Great topic brought up by Ed Brayton at Dispatches, who writes in part:
The entire span of a person’s existence on earth is not even a blip on the radar in the context of the physical and temporal existence of the universe. But just because our lives have no grand, universal meaning doesn’t mean they don’t have any meaning at all. You do not matter to the universe but you certainly matter to the people around you.
Artist's impression of a planet ejected from the early solar system. CREDIT: Southwest Research Institute
Hot Jupiter’s, possible water worlds or gas dwarfs, even one planet that could have a mantle of diamond, exo-solar planets remind us that the universe can still harbor secrets. In the last decade or two, as the number of strange exo-planetary denizens grew, it became clear that some must have migrated. Moved closer, or shot away, from their primary star. The early history of our own solar system, how the planets formed and ended up in the relatively stable configuration we see today, can be studied with the same techniques developed and refined to model those alien systems. One of the simulations that best explains the familiar worlds we know huddling around the sun comes with an extra planet, or maybe two: [Read more…]
Dwarf Galaxies 9 billion light-years away in near infrared. Image courtesy NASA/ESA
The mighty eye of Hubble has been turned toward the genesis of galaxies and stars and found great big things start out in smaller, dynamic packages. Today the baryonic universe is dominated by elegant spirals like our own Milky Way and massive elliptical galaxies buzzing like a swarm of angry bees in ultra slow-motion. Each with supermassive black holes lurking in their center, some weighing over a billion times the mass of our sun. But Hubble has found it wasn’t always like that: [Read more…]
Foolish humans! Responding a petition from UFO nuts, the White House as issued a statement that there are no aliens, as far as they know, in Area 51 or anywhere else:
In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye. However, that doesn’t mean the subject of life outside our planet isn’t being discussed or explored.”
Not that that will end the claims of hidden aliens meddling in our race or governmental affairs. … I mean what else would a government compromised by Grays say?
If you’re a wonder junkie like me, and not reading Ethan Siegal’s blog, Starts with a Bang!, you’re missing out. This post on why cosmologists think our universe is part of a multiverse is one of the best I’ve ever read. And it was from another of his superb pieces that I swiped the video below the jump showing a binary neutron star system decaying via gravity waves and merging into a single hot, throbbing mass. [Read more…]
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope infrared mosaic image represents the sharpest survey of the Galactic Center to date.
You’re staring straight into the churning heart of our Milky Way galaxy, right through the “teapot” in the constellation Sagittarius, as revealed by infrared light and Mr Hubble’s Space Telescope. Click image for HST homepage. Image description below the fold. [Read more…]
This artist's concept illustrates an icy planet-forming disk around a young star called TW Hydrae, located about 175 light-years away in the Hydra, or Sea Serpent, constellation. Courtesy NASA/HSO
The translation of the constellation Hydra is Water Serpent, and astronomers now know the name is strangely appropriate for at least part of the formation. [Read more…]
These two infrared images were taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2004 and 2009. They show a faint object moving through space together with a white dwarf. The brown dwarf, named WD 0806-661 B, is the coldest companion object to be directly imaged outside our solar system. Credit: Kevin Luhman, Penn State University, October 2011
I don’t know what it is about brown dwarfs, but I just love these things. Maybe it’s the thought of a bunch of cold bodies wandering unseen, up to now anyway, through interstellar space:
Luhman classifies this object as a “brown dwarf,” an object that formed just like a star out of a massive cloud of dust and gas. But the mass that a brown dwarf accumulates is not enough to ignite thermonuclear reactions in its core, resulting in a failed star that is very cool. In the case of the new brown dwarf, the scientists have gauged the temperature of its surface to be between 80 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit — possibly as cool as a human.
It’s strongly suspected that Mars was warmer and wetter in the past. It had to be above the freezing temperature of water at various times for the geological evidence uncovered by a suite of probes to make sense. But now we have the first hard estimate of just how warm ancient Mars may have been: [Read more…]
Uranus as seen by Hubble in 2005, shown in approximate orientation to the plane of its orbit.
If you want to get a feel for how utterly dishonest creationist arguments can be, look no further than Mr. Hovind and the Professor. It’s a spiel told by creationist nutbag Kent Hovind AKA Dr. Dino where he purportedly confounds a nameless scientist by pointing out that some planets and moon rotate backward. Hovind says since “Evolutionists claim the whole universe came from a single spinning dot that blew up,” and therefore any planets or moons, such as Uranus or Triton, going backward would defy the conservation of angular momentum. Thus, evolution is wrong.
Last I heard Hovind was doing time and it’s unlikely he’s open to evidence contradicting his little diatribe anyway. Nonetheless, such evidence exists and more is being gathered all the time:
Uranus is a real oddball in our solar system. Its spin axis is tilted by a whopping 98 degrees, meaning it essentially spins on its side. No other planet has anywhere near such a tilt. Jupiter is tilted by 3 degrees, for example, and Earth by 23 degrees. Scientists have long suspected that some manner of violent impact knocked Uranus off kilter. The accepted wisdom had been that a single object several times more massive than Earth did the damage, slamming into Uranus long ago, researchers said.