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vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #150 on: September 18, 2019, 01:46:59 AM »
U.S. Air Force Warns There's a Chance an American and Russian Satellite Could Collide Overnight
https://gizmodo.com/u-s-air-force-warns-an-american-and-russian-satellite-1838195500

Earlier today, the private American firm Bigelow Aerospace was notified by the U.S. Air Force that its Genesis II spacecraft has a slim chance of smashing into a dead Russian spy satellite.

https://mobile.twitter.com/BigelowSpace/status/1174007949863211008

Quote
... “Today, we were notified by the US Air Force that there is a 5.6% chance that Genesis II will collide with dead Russian satellite Cosmos 1300 in 15 hours,” says the tweet. “Although this is a relatively low probability, it brings to light that low Earth orbit is becoming increasingly more littered.”

Bigelow Aerospace posted its tweet at 1:30 p.m. ET. The collision, should it happen, would occur around 4:05 a.m. ET tomorrow (September 18, 2019), according to the company.

The defunct Kosmos 1300 surveillance satellite, built and operated by the former Soviet Union, dates back to 1981.
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pikaia

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #151 on: September 18, 2019, 11:38:49 AM »

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #152 on: September 18, 2019, 09:48:13 PM »
Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event: Asteroid Dust Cloud Sparked Explosion in Primitive Life on Earth
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-giant-asteroid-ancient-ice-age.html



About 466 million years ago, long before the age of the dinosaurs, the Earth froze. The seas began to ice over at the Earth's poles, and the new range of temperatures around the planet set the stage for a boom of new species evolving. The cause of this ice age was a mystery, until now: a new study in Science Advances argues that the ice age was caused by global cooling, triggered by extra dust in the atmosphere from a giant asteroid collision in outer space.

When the 93-mile-wide asteroid between Mars and Jupiter broke apart 466 million years ago, it created way more dust than usual. "Normally, Earth gains about 40,000 tons of extraterrestrial material every year," says Philipp Heck, a curator at the Field Museum, associate professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the paper's authors. "Imagine multiplying that by a factor of a thousand or ten thousand." To contextualize that, in a typical year, one thousand semi trucks' worth of interplanetary dust fall to Earth. In the couple million years following the collision, it'd be more like ten million semis.

The levels stayed high for 2m-4m years. “The grains come with the dust so when you see an increase in these, you know there’s been an increase in the dust,” said Schmitz.

Further tests on the ancient limestone revealed a similar spike in levels of an isotope of helium that streams out of the sun in the surge of particles known as the solar wind. The researchers believe that the helium was brought to Earth when it became embedded in the finer space dust particles as they travelled through the solar system.



Open Access: B. Schmitz el al., "An extraterrestrial trigger for the Mid-Ordovician ice age: Dust from the breakup of the L-chondrite parent body," Science Advances (2019)
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Tom_Mazanec

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #153 on: September 18, 2019, 10:03:49 PM »
Great read. There is a mature planetary system with millions of times our dust level... implying collision of Earth sized planets.

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #154 on: September 18, 2019, 10:27:13 PM »
Great read. There is a mature planetary system with millions of times our dust level... implying collision of Earth sized planets.
What 'read' are you talking about?
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

Tom_Mazanec

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #155 on: September 18, 2019, 11:22:48 PM »
I was talking about the article you posted right above me.
The system I meant was BD +20 307.

kassy

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #156 on: September 19, 2019, 12:27:47 PM »
Within Months, 6 Quiet Galaxies Became Blazing Quasars And Scientists Don't Know How

...

when a team of astronomers led by astronomer Sara Frederick of the University of Maryland went over the first nine months' worth of data from the Zwicky Transient Facility automated sky survey, they found six LINER galaxies doing something… odd.

"For one of the six objects, we first thought we had observed a tidal disruption event, which happens when a star passes too close to a supermassive black hole and gets shredded," Frederick said.

"But we later found it was a previously dormant black hole undergoing a transition that astronomers call a 'changing look,' resulting in a bright quasar. Observing six of these transitions, all in relatively quiet LINER galaxies, suggests that we've identified a totally new class of active galactic nucleus."

https://www.sciencealert.com/six-galaxies-transformed-from-mild-mannered-liners-to-wildly-blazing-quasars

New data set immediately gives us a new puzzle.  :)
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vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #157 on: September 22, 2019, 02:26:34 AM »
Mysterious Magnetic Pulses Discovered on Mars
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/09/mars-insight-feels-mysterious-magnetic-pulsations-at-midnight/

At midnight on Mars, the red planet’s magnetic field sometimes starts to pulsate in ways that have never before been observed. The cause is currently unknown.

That’s just one of the stunning preliminary findings from NASA’s very first robotic geophysicist there, the InSight lander, since touching down in November 2018.

In addition to the odd magnetic pulsations, the lander’s data show that the Martian crust is far more powerfully magnetic than scientists expected. What’s more, the lander has picked up on a very peculiar electrically conductive layer, about 2.5 miles thick, deep beneath the planet’s surface. It’s far too early to say with any certainty, but there is a chance that this layer could represent a global reservoir of liquid water.

If these results bear out, a liquid region at this scale on modern Mars has enormous implications for the potential for life, past or present.




InSight’s magnetometer, the first placed on the Martian surface, gave scientists their best look yet at the crustal magnetic field, and it gave them a bit of a shock: The magnetic field near the robot was around 20 times stronger than what had been predicted based on past orbital measurements.

Perhaps even more puzzling, InSight also found that the crustal magnetic field near its location jiggled about every now and then. These pulses are fluctuations in the strength or direction of the magnetic field, and they are not entirely unusual.

What’s strange is that these Martian wobbles happen at local midnight, as if responding to the demands of an unseen, nocturnal timer.
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

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vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #158 on: September 22, 2019, 03:44:38 PM »
Edgar Rice Burroughs might have been on to something ...

---------------------

Could Venus Have Been Habitable?
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-venus-habitable.html


Venus in its halcyon days?

Venus may have been a temperate planet hosting liquid water for 2-3 billion years, until a dramatic transformation starting over 700 million years ago resurfaced around 80% of the planet. A study presented today at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 by Michael Way of The Goddard Institute for Space Science gives a new view of Venus's climatic history and may have implications for the habitability of exoplanets in similar orbits.

To see if Venus might ever have had a stable climate capable of supporting liquid water, Dr. Way and his colleague, Anthony Del Genio, have created a series of five simulations assuming different levels of water coverage.

In all five scenarios, they found that Venus was able to maintain stable temperatures between a maximum of about 50 degrees Celsius and a minimum of about 20 degrees Celsius for around three billion years. A temperate climate might even have been maintained on Venus today had there not been a series of events that caused a release, or 'outgassing', of carbon dioxide stored in the rocks of the planet approximately 700-750 million years ago.

Although many researchers believe that Venus is beyond the inner boundary of our Solar System's habitable zone and is too close to the Sun to support liquid water, the new study suggests that this might not be the case.

Quote
... "Venus currently has almost twice the solar radiation that we have at Earth. However, in all the scenarios we have modelled, we have found that Venus could still support surface temperatures amenable for liquid water"

... "Something happened on Venus where a huge amount of gas was released into the atmosphere and couldn't be re-absorbed by the rocks. On Earth we have some examples of large-scale outgassing, for instance the creation of the Siberian Traps 500 million years ago which is linked to a mass extinction, but nothing on this scale. It completely transformed Venus," said Way.

Open Access: Michael Way and Anthony Del Genio, A view of the possible habitability of ancient Venus and similar exoplanetary worlds, EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019
« Last Edit: September 22, 2019, 04:09:05 PM by vox_mundi »
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

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vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #159 on: September 25, 2019, 11:59:29 PM »
NASA Visualization Shows a Black Hole's Warped World
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-nasa-visualization-black-hole-warped.html



This new visualization of a black hole illustrates how its gravity distorts our view, warping its surroundings as if seen in a carnival mirror. The visualization simulates the appearance of a black hole where infalling matter has collected into a thin, hot structure called an accretion disk. The black hole's extreme gravity skews light emitted by different regions of the disk, producing the misshapen appearance.

Seen nearly edgewise, the turbulent disk of gas churning around a black hole takes on a crazy double-humped appearance. The black hole's extreme gravity alters the paths of light coming from different parts of the disk, producing the warped image. The black hole's extreme gravitational field redirects and distorts light coming from different parts of the disk, but exactly what we see depends on our viewing angle. The greatest distortion occurs when viewing the system nearly edgewise.

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

blumenkraft

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #160 on: September 27, 2019, 09:35:17 PM »

philopek

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #161 on: September 27, 2019, 10:34:12 PM »
‘Planet Nine’ may actually be a black hole

Link >> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/planet-nine-may-actually-be-black-hole?rss=1

There is a critical mass for black holes to be stable and that makes the idea linked above far fetched to say it nicely.

As per now the most probably smallest black hole would have between 3.8 and 5 times the mass of our sun that is XTE J1650-500.

Smaller masses are possible but have not yet been found somewhere in the 2.x sun masses.

The smallest theoretically possible black holes would be non-stellar and there existence in the wild is not realistically possible due to the age of the universe, it would take more time for them to come into existence (in theory) and then they would not be stable.

Chances that the solar system contains a black hole with a size larger than the sun is negligible (speak: impossible) and the existence of a black hole that is smaller than 2.x sun masses is "not probable" (speak: impossible at this moment in time) as well.

The 2.x sun masses black hole would hardly form from a collapsing star (super nova) but in theory could form from two merging neutron stars (in theory)

Should we ever want to find significantly smaller than 2.x sun mass "natural" black holes we have to give them way more time to form.

Black holes lose mass over time! Because of the fact that the Universe is quantum in nature, producing particle-antiparticle fluctuations all the time both inside, outside and on the event horizon of black holes, these objects aren’t completely static in time. Although it happens very slowly, black holes evaporate thanks to a process known as Hawking radiation!
This isn’t a stream of particles and/or antiparticles that emanate from black holes, but rather some very low-energy, almost constant flux of blackbody radiation.

Over huge timescales — something like 10^68 or 10^69 years — these lowest mass black holes will evaporate, decreasing in mass slowly at first and then incredibly rapidly, losing the last few tonnes in just microseconds!

So if you want to see an even smaller black hole than what we’ve got in the Universe today, stick around for a while. And if you want them to be smaller NOW, no way.

The absolute minimum thinkable mass of a black hole should be not much greater than the Planck mass
« Last Edit: September 28, 2019, 03:11:32 AM by philopek »

Tom_Mazanec

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #162 on: September 27, 2019, 11:33:49 PM »
One dark horse way you could have a Black Hole less than two solar masses in the present universe is if they are primordial...compressed local inhomogeneities in the Big Bang.
But even if they are possible, they would almost certainly not be in orbit around a present day star.

philopek

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #163 on: September 28, 2019, 03:15:08 AM »
One dark horse way you could have a Black Hole less than two solar masses in the present universe is if they are primordial...compressed local inhomogeneities in the Big Bang.
But even if they are possible, they would almost certainly not be in orbit around a present day star.

The absolute minimum thinkable mass of a black hole should be not much greater than the Planck mass but as mentioned above that would not be stable, hence to say it can exist in the present universe is correct in one way but as you correctly pointed out, in short, not really in the common meaning of "existing" in a form that could be observed other than under laboratory conditions like i.e. the LHC would be one.

Tom_Mazanec

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #164 on: September 28, 2019, 03:56:20 PM »
A Planck Mass BH lasts for a Planck Time. A solar mass BH lasts for something like a google ages of the universe. Nor BH is "stable".
I believe the minimum primordial mass BH that could still exist now is one that was about the mass of a typical asteroid at the Big Bang.

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #165 on: September 30, 2019, 03:26:43 AM »
Life on Mars Could be Found Within Two Years But World is ‘Not Prepared’, NASA’s Chief Scientist Says
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nasa-mars-life-discovery-space-exomars-rover-chief-scientist-jim-green-a9125076.html?amp

NASA is close to finding life on Mars but the world is not ready for the “revolutionary” implications of the discovery, the space agency’s chief scientist has said.

Dr Jim Green has warned that two rovers from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) could find evidence of life within months of arriving on Mars in March 2021.


Dr Green compared the potential discovery to when the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus stated that the Earth revolves around the Sun in the 16th century.

“It will start a whole new line of thinking. I don’t think we’re prepared for the results,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “I’ve been worried about that because I think we’re close to finding it and making some announcements.”

... “What happens next is a whole new set of scientific questions. Is that life like us? How are we related?” he said. “Can life move from planet-to-planet or do we have a spark and just the right environment and that spark generates life – like us or do not like us – based on the chemical environment that it is in?”

Earlier this year, scientists discovered that there may be a vast and active system of water running underneath the surface of Mars.

... “There is no reason to think that there isn’t civilisations elsewhere, because we are finding exoplanets [planets outside the solar system] all over the place,” he said.

---------------------

We Should Deliberately Contaminate Mars With Our Microbes, Controversial Study Argues
https://gizmodo.com/we-should-deliberately-contaminate-mars-with-our-microb-1838496474/amp

A research team is proposing a major philosophical shift in our thinking about the spread of Earthly microbes in space and on Mars in particular. Believing interplanetary contamination to be “inevitable,” the team argues that future Martian colonists should use microorganisms to reshape the Red Planet—a proposition deemed grossly premature by some experts.

In a paper published last month in FEMS Microbiology Ecology, microbiologist Jose Lopez, a professor at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, along with colleagues W. Raquel Peixoto and Alexandre Rosado from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, proposed a “major revision” to current philosophies behind space exploration and planetary protection policies as they pertain to the spread of microorganisms in space.

Quote
...“Microbial introduction should not be considered accidental but inevitable.”

Rather than worry about contaminating foreign celestial bodies—something NASA and other space agencies take great care to avoid—Lopez and his co-authors make the case that we should deliberately send our germs to outer space and that the dissemination of our microbes should be part of a larger colonization strategy to terraform the climate on Mars. A key argument proposed by the researchers is that the prevention of contamination is a “near impossibility,” as the authors phrase it in the study.

Open Access: Jose V Lopez, et.al., "Inevitable future: space colonization beyond Earth with microbes first", FEMS Microbiology Ecology, Volume 95, Issue 10, October 2019

--------------------

Resistance is futile!
« Last Edit: September 30, 2019, 04:07:31 AM by vox_mundi »
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sidd

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #166 on: September 30, 2019, 06:26:31 AM »
This seems quite irresponsible. Our microbes might wipe out life native to other planets. I suppose it's a version of Manifest Destiny.

sidd

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #167 on: September 30, 2019, 06:36:15 AM »
Irresponsible but difficult to avoid if you send humans on mars. Maybe it would be a good reason not to do it.

Aporia_filia

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #168 on: September 30, 2019, 12:21:53 PM »
"Manifest Destiny" You're one of my idols here Sidd. But this is an idea where I'm not that sure. Why? Because we cannot know how free our free will is. We're always talking as if our brains could rationalise everything, but we know that our behavior is more hormone based than rational. How unnatural that Manifest Destiny behavior is?
Probably very unnatural if you think of individuals, but how about Humanity?
We are so proud of our free will and our intelligence that we don't consider what is a must when studying other spicies: the effects and behavior of the Superorganism.
And I bring back something that even had a thread in this forum (if remembered correctly); we should consider the size of human groups as a fundamental characteristic  of its nature.
This could be applied to nanning hypothesis; we are evolving, we are not equal (no one better than other), but those who are selfish have easier time into big groups of people than into 'tribes'.
There are so many evolutionary studies with pigeons, foxes, daisys... about all this, why not about us?

gerontocrat

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #169 on: September 30, 2019, 12:30:02 PM »

We Should Deliberately Contaminate Mars With Our Microbes, Controversial Study Argues


Since we are doing the best we can to wipe out life on Earth, we might as well make sure the rest of the Solar System is dead as well.
"Para a Causa do Povo a Luta Continua!"
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TerryM

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #170 on: September 30, 2019, 08:14:48 PM »
^^
Raman!!


+ a Martian Marshall Plan, to keep Intergalactic Corporations from gaining an appendage hold in "our" solar system. 8)


Terry, & the Planetary Pirates INC.


vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #171 on: October 02, 2019, 12:34:09 AM »
Scientists Are Starting to Take Warp Drives Seriously, Especially One Specific Concept
https://www.uah.edu/news/news/standing-room-only-crowd-engages-in-student-s-warp-drive-theory-speech

Warp drive, as Star Trek fans know, is the ability to fly through space at speeds faster than light. A report on University of Alabama in Huntsville student Joseph Agnew’s work succinctly explained the value of speeds like that: Unless we can do it, we’re not going very far from home.

In recent years, the scientific community has become understandably excited and skeptical about claims that a particular concept – the Alcubierre Warp Drive – might actually be feasible.



This was the subject of a presentation made at this year's American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Propulsion and Energy Forum, which took place from August 19th to 22nd in Indianapolis.

This presentation was conducted by Joseph Agnew – an undergraduate engineer and research assistant from the University of Alabama in Huntsville's Propulsion Research Center (PRC).

As part of a session titled "The Future of Nuclear and Breakthrough Propulsion", Agnew shared the results of a study he conducted titled "An Examination of Warp Theory and Technology to Determine the State of the Art and Feasibility".

Quote
... "Mathematically, if you fulfill all the energy requirements, they can’t prove that it doesn’t work"

"Warp drive theory is at the point where the mathematics needs more development and the technologies need more development," Agnew says.

The field is where radio, television, radar, microwaves, computing, cellular communications, human flight, space exploration and travel by automobile all once were. It’s ahead of the current cutting edge, theoretically possible, but limited by its prodigious energy requirements and scalability issues as well as the current state of supporting technologies.

But even if it has doubters, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

... Engage!

J. Agnew, An Examination of Warp Theory and Technology to Determine the State of the Art and Feasibility, AIAA Propulsion and Energy 2019 Forum

-------------------------------------------

Maybe they could tap into the energy all around us ...

Physicist Suggests 'Quantum Foam' May Explain Away Huge Cosmic Energy
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-physicist-quantum-foam-huge-cosmic.html

... Conventional theory suggests that spacetime should be filled with a huge amount of energy—perhaps as much as 10120 more than seemingly exists. Over the years, many theorists have suggested ideas on why this may be—most have tried the obvious approach, trying to figure out a way to make the energy go away. But none have been successful. In this new effort, Carlip suggests that maybe all that energy really is there, but it does not have any ties to the expansion of the universe because its effects are being canceled out by something at the Planck scale.

The new theory by Carlip is based very heavily on work done by John Wheeler back in the 1950s—he suggested that at the smallest possible scale, space and time turn into something he called "spacetime foam." He argued that at such a small scale, defining time, length and energy would be subject to the uncertainty principle. Since then, others have taken a serious look at spacetime foam—and some have suggested that if a vacuum were filled with spacetime foam, there would be a lot of energy involved. Others argue that such a scenario would behave like the cosmological constant.

Thus, to explain their ideas, they have sought to find ways to cancel out the energy as a way to make it go away. Carlip suggests instead that in a spacetime foam scenario, energy would exist everywhere in a vacuum—but if you took a much closer look, you would find Planck-sized areas that have an equal likelihood of expanding or contracting. And under such a scenario, the patchwork of tiny areas would appear the same as larger areas in the vacuum—and they would not expand or contract, which means they would have a zero cosmic constant. He notes that under such a scenario, time would have no intrinsic direction.


https://medium.com/@aleksejskonovaliks/how-quantum-foam-unites-quantum-field-theory-with-string-theory-false-wave-particle-duality-7eebc1ef8516

S. Carlip. Hiding the Cosmological Constant, Physical Review Letters (2019).
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blumenkraft

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #172 on: October 02, 2019, 05:39:11 AM »
Quote
Warp drive, as Star Trek fans know, is the ability to fly through space at speeds faster than light.

Well, as a Star Trek fan, i know warp drive does nothing of sorts. It wraps the space and therefore moves the vessel relative in space. Nothing is faster than light. ;)

blumenkraft

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #173 on: October 02, 2019, 08:25:58 AM »
First alien gases detected from interstellar comet

Quote
Just weeks after the discovery of the second-ever comet from outside of our solar system (the first was the cigar-shaped ‘Oumuamua), astronomers have detected gas emitted from its surface—the first hint of what an interstellar traveler is made of.

Sadly, it’s not kryptonite, or even unobtanium, but cyanogen, a simple but toxic molecule made up of two carbon and two nitrogen atoms. The comet, dubbed 2I/Borisov, was first spotted on 30 August by Ukrainian astronomer Gennadiy Borisov. Later observations showed it was moving in an orbit not bound by the sun’s gravity. Since then, many astronomers have studied the object including a team using the 4.2-meter William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in Spain’s Canary Islands.

Link >> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/first-alien-gasses-detected-interstellar-comet

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #174 on: October 02, 2019, 05:19:25 PM »
Quote
Warp drive, as Star Trek fans know, is the ability to fly through space at speeds faster than light.

Well, as a Star Trek fan, i know warp drive does nothing of sorts. It wraps the space and therefore moves the vessel relative in space. Nothing is faster than light. ;)

Quote
... There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

 Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 159–167

Both a STNG 'Warp Drive' and the 'Alcubierre Drive' use a 'Warp Bubble' within which, as you say, the speed of light (c) is not violated (no local space/time violation). However, the 'Warp bubble' can move through space at faster than light speed. This does not violate general relativity.

The most credible way of sending signals faster than light is via negative matter. You can do this by compressing the space in front of you and expanding the space behind you, so that you surf on a tidal wave of warped space. You can calculate that this tidal wave travels faster than light if driven by negative matter. (... this is the method I posted, and the way the Enterprise apparently travels.)  ;)

Negative Matter Propulsion
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/3.23219?journalCode=jpp

Cosmologists Prove Negative Mass Can Exist In Our Universe
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/cosmologists-prove-negative-mass-can-exist-in-our-universe-250a980320a7

Negative Mass Bubbles In De Sitter Space-Time
http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.1457

Faster Than the Speed of Light: New Model Proposes Jets Go Superluminal in Gamma-Ray Bursts
https://scitechdaily.com/faster-than-the-speed-of-light-new-model-proposes-jets-go-superluminal-in-gamma-ray-bursts/

Superluminal Light Pulse Propagation
https://www.physics.byu.edu/faculty/peatross/Superluminal.aspx

Gain-Assisted Superluminal Light Propagation
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10917523

Testing the Speed of ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07121

---------------------------

Hypothetical Speed & Energy Constraints of Warp Drive ...





-----------------------------------------

Black Holes As We Know Them May Not Exist
https://www.livescience.com/black-holes-may-not-exist.html

K. S. Croker, J. L. Weiner, Implications of Symmetry and Pressure in Friedmann Cosmology. I. Formalism, The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 882, Number 1, Aug. 2019

... Researchers were looking at Friedmann's equations, which are simplified from Einstein's theory of general relativity. (Relativity describes how mass and energy warp space-time.) Physicists use Friedmann's equations to describe the expansion of the universe, in part because the math is simpler than in Einstein's body of equations describing relativity. The team found that, in order to properly write down Friedmann's equations, ultradense and isolated regions of space, like neutron stars and black holes, had to be treated in the same mathematical way as all other areas. Previously, cosmologists believed it was reasonable to ignore the internal details of ultradense and isolated regions, such as the inside of a black hole.

"We showed there's only one way to [construct these equations] correctly," Croker told Live Science. "And if you do it that one way, which is the correct way to do it, you find some interesting things."

The new results suggest that all the dark energy required for the accelerated expansion of the universe could be contained in these alternatives to black holes. The researchers discovered this in the math, after they had corrected the way to write out Friedmann's equations. And in a follow-up paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal and posted Sept. 7 on the preprint journal arXiv, they showed that these alternatives to black holes, called Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs), could also help explain peculiarities in gravitational-wave observations from 2016.

The math from Friedmann's equations showed that over time, these ultradense objects gain weight simply due to the expansion of the universe, even when there is no nearby material for them to consume. Just as light traveling through expanding space loses energy — an effect known as redshift — matter also loses weight as space expands. The effect is usually so tiny it cannot be seen. But in ultradense material with very strong pressures inside, known as relativistic material, the effect becomes noticeable. Dark energy is very relativistic, and its pressure acts oppositely to normal matter and light — so objects made of it (like these hypothetical GEODEs) gain weight over time.

"Light is sort of a weird thing. It behaves counterintuitively, in many ways," Croker said. "People didn't expect that this behavior could also be exhibited in other objects. But we showed, yes, you can see it in another object," namely inside GEODEs.

it turns out these weird objects could also provide a simple explanation for observed large black hole mergers. In 2016, members of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)-Virgo collaboration announced they had the first-ever observations of a black hole merger, but the calculated masses of the supposed black holes was unexpected — scientists expected the masses to be either much higher or lower.

But GEODEs, unlike traditional black holes, gain weight over time. If two GEODEs that had formed in the younger universe eventually collided, by the time they collided, they would have grown larger than typical black holes. By that point, the GEODEs' masses would match the masses seen in the collision observed by LIGO-Virgo. Instead of having to conceive of a highly specific situation that led to the merger, GEODEs could provide a simpler solution to explain the observations. (See also: Occam's razor)

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vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #175 on: October 02, 2019, 05:34:55 PM »
Add this to the pile Terry ...

New Research Supports Hypothesis that Asteroid Contributed to Mass Extinction During the Younger Dryas
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-hypothesis-asteroid-contributed-mass-extinction.html



A team of scientists from South Africa has discovered evidence partially supporting a hypothesis that Earth was struck by a meteorite or asteroid 12 800 years ago, leading to global consequences including climate change, and contributing to the extinction of many species of large animals at the time of an episode called the Younger Dryas.

The team, led by Professor Francis Thackeray of the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, discovered evidence of a remarkable "platinum spike" at a site called Wonderkrater in the Limpopo Province, north of Pretoria in South Africa. Working with researcher Philip Pieterse from the University of Johannesburg and Professor Louis Scott of the University of the Free State, Thackeray discovered this evidence from a core drilled in a peat deposit, notably in a sample about 12 800 years old. This research was published in Palaeontologia Africana.

Noting that meteorites are rich in platinum, Thackeray said "Our finding at least partially supports the highly controversial Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH).

... Human populations may have been indirectly affected at the time in question. In North America there is a dramatic termination of the stone tool technology of Clovis people. Remarkably, archaeologists in South Africa have detected an almost simultaneous termination of the Robberg stone artifact industry associated with people in some parts of the country, including the area around Boomplaas near the Cango Caves in the southern Cape, close to the town of Oudshoorn.

... "We cannot be certain, but a cosmic impact could have affected humans as a result of local changes in environment and the availability of food resources, associated with sudden climate change."

At Wonderkrater, the team has evidence from pollen to show that about 12 800 years ago there was temporary cooling, associated with the "Younger Dryas" drop in temperature that is well documented in the northern hemisphere, and now also in South Africa. According to some scientists, this cooling in widespread areas could at least potentially have been associated with the global dispersal of platinum-rich atmospheric dust.

This is the first evidence in Africa for a platinum spike preceding climate change. Younger Dryas spikes in platinum have also been found in Greenland, Eurasia, North America, Mexico and recently also at Pilauco in Chile. Wonderkrater is the 30th site in the world for such evidence.

A large crater 31 kilometers in diameter has been discovered in northern Greenland beneath the Hiawatha Glacier. "There is some evidence to support the view that it might possibly have been the very place where a large meteorite struck the planet earth 12 800 years ago."



Open Access: Thackeray, J. Francis; Scott, Louis; Pieterse, P, The Younger Dryas interval at Wonderkrater (South Africa) in the context of a platinum anomaly, Palaeontologia Africana 2019-10-02
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

kassy

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #176 on: October 02, 2019, 07:40:37 PM »
How would we store the negative matter and what would that do to the ship?

The warp drive was wasted in the first series. All that tech for some intergalactic womanizing. Worst episode was when they beamed down to Olympus. But at least the rest was a lot better (until the timewarp in the prequel series).

Thanks for the GEODE and YD articles.
Þetta minnismerki er til vitnis um að við vitum hvað er að gerast og hvað þarf að gera. Aðeins þú veist hvort við gerðum eitthvað.

kassy

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #177 on: October 03, 2019, 08:23:20 PM »
Already posted and sicussed in #160 and on.

Aside that graphic in post #159 is really cool.  8)
Þetta minnismerki er til vitnis um að við vitum hvað er að gerast og hvað þarf að gera. Aðeins þú veist hvort við gerðum eitthvað.

Tom_Mazanec

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #178 on: October 03, 2019, 08:50:33 PM »
Sorry, kassy.
How do I get to post #159 (or whatever #)?
Also, could you translate your signature?

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #179 on: October 03, 2019, 09:34:32 PM »
If you observe closely (under the title), your last reply was #179. The one above it was #178, ergo, Q.E.D.
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

kassy

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #180 on: October 04, 2019, 10:37:24 AM »
Þetta minnismerki er til vitnis um að við vitum hvað er að gerast og hvað þarf að gera. Aðeins þú veist hvort við gerðum eitthvað.

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #181 on: October 05, 2019, 01:46:41 AM »
Double Protostar Caught in Process of Forming
http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/double-protostar-07662.html

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have captured a stunning image of two circumstellar disks in which two protostars are growing, fed by a complex network of filaments of gas and dust.

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #182 on: October 06, 2019, 08:38:50 PM »
Building a Galaxy: Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/building-andromeda-galaxy-ended-up-with-stars-orbiting-at-right-angles/

In a paper published on Wednesday in Nature, the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey team describes uncovering some of our nearest galactic neighbor's violent past. The paper shows that Andromeda was built in part by two major collisions that have left clusters of stars occupying two perpendicular orbits. In the process of writing their paper, the researchers also uncover a bit of a mystery about an unexpected alignment between some of these clusters and Andromeda's satellite galaxies.

... The researchers identified 92 globular clusters in the halo of the galaxy, orbiting at least 25,000 parsecs from its core. These were imaged to determine their motion relative to Earth using the Doppler shift. That information could be converted to the clusters' local motion relative to the rest of Andromeda.

The analysis indicated there were two distinct populations. One group of clusters was associated with previously identified structures within Andromeda during its orbits. A second group, orbiting in a plane that's 90° off from this one, doesn't appear to be associated with anything in the galaxy itself. Notably, neither of these planes match that of Andromeda's disk.

... Structures like the ones here have to be a product of a relatively recent event—an event like a galaxy merger. "These clearly represent debris from one or more accretions that must have occurred relatively recently," the authors write, "in order for the underlying structures to be still coherent."

This, they suggest, may be related to a merger with a relatively large galaxy that occurred about a billion years ago ("recent" means something different in astronomy.)



The orbit of the older group of globular clusters roughly lined up with the orbits of many of Andromeda's satellite galaxies. That makes sense if we assume these globular clusters were stripped from some of the satellites. But it makes less sense when you consider that the satellites shouldn't stay in the same plane for long, as gravitational interactions among themselves and with Andromeda's dark matter halo should skew them out of the plane they started in.

The authors are at a loss to explain this part of their results

Two major accretion epochs in M31 from two distinct populations of globular clusters Nature, 2019
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1597-1

---------------------------

Not Long Ago, the Center of the Milky Way Exploded
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-center-milky.html

A titanic, expanding beam of energy sprang from close to the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way just 3.5 million years ago, sending a cone-shaped burst of radiation through both poles of the Galaxy and out into deep space.

The phenomenon, known as a Seyfert flare, created two enormous 'ionisation cones' that sliced through the Milky Way—beginning with a relatively small diameter close to the black hole, and expanding vastly as they exited the Galaxy.

In Galactic terms, that is astonishingly recent.



A schematic diagram modelling the ionizing radiation field over the South Galactic Hemisphere of the Milky Way, disrupted by the Seyfert flare event.

The blast, the researchers estimate, lasted for perhaps 300,000 years—an extremely short period in galactic terms.

----------------

Could this have impacted life on Earth?
E.L.E.?
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

Sigmetnow

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #183 on: October 06, 2019, 08:44:35 PM »
Jonathan McDowell: "After an 11 year mission the Jason 2 oceanographic altimetry satellite was retired on Oct 1 and will be finally turned off on Oct 10. Its orbit is 1305 x 1317 km x 66 deg (lowered from 1332 x 1344 km in Jul 2017)"
https://mobile.twitter.com/planet4589/status/1180867782638030848

Quote
Like its two predecessors, OSTM/Jason-2 used high-precision ocean altimetry to measure the distance between the satellite and the ocean surface to within a few centimeters. These very accurate observations of variations in sea surface height—also known as  ocean topography—provide information about global sea level, the speed and direction of ocean currents, and heat stored in the ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSTM/Jason-2
People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

philopek

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #184 on: October 06, 2019, 09:26:42 PM »
Building a Galaxy: Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey

Thanks for all the extremely interesting posts of yours.

Beside anything sea-ice related they are, for me at least, the most interesting input found on this forum, well worth a forum of it's own, because after all that's about the greatest possible picture and IMO astronomy and astrophysics should be compulsory subjects in everyone's education plan,
so to give every human being an impression/clue about self-non-importance and what it really is
that matters and moves the world(s).

The part I like most about astrophysics is that fact that there is no way to negotiated with
laws of nature/physics. People cannot discuss facts to death like they do all over the place
and in the process put an endless number of obstacles in any possible path to solutions.

What we end up with are an endless loop of self-destructive/destructive workarounds just to
find confirmed that there is nothing to be negotiated, live with the facts or pay the price.

For the religious among us I would recommend to change "The word of god" into "the laws of nature" and there we go, but without killing each other.

Interestingly to understand that, would keep people from fighting each other because there is nothing to fight because laws of physics are the boundaries non of us can breach.

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #185 on: October 07, 2019, 05:54:18 PM »
Thanks philopek

-----------------------------

Extreme Solar Storms May Be More Frequent Than Previously Thought
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-extreme-solar-storms-frequent-previously.html

New research in AGU's journal Space Weather indicates storms like the Carrington Event are not as rare as scientists thought and could happen every few decades, seriously damaging modern communication and navigation systems around the globe.



Depending on a coronal mass ejection's strength and trajectory, they can significantly distort Earth's magnetic field, causing an intense magnetic storm, global auroras and damaging any technology that relies on electromagnetic waves.

... newly recovered historical documents suggest the Carrington sunspot group had probably launched multiple outbursts from early August to early October, including a preceding solar storm in late August 1859. The researchers estimate this event happened around August 27th, 1859 and sent out separate coronal mass ejections that were strong enough to impact Earth's magnetic field. The August storm may have played a role in making the September Carrington Event so intense.

After reconstructing the storms around the Carrington Event, the researchers compared the solar storm to other storms in 1872, 1909, 1921, and 1989 and found two of them—those in 1872 and 1921—were comparable to this event. The 1989 event caused a serious blackout throughout all of Quebec, Canada. This means events like the Carrington may not be as legendary and elusive as once thought, and scientists need to consider the hazards of such events more seriously than before, according to Hayakawa.

"The Carrington Event was considered to be the worst-case scenario for space weather events against the modern civilization… but if it comes several times a century, we have to reconsider how to prepare against and mitigate that kind of space weather hazard," said Hisashi Hayakawa, lead author of the new study and an astrophysicist at Osaka University in Osaka, Japan and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom.

Hisashi Hayakawa et al. Temporal and Spatial Evolutions of a Large Sunspot Group and Great Auroral Storms around the Carrington Event in 1859, Space Weather (2019)

-------------------------------

A Massive Solar Storm Could Cost the US Economy $40 Billion per Day
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/243255-massive-solar-storm-cost-us-economy-40-billion-per-day

The new report, aptly titled “Space Weather,” seeks to determine the total economic losses to the United States in various scenarios, ranging from an indirect strike to a geomagnetic storm capable of disrupting the power grid across the United States. As we’ve discussed before, the power grid in America is potentially quite vulnerable to this type of disruption, since the grid literally isn’t designed to handle this type of problem and doesn’t contain any safeguards that would protect directly against it. In fact, some of the strategies you use to mitigate against certain terrestrial problems in the power grid are exactly the opposite of what you might want to do if the power grid was hit by a geomagnetic storm.

The US is vulnerable to some of these disruptions because we make heavy use of high-voltage, low-resistance power lines, with transmission voltages in the 200-700 kV range. These types of lines are more vulnerable to geomagnetically induced current, or GIC.



The long restoration periods for damage to EHV transformers arise from the average lead time for a bespoke domestically manufactured transformer of 5 to 12 months and for internationally manufactured transformers, of around 6 to 16 months… Moreover, there can be a protracted lead time before their manufacture and delays in physically installing them in place due to their size and weight, which require specialist transport and permits to move them along their chosen route.

The secondary effect of transformer damage, including delayed failure in the weeks or months following an event… would cause problems in energy-constrained economies, since the transformers most likely to be affected are generator step-up units and the generator capacity will not be available until the transformer is replaced. In addition to having to replace damaged transformers within the region of the extreme GMD, transformers beyond the region might also be damaged. Units in which damage has been initiated will degrade over weeks or months until they fail, well after the GMD event is over. The failure of these transformers in adjacent regions will increase the pressure on manufacturing replacement transformers.

In short, it could take five to 16 months to completely restore electrical service after a major solar flare. The economic consequences of such an event could bring US GDP to a near-standstill. It might be tempting to write off the prospect of another solar flare as just another example of doom-and-gloom projections that aren’t likely to happen, like the idea of a huge meteor striking Earth.

This, I think, would be a mistake. Unlike civilization-destroying meteors, which don’t show up very often, massive solar flares are well represented in the historical record.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016SW001491
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

Tom_Mazanec

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #186 on: October 07, 2019, 06:34:47 PM »
We almost had a solar apocalypse in 2012, vox_mundi:
Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm
Quote
July 23, 2014: If an asteroid big enough to knock modern civilization back to the 18th century appeared out of deep space and buzzed the Earth-Moon system, the near-miss would be instant worldwide headline news.
Two years ago, Earth experienced a close shave just as perilous, but most newspapers didn't mention it. The "impactor" was an extreme solar storm, the most powerful in as much as 150+ years.
"If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces," says Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado.

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #187 on: October 08, 2019, 12:37:40 AM »
Saturn Overtakes Jupiter as Planet With Most Moons
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49962134

Saturn has overtaken Jupiter as the planet with the most moons, according to US researchers.

A team discovered a haul of 20 new moons orbiting the ringed planet, bringing its total to 82; Jupiter, by contrast, has 79 natural satellites.



Each of the newly discovered objects in orbit around Saturn is about 5km (three miles) in diameter; 17 of them orbit the planet "backwards".

This is known as a retrograde direction. The other three moons orbit in a prograde direction - the same direction as Saturn rotates.

Two of the prograde moons take about two years to travel once around the ringed planet. ... The more-distant retrograde moons and one of the prograde moons each take more than three years to complete an orbit.

Scientists think the retrograde and prograde moons are the broken up remnants of at least three larger bodies. These bigger objects were smashed up by collisions, either between distinct moons or with outside objects such as passing asteroids

... The team has initiated a contest to name the moons. They have to be named after giants from Norse, Gallic or Inuit mythology, corresponding to the three different clusters

Rules at: https://carnegiescience.edu/NameSaturnsMoons

Tweet your suggested moon name to @SaturnLunacy and tell us why you picked it. Photos, artwork, and videos are strongly encouraged. Don't forget to include the hashtag #NameSaturnsMoons
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #188 on: October 08, 2019, 12:55:10 AM »
Curiosity Rover Finds an Ancient Oasis on Mars
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-curiosity-rover-ancient-oasis-mars.html

Looking across the entirety of Curiosity's journey, which began in 2012, the science team sees a cycle of wet to dry across long timescales on Mars.

... Given that Earth and Mars were similar in their early days, Rapin speculated that Sutton Island formation in Gale Crater might have resembled saline lakes on South America's Altiplano. Streams and rivers flowing from mountain ranges into this arid, high-altitude plateau lead to closed basins similar to Mars' ancient Gale Crater. Lakes on the Altiplano are heavily influenced by climate in the same way as Gale.



... Up until now, the rover has encountered lots of flat sediment layers that had been gently deposited at the bottom of a lake. Team member Chris Fedo, who specializes in the study of sedimentary layers at the University of Tennessee, noted that Curiosity is currently running across large rock structures that could have formed only in a higher-energy environment such as a windswept area or flowing streams.

Wind or flowing water piles sediment into layers that gradually incline. When they harden into rock, they become large structures similar to "Teal Ridge," which Curiosity investigated this past summer.

"Finding inclined layers represents a major change, where the landscape isn't completely underwater anymore," said Fedo. "We may have left the era of deep lakes behind." ...


This animation demonstrates the salty ponds and streams that scientists think may have been left behind as Gale Crater dried out over time. The bottom of the image is the floor of Gale Crater, with the peak being the side of Mount Sharp.

An interval of high salinity in ancient Gale crater lake on Mars, Nature Geoscience (2019)
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #189 on: October 08, 2019, 10:39:51 PM »
Re: Building a Galaxy


Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Planet Factory Floor

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

Sebastian Jones

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #190 on: October 09, 2019, 07:48:43 AM »
Aaah, Earth Mark 2. I wonder how far back in time they can reset it?

Tom_Mazanec

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #191 on: October 13, 2019, 04:07:55 AM »
Astronomy in a Low-Carbon Future
(A White Paper prepared for the Canadian Long Range Plan 2020)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.01272.pdf

Abstract:
The global climate crisis poses new risks to humanity, and with them, new challenges to the practices of
professional astronomy. Avoiding the more catastrophic consequences of global warming by more than 1.5
degrees requires an immediate reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. According to the 2018 United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel report, this will necessitate a 45% reduction of emissions by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050. Efforts are required at all levels, from the individual to the governmental, and every discipline
must find ways to achieve these goals. This will be especially difficult for astronomy with its significant reliance
on conference and research travel, among other impacts. However, our long-range planning exercises provide
the means to coordinate our response on a variety of levels. We have the opportunity to lead by example, rising
to the challenge rather than reacting to external constraints.
We explore how astronomy can meet the challenge of a changing climate in clear and responsible ways, such
as how we set expectations (for ourselves, our institutions, and our granting agencies) around scientific travel,
the organization of conferences, and the design of our infrastructure. We also emphasize our role as reliable
communicators of scientific information on a problem that is both human and planetary in scale.

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #192 on: October 26, 2019, 06:00:45 PM »
US Army Will Study ‘Metamaterials’ Collected by UFO Study Group
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/10/army-partners-ufo-researchers-study-active-camouflage-and-other-sci-fi-tech/160815/

The Army Combat Capabilities Development Command recently partnered with the TTSA to study a wide variety of different technologies and materials, most of which sound like they were pulled straight from a sci-fi movie. The cooperative research and development agreement is set to last five years and could ultimately help the Army develop new capabilities for its fleet of ground vehicles. The service has pledged to spend $750,000 to examine the futuristic materials and technologies.

... Specifically, the Army wants to explore a handful of futuristic materials and technologies the group has either studied or has in its possession, including inertial mass reduction, quantum communications, beamed energy propulsion, active camouflage and directed photon projection. The Army also plans to study the “mechanical and [electromagnetic] sensitive” metamaterials—a type of synthetic material that can manipulate light and other waves—the group collected “as part of its field operations.”

... these metal samples displayed anti-gravitational or levitational properties when exposed to certain frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.

Army Contract Aggrement: https://www.nextgov.com/media/gbc/docs/pdfs_edit/ng_ttsa_crada.pdf

The Army here is presenting as a simple statement that TTSA has "materiel and technology innovations," not that they might have them.

Halleaux was quick to dismiss any claims that the Army was studying “alien technology.” TTSA may purport the metamaterials and other tech in their possession came from UFOs, but for the Army, those claims are irrelevant, he said. ... “Speculation … as to the origin of materials really to our researchers isn’t what matters,” Halleaux said. “The reason TTSA was taken seriously is the credentials of the people on their team. These are folks that have backgrounds in industry and backgrounds in materials science and defense work. [They’re] serious professionals with respect to backgrounds.

------------------------------


U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center (USAASC) Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology Magazine - Fall 2019

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Scientist Behind The Navy's "UFO Patents" Has Now Filed One For A Compact Fusion Reactor
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30256/scientist-behind-the-navys-ufo-patents-has-now-filed-one-for-a-compact-fusion-reactor

... While Lockheed Martin’s compact fusion reactor designs have garnered quite a bit of media attention and internet buzz in recent years, it appears one of the Skunk Works' major clients is also hard at work in this field. The U.S. Navy has filed a potentially revolutionary patent application for a radical new compact fusion reactor that claims to improve upon the shortcomings of the Skunk Works CFR, and judging from the identity of the reactor’s inventor, it's sure to raise eyebrows in the scientific community.

This latest design is the brainchild of the elusive Salvatore Cezar Pais, the inventor of the Navy’s bizarre and controversial room temperature superconductors, high energy electromagnetic field generators, and sci-fi-sounding propulsion technologies that The War Zone has previously reported on. The patent for Pais’ “Plasma Compression Fusion Device” was applied for on March 22, 2018, and was just published on September 26, 2019.

... It is claimed in the patent application that this plasma compression fusion device is capable of producing power in the gigawatt (1 billion watts) to terawatt (1 trillion watts) range and above with input power only in the kilowatt (1,000 watts) to megawatt (1,000,000 watts) range. By comparison, America's largest nuclear power plant, the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona, generates around 4,000 megawatts (4 gigawatts), and the A1B nuclear reactors designed for the Navy's Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers generate around 700 megawatts. The patent even claims that the device can "possibly lead to ignition plasma burn, that is self-sustained plasma burn without need for external input power."

... The Navy has vouched for some of his designs in the past going so far as to claim these inventions actually exist in an operable form and that they are needed for national security purposes, most notably to keep pace with adversaries like China. But unlike some of Pais’ patents, this application sailed through the United States Patent and Trademark Office without rejection and subsequent appeal.

Curiously, the patent states that “the invention will be discussed in a space, sea, or terrestrial environment” but notes that “this invention can be utilized for any type of application that requires the use of energy generation.” It is unclear what type of application may exist other than space, sea, or land.

... With all this in mind, is the Navy building some sort of incredible craft based on science that remains foreign to the larger scientific community? Did they already do this years ago and are just slowly lifting the veil now? Are they clumsily trying to emulate what their pilots are seeing in the field, but can not yet fully explain? Could these patents just represent gross mismanagement of resources on the Navy's behalf? Or is this all some sort of elaborate disinformation play by the Navy—one that seems to have emerged right in step the rise of major peer-state competition from the likes of Russia and China, and the biggest expansion of advanced aerospace development programs in decades?
« Last Edit: October 26, 2019, 06:27:42 PM by vox_mundi »
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vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #193 on: October 26, 2019, 06:44:45 PM »
New Research on Giant Radio Galaxies Defies Conventional Wisdom
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-giant-radio-galaxies-defies-conventional.html

Conventional wisdom tells us that large objects appear smaller as they get farther from us, but this fundamental law of classical physics is reversed when we observe the distant universe.

Astrophysicists at the University of Kent simulated the development of the biggest objects in the universe to help explain how galaxies and other cosmic bodies were formed. They expected to find that as they simulated objects farther into the distant universe, they would appear smaller, but in fact they found the opposite.

Professor Smith said: "When we look far into the distant universe, we are observing objects way in the past—when they were young. We expected to find that these distant giants would appear as a comparatively small pair of vague lobes. To our surprise, we found that these giants still appear enormous even though they are so far away."

Professor Smith said: "We already know that once you are far enough away, the Universe acts like a magnifying glass and objects start to increase in size in the sky. Because of the distance, the objects we observed are extremely faint, which means we can only see the brightest parts of them, the hot spots. These hot spots occur at the outer edges of the radio galaxy and so they appear to be larger than ever, confounding our initial expectations."

Michael D Smith et al, The morphological classification of distant radio galaxies explored with three-dimensional simulations, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2019)

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Strange 'Methuselah' Star Appears Older Than the Universe
https://www.space.com/how-can-a-star-be-older-than-the-universe.html

For more than 100 years, astronomers have been observing a curious star located some 190 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra. It rapidly journeys across the sky at 800,000 mph (1.3 million kilometers per hour). But more interesting than that, HD 140283 — or Methuselah as it's commonly known — is also one of the universe's oldest known stars.

In 2000, scientists sought to date the star using observations via the European Space Agency's (ESA) Hipparcos satellite, which estimated an age of 16 billion years old. Such a figure was rather mind-blowing and also pretty baffling. As astronomer Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University pointed out, the age of the universe — determined from observations of the cosmic microwave background — is 13.8 billion years old. "It was a serious discrepancy," he said.

... Matthews believes the answers lie in greater cosmological refinement. "I suspect that the observational cosmologists have missed something that creates this paradox, rather than the stellar astrophysicists," he said, pointing to the measurements of the stars being perhaps more accurate. "That's not because the cosmologists are in any way sloppier, but because age determination of the universe is subject to more and arguably trickier observational and theoretical uncertainties than that of stars."
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

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vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #194 on: October 28, 2019, 05:32:54 PM »
ESO Telescope Reveals What Could Be the Smallest Dwarf Planet Yet In the Solar System
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-eso-telescope-reveals-smallest-dwarf.html

Astronomers using ESO's SPHERE instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed that the asteroid Hygiea could be classified as a dwarf planet. The object is the fourth largest in the asteroid belt after Ceres, Vesta and Pallas. For the first time, astronomers have observed Hygiea in sufficiently high resolution to study its surface and determine its shape and size. They found that Hygiea is spherical, potentially taking the crown from Ceres as the smallest dwarf planet in the Solar System.



The team used the SPHERE observations to constrain Hygiea's size, putting its diameter at just over 430 km. Pluto, the most famous of dwarf planets, has a diameter close to 2400 km, while Ceres is close to 950 km in size.

P. Vernazza, et.al. A basin-free spherical shape as an outcome of a giant impact on asteroid Hygiea, Nature Astronomy (2019)
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

Pmt111500

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #195 on: October 29, 2019, 02:51:48 PM »
Even Independet reports of this, so it is pretty much settled, i guess
Hygiea to become a dwarf planet, skipping larger Pallas and Vesta, which have had a more battered past, Hygiea is sufficiently rounded and smooth, I guess. I'd promote also Vesta in this class since it's just malformed currently... Then all sections of asteroid belt would have their own dwarf planet. I've not seen good photos of Pallas, but maybe even it is one.

 https://astronomynow.com/2019/10/29/vlt-images-suggest-fourth-largest-asteroid-may-be-a-dwarf-planet/

Note: thsnk you vox_mundi for the correction below, it turns out Hygiea might have been battered too.
« Last Edit: October 30, 2019, 02:26:32 AM by Pmt111500 »

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #196 on: October 30, 2019, 12:33:50 AM »
Collision Liquified the 4th-Largest Asteroid, Turning It Into a Dwarf Planet
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/collision-liquified-the-4th-largest-astroid-turning-it-into-a-dwarf-planet/

... To figure out how the asteroid family could have formed, the researchers built a model that allowed them to try out different collisions, testing different impactor sizes and angles of impact. After using these collision models to generate debris, the researchers let gravity take over and figure out what the re-formed Hygiea and its remaining debris (which would go on to form the asteroid family) would look like.



Rather than forming a large crater, the collisions that worked instead completely shattered the asteroid. This could be done either by a head-on collision with a 75km object or an off-center collision with a 150km object. The off-center collisions, however, tended not to leave any large bodies in the debris (other than Hygiea itself); since some members of the resulting asteroid family are larger, the researchers conclude that a head-on collision is most likely.

In addition to liberating a debris field, the collision turned the remains of Hygiea into a fluid, which underwent large-scale oscillations for about four hours after the event. This allowed the debris to evenly mix and equilibrate, producing the body's current spherical shape. This was probably enabled by the relatively low density of the material; the researchers estimate that Hygiea is less than twice as dense as water.

This is similar to the density of Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt. The authors suggest that the two formed further out than the "snow line" of water, the point where material was far enough from the Sun for water to remain frozen.
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vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #197 on: October 30, 2019, 05:01:12 PM »
Cosmic Triangles Open a Window to the Origin of Time
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-origin-of-time-bootstrapped-from-fundamental-symmetries-20191029/

Like fossils, astronomical objects are not randomly strewn throughout space. Rather, spatial correlations between the positions of objects such as galaxies tell a detailed story of the ancient past.

... One curious pattern cosmologists have known about for decades is that space is filled with correlated pairs of objects: pairs of hot spots seen in telescopes’ maps of the early universe; pairs of galaxies or of galaxy clusters or superclusters in the universe today; pairs found at all distances apart. You can see these “two-point correlations” by moving a ruler all over a map of the sky. When there’s an object at one end, cosmologists find that this ups the chance that an object also lies at the other end.

The simplest explanation for the correlations traces them to pairs of quantum particles that fluctuated into existence as space exponentially expanded at the start of the Big Bang. Pairs of particles that arose early on subsequently moved the farthest apart, yielding pairs of objects far away from each other in the sky today. Particle pairs that arose later separated less and now form closer-together pairs of objects. Like fossils, the pairwise correlations seen throughout the sky encode the passage of time — in this case, the very beginning of time.



Cosmologists believe that rare quantum fluctuations involving three, four or even more particles should also have occurred during the birth of the universe. These presumably would have yielded more complicated configurations of objects in the sky today: triangular arrangements of galaxies, along with quadrilaterals, pentagons and other shapes.

Theorists have found it challenging even to calculate what the signals would look like — until recently. In the past four years, a small group of researchers has approached the question in a new way. They have found that the form of the correlations follows directly from symmetries and other deep mathematical principles. The most important findings to date were detailed in a paper by Arkani-Hamed and three co-authors that took its final form this summer.

... Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the work, Silverstein and others said, is what it implies about the nature of time. There’s no “time” variable anywhere in the new bootstrapped equation. Yet it predicts cosmological triangles, rectangles and other shapes of all sizes that tell a sensible story of quantum particles arising and evolving at the beginning of time.

Quote
... This suggests that the temporal version of the cosmological origin story may be an illusion. Time can be seen as an “emergent” dimension, a kind of hologram springing from the universe’s spatial correlations, which themselves seem to come from basic symmetries. In short, the approach has the potential to help explain why time began, and why it might end.

As Arkani-Hamed put it, “The thing that we’re bootstrapping is time itself.”

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A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics
https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-discover-geometry-underlying-particle-physics-20130917/



Physicists have discovered a jewel-shaped geometric object that challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental constituents of nature.

The amplituhedron reconceptualized colliding particles — ostensibly temporal events — in terms of timeless geometry. When it was discovered in 2013, many physicists saw yet another reason to think that time must be emergent — a variable that we perceive and that appears in our coarse-grained description of nature, but which is not written into the ultimate laws of reality.

The new geometric version of quantum field theory could facilitate the search for a theory of quantum gravity that would seamlessly connect the large- and small-scale pictures of the universe. Attempts thus far to incorporate gravity into the laws of physics at the quantum scale have run up against nonsensical infinities and deep paradoxes. The amplituhedron, or a similar geometric object, could help by removing two deeply rooted principles of physics: locality and unitarity.

Locality is the notion that particles can interact only from adjoining positions in space and time. And unitarity holds that the probabilities of all possible outcomes of a quantum mechanical interaction must add up to one. The concepts are the central pillars of quantum field theory in its original form, but in certain situations involving gravity, both break down, suggesting neither is a fundamental aspect of nature.

In keeping with this idea, the new geometric approach to particle interactions removes locality and unitarity from its starting assumptions. The amplituhedron is not built out of space-time and probabilities; these properties merely arise as consequences of the jewel’s geometry. The usual picture of space and time, and particles moving around in them, is a construct.

... Recently, a strange duality has been found between string theory and quantum field theory, indicating that the former (which includes gravity) is mathematically equivalent to the latter (which does not) when the two theories describe the same event as if it is taking place in different numbers of dimensions. No one knows quite what to make of this discovery. But the new amplituhedron research suggests space-time, and therefore dimensions, may be illusory anyway.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.2007.pdf
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Sigmetnow

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #198 on: October 31, 2019, 02:05:44 PM »
Did it hit a sand worm? :o

The 'Mole' on NASA's Mars Lander Just Popped Out Of Its Hole (and That's Not Good)
https://www.livescience.com/nasa-mars-lander-mole-pops-out-of-hole.html
People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

vox_mundi

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Re: Astronomical news
« Reply #199 on: November 01, 2019, 02:23:04 PM »
Devon Island: Mars on Earth ...

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late