. Both of those planets are nearly four times as big as this one, too. How could it happen? Well you probably know diamonds are created due to extreme pressure. The atmospheres of both planets contain methane, which is a hydrocarbon.
The atmospheres, which are extremely dense, have temperatures up to 12,000 degrees fahrenheit and pressures up to 6 million times that of our own atmosphere. Basically all that means is the intense pressure and temperature of the planets turns the methane in the atmosphere to diamonds- raining diamonds from the sky.
Uranus and Neptune may literally rain diamonds, which then pile up miles-thick. And those are not the only diamonds being produced in space. You or may not know that there are some planets covered in diamonds. Well some planetary scientists think we just might have a few of them in this very system.
These scientists believe that Uranus and Neptune might actually rain diamonds to such a degree that they’re piled up miles above ground level. Both of those planets are nearly four times as big as this one, too. How could it happen? Well you probably know diamonds are created due to extreme pressure. The atmospheres of both planets contain methane, which is a hydrocarbon.
The atmospheres, which are extremely dense, have temperatures up to 12,000 degrees fahrenheit and pressures up to 6 million times that of our own atmosphere. Basically all that means is the intense pressure and temperature of the planets turns the methane in the atmosphere to diamonds- raining diamonds from the sky.
SwingNSeam
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subhanAllah..thats just amazing ^ especially post# 80
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Think you mean clockwise?
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The object doesn't have to move at the speed faster than light, but the space around it can be distorted. Theoretically an object can travel at a speed greater than light, without defying the theory of relativity.
Interesting read below:
http://techland.time.com/2012/09/19/nasa-actually-working-on-faster-than-light-warp-drive/
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wow some mind blowin facts above..keep it up MRSN!
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lol no the chances of returning back safely are I think closer to none even if we land there safely..
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I forgot to post yesterday....
Brilliant Job...spent a good 1 hr 15 min last night reading this.....
Brilliant Job...spent a good 1 hr 15 min last night reading this.....
There is no end, it keeps growing faster than you can reach its end
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is it the only universe we have or something like parallel universes also exist?
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thanks guys!!..and TM, in theories yes it does..for more watch out this documentary explains a lot..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HENLeZ1TcHI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ds47ozzSrU
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MRSN
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Uranus is tilted to such a degree that Winter lasts 21 years there.
MRSN
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This is the spectacular Orion Nebula
MRSN
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Saturn's moon titan is the only moon to have a reasonable atmosphere, it also has lakes, pebbles and rivers but made from ice and methane instead
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The star Epsilon Aurigae dims every 27 years due to a mysterious dark object eclipsing it periodically.
For almost two centuries, humans have looked up at a bright star called Epsilon Aurigae and watched with their own eyes as it seemed to disappear into the night sky, slowly fading before coming back to life again. Today, as another dimming of the system is underway, mysteries about the star persist. Though astronomers know that Epsilon Aurigae is eclipsed by a dark companion object every 27 years, the nature of both the star and object has remained unclear.
Now, new observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope -- in combination with archived ultraviolet, visible and other infrared data -- point to one of two competing theories, and a likely solution to this age-old puzzle. One theory holds that the bright star is a massive supergiant, periodically eclipsed by two tight-knit stars inside a swirling, dusty disk. The second theory holds that the bright star is in fact a dying star with a lot less mass, periodically eclipsed by just a single star inside a disk. The Spitzer data strongly support the latter scenario.
"We've really shifted the balance of the two competing theories," said Donald Hoard of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Now we can get busy working out all the details." Hoard presented the results today at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington.
Epsilon Aurigae can be seen at night from the northern hemisphere with the naked eye, even in some urban areas. Last August, it began its roughly two-year dimming, an event that happens like clockwork every 27.1 years and results in the star fading in brightness by one-half. Professional and amateur astronomers around the globe are watching, and the International Year of Astronomy 2009 marked the eclipse as a flagship "citizen science" event. More information is at http://www.citizensky.org .
Spectrum of Binary Star Epsilon Aurigae This graph of data from multiple telescopes shows the distribution of light from a pair of stars known as Epsilon Aurigae.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Full image and caption
› Larger image
Astronomers study these eclipsing binary events to learn more about the evolution of stars. Because one star passes in front of another, additional information can be gleaned about the nature of the stars. In the case of Epsilon Aurigae, what could have been a simple calculation has instead left astronomers endlessly scratching their heads. Certain aspects of the event, for example the duration of the eclipse, and the presence of "wiggles" in the brightness of the system during the eclipse, have not fit nicely into models. Theories have been put forth to explain what's going on, some quite elaborate, but none with a perfect fit.
The main stumper is the nature of the naked-eye star -- the one that dims and brightens. Its spectral features indicate that it's a monstrous star, called an F supergiant, with 20 times the mass, and up to 300 times the diameter, of our sun. But, in order for this theory to be true, astronomers had to come up with elaborate scenarios to make sense of the eclipse observations. They said that the eclipsing, companion star must actually be two so-called B stars surrounded by an orbiting disk of dusty debris. And some scenarios were even more exotic, calling for black holes and massive planets.
A competing theory proposed that the bright star was actually a less massive, dying star. But this model had holes too. There was no simple solution.
Hoard became interested in the problem from a technological standpoint. He wanted to see if Spitzer, whose delicate infrared arrays are too sensitive to observe the bright star directly, could be coaxed to observe it using a clever trick. "We pointed the star at the corner of four of Spitzer's pixels, instead of directly at one, to effectively reduce its sensitivity." What's more, the observation used exposures lasting only one-hundredth of a second -- the fastest that images can be obtained by Spitzer.
The resulting information, in combination with past Spitzer observations, represents the most complete infrared data set for the star to date. They confirm the presence of the companion star's disk, without a doubt, and establish the particle sizes as being relatively large like gravel rather than like fine dust.
But Hoard and his colleagues were most excited about nailing down the radius of the disk to approximately four times the distance between Earth and the sun. This enabled the team to create a multi-wavelength model that explained all the features of the system. If they assumed the F star was actually a much less massive, dying star, and they also assumed that the eclipsing object was a single B star embedded in the dusty disk, everything snapped together.
"It was amazing how everything fell into place so neatly," said Steve Howell of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Ariz. "All the features of this system are interlinked, so if you tinker with one, you have to change another. It's been hard to get everything to fall together perfectly until now."
According to the astronomers, there are still many more details to figure out. The ongoing observations of the current eclipse should provide the final clues needed to put this mystery of the night sky to rest.
For almost two centuries, humans have looked up at a bright star called Epsilon Aurigae and watched with their own eyes as it seemed to disappear into the night sky, slowly fading before coming back to life again. Today, as another dimming of the system is underway, mysteries about the star persist. Though astronomers know that Epsilon Aurigae is eclipsed by a dark companion object every 27 years, the nature of both the star and object has remained unclear.
Now, new observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope -- in combination with archived ultraviolet, visible and other infrared data -- point to one of two competing theories, and a likely solution to this age-old puzzle. One theory holds that the bright star is a massive supergiant, periodically eclipsed by two tight-knit stars inside a swirling, dusty disk. The second theory holds that the bright star is in fact a dying star with a lot less mass, periodically eclipsed by just a single star inside a disk. The Spitzer data strongly support the latter scenario.
"We've really shifted the balance of the two competing theories," said Donald Hoard of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Now we can get busy working out all the details." Hoard presented the results today at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington.
Epsilon Aurigae can be seen at night from the northern hemisphere with the naked eye, even in some urban areas. Last August, it began its roughly two-year dimming, an event that happens like clockwork every 27.1 years and results in the star fading in brightness by one-half. Professional and amateur astronomers around the globe are watching, and the International Year of Astronomy 2009 marked the eclipse as a flagship "citizen science" event. More information is at http://www.citizensky.org .
Spectrum of Binary Star Epsilon Aurigae This graph of data from multiple telescopes shows the distribution of light from a pair of stars known as Epsilon Aurigae.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Full image and caption
› Larger image
Astronomers study these eclipsing binary events to learn more about the evolution of stars. Because one star passes in front of another, additional information can be gleaned about the nature of the stars. In the case of Epsilon Aurigae, what could have been a simple calculation has instead left astronomers endlessly scratching their heads. Certain aspects of the event, for example the duration of the eclipse, and the presence of "wiggles" in the brightness of the system during the eclipse, have not fit nicely into models. Theories have been put forth to explain what's going on, some quite elaborate, but none with a perfect fit.
The main stumper is the nature of the naked-eye star -- the one that dims and brightens. Its spectral features indicate that it's a monstrous star, called an F supergiant, with 20 times the mass, and up to 300 times the diameter, of our sun. But, in order for this theory to be true, astronomers had to come up with elaborate scenarios to make sense of the eclipse observations. They said that the eclipsing, companion star must actually be two so-called B stars surrounded by an orbiting disk of dusty debris. And some scenarios were even more exotic, calling for black holes and massive planets.
A competing theory proposed that the bright star was actually a less massive, dying star. But this model had holes too. There was no simple solution.
Hoard became interested in the problem from a technological standpoint. He wanted to see if Spitzer, whose delicate infrared arrays are too sensitive to observe the bright star directly, could be coaxed to observe it using a clever trick. "We pointed the star at the corner of four of Spitzer's pixels, instead of directly at one, to effectively reduce its sensitivity." What's more, the observation used exposures lasting only one-hundredth of a second -- the fastest that images can be obtained by Spitzer.
The resulting information, in combination with past Spitzer observations, represents the most complete infrared data set for the star to date. They confirm the presence of the companion star's disk, without a doubt, and establish the particle sizes as being relatively large like gravel rather than like fine dust.
But Hoard and his colleagues were most excited about nailing down the radius of the disk to approximately four times the distance between Earth and the sun. This enabled the team to create a multi-wavelength model that explained all the features of the system. If they assumed the F star was actually a much less massive, dying star, and they also assumed that the eclipsing object was a single B star embedded in the dusty disk, everything snapped together.
"It was amazing how everything fell into place so neatly," said Steve Howell of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Ariz. "All the features of this system are interlinked, so if you tinker with one, you have to change another. It's been hard to get everything to fall together perfectly until now."
According to the astronomers, there are still many more details to figure out. The ongoing observations of the current eclipse should provide the final clues needed to put this mystery of the night sky to rest.
MRSN
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The 'Great Red Spot' - a storm on Jupiter that has been going on for 300 years - is so big that dozens of Earths would fit into it.(
MRSN
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A supermassive blackhole is believed to be present in the centre of nearly every galaxy, including our own Milky Way.
MRSN
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The Pistol Star is the most luminous star known - 10 million times the power of the Sun and as big as the size of Earth's entire orbit around the Sun.
TM Riddle
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wow thanks for sharing!
QazzarFan
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That's a piece of meteorite found recently.
MRSN
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Recent findings about the Higgs Boson indicate that when the universe has rarefied enough (it's expanding and will continue to expand) there will be another quantum vacuum fluctuation resulting in the birth of a new universe. The big bang probably happened as a result of a previous expanding universe becoming so rarefied that a new universe was born. This may have been going on forever. BTW there is no indication that the universe will ever contract, the expansion is accelerating and will most likely continue forever.
http://www.daynews.com/latest-news/...-theory-particle-discovery-is-confirmed-16369
H2O1
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More please
MRSN
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Jupiter's strong gravitational pull protects the Earth from dangerous asteroids by drawing them into its atmosphere and also slings long-period comets out of the solar system...
MRSN
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In the weightless environment, sleeping on the floor is just as comfortable as sleeping on the wall...
The best thing about sleeping in space is that you can do it anywhere. In the weightless environment, sleeping on the floor is just as comfortable as sleeping on the wall, and astronauts don't require a mattress. Still, some astronauts find sleeping in weightlessness causes unfamiliar sensations, which combined with excessive light and noise creates poor conditions for getting a good night's rest
The best thing about sleeping in space is that you can do it anywhere. In the weightless environment, sleeping on the floor is just as comfortable as sleeping on the wall, and astronauts don't require a mattress. Still, some astronauts find sleeping in weightlessness causes unfamiliar sensations, which combined with excessive light and noise creates poor conditions for getting a good night's rest
MRSN
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Astronauts see 16 sunrises & sunsets in one 24-hour orbital period."
Astronauts onboard the International Space Station see the Earth from a unique perspective — for example, in one 24-hour period, they see not one sunrise and sunset, but 16 on average.
Each changeover between day and night is marked by the terminator, a line on Earth's surface separating the sunlit side from the darkness.
While the terminator is often conceptualized as a hard boundary, in reality the edge of light and dark is diffuse due to the scattering of light by the Earth's atmosphere. This zone of diffuse lighting is experienced as dusk or twilight on the ground; while the Sun is no longer visible, some illumination is still present due to light scattering over the local horizon.…
Astronauts onboard the International Space Station see the Earth from a unique perspective — for example, in one 24-hour period, they see not one sunrise and sunset, but 16 on average.
Each changeover between day and night is marked by the terminator, a line on Earth's surface separating the sunlit side from the darkness.
While the terminator is often conceptualized as a hard boundary, in reality the edge of light and dark is diffuse due to the scattering of light by the Earth's atmosphere. This zone of diffuse lighting is experienced as dusk or twilight on the ground; while the Sun is no longer visible, some illumination is still present due to light scattering over the local horizon.…
MRSN
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Juggling not possible in space..
Hari Sombar
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Saturn's moon titan is the only moon to have a reasonable atmosphere, it also has lakes, pebbles and rivers but made from ice and methane instead
More on this, titan shoots geysers of methane directly into the sky, some reaching miles. An odd phenonemon then happens, the geysers suddenly take a right angle turn and continue horizontally. This is due to the impenetrability of the atmosphere.
MRSN
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Time is a human made concept and in reality it doesn't exist..
http://www.helium.com/items/440031-assessing-time-as-an-illusion-of-the-human-brain?page=2
MRSN
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Why Is Space so freezing cold?
so if you get exposed in space without space suit, then your body will freez on the side not facing sun and burn the side facing sun and float endlessly unless it hits something..
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/The_sun_s...zing_cold_in_space_what_causes_the_difference
so if you get exposed in space without space suit, then your body will freez on the side not facing sun and burn the side facing sun and float endlessly unless it hits something..
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MRSN
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How Earth's magnetic field protects us from high energy particles such as a solar flare or solar storm..
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ZmVK0ESAyG4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This video taken by Göran Strand from Östersund, Sweden shows what happened on March 17, 2013 when a Coronal Mass Ejection hit Earth’s magnetic field. Two days earlier, sunspot AR1692 had produced a M1-class solar flare that resulted in the CME that hit Earth.
This time lapse from an all-sky camera captures the magnificent sky show between 19:20 and 23:35 UT on the 17th.
The size of Earth compared to sunspot AR1692 on March 15, 2013. Screenshot from the video by Göran Strand.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ZmVK0ESAyG4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This video taken by Göran Strand from Östersund, Sweden shows what happened on March 17, 2013 when a Coronal Mass Ejection hit Earth’s magnetic field. Two days earlier, sunspot AR1692 had produced a M1-class solar flare that resulted in the CME that hit Earth.
This time lapse from an all-sky camera captures the magnificent sky show between 19:20 and 23:35 UT on the 17th.
The size of Earth compared to sunspot AR1692 on March 15, 2013. Screenshot from the video by Göran Strand.
cricketworm
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBi6gUbsz-E
"New York is moving inch closer to UK and Australia is closing in with 3 inches per year."
"New York is moving inch closer to UK and Australia is closing in with 3 inches per year."
Science looks logical to people when it gives numbers that can not be confirmed. This is the irony my friend
MRSN
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delete
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MRSN
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Is Our Universe a Hologram?
What if our existence is a holographic projection of another, flat version of you living on a two-dimensional "surface" at the edge of this universe? In other words, are we real, or are we quantum interactions on the edges of the universe - and is that just as real anyway?
Whether we actually live in a hologram is being hotly debated, but it is now becoming clear that looking at phenomena through a holographic lens could be key to solving some of the most perplexing problems in physics, including the physics that reigned before the big bang,what gives particles mass, a theory of quantum gravity.
In 1982 a litttle known but epic event occured at the University of Paris, where a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the Daily Show. In fact, unless you are a physicist you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though increasing numbers of experts believe his discovery may change the face of science.
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.
Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with increasingly elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings.
University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. Bohm was involved in the early development of the holonomic model of the functioning of the brain, a model for human cognition that is drastically different from conventionally accepted ideas. Bohm developed the theory that the brain operates in a manner similar to a hologram, in accordance with quantum mathematical principles and the characteristics of wave patterns.
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand that a hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams conflate) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.
In a recent collaboration between Fermilab scientists and hundreds of meters of laser may have found the very pixels of reality, grains of spacetime one tenth of a femtometer across.
The GEO600 system is armed with six hundred meters of laser tube, which sounds like enough to equip an entire Star War, but these lasers are for detection, not destruction. GEO600's length means it can measure changes of one part in six hundred million, accurate enough to detect even the tiniest ripples in space time - assuming it isn't thrown off by somebody sneezing within a hundred meters or the wrong types of cloud overhead (seriously). The problem with such an incredibly sensitive device is just that - it's incredibly sensitive.
The interferometer staff constantly battle against unwanted aberration, and were struggling against a particularly persistent signal when Fermilab Professor Craig Hogan suggested the problem wasn't with their equipment but with reality itself. The quantum limit of reality, the Planck length, occurs at a far smaller length scale than their signal - but according to Hogan, this literal ultimate limit of tininess might be scaled up because we're all holograms. Obviously.
The idea is that all of our spatial dimensions can be represented by a 'surface' with one less dimension, just like a 3D hologram can be built out of information in 2D foils. The foils in our case are the edges of the observable universe, where quantum fluctuations at the Planck scale are 'scaled up' into the ripples observed by the GEO600 team. We'd like to remind you that although we're talking about "The GEO600 Laser Team probing the edge of reality", this is not a movie.
What does this mean for you? In everyday action, nothing much - we're afraid that a fundamentally holographic nature doesn't allow you to travel around playing guitar and fighting crime (no matter what 80s cartoons may have taught you.) Whether reality is as you see it, or you're the representation of interactions on a surface at the edge of the universe, getting run over by a truck (or a representation thereof) will still kill you.
In intellectual terms, though, this should raise so many fascinating questions you'll never need TV again. While in the extreme earliest stages, with far more work to go before anyone can draw any conclusions, this is some of the most mind-bending metaphysical science you'll ever see.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblo...event-occured-at-the-university-of-paris.html
from 47:00 onwards
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KJjkZrWors
What if our existence is a holographic projection of another, flat version of you living on a two-dimensional "surface" at the edge of this universe? In other words, are we real, or are we quantum interactions on the edges of the universe - and is that just as real anyway?
Whether we actually live in a hologram is being hotly debated, but it is now becoming clear that looking at phenomena through a holographic lens could be key to solving some of the most perplexing problems in physics, including the physics that reigned before the big bang,what gives particles mass, a theory of quantum gravity.
In 1982 a litttle known but epic event occured at the University of Paris, where a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the Daily Show. In fact, unless you are a physicist you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though increasing numbers of experts believe his discovery may change the face of science.
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.
Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with increasingly elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings.
University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. Bohm was involved in the early development of the holonomic model of the functioning of the brain, a model for human cognition that is drastically different from conventionally accepted ideas. Bohm developed the theory that the brain operates in a manner similar to a hologram, in accordance with quantum mathematical principles and the characteristics of wave patterns.
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand that a hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams conflate) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.
In a recent collaboration between Fermilab scientists and hundreds of meters of laser may have found the very pixels of reality, grains of spacetime one tenth of a femtometer across.
The GEO600 system is armed with six hundred meters of laser tube, which sounds like enough to equip an entire Star War, but these lasers are for detection, not destruction. GEO600's length means it can measure changes of one part in six hundred million, accurate enough to detect even the tiniest ripples in space time - assuming it isn't thrown off by somebody sneezing within a hundred meters or the wrong types of cloud overhead (seriously). The problem with such an incredibly sensitive device is just that - it's incredibly sensitive.
The interferometer staff constantly battle against unwanted aberration, and were struggling against a particularly persistent signal when Fermilab Professor Craig Hogan suggested the problem wasn't with their equipment but with reality itself. The quantum limit of reality, the Planck length, occurs at a far smaller length scale than their signal - but according to Hogan, this literal ultimate limit of tininess might be scaled up because we're all holograms. Obviously.
The idea is that all of our spatial dimensions can be represented by a 'surface' with one less dimension, just like a 3D hologram can be built out of information in 2D foils. The foils in our case are the edges of the observable universe, where quantum fluctuations at the Planck scale are 'scaled up' into the ripples observed by the GEO600 team. We'd like to remind you that although we're talking about "The GEO600 Laser Team probing the edge of reality", this is not a movie.
What does this mean for you? In everyday action, nothing much - we're afraid that a fundamentally holographic nature doesn't allow you to travel around playing guitar and fighting crime (no matter what 80s cartoons may have taught you.) Whether reality is as you see it, or you're the representation of interactions on a surface at the edge of the universe, getting run over by a truck (or a representation thereof) will still kill you.
In intellectual terms, though, this should raise so many fascinating questions you'll never need TV again. While in the extreme earliest stages, with far more work to go before anyone can draw any conclusions, this is some of the most mind-bending metaphysical science you'll ever see.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblo...event-occured-at-the-university-of-paris.html
from 47:00 onwards
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KJjkZrWors
Last edited:
MRSN
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did you ever notice Earth goes through at least 4 different motions traveling through space?
1. The Earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours. Speed depends on your latitude. some say about 1,000 mph..
2. The Earth revolves around the Sun once every 365.24 days. Speed = 29.786 km/s
3. The Sun revolves around the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy once every 200 million years. Speed = 230 km/s
4. The Milky Way Galaxy is moving through space towards the Andromeda Galaxy. Speed = 400 km/s
1. The Earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours. Speed depends on your latitude. some say about 1,000 mph..
2. The Earth revolves around the Sun once every 365.24 days. Speed = 29.786 km/s
3. The Sun revolves around the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy once every 200 million years. Speed = 230 km/s
4. The Milky Way Galaxy is moving through space towards the Andromeda Galaxy. Speed = 400 km/s
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velu
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great thread MRSN 
missed this b4 will go through it in my free time..
gamma ray burst sounds scary
missed this b4 will go through it in my free time..
gamma ray burst sounds scary
Varun
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If you watch the story of NASA backwards, it's about a space agency that initially has no spaceflight capability, then does low-orbit flights, then lands a man on the moon.
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coca-cola
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^ since events are just a flow of atoms, maybe in some parallel reality events do occur "backwards"
MRSN
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If you breathed in 1 inhale of air from Jupiter you'd just die of suffocation since there's no Oxygen
MRSN
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did you know the moon looks "upside down" when you are in the Southern Hemisphere, compared to how it looks in the Northern Hemisphere.
similarly being on the south pole of the moon would make the earth appear upside down.
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What would happen if you tried to fly a normal Earth airplane above different Solar System bodies?
Here’s what happens when the aircraft is launched above the surface of the 32 largest Solar System bodies:
In most cases, there’s no atmosphere, and the plane falls straight to the ground. (If it’s dropped from one kilometer, in a few cases, the crash will be slow enough that the pilot may survive—although the life-support equipment probably won’t.)
There are nine Solar System bodies with atmospheres thick enough to matter: Earth—obviously—Mars, Venus, the four gas giants, Saturn’s moon Titan, and the Sun. Let’s take a closer look at what would happen to a plane on each one.
The Sun: This works about as well as you'd imagine. If the plane is released close enough to the Sun to feel its atmosphere at all, it's vaporized in less than a second.
Mars: To see what happens to aircraft on Mars, we turn to X-Plane.
X-Plane is the most advanced flight simulator in the world. The product of 20 years of obsessive labor by a hardcore aeronautics enthusiast who uses capslock a lot when talking about planes, it actually simulates the flow of air over every piece of an aircraft’s body as it flies. This makes it a valuable research tool, since it can accurately simulate entirely new aircraft designs—and new environments.
In particular, if you change the X-Plane config file to reduce gravity, thin the atmosphere, and shrink the radius of the planet it can simulate flight on Mars. (Note: Thank you to Tom J and the folks in the X-Plane community for their help with aerodynamic calculations in different atmospheres.)
X-Plane tells us that flight on Mars is difficult, but not impossible. NASA knows this, and has considered surveying Mars by airplane. The tricky thing is that with so little atmosphere, to get any lift, you have to go fast. You need to approach Mach 1 just to get off the ground, and once you get moving, you have so much inertia that it’s hard to change course—if you turn, your plane rotates, but keeps moving in the original direction. The X-Plane author compared piloting Martian aircraft to flying a supersonic ocean liner.
Our Cessna 172 isn’t up to the challenge. Launched from 1 km, it doesn’t build up enough speed to pull out of a dive, and plows into the Martian terrain at over 60 m/s (135 mph). If dropped from four or five kilometers, it could gain enough speed to pull up into a glide—at over half the speed of sound. The landing would not be survivable.
Venus:Unfortunately, X-Plane is not capable of simulating the hellish environment near the surface of Venus. But physics calculations give us an idea of what flight there would be like. The upshot is: Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane.
The atmosphere on Venus is over 60 times denser than Earth’s, which is thick enough that a Cessna moving at running speed would rise into the air. Unfortunately, the air it’s rising into is hot enough to melt lead. The paint would start melting off in seconds, the plane’s components would fail rapidly, and the plane would glide gently into the ground as it came apart under the heat stress.
A much better bet would be to fly above the clouds. While Venus’s surface is awful, its upper atmosphere is surprisingly Earthlike. 55 kilometers up, a human could survive with an oxygen mask and a protective wetsuit; the air is room temperature and the pressure is similar to that on Earth mountains. You need the wetsuit, though, to protect you from the sulfuric acid. (I’m not selling this well, am I?)
The acid's no fun, but it turns out the area right above the clouds is a great environment for an airplane, as long as it has no exposed metal to be corroded away by the sulfuric acid. And is capable of flight in constant Category-5-hurricane-level winds, which are another thing I forgot to mention earlier.
Venus is a terrible place.
Jupiter: Our Cessna can’t fly on Jupiter; the gravity is just too strong. The power needed to maintain level flight is three times greater than that on Earth. Starting from a friendly sea-level pressure, we’d accelerate through the tumbling winds into a 275 m/s (600 mph) downward glide deeper and deeper through the layers of ammonia ice and water ice until we and the aircraft were crushed. There's no surface to hit; Jupiter transitions smoothly from gas to solid as you sink deeper and deeper.
Saturn: The picture here is a bit friendlier than on Jupiter. The weaker gravity—close to Earth’s, actually—and slightly denser (but still thin) atmosphere mean that we’d be able to struggle along a bit further before we gave in to either the cold or high winds and descended to the same fate as on Jupiter.
Uranus: Uranus is a strange, uniform bluish orb. There are high winds and it’s bitterly cold. It’s the friendliest of the gas giants to our Cessna, and you could probably fly for a little while. But given that it seems to be an almost completely featureless planet, why would you want to?
Neptune: If you’re going to fly around one of the ice giants, Neptune (Motto: “The Slightly Bluer One”) is probably a better choice than Uranus. It at least has some clouds to look at before you freeze to death or break apart from the turbulence.
Titan: We’ve saved the best for last. When it comes to flying, Titan might be better than Earth. Its atmosphere is thick but its gravity is light, giving it a surface pressure only 50% higher than Earth’s with air four times as dense. Its gravity—lower than that of the Moon—means that flying is easy. Our Cessna could get into the air under pedal power.
In fact, humans on Titan could fly by muscle power. A human in a hang glider could comfortably take off and cruise around powered by oversized swim-flipper boots—or even take off by flapping artificial wings. The power requirements are minimal—it would probably take no more effort than walking.
The downside (there’s always a downside) is the cold. It’s 72 kelvin on Titan, which is about the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Judging from some numbers on heating requirements for light aircraft, I estimate that the cabin of a Cessna on Titan would probably cool by about two degrees per minute.
The batteries would help to keep themselves warm for a little while, but eventually the craft would run out of heat and crash. The Huygens probe, which descended with batteries nearly drained (taking fascinating pictures as it fell), succumbed to the cold after only a few hours on the surface. It had enough time to send back a single photo after landing—the only one we have from the surface of a body beyond Mars.
If humans put on artificial wings to fly, we might become Titan versions of the Icarus story—our wings could freeze, fall apart, and send us tumbling to our deaths.
But I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive. The cold of Titan is just an engineering problem. With the right refitting, and the right heat sources, a Cessna 172 could fly on Titan—and so could we.
http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/
Here’s what happens when the aircraft is launched above the surface of the 32 largest Solar System bodies:
In most cases, there’s no atmosphere, and the plane falls straight to the ground. (If it’s dropped from one kilometer, in a few cases, the crash will be slow enough that the pilot may survive—although the life-support equipment probably won’t.)
There are nine Solar System bodies with atmospheres thick enough to matter: Earth—obviously—Mars, Venus, the four gas giants, Saturn’s moon Titan, and the Sun. Let’s take a closer look at what would happen to a plane on each one.
The Sun: This works about as well as you'd imagine. If the plane is released close enough to the Sun to feel its atmosphere at all, it's vaporized in less than a second.
Mars: To see what happens to aircraft on Mars, we turn to X-Plane.
X-Plane is the most advanced flight simulator in the world. The product of 20 years of obsessive labor by a hardcore aeronautics enthusiast who uses capslock a lot when talking about planes, it actually simulates the flow of air over every piece of an aircraft’s body as it flies. This makes it a valuable research tool, since it can accurately simulate entirely new aircraft designs—and new environments.
In particular, if you change the X-Plane config file to reduce gravity, thin the atmosphere, and shrink the radius of the planet it can simulate flight on Mars. (Note: Thank you to Tom J and the folks in the X-Plane community for their help with aerodynamic calculations in different atmospheres.)
X-Plane tells us that flight on Mars is difficult, but not impossible. NASA knows this, and has considered surveying Mars by airplane. The tricky thing is that with so little atmosphere, to get any lift, you have to go fast. You need to approach Mach 1 just to get off the ground, and once you get moving, you have so much inertia that it’s hard to change course—if you turn, your plane rotates, but keeps moving in the original direction. The X-Plane author compared piloting Martian aircraft to flying a supersonic ocean liner.
Our Cessna 172 isn’t up to the challenge. Launched from 1 km, it doesn’t build up enough speed to pull out of a dive, and plows into the Martian terrain at over 60 m/s (135 mph). If dropped from four or five kilometers, it could gain enough speed to pull up into a glide—at over half the speed of sound. The landing would not be survivable.
Venus:Unfortunately, X-Plane is not capable of simulating the hellish environment near the surface of Venus. But physics calculations give us an idea of what flight there would be like. The upshot is: Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane.
The atmosphere on Venus is over 60 times denser than Earth’s, which is thick enough that a Cessna moving at running speed would rise into the air. Unfortunately, the air it’s rising into is hot enough to melt lead. The paint would start melting off in seconds, the plane’s components would fail rapidly, and the plane would glide gently into the ground as it came apart under the heat stress.
A much better bet would be to fly above the clouds. While Venus’s surface is awful, its upper atmosphere is surprisingly Earthlike. 55 kilometers up, a human could survive with an oxygen mask and a protective wetsuit; the air is room temperature and the pressure is similar to that on Earth mountains. You need the wetsuit, though, to protect you from the sulfuric acid. (I’m not selling this well, am I?)
The acid's no fun, but it turns out the area right above the clouds is a great environment for an airplane, as long as it has no exposed metal to be corroded away by the sulfuric acid. And is capable of flight in constant Category-5-hurricane-level winds, which are another thing I forgot to mention earlier.
Venus is a terrible place.
Jupiter: Our Cessna can’t fly on Jupiter; the gravity is just too strong. The power needed to maintain level flight is three times greater than that on Earth. Starting from a friendly sea-level pressure, we’d accelerate through the tumbling winds into a 275 m/s (600 mph) downward glide deeper and deeper through the layers of ammonia ice and water ice until we and the aircraft were crushed. There's no surface to hit; Jupiter transitions smoothly from gas to solid as you sink deeper and deeper.
Saturn: The picture here is a bit friendlier than on Jupiter. The weaker gravity—close to Earth’s, actually—and slightly denser (but still thin) atmosphere mean that we’d be able to struggle along a bit further before we gave in to either the cold or high winds and descended to the same fate as on Jupiter.
Uranus: Uranus is a strange, uniform bluish orb. There are high winds and it’s bitterly cold. It’s the friendliest of the gas giants to our Cessna, and you could probably fly for a little while. But given that it seems to be an almost completely featureless planet, why would you want to?
Neptune: If you’re going to fly around one of the ice giants, Neptune (Motto: “The Slightly Bluer One”) is probably a better choice than Uranus. It at least has some clouds to look at before you freeze to death or break apart from the turbulence.
Titan: We’ve saved the best for last. When it comes to flying, Titan might be better than Earth. Its atmosphere is thick but its gravity is light, giving it a surface pressure only 50% higher than Earth’s with air four times as dense. Its gravity—lower than that of the Moon—means that flying is easy. Our Cessna could get into the air under pedal power.
In fact, humans on Titan could fly by muscle power. A human in a hang glider could comfortably take off and cruise around powered by oversized swim-flipper boots—or even take off by flapping artificial wings. The power requirements are minimal—it would probably take no more effort than walking.
The downside (there’s always a downside) is the cold. It’s 72 kelvin on Titan, which is about the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Judging from some numbers on heating requirements for light aircraft, I estimate that the cabin of a Cessna on Titan would probably cool by about two degrees per minute.
The batteries would help to keep themselves warm for a little while, but eventually the craft would run out of heat and crash. The Huygens probe, which descended with batteries nearly drained (taking fascinating pictures as it fell), succumbed to the cold after only a few hours on the surface. It had enough time to send back a single photo after landing—the only one we have from the surface of a body beyond Mars.
If humans put on artificial wings to fly, we might become Titan versions of the Icarus story—our wings could freeze, fall apart, and send us tumbling to our deaths.
But I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive. The cold of Titan is just an engineering problem. With the right refitting, and the right heat sources, a Cessna 172 could fly on Titan—and so could we.
http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/
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Two Galaxies merging with a starburts region in between them as they exchange matter.
The Galaxies are interacting with each other at a distance of about 500 million light-years away from Earth.
The Galaxies are interacting with each other at a distance of about 500 million light-years away from Earth.
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Milky Way Galaxy with the red coloured Aurora Australis. Red Aurora is caused by oxygen atoms interacting with charged particles from the Sun.
Two Satellite Galaxies which are in orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy are also clearly shown in this image, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC).
Two Satellite Galaxies which are in orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy are also clearly shown in this image, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC).
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A lightning striking Milky Way!
Our Milky Way Galaxy and a raging thunder storm caught in a 15 seconds image exposure, South Dakota.
Our Milky Way Galaxy and a raging thunder storm caught in a 15 seconds image exposure, South Dakota.
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Not only can we see planets or the Moon transiting the Sun...
*note on the first image, hubble is the little dot seen together with Space shuttle Atlantis (the larger object)
*note on the first image, hubble is the little dot seen together with Space shuttle Atlantis (the larger object)
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Not only can we see planets or the Moon transiting the Sun...
*note on the first image, hubble is the little dot seen together with Space shuttle Atlantis (the larger object)
Reminded me of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vm7N5D5sg0
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