DShomshak Posted September 21, 2016 Report Share Posted September 21, 2016 ESA will use lasers to study wind But someone seems unable to spell "Aeolus." Pfft. It's only a triple vowel in Greek. Dean Shomshak Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DShomshak Posted September 21, 2016 Report Share Posted September 21, 2016 Today, the NPR program All Things Considered had a brief story about Lyman-Alpha Blobs. Yes, that's an actual astronomical term: these clouds of gas, bigger than galaxies, glow ultraviolet in a Lyman-Alpha spectrum, and they are blobs. Very, very big blobs -- bigger than galaxies. Some astronomers figured out what makes one of these blobs glow. It contains a pair of galaxies undergoing crazy intense bursts of star formation. The radiation from all these hot young stars makes the gas of the blob glow, while dust in the galaxies and the surrounding gas makes the galaxies themselves harder to see. The astronomer interviewed compared the effect to a streetlight in a fog. You can see the wide area of light but the light itself hardly stands out. Dean Shomshak Old Man, pinecone and Netzilla 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkdguy Posted September 22, 2016 Author Report Share Posted September 22, 2016 VR Tour of Mars Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkdguy Posted September 22, 2016 Author Report Share Posted September 22, 2016 Please help me I'm falling... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted September 22, 2016 Report Share Posted September 22, 2016 Free fallin', I'm-a free fallin' .. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted September 22, 2016 Report Share Posted September 22, 2016 I got it! I got it! *CLANG* Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted September 22, 2016 Report Share Posted September 22, 2016 Oh great. Now I've got it too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Badger Posted September 25, 2016 Report Share Posted September 25, 2016 A piece of the Chineses Space Station Tiangong ("Heavily Palace") 2 was launched on 15th of September sucessfully. However, it looks like the Heaven will fall on our heads in the near future. China apparently lost control over Tiangong 1: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-space-station-tiangong-1-crash-tiangong-1-out-of-control-a7319916.html Lost control? Or did they? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Badger Posted September 25, 2016 Report Share Posted September 25, 2016 Free fallin', I'm-a free fallin' .. Sometimes when the song pops up I hear: Free ballin' L. Marcus and tkdguy 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted September 25, 2016 Report Share Posted September 25, 2016 Commando!! tkdguy 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DShomshak Posted September 29, 2016 Report Share Posted September 29, 2016 This month's Scientific American has a brief article on the latest failure of an experiment to detect Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, currently the theorists' favorite candidate for Dark Matter. The simplest, most straightforward attempts to extend the Standard Model of physics predict the Big Bang should have produced scads of WIMPs, which should then condense in clouds that have just the results observed for Dark Matter. Except, the experiments that should detect these hypothesized WIMPs. don't. Theorists are flummoxed. Numerous explanations are proposed. There's also a feature article on the subsurface ocean of Enceladus. It's been mapped through its affect on Enceladus' gravitational field. Moreover, the jets of water vapor from Enceladus' south pole have been fingered as the source of silica nanoparticles collected by one of the Cassini probe's instruments. These nanoparticles can only be made by hydrothermal vents, like those on Earth, but jetting into an ocean a little more alkaline and a little less salty than our own. Still, if you transplanted a hydrothermal vent ecosystem from Earth to Enceladus, it could survive. It's a really clever bit of detective work. Dean Shomshak Christopher and pinecone 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Posted September 30, 2016 Report Share Posted September 30, 2016 It looks like Rosette hit Turchy: https://twitter.com/esa_rosetta?lang=en xkcd had this to say on the ocassion:http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/rosetta.pnghttp://xkcd.com/1740/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted October 6, 2016 Report Share Posted October 6, 2016 Proxima b could be a waterworld Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted October 6, 2016 Report Share Posted October 6, 2016 Planet orbiting an A star found by timing the star's pulsations tkdguy 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted October 6, 2016 Report Share Posted October 6, 2016 Proxima b could be a waterworldI gave a talk on Proxima Cen b yesterday starting at 5:00. I finished my prep for that at about 1:00. I found the paper about its possible climate evolution a bit after 2:00. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted October 6, 2016 Report Share Posted October 6, 2016 And ... the Starshot proposal to Proxima Cen b has some problems Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Posted October 7, 2016 Report Share Posted October 7, 2016 And ... the Starshot proposal to Proxima Cen b has some problems Basically if you plow through the interstellar medium at 20% the speed of light, you might end up getting "Road-rash" without there being any road involved. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zeropoint Posted October 9, 2016 Report Share Posted October 9, 2016 And this provides an excuse to make your spaceships streamlined and cool-looking. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Posted October 9, 2016 Report Share Posted October 9, 2016 And this provides an excuse to make your spaceships streamlined and cool-looking. At least until our drive and material technology evolves. Then we can finally build those blocky "Standard Human Spaceships"... wait, was the development not supposed to the the other way? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NuSoardGraphite Posted October 14, 2016 Report Share Posted October 14, 2016 Not sure if ths has been posted yet. We were wrong about the number of galaxies. http://gizmodo.com/we-were-very-wrong-about-the-number-of-galaxies-in-the-1787750693?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow Nolgroth and tkdguy 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted October 14, 2016 Report Share Posted October 14, 2016 Dammit now I have to start over! One... two... three... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
megaplayboy Posted October 14, 2016 Report Share Posted October 14, 2016 700 sextillion stars. That's...700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. I wonder what this does to the idea of "dark matter" and "dark energy". I mean, we just "found" the missing mass! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NuSoardGraphite Posted October 14, 2016 Report Share Posted October 14, 2016 700 sextillion stars. That's...700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. I wonder what this does to the idea of "dark matter" and "dark energy". I mean, we just "found" the missing mass! Essentially yes. They always said that 90% of the mass was "dark". If there are 10-20 times the number of galaxies, then there's the answer. So Dark Matter is a non starter, but that still doesnt solve the "dark energy" delimma Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Posted October 14, 2016 Report Share Posted October 14, 2016 Essentially yes. They always said that 90% of the mass was "dark". If there are 10-20 times the number of galaxies, then there's the answer. So Dark Matter is a non starter, but that still doesnt solve the "dark energy" delimma Well, if the stuff was not visible it kind of was dark. It appears only ALMA and Hubble together can see it all. http://gizmodo.com/new-deep-space-images-reveal-a-new-type-of-galaxy-1786924442 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
megaplayboy Posted October 14, 2016 Report Share Posted October 14, 2016 Maybe the hidden galaxies were just blocking us on social media. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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