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Astronomy/Cosmology/Astrophysics thread - Even though there are no gods I still pray

Shambles said:
Eric Davis: Interstellar Flight - What's it all about?

Gloss over the fact this talk was given at a UFO conference (he is a "proper" scientist and it's kinda on-topic for such things) and you'll find some really rather interesting stuff about the possibilities for interstellar travels. Mostly stuff I'd heard before but brings it more up to date than I've previously seen in talks on this topic before. Still a helluva long way off but some small progress is being made which is encouraging :)
Click to expand...

I gave this a watch last night and thought it was rather good, even if it did seem like the first half was taken up by introducing the guy and all of his work :D
 
After Shambles and others have kindly given it the odd bit of CPR, it has been my intention for a long time to recommence my efforts to contribute towards this thread. As its remit covers, well, the whole of nature and reality I'm not sure where to jump back on board so as I don't think it's been discussed in here as yet here is the beautiful money shot of Pluto taken last summer during the New Horizons flyby.

gq0qEks.jpg


Amazing, I have visualised what this world could possibly be like since the age of 5 or 6 so to finally see what a beautiful and varied environment it is was a fantastic revelation.
 
Despite the misgivings expressed about the film in this forum, the serious lack of weed I have had to put up with over the weekend (about half a gram making the last fortnight one of the few periods on my life where I have used next to no dugs whatsoever (prescribed methadone non withstanding) means I have finally got around to reading

t3TgLd6.jpg


Which, especially given the relatively recent results from the LIGO Interferometer, makes a lot of what was was still 'reasonable speculation' when the film was released now observed, real cosmological phenomena.

I've also read

aBs3lCB.jpg


over the last week, a fantastic book that deals with the history of Mercury's eccentric orbit and provides a slightly alternative look at how Einstein's model of General Relativity developed and accounted for this, without the requirement of the fictional titular inner planet that the book discusses.

I have an half oz. of ganja due on Thursday........
 
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That second one sounds good, Stee. I know the basics of the Vulcan story but nothing more. Likes me a bit of science history.

In more recent news, just saw this posted on the BBC news site...

Proxima Centauri: Nearest Earth-sized world discovered

The nearest habitable world beyond our Solar System might be right on our doorstep - astronomically speaking. Scientists say their investigations of the closest star, Proxima Centauri, show it to have an Earth-sized planet orbiting about it. What is more, this rocky globe is moving in a zone that would make liquid water on its surface a possibility. Proxima is 40 trillion km away and would take a spacecraft using current technology thousands of years to reach.

Nonetheless, the discovery of a planet potentially favourable to life in our cosmic neighbourhood is likely to fire the imagination. "For sure, to go there right now is science fiction, but people are thinking about it and it's no longer just an academic exercise to imagine we could send a probe there one day," said Guillem Anglada-Escudé whose "Pale Red Dot" team reports the existence of the new world in the journal Nature.

(linky to rest of article)
(and another linky to pdf file of the nature paper)
Click to expand...

That's more or less feasible to reach (unmanned) using current or just-over-the-horizon technologies. Earth-sized and in the Habitable Zone around Proxima Centauri is about as good as it gets for tempting targets (well, as long as a suitable atmosphere can be confirmed). Surely has to be worth a flying visit. Long-shot to happen in my lifetime but a boy can hope :D
 
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Well, it's like one of the only stars that we may, just may, as a species, actually get to so the idea of the system having a potentially habitable world sounds far too wonderfully convenient. Kepler seems to be able to come up with tons of data on the exo planets it observes so I can't see why It would take too long to confirm the specifics of our new home. Lets hope it has an ocean made of liquid LSD and an MDMA crystal mountain range.
 
House music and cosmology (ok this is astrophysics)? If youre a girl Id marry you. Maybe even if a guy. :)
 
steewith2ees said:
Well, it's like one of the only stars that we may, just may, as a species, actually get to so the idea of the system having a potentially habitable world sounds far too wonderfully convenient. Kepler seems to be able to come up with tons of data on the exo planets it observes so I can't see why It would take too long to confirm the specifics of our new home. Lets hope it has an ocean made of liquid LSD and an MDMA crystal mountain range.
Click to expand...

Funny you should say that, Stee...

Hawking backs interstellar travel project

Stephen Hawking is backing a project to send tiny spacecraft to another star system within a generation. They would travel trillions of miles; far further than any previous craft. A $100m (£70m) research programme to develop the computer chip-sized "starships" was launched by the billionaire Yuri Milner, supported by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Interstellar travel has long been a dream for many, but significant technological hurdles remain. But Prof Hawking told BBC News that fantasy could be realised sooner than we might think.

(linky to rest of article)
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Seems to be some promise in the various ideas knocking about for unmanned - and mostly teensy-weensy - long-distance space exploration vehicles. These particular ones are basically mini-solarsail-powered swarms which could be a good start towards building the technology to produce lasers powerful enough to make more substantial solarsailors a viable proposition. Even with their presumably highly optimistic estimate of 30y travel time it's still unlikely I'd get to see the first images taken from within an extra-solar system but it would be great just to see any meaningful progress made towards interstellar travel.
 
As long as they get the cryogenics sorted quicktime Sham I can't see why there wouldn't be a spare couple of cryotubes on board that we could hop in before we kark it, and just get woken up in time to take a few snaps of the system before ones clogs pops. I'd want to be aboard, even if it means a ticket in Peter Weyland class as if they manage to get anywhere near a relativistic speed it will be pointless to wait behind anyway as due to the massive amount of time dilation we would be dust before the crew even got a chance to start sending the 4.5 year travel time photos back.
 
steewith2ees said:
After Shambles and others have kindly given it the odd bit of CPR, it has been my intention for a long time to recommence my efforts to contribute towards this thread. As its remit covers, well, the whole of nature and reality I'm not sure where to jump back on board so as I don't think it's been discussed in here as yet here is the beautiful money shot of Pluto taken last summer during the New Horizons flyby.

gq0qEks.jpg


Amazing, I have visualised what this world could possibly be like since the age of 5 or 6 so to finally see what a beautiful and varied environment it is was a fantastic revelation.
Click to expand...

Aside from the pretty pic there wasn't really much to say about the Pluto flyby at the time but now a fair chunk of the data has been analysed (although there's still years left to go) there's a couple of interesting talks about it now. Probably the best two I've seen so far have been...

Report from the Planetary Frontier: The Latest from New Horizons at Pluto

Charon: Pluto's Fascinating Moon

Both very geology-heavy as you'd expect and a good start at putting some factual flesh on the pictorially pretty bones.

Also, I'll take your Pluto and raise you a (rather high resolution so NSFW'd for size) Charon...

NSFW:
Charon-Neutral-Bright-Release.jpg
 
That's gorgeous Sham. I know the data is only really just starting to come through but I was absolutely fascinated just by the initial observations made during the fly by - the spectacular and enormous mountain range, made out of ice as hard as steel, grabbed my imagination straight away, regardless of any immediate lack of a geological explanation the mental image alone, was, well, fucking mental from an aesthetic desirability if nothing else.

But even that early stage, which while light on science, provided these pictures - and cheers for posting the Charon image as they really both have to be seen in such exquisite detail to provide at least some context to 2 really fantastic observations that were made by the spacecraft on the approach to and arrival at the system on its way in to perform the fly by -

1: the fact that Charon was not a satellite of Pluto but an entirely separate dwarf planet in it's own right, as it became clear during the approach by New Horizons that the barycentre of both bodies lay well above the surface of Pluto (the calculations for which can be found here: http://mathscinotes.com/2015/06/barycenter-of-pluto-and-charon/, which should eventually define them as a double system as soon as the IAU gets around to classifying the relatively new concept of 'dwarf planets' as a way as such planetoids behaving as such.

2: The fascinating red material that is so visible on both Pluto and Charon (which has a good chance of being some sort of molecular organic slush ) was quickly suggested as being exchanged from the surface of Pluto to Charon by some mechanism (or vice versa as your links Sham, which I will be attending to within the next 6 hours, will be the first serious material I have looked at regarding the flight since the encounter and will hopefully shed some light on this amazing process), across the near 20,000 km of raw, bona - fide space.

Blue_hazes_over_backlit_Pluto.jpg



To finish off the Pluto / Charon gallery here is one of the beautiful images New Horizons captured as it left the system, with the planets atmosphere clearly visible through the backlight.
 
I really love that photo, stee. We got some great images from New Dawn and New Horizons. It's promising that we're still exploring deep space with the limited budgets that are available. I'm really looking forward to some good data from Juno and more from New Horizons!

Some of the technology being developed by private space companies is impressive but it is marred by failures like the recent launchpad explosion of Space X. The space tourism aspect doesn't really excite me too much :\

Did anybody see that story today about the fossils which suggest life may have emerged ~200m years earlier than previously thought? Perhaps life isn't too fussy after all :)
 
Watched this last night = really good lecture on possible variations on physical constants, framed of course around the notion that the big one - C - may vary as the fundamental models of physics change. It's as much a philosophical topic as anything else but this factor is acknowledged after which the lecture is presented from a physics perspective.

Prof. João Magueijo (Imperial College London) - 'Faster than the Speed of Light - Could the laws of physics change?' from the Perimeter Institute in Canada...

 
I've got that on my 'watch later' list, stee.

It's something I think about a lot. Documentaries tend to be made for the laymen, like myself, so they gloss over the fact that there is any debate about the constancy of the speed of light.

I seem to remember something about an experiment that demonstrated that by manipulating the structure of light pulses you could reduce their speed (but not increase it, otherwise we'd all have heard about it) in a vacuum.
 
I'm no more than a layman when it comes to this stuff, I started with Hawking's A Brief History Of Time and Jim Al-Khalili's Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed and have just gone deeper piece by piece, mainly through web hosted lectures and other books.

It's still driven though by a basic love of practical astronomy and observations, it's just that I have got to the age where I can deal with my own mortality and irrelevance in the overwhelming face of nature and start thinking about these things without getting brain zaps whenever I contemplate the mechanics of existence, or when I stare into the sky - acknowledging that all I see, however beautiful, are simply old photographs of varying age, whether it's the moon (about 1.8 seconds old) or the light horizon on the edge of the observable universe (13 - 14 billion years or so).
 
I watched it last night and thought it was good. My only gripe is that the camera never showed the projector so I couldn't see the diagrams he was referring to.

I also kept thinking he was saying 'Bearing Sea' instead of 'varying C' :D
 
The Orionid Meteor Shower

Lets hope for clear skies. I'm certain this was part of the same meteor shower I saw a few years ago that gave me the best meteor I've ever seen travel across the sky. It was magnificent!

Looking forward to catching a glimpse of a few.
 
Just don't go staring at meteor showers while you've got a grow on ;) Or at least, keep a bucket or two of sea water handy .....
 
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