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Space: The Final Frontier

Z

Zapages

Member
I really wish I had my thread making privileges right now. *sigh* Anyway this is really interesting and baffling.

Mysterious force holds back Nasa probe in deep space
A space probe launched 30 years ago has come under the influence of a force that has baffled scientists and could rewrite the laws of physics.

Researchers say Pioneer 10, which took the first close-up pictures of Jupiter before leaving our solar system in 1983, is being pulled back to the sun by an unknown force. The effect shows no sign of getting weaker as the spacecraft travels deeper into space, and scientists are considering the possibility that the probe has revealed a new force of nature.

Dr Philip Laing, a member of the research team tracking the craft, said: "We have examined every mechanism and theory we can think of and so far nothing works.


"If the effect is real, it will have a big impact on cosmology and spacecraft navigation," said Dr Laing, of the Aerospace Corporation of California.

Pioneer 10 was launched by Nasa on March 2 1972, and with Pioneer 11, its twin, revolutionised astronomy with detailed images of Jupiter and Saturn. In June 1983, Pioneer 10 passed Pluto, the most distant planet in our solar system.

Both probes are now travelling at 27,000mph towards stars that they will encounter several million years from now. Scientists are continuing to monitor signals from Pioneer 10, which is more than seven billion miles from Earth.

Research to be published shortly in The Physical Review, a leading physics journal, will show that the speed of the two probes is being changed by about 6 mph per century - a barely-perceptible effect about 10 billion times weaker than gravity.

Scientists initially suspected that gas escaping from tiny rocket motors aboard the probes, or heat leaking from their nuclear power plants might be responsible. Both have now been ruled out. The team says no current theories explain why the force stays constant: all the most plausible forces, from gravity to the effect of solar radiation, decrease rapidly with distance.

The bizarre behaviour has also eliminated the possibility that the two probes are being affected by the gravitational pull of unknown planets beyond the solar system.

Assertions by some scientists that the force is due to a quirk in the Pioneer probes have also been discounted by the discovery that the effect seems to be affecting Galileo and Ulysses, two other space probes still in the solar system. Data from these two probes suggests the force is of the same strength as that found for the Pioneers.

Dr Duncan Steel, a space scientist at Salford University, says even such a weak force could have huge effects on a cosmic scale. "It might alter the number of comets that come towards us over millions of years, which would have consequences for life on Earth. It also raises the question of whether we know enough about the law of gravity."

Until 1988, Pioneer 10 was the most remote object made by man - a distinction now held by Voyager 1. Should Pioneer 10 make contact with alien life, it carries a gold-plated aluminium plaque on which the figures of a man and woman are shown to scale, along with a map showing its origin that Nasa calls "the cosmic equivalent of a message in a bottle".
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Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/...orce-holds-back-Nasa-probe-in-deep-space.html
 
I

ILikeFeet

Banned
Koshiro said:
Very old, we're talking years. It was later proven that the slowing effect was due to a larger amount of dust than there was believed to be in that region of space. (measurements were re-taken etc)
Click to expand...
LIES! God is bringing it back!
 
Insane Metal

Insane Metal

Member
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100929170503.htm

Newly Discovered Planet May Be First Truly Habitable Exoplanet
ScienceDaily (Sep. 29, 2010) — A team of planet hunters led by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet (three times the mass of Earth) orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star's "habitable zone," where liquid water could exist on the planet's surface. If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one.
Click to expand...

:OOOOOO
 
S

Scrow

Still Tagged Accordingly
fallout said:
I recommend watching this in some form of HD:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_d-gs0WoUw&feature=player_embedded

Video Created by Scott Manley, this is a view of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids starting in 1980, as asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones.
The final colour of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system.
Earth Crossers are Red
Earth Approachers (Perihelion less than 1.3AU) are Yellow
All Others are Green

Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You'll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.

As the video moves into the mid 1990's we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you'll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.

At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that's tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.

The scale of the video at 1080P resolution is roughly 1million kilometers per pixel, and each second of video corresponds to 60 days.​
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the vast emptiness of space becomes a thick soup of "stuff" when perceived like that.

truly amazing.
 
E

Extollere

Sucks at poetry
Scrow said:
the vast emptiness of space becomes a thick soup of "stuff" when perceived like that.
Click to expand...

Nah, not really. Those dots are a hell of a lot bigger in that video for scale sake. Also, while solar systems have a lot of shit flying around in them, the space between stars, and even between galaxies is a lot more vast (and probably a hell of a lot more empty) than something like an asteroid belt might be.

At least this is going on my basic knowledge. I'm not really qualified to make statements like that at all :lol
 
S

Scrow

Still Tagged Accordingly
Extollere said:
Nah, not really. Those dots are a hell of a lot bigger in that video for scale sake. Also, while solar systems have a lot of shit flying around in them, the space between stars, and even between galaxies is a lot more vast (and probably a hell of a lot more empty) than something like an asteroid belt might be.
Click to expand...
google hubble deep field. that might change your mind ;)

space is FULL of stuff
 
P

pestul

Member
Scrow said:
google hubble deep field. that might change your mind ;)

space is FULL of stuff
Click to expand...
Yep. Dark energy and matter are still something.. even if we don't quite understand what it is yet.
 
V

Vespasian

Neo Member
Scrow said:
google hubble deep field. that might change your mind ;)

space is FULL of stuff
Click to expand...

Hubble deep field inclusive, there's still a vast amount of space between solar systems, not to mention between galaxies. Vast even relative to inter-planetary space. Space really is a cold, empty place all things considered.
 
E

Extollere

Sucks at poetry
Scrow said:
google hubble deep field. that might change your mind ;)

space is FULL of stuff
Click to expand...

That's not exactly what I meant....

I'm very familiar with almost all of the Hubble images, and have several books on astronomy (although I'm no expert). What I mean to say is - while there are hundreds of billions of galaxies (and trillions of objects in those galaxies), the space, or rather the distance, between them is even greater than the distances or dimensions that galaxies occupy. Disregarding dark matter/energy that permeates everything (even empty space), there is more "empty", or unoccupied space (far more) than space being occupied by nebulae, stars, planetary systems and so forth.

Assuming that dark matter exists (and it seems to, from all experiments and inferences so far), then space is "full" of stuff everywhere, in every corner. But it isn't full of objects that could be touched, seen, or felt, such as asteroids, planets, and galaxies. The video you quoted is amazing - but the point I was trying to make is, it's a diagram showing the advancement of our scanning equipment, and documentation of the objects. It would be a bit of a misnomer to look at that and then think that space is a thick soup of objects and "stuff". It largely isn't, although it can definitely look that way from videos and images.
 
S

Scrow

Still Tagged Accordingly
Vespasian said:
Hubble deep field inclusive, there's still a vast amount of space between solar systems, not to mention between galaxies. Vast even relative to inter-planetary space. Space really is a cold, empty place all things considered.
Click to expand...
only from our perspective, because we are so small.
 
D

Deku

Banned
pestul said:
Yep. Dark energy and matter are still something.. even if we don't quite understand what it is yet.
Click to expand...
They're completely made up. some astrophysicists doubt they even exist.

Both dark energy and dark matter are made up 'variables' so that newtonian laws of gravity will make sense to all observations, not just at predicting the orbits of planets. But also apply to the rotation of galaxies and their gravitational pull on surrounding clusters of stars.

What we've found is that newton's laws work pretty well at predicting solar orbits, but out there in the big vast universe, it doesn't quite explain the motion of galaxies. (ie: stars at the edge of the galaxy move at the same speed as those close in to the centre).

This is opposite to what we observe in our solar system where the inner planets orbit faster and the orbits of the outer planets slow down. To explain this contradiction, astrophysicists ascribe a 'dark' superstructure we cannot see ontop/inside/next to/in the middle of galaxies.

This would be silimar to sticking a galaxy ontop of a 'dark' unseen plate and spinning the plate. With the plate spinning, the galaxy itself and all its stars spins at the same rate.
 
A

Asbel

Member
Vespasian said:
Hubble deep field inclusive, there's still a vast amount of space between solar systems, not to mention between galaxies. Vast even relative to inter-planetary space. Space really is a cold, empty place all things considered.
Click to expand...
yep, if there were more galaxies and stars, space would be a lot warmer, but it's near absolute zero in space because so much of it is empty.
 
S

Scrow

Still Tagged Accordingly
Extollere said:
No... it really is mostly empty.
Click to expand...
try and think of it like this...

look at your hand. seems pretty solid right? you can push it against things and they will "push back"; your hand can't pass through it because your hand collides with the object when you touch it, right?

wrong.

you never actually touch anything. atoms can get very very close to each other (from our perspective at least), but they never actually touch. from, say, a neutrino's perspective, you are really just a floating cloud of atoms with MASSIVE spaces separating each atom... much like how the universe appears unfathomably vast with HUGE distances between significant objects like stars or other galaxies... from OUR perspective.

hell, even an atom itself is mostly space rather than "stuff". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kypne21A0R4

so what's my point? i've already said it a few times... PERSPECTIVE. the only reason things immediately local to us seem so full of stuff and solid is because of our perspective. and the only reason everything else out there in the universe seems so empty is because of our perspective.

but when we look further out into the universe with things like the hubble telescope and we actually observe stars, nebulas and galaxies our perception of the "emptiness" of space should change.

to use an old cliché you just need to open your mind and think out side the box a little bit.

space is full of stuff. it's an observable fact.
 
H

hirokazu

Member
Scrow said:
try and think of it like this...

look at your hand. seems pretty solid right? you can push it against things and they will "push back"; your hand can't pass through it because your hand collides with the object when you touch it, right?

wrong.

you never actually touch anything. atoms can get very very close to each other (from our perspective at least), but they never actually touch. from, say, a neutrino's perspective, you are really just a floating cloud of atoms with MASSIVE spaces separating each atom... much like how the universe appears unfathomably vast with HUGE distances between significant objects like stars or other galaxies... from OUR perspective.

hell, even an atom itself is mostly space rather than "stuff". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kypne21A0R4

so what's my point? i've already said it a few times... PERSPECTIVE. the only reason things immediately local to us seem so full of stuff and solid is because of our perspective. and the only reason everything else out there in the universe seems so empty is because of our perspective.

but when we look further out into the universe with things like the hubble telescope and we actually observe stars, nebulas and galaxies our perception of the "emptiness" of space should change.

to use an old cliché you just need to open your mind and think out side the box a little bit.

space is full of stuff. it's an observable fact.
Click to expand...
Yeah, it's "full of stuff" as in that there so much stuff in there compared to, say stuff in the solar system or stuff in the galaxy, but your "perspective" doesn't account how how sparsely distributed this stuff is across the scale of the universe, which is what everyone else is taking into consideration. In that regard, it's rather empty in that you get a few clusters of things - solar systems, galaxies, galaxy clusters, but the space in between them is astronomical in comparison.

Sorry, subatomic matter is a very different beast.
 
E

Extollere

Sucks at poetry
Scrow, I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not saying there isn't stuff in the Universe, and that there isn't, in fact, a whole lot of stuff in the Universe. There is. But as crazy as that is, there is more empty space out there than there is stuff.

In fact, the universe does not seem empty from our perspective at all. From our perspective, even the night sky outside of the city is full of stars. And through the telescope, the Universe is full of galaxies. But it is an observable fact that there is more emptiness in space (or what we call emptiness, rather) than there are stars, galaxies, and so forth. Not just inside the objects, like the atoms in our hand - but also between the objects. Between each galaxy, and each solar system, is an unimaginable amount of space. Let me put it this way... Our galaxy is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter. With all the other galaxies out there, the one closed to us, our immediate neighbor, Andromeda, is still another 2 and a half million light years away. That's 2.5 million light years of empty space, between us and another galaxy only a hundred thousand or so light years in size.

When we look out into deep space and see all the crazy shit out there, it's easy to be fooled into thinking space is just stuffed full of junk, and to some extent it is, but that doesn't change the fact that there is a whole lot more space between that stuff, than there is stuff itself.

At least that is what we know so far, as for dark matter, the poster above who mentioned that it is theoretical is right. Plenty of scientists feel pretty sure that it exists, but only because it answers questions to certain equations. That's how science works. It "infers" the existence of things by using those ideas to satisfy equations. But with new projects out there like the ones that Cern are doing, we'll be sure to learn even more in the near future.
 
E

Extollere

Sucks at poetry
Actually, after reading your post again, I think you and I are talking arguing about two different things. Here are some maps of the Universe from our perspective on Earth:

XSC_SGC-small.jpg


XSC_allsky_integrated.gif


These maps chart about roughly 1.6 million galaxies (a very small amount) out of something called the 2MASS Extended Source Catalog. And about half a billion stars from our own galaxy.

If you step back and view the Universe on a wide scale - there is a lot of shit out there. Just like our own bodies, which are made from trillions of cells. I think this is where our argument falls over on itself, because our definitions are different. You are saying (if you don't mind), that space is "full" of things (a definition which derives from looking at the uniform distribution of countless objects), and I am saying that it is mostly "empty" (a definition based on a mass to distance sort of ratio of the Universe.) They are both essentially true statements, it just depends on what you mean by "full" or "empty".
 
E

Extollere

Sucks at poetry
That's the center plane of our own galaxy. No it's not as big as the universe. The reason it's so large in the image is because that map of the galaxy is a map based off our view from the sky. Those colored dots are stars in the galaxy. The other dots are the formations of galaxy clusters in the background far away.
 
E

Extollere

Sucks at poetry
W

Windu

never heard about the cat, apparently
The long wait for the first free flight by SpaceShipTwo may nearly be over. Popular Mechanics reported Saturday that, according to its sources, Scaled will perform the first glide test as soon as Sunday morning, taking the aircraft up to an altitude of 15,000 meters (50,000 feet) and then release it. SpaceShipTwo most recently flew a captive carry flight with the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft on September 30th; according to the published test log the flight was a “rehearsal mission” for upcoming glide tests.
Click to expand...
http://www.newspacejournal.com/2010/10/10/scaled-ready-to-begin-spaceshiptwo-glide-tests/
 
K

Kaako

Felium Defensor
Pacman in space...fuck yeaaaah!

5066427259_5bd3fd7a11_b.jpg


Explanation: Touring the solar system with a 6 year orbital period, small comet Hartley 2 (103/P Hartley) will make its closest approach to planet Earth on October 20 and its closest approach to the Sun on October 28. It may become a naked-eye comet, just visible in clear, dark skies. Meanwhile the comet has been a tempting telescopic target, seen here with an alluring green coma as it shares the frame with emission nebula NGC 281 and stars of the constellation Cassiopeia on October 2. The nebula's gaping profile defined by dust clouds against the red glow suggests its more playful moniker, the Pacman Nebula. An apparent short bright streak shows the comet's motion against the background stars during the hour of accumulated exposure time. Over the next few days Comet Hartley 2's motion will also carry it across a field of view featuring the famous double star cluster in Perseus. On November 4 a spacecraft from planet Earth will actually fly within about 700 kilometers of the comet's nucleus. Now dubbed EPOXI, that spacecraft was formerly known as Deep Impact.
Click to expand...
 
B

big_z

Member
Extollere said:
I love magnetic fields :lol

Btw, if anyone isn't subsribed to Tony Darnell, his videos are some of my favorite on youtube. A new one was posted recently about the consequences of the limited speed of light (and what that means for travel as well).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhP5J9sRrKE

Super interesting stuff. Also worth checking out his whole playlist as well if you haven't already.
Click to expand...


who would want to travel space? if you were traveling 90% speed of light on a 1 year journey, thousands upon thousands of earth years would have gone by. providing humans dont die off in that time it's possible they'll have been at the planet already or even used it up and left by the time you get there thanks to advances in technology.

we need some event horizon ships to make travel worth while.
 
E

Extollere

Sucks at poetry
big_z said:
who would want to travel space? if you were traveling 90% speed of light on a 1 year journey, thousands upon thousands of earth years would have gone by. providing humans dont die off in that time it's possible they'll have been at the planet already or even used it up and left by the time you get there thanks to advances in technology.

we need some event horizon ships to make travel worth while.
Click to expand...

I'm not saying anyone would, but just thinking about the implications (as shown in that video) is quite chilling to say the least. Also - it's just straight up weird. It's funny that the Universe we live in alters times with speed. I suppose it couldn't be any other way, but it's pretty bizarre.
 
abstract alien

abstract alien

Member
Extollere said:
That's the center plane of our own galaxy. No it's not as big as the universe. The reason it's so large in the image is because that map of the galaxy is a map based off our view from the sky. Those colored dots are stars in the galaxy. The other dots are the formations of galaxy clusters in the background far away.
Click to expand...
Ah, makes sense. Thanks.
 
Y

Youta Mottenai

Member
Extollere said:
I love magnetic fields :lol

Btw, if anyone isn't subsribed to Tony Darnell, his videos are some of my favorite on youtube. A new one was posted recently about the consequences of the limited speed of light (and what that means for travel as well).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhP5J9sRrKE

Super interesting stuff. Also worth checking out his whole playlist as well if you haven't already.
Click to expand...
Great video.
And I think it´s the first one I see where they show clearly how the time dilatation affects the crew.
Most of the times they mix the distance with the time passed from the crew time perspective. So, instead of a trip to a 5 light-years away star taking 5 years (duh!) for the control on Earth and a fraction of this time for the crew, they usually show it as a 5 years long journey for the crew and a thousands of years wait for the Earth control, usually with a ominous background music.
 
L

Lucky Forward

Member
Discover: The boiling, erupting Sun

not_the_great_pumpkin.jpg


proms_102010.jpg


Holy solar retinopathy! That’s the Sun?

Yup. But this is not a space-based image from some bazillion dollar observatory! This phenomenal picture was taken by astrophotographer Alan Friedman with this relatively small (but very, very nice) ’scope. He shot it on October 20th, and it shows our nearest star in the light of hydrogen, specifically what astronomers call Hα (H-alpha).
Click to expand...
The Sun’s surface puts out light at all wavelengths, but the surface isn’t solid. It’s a gas, and it tapers off with height. Normally, a thin gas in space emits light at very specific colors as electrons jump from one energy level to another in the individual atoms. But compressed gas in the thicker, denser part of the Sun mashes together all those energies, spreading them out, so it emits white light (that layer of the Sun is called the photosphere). Above that layer, where the gas is thinner (in a layer called the chromosphere), the hydrogen does emit light at specific colors. One of these, Hα, is in the red part of the spectrum, and in fact hot, thin hydrogen emits very strongly in Hα.

By plopping a filter in front of a telescope, you can block a lot of the light from the photosphere but let light from the chromosphere through. That’s what Alan Friedman did — he used a filter that let through a very narrow range of colors centered on Hα — to get this stunning picture. Well that, plus quite a bit of image processing! But everything you’re seeing there is real, and is happening on the Sun.
Click to expand...
 
M

McNei1y

Member
Man, I love all the stuff we are learning, taking pictures of, and discovering, but we really need to get our asses back out there.

I am writing a paper on Wernher von Braun and how he worked in NASA and was a big part of developing rockets and manned flights and such (still don't have a topic)... but some of the primary sources I am reading makes me feel bad for all of the ideas they thought we could do. They lived during a time of excitement of progression and attempting to orbit the earth and travel to the moon,which they did. Then they also thought we would be exceeding those limits and get further. To bad we haven't had any manned flights further than orbits. I want us to expand!
 
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