• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Space: The Final Frontier

fallout

Member
The CMB cold spot is certainly an interesting thing, but the picture also implies that it emits no radiation of any detectable kind. This is false. The "cold spot" is approximately 70 µK colder than the average CMB temperature (approximately 2.7 K), so there's definitely some radiation.

It's straight bullshit, no matter how you cut it. It's trying to make cosmology more relatable by tying a really nice picture of a dark nebula to a cosmological phenomena of which we don't really have an explanation. It's an insidious lie.
 

Is this the comet that will fly over our little planet in November? Last I heard that it's not behaving in a good way and that it might not be as bright as first thought.

Edit:

In November, ISON is expected to fly through the sun's atmosphere at about 700,000 miles above the surface. If it survives the sun's heat, experts say it might glow as brightly as the moon and be briefly visible in daylight. Its tail might stretch far across the night sky. Or the sun could cause it to break apart.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/07/us/comet-ison-5-things
 

Woorloog

Banned
Here's a weird discovery. A tiny Galaxy, that helps prove some of the theories about clumping Dark Matter.


http://science.time.com/2013/06/13/meet-the-itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny-galaxy/?hpt=hp_t3

Dark matter has mass just like normal matter, correct?
Was just wondering what it was that was suggested to be behind the universe's expansion, dark energy? Dark matter in really large scale?

Anyway, that leads to kinda related question:

What is the direction of gravitation?
You see, there are gravitational waves (note: strictly speaking they seem to be more like waves in spacetime rather than being "extra gravity"), that travel outward from where they're formed. Presumably, if it exists, gravitons are emitted like photons... Yet gravity pulls things together?
Think it this way: you blow at a balloon, and instead of going away, it comes toward you.
Counter-intuitive.
Makes me wonder... hypothetical negative mass (not the same thing as anti-matter) would accelerate toward a push, unlike normal matter. Gravity seems to be doing that, sort of.

Just some idle musings, stupid questions thread is closed :/
 
Is there any modern equivalent to Cosmos(or one in the works) that features new findings and the like? I suppose there aren't really any Cosmologists as famous as him with the exceptions of Hawkings who obviously can't run a show. And it's worth noting that most of the explanations from the show remain relevant.

Was excited about the Universe but it seemed to mostly be apocalyptic mumbo jumbo from what I watched :/

Nope, just condemned to the formless void of 'Community'.

If nothing else I was finally forced to use the subscribe feature.
 

Melchiah

Member
Pretty interesting, if true.
l0EbMOs.jpg

Source: https://www.facebook.com/B5Scrolls
EDIT: The FB page contains some interesting stuff for the fans of the series.

Found also this on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfury
During an online conversation with fans on AOL in December 1995, Straczyski reported that “we've received a number of inquiries from folks associated with NASA about the prospect of perhaps someday actually building working Starfuries, mainly as the space industry equivilent [sic] to fork lifts and heavy loaders”. When asked if there was still interest in doing that, during an interview in 2009, he indicated that he had not “heard anything new about this in several years”.
 

GaimeGuy

Volunteer Deputy Campaign Director, Obama for America '16
Neither did I. Also: it has five moons, which is a little odd considering its size.

I thought moons had to be spherical bodies as well?

a moon is just a natural satellite. They don't have to be spherical. A spherical shape just most evenly distributes the gravitational force among a body's mass, minimizing the surface area for a given volume, and stabilizing an orbit.

BTW: the earth's moon is by far the largest moon relative to its planet in the solar system. It has 27% the diameter of the earth. The next largest by ratio is Triton, which is about 5.45% the diameter of Mercury.
 

Melchiah

Member
I found this to be very cool.

http://spaceref.com/mercury/newly-named-craters-on-mercury.html
Newly Named Craters on Mercury

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) - the arbiter of planetary and satellite nomenclature since its inception in 1919 - recently approved a proposal from the MESSENGER Science Team to assign names to nine impact craters on Mercury. In keeping with the established naming theme for craters on Mercury, all of the newly designated features are named after famous deceased artists, musicians, or authors or other contributors to the humanities.

The newly named craters are:

...

* Lovecraft, for Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), an American author of horror, fantasy, and science fiction regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century. He popularized "cosmic horror," the notion that some concepts, entities, or experiences are barely comprehensible to human minds, and those who delve into such topics risk their sanity.
 

Melchiah

Member
Fascinating
http://science.time.com/2013/07/05/the-mystery-of-the-intergalactic-radio-bursts/
The Mystery of the Intergalactic Radio Bursts

Scientists have discovered a new class of cosmic energy in outer space — nearly 10,000 bursts of radio waves popping off every day — but where they come from and how they occur are still a mystery

It’s a recurring theme in astronomy: observers see a blast of energy out in the cosmos, scratch their heads in confusion for a while, and finally uncover the existence of something entirely surprising and new. It happened with the quasars (now known to be gigantic burps from black holes swallowing hot gas), the pulsars (fast-spinning neutron stars sending out blips of radio noise hundreds of times every second), and even the Big Bang itself, first seen as a stream of microwaves slamming into Earth from all directions, nearly 14 billion years after the event itself.

Now it may be happening again. Back in 2007, astronomers detected a burst of radio noise, lasting maybe a second or so, the cause of which was totally unclear. There was reason to suspect it came from beyond the Milky Way, and must be extremely powerful to be visible at all. But it never repeated, and neither did a second, similar blast seen in 2011, making it very tough to puzzle out what was going on. Maybe both events were just some sort of rare fluke.

But a new paper in Science makes that seem very unlikely. Using the giant Parkes radio telescope in Australia, astronomers have recorded four more of these mysterious bursts, and when the scientists extrapolated across the entire sky, they concluded that perhaps 10,000 of these blasts are popping off every day, all over the heavens. “It’s still a mystery what they are,” says lead author Dan Thornton, of the University of Manchester, in the U.K. “But at least it’s not a mystery that they exist.” In fact, Thornton and his co-authors claim that the observations reveal what he calls a “new cosmological population” of energy blasts, whose true nature is unknown.

At the time of the first observations, back in 2007, there was some talk that the original burst might have come from inside the Milky Way. There was a way to test that proposition: radio outbursts generally come in a range of frequencies — channels, essentially, like those on a radio dial. As they speed through the empty spaces in our galaxy, the waves run into loose electrons that linger between the stars. The electrons slow the radio waves down a bit, with the lowest-frequency waves slowing the most. A radio burst that was emitted in a fraction of a second might be received over a longer period, depending on how far the burst had been traveling, and through what part of the Milky Way.

The first and second bursts were indeed spread out, or dispersed, this way, and the first, especially, seemed to be too dispersed to have originated in our own galaxy. But the second was marginal, leaving astronomers stuck. The four new blasts, however, were unmistakable. “The dispersion is so high,” says Thornton, “that from what we know, they could not have come from the Milky Way.”

Instead, he says, he and his co-authors estimate that whatever is sending out these radio bursts is located between five and 10 billion light-years away — a substantial fraction of the way out to the edge of the visible universe.

So that’s the “where” of the mystery, but nobody has a good idea yet about the “what.” Some of the possibilities of the blasts cause include: evaporating black holes (something predicted by Stephen Hawking), or giant black holes eating neutron stars. Or, writes Cornell astronomer James Cordes, tantalizingly, in a commentary also appearing in Science, “they could represent an entirely new class of source.”


The only way to figure it out is to follow up on the radio bursts with observations by visible-light, X-ray and other telescopes to try and get a glimpse of whatever’s going on from another perspective. That’s how astronomers figured out the inner workings of gamma-ray bursts, which turned out to be a special kind of exploding star — and just as with gamma-ray bursts, it will be important to do those follow-ups quickly. “We discovered these events about a year after they happened,” says Thornton, by which time any lingering visible or X-ray glow from the triggering event would long since have faded. “But now we’re working on real-time alerts.”

If those can be organized — and given the fact that one of these blasts probably goes off about once every second around the clock — it might not be long before pulsars, quasars, gamma-ray bursts and other blasts of cosmic energy welcome a new cousin to the family.
 

smiggyRT

Member
Not new, but still awesome.

iolava.jpg


http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/space-photo-of-the-day-2/?pid=7292 said:
Lava Flows on Io
An active volcanic eruption on Jupiter's moon Io was captured in this image taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. Tvashtar Catena, a chain of giant volcanic calderas centered at 60 degrees north, 120 degrees west, was the location of an energetic eruption caught in action in November 1999. A dark, "L"-shaped lava flow to the left of the center in this more recent image marks the location of the November eruption. White and orange areas on the left side of the picture show newly erupted hot lava, seen in this false color image because of infrared emission. The two small bright spots are sites where molten rock is exposed to the surface at the toes of lava flows. The larger orange and yellow ribbon is a cooling lava flow that is more than more than 60 kilometers (37 miles) long. Dark, diffuse deposits surrounding the active lava flows were not there during the November 1999 flyby of Io.
 

fallout

Member
Io is really cool. I've always been fascinated by the fact that it's basically being torn from the inside out by tidal forces between Jupiter and the other Galilean moons.
 

Prez

Member
That Jupiter pic should be what it looks like from Europa? Would be awesome to see that huge planet and realising you're rotating around it.
 

Dice

Pokémon Parentage Conspiracy Theorist
So how come we never see/hear the biological concerns of moving to another life-sustaining planet? On the one hand, we aren't evolved to handle another ecosystem's germs. On the other hand, the germs aren't evolved to handle our immune system. Would we be fine, or would we be like the aliens in War of the Worlds? I feel like we'd be fine against viruses but bacteria could fuck us up.
 

y2dvd

Member
So how come we never see/hear the biological concerns of moving to another life-sustaining planet? On the one hand, we aren't evolved to handle another ecosystem's germs. On the other hand, the germs aren't evolved to handle our immune system. Would we be fine, or would we be like the aliens in War of the Worlds? I feel like we'd be fine against viruses but bacteria could fuck us up.

It wouldn't just be biological concerns. It would be an evolutionary concern. Vsauce did a good video on this. The trip there may take a few lifetimes. We would need to reproduce. Thing is without Earth's gravity to tell us which way is up/down, left/right, or forward/backward, we would suffer from constant motion sickness. I think they even touched on how sperm wouldn't be able to "direct" itself for a lack of a better term lol. Without Earth's gravity to stress our bones, we would have softer and longer bones. We would have poorer vision because blood flow wouldn't flow properly to our eyes. They pretty much said we'd be fucked unless we can somehow mimics Earth's gravity onto the spaceship.
 
So how come we never see/hear the biological concerns of moving to another life-sustaining planet? On the one hand, we aren't evolved to handle another ecosystem's germs. On the other hand, the germs aren't evolved to handle our immune system. Would we be fine, or would we be like the aliens in War of the Worlds? I feel like we'd be fine against viruses but bacteria could fuck us up.
Human beings will probably not live on another planet. We will have advanced robotics or biologic androids to do the stuff a human just couldn't survive doing. No point in sending somebody off to possibly die when we'll have technology that feels no pain and can easily be repaired.

But if one day we decide to move to a life sustaining planet I'm sure we'll have the know how to counter anything it throws at us.
 
First Images of Our Solar System's Tail Revealed.


Astronomers have gotten the first-ever peek at our solar system's tail, called the heliotail, finding that it's shaped like a four-leaf clover, NASA scientists announced today (July 10).

The discovery was made using NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), a coffee table-sized spacecraft that is studying the edge of the solar system.

Many models have suggested the heliotail might look like this or like that, but we have had no observations," David McComas, IBEX principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Tex., said in a statement. "We always drew pictures where the tail of the solar system just trailed off the page, since we couldn't even speculate about what it really looked like.



More here: http://www.space.com/21913-solar-system-tail-first-photos-unveiled.html
 
Top Bottom