Astronomy // Current

Black holes are cosmic factories for building galaxies, scientists believe

The new research may help explain why large galaxies tend to have super-massive black... more

Vierotchka
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2 days ago
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Hypernova Confirmed: Most Violent Object in the Universe

Most astronomers today believe that one of the most plausible reasons we have yet to detect intelligent life in the universe is due to the deadly effects of local supernova explosions that wipe out all life in a given region of a galaxy.

While there is, on average, only one supernova per galaxy per century, there is something on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. Taking 10 billion years for the age of the Universe (it's actually 13.7 billion, but stars didn't form for the first few hundred million), Dr. Richard Mushotzky of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, derived a figure of 1 billion supernovae per year, or 30 supernovae per second in the observable Universe!

Certain rare stars -real killers -type 11 stars, are core-collapse hypernova that generate deadly gamma ray bursts (GRBs). These long burst objects release 1000 times the non-neutrino energy release of an ordinary "core-collapse" supernova. Concrete proof of the core-collapse GRB model came in 2003.

It was made possible in part to a fortuitously "nearby" burst whose location was distributed to astronomers by the Gamma-ray Burst Coordinates Network (GCN). On March 29, 2003, a burst went off close enough that the follow-up observations were decisive in solving the gamma-ray burst mystery. The optical spectrum of the afterglow was nearly identical to that of supernova SN1998bw. In addition, observations from x-ray satellites showed the same characteristic signature of "shocked" and "heated" oxygen that's also present in supernovae. Thus, astronomers were able to determine the "afterglow" light of a relatively close gamma-ray burst (located "just" 2 billion light years away) resembled a supernova.

It isn't known if every hypernova is associated with a GRB. However, astronomers estimate only about one out of 100,000 supernovae produce a hypernova. This works out to about one gamma-ray burst per day, which is in fact what is observed.

What is almost certain is that the core of the star involved in a given hypernova is massive enough to collapse into a black hole (rather than a neutron star). So every GRB detected is also the "birth cry" of a new black hole.

Who ever said science is boring!

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/11/hypernovas-the-most-violent-object-in-the-universe-confirmed.html

http://www.williamsclass.com/EighthScienceWork/ImagesEighth/SuperNovaReminant.jpgMost astronomers today believe that one of the most plausible reasons we have yet to... more

EmperorThan
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6 days ago
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5 comments

Highest Resolution Image of the Milky Way Ever, 500 Million Megapixels

The site linked with the image itself is 'kind of' slow so please be patient, it's... more

EmperorThan
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8 days ago
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0 comments

Jupiter, our Hero and Saturn is his trusty sidekick! |

Do you have any idea how many threats our dear Earth face from the cosmic... more

zamurai127
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9 days ago
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22 comments

Jupiter's Moon Europa Might Be Teeming With Fish

New evidence has come to light that the vast, ice-encrusted oceans of Europa may be... more

pjacobs51
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15 days ago
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60 comments

PLANETS [data and graphics]; Know Your Neighborhood Pantheon

Computergraphic Vistas by Walter Myers - Space Art, Astronomical Art, Astronautical... more

remanns
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18 days ago
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3 comments

What Would Happen if You Ate a Teaspoonful of White Dwarf Star?

“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let’s assume, though, that you’ve spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. “You’d have to get your sample—which would be very hard to carve out—without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma,” Hammergren says. “And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.”

(This type of reaction, by the way, is what triggers a hydrogen bomb.)

Then you’d have to worry about confinement. Freeing the sample from its superdense, high-pressure home and bringing it to Earth’s relatively low-pressure environment would cause it to expand explosively without proper containment. But if it didn’t blow up in your face—or vaporize your face, since the stuff’s temperature ranges between 10,000˚ and 100,000˚F—and you somehow got it to your kitchen table, you’d be hard-pressed to feed yourself: A single teaspoon would weigh in excess of five tons. “You’d pop it into your mouth and it would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions, and burrow a hole toward the center of the Earth,” Hammergren says. “The good news is that it’s not quite dense enough to have a strong enough gravitational field to rip you apart from the inside out.”

It probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble anyway, Hammergren laments. White dwarfs are mostly helium or carbon, so your teaspoonful would taste like a whiff of flavorless helium gas or a lick of coal. But if you’re desperate for a taste of star, you don’t really need to travel 8.6 light-years—your fridge is full of the stuff. Most of the elements that make up our bodies and everything around us were formed in the cores of stars and then belched out into the universe over billions of years. Basically everything you eat was once part of a star. Might we recommend some star fruit?

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-10/what-would-happen-if-i-ate-teaspoonful-white-dwarf-star“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler... more

pjacobs51
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21 days ago
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7 comments

NASA discovers water on the moon!

~y2009m11d13-NASA--discovers-water-on-the-moon

stormchaser4850
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20 days ago
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0 comments

Mississippi Storm History: What happened on this date (November 12)

~y2009m11d13-Mississippi-Storm-History-What-happened-on-this-date-November-12

stormchaser4850
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20 days ago
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0 comments

Heart of the Milky Way Photos From NASA

really amazing composite image of the Milky Way released by NASA. They combined infra... more

Tyrannous
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22 days ago
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8 comments

Vatican Looks to Heavens for Signs of Alien Life

"VATICAN CITY - E.T. phone Rome. Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.

"The questions of life's origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration," said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.

Funes, a Jesuit priest, presented the results Tuesday of a five-day conference that gathered astronomers, physicists, biologists and other experts to discuss the budding field of astrobiology — the study of the origin of life and its existence elsewhere in the cosmos.

Funes said the possibility of alien life raises "many philosophical and theological implications" but added that the gathering was mainly focused on the scientific perspective and how different disciplines can be used to explore the issue."

The Vatican created the "Big Bang Theory" to mimic the story of the Virgin Mary. It is a complete lie, just like Black Holes and Al Gore's cult of Global Warming.

For thousands of years ancient people have been charting the heavens with precision. They always knew the Earth was round from seeing the Earth's shadow on the moon during lunar eclipses, which they knew when were going to happen. They even had accurate dimensions of the Earth from mathematical computations on the angles of the horizon.

The Vatican has one of the biggest observatories in the world. If you think the Church doesn't know science, you are sadly mistaken. They told the people the Earth was flat back then and they're telling us the the Big Bang myth today. What they know and what they tell are two different stories...NASA too.

Those who are excommunicated today, will be vindicated tomorrow. Check out my Electric Universe group or just research the theory and learn from today's excommunicated scientists."VATICAN CITY - E.T. phone Rome. Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for... more

rodstradamus
added this
22 days ago
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Big Bang Theory

In physical cosmology, the Big Bang is the scientific theory of how the universe... more

remanns
added this
27 days ago
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2 comments

Infant neutron star observed for first time

The 12.4 mile-wide object has been cloaked in mystery since it was identified as a... more

copperdragon
added this
27 days ago
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16 comments

Jack White's Third Man Records to release Stephen Hawking/Carl Sagan - featuring Auto-Tune mix on Vinyl

'A Glorious Dawn' is a tribute to fellow astronomer Carl Sagan' Jack White's Third... more

sk8r408
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29 days ago
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10 comments

What is Redshift?

If the lines in the spectrum of the light from a star or galaxy appear at a lower frequency (shifted toward the red) than where they are observed in the spectrum of the Sun, we say this object exhibits 'positive redshift'. The accepted explanation for this effect is that the object must be moving away from us. This interpretation is drawn by analogy with the downward shift in the pitch of a train whistle as it passes through a railroad crossing and then speeds away from us. The question is: Is recessional velocity the only thing that can produce a redshift, as modern astrophysicists presume? It has become clear that the answer to that question is an emphatic NO!

But a high redshift value does not necessarily mean the object is far away. There is another, more important cause of high redshift values.

Halton C. Arp is a professional astronomer who, earlier in his career, was Edwin Hubble's assistant. He has earned the Helen B.Warner prize, the Newcomb Cleveland award and the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award. For years he worked at the Mt. Palomar and Mt. Wilson observatories. While there, he developed his well known catalog of "Peculiar Galaxies" that are misshapen or irregular in appearance.

Arp discovered, by taking photographs through the big telescopes, that many pairs of quasars (quasi-stellar objects) which have extremely high redshift z values (and are therefore thought to be receding from us very rapidly - and thus must be located at a great distance from us) are physically associated with galaxies that have low redshift and are known to be relatively close by. Arp has photographs of many pairs of high redshift quasars that are symmetrically located on either side of what he suggests are their parent, low redshift galaxies. These pairings occur much more often than the probabilities of random placement would allow. Mainstream astrophysicists try to explain away Arp's observations of connected galaxies and quasars as being "illusions" or "coincidences of apparent location". But, the large number of physically associated quasars and low red shift galaxies that he has photographed and cataloged defies that evasion. It simply happens too often

Because of Arp's photos, the assumption that high red shift objects have to be very far away - on which the "Big Bang" theory and all of "accepted cosmology" is based - is proven to be wrong! The Big Bang theory is therefore falsified.If the lines in the spectrum of the light from a star or galaxy appear at a lower... more

rodstradamus
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1 month ago
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The Electric Universe 4

Part 4 of 4 Theory of Electric Universe easily explained in this documentary.

rodstradamus
added this
1 month ago
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0 comments

The Electric Universe 3

Part 3 of 4 Theory of Electric Universe easily explained in this documentary.

rodstradamus
added this
1 month ago
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0 comments

The Electric Universe 2

Part 2 of 4 Theory of Electric Universe easily explained in this documentary.

rodstradamus
added this
1 month ago
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0 comments

The Electric Universe 1

Part 1 of 4 Theory of Electric Universe easily explained in this documentary.

rodstradamus
added this
1 month ago
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0 comments

The Science Cartel vs. Immanuel Velikovsky

"In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky culminated decades of research with a book titled Worlds in Collision that "proposes that many myths and traditions of ancient peoples and cultures are based on actual events." His approach was interdisciplinary, a rarity in the 20th century, taking into account astronomy, physics, chemistry, psychology, ancient history, and comparative mythology.

While recognized as "neither crank nor charlatan," Velikovsky and his ideas were denied a hearing in what same to be known as the "Velikovsky Affair."

Immanuel Velikovsky was too eminent a scholar to be dismissed outright as a kook, and he counted some respected people among his friends. (See The Einstein-Velikovsky Correspondence). Nevertheless, his Catastrophism was rejected outright by a scientific establishment that couldn't stomach an interdisciplinary challenge to its dogmatic Uniformitarianism, even after Velikovsky's predictions about the temperature of Venus and radio activity from Jupiter were proven true.

Say what you will of Velikovskian cosmology, more scientists themselves are questioning whether it is right to dismiss outright celestial events as described in ancient texts, as this article suggests – The Odyssey astronomically accurate? And exciting news just today that the largest planet of our solar system "snared a passing comet in the middle of the last century, eventually releasing it 12 years later," rings a Velikovskian bell – Jupiter had temporary moon for 12 years.

Whatever conclusions one may come to on this matter, it raises interesting questions about the tyrannical conformity of thought that plagues not only the scientific but also the economic and political spheres as well. Are not proponents of the Austrian School of Economics similarly marginalized by the academic cartel, as are advocates the traditional United States non-interventionism by the political cartel? Alternative medicine's long history of suppression by the American Medical Association is also a parallel.

Like Velikovskianism, both Austrianism and Non-interventionism touch on more dimensions of the human experience than do the "mainstream" approaches to economics and foreign policy they oppose. Velikovskianism appeals to the traditional authority of ancient texts; Austrianism appeals to the traditional authority of the discoveries of the School of Salamanca, and Non-interventionism to the traditional authority of the Founders.

Fascinating as the cosmological speculations detailed above are, they are far less convincing than the economic and political ideas mentioned in the last paragraphs. It is nothing less than scandalous that these are denied a hearing."

Rumor has it that Velikovsky's "Worlds in Collision" was the book found on Einstein's nightstand when he died. It was also a #1 best seller until the science mafia assassinated his character (less bloody than regular assassination)."In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky culminated decades of research with a book titled Worlds... more

rodstradamus
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1 month ago
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0 comments

tagged w/ Astronomy

Black holes are cosmic factories for building galaxies, scientists believe

Hypernova Confirmed: Most Violent Object in the Universe

Highest Resolution Image of the Milky Way Ever, 500 Million Megapixels

Jupiter, our Hero and Saturn is his trusty sidekick! |

Jupiter's Moon Europa Might Be Teeming With Fish

PLANETS [data and graphics]; Know Your Neighborhood Pantheon

What Would Happen if You Ate a Teaspoonful of White Dwarf Star?

NASA discovers water on the moon!

Mississippi Storm History: What happened on this date (November 12)

Heart of the Milky Way Photos From NASA

Vatican Looks to Heavens for Signs of Alien Life

Big Bang Theory

Infant neutron star observed for first time

Jack White's Third Man Records to release Stephen Hawking/Carl Sagan - featuring Auto-Tune mix on Vinyl

What is Redshift?

The Electric Universe 4

The Electric Universe 3

The Electric Universe 2

The Electric Universe 1

The Science Cartel vs. Immanuel Velikovsky

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