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Space: The Final Frontier

I

iidesuyo

Member
The first picture from space. It was taken in 1946 by a V2 rocket that the US had captured from Nazi Germany.

First_photo_from_space.jpg


Must have been a mind blowing moment to see this for the first time.
 
T

The Librarian

Banned
Stinkles said:
the weirdest thing is that statistically not one pair of stars will collide. They'll all miss each other by light years. Gravity will start merging and repositioning everything with crazy new orbits, but galaxies are almost entirely empty.
Click to expand...

What's as amazing to me is that, given how big the universe is, galaxies still manage to collide with each other.
 
S

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
Dax01 said:
What's as amazing to me is that, given how big the universe is, galaxies still manage to collide with each other.
Click to expand...

That actually makes sense tho - if you look at the "web" structure of the universe - which is estimated to look like this:


[
PXfF5lG.jpg


You see that while there's loads of "empty space" - the strands of normal matter (superclusters of galaxies) are quite dense in their distribution.

I mean the distances and timescales are stupefying, but it makes more sense than an evenly distributed set of Galaxies (that are largely all moving away from each other as space itself expands).
 
T

The Librarian

Banned
Stinkles said:
That actually makes sense tho - if you look at the "web" structure of the universe - which is estimated to look like this:


[
PXfF5lG.jpg


You see that while there's loads of "empty space" - the strands of normal matter (superclusters of galaxies) are quite dense in their distribution.

I mean the distances and timescales are stupefying, but it makes more sense than an evenly distributed set of Galaxies (that are largely all moving away from each other as space itself expands).
Click to expand...
Oh yeah. I've seen that before. The Millenium Simulation it's called? Looks like neurons in a brain.
 
Melchiah

Melchiah

Member
http://www.nature.com/news/did-a-hyper-black-hole-spawn-the-universe-1.13743
Did a hyper-black hole spawn the Universe?
Big Bang was mirage from collapsing higher-dimensional star, theorists propose.

LmzeFGQ.jpg

The event horizon of a black hole — the point of no return for anything that falls in — is a spherical surface. In a higher-dimensional universe, a black hole could have a three-dimensional event horizon, which could spawn a whole new universe as it forms. ARTIST'S IMPRESSION BY VICTOR DE SCHWANBERG/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

It could be time to bid the Big Bang bye-bye. Cosmologists have speculated that the Universe formed from the debris ejected when a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole — a scenario that would help to explain why the cosmos seems to be so uniform in all directions.

The standard Big Bang model tells us that the Universe exploded out of an infinitely dense point, or singularity. But nobody knows what would have triggered this outburst: the known laws of physics cannot tell us what happened at that moment.

“For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity,” says Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.

It is also difficult to explain how a violent Big Bang would have left behind a Universe that has an almost completely uniform temperature, because there does not seem to have been enough time since the birth of the cosmos for it to have reached temperature equilibrium.

To most cosmologists, the most plausible explanation for that uniformity is that, soon after the beginning of time, some unknown form of energy made the young Universe inflate at a rate that was faster than the speed of light. That way, a small patch with roughly uniform temperature would have stretched into the vast cosmos we see today. But Afshordi notes that “the Big Bang was so chaotic, it’s not clear there would have been even a small homogenous patch for inflation to start working on”.

On the brane

In a paper posted last week on the arXiv preprint server1, Afshordi and his colleagues turn their attention to a proposal2 made in 2000 by a team including Gia Dvali, a physicist now at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany. In that model, our three-dimensional (3D) Universe is a membrane, or brane, that floats through a ‘bulk universe’ that has four spatial dimensions.

Ashfordi's team realized that if the bulk universe contained its own four-dimensional (4D) stars, some of them could collapse, forming 4D black holes in the same way that massive stars in our Universe do: they explode as supernovae, violently ejecting their outer layers, while their inner layers collapse into a black hole.

In our Universe, a black hole is bounded by a spherical surface called an event horizon. Whereas in ordinary three-dimensional space it takes a two-dimensional object (a surface) to create a boundary inside a black hole, in the bulk universe the event horizon of a 4D black hole would be a 3D object — a shape called a hypersphere. When Afshordi’s team modelled the death of a 4D star, they found that the ejected material would form a 3D brane surrounding that 3D event horizon, and slowly expand.

The authors postulate that the 3D Universe we live in might be just such a brane — and that we detect the brane’s growth as cosmic expansion. “Astronomers measured that expansion and extrapolated back that the Universe must have begun with a Big Bang — but that is just a mirage,” says Afshordi.

...
Click to expand...

More in the link.
 
F

fallout

Member
I thought today's APOD was worth sharing (click for higher res). It's really neat to me that we're so early-on in the area of stellar cartography.



The Local Fluff
Illustration Credit: NASA, Goddard, Adler, U. Chicago, Wesleyan

Explanation: The stars are not alone. In the disk of our Milky Way Galaxy about 10 percent of visible matter is in the form of gas, called the interstellar medium (ISM). The ISM is not uniform, and shows patchiness even near our Sun. It can be quite difficult to detect the local ISM because it is so tenuous and emits so little light. This mostly hydrogen gas, however, absorbs some very specific colors that can be detected in the light of the nearest stars. A working map of the local ISM within 20 light-years, based on ongoing observations and recent particle detections from the Earth-orbiting Interstellar Boundary Exporer satellite (IBEX), is shown above. These observations indicate that our Sun is moving through a Local Interstellar Cloud as this cloud flows outwards from the Scorpius-Centaurus Association star forming region. Our Sun may exit the Local Cloud, also called the Local Fluff, during the next 10,000 years. Much remains unknown about the local ISM, including details of its distribution, its origin, and how it affects the Sun and the Earth. Unexpectedly, recent IBEX spacecraft measurements indicate that the direction from which neutral interstellar particles flow through our Solar System is changing.​

Source: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130924.html
 
N

Nokterian

Member
So today i went to utrecht with my dad to see Human Adventure showing replica's but also real stuff from NASA and from russia in the space race. It's mindblowing what they made in the 50/60's. You get a ipod with a hearing tour guide for every part you are showing numbers on locations there it works really well, about the founding fathers to pioneers in space etc. I was suprised how small Gemini was my god.

For those hours at least 3 to 4 hours we where there it was absoluty fascinating. Even from the early stories from Jules Verne to Da Vinci with his inventions.

I cannot believe that money have stopped all of this. And that no one is making dreams a reality. All of that money only funding army's instead of science. Like Kennedy said do not look back to the past look to the future look beyond that. I think it's still a shame that they didn't push any further. Still blows my mind that 2 people have landed on the moon with technology what now mostly is normal these days but a lot of was build by NASA and even Russia.
 
G

Goodacre0081

Member
Saturn's hexagon recreated in the laboratory

Cassini's VIMS spectrometer of saturns northern pole
PIA09187_th.gif


They set up a cylindrical, rotatable tank 10 centimeters deep and 60 centimeters wide. The tank had a lid and base that were split into concentric sections. They could rotate the inner circle of the lid and floor of the tank at a different rate than they rotated the outer circle of the tank and floor, setting up a gradient in the flow speed of the liquid at the joint between the inner and outer circles. Depending on the relative speeds of the two disks, different things happened. At low relative speeds, there was nothing particularly unusual in the flow, just rotation of the water in the tank. But as the gradient between the two rotating sections was increased, wavelike instabilities started forming at the boundary between the two disks. Depending on conditions, the waves evolved chaotically or sometimes quite stably; there might be as few as two or as many as eight waves encircling the axis of rotation. But for a reasonably wide range of experimental parameters, they produced a wavenumber of 6: a hexagon.
Click to expand...
Fig10_dyecolor300dpi_med.jpg
Click to expand...

here's a wave number of 3
wavenumber3_med.jpg
Click to expand...
 
Y

y2dvd

Member
maxcer0081 said:
Two billion planets in our galaxy may be suitable for life
Click to expand...

Wow, 1 of every 5 sun-like stars may host an Earth-like planet. Our galaxy alone may contain 2 billion of such planets?

Here's a link to how many stars there are in the universe.
http://www.universetoday.com/102630/
Astronomers estimate that the Milky Way contains up to 400 billion stars of various sizes and brightness.
Click to expand...
And so, if you multiply the number of stars in our galaxy by the number of galaxies in the Universe, you get approximately 10[to the 24th power] stars. That’s a 1 followed by twenty-four zeros.
That’s a septillion stars.
But there could be more than that.
Click to expand...

I gotta like the odds that there are life out there in other planets.
 
O

Orbis

Member
Got a new telescope the other day (well, my first actually). A Nexstar 6SE which I've had the chance to have a play around with for a couple of nights now. This evening I managed to produce the following shot of Jupiter:
Jupiter%2009-11-2013.png

Basically I pointed my point-and-shoot digital camera through the eyepiece, recorded about 40 seconds of usable video, picked out the best set of frames and used RegiStax to align, select and stack them into one image which was then slightly adjusted to reduce noise and enhance those lovely colour bands.

I'm really happy with the outcome considering I was literally holding this camera in my hands, wobbling all over the place. The software does a real good job of it.

Also tonight I took a single-shot as a photo, which lacks any detail on the planet, but you can see the moons Europa, Io and Ganymede (from left to right below):
P1020258_2.jpg

Again, excuse the poor quality but it's not easy and totally not how you're supposed to do astrophotography.

The night before I was using a blue filter, which helped with getting more detail with my eyes, but the camera wasn't as good with this. Also had to do some colour adjustment obviously but I didn't realise how bad that was until looking at it in true-colour today. Better than the deep blue it was originally though:

Jupiter%20%28Final%29%2007-11-2013.png

The dark spot there is the shadow of a moon (Ganymede I believe).
 
F

fallout

Member
Nice work, Orbis!

I acquired a used C8 and CG-5 mount this summer. I've been meaning to hook up a webcam to do some planetary with.
 
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