NASA has a very exciting upcoming mission called Kepler to find Earth-mass extrasolar planets. We won't actually get "pictures" of these planets, because that's not how planet finding works. These planets are found by imaging the stars and looking for dips in the light curve that indicate that a smaller body is transiting the star. This is discussed in more detail at the Kepler mission site, http://kepler.nasa.gov/
James Webb Space Telescope. Planned launch in 2013 - with an orbit at L2! Satellites use radio waves to transmit data. A good idea.
My theory (with no evidence to back it up whatsover) 1) God is some sort of energy form not a physical being, it created this universe and it is present everywhere in every particle and atom. It can take any shape or form and manifest itself even in human form in neccessary. 2) The universe has a life and death cycle it expands and then collapses onto itself. This process is infinitely repeated. It was the never created nor will it ever be destroyed, it is continous never ending process. 3) Heaven is higher a dimension within the universe perhaps a distant galaxy where the rules of our world don't apply ie gravity, limited energy ressouces, age and death.
Think Entropy as a one way trip from potential to realization, from higher concentrations to dispersion, from simplicity to complexty. What's more simple than uniformity? More complex strutures are more stable in the fact that they have less potential for change. Nope, the universe is accelerating it's expansion. It's a one way trip; to more and more dispersion. (the new expansion theory really really messed with my head....cycles made comforting sense to me too. Endlessness is tough to chew)
I believe they proved a while back that the universe isn't slowing down at all. In fact, all signs point to it speeding up. Which makes the "Big Crunch" theory not possible. They attribute the energy taken to actually speed up the universe as "dark matter," which is a fancy NASA way of saying they have no idea.
Dark energy is responsible for the acceleration of the universe. Dark matter is responsible for other things we can't explain.
My understanding is that based on observable mater, the velocity from rotation for objects in galaxies exceeds by quite a bit the centripetal force exerted by gravity which would keep them circling the center. In other words, without an unaccounted for ‘dark’ mater, galaxies would spin themselves to pieces. So without dark matter we can't explain why galaxies exist in their current form.
So you're saying stable, complex structures are a sign of increased disorder? I've always thought the uniform dispersion of energy throughout the available system was the highest degree of entropy.
Correct. I know what dark matter is. What I meant is that it is used to explain things that we could not explain otherwise without coming up with a new theory of gravity.
I stumbled across this blog by accident. It's from http://www.badastronomy.com and has a pretty interesting take on black holes. http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/06/19/news-do-black-holes-really-exist/ News: Do black holes really exist? Black holes are weird. Really weird. But you know this. Infinitely small, with huge gravity, warpers of time and space; they’re simply cool to astronomer and the public alike. Everything about them is interesting. They form when massive stars explode in titanic supernovae, they sit in the centers of big galaxies (like ours!) with masses millions or billions of times that of the Sun, and if they’re feeding on material around them they can form disks of swirling material which can easily outshine the rest of the galaxy combined. But do they really exist? No astronomer doubts that these gravitational objects actually exist. But astronomers Tanmay Vachaspati, Dejan Stojkovic, and Lawrence Krauss at Case Western Reserve University have written a new paper which has thrown a monkey in the wrench about the exact, well, "surface" of a black hole. Here’s how this works. When a massive star ends its life, the core collapses. As the core shrinks, its surface gravity increases (that is, the gravity you would feel if you were standing on its surface). This means the escape velocity increases as well — this is how fast an object would have to move to be able to break free and escape to infinity. For the Earth it’s about 11 km/sec (7 miles/sec), and for the Sun it’s about 600 km/sec (400 miles/sec). The escape velocity of a body depends on how massive it is and how big it is. For a given mass, a smaller body has a higher escape velocity. So as the core of the star shrinks, the escape velocity increases. At some point, if the core has enough mass, the escape velocity reaches the speed of light. This means that if you are standing there on the core’s surface, you would need to move at the speed of light to escape (actually, the situation is more complicated than this, but I’m simplifying). It’s like an infinitely deep hole; any matter in it cannot get out. If the core shrinks just a wee bit more, not even light can escape. To an outside observer, the core becomes black. So let’s see, it’s a hole, and it’s black. What should we call such a thing? Anyway, the theory is that the mass inside the black hole shrinks all the way to a point, an object of infinitely small size, called a singularity. The region around it where the escape velocity equals the speed of light is called the event horizon. And this is where things get sticky. Einstein showed that as gravity increases, your clock runs slower. Literally, if you have two people, one guy up high above a black hole, and another guy close in, the guy outside sees the close-in guy’s clock running slower. Literally, time flows more slowly near an object with gravity, and the stronger the gravity the slower time flows relative to an outside observer. For a black hole, time literally stretches to infinity at the event horizon. Clocks stop. Update: Well, I was being glib. Actually they continue to slow, ever approaching stopping but never actually reaching it. I was trying to simplify, but oversimplified — I make similar comments below in this entry, so where you read that things stop, think of it as "slowing almost to but never quite reaching zero". Read the comments thread below for details. This brings up a very interesting situation. If time takes forever to flow, then how does a black hole ever form? Imagine the core collapsing, and you’re looking at it from far away. You see it getting smaller, but the collapse also appears to be going more slowly because of the time dilation. Like Zeno’s paradox, you see the escape velocity approach the speed of light, but you’ll never see it actually get to the speed of light! Time would stretch out infinitely, and the collapse of the core would appear to you to stop. No black hole. But it gets worse. Years ago, Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes can in fact "leak" out mass. It’s very complicated, and has to do with entropy and quantum mechanics, so forgive me if I leave out details. Let’s just say that black holes can evaporate, and go from there. From the black hole’s viewpoint, time flows just fine. It starts to form, and it starts to very slowly lose mass through Hawking radiation. Over time, billions of years or more, it eventually evaporates away. But from your point of view, high above the black hole, the event horizon never quite actually forms. It gets closer and closer, remember, but slower and slower. Yet the Hawking radiation isn’t really affected by this. So the two effects compete: the event horizon never totally forms because it would take an infinite amount of time, but during that time the hole is losing mass. So the black hole will actually evaporate before it ever really becomes a black hole. If you throw something, let’s say a wad of paper, into the black hole, you would actually see the black hole evaporate (if you could wait long enough) before you’d see the paper wad get to the event horizon. So the black holes loses mass faster than it can gain mass and the event horizon can never actually form. This idea makes scientists nuts. And this is what the new paper is about. Some people have thought that if you take quantum mechanics into account, this paradox may be resolved. What the authors appear to have shown is that QM doesn’t help. The black hole itself, the event horizon, never really forms. However, have a care here: there is still a massive, dense, highly gravitational object there! So we still have what are essentially black holes in the cores of galaxies and forming when stars explode and all that, it’s just that, technically, well, they aren’t actually black holes. Get it? I will note that this is how I understand the situation, and I may have it wrong. This is very complicated stuff! This paper is by no means the last word on the subject — even the experts argue incessantly about it, and I’m no expert. This is a very interesting situation, and I’m quite sure that it is nowhere near being resolved. I have many friends who study black holes and I’m sure they’ll have quite the reaction to this story. If I hear more I’ll post again. I guarantee that this idea won’t, ah, evaporate on its own anytime soon.
I thought this was interesting. --- First planet with water is spotted outside Solar System PARIS (AFP) - Astronomers on Wednesday announced they had spotted the first planet beyond the Solar System that has water, the precious ingredient for life. The watery world, though, is far beyond the reach of our puny chemically-powered rockets -- and in any case is quite uninhabitable. It is made of gas rather than rock and its atmosphere reaches temperatures hot enough to melt steel, which means the water exists only as superheated steam. The find, named HD189733b, is about 15 percent bigger than our Jupiter and orbits a star in the constellation of Vulpecula the Fox, according to a paper released by Nature, the weekly British science journal. It was spotted by a team led by Giovanna Tinetti of the European Space Agency (ESA) and University College London. As HD 189733b swung in front of its star, it absorbed part of the spectrum of starlight in a telltale way that can only be explained by the presence of water in its atmosphere, the discoverers say. Extrasolar worlds -- also called exoplanets -- were first spotted in 1995. So far, 245 of them have been spotted, according to the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia (http://exoplanet.eu/), and the tally is growing at the rate of three or four a month. Virtually all of the discoveries have been made indirectly, mainly by a "wobble" in light, seen from Earth, when the planet swings around its star. The change in light is a fingerprint that can yield many clues about the planet's size, orbit and atmosphere. But this is the first time that astronomers have been able to confirm that water is present. "Although HD 189733b is far from being habitable and actually provides a rather hostile environment, our discovery shows that water might be more common out there than previously thought," said Tinetti. "Our method can be used in the future to study more 'life-friendly' environments." The planet's star, HD 189733, is similar in size to our Sun, but a bit cooler. But the planet itself would be hell for humans. Orbiting cheek by jowel to the star, at a distance that is 30 times closer than that between the Earth and the Sun, parts of the planet's atmosphere reach 2,000 degrees Celsius (3,600 degrees Fahrenheit). This seething temperature is reached on the side of the planet that always faces the star. By comparison, the other side of the planet is relatively balmy, with a low of 500 C (932 F). Tinetti's team used NASA's Spitzer orbiting telescope, using its infrared sensors to pick out the tiny signature that occurs when water vapour absorbs light from a star. The big prize is to spot a rocky planet that lies in the so-called Goldilocks Zone, where the temperature is not so hot that water evaporates, nor so cold that it is perpetually frozen, but "just right", enabling water to exist in liquid form. "The 'Holy Grail' for today's planet-hunters is to find an Earth-like planet that also has water in its atmosphere," explained Tinetti. "When it happens, the discovery will provide real evidence that planets outside our Solar System might harbour life. Finding the existence of water on an extra-solar gas giant is a vital milestone along that road of discovery." http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070711/sc_afp/spaceastronomy_070711175803
I used to be obsessed w/ everything dealing w/ astronomy and anything related when I was kid, constantly checking out books from the library every week on the subject. I grew out of it, but I have been curious about checking out Stephen Hawking's book 'A Brief History of Time'. I actually enjoyed physics in college, which helped me stumble across this book. Coincidentally I had a roommate in college that was working on a PhD in astronomy. He would work all night and sleep during the day. Obviously his research was only possible during the nighttime. One nice perk is his boss would occassionaly send him to locales where they had the most powerful telescopes on earth and usually they were in interesting and exotic locales.
Reading this makes my head hurt really bad. I just wanted to point out another thing about Hawking's theory of black holes. Because of the black holes "leaking" out matter, then there is a possibility that all information in the world then would be lost at some point (Information Paradox). Thus, it is possible for "alternate" universes to exist. It's only that their information has been lost.
Hey what part of Orange county do you live in??? I live in Dana Point(although I was born in Houston) so its impossible to find good Rox fans.
I live in Anaheim. Right next to disney land and anaheim stadium. I used to live in Houston for 4 years before moving here 6 years ago.
now why the hell is dark meat so much damn better tasting? That's the question we should be trying to answer.
