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Physics and astronomy thread (1 Viewer)

jamny

Footballguy
:grad: :nerd:

Something I'm interested in and I know there are very knowledgeable people here on the topics. Plus there are so many random stories that barely get attention, so here's a place to put them.

NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto to illuminate mysterious reaches of solar system

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is whizzing to the outer reaches of our solar system, where it will perform the first close-up flyby of Pluto.


The piano-size probe took off from Earth in January 2006. It is on track to soar close to the dwarf planet and within the orbit of its five known moons on July 14 — after 3 billion miles.

“It’s an incredibly exhilarating and humbling experience to think this is civilization’s first step to see the Kuiper belt. It’s not going to happen, I think, in my lifetime again,” Hal Weaver, a New Horizons project scientist, said in an interview with Yahoo News.

Weaver, who works at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., says that a relatively small team of scientists has been working on the project at any given time. Right now, there are about 10, but that number will approach 50 as the probe reaches Pluto.

The groundbreaking journey could shed light on the Kuiper belt, a region of the solar system that we do not know much about.

For Earthlings, the reconnaissance mission is expected to transform this little pixelated blob into a vibrant world full of complexity and diversity, with new information vastly superior to what we now have.


“When future civilizations look back at the landmark things that happened, they will, if all goes well, see this as our first foray into this new zone that we didn’t even know existed until 1992,” Weaver said.

New Horizons, the fastest spacecraft ever launched, awoke from hibernation last month and will snap long-range photos of the Pluto system using the telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI).

Over the next few months, the spacecraft will beam hundreds of ever-improving images back to mission scientists. The images will help chart the course for the remaining 135 million miles.

“This is a mission of delayed gratification, but the gratification is about to come,” Weaver said, laughing.

Excitement surrounding the mission is rippling through the scientific community.

Denton Ebel, a geologist specializing in meteorites at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said there is so much about the Kuiper belt that we just don’t know because of the distance — 4.67 billion miles from Earth.

“What are the moons made of? Are they big ice balls? Are any rocky? We just don’t know. What these bodies are made out of is the most interesting part of what we are going to learn,” Ebel said in an interview with Yahoo News.

The extraterrestrial rock expert pointed out that we were not even aware of all of Pluto’s currently known moons when New Horizons launched.

Now we are on the cusp of a quantum leap forward in our understanding of the Kuiper belt, which could, in turn, shed tremendous light on the formation of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago.

“We live in exciting times,” Ebel said

 
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Long Lost Beagle Probe Finally Found On Mars

On Christmas day, 2003, the British spacecraft Beagle 2 was supposed to make touchdown on the surface of Mars to begin its mission of searching for signs of extraterrestrial life. Scientists eagerly awaited communication from the probe to confirm its landing, but disappointedly, no radio contact was ever made. Beagle 2 was presumed destroyed.

Now, twelve years on, the unlucky explorer has finally been spotted, and it looks like it didn’t experience a crash landing after all. New images, taken from orbit by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, show the doomed probe’s landing spot, and it appears to be intact. What’s more, the images hint at what went wrong on that fateful Christmas day.

Beagle 2, which was named after Charles Darwin’s famous ship, piggybacked to Mars with ESA’s Mars Express orbiter, which is still in operation today. The probe separated from its mothership on December 19, and the orbiter even took a photo of Beagle 2 on its way down. But what happened next remained a mystery.

The craft was supposed to make a soft landing using parachutes and airbags, but some believed that it may have been caught out by the thinner than anticipated Martian atmosphere, causing it to approach too fast and thus hit the surface too hard. However, the images suggest that Beagle 2 is in one piece, so it probably didn’t experience a crash landing. What seems to be the case is that it failed to correctly unfold its petal-like solar panels, meaning it couldn't talk to scientists back on Earth.

“Without full deployment, there is no way we could have communicated with it as the radio frequency antenna was under the solar panels,” Beagle mission manager Professor Mark Sims told BBC News. What caused this failure is pure speculation, says Sims, although it could have been a heavy bounce or a punctured airbag.

The failure of this mission was blamed on a number of things, including poor management, inadequate testing, and its shoestring budget of £50 million ($76 million). Now, it seems that it was just a case of bad luck. Unfortunately, Beagle’s principal investigator, Colin Pillinger, will never know just how close his team was to achieving success, as he died last year.

 
Are there serious doubts about the discovery of the Higgs boson? It sounds like there are already people putting what was found into a sub-category. Was the range it was found in not concise enough? Did they jump to a conclusion too soon?

eta: Can you jump to a conclusion too late? lol

 
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Are there serious doubts about the discovery of the Higgs boson? It sounds like there are already people putting what was found into a sub-category. Was the range it was found in not concise enough? Did they jump to a conclusion too soon?

eta: Can you jump to a conclusion too late? lol
I don't think there's any doubt that they found a particle at the mass-energy point that was predicted. Just a question of whether it means what they thought it would mean.
 
Are there serious doubts about the discovery of the Higgs boson? It sounds like there are already people putting what was found into a sub-category. Was the range it was found in not concise enough? Did they jump to a conclusion too soon?

eta: Can you jump to a conclusion too late? lol
I don't think there's any doubt that they found a particle at the mass-energy point that was predicted. Just a question of whether it means what they thought it would mean.
Exactly. That's kinda important. Did they rush this announcement?

 
Are there serious doubts about the discovery of the Higgs boson? It sounds like there are already people putting what was found into a sub-category. Was the range it was found in not concise enough? Did they jump to a conclusion too soon?

eta: Can you jump to a conclusion too late? lol
I don't think there's any doubt that they found a particle at the mass-energy point that was predicted. Just a question of whether it means what they thought it would mean.
Exactly. That's kinda important. Did they rush this announcement?
i don't think so. The hypothesis made a prediction, and it was confirmed. How it's reported is a whole other issue.
 
Are there serious doubts about the discovery of the Higgs boson? It sounds like there are already people putting what was found into a sub-category. Was the range it was found in not concise enough? Did they jump to a conclusion too soon?

eta: Can you jump to a conclusion too late? lol
I don't think there's any doubt that they found a particle at the mass-energy point that was predicted. Just a question of whether it means what they thought it would mean.
Exactly. That's kinda important. Did they rush this announcement?
i don't think so. The hypothesis made a prediction, and it was confirmed. How it's reported is a whole other issue.
So was it "a" particle, or "the" particle. The God Particle?

I don't have a total grasp on it, but from what I understand, this is proof of an existence of a particle that changed energy into matter. It's a particle or a field, that much I'm not clear on. But the Higgs boson was supposed to be that particle. The one they announced they found. If it doesn't mean what they thought it would mean, what is it?

 
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Are there serious doubts about the discovery of the Higgs boson? It sounds like there are already people putting what was found into a sub-category. Was the range it was found in not concise enough? Did they jump to a conclusion too soon?

eta: Can you jump to a conclusion too late? lol
I don't think there's any doubt that they found a particle at the mass-energy point that was predicted. Just a question of whether it means what they thought it would mean.
Exactly. That's kinda important. Did they rush this announcement?
i don't think so. The hypothesis made a prediction, and it was confirmed. How it's reported is a whole other issue.
So was it "a" particle, or "the" particle. The God Particle?I don't have a total grasp on it, but from what I understand, this is proof of an existence of a particle that changed energy into matter. It's a particle or a field, that much I'm not clear on. But the Higgs boson was supposed to be that particle. The one they announced they found. If it doesn't mean what they thought it would mean, what is it?
you want to call it that, fine. Peter Higgs didn't call it that. Again, the hypothesis was that it was a force carrier(boson) that gave mass to matter. I'm not aware of anything published that shoots that down.
 
this boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname: the God Particle. Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn't let us call it the ####### Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one...

- Leon Lederman

 
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Are there serious doubts about the discovery of the Higgs boson? It sounds like there are already people putting what was found into a sub-category. Was the range it was found in not concise enough? Did they jump to a conclusion too soon?

eta: Can you jump to a conclusion too late? lol
I don't think there's any doubt that they found a particle at the mass-energy point that was predicted. Just a question of whether it means what they thought it would mean.
Exactly. That's kinda important. Did they rush this announcement?
i don't think so. The hypothesis made a prediction, and it was confirmed. How it's reported is a whole other issue.
So was it "a" particle, or "the" particle. The God Particle?I don't have a total grasp on it, but from what I understand, this is proof of an existence of a particle that changed energy into matter. It's a particle or a field, that much I'm not clear on. But the Higgs boson was supposed to be that particle. The one they announced they found. If it doesn't mean what they thought it would mean, what is it?
you want to call it that, fine. Peter Higgs didn't call it that. Again, the hypothesis was that it was a force carrier(boson) that gave mass to matter. I'm not aware of anything published that shoots that down.
Well, that's what I'm asking. I'm reading things about people who are questioning it. There's nothing published yet. I'm sure "God particle" is a negative connotation but it is what it is.

 
LINK

Big Bang Theory may not be correct, after all.
Well you had to figure that it would be wrong since the whole concept of the universe is impossible to comprehend. It has no end but how can it have no end. It always existed? How is that even possible. If it didn't always exist, what was there before it existed. No one has any idea or ever will because it's insane when you really think about it.

Over 100 billion galaxies, each with around 300 billion stars. Stars 2000x times the size of the sun. It's all just insane.

 
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the BBT in general doesn't start from a singularity, it starts one Planck time after. t=0 has never been attempted to be explained by the theory.

 
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http://astronomynow.com/2015/02/25/ancient-quasar-at-cosmic-dawn-found-with-massive-black-hole/

Quasars supermassive black holes found at the centre of distant massive galaxies are the most luminous beacons in the sky. These central supermassive black holes actively accrete the surrounding materials and release a huge amount of their gravitational energy. An international team of astronomers, including Carnegies Yuri Beletsky, has discovered the brightest quasar ever found in the early universe, which is powered by the most massive black hole observed for an object from that time. Their work is published February 26th by Nature.

The quasar was found at a redshift of z = 6.30. This is a measurement of how much the wavelength of light emitted from it that reaches us on Earth is stretched by the expansion of the universe. As such, it can be used to calculate the quasars age and distance from our planet. A higher redshift means larger distance and hence looking further back in time.

At a distance of 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, this quasar was formed only 900 million years after the Big Bang. Named SDSS J0100+2802, studying this quasar will help scientists understand how quasars evolved in the earliest days of the universe. There are only 40 known quasars that have a redshift of higher than 6, a point that marks the beginning of the early universe.

This quasar is very unique. Just like the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe, its glowing light will help us to probe more about the early universe, said team-leader Xue-Bing Wu of Peking University and the Kavli Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

With a luminosity of 420 trillion that of our own Suns, this new quasar is seven times brighter than the most distant quasar known (which is 13 billion light-years away). It harbours a black hole with mass of 12 billion solar masses, proving it to be the most luminous quasar with the most massive black hole among all the known high-redshift quasars.

The team developed a method of detecting quasars at redshifts of 5 and higher. These detections were verified by the 6.5-metre Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT) and 8.4-metre Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona; the 6.5-metre Magellan Telescope at Carnegies Las Campanas Observatory in Chile; and the 8.2-metre Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii.

This quasar is a unique laboratory to study the way that a quasars black hole and host galaxy co-evolve, Beletsky said. Our findings indicate that in the early universe, quasar black holes probably grew faster than their host galaxies, although more research is needed to confirm this idea.
 
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http://astronomynow.com/2015/02/25/ancient-quasar-at-cosmic-dawn-found-with-massive-black-hole/

With a luminosity of 420 trillion that of our own Suns, this new quasar is seven times brighter than the most distant quasar known (which is 13 billion light-years away). It harbours a black hole with mass of 12 billion solar masses, proving it to be the most luminous quasar with the most massive black hole among all the known high-redshift quasars.
Holy crap... :eek:

 
[SIZE=10pt]Crawl into that cocoon. Today, the moon in Taurus, your intimate eighth house, forms an auspicious trine to heavy-hitter Pluto in Capricorn. The mood is decidedly cozy, if intense, and you may opt for an evening in with a small circle of loved ones, or your mate. Of course, you may have “home” on the brain for a different reason: you’re intent on making a savvy financial move, maybe even buying or selling a piece of property. You and a family member may discuss investment strategies and passive income opportunities. Making strides toward financial security soothes your soul.[/SIZE]
 
Pluto a Planet Again? It May Happen This Year

The New Horizons mission is poised to answer some of our myriad questions about Pluto. How did it form? What is the atmosphere made of? What is the surface like? Does Pluto have a magnetic field? What are the moons like? Does Pluto have a subsurface ocean? Is the surface of Pluto’s moon Charon pure water ice?

Pluto has guarded its secrets for four and half billion years. But in a few months, a few intrepid humans will pull back the curtain on Pluto and say “Hello, Pluto, we’re here.” And Pluto will begin to share her secrets with us. When she does, as with Ceres, our familiarity with Pluto will help us recognize that Pluto is, was, and has always been a planet, albeit a small one.
 
You guys are all probably well aware of Through the Wormhole, but for those that are not - it is worth downloading all 5 seasons from Amazon Instant Video. It'll run you about $100 total, but it's worth every penny in my opinion.

 
http://astronomynow.com/2015/02/25/ancient-quasar-at-cosmic-dawn-found-with-massive-black-hole/

With a luminosity of 420 trillion that of our own Suns, this new quasar is seven times brighter than the most distant quasar known (which is 13 billion light-years away). It harbours a black hole with mass of 12 billion solar masses, proving it to be the most luminous quasar with the most massive black hole among all the known high-redshift quasars.
Holy crap... :eek:
http://what-if.xkcd.com/73/

The physicist who mentioned this problem to me told me his rule of thumb for estimating supernova-related numbers: However big you think supernovae are, they're bigger than that.

Here's a question to give you a sense of scale:

Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina:

  1. A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or
  2. The detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?
Applying the physicist rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. And indeed, it is ... by nine orders of magnitude.
Is that to say nine times brighter? Or is "9 orders of magnitude" = 1 billion? e.g. 109?

 
http://astronomynow.com/2015/02/25/ancient-quasar-at-cosmic-dawn-found-with-massive-black-hole/

With a luminosity of 420 trillion that of our own Suns, this new quasar is seven times brighter than the most distant quasar known (which is 13 billion light-years away). It harbours a black hole with mass of 12 billion solar masses, proving it to be the most luminous quasar with the most massive black hole among all the known high-redshift quasars.
Holy crap... :eek:
http://what-if.xkcd.com/73/

The physicist who mentioned this problem to me told me his rule of thumb for estimating supernova-related numbers: However big you think supernovae are, they're bigger than that.

Here's a question to give you a sense of scale:

Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina:

  1. A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or
  2. The detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?
Applying the physicist rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. And indeed, it is ... by nine orders of magnitude.
Is that to say nine times brighter? Or is "9 orders of magnitude" = 1 billion? e.g. 109?
nine orders of magnitude = 10^9, but if you are unfortunate enough to experience either of these things, your perception of it will not matter much!

 
Let's scale the solar system. I'm sure somebody else has already done the algebra, but I could not help but to fly solo. Beginning with the Sun having a diameter of 109X of the Earths, and going with the distance between the two bodies is 92.6 million miles...

If the Sun were the size of a basketball, the Earth would be approximately the size of a BB about 85 feet away (9-10 Leroy Hoard rushes). Does that sound about right? ... Given these dimensions, I just can't wrap my head around the fact that earth continuously revolves around the sun.

Anyone want to step in and add other planets to this tapestry. I don't think the size of the planets is all that important, but the distances between bodies matters.

The next nearest star, over 4500 miles away. Am I correct?

 
Let's scale the solar system. I'm sure somebody else has already done the algebra, but I could not help but to fly solo. Beginning with the Sun having a diameter of 109X of the Earths, and going with the distance between the two bodies is 92.6 million miles...

If the Sun were the size of a basketball, the Earth would be approximately the size of a BB about 85 feet away (9-10 Leroy Hoard rushes). Does that sound about right? ... Given these dimensions, I just can't wrap my head around the fact that earth continuously revolves around the sun.

Anyone want to step in and add other planets to this tapestry. I don't think the size of the planets is all that important, but the distances between bodies matters.

The next nearest star, over 4500 miles away. Am I correct?
the wildest thing about Gravity is how weak it is, especially relative to the electromagnetic force and strong nuclear force
 
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Let's scale the solar system. I'm sure somebody else has already done the algebra, but I could not help but to fly solo. Beginning with the Sun having a diameter of 109X of the Earths, and going with the distance between the two bodies is 92.6 million miles...

If the Sun were the size of a basketball, the Earth would be approximately the size of a BB about 85 feet away (9-10 Leroy Hoard rushes). Does that sound about right? ... Given these dimensions, I just can't wrap my head around the fact that earth continuously revolves around the sun.

Anyone want to step in and add other planets to this tapestry. I don't think the size of the planets is all that important, but the distances between bodies matters.

The next nearest star, over 4500 miles away. Am I correct?
Couple of points.... First, those 9-10 leroy Hoard rushes would also have resulted in about 7 touchdowns. Second, the other size analogy I like when it comes to physics is the construct of the atom. If the nucleus were the head of a pin, in the middle of a professional football stadium, the electrons whirling around it would be outside of the stadium! Think about all that empty space inside an atom, and it's unfathomable that mass even exists.

 
Dawn Spacecraft Arrives at Ceres, Becomes First to Orbit a Dwarf Planet

Shortly after 7:30 am Eastern time this morning, a seven-year space voyage at last reached its final destination: NASAs Dawn mission entered orbit around Ceres, a small, icy world orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter. Confirmation of Dawns arrival came about an hour later, via the spacecrafts radio signal to NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Now, after a journey of 3.1 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) and 7.5 years, Dawn calls Ceres home, said Marc Rayman, Dawns mission director and chief engineer at JPL.

Since its discovery in 1801, Ceres has mystified astronomers and defied easy categorization. Its been called a planet, then an asteroid, and most recently a dwarf planet akin to Pluto. Unlike an asteroid, which is typically misshapen and lumpy, Ceres is round like a planet. It is small as far as worlds go: at nearly 950 kilometers in diameter, its approximately the size of Texas. Even so, it contains a third of all the mass in the asteroid belt, and is probably an ancient planetary building block left over from the solar systems infancy some four and a half billion years ago.

Dawn is the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet, beating out NASAs New Horizons mission, which will arrive at Pluto in July. Dawn is also the first spacecraft to orbit two worlds after leaving Earth. After its launch in September 2007, Dawn first visited the large asteroid Vesta before disembarking for Ceres. No conceivable conventional rocket could perform such a feat without stopping to refuel. Dawns multiple orbital destinations are possible thanks to its fuel-efficient ion engine, which can maintain a weak thrust for years on end using only solar power and a small reservoir of xenon propellant. At peak thrust, Dawns engine produces only as much force as a single falling sheet of paper. That thrust has built up in the years since Dawn left Earth, boosting Dawns speed by a record-breaking 39,600 kilometers per hour.

Studying Ceres up-close will help researchers better understand the dwarf planets history, and with it how our planetary system formed and evolved. Those studies could also uncover a new frontier in the search for extraterrestrial life. Telescopic measurements suggest Ceres has a large mantle of water ice on top of a dense, rocky coreenough water, in fact, to make some scientists think Ceres-like objects were how Earth got its oceans. Early in its life Ceres may have had an ocean, too. That ocean would have frozen as Ceres slowly cooled, and its icy surface would have gradually sublimated in the sunlight, leaving behind gunky, briny deposits of organic minerals. Astronomers have already used large ground- and space-based telescopes to glimpse what seem to be carbonates, clays, and other water-altered minerals on the dwarf planet. Ceress dust-covered, crater-scarred face may actually be the frozen surface of an ancient abyss, and some researchers speculate there could still be reservoirs of liquid seawater lurking within it.

Dawn could deliver answers soon as it settles in for at least a year and a half of exploration. Already, it has spied strange bright spots on the dwarf planets surface that may be deposits of highly reflective minerals salts or even water ice. As Dawn gets closer to Ceress surface and gains a better view, the nature of these mysterious spots will become clear.

In late April, after its gentle ion jets bring it into a polar orbit some 13,500 kilometers high, Dawn will begin making a world map of the dwarf planet. A survey orbit at 4,400 kilometers will come next, followed by a high-resolution mapping orbit at 1,470 kilometers. Finally, Dawn will slip into a 375-kilometer-high orbit to snap very high-resolution images and to map the distribution of elements at and just below the surface.

By then, fuel will be too low to shift orbits again. Dawns primary mission will end. For a while, Dawn keep circling Ceres in its lonely, low orbit. If Ceres proves half as interesting as some astrobiologists suspect it to be, other visiting orbiters, landers, and rovers wont be far behind.
 

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