MRSN
T20I Star
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2010
- Runs
- 30,597
Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: this_feature_currently_requires_accessing_site_using_safari
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..
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
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
<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>
Code:<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.
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?
I want to ask PPer this question,
What happens if you reach the end of the universe, what is after it?
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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 sun from it's core & 8min to reach the earth thereafter.
Tachyons(hypothetical)... faster than light ...
hahaha.Is that Atul Sharma?..
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.
Nopes Atul Sharma is tested and proven to be several times faster than theoretical particles like Tachyons
i created supermoon thread , but no reply on that thread.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.
may be they were busy watching the moon.i created supermoon thread , but no reply on that thread.
http://www.pakpassion.net/ppforum/s...dy-for-the-largest-%93supermoon%94-since-1948
thanksNice pic of deflated moon.
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.
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.
Hopefully it wont crash in my cityA 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
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.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.
Yep, the whole earth is till there with many mysteries to e explored, yet nations are trying to go into the space.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.).