Astrophysicists Announce Major Discovery Of Big Bang's Smoking Gun (1 Viewer)

[NCCommish]

Good stuff

 

[jon_mx]

This whole theory of gravity is simply ridiculous. If larger masses really attract more, explain fat women.

 

[drummer]

This whole theory of gravity is simply ridiculous. If larger masses really attract more, explain fat women.

I have a way you can test the theory.

 

[joffer]

I'm kind of adopting this thread as my official astrophysics thread.

NASA has scheduled a press conference for Thursday to announce a new discovery by the Kepler telescope

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/m/news/news.php?release=2014-113&1&utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NASAJPL&utm_content=releases20140415#.U02hAie9KSM

 

[joffer]

http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/nasas-kepler-discovers-first-earth-size-planet-in-the-habitable-zone-of-another-star/index.html#.U1A5BCe9KK1

First Earth-like planet found in the habitable zone about 500 light years away.

 

[Yankee23Fan]

Cool.

I can picture that world without war. Without hate. And I could picture us attacking that world because they would never expect it.

 

[NCCommish]

http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/nasas-kepler-discovers-first-earth-size-planet-in-the-habitable-zone-of-another-star/index.html#.U1A5BCe9KK1

First Earth-like planet found in the habitable zone about 500 light years away.

Cool

 

[Andy Dufresne]

JFC, when did CNN become like the National Enquirer?

Their headline for this event is "NASA discovers Earth-sized planet that may sustain life".

Ugh.

 

[joffer]

JFC, when did CNN become like the National Enquirer?

Their headline for this event is "NASA discovers Earth-sized planet that may sustain life".

Ugh.

I'm thrilled they covered it at all.

 

[fatness]

JFC, when did CNN become like the National Enquirer?

Their headline for this event is "NASA discovers Earth-sized planet that may sustain life".

Ugh.

I'm thrilled they covered it at all.

Their article is pretty decent.

The size -- estimated to be 10% larger than Earth -- and distance from its star don't just make for interesting factoids. They give scientists hope that Kepler-186f might sustain life as we know it.

Of nearly 1,800 "confirmed exoplanets" that have been found, approximately 20 orbit their host stars within habitable zones, where it's believed surface water would not freeze or boil. In 2011, NASA announced that Kepler had observed five planets approximately the size of Earth and in the habitable zone.

But the "previously discovered worlds are larger than Earth, and consequently their true nature -- rocky or gaseous -- is unknown," the SETI Institute said in a written announcement on Thursday. "On the basis of the observed dimming of starlight from Kepler-186, the authors estimate that this newly discovered planet is roughly the same size as the Earth."

Theoretical models and observations tell scientists that planets the size of Kepler-186f likely have a composition of iron, rock and ice, like Earth, Quintana told reporters Thursday.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/17/tech/space-earth-size-planet/

 

[jamny]

So if we send a probe there, it'll arrive around the year 2127000

 

[NCCommish]

JFC, when did CNN become like the National Enquirer?

Their headline for this event is "NASA discovers Earth-sized planet that may sustain life".

Ugh.

Which part of that headline isn't true? NASA did discover an earth sized planet that may be able to support life given our understanding of the environment necessary for that to be possible.

 

[Yankee23Fan]

My son is in full geek mode about this. He is doing a science report on Kepler the man so this fits in perfectly. He already woke up this morning going through the DVD of Cosmos to find when they talked about him - another good ding for Cosmos.

 

[joffer]

I'm kind of adopting this thread as my official astrophysics thread

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2014/05/simulator-successfully-recreates-space-dust

A team of scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, has successfully reproduced, right here on Earth, the processes that occur in the atmosphere of a red giant star and lead to the formation of planet-forming interstellar dust.

Using a specialized facility, called the Cosmic Simulation Chamber (COSmIC) designed and built at Ames, scientists now are able to recreate and study in the laboratory dust grains similar to the grains that form in the outer layers of dying stars. Scientists plan to use the dust to gather clues to better understand the composition and the evolution of the universe.

Dust grains that form around dying stars and are ejected into the interstellar medium, after a life cycle spanning millions of years, lead to the formation of planets and are a key component of the universe’s evolution. Scientists have found the materials that make up the building blocks of the universe are much more complicated than originally anticipated.

“The harsh conditions of space are extremely difficult to reproduce in the laboratory and have long hindered efforts to interpret and analyze observations from space,” said Farid Salama from Ames Research Center. “Using the COSmIC simulator, we can now discover clues to questions about the composition and the evolution of the universe, both major objectives of NASA’s space research program.”

In the past, the inability to simulate space conditions in the gaseous state prevented scientists from identifying unknown matter. Because conditions in space are vastly different from conditions on Earth, it is challenging to identify extraterrestrial materials. Thanks to COSmIC, researchers can successfully simulate gas-phase environments similar to interstellar clouds, stellar envelopes, or planetary atmosphere by expanding gases using a cold jet spray of argon gas seeded with hydrocarbons that cools down the molecules to temperatures representative of these environments.

COSmIC integrates a variety of state-of-the-art instruments to allow scientists to recreate space conditions in the laboratory to form, process, and monitor simulated planetary and interstellar materials. The chamber is the heart of the system. It recreates the extreme conditions that reign in space where interstellar molecules and ions float in a vacuum at densities that are billionths of Earth’s atmosphere; average temperatures can be less than –270° Fahrenheit (–170° Celsius), and the environment is bathed in ultraviolet and visible radiation emanating from nearby stars.

“By using COSmIC and building upon the work we recently published in The Astrophysical Journal August 29, 2013, we now can for the first time truly recreate and visualize in the laboratory the formation of carbon grains in the envelope of stars and learn about the formation, structure, and size distribution of stellar dust grains,” said Cesar Contreras of the Bay Area Environmental Research (BAER) Institute. “This type of new research truly pushes the frontiers of science toward new horizons and illustrates NASA’s important contribution to science.”

The team started with small hydrocarbon molecules that it expanded in the cold jet spray in COSmIC and exposed to high energy in an electric discharge. They detected and characterized the large molecules that are formed in the gas phase from these precursor molecules with highly sensitive detectors, and then collected the individual solid grains formed from these complex molecules and imaged them using Ames’ Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM).

“During COSmIC experiments, we are able to form and detect nanoparticles on the order of 10-nanometer size, grains ranging from 100 to 500 nanometers and aggregates of grains up to 1.5 micrometers in diameter, about a tenth the width of a human hair, and observe their structure with SEM, thus sampling a large size distribution of the grains produced,” said Ella Sciamma-O’Brien of the BAER Institute.

These results have important implications and ramifications not only for interstellar astrophysics, but also for planetary science. For example, they can provide new clues on the type of grains present in the dust around stars. That in turn will help astronomers understand the formation of planets, including Earth-like planets. They also will help interpret astronomical data from the Herschel Space Observatory, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), and the ground-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array observatory in Chile.

“Today, we are celebrating a major milestone in our understanding of the formation and the nature of cosmic dust grains that bears important implications in this new era of exoplanets discoveries,” said Salama.

 

[NCCommish]

Very cool

 

[General Tso]

Religion is the opiate of the people. A much needed opiate.

 

[Andy Dufresne]

Then again, maybe not.

Everyone wants to be right. Most of us sure hate being wrong.

But scientists know that new discoveries often change or even invalidate earlier ideas. Being wrong can mean we have learned something new.

This week, a controversy about the Big Bang and the origin of the universe came to light at the American Astronomical Society conference in Boston. In an invited lecture sponsored by the Kavli Foundation, Princeton astrophysicist David Spergel offered a different idea about a discovery made last March, where the BICEP2 Antarctic cosmology experiment reported evidence of a period of rapid "inflation" in the very early universe. Specifically, researchers detected the special pattern of polarization that would be caused by gravitational waves stretching and squeezing space itself during inflation.

But at the American Astronomical Society conference, Spergel argued that the BICEP2 results reported in March could instead be explained by a more pedestrian effect, namely, light scattering off dust between the stars in our Milky Way galaxy. If he is correct, the widely heralded BICEP2 announcement was premature at best and wrong at worst.Last week, three theorists -- Alan Guth, Andrei Linde and Alexei Starobinsky -- were awarded the prestigious Kavli Prize for astrophysics for their work developing the theory of cosmic inflation. (This prize and the AAS lecture were sponsored by the same foundation but were otherwise completely independent.) Their award may well have been prompted by the BICEP2 discovery, which generated a lot of excitement about early universe cosmology.

This kind of controversy is completely normal in science. It's the way science progresses. You put an idea out there and your colleagues -- many of them good friends and scientific collaborators -- try to shoot it down.

A scientist's first reaction to a new idea is often: "That's wrong because...." To which the proponent replies, "No, you are wrong because..." And so the debate begins.

No matter how much a scientist might hope to be right, nature holds the answer. One theory may be more beautiful than another, or more complicated, or more elegant, but nature doesn't know or care. The job of a scientist is to find out what the real answer is, not to advocate for any one point of view.

We do that by making careful measurements and assessing the accuracy of the result. BICEP2 detected certain polarization patterns in light from the cosmic microwave background, which they believe were created during inflation. David Spergel is instead suggesting the light was polarized by passing through galactic dust near the end of its journey to our telescopes -- indeed, he argued, this dust is expected to create the kind of polarization signal BICEP2 saw.

To support his contention, Spergel cited data from a space experiment called Planck, which like BICEP2 measures polarized light from the cosmic microwave background. Planck's ability to measure light at more wavelengths than BICEP2 gives it an advantage in diagnosing the effects of dust.

If the BICEP2 team is correct, they detected the first signs of gravitational wave distortions of space in the first one hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second of an early, extreme inflation of space -- an extremely important discovery.

If Spergel is correct, a significant signal from primordial gravitational waves has not yet detected and we need to keep looking for this critical probe of our universe.

New measurements from the Planck team are expected next fall. Maybe they will settle the controversy. Either way, an array of increasingly sensitive experiments will make still better measurements of the cosmic microwave background.

This is an important goal. Since the early universe is far hotter than any laboratory on Earth -- or, for that matter, in the most energetic regions around black holes or in the most massive clusters of galaxies -- it offers a very important experimental laboratory for testing fundamental physics theories.

That's one reason the debates will continue until one side convinces the other. But most scientists really don't care about the "win" -- we care about understanding nature.

Even Spergel, at the beginning of his address to the American Astronomical Society audience, called the BICEP2 results "heroic science" -- a very difficult measurement that pushes the limits of current technology.

Controversy and debate may be messy but that's how we make progress in science.

:whoosh:

 

[NCCommish]

Then again, maybe not.

Controversy and debate may be messy but that's how we make progress in science.

:whoosh:

Says it all.

 

[Bobcat10]

,

 

[matuski]

Scientists abandon highly publicized claim about cosmic find

Scientists who made headlines last March by announcing that they'd found long-sought evidence about the early universe are now abandoning that claim.


New data show that their cosmic observations no longer back up that conclusion, they say.

The original announcement caused a sensation because it appeared to show evidence that the universe ballooned rapidly a split-second after its birth, in what scientist call cosmic inflation. That idea had been widely believed, but researchers had hoped to bolster it by finding a particular trait in light left over from the very early universe.

That signal is what the researchers claimed they had found in observations of the sky taken from the South Pole, in a project called BICEP2.

But now, in a new paper submitted for publication, "we are effectively retracting the claim," said Brian Keating of the University of California, San Diego, a member of the BICEP2 team.

"It's disappointing," he said in a telephone interview Friday after the European Space Agency publicized the results. "It's like finding out there's no Santa Claus. But it's important to know the truth."

The new analysis was conducted by BICEP2 researchers plus scientists who worked with the European Planck satellite, which provided new data to help interpret the original observations

In essence, Keating said, the analysis shows that the source of the signal observed by BICEP2 isn't necessarily the very early universe. Instead, it's equally likely to have come from dust in our galaxy, which would mean it does not provide the evidence BICEP2 had claimed.

That possibility had been raised by other scientists soon after the announcement last March. When the BICEP2 team published its results in June it acknowledged it might have been fooled by the dust, but it still stood by its initial conclusions.

Keating said the search for the signal from the early universe would continue. And the new analysis has helped, he said, by showing how to avoid being misled by the galactic dust.

 

[SaintsInDome2006]

Back to Square 1.

 

[matuski]

Back to Square 1.

No not really.

 

[joffer]

bummer

 

[SaintsInDome2006]

Back to Square 1.

No not really.

Ok fine, overstatement, but they also have not disproven cosmic inflation either.

 

[NCCommish]

Well that's how science works. We think we have an answer and then more information comes in and changes things. It's part of the fun.

 

[Slapdash]

Checkmate, science.

 

[SacramentoBob]

I find all of this fascinating and creepy at the same time.