Astronomy and Space Facts!!!!

[MRSN]

 

[MRSN]

Mars rover Curiosity captured both martian natural satellites 'Phobos' and 'Deimos' together in the Martian Night Sky.

Moon Phobos is the larger object to the left and moon Deimos the smaller object to the right of this image.

 

[MRSN]

 

[MRSN]

Gravitational lenses are Nature’s largest telescopes, created by colossally massive clusters of thousands of galaxies that bend and magnify the light of more distant objects behind them in a way similar to a glass lens. But gravitational lenses are far from perfect. Though they make very distant galaxies from the early universe visible to telescopes, they also put the images through a cosmic blender. As a result, the smeared and distorted images don’t offer much in the way of direct information about what the earliest galaxies looked like.

But that is not the case for an elegant little spiral galaxy called Sp1149, located 9.3 billion light-years away. The galaxy’s image has come through a gravitational lens magnified 22 times and fairly intact, as seen in a Hubble Space Telescope image. The image was first observed in detail by the University of Hawaii’s Tiantian Yuan and was initially taken by Harald Ebeling, also of Hawaii, and published by Graham P. Smith and colleagues in 2009. The giant cluster of galaxies that created the lens is located in the vast expanse of space between Sp1149 and Earth, and appears beside Sp1149 in the Hubble image.

 

[MRSN]

Moon formation, 'The Impact theory'.

The hypothesis explains that a Mars sized planet called 'Theia' collided with the young nearly formed Earth. Debris from both bodies came in to orbit around the partially damaged Earth and overtime the debris collided and stuck together forming our Moon.

 

[MRSN]

 

[MRSN]

one of the methods to detect planets around other stars.

 

[MRSN]

 

[LA Guy]

Hello fellow members
I just join this wonderful forum and this is my first atempt at posting
I am not an astronomer but have lot of interest in this subject, it is facinating to see all these thought provoking posts and the knowledge the members have.
I know and you all know that there are billions and billions of Suns and billions of plantes and I am sure there are again billions of palntes exactly like our earth, same size, same temperature, same distance from the sun as we are and may be with oceans so you think there are may be some kind of life, may be as advance as us or more advance or may be just primitive basic life, this is where I disagree.
Here is my 2 cents worth of theory, when universe was created some 10 odd billion years ago and all these suns. planets and moons were formed, they were given a lottery just like the lotto here in U S where you pick 6 numbers out of 50 some numbers in any order and win millions of dollars, the differnce between this lottery and the lottery of life was that inatead of 6 numbers all the bodies in the universe were given to choose 6 million numbers in exact order out of some hundred billion numbers. The only winning combination was provided by planet earth and hence we were given the gift of life, so in my opinion there is no other life, no UFO's no aliens, we are the only one with this gift of life and we should cherish it and preserve it as long as possible and if we human do not screw it up then may be in few hundred years we will find the aliens, and other life on different planets but those aliens would be us human ventured out there

 

[MRSN]

visualization of 10,000 stars..
http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/

 

[MRSN]

Hello fellow members
I just join this wonderful forum and this is my first atempt at posting
I am not an astronomer but have lot of interest in this subject, it is facinating to see all these thought provoking posts and the knowledge the members have.
I know and you all know that there are billions and billions of Suns and billions of plantes and I am sure there are again billions of palntes exactly like our earth, same size, same temperature, same distance from the sun as we are and may be with oceans so you think there are may be some kind of life, may be as advance as us or more advance or may be just primitive basic life, this is where I disagree.
Here is my 2 cents worth of theory, when universe was created some 10 odd billion years ago and all these suns. planets and moons were formed, they were given a lottery just like the lotto here in U S where you pick 6 numbers out of 50 some numbers in any order and win millions of dollars, the differnce between this lottery and the lottery of life was that inatead of 6 numbers all the bodies in the universe were given to choose 6 million numbers in exact order out of some hundred billion numbers. The only winning combination was provided by planet earth and hence we were given the gift of life, so in my opinion there is no other life, no UFO's no aliens, we are the only one with this gift of life and we should cherish it and preserve it as long as possible and if we human do not screw it up then may be in few hundred years we will find the aliens, and other life on different planets but those aliens would be us human ventured out there

lol nice concept but as you said the universe is infinite so it's really impossible to come to the conclusion that there may not be a life outside earth..Our observable universe is nothing compare to the whole universe..in our galaxy alone,if I'm not wrong, Keplar has scanned about 2 million habitable planets having water,life etc everything necessary for life but they are too far away..would take us millions of years to travel there and find out what kind of life is there..

 

[MRSN]

Lunar phases

 

[MRSN]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4x39AJ9Wzk
Did you know you can distinguish between stars and planets in the sky?
Stars twinkle, planets don’t.
Okay, that’s not actually correct. The stars, planets, even the Sun and Moon twinkle, all in varying amounts.
Anything outside the atmosphere is going to twinkle.
If you’re feeling a little silly using the word twinkle over and over again, we can also use the scientific term:
astronomical scintillation.

You can’t feel it, but you’re carrying the entire weight of the atmosphere on your shoulders.
Every single square inch of your skin is getting pushed by 15 pounds of pressure.
And even though astronomers need our atmosphere to survive, it still drives them crazy. As it makes objects in space so much harder to see.
Stars twinkle, I mean scintillate, because as light passes down through a volume of air, turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere refracts light
differently from moment to moment. From our perspective, the light from a star will appear in one location, then milliseconds later,
it’ll be distorted to a different spot.
We see this as twinkling.
So why do stars appear to twinkle, while planets don’t?


Stars appear as a single point in the sky, because of the great distance between us and them. This single point can be highly affected
by atmospheric turbulence. Planets, being much closer, appear as disks.
We can’t resolve them as disks with our eyes, but it still averages out as a more stable light in the sky.
Astronomers battle atmospheric turbulence in two ways:

The Hubble

First, they try to get above it. The Hubble Space Telescope is powerful because it’s outside the atmosphere.
The mirror is actually a quarter the size of a large ground-based observatory, but without atmospheric distortion,
Hubble can resolve galaxies billions of light-years away. The longer it looks, the more light it gathers.
Second, they try to compensate for it.

Some of the most sophisticated telescopes on Earth use adaptive optics,
which distorts the mirror of the telescope many times a second to compensate for the turbulence in the atmosphere.

A beam from the Laser Star Guide on one of the VLT’s four Unit Telescopes helps to correct the
blurring effect of Earth’s atmosphere before making observations (ESO/Y. Beletsky)

Astronomers project a powerful laser into the sky, creating an artificial star within their viewing area.
Since they know what the artificial star should look like, they distort the telescope’s mirror with pistons cancelling out the atmospheric distortion.
While it’s not as good as actually launching a telescope into space, it’s much, much cheaper.
Now you know why stars twinkle, why planets don’t seem to twinkle as much, and how you can make all of them stop.

 

[MRSN]

Explosion Illuminates Invisible Galaxy in the Dark Ages

Press Release
Release No.: 2013-22
For Release: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 02:00:00 PM



Cambridge, MA - More than 12 billion years ago a star exploded, ripping itself apart and blasting its remains outward in twin jets at nearly the speed of light. At its death it glowed so brightly that it outshone its entire galaxy by a million times. This brilliant flash traveled across space for 12.7 billion years to a planet that hadn't even existed at the time of the explosion - our Earth. By analyzing this light, astronomers learned about a galaxy that was otherwise too small, faint and far away for even the Hubble Space Telescope to see.

"This star lived at a very interesting time, the so-called dark ages just a billion years after the Big Bang," says lead author Ryan Chornock of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

"In a sense, we're forensic scientists investigating the death of a star and the life of a galaxy in the earliest phases of cosmic time," he adds.

The star announced its death with a flash of gamma rays, an event known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB). GRB 130606A was classified as a long GRB since the burst lasted for more than four minutes. It was detected by NASA's Swift spacecraft on June 6th. Chornock and his team quickly organized follow-up observations by the MMT Telescope in Arizona and the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii.

"We were able to get right on target in a matter of hours," Chornock says. "That speed was crucial in detecting and studying the afterglow."

A GRB afterglow occurs when jets from the burst slam into surrounding gas, sweeping that material up like a snowplow, heating it, and causing it to glow. As the afterglow's light travels through the dead star's host galaxy, it passes through clouds of interstellar gas. Chemical elements within those clouds absorb light at certain wavelengths, leaving "fingerprints." By splitting the light into a rainbow spectrum, astronomers can study those fingerprints and learn what gases the distant galaxy contained.

All chemical elements heavier than hydrogen, helium, and lithium had to be created by stars. As a result those heavy elements, which astronomers collectively call "metals," took time to accumulate. Life could not have existed in the early universe because the elements of life, including carbon and oxygen, did not exist.

Chornock and his colleagues found that the GRB galaxy contained only about one-tenth of the metals in our solar system. Theory suggests that although rocky planets might have been able to form, life probably could not thrive yet.

"At the time this star died, the universe was still getting ready for life. It didn't have life yet, but was building the required elements," says Chornock.

At a redshift of 5.9, or a distance of 12.7 billion light-years, GRB 130606A is one of the most distant gamma-ray bursts ever found.

"In the future we will be able to find and exploit even more distant GRBs with the planned Giant Magellan Telescope," says Edo Berger of the CfA, a co-author on the publication.

The team's results will be published in the Sept. 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal and are available online.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2013/pr201322.html

 

[MRSN]

Earth's Gold Came from Colliding Dead Stars

Cambridge, MA - We value gold for many reasons: its beauty, its usefulness as jewelry, and its rarity. Gold is rare on Earth in part because it's also rare in the universe. Unlike elements like carbon or iron, it cannot be created within a star. Instead, it must be born in a more cataclysmic event - like one that occurred last month known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB). Observations of this GRB provide evidence that it resulted from the collision of two neutron stars - the dead cores of stars that previously exploded as supernovae. Moreover, a unique glow that persisted for days at the GRB location potentially signifies the creation of substantial amounts of heavy elements - including gold.

"We estimate that the amount of gold produced and ejected during the merger of the two neutron stars may be as large as 10 moon masses - quite a lot of bling!" says lead author Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Berger presented the finding today in a press conference at the CfA in Cambridge, Mass.

A gamma-ray burst is a flash of high-energy light (gamma rays) from an extremely energetic explosion. Most are found in the distant universe. Berger and his colleagues studied GRB 130603B which, at a distance of 3.9 billion light-years from Earth, is one of the nearest bursts seen to date.

Gamma-ray bursts come in two varieties - long and short - depending on how long the flash of gamma rays lasts. GRB 130603B, detected by NASA's Swift satellite on June 3rd, lasted for less than two-tenths of a second.

Although the gamma rays disappeared quickly, GRB 130603B also displayed a slowly fading glow dominated by infrared light. Its brightness and behavior didn't match a typical "afterglow," which is created when a high-speed jet of particles slams into the surrounding environment.

Instead, the glow behaved like it came from exotic radioactive elements. The neutron-rich material ejected by colliding neutron stars can generate such elements, which then undergo radioactive decay, emitting a glow that's dominated by infrared light - exactly what the team observed.

"We've been looking for a 'smoking gun' to link a short gamma-ray burst with a neutron star collision. The radioactive glow from GRB 130603B may be that smoking gun," explains Wen-fai Fong, a graduate student at the CfA and a co-author of the paper.

The team calculates that about one-hundredth of a solar mass of material was ejected by the gamma-ray burst, some of which was gold. By combining the estimated gold produced by a single short GRB with the number of such explosions that have occurred over the age of the universe, all the gold in the cosmos might have come from gamma-ray bursts.

"To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we are all star stuff, and our jewelry is colliding-star stuff," says Berger.

The team's results have been submitted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and are available online. Berger's co-authors are Wen-fai Fong and Ryan Chornock, both of the CfA.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

 

[MRSN]

Future Evidence for Extraterrestrial Life Might Come from Dying Stars

Cambridge, MA - Even dying stars could host planets with life - and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star.

"In the quest for extraterrestrial biological signatures, the first stars we study should be white dwarfs," said Avi Loeb, theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation.

When a star like the Sun dies, it puffs off its outer layers, leaving behind a hot core called a white dwarf. A typical white dwarf is about the size of Earth. It slowly cools and fades over time, but it can retain heat long enough to warm a nearby world for billions of years.

Since a white dwarf is much smaller and fainter than the Sun, a planet would have to be much closer in to be habitable with liquid water on its surface. A habitable planet would circle the white dwarf once every 10 hours at a distance of about a million miles.

Before a star becomes a white dwarf it swells into a red giant, engulfing and destroying any nearby planets. Therefore, a planet would have to arrive in the habitable zone after the star evolved into a white dwarf. A planet could form from leftover dust and gas (making it a second-generation world), or migrate inward from a larger distance.

If planets exist in the habitable zones of white dwarfs, we would need to find them before we could study them. The abundance of heavy elements on the surface of white dwarfs suggests that a significant fraction of them have rocky planets. Loeb and his colleague Dan Maoz (Tel Aviv University) estimate that a survey of the 500 closest white dwarfs could spot one or more habitable Earths.

The best method for finding such planets is a transit search - looking for a star that dims as an orbiting planet crosses in front of it. Since a white dwarf is about the same size as Earth, an Earth-sized planet would block a large fraction of its light and create an obvious signal.

More importantly, we can only study the atmospheres of transiting planets. When the white dwarf's light shines through the ring of air that surrounds the planet's silhouetted disk, the atmosphere absorbs some starlight. This leaves chemical fingerprints showing whether that air contains water vapor, or even signatures of life, such as oxygen.

Astronomers are particularly interested in finding oxygen because the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere is continuously replenished, through photosynthesis, by plant life. Were all life to cease on Earth, our atmosphere would quickly become devoid of oxygen, which would dissolve in the oceans and oxidize the surface. Thus, the presence of large quantities of oxygen in the atmosphere of a distant planet would signal the likely presence of life there.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled for launch by the end of this decade, promises to sniff out the gases of these alien worlds. Loeb and Maoz created a synthetic spectrum, replicating what JWST would see if it examined a habitable planet orbiting a white dwarf. They found that both oxygen and water vapor would be detectable with only a few hours of total observation time.

"JWST offers the best hope of finding an inhabited planet in the near future," said Maoz.

Recent research by CfA astronomers Courtney Dressing and David Charbonneau showed that the closest habitable planet is likely to orbit a red dwarf star (a cool, low-mass star undergoing nuclear fusion). Since a red dwarf, although smaller and fainter than the Sun, is much larger and brighter than a white dwarf, its glare would overwhelm the faint signal from an orbiting planet's atmosphere. JWST would have to observe hundreds of hours of transits to have any hope of analyzing the atmosphere's composition.

"Although the closest habitable planet might orbit a red dwarf star, the closest one we can easily prove to be life-bearing might orbit a white dwarf," said Loeb.

Their paper has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

 

[MRSN]

Our Galaxy Might Hold Thousands of Ticking "Time Bombs"

Cambridge, MA - In the Hollywood blockbuster "Speed," a bomb on a bus is rigged to blow up if the bus slows down below 50 miles per hour. The premise - slow down and you explode - makes for a great action movie plot, and also happens to have a cosmic equivalent.

New research shows that some old stars might be held up by their rapid spins, and when they slow down, they explode as supernovae. Thousands of these "time bombs" could be scattered throughout our Galaxy.

"We haven't found one of these 'time bomb' stars yet in the Milky Way, but this research suggests that we've been looking for the wrong signs. Our work points to a new way of searching for supernova precursors," said astrophysicist Rosanne Di Stefano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

The specific type of stellar explosion Di Stefano and her colleagues studied is called a Type Ia supernova. It occurs when an old, compact star known as a white dwarf destabilizes.

A white dwarf is a stellar remnant that has ceased nuclear fusion. It typically can weigh up to 1.4 times as much as our Sun - a figure called the Chandrasekhar mass after the astronomer who first calculated it. Any heavier, and gravity overwhelms the forces supporting the white dwarf, compacting it and igniting runaway nuclear fusion that blows the star apart.

There are two possible ways for a white dwarf to exceed the Chandrasekhar mass and explode as a Type Ia supernova. It can accrete gas from a donor star, or two white dwarfs can collide. Most astronomers favor the first scenario as the more likely explanation. But we would expect to see certain signs if the theory is correct, and we don't for most Type Ia supernovae.

For example, we should detect small amounts of hydrogen and helium gas near the explosion, but we don't. That gas would come from matter that wasn't accreted by the white dwarf, or from the disruption of the companion star in the explosion. Astronomers also have looked for the donor star after the supernova faded from sight, without success.

Di Stefano and her colleagues suggest that white dwarf spin might solve this puzzle. A spin-up/spin-down process would introduce a long delay between the time of accretion and the explosion. As a white dwarf gains mass, it also gains angular momentum, which speeds up its spin. If the white dwarf rotates fast enough, its spin can help support it, allowing it to cross the 1.4-solar-mass barrier and become a super-Chandrasekhar-mass star.

Once accretion stops, the white dwarf will gradually slow down. Eventually, the spin isn't enough to counteract gravity, leading to a Type Ia supernova.

"Our work is new because we show that spin-up and spin-down of the white dwarf have important consequences. Astronomers therefore must take angular momentum of accreting white dwarfs seriously, even though it's very difficult science," explained Di Stefano.

The spin-down process could produce a time delay of up to a billion years between the end of accretion and the supernova explosion. This would allow the companion star to age and evolve into a second white dwarf, and any surrounding material to dissipate.

In our Galaxy, scientists estimate that there are three Type Ia supernovae every thousand years. If a typical super-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarf takes millions of years to spin down and explode, then calculations suggest that there should be dozens of pre-explosion systems within a few thousand light-years of Earth.

Those supernova precursors will be difficult to detect. However, upcoming wide-field surveys conducted at facilities like Pan-STARRS and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope should be able to spot them.

"We don't know of any super-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarfs in the Milky Way yet, but we're looking forward to hunting them out," said co-author Rasmus Voss of Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

This research appears in a paper in the Sept. 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available online. Authors are Di Stefano (CfA), Voss (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands), and J.S.W. Claeys (Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands).

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

 

[MRSN]

What Will Happen When the Sun’s Magnetic Poles Reverse?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gNgaME86Y#at=165
The Sun’s magnetic field will likely reverse sometime in the next three to four months. No, this is not the next doomsday prediction scenario. It really will happen. But there’s nothing to fear because in reality the Sun’s magnetic field changes regularly, about every 11 years.
The flip-flopping of the Sun’s magnetic field takes place at the peak of each solar activity cycle when the Sun’s internal magnetic dynamo reorients itself. When the field reversal happens, the magnetic field weakens, then dies down to zero before emerging again with a reversed polarity.
While this is not a catastrophic event, the reversal will have effects, said solar physicist Todd Hoeksema, the director of Stanford University’s Wilcox Solar Observatory, who monitors the Sun’s polar magnetic fields. “This change will have ripple effects throughout the Solar System,” he said.


The magnetic flux of the Sun through the solar cycle (credit: Ian O’Neill)

When solar physicists talk about solar field reversals, their conversation often centers on the “current sheet.” The current sheet is a sprawling surface jutting outward from the sun’s equator where the Sun’s slowly-rotating magnetic field induces an electrical current. The current itself is small, only one ten-billionth of an amp per square meter (0.0000000001 amps/m2), but there’s a lot of it: the amperage flows through a region 10,000 km thick and billions of kilometers wide. Electrically speaking, the entire heliosphere is organized around this enormous sheet.

During field reversals, the current sheet becomes very wavy, and as Earth orbits the Sun, we dip in and out of the current sheet. This means we can see an uptick in space weather, with any solar storms affecting Earth more. So, there may be more auroras in our near future.

Cosmic rays are also affected. These are high-energy particles accelerated to nearly light speed by supernova explosions and other violent events in the galaxy. Cosmic rays are a danger to astronauts and space probes, and some researchers say they might affect the cloudiness and climate of Earth. The current sheet acts as a barrier to cosmic rays, deflecting them as they attempt to penetrate the inner solar system. The good news is that a wavy sheet acts as a better shield against these energetic particles from deep space.

Scientists say the Sun’s north pole is already quite far along losing its polarity, with the south pole coming along behind.

“The sun’s north pole has already changed sign, while the south pole is racing to catch up,” said Phil Scherrer, another solar physicst at Standford. “Soon, however, both poles will be reversed, and the second half of Solar Max will be underway.”

Meaning that activity in this already weak solar cycle will start to abate.
http://www.universetoday.com/103960/what-will-happen-when-the-suns-magnetic-poles-reverse/

 

[MRSN]

The Moon rises surrounded by noctilucent clouds, as seen from the International Space Station

 

[MRSN]

What is a Meteor Shower?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjCyfSJG5_o
When tiny grains of dust impact our atmosphere, they leave a trail of glowing material, like a streak of light across the sky.
This is a meteor, or a shooting star.

On any night, you can go outside, watch the sky, and be guaranteed to see one. Individual meteors start as meteoroids –
pieces of rock smaller than a pebble flying around the Solar System.

Even though they’re tiny, these objects can be moving at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour.
When they hit Earth’s atmosphere, they release tremendous amounts of energy, burning up above an altitude of 50 kilometers.
As they disintegrate, they leave a trail of superheated gas and rocky sparks which last for a moment in the sky,
and then cool down and disappear from view.

Throughout the year there are several meteor showers, when the number of meteors streaking through the sky increases dramatically.
This happens when the Earth passes through the trail of dust left by a comet or asteroid.

Meteor showers are when night sky puts on a special show, and it’s a time to gather your friends and family together
and enjoy the spectacle.

Some showers produce only a trickle of objects, while others, like the famous Perseid meteor shower,
can dependably bring dozens of meteors each hour.

If the trail is dense enough, we can get what is called a meteor storm. The most powerful meteor storms in history
truly made it look like the sky was falling. The Leonids in 1833 produced hundreds of thousands per hour.
Meteor showers take their name from the constellation from where they appear to originate. For example,
the Perseids trace a trail back to the constellation Perseus; although you can see them anywhere across the sky.

You can see meteors any time of the year, and you don’t need any special equipment to enjoy an average meteor shower.
But here are some ways you can improve your experience.

You’ll want to find a location with as clear a view to the horizon in as many directions as possible. An open field is great.
Lie on your back, or on a reclining chair, look up to the sky

… and be patient.

You probably won’t see a meteor right away, but after a few minutes, you should see your first one.
The longer you look, the more you’ll see, and the better chance you’ll have of seeing a bolide or fireball;
a very bright meteor that streaks across the sky, leaving a trail that can last for a long time.
You can see meteors any time that it’s dark, but the most impressive ones happen in the early morning,
when your location on Earth is ploughing directly into the space dust.
You also want the darkest skies you can get, far away from city light pollution, and
many hours after the Sun has gone down.
Enjoy the early evening meteors, but then set your alarm and get up around 4 in the morning to see the real sky show.


If I could only see one meteor shower every year, it would have to be the Perseids.
These come when the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle, and peak around August 12th every year.
It’s not always the most active shower, but it’s warm outside in the Northern hemisphere,
and this is a fun activity to do with your friends and family.
Now get outside, and enjoy a meteor shower.

 

[LA Guy]

lol nice concept but as you said the universe is infinite so it's really impossible to come to the conclusion that there may not be a life outside earth..Our observable universe is nothing compare to the whole universe..in our galaxy alone,if I'm not wrong, Keplar has scanned about 2 million habitable planets having water,life etc everything necessary for life but they are too far away..would take us millions of years to travel there and find out what kind of life is there..

First of all MRSN I am really in awe of the knowledge you posses about space and astronomy and thank you very much for teaching and sharing and opening lot of eyes, we all like to believe that there is life out there and law of numbers suggests that there is got to be some sort of other life considering trillions of possibilities
Keplar have indeed found 2 million planets that could be habitable and may have water, but it takes more than water and energy from the parent star to start the life, millions of events have to happen precisely in a right sequence to form the first form and another billions of years and more events again in the right sequence for the first form of life to get to what we have today.
I am not saying it is impossible, it happened here but it is highly improbable

 

[MRSN]

First of all MRSN I am really in awe of the knowledge you posses about space and astronomy and thank you very much for teaching and sharing and opening lot of eyes, we all like to believe that there is life out there and law of numbers suggests that there is got to be some sort of other life considering trillions of possibilities
Keplar have indeed found 2 million planets that could be habitable and may have water, but it takes more than water and energy from the parent star to start the life, millions of events have to happen precisely in a right sequence to form the first form and another billions of years and more events again in the right sequence for the first form of life to get to what we have today.
I am not saying it is impossible, it happened here but it is highly improbable

thanks lol it's my pleasure to share all the cool facts but no I'm not that great at it..just have great interest and passion just like you guys..and yeah at this very moment we haven't found any evidence so it becomes difficult to believe but then again the universe is 156 billion light-years across(that's huge) we can't even observe it beyond a 45.7 billion light-year radius so to say there's no life at all basing on our very little research in our solar system will be against science..Your saying we are the only ones in this infinite universe is true only if something else not human created us..there's no such thing as life being gifted to particular planet.Science doesn't work that way.the events that happened on earth could happen on any other planet in this infinite universe..We're not even done proving there wasn't any life in the past or won't be in future on Mars or Jupiter's moon Europa(which has lakes flowing,Fish-esque life-forms) or Saturn's moon Titan which are in our own solar system so how can we make such assumption about the whole universe.

 

[MRSN]

The Edge of the Universe

The universe is big…really, really big. You have no idea just how gargantuan it actually is. The universe is everything in existence, so it is thought. Unless there are others, and ours is just one among trillions, but that’s for another article all together. Ok, so you know we live in a galaxy called the Milky Way containing a few hundred billion stars of which our Sun is just one. If the Milky Way was reduced to a disk measuring 10 metres in diameter, then our entire solar system would be no more than 0.1 of a millimetre across. If it’s nice and clear tonight and you look up into the sky, you’ll only ever see 0.000003% of all the stars that are in our Galaxy. So let’s take one of those stars, the nearest one to our Sun in fact. This is a red dwarf star called Proxima Centauri, at 4.24 light years away. It’s too small to see with the naked eye but its light takes 4.24 years to cross space and get to us. So if you wanted to travel to Proxima Centauri with the rocket technology we have now, it would take you between 70,000 and 80, 000 years to get there. If we actually managed to accomplish light speed travel (186,000 miles per second) it would still take you four and a quarter years to get there, that’s nine and a half years for the round trip. Now this is just the star next door, our nearest stellar neighbour. We’re not really travelling across the universe here.

If you wanted to cross your very own home spiral, the Milky Way from one side to the other, it would take an astonishing 100,000 years. That’s roughly 1,250 human lifetimes. No this is not with our present fastest rocket engines, this is at blisteringly fast light speed. Travelling this fast, you could go seven times around the Earth in a second. What if you wanted to visit our nearest major galaxy at this speed? That’ll be the Andromeda Galaxy, and it would take you every one of 2.5 million years to get out of the Milky Way and arrive at Andromeda. Kind of puts things into perspective, and the universe is a whole, whole lot bigger than that…this is still just small potatoes!

This is where the numbers start to get slightly terrifying. There are billions, upon billions, upon billions of other galaxies out there just like the Milky Way and Andromeda, each with up to hundreds of billions of star systems, and their trillions of planets.

If you pull out further and look at the even bigger picture, then you’ll see that galaxies seem to clump together, these are the galaxy groups and larger galaxy clusters. They are collections of somewhere between 50 and a 1,000 galaxies. The next scale up from the galaxy clusters are even more gigantic conglomerations…galactic superclusters. These are the largest things known to humankind, made up of galaxy groups and clusters into huge cosmic super structures spanning hundreds of millions of light years, even up to a billion light years across. They’re made up of colossal walls, sheets, and filaments of galaxies. They are objects of unimaginable scale, that they take up pretty sizable chunks of the observable universe. Pull out even further and these clusters and superclusters form around large voids in the universe, resembling a structure like a sponge or a loaf of bread. The Galaxy clusters are the bread, and the voids are the air bubbles.

So how big is the whole universe? Well nobody really knows the answer to that. We can only see so far in all directions, but it’s here where we hit upon a “brick wall”. Distance is not the issue when we’re looking to the edge of the observable universe, it’s actually time. The cosmos is known to be 13.7 billion years old and the thinking is that anything past 13.7 billion light years, then the light hasn’t had enough time to cross space and reach us since the Big Bang. So that makes a sphere of visible universe around the Earth of about 13 billion light years in radius. At the time of writing 13 billion light years is roughly the distance of the furthest galaxy yet seen.

But what about the rapid expansion of the universe, and that ever accelerating expansion due to mysterious dark energy? Well this expansion has stretched space during this time, and makes for an actual observable universe of a whopping 78 billion light years, a visible sphere 156 billion light years across. Just say a star at say 13.7 billion light years away emitted a photon (although this is impossible as this is at the beginning of everything, but just for this example). Then by the time that photon gets to Earth, then the starting point of that photon is no longer at 13.7 billion light years away, but at around 78 billion light years away. The light hasn’t actually travelled across 78 billion light years, but the space between us and its beginning point has been stretched. So the photons of light we see from very distant objects are at much further points away than they were when the light was emitted.

There is a point where it was impossible for light or any kind of radiation to travel, this point is earlier than 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Astronomers would never see any kind of light from this time, not visible light, not gamma-rays, not radio, or ultraviolet, nothing on the electromagnetic spectrum. You might have seen that strange looking green and blue map of blobs(below), this is the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. This is the afterglow of the Big Bang itself, and the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation marks the point whereby the universe became transparent to radiation. It was opaque before this time, opaque like the centre of a star is opaque.

The varying colours on the CMBR show tiny temperature variations as the infant universe cooled and became transparent. These small temperature variations imply varying density, and this pattern matches the places where the giant galaxy clusters and superclusters are situated today.

So astronomers look out to the edge of our 78 billion light year radius observable sphere, but even this is probably just a miniscule part of what may actually exist. Nobody knows for sure but scientists estimate it may account for just one ten-thousanth of what’s actually out there. What is the universe like beyond? Is it the same everywhere or do the physics vary? What worlds and other civilisations lie out there forever out of our reach? Does it go on for infinity, or does it have an edge? It seems that most of the universe is beyond our telescopes, our comprehension, and maybe even our imagination.
http://astronomycentral.co.uk/how-big-is-the-universe/

 

[MRSN]

What Is A Quasar?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fThGKOgSo5I


Astronomers first knew they had a mystery on their hands in the 1960s when they turned the first radio telescopes to the sky.

They detected the radio waves streaming off the Sun, the Milky Way and a few stars,
but they also turned up bizarre objects they couldn’t explain. These objects were small and incredibly bright.

They named them quasi-stellar-objects or “quasars”, and then began to argue about what might be causing them.
The first was found to be moving away at more than a third the speed of light.

But was it really?

Maybe we were seeing the distortion of gravity from a black hole, or could it be the white hole end of a wormhole.
And If it was that fast, then it was really, really far… 4 billion light years away.
And it generating as much energy as an entire galaxy with a hundred billion stars.
What could do this?

Here’s where Astronomers got creative. Maybe quasars weren’t really that bright,
and it was our understanding of the size and expansion of the Universe that was wrong.
Or maybe we were seeing the results of a civilization, who had harnessed all stars in their galaxy into some kind of energy source.

Then in the 1980s, astronomers started to agree on the active galaxy theory as the source of quasars.
That, in fact, several different kinds of objects: quasars, blazars and radio galaxies were all the same thing,
just seen from different angles. And that some mechanism was causing galaxies to blast out jets of radiation from their cores.

But what was that mechanism?

We now know that all galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers;
some billions of times the mass of the Sun. When material gets too close, it forms an accretion disk around the black hole.
It heats up to millions of degrees, blasting out an enormous amount of radiation.
The magnetic environment around the black hole forms twin jets of material which flow out into space for millions of light-years.
This is an AGN, an active galactic nucleus.

When the jets are perpendicular to our view, we see a radio galaxy. If they’re at an angle, we see a quasar.
And when we’re staring right down the barrel of the jet, that’s a blazar. It’s the same object, seen from three different perspectives.

Supermassive black holes aren’t always feeding. If a black hole runs out of food, the jets run out of power and shut down
. Right up until something else gets too close, and the whole system starts up again.

The Milky Way has a supermassive black hole at its center, and it’s all out of food. It doesn’t have an active galactic nucleus,
and so, we don’t appear as a quasar to some distant galaxy.

We may have in the past, and may again in the future. In 10 billion years or so, when the Milky way collides with Andromeda
, our supermassive black hole may roar to life as a quasar, consuming all this new material.

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/73222/what-is-a-quasar/#ixzz2brK1UZpL

 

[MRSN]

What is a redshift?
Subtle changes in the color of starlight let astronomers find planets, measure the speeds of galaxies, and track the expansion of the universe.

Astronomers use redshifts to track the rotation of our galaxy, tease out the subtle tug of a distant planet on its parent star, and measure the expansion rate of the universe. What is a redshift? It’s often compared to the way a police officer catches you when you’re speeding. But, in the case of astronomy, these answers all come from our ability to detect miniscule changes in the color of light.

Police and astronomers both rely on a principle called the Doppler shift. It’s something you’ve experienced while standing near a passing train. As the train approaches, you hear the horn blowing at a particular pitch. Suddenly, as the train passes, the pitch drops. Why does the horn pitch depend on where the train is?

Sound can only move so fast through the air – about 1,200 kilometers per hour (about 750 miles per hour). As the train rushes forward and blows its horn, the sound waves in front of the train get squished together. Meanwhile, the sound waves behind the train get spread out. This means the frequency of the sound waves is now higher ahead of the train and lower behind it. Our brains interpret changes in the frequency of sound as changes in pitch. To a person on the ground, the horn starts off high as the train approaches and then goes low as the train recedes.

As a car moves, sound waves in front of it get squished up while those behind get spread out. This changes the perceived frequency and we hear the pitch change as the car goes by. Credit: Wikipedia

Light, like sound, is also a wave stuck at a fixed speed – one billion kilometers per hour – and therefore plays by the same rules. Except, in the case of light, we perceive changes in frequency as changes in color. If a lightbulb moves very rapidly through space, the light appears blue as it approaches you and then becomes red after it passes.

Measuring these slight changes in the frequency of light lets astronomers measure the speed of everything in the universe!

Just like sounds from a moving car, as a star moves away from us, the light becomes redder. As it moves towards us, the light becomes bluer. Credit: Wikipedia

Of course, making these measurements is little trickier than just saying “that star looks redder than it should be.” Instead, astronomers make use of markers in the spectrum of starlight. If you shine a flashlight beam through a prism, a rainbow comes out the other side. But if you place a clear container filled with hydrogen gas between the flashlight and the prism, the rainbow changes! Gaps appear in the smooth continuum of colors – places where the light literally goes missing.


The dark absorption lines of a star at rest (left) get shifted towards red if the star is moving away from Earth (right). Credit: Wikipedia

The hydrogen atoms are tuned to absorb very specific frequencies of light. When light consisting of many colors tries to pass through the gas, those frequencies get removed from the beam. The rainbow becomes littered with what astronomers call absorption lines. Replace the hydrogen with helium and you get a completely different pattern of absorption lines. Every atom and molecule has a distinct absorption fingerprint that allows astronomers to tease out the chemical makeup of distant stars and galaxies.

When we pass starlight through a prism (or similar device), we see a forest of absorption lines from hydrogen, helium, sodium, and so on. However, if that star is hurtling away from us, all those absorption lines undergo a Doppler shift and move towards the red part of the rainbow – a process called redshifting. If the star turns around and now comes flying towards us, the opposite happens. This is called, not surprisingly, blueshifting.

By measuring how far the pattern of lines moves from where it’s supposed to be, astronomers can precisely calculate the speed of the star relative to Earth! With this tool, the motion of the universe is revealed and a host of new questions can be investigated.

Take the case where the absorption lines of a star regularly alternate between blueshift and redshift. This implies the star is moving towards us and away from us – over and over and over. It tells us the star is wobbling back and forth in space. This could only happen if something unseen was pulling the star around. By carefully measuring how far the absorption lines shift, an astronomer can determine the mass of the invisible companion and its distance from the star. And that’s how astronomers have found nearly 95% of the nearly 800 known planets orbiting other stars!


As a planet orbits a star, it tugs the star back and forth. Astronomers see the star's movement as an alternating red and blueshift of its spectrum. Credit: ESO

In addition to finding roughly 750 other worlds, redshifts also led to one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century. In the 1910s, astronomers at Lowell Observatory and elsewhere noticed that the light from nearly every galaxy was redshifted. For some reason, most galaxies in the universe were racing away from us! In 1929, American astronomer Edwin Hubble matched up these redshifts with distance estimates to these galaxies and uncovered something remarkable: the farther away a galaxy, the faster it’s receding. Hubble had stumbled upon a startling truth: the universe was uniformly expanding! What came to be known as the cosmological redshift was the first piece of the Big Bang theory – and ultimately a description of the origin of our universe.


Edwin Hubble found a correlation between distance to a galaxy (horizontal axis) and how quickly it's moving away from Earth (vertical axis). The movement of galaxies in a nearby cluster adds some noise to this plot. Credit: William C. Keel (via Wikipedia)

Redshifts, the subtle movement of tiny dark lines in a star’s spectrum, are a fundamental part of the astronomer’s toolkit. Isn’t it remarkable that the principle behind something as mundane as the changing pitch of a passing train horn underlies our ability to watch galaxies spin, find hidden worlds, and piece together the entire history of the cosmos?
http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/what-is-a-redshift

 

[LA Guy]

The Edge of the Universe

The universe is big…really, really big. You have no idea just how gargantuan it actually is. The universe is everything in existence, so it is thought. Unless there are others, and ours is just one among trillions, but that’s for another article all together. Ok, so you know we live in a galaxy called the Milky Way containing a few hundred billion stars of which our Sun is just one. If the Milky Way was reduced to a disk measuring 10 metres in diameter, then our entire solar system would be no more than 0.1 of a millimetre across. If it’s nice and clear tonight and you look up into the sky, you’ll only ever see 0.000003% of all the stars that are in our Galaxy. So let’s take one of those stars, the nearest one to our Sun in fact. This is a red dwarf star called Proxima Centauri, at 4.24 light years away. It’s too small to see with the naked eye but its light takes 4.24 years to cross space and get to us. So if you wanted to travel to Proxima Centauri with the rocket technology we have now, it would take you between 70,000 and 80, 000 years to get there. If we actually managed to accomplish light speed travel (186,000 miles per second) it would still take you four and a quarter years to get there, that’s nine and a half years for the round trip. Now this is just the star next door, our nearest stellar neighbour. We’re not really travelling across the universe here.

If you wanted to cross your very own home spiral, the Milky Way from one side to the other, it would take an astonishing 100,000 years. That’s roughly 1,250 human lifetimes. No this is not with our present fastest rocket engines, this is at blisteringly fast light speed. Travelling this fast, you could go seven times around the Earth in a second. What if you wanted to visit our nearest major galaxy at this speed? That’ll be the Andromeda Galaxy, and it would take you every one of 2.5 million years to get out of the Milky Way and arrive at Andromeda. Kind of puts things into perspective, and the universe is a whole, whole lot bigger than that…this is still just small potatoes!

This is where the numbers start to get slightly terrifying. There are billions, upon billions, upon billions of other galaxies out there just like the Milky Way and Andromeda, each with up to hundreds of billions of star systems, and their trillions of planets.

If you pull out further and look at the even bigger picture, then you’ll see that galaxies seem to clump together, these are the galaxy groups and larger galaxy clusters. They are collections of somewhere between 50 and a 1,000 galaxies. The next scale up from the galaxy clusters are even more gigantic conglomerations…galactic superclusters. These are the largest things known to humankind, made up of galaxy groups and clusters into huge cosmic super structures spanning hundreds of millions of light years, even up to a billion light years across. They’re made up of colossal walls, sheets, and filaments of galaxies. They are objects of unimaginable scale, that they take up pretty sizable chunks of the observable universe. Pull out even further and these clusters and superclusters form around large voids in the universe, resembling a structure like a sponge or a loaf of bread. The Galaxy clusters are the bread, and the voids are the air bubbles.

So how big is the whole universe? Well nobody really knows the answer to that. We can only see so far in all directions, but it’s here where we hit upon a “brick wall”. Distance is not the issue when we’re looking to the edge of the observable universe, it’s actually time. The cosmos is known to be 13.7 billion years old and the thinking is that anything past 13.7 billion light years, then the light hasn’t had enough time to cross space and reach us since the Big Bang. So that makes a sphere of visible universe around the Earth of about 13 billion light years in radius. At the time of writing 13 billion light years is roughly the distance of the furthest galaxy yet seen.

But what about the rapid expansion of the universe, and that ever accelerating expansion due to mysterious dark energy? Well this expansion has stretched space during this time, and makes for an actual observable universe of a whopping 78 billion light years, a visible sphere 156 billion light years across. Just say a star at say 13.7 billion light years away emitted a photon (although this is impossible as this is at the beginning of everything, but just for this example). Then by the time that photon gets to Earth, then the starting point of that photon is no longer at 13.7 billion light years away, but at around 78 billion light years away. The light hasn’t actually travelled across 78 billion light years, but the space between us and its beginning point has been stretched. So the photons of light we see from very distant objects are at much further points away than they were when the light was emitted.

There is a point where it was impossible for light or any kind of radiation to travel, this point is earlier than 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Astronomers would never see any kind of light from this time, not visible light, not gamma-rays, not radio, or ultraviolet, nothing on the electromagnetic spectrum. You might have seen that strange looking green and blue map of blobs(below), this is the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. This is the afterglow of the Big Bang itself, and the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation marks the point whereby the universe became transparent to radiation. It was opaque before this time, opaque like the centre of a star is opaque.

The varying colours on the CMBR show tiny temperature variations as the infant universe cooled and became transparent. These small temperature variations imply varying density, and this pattern matches the places where the giant galaxy clusters and superclusters are situated today.

So astronomers look out to the edge of our 78 billion light year radius observable sphere, but even this is probably just a miniscule part of what may actually exist. Nobody knows for sure but scientists estimate it may account for just one ten-thousanth of what’s actually out there. What is the universe like beyond? Is it the same everywhere or do the physics vary? What worlds and other civilisations lie out there forever out of our reach? Does it go on for infinity, or does it have an edge? It seems that most of the universe is beyond our telescopes, our comprehension, and maybe even our imagination.
http://astronomycentral.co.uk/how-big-is-the-universe/

WOW this is beyond imagination, infinite suns planets and moons and impossible distances to ever be able to reach there for humans or machines but it is out there and I am not sure why.
It is quite obvious that these distances cannot be tarveled but I have a question we all know the speed of light (186000 miles a second) what is the speed of radio, tv or other transmission that we have been using for 100 years? and i am sure with distance signal gets weaker and weaker but with the signals coming from satalliets for past 30 years is it possible for some advanced life with in 100 light years is able to listen in if the speed of signals is the same as light and do we have the technology to listen in for artificial signals from light years away, if we can do that then I think listening is the easiest way to detect life outside of our solar system than actually getting there or detecting planets with the current technology.
So more than a hundred billion suns in our Milky way, let's assume that each of these suns or stars have one habitable planet and we are able to put one human being on one of those planets then we will have one human on 7 billion plantes. two problems with this
1) That one human will be the most lonely person in the universe and
2) There will be more that 97 billion planets empty

 

[MRSN]

WOW this is beyond imagination, infinite suns planets and moons and impossible distances to ever be able to reach there for humans or machines but it is out there and I am not sure why.
It is quite obvious that these distances cannot be tarveled but I have a question we all know the speed of light (186000 miles a second) what is the speed of radio, tv or other transmission that we have been using for 100 years? and i am sure with distance signal gets weaker and weaker but with the signals coming from satalliets for past 30 years is it possible for some advanced life with in 100 light years is able to listen in if the speed of signals is the same as light and do we have the technology to listen in for artificial signals from light years away, if we can do that then I think listening is the easiest way to detect life outside of our solar system than actually getting there or detecting planets with the current technology.
So more than a hundred billion suns in our Milky way, let's assume that each of these suns or stars have one habitable planet and we are able to put one human being on one of those planets then we will have one human on 7 billion plantes. two problems with this
1) That one human will be the most lonely person in the universe and
2) There will be more that 97 billion planets empty

Radio signals do travel at the speed of light..a sound coming from a 10 light years distance would reach us in like 10 years so as you said we've been using these for barely 100 years so it's possible for the intelligent life within 100 light years if there's any might have heard it by now. one thing more as the distances increases the signals become weaker and weaker so would be difficult for intelligent life living far away could listen our sounds or we could detect their sounds( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuation ).....and yes we have the technology to listen in for the artificial signals
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence )
but so far we haven't detected any.

 

[QazzarFan]

<embed src="http://scale2.s3.amazonaws.com/scale2.swf" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="454" height="700"></object>

Everyone check this out by clicking on start. Shows how insignificant we are in terms of this visible universe.

 

[MRSN]

<embed src="http://scale2.s3.amazonaws.com/scale2.swf" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="454" height="700"></object>

Everyone check this out by clicking on start. Shows how insignificant we are in terms of this visible universe.

that was amazing..thanks for sharing.

 

[LA Guy]

I cannot seem to understand that if BIG BANG occurred about 15 Billions ago and all the matter that was formed at that point in time started racing out at the speed of light, so the farthest object in universe should be about 15 Billion light years away but then we are finding galaxies 150 Billion light years away, where did that come from?

 

[RWAC]

Delete

 

[MRSN]

Earth-like exoplanet found to complete orbit in mere 8.5 hours

WASHINGTON, Aug. 19 (Xinhua) -- U.S. researchers said Monday that they have discovered an Earth-sized exoplanet that orbits its host star in the time it takes you to complete a single workday, or get a full night's sleep.

Located about 700 light-years away, the exoplanet named Kepler 78b is extremely close to its star. Its orbital radius is only about three times the radius of the star, causing it to complete an orbital year in a mere 8.5 hours, one of the shortest orbital periods ever detected.

Most importantly, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were able to detect light emitted by the planet,a first for an exoplanet as small as Kepler 78b. This light, once analyzed with larger telescopes, may give scientists detailed information about the planet's surface composition and reflective properties.

While it is about the size of Earth, Kepler 78b is most certainly not habitable, due to its extreme proximity to its host star, the MIT researchers wrote in the Astrophysical Journal.

They estimated that its surface temperatures may be as high as 2,760 degrees Celsius. In such a scorching environment, the top layer of the planet is likely completely melted, creating a massive, roiling ocean of lava.

"You'd have to really stretch your imagination to imagine living on a lava world," co-author Josh Winn, an associate professor of physics at the MIT, said. "We certainly wouldn't survive there."

The researchers also determined that the planet is about 40 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our Sun. The star around which Kepler 78b orbits is likely relatively young, as it rotates more than twice as fast as the Sun, a sign that the star has not had as much time to slow down.

Keplar 78b was observed by the U.S. Kepler Telescope, which has recently been retired from its planet-hunting mission after U.S. engineers failed to find a fix for its hobbled pointing system. Winn and his colleagues were tasked with looking for Earth-sized planets with very short orbital periods.

"We've gotten used to planets having orbits of a few days," said Winn. "But we wondered, what about a few hours? Is that even possible? And sure enough, there are some out there."

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/sci/2013-08/20/c_132644518.htm

 

[LA Guy]

Most of these planets found around other solar systems are hellish world with no chance of life ever evolving or survive and now this so called exoplanet, it has the same issues, too close, too far, too big, too small and other host of problems, on top of that a planet have to have liquid, megnetic field, ozone layer and a moon or two to have chance of starting some short of reaction and hence a carbon based life form.
One fact is stablished that there are other planets and other earth like and earth size planets but they are not a paradise like our earth, they are more like a burning hell and i think we are the only odd ball in the universe

 

[SwingNSeam]

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) from Earth. Sagan pointed out that "all of human history has happened on that tiny pixel.

 

[Mystrey]

Most of these planets found around other solar systems are hellish world with no chance of life ever evolving or survive and now this so called exoplanet, it has the same issues, too close, too far, too big, too small and other host of problems, on top of that a planet have to have liquid, megnetic field, ozone layer and a moon or two to have chance of starting some short of reaction and hence a carbon based life form.
One fact is stablished that there are other planets and other earth like and earth size planets but they are not a paradise like our earth, they are more like a burning hell and i think we are the only odd ball in the universe

Typical arrogant response

How do you know life hasn't evolved and adapted to those planets conditions?

 

[LA Guy]

Typical arrogant response

How do you know life hasn't evolved and adapted to those planets conditions?

Exactly no one knows if life can evolved in any conditions and looking at the law of shear numbers of bodies in the universe, millions and millions of galaxies and 100's of billions of stars in each galaxies and if they have planets then trillions of moons (our solar system have 300+ moons)
I am not being arrogant just stating my opinion, formation of life is very complicated and odds of life somewhere else are hundreds of time more than all the suns, planets, moons in the universe combined.
We are given this incredible gift of life and this is a one time gift given to Earth, if we do not screw it up then we can sustain it for a long time but if we screw it up then life is gone for ever in the universe

 

[MRSN]

Will Mars look as big as the moon? Sorry, that's just a Facebook hoax

The silly idea that Mars will look as big as the moon in August gets a visual aid on Facebook, in the form of a doctored picture showing two moons above a Russian monastery. The picture was apparently created as an artistic hack, then appropriated for the decade-old Mars myth



Just when you thought the famous August Mars hoax was dead, dead, dead, it's risen from the grave big time — in part due to Facebook.

The alert makes the round every year: "WARNING: August 27 at 00:30 Lift up your eyes and look up at the night sky. On this night, the planet Mars will pass just 34.65 million miles from the earth. To the naked eye it looks like two of the moon above the ground! ... Share the news with your friends, because no one living on this earth has ever seen!"

This year, they're sharing it with a vengeance: One photo, showing two moons in the sky, has been shared more than 557,000 times on Facebook. There's quite a buzz on Twitter, too.

Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait reviews the history of the Mars moon myth, which goes back a decade. Back on Aug. 27, 2003, there really was a historic encounter with Mars: It was the planet's closest approach to Earth in tens of thousands of years, and when an observer looked through a modest-sized telescope at Mars, the disk would appear as large as the moon's disk looks when seen with the naked eye. That's smaller than the width of a dime held out at arm's length.

Note the comparison between Mars (as seen through a telescope) and the moon (as seen with the naked eye). Those parenthetical qualifications were sometimes lost in translation as the alert about the 2003 encounter was passed along via email. Even worse, the not-quite-right email virus has resurfaced every summer, even when Mars is distant from Earth. This August, for example, the Red Planet is almost as far away as it can get. Its next close approach is due on April 14, 2014.

Tracking down those two moons
Back in the old days, the Mars moon myth went viral via email, but now social networks are the viral channel of choice. And the two-moon picture on Facebook is almost irresistible, even when you know that the claims are mere hokum.

So where did that picture come from? The image had its heyday on Russian social networks last summer, but if you're obsessive about image searching, you'll find that it actually goes back at least four years. It appeared in 2009 on a Russian site called "Dream Worlds," as part of a gallery of fanciful double-moon images. This suggests that someone from Russia picked up the image to play a social-network prank.

As for the buildings shown in the doctored image: They're the domes and bell tower of the St. Nil Stolbenskii Monastery, on Russia's Lake Seliger. Here's a view of the monastery from another angle. Thus, all the evidence points to Russia as the source for this social-media twist on the Mars moon myth.

Whether you live in Moscow, Russia, or Moscow, Idaho, there are plenty of real sights to see in the night sky this weekend: For example, there's the naked-eye nova in the constellation Delphinus ... Venus sparkling in the evening twilight ... Mars and Jupiter in predawn skies ... and if you're lucky, the International Space Station flying overhead. So watch the skies — or, for our Russian friends, smotritye v nyevo.
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/will-mars-look-big-moon-sorry-thats-just-facebook-hoax-8C10990500

 

[MRSN]

The nature of nothing: If you take away everything that is physical (matter/energy), you are left with nothing (no thing). Nothing is completely empty space, absolute cold, silence and darkness. Nothing is infinite, eternal and indestructible. It does not move; it does not have to. It is already everywhere. The universe is more than 99.999% empty space, including our own bodies.

All physical things are made of atoms which are mostly empty space. If the nucleus is the size of a marble, the electrons would be specks of dust a half mile away. Every physical thing has that much empty space in it.

If you removed all the empty space from human bodies leaving only electrons and the other subatomic particles, all seven billion human bodies would fit in the space of a sugar cube.
http://www.truthcontest.com/entries/the-present-universal-truth/nature-of-nothing.html

Most of everything is nothing.

What is faster, the speed of light or the speed of dark? Turn off the light and try to get into bed before it gets dark. I am just kidding, but I am trying to make a point. You cannot turn off “nothing” or do anything to it. It always stays the same, is always everywhere all the time.

Nothing is really something.

Einstein's general relativity equations show that space bends and prove that nothing is really something with substance. Supposedly, empty space is shaped, and it is the shape of space that creates the gravity that controls and creates the whole universe. It holds the planets in orbit, makes the sun and other stars burn, and it is empty space, nothing.

Value of general relativity: I always wondered what the practical benefit of general relativity was, and now I know. It proves that nothing is something, and in fact controls and creates the whole universe.

Nothing causes everything to happen. It creates gravity, gravity creates planets and stars, stars concentrate and release all energy and matter. Thus everything physical comes from and is created by nothing. 0 = 2

 

[yasir]

I want to ask PPer this question,

What happens if you reach the end of the universe, what is after it?

When earth was consider flat, people had notion of beginning of earth, middle earth, far end etc. since we know earth is spherical object, it's symmetrical, it has no notion of beginning or end.

Conceptually universe is same, symmetrical. We cannot get out of the earth's gravity without using significant amount of energy (escape velocity). Similarly, Ge cannot escape universe, we don't how to yet but escape from universe may be possible in future as our knowledge about cosmos gets better...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[bones]

Most of these planets found around other solar systems are hellish world with no chance of life ever evolving or survive and now this so called exoplanet, it has the same issues, too close, too far, too big, too small and other host of problems, on top of that a planet have to have liquid, megnetic field, ozone layer and a moon or two to have chance of starting some short of reaction and hence a carbon based life form.
One fact is stablished that there are other planets and other earth like and earth size planets but they are not a paradise like our earth, they are more like a burning hell and i think we are the only odd ball in the universe

I agree with you and not those who are of the belief "the chances of life are very likely".

There are hundreds of planets in other solar systems that have already been discovered. Estimates of the number of planets that exist is probably in the millions of billions.

But let's be frank, just how perfect do conditions have to be for life to exist? So far we know, liquid water is essential. You need luck, the luck that a single cell organism could just appear. That's the one part that's most difficult to come to terms with.

Yes life could exist in many places, but it needs to start off somewhere and on earth it was with single cell organisms in the water, which expanded and expanded.

The atmosphere here. The distance from the sun, the types of minerals and gasses. The Earth O zone layer, the protection of UV and radiowaves. We also have a hospitable climate, where the temperature allows cells to develop. We also have a single satellite that gives us our tidal waves, which give us the currents. We have fresh water.

There are so so so many conditions that we know from our own planet, that they have to be perfect, otherwise, that one off chance for a single cell organism to form would not occur.

The more and more conditions/factors that you think about, the less and less likely that there is life out there. In fact, no matter how many planets you have, you still need to think about the fact that you have to go from non-living to living on that planet.

One thing is for sure, we humans will never ever find complex life, no matter how advanced the technology of the future generations becomes.

The distances we're talking about between solar systems, not even even galaxies, is so so vast that we simply will never be able to scale them.

Sometimes it's better to not even think about it. It would drive you crazy thinking about it.

 

[bones]

Typical arrogant response

How do you know life hasn't evolved and adapted to those planets conditions?

How do you know it has?

There are so many conditions that had to be perfect for life to form on Earth and a hell of a lot of luck, to go from the non-living world to the living world.

 

[bones]

I've been watching a few documentaries and lectures about Quasars at the moment. They're fascinating, but so far there are only a handful of actual samples they can refer to. One quasar they've found is 4 billion light years across, I dare not think about the immense energy involved.

 

[MRSN]

What's the Fastest Spacecraft Ever?

New Horizons

For spacecraft that zoom through the cosmos at thousands of miles per hour, calculating which one is traveling at the fastest speed is more complicated than simply clocking the first to cross the finish line.

When space agencies calculate and establish speed records, these numbers need to be defined and qualified, because there can be more than one frame of reference. In other words, the speed of a spacecraft can be calculated relative to the Earth, the sun, or some other body.

The record for the highest speed at which a spacecraft has launched and escaped from Earth's gravity is held by the New Horizons probe. This 1,054 pound (478 kg), piano-sized spacecraft, which launched in January 2006, sped away from the Earth at a blistering pace of 36,000 miles per hour(16.26 km/s ) (almost 58,000 kilometers per hour).

As the first mission to the distant Pluto, New Horizons is currently on a trajectory that will take it more than 3 billion miles away, toward the dwarf planet.

New Horizons' escape speed from Earth beat the previous record of 32,400 mph (about 52,000 km/h), set when Pioneer 10 set out for Jupiter in 1972.

After New Horizon encounters its primary science target, Pluto, and possibly a few of the asteroid-like objects in the Kuiper Belt that stretches beyond Pluto, the probe will leave our solar system. Here, it will join four other spacecraft, and could vie for yet another title: fastest interstellar spacecraft ever launched from Earth.

At present, the four interstellar spacecraft include Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. Voyager 1 is speeding away from the sun at the quickest pace, at a speed of more than 38,500 mph (more than 62,000 km/h).

New Horizons is expected to reach Pluto by 2015, and will approach the planet at a speed of more than 31,000 mph (about 50,000 km/h). It is, however, unlikely that the probe will surpass Voyager 1's speed, as the spacecraft won't be able to get much of a speed boost from the relatively weak gravitational effect of Pluto and other small Kuiper Belt bodies.

For spacecraft that have re-entered Earth's atmosphere, the highest speed was set by the comet-catching Stardust spacecraft, which plunged back toward Earth at a speed of 29,000 mph (more than 46,600 km/h).

http://www.livescience.com/32655-whats-the-fastest-spacecraft-ever.html

 

[MRSN]

As the universe expands it pulls time with it. As space and time are linked as one. But if the universe to reach a theoretical limit of expansion and to begin to contract then time would reverse. That means time would move backwards, with everything coming back to era of simplicity and ending with a big crunch. Will we be given another life by the contraction of universe and reversal of time?

What goes up must come down. With that thought in mind, the entire Universe might one day decide to shrink. And shrink, and shrink, and shrink. Until there's nothing left.

The Universe began some ten billion years ago, with the Big Bang. Out of nothing, a bulb of tremendous energy set free. Matter didn't exist. The only thing there was, was intense heat, and particles.

Outside the bulb was nothing. No time, no space -- as a matter of fact, not even a place where the word `nothing' would have any meaning. To ask what was `before' the Big Bang or what is `outside' the Universe is a meaningless question. It would be like asking what continent is south of the South Pole, or what Bill Gates did before he was born.

But the Universe expanded, at immense speed. It began to cool down, and matter slowly started to take shape. After 100,000 years, the first atoms formed. After 1,000,000 years, the first star flickered up. After 3,000 million years, a small star that later would be called `Sun' was born. And another 5,000 million years later, an astrophysicist named Edwin Hubble would prove there was such a thing as a `Big Bang' in the first place.

Well, the Universe is still expanding, and cooling down. Time ticks. At least, that's what we experience from our point of view.

Time as we experience it is governed by entropy: the natural tendency of things to go into a more chaotic, less energetic state. That sounds more difficult than it really is. When you throw a coffee mug on the floor, it will break up into a chaotic configuration of splinters, while throwing a handful of splinters on the floor will not create a new a mug. When you put a lump of sugar into your tea, the sugar molecules want to mingle with the tea molecules, creating chaos. The only way to beat entropy is to invest energy -- for example; by gluing the splinters of the broken mug together one by one.

But in the end, entropy always wins. Mountains erode, the Universe cools, the Sun cools and will one day die, the Earth will eventually vanish, and all coffee mugs will some day be broken. Entropy is deepest, most profound driving force of the Universe. It defines time, ordering it to point towards what we call `the future'.

But then, out of the blue, something completely crazy happens. Suddenly, the Universe stops expanding. And it actually starts shrinking again, like a balloon losing air.

Some cosmologists assume this will indeed be the case. There may be too much mass in the Universe for the expansion to go on forever. The gravity of all matter in the Universe combined may cause the inflation of the Universe to slow down, come to a halt -- and after that, the Universe would start shrinking again.

This would have unimaginable consequences. In a Universe that's contracting, everything goes reverse. The arrow of time points backwards. Amazingly, entropy would go the other way around.

So there it is, the reverse-Universe. There are lumps of sugar coming out of nowhere and pieces of pottery coming together to form a coffee mug. Light will be mysteriously attracted to the Sun, and sucked into it. Atoms will want to form molecules as difficult as possible. Out of dust, mountains will form. Rivers will flow backwards. And you'll have to add cold to keep your cup of tea from becoming so hot it vaporizes and flies off.

But you won't. As a matter of fact, you won't do anything -- since you're probably not there anymore. Although some theorists believe that in a reverse-Universe, the dead would rise again, living reversed lives until they vanish into nothing, it is unlikely this will happen.

For one thing, our bodies simply may not be apt to contracting universes. The biological mechanisms in our bodies are run by entropy. We need entropy like we need oxygen. No entropy, no life.

What's more, it will take a long, long time before shrinking day comes -- some estimates lead up to ten or twenty trillion years from now: 20,000,000,000,000,000 years. By that time, our Universe will have changed completely. Entropy will have caused stars to fade out and black holes to vaporize. Matter will be divided evenly across the Universe. It will have no particular reason to form stars and planets or humans living backwards lives. Matter will just clot together, making a denser and denser Universe.
Admittedly, it's all speculative business. But don't bother, you won't miss a thing if you're not there when the Universe contracts. After some ten to twenty trillion years of rewinding, the Universe would eventually go zip, as if it never existed. It's the event known as the Big Crunch -- `crunch' in the mind of scientists apparently being the opposite of `bang'.

But will the Universe really vanish? At the moment, most cosmologists don't think so. The latest evidence suggests that the Universe will keep expanding forever, becoming an ever emptier and colder place. Yes, that gives some problems of it's own -- but that's another story. However, the question whether the Universe will shrink or expand forever is still not completely settled.

But then again, many theorists think that the Big Crunch won't be the ultimate end. As the Universe is shrunk back into a ridiculously tiny proportion known as the `Planck length', it would go Bang again. The Universe would expand once more, and everything would start all over again, ping-ponging us forwards and backwards in time forever.
http://www.exitmundi.nl/bigcrunch.html

 

[MRSN]

Recorded on April 15th, 2014 this total lunar eclipse sequence looks south down icy Waterton Lake from the Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada, planet Earth. The most distant horizon includes peaks in Glacier National Park, USA. An exposure every 10 minutes captured the Moon's position and eclipse phase, as it arced, left to right, above the rugged skyline and Waterton town lights. In fact, the sequence effectively measures the roughly 80 minute duration of the total phase of the eclipse.

 

[jeetu]

I routinely use"Google skymap" on android phone to identify Star/Planet. On Laptop/Desktop , i recommend Stellarium.

 

[Arsal_AK]

Has anyone watched the TV series Cosmos??
If you want to know about the observable universe, space-time, how we came to be and the history of the cosmos, I suggest you watch it.Both the orignal and the remake which I believe is called Cosmos: A Space-time Odyssey.

Really good stuff.

 

[MRSN]

amazing article wanted to share this.

Hunting Ghosts Across the Cosmos


What we see versus what we believe: The bottom signal represents the vibration signal at the two LIGO gravitational wave facilities. The illustration above indicates the astrophysical interpretation of the signal–two black holes merging into one. It has taken a century to come up with the concept and technology to track down invisible gravitational waves (Credit: LIGO, NSF, Aurore Simonnet)




The recent discovery of gravitational waves by the twin LIGO detectors drove home the gaping chasm between the popular image of how astronomers explore the cosmos and the way it actually happens. In the layperson’s view — which, to be fair, aligns well with daily experience of how we find out new things — exploration is a matter of looking, seeing, and understanding. In reality, most of what astronomers do involves looking without seeing, or seeing without understanding. It involves not just working at the edge of perception, but trying to deduce what lies beyond perception.

At the risk of sounding unscientific, I’d call it cosmic ghost hunting.

Look at the specifics of the first-ever confirmed gravitational wave signal (known as GW150914, in the businesslike style customary to people who are used to sifting through a lot of data). It was created by the merger of a pair of black holes, 29 and 36 times as massive as the sun. When the two collided and combined, the event briefly emitted 50 times as much energy as all the light from all the stars in the entire visible universe. The event literally shook the foundations of space and time. And we could barely see it, or more accurately, we could not see it at all. There is, as yet, no confirmed radiation signal of any kind associated with the black hole merger; it began in blackness and ended in blackness, shining only in gravity.

The actual signal from GW150914 took the form of a subtle squeezing and stretching of the two LIGO facilities in Louisiana and Washington state. The amount of squeezing: about 1/10,000th the diameter of a proton. The effect is so subtle that it’s taken scientists more than four decades to come up with a workable device that can pick it up. The effect is so obscure that the physicists working on LIGO disagreed passionately about whether the “O” in the name could be justified. The “O” stands for “Observatory”–but is that the right term for an experiments that picks up things that fundamentally cannot be observed?



This is how astronomers actually “observe” gravitational waves. (Illustration from the discovery paper by Abbott et al)


LIGO is just the latest and most dramatic example of cosmic ghost hunting. Another notable one is the discovery of dark energy, a kind of antigravity effect that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. And how do we know this? Well, the story began with teams of researchers who were trying to measure the deceleration of the universe, on the assumption that the mutual gravitational pull of all the galaxies should be slowing things down. OK, and how do you do that? Ah, here come more ghosts.

You cannot directly observe the expansion of the universe. You have to infer it by the way that the light from extremely distant stars is stretched by the stretching of space, which causes the light to lose energy and become redder. To deduce how the rate of expansion is changing, you have to take on an even more complex problem. The way to solve it is to look at how much the light of a distant supernova (exploding star) has been stretched and reddened, and then compare that to how much the light has been dimmed by distance. Then there’s a whole other calculation needed to figure out the true brightness of the star and to compare it to the light collected by the digital detectors at the observatory. Human eyes are not involved in any stage of the process.

The astrophysicists crunching the numbers uncovered a ghostly effect: The universe was not slowing down as expected, but speeding up. That acceleration is a symptom of dark energy–not that we know what it is, exactly, we just know broadly what it does. It is an energy that pushes things apart. It is everywhere, and it cannot be seen. It haunts the universe.

Even seemingly tangible things like planets around other stars mostly exist not as visible things but as indirect interpretations. The Kepler Observatory, which is responsible for the bulk of the exoplanets discovered so far, finds alien worlds by watching their shadows as they pass in front of their stars. That may seem fairly concrete, but there are a lot of things that can cause a small variation in a star’s brightness other than a transiting planet.

For five years, a team led by Alexandre Santerne from Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço examined the Kepler stars one by one, trying to understand exactly what they were seeing. In the end, they concluded that more than half of the inferred giant planets around other stars were not planets at all. They were the kinds of ghosts that vanish when you turn on the lights.

Kepler scientists are now wrestling with another spectral presence, known as KIC 8462852, or Tabby’s star. You might also know it as the “alien megastructure” star, so called because its strange flickering could be caused — possibly maybe — by an enormous artifact orbiting around it. No obvious natural process can explain the star’s peculiar behavior. Then again, we are operating at the edge of perception here, in the zone where it is easy to mistake unusual or misunderstood effects for things that fit into a neat narrative that attracts a lot of media attention–something like an alien megastructure, for instance.

Anyone who has ever watched the silliness of the television “ghost hunter” shows will know how easy it is to mistake signal for noise when you are operating at the edge of perception, how easy it is to get swept up in hypotheses when you do not have enough data to constrain them.

The LIGO folks are certainly aware of the perils of ghost hunting, which is a big part of the reason why their task has taken so long. By the team’s calculation, a signal like GW150914 could happen by chance just once every 203,000 years. This ghost, at least, seems to be the real deal.


http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outthere/2016/02/29/chasing-ghosts-across-the-cosmos/#.VtVy_-Zas_Y

 

[JibranAnsari]

Brilliant thread this [MENTION=57576]MRSN[/MENTION]

How amazing is this that the light takes 1 million years to reach theearth from the sun's center.

 

[MRSN]

Brilliant thread this [MENTION=57576]MRSN[/MENTION]

How amazing is this that the light takes 1 million years to reach theearth from the sun's center.

thanks bro. yes even the light the fastest force in the universe has it's limits.

 

[On_the_up]

Temperature of the Earth's core is comparable with that at the surface of the sun.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22297915

 

[anakin]

thanks bro. yes even the light the fastest force in the universe has it's limits.

Tachyons(hypothetical)... faster than light ...

 

[in_cutter]

Brilliant thread this [MENTION=57576]MRSN[/MENTION]

How amazing is this that the light takes 1 million years to reach theearth from the sun's center.

Really? Are you sure?

 

[in_cutter]

Brilliant thread this [MENTION=57576]MRSN[/MENTION]

How amazing is this that the light takes 1 million years to reach theearth from the sun's center.

Really? Are you sure?it takes 20,000yrs for light to reach the surface of its surface to it's core & 8min to reach the earth thereafter.

 

[in_cutter]

Really? Are you sure?it takes 20,000yrs for light to reach the sun from it's core & 8min to reach the earth thereafter.

Fixed

 

[MRSN]

Tachyons(hypothetical)... faster than light ...

hahaha.Is that Atul Sharma?..

 

[anakin]

hahaha.Is that Atul Sharma?..

Nopes Atul Sharma is tested and proven to be several times faster than theoretical particles like Tachyons

 

[MRSN]

Really? Are you sure?it takes 20,000yrs for light to reach the surface of its surface to it's core & 8min to reach the earth thereafter.

the answer you are looking for is 170,000 years. Beautifully explained in this video.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z-UO-RZBQ3U" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[MRSN]

Nopes Atul Sharma is tested and proven to be several times faster than theoretical particles like Tachyons

no doubt he is a legend.

 

[MRSN]

What Is Dark Matter? Prime Candidate Gets Profiled



The ring of darkness in the galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17 indicates the presence of dark matter.
Credit: NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)


The search for elusive dark matter may have just gotten a big boost.

Scientists have calculated the predicted mass of the axion, a hypothetical particle that some astronomers think may be the main constituent of dark matter. The new finding should greatly aid the hunt for axions, and could therefore help solve the longstanding dark-matter mystery, study team members said.

"The results we are presenting will probably lead to a race to discover these particles," study co-author Zoltan Fodor, of Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary, said in a statement

Dark matter apparently neither absorbs nor emits light, which explains its name. Though astronomers can't observe dark matter directly, they strongly suspect that the stuff exists based on its gravitational effects. For example, there is not nearly enough "normal" matter within galaxies to explain their rapid rotation, astronomers say.

Indeed, normal matter — the stuff that makes up stars, planets and everything else we can see and touch — is but a minor component of the universe: Astronomers think dark matter outweighs normal matter by a factor of 6 to 1. (And dark energy, the puzzling force behind the universe's accelerating expansion, makes up an even bigger portion of the universe's mass-and-energy budget. Together, dark energy and dark matter make up about 96 percent of the cosmos.)

But scientists don't know what dark matter is. Some researchers suspect it's made up of relatively few heavy particles, whereas others favor a hypothesis involving huge numbers of very light particles, known as axions.

Scientists have been searching for heavy dark-matter candidates using particle accelerators and sensitive underground detectors, but so far they've come up empty. Finding direct evidence of axions is likely an even taller order — but it is theoretically possible, study team members said.

"However, to find this kind of evidence, it would be extremely helpful to know what kind of mass we are looking for," co-author Andreas Ringwald, a theoretical physicist at the German Electron Synchrotron (which is commonly known by its German acronym, DESY) in Hamburg, said in the same statement. "Otherwise, the search could take decades, because one would have to scan far too large a range."

<script height="352px" width="540px" src="http://player.ooyala.com/iframe.js#pbid=91ac0f6dcbdf466c84659dbc54039487&ec=c3Mzl1dTorzbVhArfXUhEpGWRIZJ_-nP"></script>

The new study, which was published online today (Nov. 2) in the journal Nature, should help in this regard. The research team, led by Szabolcs Borsanyi of the University of Wuppertal in Germany, used a supercomputer to calculate the likely mass of the axion. The scientists found that, if axions are indeed the primary component of dark matter, they likely have a mass between 50 and 1,500 microelectronvolts — meaning they're up to 10 billion times lighter than electrons.

This would mean that every cubic centimeter in the universe contains, on average, about 10 million axions, researchers said. But dark matter is clumped, not evenly distributed; Earth's region of the Milky Way would have about 1 billion axions per cubic centimeter.

If the new mass prediction is accurate, scientists should be able to figure out whether axions actually exist within the next few years, study team members said.

Axions are also predicted by an extension of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory describing the strong nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature (along with gravitation, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force).

The strong force is time-symmetric, meaning it wouldn't change if time for some reason began flowing backward instead of forward.

"However, the equations of QCD might contain a symmetry-violating term that could theoretically take any value. And nature has chosen to set this term to zero," Maria Paolo Lombardo, of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Rome, wrote in an accompanying "News and Views" piece in the same issue of Nature.

"Why is this?" Lombardo added. "The leading explanation is that the term is not zero, but is cancelled out by the presence of a 'neutralizing' particle called the axion, which has yet to be discovered."

So the detection of the axion would solve a quantum-physics puzzle as well as a cosmological one. Stay tuned!
http://www.space.com/34595-dark-matter-search-axion-mass.html

 

[MenInG]

Good stuff this thread!

 

[MRSN]

Hey, have you heard about today’s “Supermoon”? If you have, then chances are you’re heard a lot of hype about it being superclose and superbright and super, uh, super.

Except not so much. I mean, the stories are accurate as far as they go, but you need to put them in context. Yeah, the Moon will be closer than usual when it’s full, but by a margin so small it’s essentially meaningless. Let me explain …

But first, let me be clear: I always always urge people to go out and look at the Moon! It’s beautiful and fascinating and wondrous. If you can, use binoculars or a small telescope to get an even closer look; it’s an entire world hanging in the sky so there’s a lot to explore. Craters, impact sites, mountains, and more … it’s simply awe-inspiring.

But I want your sense of awe to be honest, and honestly stoked. This Supermoon stuff isn’t the right way to do it.

So what’s a “Supermoon”? It’s not a real astronomical term—it was actually coined by an astrologer, so don’t even get me started here—but in the popular vernacular it’s when there’s a full Moon within a few hours of the Moon being closest to Earth.

The Moon orbits the Earth on an elliptical path, so sometimes it’s closer to us than other times. Monday, the Moon reached its closest point to Earth (called perigee) at approximately 11:20 UTC (06:20 Eastern U.S. time†) when the center of the Moon was just a hair under 356,508 kilometers from the center of the Earth (astronomers like to use the centers of objects to measure distances, to avoid messy circumstances like nonspherical surfaces).

As the Moon orbits the Earth, its phase (the amount of lit surface we see) changes. When it’s near the Sun in the sky we see it’s dark, unilluminated side facing us, so we say it’s new. Two weeks later it’s opposite the Sun in the sky, and we see it fully illuminated, and we say it’s full.

Monday the Moon was full at 13:52 UTC (08:52 Eastern). That’s just a couple of hours after it was at perigee, hence the Supermoon stuff.*

But what does that really mean?


Deflating the Supermoon: An actual photo of the Moon from the International Space Station, its appearance distorted through our atmosphere. Click for more info.




On average, the Moon’s perigee distance is roughly 360,000 km from Earth. Also on average, it’s about 405,000 km away at its most distant point (called apogee). That’s about a 10 percent difference. That in turn means the Moon looks about 10 percent bigger when it’s at perigee than at apogee.

That’s not much! And those are the extremes, too. If you’re an experienced lunar observer you might notice that difference, but for an average person I’d expect you wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking. The Moon is pretty small on the sky, far smaller than you think. Let me ask you this: If you held up a dime, how far away from your eyes would it have to be to appear the same size as the Moon? Here’s the answer, and it may surprise you. The point? A 10 percent change in size isn’t a big deal (and be careful not to be confused about the famous Moon Illusion, when the Moon looks bigger when it's on the horizon; that really is an illusion, and happens whether the Moon is near perigee or not).

It gets worse. Monday’s “Supermoon” is supposed to be closer to Earth than it has been for decades. That may be true, but by how much? The last time a full Moon was this close was on Jan. 26, 1948, when it was 356,462 kilometers away. That’s a difference of just 45 kilometers or so closer than it was Monday! Remember, this is the distance between the Earth’s and Moon’s centers … and the Earth is nearly 13,000 kilometers across! So this small difference in records is completely wiped out by the simple fact that someone standing on a different part of the Earth might be thousands of kilometers closer or farther from the Moon




That’s why I don’t particularly care for glorifying “records” in cases like these. It may be true numerically, but in practical terms it doesn’t make any real difference.

Another Supermoon claim is how bright it’ll be, too. It’s true that an object closer to you will appear brighter, and it’s a strong effect. In the end the Moon will be about 20-30 percent brighter than a usual full Moon. That may be enough to notice, but atmospheric conditions (clouds and haze) could easily affect that, and it’s hard for people to simply compare one full Moon to another, because you have to remember how bright it was last time, a month ago, and that’s hard to do. I’m not saying you won’t notice! But the hype makes it seem like the Moon will be vastly brighter; a powerful orb searing the heavens.

In reality, the full Moon is pretty bright anyway. If you notice the difference, terrific! But always be a little bit skeptical.

All in all, stuff like this “Supermoon” makes me conflicted. I love the idea that people will hear about it, go outside, and take a look at our nearest cosmic neighbor … especially if they otherwise wouldn’t. Getting people to go out and look up is a good contender for my Astronomical Prime Directive.

But I think they should be armed with the facts when they do, and be doing it for the right reasons. The right reasons are that the Moon is gorgeous, ever-changing, and honestly really fun to observe. Those are, in my opinion, the reasons you should go out and see it.

Either way: Go out and look up. Watch the Moon! When you do, you’ll realize it’s always super.

I’ve written about the Supermoon many times. Here are a few articles for your edification:

Kryptonite for the Supermoon
Moon of Steel: Supermoon Returns
No, the Supermoon Did Not Cause the Japanese Earthquake
Deflated Supermoon
Supermoonset

*Note that both these times are during the day for the U.S. That's OK; if you saw the Moon on Sunday night or wait until Monday night it'll still look full, and still be near perigee. It rises around 5 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. local time for you (it depends a bit on where you are in your time zone; check your local listing).

† Correction, Nov. 14, 2016: I originally wrote that 11:20 UTC was 07:20 Eastern time.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/11/14/supermoon_kinda.html

 

[jeetu]

Hey, have you heard about today’s “Supermoon”? If you have, then chances are you’re heard a lot of hype about it being superclose and superbright and super, uh, super.

i created supermoon thread , but no reply on that thread.
http://www.pakpassion.net/ppforum/s...dy-for-the-largest-%93supermoon%94-since-1948

Nice pic of deflated moon.

 

[MRSN]

i created supermoon thread , but no reply on that thread.
http://www.pakpassion.net/ppforum/s...dy-for-the-largest-%93supermoon%94-since-1948

may be they were busy watching the moon.

Nice pic of deflated moon.

thanks

 

[Last Monetarist]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/06/champagne-moment-as-supernova-captured-in-detail-for-the-first-time

The earliest moments of a supernova – the cataclysmic explosion of a massive star – have been observed in unprecedented detail, in a development researchers say could help us better understand what happens to stars when they die.

Using data collected from Nasa’s Kepler space telescope in 2017, astrophysicists recorded the initial light burst from a supernova as a shockwave blasted its way through a star.

In a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists suggested the star that exploded was likely a yellow supergiant, which is more than 100 times bigger than our sun. Patrick Armstrong, a PhD student at the Australian National University and the study’s first author, said the earliest phase of a supernova had not ever been fully observed before.

“In order to capture this, you have to be looking at the right part of the sky, at the right time, with the right amount of detail, to be able to see everything,” he said.

Armstrong said the supernova, called SN2017jgh, was more than one billion light years away from Earth. “The light we were seeing had actually left that star a billion years ago.”

On average, astronomers expect one star to explode per galaxy every 100 years. “There are millions of galaxies in the night sky, which means depending on how good your camera is, you might get about one supernova a week or up to one supernova a day if you’ve got a good camera like the Kepler space telescope,” Armstrong said.

A supernova explodes rapidly but it takes weeks or months to brighten and then eventually dim. The early phase of its explosion is observable for only a few days.

The scientists made the discovery based on a “shock cooling light curve”, which measured the change in the amount of light emitted by the supernova over time. “We see in the night sky this tiny point of light get brighter and brighter … as the supernova explodes, and [then] get dimmer,” Armstrong said. “This is the first time we’ve ever seen the shock cooling light curve in complete detail.”

The spectrum of light released by the supernova also gave clues as to its composition.

“We take the light from that supernova and we split it up into [a] rainbow, and depending on what colours we see – if there’s lots of red or green – that can give us information about what elements are in that supernova,” Armstrong said. Armstrong said the observation allowed scientists to better understand what stars explode into different supernovae. “Normally we can’t get much information about these stars because they have exploded and there’s not much left to look at.”

Unlike other telescopes which take observations once daily, Nasa’s Kepler telescope captured images once every half an hour, enabling the light curve to be comprehensively documented. Kepler’s mission officially ended in 2018 when it ran out of fuel.

 

[Last Monetarist]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/08/dark-matter-one-last-push-to-crack-the-biggest-secret-in-the-universe

Deep underground, scientists are closing in on one of the most elusive targets of modern science: dark matter. In subterranean laboratories in the US and Italy, they have set up huge vats of liquid xenon and lined them with highly sensitive detectors in the hope of spotting subatomic collisions that will reveal the presence of this elusive material.

However, researchers acknowledge that the current generation of detectors are reaching the limit of their effectiveness and warn that if they fail to detect dark matter with these types of machines, they could be forced to completely reappraise their understanding of the cosmos.

“Dark matter accounts for around 85% of all the universe’s mass but we have not been able to detect it so far – despite building more and more powerful detectors,” said physicist Professor Chamkaur Ghag of University College London. “We are now getting close to the limits of our detectors and if they do not find dark matter in the next few years, we may have to accept there is something very wrong with the way we think about the universe and about gravity.”

The hunt for dark matter began last century when astronomers found that galaxies appeared to be rotating too quickly to remain stable. Observations indicated they must have masses 10 times greater than their visible contents – stars, planets and dust clouds – otherwise they would tear themselves apart.

The missing material generating the extra gravity needed to hold galaxies together was dubbed “dark matter”. Astronomers initially thought it could be made up of stars too small or dim to be seen from Earth or by other candidates – such as neutron stars. However, new generations of powerful telescopes showed these were not viable possibilities.

So scientists turned from the astronomically large to the incredibly small to explain the universe’s missing mass. Vast numbers of undetected particles form invisible halos around galaxies and boost their gravitational fields, they argued. These hypothetical particles are called wimps – weakly interacting massive particles – and for two decades researchers have strived to detect them.

These efforts have involved building detectors deep underground where they are shielded from subatomic particles – triggered by cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere that constantly shower down on Earth and which would trigger streams of false positive readings on their instruments.

“The expectation has been that a wimp will strike a xenon nucleus and the resulting flash of light will be spotted by a detector and so reveal the presence of a dark matter wimp,” said Ghag. “Despite years of effort, we have yet to see a single flash like that, however. We need greater sensitivity.”

Now researchers are pinning their hopes on the two most sensitive wimp-hunters ever designed. One, built below Italy’s Gran Sasso mountains, is known as XENONnT. The other, Lux-Zeplin, has been constructed in an old South Dakota gold mine. Both devices have been filled with several tonnes of xenon – much more than has been put in any previous device – and that should increase chances of a nucleus being struck by a wimp.

Ghag, a member of the Lux-Zeplin team, said: “Both devices are now being put through operational tests, and in a few months those trials will be completed. We may find we have detected dark matter over that period – which would be very good news. If not, both devices will be run without interruption for several years. Essentially, the more xenon we have in our machines and the longer we run our detectors, the better our prospects of collisions occurring and dark matter revealing its presence.”

However, it is now accepted there is a prospect that this will not happen and dark matter could remain elusive. As Mariangela Lisanti, a physicist at Princeton University in New Jersey, stated in the journal Science recently: “The wimp hypothesis will face its real reckoning after these next-generation detectors run.”

If Lux-Zeplin and XENONnT fail to find Wimps, the two teams of scientists will have one final chance to use current technology to find them – by joining forces to create one final super-large detector that would contain tens of tonnes of xenon, a rare and expensive gas to isolate, and which would be run for several years.

And if that last-chance detector fails to find dark matter, scientists would be stumped. Making their machines even more sensitive would result in them being swamped by signals triggered by another type of subatomic particle, the neutrino, which rain down on the Earth in their trillions every second. Other approaches would have to be taken.

“It could be that in looking for wimps, we’re looking for our keys under the street lamp,” added Ghag. “Dark matter could be a lot weirder than we have assumed so far. It could be made of tiny black holes. Or it could be made of something that’s a million times lighter than a wimp and detecting that will be very hard. So we will have to be a lot more sophisticated in our attempts at detection.”

Such efforts to find a form of matter that can scarcely interact with normal matter may seem unnecessary. But if it were not for dark matter’s pervasive gravitational influence, galaxies and stars and planets would not have held together in the early universe and life as we know it would not have evolved. Hence scientists continuing efforts to discover its true nature.

 

[MenInG]

(CNN)Venus and Jupiter will appear to touch each other in the sky at the end of the month, despite actually being millions of miles apart.

The two planets will appear closest together around 3 p.m. ET on April 30, with Venus 0.2 degrees south of Jupiter, according to EarthSky. The distance is less than the diameter of the moon, the space site added.

By May 1, the planets will have continued on their paths and look as if they are spreading farther apart from Earth's vantage point.

The Venus-Jupiter conjunction happens about once a year, but this year the two planets will appear significantly closer than they usually do, said Patrick Hartigan, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University in Houston.

A conjunction is when two planets appear to touch each other in the sky from Earth's point of view, according to NASA.

The last time the two planets were closer than this year's conjunction was August 2016, although it was more difficult to see since they were close to the sun, according to Hartigan.

In the nights leading up to the conjunction, the moon will slowly become less visible as it transitions to a new moon on April 30, according to NASA.

Although the conjunction takes place at the end of the month, viewers can already see the two planets slowly creeping toward each other. On April 27, they will be 3.2 degrees apart, EarthSky said.

Mars and Saturn will roughly align north of Venus and Jupiter, according to EarthSky, meaning astronomers will be able to see four planets while viewing the conjunction. Alignment means the planets form a line between them, but do not appear significantly close to each other like a conjunction.

"Venus and Jupiter are typically the two brightest planets in the sky, so they can put on quite a show when they are in close conjunction. It is a beautiful sight and easy for everyone to see," Hartigan said.

How to view the conjunction
The early morning hours of April 30 and May 1 will provide great viewing opportunities, according to EarthSky, and you won't need a telescope to view them.

In the Northern Hemisphere, viewers should look along the southeastern horizon just as dawn begins to break, but while it's still dark enough to see some stars, Hartigan said.

Stargazers in the Southern Hemisphere will also be able to see the conjunction under the same conditions, except Venus and Jupiter will appear above the eastern horizon, EarthSky said.

Unlike in the Northern Hemisphere, Venus will appear above Jupiter on April 30 and below Jupiter on May 1 in the Southern Hemisphere, according to Hartigan.

Because the moon will not be illuminated, it will be easier to see the two planets nearly touch in the sky. That's as long as the sky is clear, since inclement weather would block the conjunction from view.

CNN

 

[jeetu]

Its tough to watch Jupiter-Venus conjunction in Delhi as it comes very close to sunrise and not far from horizon.

 

[James]

Could a moon near Saturn be the most Earth-like planet out there?

That's what scientists from Nasa are looking into, as they study Saturn's largest moon - Titan. They're trying to work out how its landscape formed.

They say that Titan has seasons, rains, rivers and even seas. But before you get too excited, it won't be water that is sloshing around, but liquid methane, and the gust winds will be nitrogen!

Planetary experts from the University of Stanford in California - alongside colleagues from Nasa - are studying Titan's landscape closely - as it's seen as a potential place for humans to set up a future base.

Using information from the Cassini mission, the team have been working on a project to understand how seasonal changes could have shaped a very Earth-like structure of mountains, ice, sand dunes and wide plains rather than just a windy dusty desert.

On Earth, rocks and minerals get eroded by water and end up moving around the planet as tiny grains. They are moved by winds and rivers to new places where they settle and turn back into rocks.

Those rocks then continue forming, being eroded, and reforming, over millions of years to form the landscapes we all see.

Experts think the same thing could be happening on Titan - just with very different minerals.

Mathieu Lapôtre, from Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences said: "Our model adds a unifying framework that allows us to understand how all of these sedimentary environments work together.

"If we understand how the different pieces of the puzzle fit together.... then we can start using the landforms left behind... to say something about the climate or the geological history of Titan - and how they could impact the prospect for life on Titan."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/61244951

 

[daytrader]

Astronomers capture largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed
Fireball ‘100 times the size of the solar system’ thought to have been caused by gas being sucked into supermassive black hole

It started as an unremarkable flicker in the night sky. But closer observations revealed that astronomers had captured the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed, an event thought to have been triggered by a giant cloud of gas being gobbled up by a supermassive black hole.

The flare-up, traced to 8bn light years away, is more than 10 times brighter than any known supernova and has so far lasted more than three years, making it the most energetic explosion on record.

“It went unnoticed for a year as it gradually got brighter,” said Dr Philip Wiseman, an astronomer at Southampton University who led the observations. It was only when follow-up observations revealed how distant it was that astronomers appreciated the event’s almost unimaginable scale.

“We’ve estimated it’s a fireball 100 times the size of the solar system with a brightness about 2tn times the sun’s,” Wiseman said. “In three years, this event has released about 100 times as much energy as the sun will in its 10bn-year lifetime.”

Scientists believe that the explosion, known as AT2021lwx, is the result of a vast cloud of gas, possibly thousands of times larger than our sun, plunging into the inescapable mouth of a supermassive black hole. The cloud of gas may have originated from the large dusty “doughnut” that typically surrounds black holes – although it is not clear what may have knocked it off course from its orbit and down the cosmic sinkhole.

AT2021lwx is not the brightest phenomenon ever witnessed. A brighter gamma-ray burst, known as GRB 221009A, was spotted last year, but this event lasted only minutes. By contrast, the new event is still going strong, meaning the overall energy release is far greater.

...
https://www.theguardian.com/science...pture-largest-cosmic-explosion-ever-witnessed

 

[Cricket Warrior]

NASA delays astronaut moon landing to at least 2026

NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon this decade amid a renewed international push for lunar exploration, is facing some lengthy delays, the space agency has announced.

The Artemis III mission, planned to hit the the crucial milestone of landing humans on the moon for the first time since the Apollo program, will not take off until at least September 2026, NASA officials said at a news conference Tuesday. The journey had previously been slated for 2025.

The primary reasons for the delay include SpaceX’s outlook for developing Starship, the gargantuan rocket and spacecraft system that is expected to ferry astronauts from lunar orbit to the moon’s south pole. Two Starship test flights in 2023 ended in explosions.

SpaceX has a long road ahead in developing its lunar lander. Even after Starship demonstrates the ability to make it safely to Earth’s orbit, the company must hash out how to get the vehicle enough propellant to travel out to the moon, a feat that is expected to involve at least 10 refueling flights, according to Jessica Jensen, SpaceX’s vice president of customer operations and integration.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/09/world/nasa-artemis-moon-landing-delay-scn/index.html

 

[Cricket Warrior]

Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko has set a new world record for the most time spent in space.

The 59-year-old clocked up a cumulative total of more than 878 days and 12 hours outside the Earth's atmosphere - the equivalent of nearly two-and-a-half years - on Sunday morning.

Mr Kononenko celebrated the milestone on board the International Space Station (ISS), which he has travelled to five times since 2008.

Cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko breaks record for most time spent in space

The 59-year-old has spent a cumulative total of nearly two-and-a-half years outside the Earth's atmosphere. The Russian said he had dreamed of exploring space ever since he was a child and was proud of his achievement.

news.sky.com

 

[Cricket Warrior]

A European Space Agency satellite is expected to reenter and largely burn up in Earth’s atmosphere on Wednesday morning.

The agency’s Space Debris Office, along with an international surveillance network, is monitoring and tracking the Earth-observing ERS-2 satellite, which is predicted to make its reentry at 6:14 a.m. ET Wednesday, with a 15-hour window of uncertainty. The ESA is also providing live updates on its website.

“As the spacecraft’s reentry is ‘natural’, without the possibility to perform manoeuvers, it is impossible to know exactly where and when it will reenter the atmosphere and begin to burn up,” according to a statement from the agency.

The exact time of the satellite’s reentry remains unclear due to the unpredictability of solar activity, which can change the density of Earth’s atmosphere and how the atmosphere tugs on the satellite. As the sun nears its 11-year cycle’s peak, known as solar maximum, solar activity has been ramping up. Solar maximum is expected to occur later this year.


CNN

 

[Cricket Warrior]

A European Space Agency satellite is expected to reenter and largely burn up in Earth’s atmosphere on Wednesday morning.

The agency’s Space Debris Office, along with an international surveillance network, is monitoring and tracking the Earth-observing ERS-2 satellite, which is predicted to make its reentry at 6:14 a.m. ET Wednesday, with a 15-hour window of uncertainty. The ESA is also providing live updates on its website.

“As the spacecraft’s reentry is ‘natural’, without the possibility to perform manoeuvers, it is impossible to know exactly where and when it will reenter the atmosphere and begin to burn up,” according to a statement from the agency.

The exact time of the satellite’s reentry remains unclear due to the unpredictability of solar activity, which can change the density of Earth’s atmosphere and how the atmosphere tugs on the satellite. As the sun nears its 11-year cycle’s peak, known as solar maximum, solar activity has been ramping up. Solar maximum is expected to occur later this year.


CNN

Hopefully it wont crash in my city

 

[Cricket Warrior]

A spacecraft built and flown by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines (LUNR.O), opens new tab began its final descent from lunar orbit on Thursday to attempt the first U.S. moon landing in more than half a century and the first ever conducted entirely by the private sector.

The six-legged robot lander, dubbed Odysseus, was headed toward a touchdown planned for 6:24 p.m. EST (2324 GMT), even as engineers at mission control were working to resolve a last-minute navigation glitch that surfaced on the spacecraft, the company and NASA commentators said in a joint webcast.


Reuters

 

[Cricket Warrior]

SpaceX Mega Rocket Lost in Final Phase of 'Successful' Test Flight

Starship, the world’s most powerful rocket, flew further and faster than ever before during its third test flight Thursday, although it was eventually lost as it re-entered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, SpaceX said.

Lift-off from the company’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas came around 8:25 am local time (1325 GMT) and was carried live on a webcast that was watched by millions on social media platform X.

The sleek mega rocket is vital to NASA’s plans for landing astronauts on the Moon later this decade — and Elon Musk’s hopes of colonizing Mars some day.

“Congrats to @SpaceX on a successful test flight!” tweeted NASA administrator Bill Nelson following the test.

All eyes were on Thursday’s launch after two prior attempts ended in spectacular explosions. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing: The company has adopted a rapid trial-and-error approach in order to accelerate development, and the strategy has brought it numerous successes in the past.

SpaceX Mega Rocket Lost in Final Phase of 'Successful' Test Flight - News18

Lift-off from the company's Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas came around 8:25 am local time (1325 GMT) and was carried live on a webcast that was watched by millions on social media platform X.

www.news18.com

 

[sweep_shot]

Hopefully it wont crash in my city

That's one hazard. What if it doesn't burn up properly? It can harm people/infrastructures. It can even kill people.

 

[BouncerGuy]

SpaceX Mega Rocket Lost in Final Phase of 'Successful' Test Flight

Starship, the world’s most powerful rocket, flew further and faster than ever before during its third test flight Thursday, although it was eventually lost as it re-entered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, SpaceX said.

Lift-off from the company’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas came around 8:25 am local time (1325 GMT) and was carried live on a webcast that was watched by millions on social media platform X.

The sleek mega rocket is vital to NASA’s plans for landing astronauts on the Moon later this decade — and Elon Musk’s hopes of colonizing Mars some day.

“Congrats to @SpaceX on a successful test flight!” tweeted NASA administrator Bill Nelson following the test.

All eyes were on Thursday’s launch after two prior attempts ended in spectacular explosions. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing: The company has adopted a rapid trial-and-error approach in order to accelerate development, and the strategy has brought it numerous successes in the past.

SpaceX Mega Rocket Lost in Final Phase of 'Successful' Test Flight - News18

Lift-off from the company's Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas came around 8:25 am local time (1325 GMT) and was carried live on a webcast that was watched by millions on social media platform X.

www.news18.com

Obsession of traveling to the moon and other planets, is good for nothing. Spending billions of dollars for this thing but we still have poor people who are struggling to feed for one time a day.

 

[sweep_shot]

Obsession of traveling to the moon and other planets, is good for nothing. Spending billions of dollars for this thing but we still have poor people who are struggling to feed for one time a day.

Exactly.

Entire Earth hasn't been explored yet. A large portion of the underwater remains unexplored to this date.

They should focus on Earth first (poverty, explorations etc.).

 

[BouncerGuy]

Exactly.

Entire Earth hasn't been explored yet. A large portion of the underwater remains unexplored to this date.

They should focus on Earth first (poverty, explorations etc.).

Yep, the whole earth is till there with many mysteries to e explored, yet nations are trying to go into the space.