I wonder how all the scientists and religious leaders of our planet would react if astrologists someday found a message encoded to stars that would spell something like "God here" That we would sure like to behold.

Scientists would say "Hey thats a pretty interesting coincidence" and stop paying attention. Our perception of the location of stars is always changing, so any type of "Encoded Message" would only be temporary making it less "Holy shit God exists" and more "Hey isn't it cool what we can do with numbers somtimes?"

When I look up with powerful binoculars, I`m awed, space is breathtaking.

I don't think astrologists even look at the stars much, never mind actually making any discovery...

The discovery of the smallest exoplanet yet found has just been announced. Kepler 10-b is about 1.4 times the size of Earth, and it's the only exoplanet confirmed to be rocky. Unfortunately, it almost certainly cannot support life; orbiting 20 times closer to its star than Mercury does to our Sun, its surface is likely made of molten rock and it can't support an atmosphere. An interesting discovery nonetheless, and the size of the planets we are able to detect keeps getting smaller.

An artist impression of the new-found planet:

Yeah i just read about that one too, HB. Quite fascinating indeed. Insane how much stuff is being discovered, what seems like daily.

The craziest part of the research is how tiny the variations that they're looking for are. For a planet this size, the dips in the stars magnitude are most likely invisible to the human eye. The technology available to us is just fascinating.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badas ... ad-part-2/
I'm diggin' this. That is one seriously huge black hole. With that size, how can they be sure it won't start to pull at galaxies more nearby to us?!

Black holes actually behave in a very precise manner, obeying rules to an exact degree much like subatomic particles. They would be able to infer the gravitational impact of the black hole by its size. Did they make such a claim? I haven't read the entire article.

Good link, have you been reading Phil's blog for long?

Regarding the black hole though, while it's indeed enormous and probably more massive than some galaxies (!), I don't think there's any chance it can go on some intergalactic rampage. Gravitational attraction quickly gets weaker with distance, and clearly this black hole has not consumed its whole home galaxy or anything, so it's not about to go swallowing its neighboring galaxies hundreds of thousands of light years away. Sure, galactic collisions do happen, and this galaxy will probably see many, given millions or billions of years, but that's because it's already a giant ten times the Milky Way's diameter, and 200 times its mass. The huge black hole is actually a tiny fraction of M87's total mass (around 0.00001% I think), so it's not really a threat to anything outside the galactic center.

In other news (but also initially linked from Bad Astronomy), apparently thunderstorms can create antimatter. Wow.

When I first heard about that I couldn't believe it
Brings up so many questions that I have, sometimes I wish I took physics.

There's a pretty awesome website that I found recently called Khan Academy that has a ton of short video lessons about a variety of topics (a ton of math, a decent amount of science, a bit of history and finance). It's actually a pretty cool story: the guy started by just making math lesson videos for his cousins on YouTube, then other people started watching and following his lessons and it got more and more popular. He eventually got attention and support from certain rich people (I think he got a grant from Bill Gates now) so that he can now work full time on this free educational resource. I think he's up to near 2000 videos. Anyway, there's stuff about physics, chemistry, astronomy there, if you're interested, though I'm not sure any of it is about antimatter yet. I've been checking out his chemistry playlist and it's pretty interesting; it's been a long time since I learned about some of this stuff in highschool, hah. And yes, I am nerdy enough to follow chemistry lessons for fun.

There's also the Berkeley University that has some of its classes available as webcasts for everyone. Their Physics 10 class (available in the spring 2008 semester, and some previous ones I think) is pretty cool if you want a basic understanding of the various concepts in physics without getting into all the mathematical details.

http://www.cosmolearning.com/ is my personal go-to academic resource. Check out Lenny Susskind's physics lectures for continued education. He's a professor at Princeton.

I didn't know that one. It looks pretty great, thanks.

Yeah that was a rad link. When reading books about string theory or quantum physics, I always seem to get the urge to wish i had done physics. One of my degrees is in science, but more about gauging streams, measuring earthquakes, and shit like that.

I've been following Bad Astronomy for about 6-8 months i think. He raises some interesting points about the material he presents.

PS: latest post:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badas ... ed-galaxy/

Thanks to hellblazer, and DRD, I spent hours on that blog. Fantastic stuff! Also found this through his top14 best pics of 2010: The entire Orion Nebulae in one picture.

http://blog.deepskycolors.com/archive/2010/10/22/orion-from-Head-to-Toes.html

The worst part about the matter-antimatter collisions is the release of high-energy gamma photons. It makes me wonder how much radiation airline customers are exposed to (given that they fly through a storm).

Incase y'all haven't seen this yet:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... ews-galaxy

Sorry to double post, but here's some pretty exciting news:
http://www.techmagdaily.com/most-distan ... witterfeed
Most distant and youngest clusters found! New record! This news is certainly proof of the awesome work being done in collaboration between a lot of different partners worldwide.

Check out Sloan's Digital Sky Survey v-III data release #6.

The SDSS will map one-quarter of the entire sky and perform a redshift survey of galaxies, quasars and stars. The DR6 is the sixth major data release and provides images, imaging catalogs, spectra, and redshifts for download.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III (SDSS-III) has released the largest digital color image of the sky ever made, and its free to all. The image has been put together over the last decade from millions of 2.8-megapixel images, thus creating a color image of more than a trillion pixels. This terapixel image is so big and detailed that one would need 500,000 high-definition TVs to view it at its full resolution.

The record for most distant object found has been broken. The new-found galaxy (with the memorable name UDFj-39546284) is 13.2 billion light-years away, meaning we see it as it was just 480 million years after the Big Bang. Cool stuff. The discovery also interestingly suggests that stars formed at a slower rate at that time in the early Universe than about 120 millions years after that (the time at which we see the previous record holder for distant objects).

Wow, it really seems like they're making new discoveries and breaking records on an almost daily basis -amazing really.

Here's interesting space-related letter I found posted on an interesting website: a contingency speech written for the president in the event the Apollo 11 mission met with disaster. I love the opening: "IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER"

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/11/in ... aster.html

Apparently in a dozen years or so we may be able to see very near the big bang, if not during it. We just need to find a way to truly see beyond astral dust, or whatever is beyond astral dust, I think we can already see beyond that. Pretty intense stuff.




I only saw a very small image of it. Is it available in its entirety?

Space....pretty much the only reason I went into Aerospace Engineering.

Maybe this has been asked before?

I understand scientists agree everything started with the Big Bang.
So light, gas, and matter all radiated out together from one initial point.
The Big Bang lasted a finite time so light radiated out then stopped.
How do we see back billions of years if our universe was forming along with the light as it radiates out. It`s as if we formed ahead or travelled faster than light to see back to the source?

I think I only half understand what you ask, but I'll try.

Light only travels at a certain speed, so passed a certain distance, we see the past, because the light of the present hasn't reached us yet. The farther you look, the more into the past you see - as it takes more time for the light to reach us - so at some point, we should reach a frontier where we can see the universe forming.

Was this what you were asking?

No, but
Thanks for replying. sorry I`m not very good at explaining what I mean.


Edited.
Have problems grasping how big space is and the concept of spacetime .

We have created glimpses into the early universe, close to the Planck Epoch, which is from zero to approximately 10^−43 seconds. By smashing gold ions going at relativistic speeds at the RHIC, we have created the newest state of matter which is referred to as the Quark-Gluon Plasma. It is somewhere to the effect of 6 trillion degrees Fahrenheit. At these temperatures/pressures, protons and neutrons are completely unstable and dissipate into their constituent parts.

I can try to shed some light on the mysteries of space-time if you'd like, on here or PM. It is truly fascinating stuff.

On the whole of it---star searching, galaxy searching, planet searching, etc---they pretty much are. Pretty exciting stuff all of it.

I really like learning about space. I want to incorporate space into my lyrics. Knowing how dark and cold space is is frightening and to be honest, being trapped on a planet by oneself would be utter hell. And knowing that a meteor the size of a thumbnail could destroy years of research and planning is also fucking insane.

Fuck yeah.

Pretty cool. And very interesting numbers. I'm sure an habitable Earth-like planet isn't all that rare, it can't be considering the vastness of space.

Grinning ear to ear when I read that. If more people would read this stuff, they would realize how pathetically minuscule we are, and perhaps lessen our arrogant stupidity.

Hell, I'd like to know if there can be a Neptune or bigger size planet with a solid surface and an atmosphere.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110201.html

I came across a post somebody made on a different forum last night that really interested me (mind you, it was from somebody on Shroomery.org):

"I suspect that due to the holographic nature of reality, we each project our universe from the inside, it's a paradox, I know, but there really is no objective world "out there".
Mystics have been saying this for ages, and science is beginning to agree...

So what's happening "up there" is a fractal mirror of what's happening "in here" or "in you" - same thing ultimately, imo.

That's why the ancients "worshiped" (read: closely followed and personified) the stars and planets, because they recognized them as aspects of their own psyches.
They understood that the celestial cycles mirrored cycles within themselves - personally and collectively."

Then he went on to list a bunch of quotes that actually do kinda follow his theory. Really amusing to think about but I don't know what to research to read about a similar philosophy.

Time is more fascinating. Given that, with time, universes can create themselves from nothing and empty themselves to nothing, it's possible that there's been an infinite number of universes before this one, and an infinite number of more to come and go.

Time allows everything imaginable and unimaginable to happen. Everything.

"Astronomers at the University of Minnesota have located a gigantic hole in the universe. This empty space, stretching nearly a billion light-years across, is devoid of any matter such as galaxies, stars, and gas, and neither does it contain the strange and mysterious dark matter, which can be detected but not seen".


Would time exist there? Is time dependant on motion?

I'm assuming that the thing you're referring to is a black hole of sorts. I could very well be wrong though.

You must keep in mind that time is a concept and tool for measuring rates of change, and this must be done with a reference frame. An asteroid can have a speed of 0 km/s if you're standing on it, or it can have a speed of 800 km/s if you're looking at it from Earth. If, from an outside frame, everything in the universe were forever constant and unchanging, the whole concept of time in that universe would be useless.

From what I've gathered, due to severe spacetime distortion occurring nearer to the centre of black holes, any information that distant observers intend on gathering, such as electromagnetic radiation readings, becomes closer to being a constant. This is due to extreme redshifting, which basically pushes and compresses all data into a certain point -- In the case of light, the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. In the case of sound, very damn near to 0 Hz.

Since all x data are virtually constant according to our measurements, the functional derivative of f(x) becomes zero, and subsequently the time derivative (dx)/(dt) becomes zero, which in turn means that there is no progress or change. It makes sense that to the distant observer, everything near the centre of a black hole is frozen still. Hence, time would be non-existent.

In quantum theory however, things are a bit different. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle still allows vacuum fluctuations to occur even near the event horizon, and the Bekenstein-Hawking radiation theory states that negative energy virtual particles can make a black hole lose some of its mass, albeit at an extremely slow rate. According to the Bekenstein-Hawking theory, after enough time has passed, a black hole can vanish after radiating all of its mass away. Therefore, we deduce that black holes cannot be constant even to distant observers, because they are after all changed by their radiating through time. This is, of course, still theory.

Having said that, it's far from easy to discuss the effect black holes have on our perception of phenomena within them. You'll find shitloads of papers, theories and doctoral theses on topics such as black holes, redshifting and gravitational time dilation. Frankly, I think most would eventually be shown to have been way off-target as we come closer to finding a way to unite general relativity with quantum mechanics.

EDIT: Read next page for some corrections.