http://earthsky.org/space/how-hard-did-it-rain-on-mars? Applying knowledge of rain on earth to Mars long ago.
Printable View
http://earthsky.org/space/how-hard-did-it-rain-on-mars? Applying knowledge of rain on earth to Mars long ago.
This one contained a shock! I had always thought the diameter of the universe grew to at least several hundred thousand light years during Cosmic Inflation.
One must adjust. It is hard to wrap one's ears around the scale visually. Yes, the diameter of the universe did increase by a hundred septillion times during inflation. However, starting out smaller than an atom, this only brought its diameter up to almost a thousandth of a meter. The mind must have a sense of how small atoms really are to make this increase seem stunning. The fact that the increase seems to have occurred in about an octillionth of a second (or somewhere in that neighborhood) can add to the effect of just how dramatic it was--to increase your size by a factor of a hundred septillion--but in an octillionth of a second. Now that's moving!
Mind-boggling argument:
https://www.universetoday.com/135922...logy-universe/
Yeah, it is mind boggling. To feel secure, one would have to understand why curvature would produce distortions in the heat signature. I am not pysicist enough to say. I get the geometrical idea--I can see how the surface you are traveling affects how many 90 degree turns are required to arrive back at your starting place. That is the first time I have seen a good explanation of what astronomers are implying when they say the universe is "flat."
Yes, desiresjab, thats where I get to, too, four 90 degree turns take you back to where you started...
Impressive images of the telescope, DW! Filmed in scientific fiction mood!
Everything you have wanted to know about the Taurid asteroids (this time of year):
https://mg.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch...l8mg8drh3#5985
If our solar system originally had two suns, I wonder what star would be the candidate for our sun's binary.
A curious opinion:
Hawking urges Moon landing to 'elevate humanity'
"We are running out of space and the only places to go to are other worlds. It is time to explore other solar systems. Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth," the Cambridge University theoretical physicist explained.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40345048
Dry comment: Having ruined the earth we are ready to go to other parts of the universe.
I don't think we ruined the earth yet, but a correction is needed.
I suspect we will get to the Moon and Mars after a thousand years of robotic exploration and habitat building or terraforming. The interest in sending human beings now before a habitable environment has been built puzzles me. There is something socio-psychological underlying this desire that I find questionable.
I think the urge of sending men to space is similar to the one that made the European navegators discover new continents.
https://www.universetoday.com/136060...lization-mars/
“You would ultimately have upwards of 1,000 or more spaceships waiting in orbit. Hence, the Mars Colonial fleet would depart en masse. It makes sense to load the spaceships into orbit because you have got 2 years to do so, and then you can make frequent use of the booster and the tanker to get really heavy reuse out of those. With the spaceship, you get less reuse because you have to consider how long it is going to last—maybe 30 years, which might be perhaps 12–15 flights of the spaceship at most.”
Cool. Mars is the sweet spot for our New Earth, but so many concerns, especially radiation effects on the human system.
Other possibilities in this wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization.
Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor STATELY
The Moon is already going to have small permanent bases on it from various countries.
A new moon going round a small planet in the Kuiper Belt has recently been discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope: https://www.universetoday.com/136123...oon-2007-or10/
https://www.universetoday.com/136174...-tunnels-mars/
several interesting issues in this post.
I like the idea of that snake robot and the focus on robotics rather than human exploration.
For the earthbound of today, to inspire the explorers of tomorrow... http://lockheedmartin.com/generation...ars-experience
That virtual reality bus is how humans should be experiencing Mars or other planets when robots are improved enough to do this exploration for us. They are our telescopes onto these objects.
One of the things we seem to ignore about Earth is that it has a magnetosphere. It is known that this protects us from radiation and so we need to protect ourselves against radiation in space, but it probably also provides us with our sanity; our hearts resonate with it. I am getting this idea from some research by HearthMath Institute: https://www.heartmath.org/research/featured-research/
Not so good news to those eager to move to Mars:
Mars may be more toxic to life than we thought
"Life on Mars … does it exist? Depending on when you last checked in with news about the Red Planet, you could probably be convinced either way. As we discover more and more about the composition and planetary dynamics of Mars, there has been cause for both elation and disappointment regarding the likelihood that organic life could manage to eke out a living on the planet."
http://www.astronomy.com/news/2017/0...rates-bacteria
I was hoping they would find life on Mars, but maybe this shows that there isn't any life there.
The Event Horizon Telescope has come up in some readings about gravitation: http://eventhorizontelescope.org/blog/eht-update One of their goals is to measure the shadow of a black hole or "grey star" as viewed by modified gravity (MOG). There are two separate predictions about the value of the measurements. This could be a way to tell if there really are black holes (points with infinite mass and event horizons) or if they are grey stars, bodies that have not collapsed to a point but are kept stable by a fifth force.
I think the point about all these experiments and speculations is to get more familiar with space and eventually find an habitable planet for us humans.
Missing DW. He hasn´t been around for some days. And he used to be a "regular".
Tracking the birth of a 'super-earth'
"Kepler has found thousands of planets, but those are all very old, orbiting around stars a few billion years old, like our sun," he explains. "You could say we are looking at the senior citizens of our galaxy, but we don't know how they were born."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0711092823.htm
I haven't seen DW either. I suspect we have hundreds of millions of years before we would need another planet. The problem would be the earth getting too close to the sun and turning into a planet like Venus. We might be able to solve that problem as well with shielding of some sort.
All is possible, Yes/No.
"Astronomers just discovered the smallest star ever
While on the search for exoplanets, the team came across this tiny companion."
http://www.astronomy.com/news/2017/07/tiny-new-star
A star about the size of Jupiter (but 85 times more massive) does seem small. I've heard that Jupiter could have been an early star that burnt out to make our system binary. Here's something about that from a quick search: https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...d-people-call/ Based on that article, apparently not. It is not massive enough to have once been a star.
Fascinating article Yes/No.
"Stellar formation is a hot topic of current research, as astronomers are trying to fathom the still-mysterious details of the birth process."
This is a topic that interests me specially because it shows how much astronomy has developed in the last years. Stellar formation will eventually lead to the discovery of an similar to earth planet. Perhaps it might also help to preview future interplanetary disasters. Anyway the universe of astronomy is expanding fastly.
The Space-Age Origins of 'Planet of the Apes'
"The famous 1968 film that kicked off the movie franchise — "Planet of the Apes," starring Charlton Heston — began with astronauts crashing into an unknown planet. A rebooted series in 2001, starring Mark Wahlberg, starts off with astronauts and apes working together, exploring space in the future."
https://www.space.com/37476-planet-o...e-origins.html
Besides the disaster that might have happened on Mars that you mentioned earlier, Venus got too close to the sun and that triggered the greenhouse gases. I wonder how one could make Venus habitable? The reason to think of that is because Earth will get closer to the Sun than it is now and could suffer the same fate (but that is many years in the future). If we can make Venus habitable, we can keep Earth habitable for longer.
Venus is probably to hot to be habitable. But possibly they will find some new planets and one or several of them might be habitable.
Venus is probably to hot to be habitable. But possibly they will find some new planets and one or several of them might be habitable.
Planet Nine hypothesis supported by new evidence
"Last year, the existence of an unknown planet in our Solar system was announced. However, this hypothesis was subsequently called into question as biases in the observational data were detected. Now Spanish astronomers have used a novel technique to analyse the orbits of the so-called extreme trans-Neptunian objects and, once again, they point out that there is something perturbing them: a planet located at a distance between 300 to 400 times the Earth-Sun separation."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0712110457.htm
Venus is too hot and that is likely the destiny of the Earth in a billion years as it gets closer to the Sun. However, one might be able to cool Venus and heat up Mars and with that knowledge regulate the temperature of the Earth. We have millions of years to figure this out.
The alternative of going to another star system seems even more unlikely than regulating the temperature of these planets near us, however, in a million years, I suspect we will know more about who is out there and perhaps make real contact with them. We may even pay them a visit.
Much earlier I think, Yes/No. Sometimes things go at a fast pace. Who would imagine something like a PC sixty years ago? And now it´s part of our every day life.
Nice to "meet you". I was working on a document inside my inbox and saw your posts on coming out. On Sunday evenings LitNet has become a desert more than ever.
Signals or not signals?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EltmHVQzxqk
Ross 128 is interesting. I hope it is aliens. :) At 11 light years away, I wonder how long it would take for an exploratory mission to reach that star?
"Jill Tarter has been asking the big question, “Are we alone in the universe?” since she was a child."
http://www.astronomy.com/news/2017/0...er-seti-search