Stars // Current

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

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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

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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

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Science in Turmoil - Are We Funding Fraud?

"There can be little doubt in the minds of those who are involved in attempting to disseminate research results among the entire scientific community that major problems exist. It is well documented that adopting certain stances will result in an inability to publish in the majority of the so-called high impact academic journals.

There are also well documented cases of people experiencing grave difficulties in their place of work and even, on some occasions, being driven out. Amazingly, there are even cases of attempts being made – some successful – to deny research students their doctorates because their theses contain material which may cause embarrassment for some person with an inflated sense of his/her own importance. Again, more and more academics, certainly in British universities, are coming under increasing pressure to draw funds into their establishments. Note the emphasis is not on good research, or even just research, but rather on attracting more and more money.

Remember though that as one university official told an academic member of staff, “I don’t pay you to think”! With this attitude, what hope is there unless people read books such as Against the Tide and learn from them?

Scientific truth, that is the actual answer to a scientific problem, is of paramount importance. Personal position and advancement on the back of a scientific untruth should never be tolerated and deliberately covering up inconvenient results by pseudo-scientific argument – such as has happened with at least some of Halton Arp’s work for example – should be treated for what it is and the perpetrators dealt with accordingly by the entire scientific community.

Occasionally, blatant examples of scientific fraud become public and are treated with horror by those who read of them – scientists and non-scientific laymen alike. However, is the suppression of scientific results and ideas such as are discussed in the articles included in this book ethically any different? This is a serious question which must be answered individually by each and every scientist. For myself, I see no difference and feel the treatment meted out to such as Halton Arp amounts to nothing less than academic fraud.

Let the public which ultimately pays the bill, know all the facts and judge accordingly!""There can be little doubt in the minds of those who are involved in attempting to... more