Space and Astronomy Megathread (MERGED) - Part 1

DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs · May 21, 2014

Pluto's Five Moons Explained In One Cool Video

[YT]pOI2Pv1iWy4[/YT]

Although Pluto has been downgraded to a "dwarf planet," it boasts more moons than Mercury, Earth, Venus and Mars combined. (Take that, smug inner planets.) Last year, its two newly discovered moons were named Kereberos and Styx which, like their companions, take their monikers from the underworld of ancient mythology.

As this video by Kurzgesagt illustrates, the satellites don't orbit Pluto itself instead, they move around a center of mass outside of the planet.
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https://www.youtube.com/user/Kurzgesagt

Cool stuff

DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs · May 23, 2014

NASA Has Discovered the Darkest Shadows in the Galaxy

NASA and the University of Zurich have announced the discovery of what are believed to be the darkest spots in the galaxy outside of a black hole's event horizon.

These shadows, formed by clumps of extremely dense gas clouds, were first observed using the Spitzer Space Telescope. They are part of a much larger cloud of gas and elemental particles that will eventually condense into O-type stars, which are among the brightest and biggest in the observable universe.

As a NASA press release points out:

The dusty cloud, the results suggest, will likely evolve into one of the most massive young clusters of stars in our galaxy. The densest clumps will blossom into the cluster's biggest, most powerful stars, called O-type stars, the formation of which has long puzzled scientists. These hulking stars have major impacts on their local stellar environments while also helping to create the heavy elements needed for life.

And the more we uncover regarding how these galactic factories form, we inch ever closer to answering the fundamental question of how the Milky Way came to beand ourselves along with it.
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http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/spitzer/pia18010/#.U34bJBVX-uZ

That is so cool

childeroland · May 28, 2014

Is Our Galaxy's Monster Black Hole Actually a Wormhole?

Although we have a pretty good idea that our galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its core, there could be another — albeit rather exotic — explanation for our observations of Sagittarius A*. It might be a wormhole.

This is according to two researchers who explore the possibility in a new paper submitted to the arXiv pre-print service. Although their work is purely theoretical, Zilong Li and Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in Shanghai have identified a specific emission signature surrounding their hypothetical wormhole, a signature that may be detected by a sophisticated instrument that will soon be attached to one of the world’s most powerful telescopes.

Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A*) is a region in the Milky Way’s core that generates powerful radio waves and astronomers have long suspected that it is the location of a black hole approximately 4 million times the mass of our sun. It wasn’t until astronomers were able to track stars orbiting close to the suspected black hole’s event horizon, however, that the supermassive black hole was confirmed to be there.
But supermassive black holes are a conundrum.

Now we know what signature our supermassive black hole generates, astronomers have discovered that the majority of other galaxies also possess supermassive black holes in their cores. Even when looking into the furthest cosmological distances at the youngest known galaxies, they also appear to host these black hole behemoths.
For a black hole to gain so much mass, it’s logical to think they need lots of time to pile on the mass — eating interstellar gas, stars and other galactic material. But to explain the earliest supermassive black holes in the youngest galaxies, there had to be some as-yet to be understood rapid growth mechanism.

According to Li and Bambi, however, to explain our observations of Sgr A* and other galaxies’ cores, a primordial consequence of Einstein’s general theory of relativity may be called into play instead, thereby sidestepping the puzzle of how supermassive black holes grew so big so quickly.

“While of exotic nature, at least some kinds of primordial WHs (wormholes) can be viable candidates to explain the supermassive objects at the center of galaxies,” they write. “These objects have no solid surface, and therefore they may mimic the presence of an event horizon. They would have been produced in the early Universe and grown during inflation, so they could explain their presence even at very high redshift.”

High redshift galaxies are the youngest galaxies we can observe; where the galactic light has traveled billions of light-years, with frequencies shifted to the reddest part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The type of wormhole that can mimic a black hole could only have been formed during the Big Bang, exerting a mass millions of times our sun’s mass, possibly explaining why the earliest galaxies appear to have supermassive black holes in their cores; they may not be black holes at all, they could in fact be gargantuan wormholes, linking disparate regions of space and time. (Though whether they can be traversed would likely remain a mystery.)

This may sound like some theoretical fun and games bordering on science fiction, but Li and Bambi have identified a powerful new instrument that could be used to differentiate emissions from space plasma surrounding the Sgr A* black hole or hypothetical wormhole.

GRAVITY will soon be installed at the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert in Chile and will be used to observe the galactic center with unprecedented precision. The researchers hope to analyze emission data from energized gases (or plasma) that could be found around the object inside Sgr A*. Should the object in fact be a wormhole, that plasma will generate a very different signature as the hypothetical wormhole will be physically smaller than a supermassive black hole.

By modeling a hot blob of plasma trapped in the warped spacetime surrounding a black hole and a wormhole, Li and Bambi noticed two very different emission signatures that both cases will generate. A wormhole would generate a “very narrow emission line,” whereas a black hole would have spectra that is “broad and skewed as a result of special and general relativistic effects,” they write.

It is rare that such exotic theories could be supported or disproved by an instrument that will be commissioned within a couple of years, but it will be very exciting to see whether the plasma emissions around the object in Sgr A* are more black hole-like or wormhole-like. And although the chances are slim, if the latter is detected, it could re-write our understanding of the Cosmos.

Source: arXiv via arXiv blog
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DA_Champion · May 28, 2014

I have a PhD in Astronomy if anyone has any questions.

Mike_D202 · May 28, 2014

Now THAT would be interesting.

Guts · May 28, 2014

Physicists discover clearest evidence yet that the Universe is a hologram

A team of physicists have provided what has been described by the journal Nature as the clearest evidence yet that our universe is a hologram.

The new research could help reconcile one of modern physics most enduring problems : the apparent inconsistencies between the different models of the universe as explained by quantum physics and Einsteins theory of gravity.

The two new scientific papers are the culmination of years work led by Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan, and deal with hypothetical calculations of the energies of black holes in different universes.

The idea of the universe existing as a hologram doesnt refer to a Matrix-like illusion, but the theory that the three dimensions we perceive are actually justpainted onto the cosmological horizon the boundary of the known universe.

If this sounds paradoxical, try to imagine a holographic picture that changes as you move it. Although the picture is two dimensional, observing it from different locations creates the illusion that it is 3D.

This model of the universe helps explain some inconsistencies between general relativity (Einsteins theory) and quantum physics. Although Einsteins work underpins much of modern physics, at certain extremes (such as in the middle of a black hole) the principles he outlined break down and the laws of quantum physics take over.

The traditional method of reconciling these two models has come from the 1997 work of theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena, whose ideas built upon string theory. This is one of the most well respected theories of everything (Stephen Hawking is a fan) and it posits that one-dimensional vibrating objects known as strings are the elementary particles of the universe.

Maldacena has welcomed the new research by Hyakutake and his team, telling the journal Nature that the findings are an interesting way to test many ideas in quantum gravity and string theory.

Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist regarded as one of the fathers of string theory, added that the work by the Japanese team numerically confirmed, perhaps for the first time, something we were fairly sure had to be true, but was still a conjecture.
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http://themindunleashed.org/2014/05/physicists-discover-clearest-evidence-yet-universe-hologram-2.html

Marvolo · May 28, 2014

tacit-ronin- said: ↑

Physicists discover clearest evidence yet that the Universe is a hologram

http://themindunleashed.org/2014/05/physicists-discover-clearest-evidence-yet-universe-hologram-2.html
Click to expand...

Ive never understood what this means or implies. What does "three dimensions painted on the horizon" actually mean?

DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs · Jun 3, 2014

Astronomers Discover New "Mega-Earth" In Distant Constellation

At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society today, a team of astronomers announced that they'd discovered a new planeta rocky world weighing 17 times the size of Earth that they've dubbed "mega-Earth."

The discovery comes as a pleasant surprise to space enthusiasts, as it was previously believed that planets so big couldn't form because they would pull in hydrogen gas as they grew and turn into Jupiter-like gas giants. The mega-Earth is all solids.

In a release that was published in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, it was announced that the planet was named Kepler-10c:

The newfound mega-Earth, Kepler-10c, circles a sunlike star once every 45 days. It is located about 560 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco. The system also hosts a 3-Earth-mass "lava world," Kepler-10b, in a remarkably fast, 20-hour orbit.
The largest comparable planets had been called "super-Earths" and though the new mega-Earth is the first of its kind, other discoveries like this could be in the future.

From the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics:

Also presenting at AAS, CfA astronomer Lars A. Buchhave found a correlation between the period of a planet (how long it takes to orbit its star) and the size at which a planet transitions from rocky to gaseous. This suggests that more mega-Earths will be found as planet hunters extend their data to longer-period orbits.
Why is that an important point to note? As Center for Astrophysics researcher Dimitar Sasselov puts it, "Finding Kepler-10c tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought. And if you can make rocks, you can make life."
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http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2014-14

Super cool

Llama_Shepherd · Jun 3, 2014

Marvolo said: ↑

Ive never understood what this means or implies. What does "three dimensions painted on the horizon" actually mean?
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You've seen holographic DVD covers or posters and stuff right? A flat 2-D surface with the illusion of 3-D depending on where you view the image from?

Yeah, it's sort of like that. But also nothing like it, but just think of that.

One of the men who did work on the holographic universe hypothesis tried explaining it to someone on a documentary and they courteously said "I think I get it" and he said "Well you shouldn't. If you think you understand it I haven't expained it well enough".

:eek: · Jun 4, 2014

Found! Oldest Known Alien Planet That Might Support Life

http://www.space.com/26115-oldest-habitable-alien-planet-kapteyn-b.html

DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs · Jun 4, 2014

NASA reveals the most colorful and detailed image of the Universe

NASA has unveiled "the most colorful view of the Universe" ever captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Part of a study called the Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, it's "a composite of separate exposures taken in 2003 to 2012 with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3."

Previously, astronomers crafted the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, using visible and near-infrared light photos of a small section of space in the constellation Fornax captured from 2003 to 2009.

The new image uses every single frequency that the Hubble can register, from the ultraviolet to near-infrared light and going through visible light.

The resulting image made from 841 orbits of telescope viewing time contains approximately 10,000 galaxies, extending back in time to within a few hundred million years of the big bang.

According to NASA, until now astronomers didn't have enough data "for the period in between, when most of the stars in the universe were born a distance extending from about 5 billion to 10 billion light-years." The project's principal investigator Harry Teplitzof Caltech in Pasadena, California"the addition of the ultraviolet fills in this missing range."
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Watch the extra large version of this image here:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/27/image/a/format/xlarge_web/

Truly amazing, if you're a fan of space than this just made your year

Marvolo · Jun 4, 2014

10,000 galaxies...each with a billion to a trillion stars and most of them have planets... you know what this means?

There is a high probability that somewhere in that photo is at least one alien civilization! Sure we cant see them, but they are there in one or more of those galaxies.

Bim · Jun 4, 2014

That's gorgeous t:. My gosh, it's amazing realizing just how vast the universe truly is.

I agree with you Marvolo.

DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs · Jun 4, 2014

Blows my mind each time I think of the vastness of space and the universe. I often wish I had been born several years in the future when we become a space faring culture and explore everything. Plus I could gorge on tons of Marvel films

DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs · Jun 6, 2014

We've Found Traces of Another World on the Moon

Scientists have discovered traces of another world in rock samples from the Moonand it's evidence of the planet that once crashed into Earth to form our rocky satellite.

It's been believed since the 80s that the Moon was created when a planet called Theia hit Earth 4.5 billion years ago. But until now, there hasn't been any evidence in lunar samples to confirm the theory.

Now, though, a new analysis of rock brought back to Earth by Apollo astronauts reveals subtle differences in the composition of the material which makes up the Moon compared to that of our planet. The researchers measured the difference in the isotopic composition of oxygen contained in rocks from Earth and Moonthat's the ratio of oxygen atoms with subtly different atomic weights.

They found a difference between the rock sampleswhich, the researchers claim, confirms the theory that the Moon was created by a dramatic collision between Theia and Earth. Their results are published in Science.

However, the differences is smaller than the researchers expected. Similar analysis of meteorites from Mars and the outer solar system yield far larger disparities, so scientists are now scratching their heads over why this new analysis provides results which are so similar.

Some have suggested Theia actually formed very close to Earth in the early days of our Solar System; others reckon that the impacting planet could have been bigger than we thought, which could have caused the Earth to pick up many of the qualities of its incoming rock, too. Regardless, we've now found evidence that Theia did indeed hit the Earth to form the Moon.
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http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6188/1146

I love it when a good theory get's confirmed

DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs · Jun 6, 2014

This Is a Star Exploding 12.1 Billion Years Ago

You're looking back in time. A long, long, long way back in time. This is an image of a star exploding just after the Big Bang happened.

This gamma ray burst was detected by Southern Methodist University in Dallas on April 19th, and because of the vast size of the Universe it's taken a staggering 12.1 billion years to reach Earth. It's a rare insight into the breathtaking beginnings of our Universeand is going to be studied in detail to try and understand more about the beginning of time.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140604105532.htm

Amazing

gohei_ · Jun 6, 2014

DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs said: ↑

We've Found Traces of Another World on the Moon

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6188/1146

I love it when a good theory get's confirmed
Click to expand...

So the moon is supposed to be the leftovers of Theia then?

DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs · Jun 6, 2014

Yup

gohei_ · Jun 6, 2014

Cool.

Marvolo · Jun 6, 2014

DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs said: ↑

We've Found Traces of Another World on the Moon

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6188/1146

I love it when a good theory get's confirmed
Click to expand...

I wonder if we could some day find the remains of Theia now that we have an idea of its chemical makeup? That would be pretty insane if we found chunks of it floating in the Oort cloud.

NewYorkSpider · Jun 7, 2014

That photo of the galaxies is simply stunning.

DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs · Jun 7, 2014

NASA has approved funding for 12 futuristic projects, including a submarine to explore the methane lakes of Titan, an aerial drone for Mars, and a probe to analyze the surface of Europa. You can learn about each individual project here.
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Awesome

Marvolo · Jun 9, 2014

The Fermi Paradox: Where is everybody?

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

This was an absolutely fascinating read that's easy to grasp and it boggles the mind so I wanted to share it. I'm gonna post it in a couple other threads. To the mods, I don't do this to spam, but to share this. It's really cool stuff.

Teelie · Jun 9, 2014

I skimmed through it and there is a lot of good pros, cons, what-ifs, maybes and all around reasonable explanations for almost all the theories out there regarding life in the universe.

I say almost of course meaning that the truth is the government really is hiding alien life from us (those bastards) is dismissed as a joke.

DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs · Jun 9, 2014

100 million worlds may have complex alien life in our galaxy

A group of international astronomers and astrobiologists have published new research that assesses the possibility of complex life on other worlds. Their calculation in the Milky Way alone is staggering: 100 million worlds in our home galaxy may harbor complex alien life. One. Hundred. Million.

It is a lotalthough maybe a bit disappointing when you consider that a) there are 17 billion Earth-sized worlds in our galaxy alone and b) these worlds are likely to be too far away from us (unless we can get a warp drive.) Also keep in mind that, according to the authors, "this study does not indicate that complex life exists on that many planets [...] only the conditions to support [complex alien] life."

But, even with those considerations in mind, I find their estimation impressive. Especially when you consider that this is only one galaxyand there are 500 billion of them in the Universe.

Their research supports "the view that the evolution of complex life on other worlds is rare in frequency but large in absolute number," and it contains the first plausible "assessment of complex life in the Universe using empirical data."

It's an assessment that comes from necessity. The search for worlds that may contain life is now the most important field of investigation in astronomy and perhaps the most important field in science, period. The discovery of worlds that can support complex life is not only vital for our long-term survival as species, but also the key to one of the most trascendental questions we face as species: Are we alone in the Universe?

To make their calculations, a team led by Louis Irwinfrom the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Texas at El Pasohave developed a new index called the Biological Complexity Index (BCI), which ranks planetary bodiesincluding moonsbased on the features discovered by our current technology. According to the paper, the index is "designed to provide a quantitative estimate of the relative probability that complex, macro-organismic life forms could have emerged on other worlds."

They believe that only 11 of the more than 1,700 planets so far discovered in the Milky Way have a higher BCI than the Jupiter's moon Europa. That seems like nothing but, when you take into consideration the estimation of worlds in our home galaxy, "the total of such planets could exceed 100 million in our galaxy alone."

The paper was published in Challenges of Astrobiology by Louis Irwinfrom the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Texas at El PasoAbel Méndezfrom the Planetary Habitability Laboratory, University of Puerto Rico at AreciboAlberto G. Fairénfrom the Department of Astronomy, Cornell Universityand Dirk Schulze-Makuchfrom the Center of Astronomy and Astrophysics, at Technical University Berlin.
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http://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/5/1/159

Sweet!

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