Universe: Facts, Secrets and Mysteries

Gliese 581 G: New Planet Discovered 2010

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 06:33:00 +0000

By: John Roach for National Geographic News

Astronomers studying a nearby star say they've found the first potentially habitable planet—likely a rocky place with an atmosphere, temperate regions, and crucially, liquid water, considered vital for life as we know it.

Other extrasolar planets have been called Earthlike, but, astronomer Paul Butler assured, "this is really the first Goldilocks planet"—not too hot, not too cold.

Orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581 about every 37 days, the new planet, named Gliese 581g, is "just the right size and just at the right distance [from its star] to have liquid water on the surface," added Butler, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., during an online press briefing today.

Gliese 581g in Goldilocks Zone

Located some 20 light-years from Earth, Gliese 581 is among the hundred closest stars to us. Already scientists have detected six planets orbiting the red dwarf, making Gliese 581 the hub of the largest known planetary system outside our solar system.

The star has also inspired perhaps the largest number of habitable-planet headlines.

For starters, planet Gliese 581c was announced in 2007 as potentially habitable but later found to orbit too close to the star—making the planet too hot for life.

Another planet, Gliese 581d, is thought to orbit on the cold side of the habitable zone. While Gliese 581d could harbor life, the planet would need a thick atmosphere with a strong greenhouse effect to warm up to the point of habitability.

"They are very close to habitable, but not quite," Steve Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said during the briefing.

"This one is right between the two, in the same system."

Terminator Aliens on Earthlike Planet?

Roughly three times more massive than Earth, the newfound planet is tidally locked to its star, which means that one side is perpetually basked in daylight, the other side constantly dark.

Aliens, if they exist, are most likely to live along the line between shadow and light, a temperate region known as the terminator, the scientists said.

Imagining the view from the terminator, Vogt said, "You basically see this star sitting on the horizon. You see an eternal sunrise or sunset, depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist."

Planet Discovery Suggests Billions More

The Gliese 581g discovery is based on 11 years of observations, largely via the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The data allowed scientists to detect the wobble in a star's orbit caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet—a technique called radial velocity.

Given the relative ease of finding this planet, 10 to 20 percent of all stars may have potentially habitable planets, Vogt said in a press release.

"There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy."

The Gliese 581g habitable-planet findings are to be reported in a future issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Source: National Geographic
llustration courtesy Lynette Cook

Ten Things You Don’t Know About the Sun

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:02:00 +0000

Quick! What's the brightest star in the sky?

If you said Sirius, then give yourself a ~~blue~~ gold star. But I'm sorry to say: Bzzzzt. You're wrong. Your problem is you know too much astronomy; Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky. The correct answer is, duh, the Sun.

The Sun is a star just like all the others in the sky, more or less, but it just so happens to be substantially closer. The funny thing is, it's so close that it's incredibly bright and we can't even look at it. Well, we can, but it hurts. And the fact that it's there every day (Seattlites: ignore that part) and we can't even glance at it means we take it for granted. It's a vast, mighty, seething cauldron of energy, and even though solar astronomers have studied it for centuries, there's a lot about the Sun that's still not understand. And if they don't get it, then I'm pretty sure that you're unaware of one or two things about it too. I'm fuzzy on one or two (or a thousand) things about it myself.

So here's my list of stuff you may not grok about our nearest star. It's the fourth in my Ten Things You Don't Know series (the others are black holes, the Milky Way, and the Earth). How many didn't you know? I'll be honest: before I wrote my book -- which has a whole chapter about our dangerous star -- I didn't know some of these things about the Sun. But I ain't sayin' which ones.

1) You won't go blind looking at it. Probably.

You've heard this from your mother, your neighbor, and pretty much everyone else: don't look at the Sun or you'll go blind! Well, that's not strictly true. To be clear: no one has ever been permanently and totally blinded by looking at the Sun (despite a recent 30 Rock episode). You can hurt your eyes, but the damage is usually not total, and a lot of it heals (though not always completely).

Usually, damage to the eyes from looking at the Sun happens during a total solar eclipse. The eclipse itself doesn't hurt you -- after all, the point of the eclipse is that the Sun is covered by the Moon! -- but the damage happens in the moments right after the eclipse. While the Sun is blocked, your pupil dilates to let in more light, so when the first sliver of the brilliant Sun reappears your eye is flooded with light. This can cause damage to your retina called solar retinopathy. It's actually not heat damage, but photochemical; the flood of UV light actually alters the chemistry of your cells, damaging them.

In general, the damage is minor and can heal well, though there can be some permanent though relatively minor effects (in other words, you still shouldn't stare at the Sun). Usually the damage is worse in children because their lenses let in more blue light (the lens yellows with age, acting as a natural filter for UV light).

So you won't go permanently and totally blind from looking at the Sun... unless you do it looking through binoculars or a telescope. But then in those cases there are Darwin Awards to consider.

Incidentally, using sunglasses to look at the Sun can actually make things worse, since they block visible light and your pupil dilates to compensate. If you want to observe the Sun -- and I recommend it, because it's fascinating and utterly beautiful -- then read Mr Eclipse's guide to safe solar viewing. It's a site for sore eyes.

2) The Sun is not an average star.

If I had a nickel for every time I have heard someone say or write that the Sun is an average star... well, I'd have a lot of nickels. But just because someone says something a lot doesn't mean it's right.

With a few exceptions, stars come in pretty much one shape (round), but lots of sizes. Also different temperatures, color, energy output, and so on. All of these characteristics are due to one overriding quality: mass. The mass of a star determines a whole lot about its life: how big it is, what color it is, how much energy it emits, and even how long it will live. Low mass stars (say, less than half the Sun's mass) are cool, red, dim, and live a long time. High mass stars (more than about 10-20 times the Sun's mass) are blue, incredibly luminous, and die after a few million years.

Where does the Sun fit on that scale?

As with most things in nature, the number of objects depends on the size. There are very few high mass stars, more intermediate mass stars, and gazillions of low mass stars. Roughly 10% of all stars by number in the Milky Way Galaxy are like the Sun, which means that very few are more massive. Even being conservative, I'd say that the Sun is more massive than 80% of the stars in the Galaxy. That's hardly average!

Now, if you take the lowest mass star and the highest mass star and average them, then yeah, the Sun looks a bit feeble (it's way down toward the low mass end). But that's unfair, because the sheer number of low mass stars drops that average considerably. The picture you usually see is like the one above on the left: the Sun compared to some ginormous star like Aldebaran, a red giant. But those stars are rare! Red dwarfs outnumber more massive stars 5:1 or better, and brown dwarfs may be even more common. So the picture on the right is more fair.

Pretty much no matter how you slice it, the Sun is a powerhouse, way way bigger, brighter, hotter, and more impressive than most of the stars in the sky.

Which brings up the question, how does it keep this up?

3) The Sun converts matter into energy.

OK, so the Sun is pretty bright. Ever wonder why?

It's because of that whole E = mc² thing. Seriously. The Sun is pretty big; at 1.4 million kilometers across it has a million times the volume of the Earth! That means that at its core, at the very center of the Sun, the pressure and temperature are ridiculously high (340 billion atmospheres and 16 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit)); so high that hydrogen can undergo nuclear fusion and turn into helium.

That's how a hydrogen bomb works! When H is turned into He, some of the matter (the m in the equation) is converted into energy (the E). Thing is, that pesky c in the equation is the speed of light, which all on its own is fast enough, but here we're squaring it too, making it a seriously ridiculous number (about 10¹¹ km²/sec² if you're keeping track at home). So a little tiny piece of matter converts into a vastly powerful and scary amount of energy.

We know how much energy the Sun emits (4 x 10²⁶ Joules per second; again, I hope you're keeping notes), and so we can use Einstein's equation to calculate that, to power the Sun, it must convert 5 million tons of matter into energy every frakking second. That's roughly the mass of seven fully loaded oil supertankers, to give you an idea of the kind of scale we're talking here.

Is your mind boggled yet? Then think on this: knowing the efficiency of hydrogen fusion, that means that 700 million tons of hydrogen are converted into 695 million tons of helium every second of every day of the billions-of-years lifespan of the Sun.

Egads.

That sounds like the Sun will run out of hydrogen quickly, but remember, the Sun is big. 5 million tons is just 0.00000000000000000025% of the Sun's mass, so we're safe for a few billion years.

If you want to hear more about this, I talked about it in detail in the second episode of my doomed video series Q & BA:

As a comparison, the total nuclear weapon arsenal on Earth is about 20,000 bombs. Assume each has a yield of one megaton (which is certainly an overestimate). How does the Sun compare to this mighty cache of weapons?

It emits the energy equivalent of 5,000,000 times the total yield of the entire Earth's nuclear weaponry stash. Every second. And that's a conservative estimate. All that, just 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) away.

Sleep tight.

4) It would be invisible to the naked eye 60 light years away.

For all the Sun's sound and fury -- and despite the point I make that it's way above average for a star -- it's incredible how quickly it would fade to invisibility if we were to move away from it. For a normal person the faintest star you can see has a magnitude of about 6, where magnitudes are a logarithmic scale with higher numbers for fainter objects; the full Moon has a mag of about -13, Venus is around -4, the bright star Vega about 0, and Polaris is about 2.

Of course, the farther away an object, the fainter it gets. It turns out that the Sun fades to 6th mag at a distance of roughly 60 light years. Now, that's a long way by human standards -- 600 trillion kilometers, or 360 trillion miles -- but on the galactic scale that's still breathing down our necks; the Milky Way is 100,000 light years or one quintillion kilometers across. That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers. A lot. In the illustration above of the Milky Way, 60 lights years is less than half a pixel. The galaxy is huge.

When you go outside at night and look at the stars, almost all the stars you see are within 100 light years from us, and only a handful of the extreme brightest ones can be seen from farther away. If you were to pluck the Sun from the solar system and plop it down in some random location in our Galaxy, there's a better than 99.99999% chance it would be invisible to the naked eye.

5) The Sun is not yellow.

This one causes a lot of confusion. Let me be clear: the Sun emits light at all different colors; red through violet. The amount it puts out at different colors is different, though. In fact, it emits most strongly in the blue-green part of the spectrum (around 480 nanometers)... but it doesn't look green because our eye (with help from the brain) combines all those different colors.

Technically, the Sun is white. This is easy to show: a piece of paper held up to sunlight appears white, as do snow and clouds. If the Sun were yellow, those would look yellow.

However, a lot of people perceive the Sun as yellow. There has been quite a bit of research into this (and never-ending discussions), but I don't think it has yet been fully understood why that is. Do people compare it to the blue sky? Are they used to seeing it lower in the sky (it hurts to look at it when it's up high) when atmospheric effects make it look yellow/red/orange? Hard to say.

But it's white. So there.

6) It solved a major problem in physics... and then created another one.

The idea that stars use nuclear fusion to generate energy is credited to Hans Bethe, who thought of it in the 1930s. In the 1950s, an incredible paper came out describing the detailed nuclear reactions going on in the cores of stars (I read it as an undergrad astronomy major a long time ago, and it's actually pretty cool).

The physics involved made a prediction: the Sun should be emitting neutrinos, energetic subatomic particles that are a severe pain in the neck to detect. The first solar neutrinos were detected in the 1960s, which was very cool. But there was a problem: only 1/3 of the predicted neutrinos were found.

This was no small thing; the very nature of what we understood about quantum mechanics and particle physics was threatened by this finding! The missing neutrino problem, as it was called, was considered one of the most outstanding mysteries in astronomy at the time. Of course, every crank and crackpot on the planet came along and said they had the solution to the missing neutrino problem, usually told to them by aliens or the ghost of Einstein.

Finally, though, the problem was solved. Through real science. Duh. The detectors astronomers had used to look for neutrinos were only sensitive to one kind of neutrino, the kind the Sun emitted. There are actually three kinds, so if, somehow, neutrinos could change their type as they flew from the Sun to here we'd only expect to see 1/3 the predicted number (2/3 would change to the kind we couldn't detect). If that were true, then statistically seeing 1/3 the total would make sense. But then the Canadian Sudbury Neutrino Observatory came online (pictured above), one that could measure the effects of all three neutrino flavors. When the results were combined and extrapolated, it was seen that the number of neutrinos coming from the Sun was just as predicted. Yay!

However, there remained a problem: the only way neutrinos can change their flavor is if they have mass. Only a tiny amount, but it's still some, and The Standard Model (yes, capitalize it when you use it!) of particle physics said they shouldn't have any mass at all. The Standard Model is, therefore, wrong. Or more properly, incomplete. The SM does pretty well for lots of other particles, but neutrinos are still something of a mystery; they're still difficult to detect and difficult to study. Someday we'll have this more under control, but for now we can be happy that the Sun, at least, is behaving as expected.

7) The Sun can blow out satellites and even cause blackouts on Earth.

The Sun may look steady and peaceful, but every now and then it gets a bee in its bonnet, and gets seriously ticked.

The Sun's magnetic field changes over time, with a 22 year cycle. At the start of the cycle the magnetic field is very weak, and grows in strength. About 5.5 years later (it varies) it reaches its peak, then fades again. It dips to zero, then strengthens again, but this time the polarity is reversed, with north becoming south and vice-versa (note the Sun doesn't physically flip over, just the polarity of the field). You can think of it as a double 11 year cycle if you'd like.

At any time, the magnetic field of the Sun is fiendishly complex, but near the peak of the magnetic cycle it gets very strong, too. It can get tangled up near the surface, like a sack full of bed springs, and store a huge amount of energy. If something happens -- a line gets crossed, for example -- that energy can be released. It can cause a solar flare, a massive explosion of matter and energy from the Sun's surface, or a coronal mass ejection (or CME), a vastly larger eruption of material. A CME can slam us with high-energy subatomic particles, and a good flare can send high-energy gamma rays our way as well, a double-whammy of nastiness.

Either of these can fry a satellite. They generate massive amounts of currents in the materials making up satellites, which can arc and blow out circuits. Most satellites can withstand a minor onslaught, but quite a few have been lost in bigger events.

We can be affected down here on Earth's surface, too. The Earth's magnetic field gets rung like a bell when slammed by a CME, which can generate vast currents under the Earth's surface. These geomagnetically induced currents, or GICs, can dump a lot of extra current into the power grid, causing widespread blackouts.

And this is not just a guess: in March 1989, just such a GIC blacked out Quebec, causing millions of dollars in damage. The picture above shows a transformer that was totally destroyed in the 1989 solar eruption. Other events like that are not hard to dig up.

The problem now is that the North American grid is carrying so much current that it's almost at full capacity, like a pipe full of water. Any extra current and down it goes... and the Sun is gearing up for the next magnetic maximum. The last one, in 2003, was a record breaker, with huge flares and CMEs. Will it happen again?

And when? Probably not when you think...

8) The peak of solar activity is not at the same time as the magnetic field peak.

You would think that all that violent activity would peak at the same time as the magnetic field peak. But it's a little more complicated than that.

The Sun's field actually peaks twice; there is a first peak which then declines over about a year, then a slight resurgence for about a year, then a decline which leads down to the minimum -- it looks like a double-humped camel's back (technically, a Bactrian camel, if a zoologist happens to be reading this). The peak of flare and CME activity is actually associated with that second peak, with more and more violent solar explosions occurring then. This last occurred in November 2003, when the Sun went nuts, blasting out flare after flare in a series that stunned astronomers (I attended a special meeting for solar astronomers about this event, and they were all aghast at what the Sun had done). The image above (in false color) shows one flare that happened on November 4, 2003, and you can see it was quite a bruiser.

The next peak in the solar magnetic field should occur sometime in 2012 or so. As you can imagine, all the Mayan prophecy goofballs are making a lot of hay with that. But the actual peak in activity won't be until 2013 or 2014! So their end-of-the-world scenarios will have to be delayed a bit... not that this will stop them.

The last peak was a real wowser, but no one knows what will happen this time. The minimum lasted much longer than usual -- we're still in it -- and solar physicists aren't sure if that means we'll have a weaker or stronger than normal cycle. This is an incredibly complex subject, and the only way we'll know what happens for sure is to wait.

Sometimes, the best teacher in science is patience.

9) It's getting hotter.

The Sun is fusing hydrogen into helium in its core. It doesn't have enough mass to squeeze the helium enough to fuse it (it takes far higher pressure and temperature to fuse helium into carbon), so that helium builds up in the core, like ash in a fireplace. As more of it piles up, its own gravity squeezes it. When you compress a gas it heats up, and that helium is basically just a gas, though a very hot and high-density one. So for billions of years, as the very center of the Sun has had more and more helium pile up, it's been getting hotter.

That extra heat works its way out from the center and eventually out through the surface. So, over time, the Sun itself, even its surface, is getting hotter. A hotter star is brighter... which means the Sun is getting brighter, too. In fact, it's about 40% brighter now than it was when nuclear fusion first switched on 4.5 billion years ago.

And it's still getting hotter now. That's bad. It's been calculated that if the Earth's average temperature were to increase by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, a runaway greenhouse effect would be triggered... and the Earth is being heated by the ever-hotter Sun. It turns out this magic moment will happen in about 1.1 billion years. At that time, the Earth will become a little too warm for comfort; the ice caps will melt, and Antarctica will be a pretty good vacation spot.

But only for a little while. 2.4 billion years later (3.5 billion years from now) the Sun will be so hot (about 40% brighter than it is today) that the Earth's temperature will rise enough to evaporate all the oceans!

That will, to use a scientific term, suck.

But (he says, chuckling in an evil fashion), it gets worse. Oh yes, far worse.

10) The Sun has 6.3 billion more years to live.

Right now, the Sun is 4.55 or so billion years old. It's been getting hotter all that time, but in general, from day to day, it's been a stable star shining steadily.

In 6.3 billions years, that'll all change.

At some point, there won't be any more hydrogen in the Sun's core to fuse. All that will be left is helium, contracting (about 30 meters per year, which is not a whole lot, but we're talking millions of years here) and getting hotter. Eventually, the core will heat up enough that hydrogen will fuse in a thin shell surrounding the core. This will add even more heat to the Sun, and what happens then is the outer part of the Sun will balloon outward (because hot gas expands). Over about 700 million years, the Sun will expand from about 1.5 times its current size to about 2.3 times.

After that time, the helium core gets so compressed under its own weight it becomes degenerate, a bizarre quantum mechanical state that is complicated and weird and you probably don't need details here. But when this happens it gets even hotter, the outer layers of the Sun swell even more, and it'll bloat out to an awesome 160 million kilometers in diameter, about 100 to 150 times its current size! Weirdly, that will add so much surface area to the Sun that it will actually get cooler; the average amount of heat per square centimeter of its surface will drop... but it will have a lot more square centimeters so it'll be brighter. Cooler stars are red, and the Sun will be huge, so it will then be a red giant.

After that, things get complicated. It will go through several periods of contraction and re-expansion. Eventually it will have some serious paroxysms which will eject over half the mass of the Sun into space. This exposes the ultra-dense blindingly bright core of the Sun. There won't be any more fusion; all the helium will be used up, and all that will be left is an Earth-sized ball of matter with about half the Sun's mass, first white hot, but then cooling over billions and hundreds of billions of years, ending up a cold black dwarf, invisible and quite thoroughly dead.

And what of the Earth? It's possible the Earth will be swallowed by the Sun when it becomes a red giant in 7 billion years, but it's also possible we'll be too far away to get eaten by our star. Either way, though, the Earth will be fried, blasted, bombarded by searing solar matter... and its surface heated well beyond the melting point of rock.

In other words, ouch. Unless we move the Earth far enough out from the Sun (like, billions of kilometers), then we'll have to find some better real estate somewhere else in the Milky Way. This one will have a little bit too much lava for my taste.

The actual series of events leading up to all this is significantly more detailed and interesting; if you want more, than read Chapter 7 of my book, Death from the Skies! and you can follow along as the Sun dies over the next 7.765 billion years. It's actually an incredibly fascinating story, and was one of my favorite chapters to write.

Conclusion:

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Oh, you want more? OK. It's easy to take the Sun for granted, but even though it's 280,000 times closer than the next nearest star we know of, it's loaded with mysteries. I've only listed a few, and I had to cull easily ten more from this list. Even to professionals in the field, the Sun is laden with questions, and the answers are still being sought.

Further reading:

If you want to learn more about the Sun, here are a few places to check out:

Big Bear Solar Observatory

SOHO, the Solar Heliospheric Observatory, a multi-nation mission which has been studying the Sun for more than thirteen years! It has great imagery and fantastic videos.

The Nine Planets has all kinds of info on the Sun and planets and is one of my favorite sites.

Image Credits:

Solar eclipse: luc_viatour's Flickr stream

Sun comparison: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss and Wikipedia.

Neutrino detector: Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

Quebec transformer: NASA.

Solar flare: SOHO, NASA, and the ESA.

Desert photo: bachmont's Flickr photostream.

Red giant sun illustration: James Gitlin/STScI

Spectacular Green Flash image: Mike Baird's Flickr photostream.

Source : Discover Magazine.com

The Sun - Introduction
The Sun is a star. It is a rather ordinary star - not particularly big or small, not particularly young or old. It is the source of heat which sustains life on Earth, and controls our climate and weather. It is the closest star to Earth, and the most closely studied.

The Sun
The light from the Sun heats our world and makes life possible. The Sun is also an active star that displays sunspots, solar flares, erupting prominences, and coronal mass ejections. These phenomena impact our near-Earth space environment and determine our "space weather."

Sun
The Sun is the most prominent feature in our solar system. It is the largest object and contains approximately 98% of the total solar system mass. One hundred and nine Earths would be required to fit across the Sun's disk, and its interior could hold over 1.3 million Earths.

Sun - Overiew
The Sun, a huge sphere of mostly ionized gas, supports life on Earth. It powers photosynthesis in green plants, and is ultimately the source of all food and fossil fuel. The connection and interactions between the Sun and Earth drive the seasons, ocean currents, weather, and climate.

Sun, The Solar System's Only Star
The realisation that the Sun is a star has done wonders for astronomy. By studying it, the closest star, scientists have learned about all stars. Conversely, by studying the stars, in all their variety we have learned about the past and future of our Sun.

New Exoplanet Orbits 'Backwards'

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 03:21:00 +0000

By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News

Astronomers have discovered the first planet that orbits in the opposite direction to the spin of its star.

Planets form out of the same swirling gas cloud that creates a star, so they are expected to orbit in the same direction that the star rotates.
The new planet is thought to have been flung into its "retrograde" orbit by a close encounter with either another planet or with a passing star.

The work has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal for publication.

Co-author Coel Hellier, from Keele University in Staffordshire, UK, said planets with retrograde orbits were thought to be rare.

"With everything [in the star system] swirling around the same way and the star spinning the same way, you have to do quite a lot to it to make it go in the opposite direction," he told BBC News.

The direction of orbit is known for roughly a dozen exoplanets (planets outside our solar system). This is the only example with a retrograde orbit. All others are prograde; they orbit in the same direction as the spin of their star.

Close Encounters

Professor Hellier said a near-collision was probably responsible for this planet's unusual orbit.

"If you have a near-collision, then you'll have a large gravitational slingshot from that interaction," he explained.

"This is the likeliest explanation. But it might be possible you can do it by gradually perturbing the orbit through the influence of a second planet. So far, we haven't found any evidence of a second planet there."

The new object has been named WASP-17b. It is the 17th exoplanet to have been discovered by the Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) consortium of UK universities.

The gas giant is about twice the size of Jupiter, but has about half the mass. This bloatedness might also be rooted in the close encounter that changed the planet's direction.

WASP-17b was detected using an array of cameras set up to monitor hundreds of thousands of stars.

Astronomers were searching for small dips in light from these stars that occur when a planet passes in front of them. When this happens, the planets are said to transit their parent star.

A team from Geneva Observatory in Switzerland then looked for spectral signs that the star was wobbling due to gravitational tugs from an orbiting planet.

"If you look at how the spectrum of the star changes when the planet transits across it, you can work out which way the planet is travelling," Professor Hellier added.

"That allows you to prove that it's in a retrograde orbit."

The size of the dip in light from the star during the transit allowed astronomers to work out the planet's radius.

To work out how massive it was, they recorded the motion of the star as it was tugged on by the orbiting planet.

Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Source : BBC News

Impact Mark on Jupiter, 19th July 2009

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:07:00 +0000

Preliminary image showing a black mark in Jupiter's South Polar Region (SPR) which is almost certainly the result of a large impact - either an asteroid or comet - similar to the Shoemaker-Levy impacts in 1994.

Image captured by Anthony Wesley on 19th July 2009 at 1554UTC from Murrumbateman Australia

Note to Media: Images from this page may be used for editorial use only in news stories and publications provided correct attribution is retained.

Date and Time of Report

Dark impact mark first noted at approximately 1330UTC on 19th July 2009 from my home observatory just outside Murrumbateman NSW Australia.

Inspection of earlier images shows the impact visible on the planets limb at 1411UTC.

Equipment and Contact Details

Contact info:
Anthony Wesley
awesley@smartnetworks.com.au
awesley@acquerra.com.au
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro
Picture of Anthony and his 14.5 inch scope

Scope: Homebrew GEM mounted Newtonian using a 14.5" Royce conical mirror
(link to images removed until the slashdot tsumani retreats)

Mount: Losmandy Titan
Optics:
- 14.5" f/5 Royce conical primary
- 1/30 wave Antares Optics secondary
- Televue 5x powermate , working at 7.7x

Camera: Point Grey Research Dragonfly2 mono camera, ICX424al
Filters: Astrodon I-Series RGB
Capture details: 60 seconds in each filter @ 47fps.
Capture software: Coriander
Operating System: Linux (Fedora 10 x86)

Processing software: Ninox for crop and presort
Registax for alignment and stacking
Astra Image for deconvolution and RGB align
The Gimp for cleanup and captioning.

Observation Report

Update (20th July 1100UT) Glenn Orton from JPL has imaged this site using the NASA Infrared Telescope on Hawaii and confirms that it is an impact site and not a localised weather event.

I started this imaging session on Jupiter at approximately 11pm local time (1300UTC). The weather prediction was not promising, clear skies but a strong jetstream overhead according to the Bureau of Met. The temperature was also unusually high for this time of year (winter), also a bad sign.

The scope in use was my new 14.5" newtonian, in use now for a few weeks and so far returning excellent images.

I was pleasantly surprised to find reasonable imaging conditions and so I decided to continue recording data until maybe 1am local time. By about midnight (12:10 am) the seeing had deteriorated and I was ready to quit. Indeed I had hovered the mouse over the exit button on my capture application (Coriander for Linux) and then changed my mind and decided instead to simply take a break for 30 minutes and then check back to see if the conditions had improved. It was a very near thing.

When I came back to the scope at about 12:40am I noticed a dark spot rotating into view in Jupiter's south polar region started to get curious. When first seen close to the limb (and in poor conditions) it was only a vaguely dark spot, I thouht likely to be just a normal dark polar storm. However as it rotated further into view, and the conditions improved I suddenly realized that it wasn't just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot.

My next thought was that it must be either a dark moon (like Callisto) or a moon shadow, but it was in the wrong place and the wrong size. Also I'd noticed it was moving too slow to be a moon or shadow. As far as I could see it was rotating in sync with a nearby white oval storm that I was very familiar with - this could only mean that the back feature was at the cloud level and not a projected shadow from a moon. I started to get excited.

It took another 15 minutes to really believe that I was seeing something new - I'd imaged that exact region only 2 days earlier and checking back to that image showed no sign of any anomalous black spot.

Now I was caught between a rock and a hard place - I wanted to keep imaging but also I was aware of the importance of alerting others to this possible new event. Could it actually be an impact mark on Jupiter? I had no real idea, and the odds on that happening were so small as to be laughable, but I was really struggling to see any other possibility given the location of the mark. If it really was an impact mark then I had to start telling people, and quickly. In the end I imaged for another 30 minutes only because the conditions were slowly improving and each capture was giving a slightly better image than the last.

Eventually I stopped imaging and went up to the house to start emailing people, with this image above processed as quick and dirty as possible just to have something to show.

More images will come along from me and many other people in the next few days.

*NOTE* Priority is being given to processing and uploading images as fast as possible, so the image quality is no necessarily as good as it might be. When time permits these images will be replaced by higher quality versions. Anthony

More Images:

Closeup of this region in green light only, from reprocessed data (155537UTC). 3 small dark spots can be seen.

Same closeup as previous (155537UTC) , now in colour. 3 small dark spots can be seen in addition to the main one, possibly more. Still looking for better quality raw data from other imaging runs around this time.

Earlier image showing the impact zone in slightly better seeing, but unfortunately the site itself is not as well resolved due to the viewing angle.

This is a very early image of the dark spot, red channel data only. It's just visible on the limb to the upper right. I haven't seen any images showing this impact site on the previous rotation so it's possible that this is the earliest recorded image of the event. Of course, it wasn't visible to me at the time I was recording the data, and after this sequence was captured I took a 30 minute break away from the scope... When I came back I noticed the dark spot.

A later image in reasonable seeing.

One of the last images from this session, this image has been more carefully processed to avoid artifacts by using 3x upsampling on the data before alignment and stacking.

Source : Jupiter.Samba.org

Top 10 Apollo Hoax Theories

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:45:00 +0000

By Robert Myers and Robert Pearlman

In the early days of the Cold War, three men claim they were chosen by a powerful new government agency to undertake a historically perilous journey. They claim this well-funded operation was staffed with the best scientists and engineers using technology pioneered by the Nazis, and they created the most powerful machine ever built.

In July of 1969, they claim, they climbed aboard an enormous rocket assembled in a Florida swamp, and were sent hurtling at incredible speeds into the sky … all the way to the Moon! Two of them even claim they landed on the Moon, got out, and walked around!

And what prize did they bring back from this momentous journey? Well … they have a bunch of black and white photos of unidentifiable persons in bulky white spacemen costumes in a field of gravel (but curiously without any stars in the black sky) -- and several bags of gray, dusty rocks.

Put that way, the story of the Apollo program can sound pretty far-fetched.

But why should we believe the stories? What evidence is there, really, that the Apollo program landed men on the Moon and brought them back?

Phil Plait, an astronomer at Sonoma University in California, and the Web master of BadAstronomy.com, has his reasons.

If I were trying to fake this, I would put stars in the image," he said referring to the complaint made by hoax proponents that the Apollo photos lack stars. If this had been an oversight, he said, it's an amazingly stupid thing to have forgotten, considering the scope of the "hoax."

Not to mention that with the way cameras work, photographing stars under those conditions would have been nearly impossible.

"If you do know about physics and photographs, you can see these arguments are all ridiculous," Plait said.

So why do people even give an idea like this a second thought?

"I'm not exactly sure," said Plait, "Michael Shermer is a renowned skeptic… and he has a list of reasons (such as) we have an innate thing inside of our brain, we have a need to believe."

"But one thing he leaves off, is that some of these things are just believable. If you don't know much physics, these arguments might sound convincing."

Besides, Plait says the political realities of the time would have made a fraud of that scale almost impossible to pull off.

"We went to the moon to beat the Soviets. If the Soviets had suspected that we faked these missions in any way, they would have been screaming at the top of their lungs."

Number 10: Apollo Hoax Theories: Fluttering Flag

The Claim: The American flag appears to wave in the lunar wind.

The Science: If you look closely, you will notice the flag's edges are pulled taut. This effect, which was done purposely as to not allow the flag to just hang flat, it was created by inserting a stiff wire into the fabric. The "flutter" was created as the astronauts worked to erect the flag. As the wire was adjusted, "Old Glory" appeared to wave.

Number 9: Apollo Hoax Theories: Glow-in-the-Dark Astronauts

The Claim: If the astronauts had left the safety of the Van Allen Belt the radiation would have killed them.

The Science: The Van Allen Belts are created by Earth's magnetic field, and protect the planet from dangerous solar radiation. The belts collects this radiation, and traps it in a layer surrounding the Earth. But unless you deliberately caused your spaceship to hover within this layer, for many hours or days, the radiation exposure is well below dangerous levels. The Apollo astronauts passed through the Belts in less than four hours total for the trip. "It's not much more serious than getting a chest x-ray," said Plait. Outside the belt, the radiation drops to low levels that are only dangerous over extremely long periods of time.

Number 8: Apollo Hoax Theories: The Shadow Knows

The Claim: Multiple-angle shadows in the Moon photos prove there was more than one source of light, like a large studio lamp.

The Science: The astronauts were taking their photos on a hilly, brightly-lit landscape while the Sun was close to the horizon. Imagine taking a photograph of someone on a rolling, uneven field of snow during a full, low-hanging Moon. The contours of the ground would produce shadows of many different lengths.

Number 7: Apollo Hoax Theories: Fried Film

The Claim: In the Sun, the Moon's temperature is toasty 280 degrees F. The film (among other things) would have melted.

The Science: No one was leaving bare film out on the hot lunar surface. All material was contained in protective canisters. In addition, at the time the Apollo missions landed, they were either at lunar dawn or dusk. As a result, the temperature was more easily manageable.

Number 6: Apollo Hoax Theories: Liquid Water on the Moon

The Claim: To leave a footprint requires moisture in the soil, doesn't it?

The Science: Not always. If you take some dry fine-grained dust such as talcum powder and dump it out, it's easy to make tracks in it that hold their shape. The particles hold their positions due to the friction between them.

Number 5: Apollo Hoax Theories: Death by Meteor

The Claim: Space is filled with super-fast micro meteors that would punch through the ship and kill the astronauts.

The Science: Space is really amazingly big. While there are indeed an uncountable number of tiny pieces of debris travelling through the Solar System at speeds in the neighborhood of 120,000MPH, the volume of space keeps the density low. The chance of any given cubic yard of space having a micro-meteor passing through it is incredibly close to zero. Additionally, the astronauts suits included a layer of kevlar to protect them from any tiny fragment they might encounter.

Number 4: Apollo Hoax Theories: No Crater at Landing Site

The Claim: When the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) landed, its powerful engine didn't burrow a deep crater in the "dusty surface."

The Science: Beneath the layer of dust, the Moon is made of fairly densely-packed rock. What dust and loose dirt there was though, was "kicked up" as referenced by the astronauts and captured in their landing films.

Number 3: Apollo Hoax Theories: Phantom Cameraman

The Claim: How come in that one video of the LEM leaving the surface, the camera follows it up into the sky? Who was running that camera?

The Science: The camera was controlled remotely from Earth.

Number 2: Apollo Hoax Theories: Big Rover

The Claim: There's no way that big moon buggy they were driving could have fit into that little landing module!

The Science: The rover was very cleverly constructed to be made out of very light materials, and designed to fold up to about the size of a large suitcase.

Number 1: Apollo Hoax Theories: Its Full of Stars!

The Claim: Space is littered with little points of lights (stars). Why then are they missing from the photographs?

The Science: If you've ever taken a photograph outside at night, you'll notice that faint distant objects don't show up. That's not because the air blocks them -- it's because the brightness of the nearby objects washes out the film. In fact if you were standing on the day side of the Moon, you'd have to somehow block the landscape out in order for your eyes to adapt enough to pick out the stars.

Source : Space.com

The Global Warming Myth - Your 2008 Year-in-Review

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:57:00 +0000

By Michael Duvinak

The global warming hoax has proved to be, if nothing else, a topic that should be openly debated instead of being considered off-limits by the climate change activists. Over the last year, I’ve compiled well over 1500 news articles that portray global warming an an inexact science at best and its proponents as being tax-seeking and lifestyle-controlling and, all the while, sometimes even displaying their own hypocrisy and arrogance. Enjoy the year-in-review.

So what about the weather? I know specific weather events do not make climate, even though global warming alarmists do use this to their advantage when it comes to floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados and the like (see Hoaxers Using Weather Inaccurately to Promote Cause). Let’s take a look back at some weather events from the last year. But before we do that, have a look at this Reuters article that claimed 2008 would be in the top 10 warmest years: 2008 to be in top 10 warmest years say forecasters and, conversely, an article that says just the opposite: Scientists Expect a Cooler 2008. And, by year’s end, Australia had the coldest August in 35 years, A town in South Africa had the coldest September night - ever, Denver set two record lows, Charlotte had the coldest November in 32 years and record cold hit Montana. And that’s just from the last page of my cold weather posts. How about more weather posts?

Latest Storm Gives Kansas Foot of Snow

Big Winter Storm Pummels Northeast

2007 One of Coldest Years in Decades, and yet the alarmists call it one of the warmest.

Record Snowfall in Denver on Christmas, and Denver had record cold this December. Remarkable!

New Hampshire Breaks 131 Year-Old December Snow Record. I think I’m starting to see a trend.

Snow in Florida? Would I Kid You? Weather does not equate to climate, folks.

Southern Farmers Fret As Cold Sets In But it certainly helps when the weather is freezing everywhere.

Snow Flurries Reported in Daytona Beach

California Mountains Under 5 Feet of Snow

A First! Snow Falls in Baghdad

Up To A Foot of Snow in Boston

China Issues Red Alert for Snowstorms

Jerusalem blanketed with heavy snow

January Cooler than Average

Madison Wisconsin to have Snowiest Winter on Record

Winter carnival activities canceled (too much snow!!)

Cool Summer in Sydney

Record Snow Buries Columbus

Quebec children get holiday as snow piles on roofs

Technically It’s Spring, But Huge Snowstorm Coming

It’s a record year for snowfall

March 52nd Coolest on Record

Cold Temperatures Freeze Gardening

Storm Sets More Records as Mercury Plunges to Eight Below

Idaho Extends Ski Season into May

Anchorage digs out after record snowfall

May blizzard shuts down parts of South Dakota

April Coolest in 11 Years

Memorial Day: Time for Hot Dogs, BBQ and … Snow?

One of the Coolest U.S. Springs on Record

Charlotte Hits 123 Year Low Temperature

Iowans Won’t Have Sweet Corn for Fourth (spring too cold and wet!)

Alaska Experiences Normal Summer

Chicago Experiences Coolest Decade of Summers…Since 1930

Patchy Frost Forecast for Minnesota, Wisconsin This Weekend (in August)

More Frost Warnings: Oregon and California (in August)

New Zealand Temperatures 0.2 Degrees Cooler in August

Australia Coldest August in 35 Years

August Temperatures Dip Slightly

2008 Coolest in Five Years

Durban, South Africa Experiences Coldest September Night…Ever

Ireland Experiences Coldest September in 14 Years

Wyoming in for Winter Storm - in Early Autumn

And speaking of weather, let’s not forget the Gore Effect. It seemed in 2008 that every time some big global warming event took place, extreme weather followed:

Protesters Could Use Some Global Warming

Gore Brings Cold Temperatures to Cambridge

Brrrrrr! Too Cold for Global Warming Relay

Students Brave Cold on Bikes to Raise Climate Change Awareness

Global Warming Protestors Brave Unseasonable Cold

Gore Effect as Britain Debates Global Warming Bill

Gore Effect in Italy

And, of course, we learned about all of the things that global warming causes over the last year:

Crime

Surge in fatal shark attacks

Water-Borne Disease

Birds Laying Eggs Early

Tomato Salmonella Outbreak

Rain and More Rain

Collapse of Dublin’s Bridge

Whale Blubber Loss

Shellfish Invasion

Australian Cooling

Growing Glaciers (you can’t make this stuff up, folks!)

Increased Insurance Rates

High Gas Prices

Penguin Decline

Killing Amphibians (or maybe not): Frogs Not Dying From Global Warming Afterall

Hinders Fight Against Poverty

Fewer Hurricanes

More Intense Hurricanes

Midwest Floods Caused by Global Warming. Maybe Not.

Hurricane Ike

Food Quality

Cannibalism

Increased Sea Salinity

Disruption in Swan Migrations

Snake Invasions

Truffle Trouble

Extended Allergy Season

And don’t forget to check out The Big List of Things Caused by Global Warming.

And all the things that cause global warming:

Not Finishing Your Food

What about taxes and lifestyle changes? After all, I’m a firm believer that the whole global warming hoax is based around taking your hard-earned money and controlling your lifestyle. What have we learned over the last year about these subjects?

First, the lifestyle changes:

Liberty, Incandescent Lightbulbs and the Global Warming Hoax

Massachusetts Passes Energy Bill

No HOV Lanes for Carbon Credit Holders

Muscle cars are dead

London to Charge $50 to Drive SUV

Motivated by a Tax, Irish Spurn Plastic Bags

Slow Down to Save the World!

Global Warming Statists Threaten Our Liberty

WaPo Demands Huge Changes in Every Aspect of Your Daily Life

Want to Go Green? Leave the Cows Alone

Incandescent 150W Bulbs Phased Out; 100W Bulbs Next

California Wants to Control Residential Thermostats by Remote Control

Turn off your AC to Save the World

Drink Less Milk to Save the World

Lights Out in Manila Tonight

Ted Turner: There are Too Many People

And now, the taxes:

Advisory Group Suggests Raising B.C. Carbon Tax After 2012

Australian Carbon Tax Proposed

Australian New Cars May Be Hit With Carbon Tax at Sale

Australian Carbon Tax Could Bankrupt Zinc Miners

City of Portland Planning Carbon Tax

Double Whammy! Canadian Carbon Tax Could Drive Fuel Higher

First U.S.-Based Cap-and-Trade Program Launches Today

James Hansen’s Carbon Tax Proposal

John McCain Threatens Economy with Global Warming Plan

Los Angeles Considers Global Warming Tax

Michigan Congressman Wants 50-Cent Tax Hike on Every Gallon of Gas

New Zealand Government’s Windfall Profits Carbon Tax

New Zealand Proposes Carbon Tax in Car Imports

Shipping carbon tax costs will fall on consumers

The Carbon Tax Will be a Cash Cow

What Would a Carbon Tax Do To Gas Prices?

Bill Clinton Praises BC Carbon Tax

Carbon Tax will Hurt Who? The Poor

Farmers Face Flatulence Fee

EPA Proposes Livestock Tax

Speaking of gasoline, the global warming alarmists were big on ethanol mandates this year which, quite frankly, caused food prices to skyrocket. The same group of individuals that vowed to protect the poor and sick only hurt them as food riots broke out.

Al Gore’s Greendom Starving The Poor

Burning Our Food

Climate Change Hinders Fight Against Poverty

Corn Hits $6 a Bushel on Tight Supplies

Corn Prices Set New Record

Promotion of Ethanol Contributed to Food Crisis

Food Costs Rising Fastest in 17 Years

Fuel From Food? Bad Idea

Surging costs of groceries hit home

The Case Against Ethanol

The Importance of the Corn Economy

Will Media Remember Gore’s Tie-Breaking Vote for Ethanol in 1994?

Rising food costs due to Ethanol Boondoggle

Backlash over Biofuels: ‘Crime Against Humanity’

British Cutting Biofuel Production to Save Food Prices

Environmentalists - Death, Poverty, Destruction, Food Riots

Era of Cheap Food Ends as Prices Soar

Global Food Crisis: Corn to Fuel Cars Thanks to Global Warming Hoax

Inconvenient Truth: People Will Go Hungry

Indian Minister Attacks Bio-Fuels

Often Forgotten, Seldom Fed

Political crisis ‘puts the poor at risk of starving’

Will that be food or fuel?

Let’s take a look at some of the Al Gore follies from the past year:

$300 Million to Promote a Scam

Al Gore Admits he Makes Money From His Global Warming Fear Mongering

Al Gore Coast-to-Coast This Week

Eco-Messiah Al Gore Continues To Ignore Contrary Scientific Evidence; Still Preaches To The Choir

Give It Back! Gore’s Nobel May Be Illegal

French Author: Al Gore a “Crook”

Fear-Mongering Gore Causes High Gas Prices

Global Warming Hoax Has Been Good to Al Gore

Gore Calls for Breaking the Law to Fight Global Warming

Gore’s Home Energy Use Could Power 232 American Homes

Gore’s Inconvenient Lifestyle Exposed

Gore’s Lifestyle a Hot Topic for Skeptics

Meet the Meat: Al Gore’s Diet

Nobel Prize for Death

The errors in Al Gore’s movie

What Al Gore Thinks of People Like Me

Why Won’t Al Gore Debate?

Campaign to Sue Al Gore Gains Support

Al Gore on 60 Minutes: Skeptics like Flat-Earthers and Moon Landing Hoaxers

And just how are we and our children indoctrinated into the global warming religion?

Al Gore Ministries Continues Indoctrination

California State Senate Approves New Global Warming Curriculum

Colleges plot global warming indoctrination

Convenient Indoctrination of Our Youth

Earth Hour’s soft fascism

Have Yourself a Green Hallowe’en!

Kids Fight Against AGW Indoctrination

Oklahoma Kindergartners Write Book on Going Green

Schools Receive Climate Change Packs

Senate bill requires textbooks to teach global warming

The Indoctrination of Global Warming Begins

All in all, 2008 has been better for skeptics than warming alarmists. With cold temperatures blanketing the globe during the Winter of 2007 and so far in the Winter of 2008, and planetary temperatures continuing their fall from their most recent high in 1998 even as greenhouse gas emissions rise, the evidence against anthropogenic sources of global warming mounts. But, as many of us know from experiences during our lifetimes, if one tells a lie enough, it becomes truth. I want to keep showing the lies here at Skeptics Global Warming and ensure that they do not become truth. Thank you for visiting during the course of the year. I look forward to another exciting 12 months of spreading the real truth about global warming.

Source : Skeptics Global Warming
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The Hundred Years Climate War ?

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:42:00 +0000

EXTRA !..EXTRA !

'All We Have To Fear Is Air Itself '

SAYS ROOSEVELT, "NEW DEAL" ON GLOBAL WARMING !

League of Nations Scientists Warn Of Catastrophe

If Hoover Re-elected

Forget the 1938 Hurricane, the Dust Bowl or the threat of climate change by the ozone devouring Niton Ray of art deco Eco-terrorist Ming the Merciless of Mongo. Years before them , The New York Times rendered The Great Depression more depressing still with the cheerful forecast of the shape of things to come that follows--

This is not a parody. The Climate Wars will indeed turn 100 in 25 years :

'The Earth is steadily growing warmer. As all the ice at the two poles melts a stupendous volume of water will be released.

'The Earth is steadily growing warmer. As all the ice at the two poles melts a stupendous volume of water will be released.

Fish will swim in Buckingham Palace...New York will be marked by the...taller skyscrapers as they jut out of the water...the climate..as when dinosaurs roamed the earth and dense jungles...grew in...Canada.

Palms and alligators would flourish at the poles ...man's food supply will not ...it is a question if he will survive '

-- The New York Times..May 15, 1932

Here's the whole thing, direct from The Times archive :

No Doomsday in 2012

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:03:00 +0000

Apparently, the world is going to end on December 21st, 2012. Yes, you read correctly, in some way, shape or form, the Earth (or at least a large portion of humans on the planet) will cease to exist. Stop planning your careers, don't bother buying a house, and be sure to spend the last years of your life doing something you always wanted to do but never had the time. Now you have the time, four years of time, to enjoy yourselves before… the end.

So what is all this crazy talk? We've all heard these doomsday predictions before, we're still here, and the planet is still here, why is 2012 so important? Well, the Mayan calendar stops at the end of the year 2012, churning up all sorts of religious, scientific, astrological and historic reasons why this calendar foretells the end of life as we know it. The Mayan Prophecy is gaining strength and appears to be worrying people in all areas of society. Forget Nostradamus, forget the Y2K bug, forget the credit crunch, this event is predicted to be huge and many wholeheartedly believe this is going to happen for real. Planet X could even be making a comeback.

For all those 2012 Mayan Prophecy believers out there, I have bad news. There is going to be no doomsday event in 2012, and here's why…

The Mayan Calendar

So what is the Mayan Calendar? The calendar was constructed by an advanced civilization called the Mayans around 250-900 AD. Evidence for the Maya empire stretches around most parts of the southern states of Mexico and reaches down to the current geological locations of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and some of Honduras. The people living in Mayan society exhibited very advanced written skills and had an amazing ability when constructing cities and urban planning. The Mayans are probably most famous for their pyramids and other intricate and grand buildings. The people of Maya had a huge impact on Central American culture, not just within their civilization, but with other indigenous populations in the region. Significant numbers of Mayans still live today, continuing their age-old traditions.

The Mayans used many different calendars and viewed time as a meshing of spiritual cycles. While the calendars had practical uses, such as social, agricultural, commercial and administrative tasks, there was a very heavy religious element. Each day had a patron spirit, signifying that each day had specific use. This contrasts greatly with our modern Gregorian calendar which primarily sets the administrative, social and economic dates.

Most of the Mayan calendars were short. The Tzolk'in calendar lasted for 260 days and the Haab' approximated the solar year of 365 days. The Mayans then combined both the Tzolk'in and the Haab' to form the "Calendar Round", a cycle lasting 52 Haab's (around 52 years, or the approximate length of a generation). Within the Calendar Round were the trecena (13 day cycle) and the veintena (20 day cycle). Obviously, this system would only be of use when considering the 18,980 unique days over the course of 52 years. In addition to these systems, the Mayans also had the "Venus Cycle". Being keen and highly accurate astronomers they formed a calendar based on the location of Venus in the night sky. It's also possible they did the same with the other planets in the Solar System.

Using the Calendar Round is great if you simply wanted to remember the date of your birthday or significant religious periods, but what about recording history? There was no way to record a date older than 52 years.

The end of the Long Count = the end of the Earth?

The Mayans had a solution. Using an innovative method, they were able to expand on the 52 year Calendar Round. Up to this point, the Mayan Calendar may have sounded a little archaic - after all, it was possibly based on religious belief, the menstrual cycle, mathematical calculations using the numbers 13 and 20 as the base units and a heavy mix of astrological myth. The only principal correlation with the modern calendar is the Haab' that recognised there were 365 days in one solar year (it's not clear whether the Mayans accounted for leap years). The answer to a longer calendar could be found in the "Long Count", a calendar lasting 5126 years.

I'm personally very impressed with this dating system. For starters, it is numerically predictable and it can accurately pinpoint historical dates. However, it depends on a base unit of 20 (where modern calendars use a base unit of 10). So how does this work?

The base year for the Mayan Long Count starts at "0.0.0.0.0". Each zero goes from 0-19 and each represent a tally of Mayan days. So, for example, the first day in the Long Count is denoted as 0.0.0.0.1. On the 19th day we'll have 0.0.0.0.19, on the 20th day it goes up one level and we'll have 0.0.0.1.0. This count continues until 0.0.1.0.0 (about one year), 0.1.0.0.0 (about 20 years) and 1.0.0.0.0 (about 400 years). Therefore, if I pick an arbitrary date of 2.10.12.7.1, this represents the Mayan date of approximately 1012 years, 7 months and 1 day.

This is all very interesting, but what has this got to do with the end of the world? The Mayan Prophecy is wholly based on the assumption that something bad is going to happen when the Mayan Long Count calendar runs out. Experts are divided as to when the Long Count ends, but as the Maya used the numbers of 13 and 20 at the root of their numerical systems, the last day could occur on 13.0.0.0.0. When does this happen? Well, 13.0.0.0.0 represents 5126 years and the Long Count started on 0.0.0.0.0, which corresponds to the modern date of August 11th 3114 BC. Have you seen the problem yet? The Mayan Long Count ends 5126 years later on December 21st, 2012.

Doomsday

When something ends (even something as innocent as an ancient calendar), people seem to think up the most extreme possibilities for the end of civilization as we know it. A brief scan of the internet will pull up the most popular to some very weird ways that we will, with little logical thought, be wiped off the face of the planet. Archaeologists and mythologists on the other hand believe that the Mayans predicted an age of enlightenment when 13.0.0.0.0 comes around; there isn't actually much evidence to suggest doomsday will strike. If anything, the Mayans predict a religious miracle, not anything sinister.

Myths are abound and seem to be fuelling movie storylines. It looks like the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is even based around the Mayan myth that 13 crystal skulls can save humanity from certain doom. This myth says that if the 13 ancient skulls are not brought together at the right time, the Earth will be knocked off its axis. This might be a great plotline for blockbuster movies, but it also highlights the hype that can be stirred, lighting up religious, scientific and not-so-scientific ideas that the world is doomed.

Some of the most popular space-based threats to the Earth and mankind focus on Planet X wiping most life off the planet, meteorite impacts, black holes, Gamma Ray Bursts from nearby galaxies, a rapid ice age and a polar (magnetic) shift. There is so much evidence against these things happening in 2012, it's shocking just how much of a following they have generated. Each of the above "threats" needs their own devoted article as to why there is no hard evidence to support the hype.

But the fact remains, the Mayan Doomsday Prophecy is purely based on a calendar which we believe hasn't been designed to calculate dates beyond 2012. Mayan archaeo-astronomers are even in debate as to whether the Long Count is designed to be reset to 0.0.0.0.0 after 13.0.0.0.0, or whether the calendar simply continues to 20.0.0.0.0 (approximately 8000 AD) and then reset. As Karl Kruszelnicki brilliantly writes:

"…when a calendar comes to the end of a cycle, it just rolls over into the next cycle. In our Western society, every year 31 December is followed, not by the End of the World, but by 1 January. So 13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan calendar will be followed by 0.0.0.0.1 - or good-ol' 22 December 2012, with only a few shopping days left to Christmas." - Excerpt from Dr Karl's "Great Moments in Science".

Source : Universe Today

Top Mysteries of Outer Space

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:24:00 +0000

The solar system, in which earth is situated, is but a speck in the Milky Way Galaxy, which in turn is just one of the countless galaxies in the Universe. Even though there have been a lot of breakthroughs in science and technology, they have still not been enough to solve the mysteries in outer space, especially the top mysteries listed below.

1. Black Holes

The Mystery: Where the Black Holes Drain

Black holes are formed when a region in space has such large concentrations of mass that it collapses. These black holes have such strong gravitational fields that even light cannot escape. This is why a black hole is invisible. It can only be seen when it sucks in matter, like gas from a nebula, and releases huge amounts of radiation. Though the existence of these black holes has been proved, scientists still do not know where the matter that gets sucked in leads to. Some speculate that these black holes drain into a parallel universe.

2. Antimatter

The Mystery: Where to Find Antimatter and How to Contain It

If you are a fan of “Star Trek,” you have probably already heard the term “antimatter” (or anti-matter) several times. Antimatter is used in that TV show as a power source for the spacecraft to make warp-speed possible. Unlike “Star Trek,” though, antimatter is not fictional. As you may know, matter is composed of smaller particles – protons, neutrons and electrons. Antimatter is just the same thing – composed of smaller particles, only having opposite charges. For example, the antimatter counterpart of the electron, which has a negative charge, is the positron, having a positive electrical charge. The mystery here is where to find this antimatter. This task is quite difficult because once antimatter gets into contact with matter, both particles undergo annihilation – a huge release of energy, which causes the destruction of both particles.

Here's how the cataclysmic interplay between matter and antimatter led to the richly detailed world we observe today. (Photo by Illustration by John MacNeill)

Big bang leads to the formation of energy and matter: the universe's first 1/1,000 of a nanosecond.
1) The big bang creates equal amounts of matter (blue) and antimatter (red). 2) One of every billion antimatter particles changes into a particle of matter. 3) Matter and antimatter annihilate each other. 4) The result: Antimatter destroys 99.9999999 percent of the matter in the universe.

The first atoms begin to form: another 3 minutes.
5) The few remaining matter particles combine in groups of three to form protons and neutrons, which along with electrons make atoms. Among the first kinds of atoms to form were hydrogen, deuterium, and helium.

Atoms coalesce into stars, galaxies, and eventually us: 15 billion more years.
6) Atoms cool, coalesce, and evolve into the universe we know today.

3. Extra-Terrestrial Life

The Mystery: Where to Find It, Where to Look, and What to Look For

This question has been asked for several decades already, even before man got the chance to go to outer space. The universe is a large place, which makes scientists and ordinary people alike ask if we are not alone. Though theories state that it is possible that there may be life outside our world, there is still no hard evidence of such. Several projects have been launched that aim not just to find life, but intelligent life forms like humans. The SETI project (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) is one example of such efforts in finding ETs.

4. Wormholes

The Mystery: Proof of Existence

Wormholes are hypothetical structures in the universe that are said to be “shortcuts” to another side of the universe. They got their name from the act of a worm burrowing into an apple to get to the other side instead of traversing the surface of the apple. Wormholes have still not been proved to exist, but the theory of relativity (think Einstein and E=mc2) includes their existence.

5. Dark Matter

The Mystery: How to Prove Its Existence and How to Detect It

Scientists believe that the biggest bulk of mass in the universe today is not the matter we can see or observe. In fact, this observable matter accounts for only about 4 percent, with the rest being dark matter and dark energy. Another thing that is unknown is the particles that make up this unseen matter. Though current technologies cannot directly detect and observe dark matter, its presence can be observed through its effect on its surroundings like nebulae, galaxies, stars, and solar systems.

6. Parallel Universes aka “Multiverse”

The Mystery: Prove the Existence of These Parallel Universes

This mystery is more of science fiction to ordinary people, just like in that Jet Li movie “The One.” You may be surprised to know though that there are some proofs and theories that point to the possibility of having several to unlimited numbers of universes. Called a “multiverse,” this would include our universe, the one in which we are situated. Who knows – maybe one day, technology might prove this and allow people to travel from one universe to another through wormholes.

7. Neutrinos

The Mystery: Capability to Travel Through Matter Unimpeded

Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles that almost have no mass, have a neutral charge, and travel almost at the speed of light. These particles pass through matter almost unimpeded. This makes detection quite complicated. The majority of the neutrinos that pass through us now come from our sun. Today, there are several neutrino detectors around the world. The reason why scientists are very interested in studying particles is because when fully analyzed, they can be used to detect and thoroughly examine stellar objects or bodies from very far distances, farther than what current technologies allow.

8. Quasars

The Mystery: Power source and Characteristics

Quasars are the brightest known bodies in the universe, producing light energy equivalent to millions of galaxies put together. Though these bodies are observable, little is known about their behavior, how they formed, and what powers them. Many scientists believe that at the core of these quasars lie super-massive black holes, and that quasars are the result of the energy released by the black hole as it devours matter. These giant power generators are said to give clues on how the universe started.

9. End of the Universe

The Mystery: How the Universe Will End

It is still unclear how the universe started, and scientists are no less baffled as to how the universe will end. The most dominant theories on the birth and death of the universe are the “Big Bang” and the “Big Crunch” theories, respectively. The big crunch states that the universe will end when it suddenly crunches back into a small particle - something like the Big Bang put on rewind. Another theory of the universe’s end is that everything would come to a screeching halt, including space time. Oh well, we won’t be alive by then anyway, so no need to worry. Who knows, humans may already be extinct by that time, and roaches the new masters of the earth.

10. Vacuum Energy

The Mystery: Its Behavior and How it Seems to Affect the Rapid Expansion of the Universe

Outer space consists of patches of matter in the form of galaxies, nebulae, stars, solar systems, and other celestial bodies. The space in between these bodies seems to be void of any matter, known as a vacuum. This vacuum, though, seems to influence or directly cause the rapid expansion of the universe where only one thing can cause such action – energy. That is why it is believed that in the vacuum of space lie “phantom” particles – energy that still cannot be detected by current technologies. Once hard proof has been found that dark or vacuum energy does exist, it will unlock the other mysteries of space.

11. Mini Black Holes

If a radical new “braneworld” theory of gravity is correct, then scattered throughout our solar system are thousands of tiny black holes, each about the size of an atomic nucleus. Unlike their larger brethren, these mini-black holes are primordial leftovers from the Big Bang and affect space-time differently because of their close association with a fifth dimension.

12. Cosmic Microwave Background

Also known as the CMB, this radiation is a primordial leftover from the Big Bang that birthed the universe. It was first detected during the 1960s as a radio noise that seemed to emanate from everywhere in space. The CMB is regarded as one of the best pieces of evidence for the theoretical Big Bang. Recent precise measurements by the WMAP project place the CMB temperature at -455 degrees Fahrenheit (-270 Celsius).

13. Exoplanets

Until about the early 1990s, the only known planets in the universe were the familiar ones in our solar system. Astronomers have since identified more than 190 extrasolar planets (as of June 2006). They range from gargantuan gas worlds whose masses are just shy of being stars to small, rocky ones orbiting dim, red dwarfs. Searches for a second Earth, however, have so far turned up empty. Astronomers generally believe that better technology is likely to eventually reveal several worlds similar to our own.

14. Gravity Waves

Gravity waves are distortions in the fabric of space-time predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The waves travel at the speed of light, but they are so weak that scientists expect to detect only those created during colossal cosmic events, such as black hole mergers like the one shown above. LIGO and LISA are two detectors designed to spot the elusive waves.

15. Galactic Cannibalism

Like life on Earth, galaxies can “eat” each other and evolve over time. The Milky Way’s neighbor, Andromeda, is currently dining on one of its satellites. More than a dozen star clusters are scattered throughout Andromeda, the cosmic remains of past meals. The image above is from a simulation of Andromeda and our galaxy colliding, an event that will take place in about 3 billion years.

Conclusion

Though man has created advanced technologies along with groundbreaking theories, all those are just not enough to explain the wonders and mysteries of space. All these experts can do right now is observe, device theories, and try to come up with ways to solve these great mysteries.

Sources : Crunkish.com, The List Universe, Popular Science

Crop Circles: Artworks or Alien Signs?

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:08:00 +0000

Information received via channel mediums tells us that crop circles are the result of photon energy patterns hitting Earth's surface causing the crops within the fields to become horizontal. The reason that they cause the crops to lie down is that photon energy is magnetic in nature. As the strands of wheat, barley, canola, etc. are hit by the photon energy, they become magnetic and then are attracted to one another. As multiple strands unite or are magnetized together, the weight of their union no longer allows them to stand straight in the air, and they "lie down" against the ground.

The formations are universal symbols that have been used by various peoples [beings] throughout time. These will continue and increase until you realise that you are not alone, that you are loved and part of a plan more beautiful and wondrous than you could have ever imagined.

Some estimated ten thousand crop circle formations have appeared all over the world in recent years. For those who believe that logic and science constitute the sum of reality, the formations provoke feelings of annoyance, disbelief, fear and a deeply rooted sense of frustration at the lack of a ready, rational explanation. For those whose belief systems extend beyond the boundaries, crop circles take on mystical meanings and offer a sense of communication with an intelligence or consciousness beyond three-dimensional reality.

Crop circles intrigue; they en-trance with their intricacies; they manifest intelligence. The circles are appearing with increasing frequency mainly in England, but also in places like America, Japan, Canada, Russia, China, Australia and many more locations. These beautiful sculpted shapes appear mostly in crops of wheat, corn or barley. From simple circular designs, the formations have grown in complexity over the years to include precise geometrical designs that puzzle and excite man's logical mind set. Probably one of the most famous is the Mandelbrot Set, a formation which surfaced in 1991.

Each year, the Salisbury Plain in England literally bursts with new circles in new shapes. (picture above). The crop circles have so far defied scientific explanation. They have continually re-invented themselves in order, it seems, to provoke scientific inquiry. Some unseen intelligence appears to have a need to communicate with human beings, to express itself in strange and spectacular ways, and it has become more talkative, carving ever more incredible signs in the fields of the world.

Within the formations, the crops appear to be pushed down by some invisible gentle force which has the capacity to create complex patterns of bent vegetation. In authentic circles, this bent vegetation is not broken or damaged and in many instances continues to grow.

How should we interpret these messages from the universe? What significance do they hold for humanity? Crop circles are like treasure chests - each holding unique and important information for humanity. The journey is one of discovery. Just as with sacred geometry and other esoteric principles, crop circles challenge the current world view of "reality" simply because science is at odds to explain them.

Many huge, complex and beautiful patterns are being found swirled into crop fields around the world every year. Despite attempts to dismiss them as the work of humans, some believe the evidence points to a more exciting explanation. Whatever their source, these spectacular designs often display very clear symbolism, scientific, esoteric and astronomical, and demonstrate some extraordinary unexplained effects.

How many appear?

Around 250 crop designs around the world appear each year on average. Several thousand have been documented since records began.

Where do they appear?

Crop circles are a global phenomenon, but predominantly appear in the Northern Hemisphere with Southern England as the main centre of activity, particularly Wiltshire.

When do they arrive?

Off-season formations have occurred, but most appear during the three main summer months of any given country.

What crops do they appear in?

Any crop can be a potential target for the phenomenon: wheat, barley and oilseed rape (canola), as the main crops grown, are the most common in England, at least, but they have also been reported in rye, oats, flax, peas, potatoes, sweet corn maize and many other mediums, including rice paddy fields in Japan. Formations have also been found in wild grass and undergrowth.

A Brief History of Crop Circles

When two retired English pranksters, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, claimed in 1991 to have invented the crop circle phenomenon as a joke a decade or so earlier, they couldn't have been aware that almost 300 documented formations predated their alleged exploits.

Swirled into growing crops, these circular indentations of carefully flattened stems looked at first like the result of freak whirlwinds. Some were a few feet across, but others were the size of tennis courts. It wasn't long before the appearance of symmetrical patterns and other unusual variations began to throw the weather theories into doubt.

By the late 80's, rapidly increasing numbers and seemingly evolving designs, still based largely on circles, had begun to capture the public imagination. Intrigued by reports of glowing lights and other bizarre phenomena associated with the circles, everyone from UFO buffs to eminent scientists was trying to unravel the mystery.

In 1990, the arrival of 'pictograms', long symbolic chains of circles, rectangles and rings gave the crop circles their place in history. Newspapers and television channels eagerly reported these astonishing patterns. But the claims of Doug and Dave and other supposed hoaxers soon left the media disillusioned.

Despite this, crop formations continue to be discovered in designs of growing sophistication and size which leave many convinced that there is an unexplained force at work.

Theories and Evidence

There has been intense debate over the circles' origins. Some believe they are communications from Extra-Terrestrials, pointing to the many sightings and videos of aerial phenomena seen in connection with formations. Others feel the lights may be the properties of an unknown natural energy which produces complex ground patterns. Others still have cited everything from Mother Earth to nature spirits being responsible.

Most other popular explanations for the crop circles have revolved around human activity, either involving satellite technology or, more usually, the simple actions of pranksters and landscape artists. However, in demonstrations, human teams have struggled to reproduce designs as geometrically complex as many seen in the fields or have taken many hours to produce anything approaching them. Certain formations have been shown to have appeared within very short periods of time and the geometrical calculation and construction required for some simply could not be carried out in one night.

Some of the patterns have shown breathtaking symbolic qualities. In 1994, several galaxy-shaped glyphs displayed a conjunction of planets over the star constellation Cetus as it would be in April 2000, and in 1995 an accurate diagram of the Earth's inner solar system was discovered. Some shapes appear to denote dates and astronomical conjunctions, but others remain obscure and are open to interpretation, seeming to reflect multi-cultural symbolism.

Phenomena associated with crop circles

Work by laboratories on circle-affected crop has shown biological changes taking place at a cellular level, suggesting the involvement of microwave energy. Other physical tests have shown anomalies not yet replicated by man-made experiments. Crop circles have the capacity to alter the local electromagnetic field so that compasses cannot locate north, cameras, cellular phones and batteries fail to operate, and aircraft equipment fails whilst flying over formations.

Circular Stories, Facts and Figures

There are around two dozen eye-witness accounts of crop circles forming. All describe similar events; an invisible force coming out of nowhere in otherwise calm conditions and spinning the crops down within seconds, usually with surprising violence - yet little damage is found in the laid crop. Tornado-like funnels, light phenomena and high-pitched whistling sounds have also been reported.

One Sunday afternoon in July 1996, a 915 foot spiral of 151 circles appeared opposite England's ancient Stonehenge monument, Wiltshire, within a 45 minute period. (Below) A pilot, gamekeeper and security guard confirmed it had not been there before 5.30pm - yet shortly after 6.00pm, the massive formation was spotted. Much smaller man-made designs have taken several hours to complete.

Biological Change

Crop circle formations often appear in canola (oil seed rape) fields. This plant has a consistency like celery. If the stalk is bent more than 45-degrees, it snaps apart. Yet, in a "genuine" crop circle formation the stalks are often bent flat at 90-degrees. No botanist or other scientist has been able to explain this, nor has it ever been duplicated by a human being.

Work by Dr W. C. Levengood, a respected Michigan-based biophysicist, has shown notable biological changes taking place inside circle-laid stalks, which could be attributable to some kind of microwave energy. No man-made test formation has ever produced these results, yet 90% of the hundreds of crop circles sampled have proved positive in this regard.

A Channelled Explanation

"The circles and other shapes imprinted upon this planet in the grain fields are a frequency, not a process or action. There is a story or language that is being implanted on the surface of earth with language symbols. These symbols come to establish a certain frequency, and they are going to increase. Light is being orchestrated to once again come onto the planet, and it is increasing daily. In order for energy to work its way through your consciousness, it must house itself on the planet. Intelligence penetrates in the form of waves making geometric shapes on the Earth.

Intelligence is beyond the spoken word and beyond the written word, for it is a frequency that sometimes comes in geometric shapes. Geometry is an evolved intelligence, a collection of experience that can communicate huge amounts of information. Crop circles all over the planet are put there by sounds above human frequency. In the beginning, these shapes are circles. They will evolve into triangles, lines, and many other things. [As they have done so].

These geometric shapes are like hieroglyphs. The hieroglyphs and pictographs carved in stone on this planet are a similar generation of intelligence. The circles and shapes being put on Earth are all connected to one another, and if they were written out simultaneously on some farmer's field, something would happen to them immediately.

These shapes hold intelligence and are being set up to eventually connect and make an intelligent gridwork around the planet. This gridwork will have a frequency that humanity can use to evolve. The whole language is not on the planet at this time. The glyphs come to Earth as a result of a certain evolvement of consciousness. They come into your reality to show you that the reasoning mind cannot control all of the data, much as it would like to.

Whenever reality cannot be explained, a certain niche is opened within consciousness. The crop circles are completely beyond the logical mind. Therefore, they force the consensus view of reality to expand, since reality, as formerly designed, cannot house these events as a possibility. They are a trigger. They force reality to move beyond its own limitations. Basically, they exist to force reality to move, to get you feeling rather than thinking. Most who explore these circles think their way through the circles rather than feel their way through them.

Because this phenomenon has no logic to it, it is forcing a logically orientated society to recognise something that makes no sense, and it is being done in a very playful and obvious way without creating a threat to anyone's view of reality. When corn lies down in concentric circles and doesn't even break or die, no one really gets too upset. It is necessary to do certain things so that you figure it out without having your circuits overloaded."

What is it that makes crop circles such a fascinating phenomenon? Even when people don't know a single thing about the crop formations, the symbols seem to stir up something within nevertheless. There's something about the patterns that has some kind of hypnotising effect on people.

All the discussions about whether or not the crop circles are a hoax could come to an end if people would first investigate before they make any judgments. A lot of research is done on the circles and many reports can be found on the Internet. Do some research and collate your own data base of 'crop circle facts'. It's well worth the effort.

Sacred Geometry

It has been estimated that over the past 25 years more than 10,000 of these mysterious images have been etched into meadows all over our planet in such diverse places as Japan, Germany, USA, The Netherlands, Austria, Canada, Brazil, Romania, Hungary, and many other countries. It seems as though "something" is trying to get our attention in a very repetitive way because each year they faithfully return like migrating birds to warmer climates.

Also intriguing is that archeologists, mystics and academics who study ancient civilisations recognise a form of sacred geometry and symbolism in these designs. Adding support to their findings is the fact that many of the mysterious glyphs that have been found in England magically appear (and frequently reappear) near ancient, sacred sites such as Stonehenge, Avebury, and the earth mound of Silbury Hill. These places are known for their high energy vortexes.

What is also compelling about crop circles is that they are real... even though hoaxers have made a small percentage of them. Unlike UFOs, which have often been linked to them, circle formations can be visited, photographed, walked on, measured, and scientifically analysed. They are concrete reminders of what appears to be the handiwork of an off-Earth intelligence and, for anyone who has researched this area, it is difficult to deny their existence. Sadly, as with other types of paranormal phenomena, crop circles have been the victims of massive disinformation programs.

Microwave Radiation?

Dr. W. C. Levengood of the Pinelandia Biophysical Laboratory in Grass Lake, Michigan has studied crop formations for years. His scientific data leads him to believe that very uniform and ordered forces are involved in their formation. His efforts have focused on the possibility that residual effects may be left behind in the crop formations that can be measured. Based upon his recent findings, Dr. Levengood suggests that the affected plants show distinct signs of having been exposed to transient high temperatures, possibly caused by microwave radiation.

The etched symbols in the crop fields, are prodding humanity into a greater cosmic awareness and an acceptance of intelligent life within the universe. There is no doubt that our collective consciousness is being raised and crop circles are an important part of the overall process.

Two very significant crop circle formations appeared at Barbury Castle in May 1997. They seemed to reveal extremely important information. One of the formations was the Kabalistic Tree of Life. The Tree of Life, of course, is mentioned many times in the Bible, from the beginning of the Book of Genesis to last part of the Book of Revelation. One who eats from this Tree, according to the Bible, is given "eternal life." The above diagram of the Tree of Life is part of an ancient tradition called "Kabala." Other spellings of the word include, kabbala, cabala, cabbala, quabala, and qabbalah. This is generally known as a special Hebrew tradition, the occult philosophy of certain Jewish rabbis, especially in the Middle Ages, based on a mystical interpretation of the Scriptures. Many scholars believe that the tradition is much older; that it traces back to the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians.

Connections to Ancient Sumeria

Over one hundred years ago, clay tablets were found in present day Iraq. They were artifacts with Cuneiform writings and pictographic carvings, left by the ancient people of that region. The Assyrian and Babylonian empires were located in that area long ago, but an even more ancient one preceded them, called Sumer, which in the Bible is called "Land of Shine'ar."

Then there was the "Double-Helix" crop formation that arrived on June 17, 1996 in Tim Carson's East Field at Alton Barnes, England. This crop circle, some 600 feet long, clearly resembles DNA.

This tells us that these and other circles are being sent to us from those we are going to meet, and they know all about our biology. "They" are not the "Grays" nor those related to the "Grays" who have been causing problems on planet Earth with abductions and the like. Rather, the circles are from those who represent the actual seeds of our DNA, those who look like us and the ones who purposely planted the DNA/Biology in our primitive ancestors ages ago. These beings, who seeded us on planet Earth, are from another place in the universe, and they are returning. (View link)

You will not find crop circles in the nightly news nor in the local newspapers. Nor will leading scientists discuss it out of fear for their project funding and jobs. But you will continue to see some TV programs that dismiss their existence as a hoax. And there will be "crazy hoaxer" stories.....This sells "news".....

Milk Hill, Wiltshire, England August 13, 2001

The crop circle noticed on Milk Hill in Wiltshire (Southern England) on August 13, 2001 is being hailed as the most awesome ever made. It is composed of 409 individual circles in a spiral pattern. Appropriately, it was found in the heart of crop circle country in the United Kingdom.

The sheer size and complexity of this formation is staggering. It has been estimated that hoaxers would have had to make one circle every 30 seconds during the night time hours in order to create this design!

Furthermore, the field in which the design was created is not flat, but consists of small, undulating hills, making it virtually impossible for hoaxers to lay out and create an accurate design.

Chilbolton England August 13-/14 2000

Sometime on 13/14 August, 2000, a spectacular crop circle was placed in the wheat field right in front of the government-owned Chilbolton Radio Telescope Observatory. It was one of the largest and most intricate made during the year 2000, measuring some 200 feet in length and 85 feet in width.

However, it's real significance could not be appreciated until exactly a year later when two other extraordinary crop formations appeared in the same field... and all three appear to be linked together.

During 1974, a coded (binary) message was sent from a radio telescope in Arecibo, Mexico to a star cluster in our Milky Way galaxy called M13. As of today, it has travelled approximately 160 trillion miles into deep space and will arrive at its intended destination some 22,000 years from now. In August of 2001, a response was received from that 1974 broadcast a lot sooner than anyone had expected, implying that a nearby off-Earth intelligence intercepted it. On Tuesday August 14, 2001, exactly one year after the last crop circle had been made next to the Chilbolton Observatory, a haunting, human-like face was placed in this very same wheat field.

Even as a stand alone formation this glyph was spectacular for several reasons. To create this image, standing clumps were made out of wheat stalks, with each clump individually swirled and stitched together as a "pixel" while adjoining wheat plants were flattened around the pixels to create the overall image effect. This is a radical departure from traditional circle design. The dark areas represent wheat that has been flattened while the light coloured dots represent standing clumps of wheat.

On the following Sunday, August 19, 2001, another incredible design was reported in the same wheat field, and this is the one that has really impressed the experts and skeptics alike. As mentioned above, we sent out a coded message in 1974 to the M13 star cluster. That coded human message has been put into graphic form. The design placed in the Chilbolton wheat field on August 19, is almost a mirror image of the one we sent into deep space.

Returned Arecibo Message Received At Chilbolton

The first notable difference is that the DNA strand shape just above the human figure in the 1974 message versus the DNA strand above the humanoid figure made in 2001 is not the same. Specifically, the respective DNA strands on the right hand side of both pictures is quite different. In the August 19 message, the DNA strand has 6 circles (6 nucleotide base pairs) per turn of the DNA while the 1974 message has 10 per turn, which is what we have in the DNA found on planet Earth.

The pictogram made in this very same wheat field a year earlier is a blown-up version of their communication device and is a replica of that seen in the lower part of their returned message to us!. Hoaxers aren't this clever or imaginative.

A number of insights can be drawn from these recent crop developments that are worth noting:

Techniques - Three different techniques have now been used to make the crop pictures. First there is the traditional swirled crop design, the second is the "retarded" growth method and the third is the pixel technique, which swirls some plants into standing pixels while adjoining plants are flattened and lie on the ground.

Timing - The 13/14 August 2000 crop circle at Chilbolton was made exactly one year before the face and in the same wheat field.
Invisibility - With security cameras guarding the Observatory complex, some of which are apparently pointed into the adjacent wheat field, no one has stepped forward and said, "Here are videotapes of the hoaxers making these crop designs." Making a pixel by pixel design in a field of plants would be an extremely difficult thing for hoaxers to accomplish. It could only be done with aerial help such as a night-flying helicopter with a two way communication system. Can you imagine all this being done in front of a government complex without attracting any attention?

Dish symbols - The difference in the Arecibo Radio Astronomy device and the one sent back in the August 19 message is quite convincing... especially since one year earlier that very same ET communication device was created as a crop design in the same Chilbolton wheat field. The linkage is striking.

Orientation - The orientation of the August 19 message in the wheat fields points directly at the dish antenna located at the Chilbolton Observatory as if to say, "We're pointing this message directly at you."

Hoaxers - No hoaxers have come forth and claimed they made these crop formations.

Source: Phils.com.au

Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved?

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:38:00 +0000

For decades arguments have raged about the disappearance of the famous Flight 19 in what became known as The Bermuda Triangle. Is it an area where the normal laws of physics simply don't apply? Could, under the sea, lie the ancient and mythical city of Atlantis? Are alien forces at work? Might it just be all one giant watery hoax or is a government cover-up in operation? Limbo of the Lost. The Twilight Zone. The Hoodoo Sea. The Devil's Triangle. The Graveyard of the Atlantic.

The vast three sided segment of the Atlantic Ocean bordered by Bermuda, Puerto Rico and Fort Lauderdale, Florida has had many names and didn't acquire its most famous nickname until 1964, two decades after the famed disappearance of Flight 19. Robert Todd Carroll's Brief History of the Devil's Triangle notes that legend of the Bermuda Triangle truly begins with the flight's disappearance. Five Navy Avenger bombers mysteriously vanished while on an apparently routine training mission vas did a rescue plane sent to search for them; six aircraft and 27 men, gone without a trace. Or that's what we're led to believe...

The Vanishing

The Bermuda Triangle has long been full of mysteries. More than 100 ships and planes have vanished there since 1945 and lost with them have been more than 1,000 lives. But the mysteries most certainly didn't start there - we've been aware of them for at least two centuries. At least six ships vanished in the 1800s without leaving any trace at all; four were American warships and one was a British training ship with 290 men aboard. But it was with increasing sea transportation and the development of the airplane that saw disappearances dramatically increase - more than 40 ships were swallowed up between 1900 and 1945. Some were sailing ships, others were steamers and at least three aircraft disappeared before Flight 19 set off.

The tale of Flight 19 starts 50 years ago on December 5, 1947. Five Avenger torpedo bombers lifted into the air from the Naval Air Station at Ft Lauderdale, Florida at just after 2PM. It was a routine flight, nothing more, a practice mission with the flight's crew comprised of students except for the commander, Lt. Charles Taylor. The mission called for Taylor and his group of 13 men to fly due east 56 miles to Hens and Chicken Shoals to conduct practice bombing runs. When they had completed this, the flight plan stated that they were to fly a further 67 miles east, then turn north for 73 miles and finally fly back to base - a distance of 120 miles. This course would take them on a triangular path over the Atlantic Ocean.

After about an hour and a half after the flight had set off, Lt. Robert Cox picked up a radio transmission from Flight 19. Lt. Taylor indicated that the compasses were not working correctly but believed himself to be flying somewhere over the long chain of islands that make up the Florida Keys. Cox urged the crew to head northwards towards Miami so Taylor would have confirmation of his position. In that transmission were the first inklings that something was going desperately wrong with the flight. Today's military and commercial planes are fitted with plenty of equipment that ensures it's almost impossible to become lost if a crew uses the technology correctly. For example, by coordinating oneself by attuning to a set of Global Position Satellites that orbit the Earth, a flight can know its exact position. 50 years ago, however, planes flying over sea had to know their starting point, how long and how fast they had flown and in what direction. If a pilot made a mistake with any of these figures, he was lost.

Although no one would deny that Taylor was an experienced pilot, there appeared to be some confusion which has led investigators to believe that he was flying further away from the base. It is strange, however, that communications between the base and Flight 19 were intermittent at best. What was influencing the plane's transmissions? But at almost 6:00 PM, almost four hours after the flight had taken off, a fix on the weakening signals was managed but it was too late to save Flight 19. Communications had deteriorated so badly that the information could not be passed on. The last transmission from Flight 19 was received at 7:04PM. Planes searched the night but to no avail. Flight 19 had disappeared. The Navy's original investigation concluded that the accident had been caused by Lt. Taylor's confusion. The lieutenant's mother, however, refused to accept that her experienced pilot son had caused the accident and finally had the Navy change the report to read that the disaster was for 'causes or reason unknown'. This may have spared the mother's feelings, but it may have blurred the facts of the case.

So where is Flight 19? In 1991 five Avengers were found off the coast of Florida by the salvage ship Deep Sea. Further examination, however, showed that they were not Flight 19. The resting place of the planes and their crew - if there is one - is still a secret only known to the Bermuda Triangle.

Triangle Fever

The saga of Flight 19 is the most repeated story about the Bermuda Triangle - but it's far from the only one. During the past 100 years, more than 20 planes and 50 ships have met their demise in the Bermuda Triangle. The term Bermuda Triangle was coined in 1964 by Vincent H. Gaddis in the magazine Argosy. Although 'Triangle Fever' peaked in the mid-1970s, there have been many 'practical' explanations of the area's so-called paranormal influence. The matter of the amount of disappearances is not in doubt - the cause always is. Skeptics attempt to disprove the mystery by claiming that the strong currents in the region, that it is the Gulf Stream forcing a large portion of the Bermuda Triangle's tides to flow directly north which would throw many ships off course and further out into sea.

Also pointed out is the large discrepancy between Magnetic North and the North Pole in the region - something that Christopher Columbus on his historic journey noted in his journals. But this explanation simply is not enough for some people. Surely there are many places in the world with dangerous currents and directional difficulties? Why is the Bermuda Triangle host to so many accidents? Among the theories is the belief that aliens are a possible reason and that alien technology is influencing the paths of ships and aircraft as many of the early reports of the Triangle believed. There is also the often repeated notion that there is an undersea Earth base for aliens who use their technology to confuse vessels that stray too close to their home. There are also theories concerning 'vile vortices' that are passages into the fourth dimension where airplanes 'fall up' and UFOs appear.

The Atlantis Theory

Others believe that the Bermuda Triangle is caused by the lost great city of Atlantis, sunk thousands of feet below the water's surface. The belief in the advanced state of Atlantean technology (often ascribed to the building of South American temples, the Egyptian pyramids and ascribed influences on early human civilizations) leads to the perspective that whatever is left of Atlantis is some- how causing these mysterious disappearances with long- abandoned machinery. There are those people that see the Bermuda Triangle as another infamous government cover-up and/or a secret base area. They argue that wouldn't the US government - considering the debate on the existence of Area 51 - also have other bases, probably dotted around the world? Some Triangle watchers argue that at some time or another the US government came across alien technology which enabled them to go deep underwater - to at least 20,000 feet - in a very cheap and easy way. The ships and planes that have disappeared may be due to them disturbing or even seeing the government base who had to eliminate all those who witnessed its existence.

Yet it is with such sensational hypotheses that the Bermuda Triangle mystery is treated as something as a joke, leading many to the conclusion that sensationalizing authors and the media coverage of the late 1960s and 1970s that did not include skeptical investigation are responsible for the legend of the Bermuda Triangle. Skepticism is fine, but at the truth we want to seek out the truth with an attitude of openness. We are ready to believe but we'd also like proof.

Case Closed?

'The US Board of Geographic Names does not recognize the Bermuda Triangle as an official name and does not maintain an official file on the area' states the pompous Internet message board of the US Coast Guard HQ and the Naval Historical Center. Seems a little too close to 'Deny Every- thing' for this writer. This government representative argues that in the past that extensive yet futile Coast Guard searches prompted by search-and-rescue cases such as Flight 19 or the trace- less sinking of the Marine Sulphur Queen in the Florida Straits have lent credence to the popular belief in the mystery and the supernatural qualities of the Bermuda Triangle. Paranormal phenomena are dismissed and 'practical' solutions to the mysteries are those that focus on environmental conditions and those that cite human error. The Bermuda Triangle is one of the few places on Earth that a magnetic compass does point towards true north. Normally, it should point towards magnetic north. The amount of variation changes - and sometimes as much as 20 degrees as a ship or aircraft circumnavigates around the globe. Without compensating, a navigator could find himself far off course and in serious trouble.

The Bermuda Triangle has at least two counterparts in other areas of the world. An area called 'The Devil's Sea' by Japanese and Filipino seamen, which is located off the east coast of Japan, also exhibits the same magnetic characteristics and is also known for its mysterious disappearances. Also, in China in 1995, some 50 scientists surveyed southwest Sichuan Province's notorious high-elevation Black Bamboo Ravine, or Heizugou, where people and livestock have vanished. The Beijing-based Xinhua News Agency reported that scientists believe rotting plants found in the cold, humid region give off a poisonous gas, "suffocating people and making them fall into the abyss". The experts also explained that the magnetic field at Heizhugou "is so strong that it is likely to disable com- passes and cause plane crashes". Sound familiar? Except for the magnetic field part, the Black Bamboo Ravine is similar geologically with Yellowstone's Death Gulch and Java's Poisoned Valley.

Breaking Wind

Oceanic flatulence. You read that right. Oceanic flatulence is believed to be the true cause of the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. We're not joking. Forget ETs, UFOs, time travel, Atlantis, even plain old boring magnetic forces. The sea bed 'breaking wind' is the latest scientific 'truth'. One suddenly doesn't know what to believe... are reports of the mysterious disappearances just a load of old gas? While studying gas hydrates back in 1984, the late Dr. Donald Davidson, a Canadian scientist, proposed the above theory which has gained much ground over the years. Bit of a science lesson now: at enormous pressures and low temperatures (as at the bottom of the ocean), water and gas molecules form gas hydrates. The compounds, it is argued, resemble ice but the water molecules form cages around gas molecules - such as methane. These solid hydrates retain their stability until conditions such as higher temperatures or lower pressures cause them to decompose. When they do decompose, they release enormous amounts of trapped gas. Disappearances of ships and aircraft passing over these 'blowouts' can then be explained. The sea could turn very violent very suddenly, into a mass of froth that could sink any ship in the area. As the methane rises, an airplane flying through the gas would experience engine failure - or worse: a spark from the engine could turn the aircraft into a flying fireball.

No one took much notice of these theories until new information concerning blowouts of naturally occurring gas hydrates emerged in 1990. Solving the tantalizing mystery has come no closer - for 'traditional' scientists - than the work done by marine geologists from the University of Wales, Cardiff in 1996. They believed that the results from drilling the ocean floor in the Bermuda region held the answer to the enduring mystery. Following Dr. Davidson's theories, they have found evidence of the frozen methane gas.

The Bottom Line

So are the paranormal theories just a load of old gas? The Bermuda Triangle has generated thousands of debates between psychic phenomena experts and 'traditional' science ever since Flight 19 disappeared. For over 50 years the public's imagination has run riot, sometimes through lack of understanding, sometimes through media hype, trying to explain the disappearance of dozens of ships, yachts and planes off the coast of Florida. Yet the scientific community's protestations have been very loud and paranormal theories concerning the Bermuda Triangle have been sneered at and derided. Going over the evidence, it could seem that orthodox scientists have been determined to prove that the Bermuda Triangle holds no paranormal influence at all. Yet, overall, it is their theories that seem to be the most logical solutions, not those concerning the paranormal. It is well known that human error is nearly always the answer when dealing with equipment failure.

The Bermuda Triangle has many violent, unpredictable and sudden weather changes that could surprise many an unwary navigator. The idea of trapped methane gas being released from 20,000 feet below sea-level may seem far-fetched but the theories of Dr. Davidson have been physically studied, not merely hypothesized. But the truth knows that life isn't always logical and straight-forward. There may have been a media hype about the disappearances but that will never mean orthodox scientists will know all the truth. They know only one truth - so far. Don't forget: no one has explained the reason why at least three areas of the planet Earth have mysterious magnetic forces at work. Why is that...?

Source : The Truth - Bermuda Triangle

Phoenix Mars Lander : Exploring the Arctic Plain of Mars

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:05:00 +0000

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander touched down safely near the Red Planet at 4:53 p.m. Pacific Time (7:53 p.m. Eastern Time), May 25, 2008, in an arctic region called Vastitas Borealis, at 68 degrees north latitude, 234 degrees east longitude, beginning its three-month investigation into the history of water on the fourth planet from the sun.

Phoenix is the sixth successful landing on Mars, out of twelve total international attempts (the sixth successful landing of seven American attempts). It is the third successful static lander since Viking 2, and as of 2008 the most recent spacecraft to land successfully on Mars.

Images from the Lander

Overview

Mars is a cold desert planet with no liquid water on its surface. But in the Martian arctic, water ice lurks just below ground level. Discoveries made by the Mars Odyssey Orbiter in 2002 show large amounts of subsurface water ice in the northern arctic plain. The Phoenix lander targets this circumpolar region using a robotic arm to dig through the protective top soil layer to the water ice below and ultimately, to bring both soil and water ice to the lander platform for sophisticated scientific analysis.

Mars north pole map

This map centered on the north pole of Mars is based on gamma rays from the element hydrogen -- mainly in the form of water ice. Regions of high ice content are shown in violet and blue and those low in ice content are shown in red. The very ice-rich region at the north pole is due to a permanent polar cap of water ice on the surface. Elsewhere in this region, the ice is buried under several to a few tens of centimeters of dry soil.

The complement of the Phoenix spacecraft and its scientific instruments are ideally suited to uncover clues to the geologic history and biological potential of the Martian arctic. Phoenix will be the first mission to return data from either polar region providing an important contribution to the overall Mars science strategy "Follow the Water" and will be instrumental in achieving the four science goals of NASA's long-term Mars Exploration Program:

Determine whether Life ever arose on Mars
Characterize the Climate of Mars
Characterize the Geology of Mars
Prepare for Human Exploration

The Phoenix Mission has two bold objectives to support these goals, which are to (1) study the history of water in the Martian arctic and (2) search for evidence of a habitable zone and assess the biological potential of the ice-soil boundary.

Objectives

Objective 1: Study the History of Water in All its Phases

Currently, water on Mars' surface and atmosphere exists in two states: gas and solid. At the poles, the interaction between the solid water ice at and just below the surface and the gaseous water vapor in the atmosphere is believed to be critical to the weather and climate of Mars. Phoenix will be the first mission to collect meteorological data in the Martian arctic needed by scientists to accurately model Mars' past climate and predict future weather processes.

Liquid water does not currently exist on the surface of Mars, but evidence from Mars Global Surveyor, Odyssey and Exploration Rover missions suggest that water once flowed in canyons and persisted in shallow lakes billions of years ago. However, Phoenix will probe the history of liquid water that may have existed in the arctic as recently as 100,000 years ago. Scientists will better understand the history of the Martian arctic after analyzing the chemistry and mineralogy of the soil and ice using robust instruments.

Objective 2: Search for Evidence of Habitable Zone and Assess the Biological Potential of the Ice-Soil Boundary

Recent discoveries have shown that life can exist in the most extreme conditions. Indeed, it is possible that bacterial spores can lie dormant in bitterly cold, dry, and airless conditions for millions of years and become activated once conditions become favorable. Such dormant microbial colonies may exist in the Martian arctic, where due to the periodic wobbling of the planet, liquid water may exist for brief periods about every 100,000 years making the soil environment habitable.

Phoenix will assess the habitability of the Martian northern environment by using sophisticated chemical experiments to assess the soil's composition of life-giving elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and hydrogen. Identified by chemical analysis, Phoenix will also look at reduction-oxidation (redox) molecular pairs that may determine whether the potential chemical energy of the soil can sustain life, as well as other soil properties critical to determine habitability such as pH and saltiness.

Despite having the proper ingredients to sustain life, the Martian soil may also contain hazards that prevent biological growth, such as powerful oxidants that break apart organic molecules. Powerful oxidants that can break apart organic molecules are expected in dry environments bathed in UV light, such as the surface of Mars. But a few inches below the surface, the soil could protect organisms from the harmful solar radiation. Phoenix will dig deep enough into the soil to analyze the soil environment potentially protected from UV looking for organic signatures and potential habitability.

Source : NASA

Orderly Universe: Evidence of God?

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:03:00 +0000

By John Allen Paulos

Not Really, ABC News Columnist Says; It's Not Unusual for Order to Occur Naturally

Since writing my book "Irreligion" and some of my recent Who's Counting columns, I've received a large number of e-mails from subscribers to creation science (who have recently christened themselves intelligent design theorists). Some of the notes have been polite, some vituperative, but almost all question "how order and complexity can arise out of nothing."

Since they can imagine no way for this to happen, they conclude there must be an intelligent designer, a God. (They leave aside the prior question of how He arose.)

My canned answer to them about biological order talks a bit about evolution, but they often dismiss that source of order for religious reasons or because of a misunderstanding of the second law of thermodynamics.

(See Complexity and Intelligent Design for my Who's Counting discussion of biological and economic order and complexity arising out of very simple programs.)

Because the seemingly inexplicable arising of order seems to be so critical to so many, however, I've decided to list here a few other sources for naturally occurring order in physics, math, and biology. Of course, order, complexity, entropy, randomness and related notions are clearly and utterly impossible to describe and disentangle in a column like this, but the examples below from "Irreligion" hint at some of the abstract ideas relevant to the arising of what has been called "order for free."

Necessarily Some Order

Let me begin by noting that even about the seemingly completely disordered, we can always say something. No universe could be completely random at all levels of analysis.

In physics, this idea is illustrated by the kinetic theory of gases. There an assumption of disorder on one formal level of analysis, the random movement of gas molecules, leads to a kind of order on a higher level, the relations among variables such as temperature, pressure and volume known as the gas laws. The law-like relations follow from the lower-level randomness and a few other minimal assumptions. (This bit of physics does not mean that life has evolved simply by chance, a common mischaracterization of evolution.)

In addition to the various laws of large numbers studied in statistics, a notion that manifests a different aspect of this idea is statistician Persi Diaconis' remark that if you look at a big enough population long enough, then "almost any damn thing will happen."

Ramsey Order

A more profound version of this line of thought can be traced back to British mathematician Frank Ramsey, who proved a strange theorem. It stated that if you have a sufficiently large set of geometric points and every pair of them is connected by either a red line or a green line (but not by both), then no matter how you color the lines, there will always be a large subset of the original set with a special property. Either every pair of the subset's members will be connected by a red line or every pair of the subset's members will be connected by a green line.

If, for example, you want to be certain of having at least three points all connected by red lines or at least three points all connected by green lines, you will need at least six points. (The answer is not as obvious as it may seem, but the proof isn't difficult.)

For you to be certain that you will have four points, every pair of which is connected by a red line, or four points, every pair of which is connected by a green line, you will need 18 points, and for you to be certain that there will be five points with this property, you will need -- it's not known exactly - between 43 and 55. With enough points, you will inevitably find unicolored islands of order as big as you want, no matter how you color the lines.

A whole mathematical subdiscipline has grown up devoted to proving theorems of this same general form: How big does a set have to be so that there will always be some subset of a given size that it will constitute an island of order of some sort?

Ramsey-type theorems may even be part of the explanation (along, of course, with Diaconis' dictum) for some of the equidistant letter sequences that constitute the bible codes. Any sufficiently long sequence of symbols, especially one written in the restricted vocabulary of ancient Hebrew, is going to contain subsequences that appear meaningful.

Self-Organization and Order

Finally, of more direct relevance to evolution and the origin of living complexity is the work of Stuart Kauffman. In his book, "At Home in the Universe," he discusses what he has termed the aforementioned notion of "order for free."

Motivated by the idea of hundreds of genes in a genome turning on and off other genes and the order and pattern that nevertheless exist, Kauffman asks us to consider a large collection of 10,000 light bulbs, each bulb having inputs from two other bulbs in the collection.

Assume that you connect these bulbs at random, that a clock ticks off one-second intervals, and that at each tick each bulb either goes on or off according to some arbitrarily selected rule. For some bulbs, the rule might be to go off at any instant unless both inputs are on the previous instant. For others it might be to go on at any instant if at least one of the inputs is off the previous instant. Given the random connections and random assignment of rules, it would be natural to expect the collection of bulbs to flicker chaotically with no apparent pattern.

What happens, however, is that very soon one observes order for free, more or less stable cycles of light configurations, different ones for different initial conditions. Kauffman proposes that some phenomenon of this sort supplements or accentuates the effects of natural selection.

Although there is certainly no need for yet another argument against the seemingly ineradicable silliness of "creation science," these light bulb experiments and the unexpected order that occurs so naturally in them do seem to provide one.

In any case, order for free and apparent complexity greater than we might naively expect are no basis for believing in God as traditionally defined. Of course, we can always redefine God to be an inevitable island of order or some sort of emergent mathematical entity. If we do that, the above considerations can be taken as indicating that such a pattern will necessarily exist, but that's hardly what people mean by God.

About the Author

John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, is the author of the best-sellers "Innumeracy" and "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper," as well as of the just-released "Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why The Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up " His "Who's Counting?" column on ABCNEWS.com appears the first weekend of every month.

Source : ABC News

The Size Of Our World - Stars And Planets In Scale

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:17:00 +0000

So how big is our planet Earth? The video below illustrates the size of planets and stars compared to each other. See how our planet and Sun become dwarfs and disappear in the scale.

W Cephei; VV Cephei: 3,676,200,000 km (ie, 288194 x Earth)
My Cephei: 3,481,250,000 kim
Antares: 1,108,430,000 km
Beteigeuze: 905,125,000 km
Rigel: 86,335,000 km
Arcturus: 4,177,500 km
Pollux: 6,962,500 km
Sirius: 2,506,500 km
Sun: 1,392,500 km
Jupiter: 142,984 km
Saturn: 108,728 km
Neptune: 49,532 km
Earth: 12,756 km
Venus: 12,104 k
Mars: 6,794 km
Mercury: 4880 km

Dozens in Texas Town Report Seeing UFO

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:44:00 +0000

By Angela K. Brown

STEPHENVILLE, Texas (AP) — In this farming community where nightfall usually brings clear, starry skies, residents are abuzz over reported sightings of what many believe is a UFO.

Several dozen people — including a pilot, county constable and business owners — insist they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it.

"People wonder what in the 2world it is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it's the end of times," said Steve Allen, a freight company owner and pilot who said the object he saw last week was a mile long and half a mile wide. "It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts."

While federal officials insist there's a logical explanation, locals swear that it was larger, quieter, faster and lower to the ground than an airplane. They also said the object's lights changed configuration, unlike those of a plane. People in several towns who reported seeing it over several weeks have offered similar descriptions of the object.

Machinist Ricky Sorrells said friends made fun of him when he told them he saw a flat, metallic object hovering about 300 feet over a pasture behind his Dublin home. But he decided to come forward after reading similar accounts in the Stephenville Empire-Tribune.

"You hear about big bass or big buck in the area, but this is a different deal," Sorrells said. "It feels good to hear that other people saw something, because that means I'm not crazy."

Sorrells said he has seen the object several times. He said he watched it through his rifle's telescopic lens and described it as very large and without seams, nuts or bolts.

Maj. Karl Lewis, a spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station in Fort Worth, said no F-16s or other aircraft from his base were in the area the night of Jan. 8, when most people reported the sighting.

Lewis said the object may have been an illusion caused by two commercial airplanes. Lights from the aircraft would seem unusually bright and may appear orange from the setting sun.

"I'm 90 percent sure this was an airliner," Lewis said. "With the sun's angle, it can play tricks on you."

Officials at the region's two Air Force bases — Dyess in Abilene and Sheppard in Wichita Falls — also said none of their aircraft were in the area last week. The Air Force no longer investigates UFOs.

One man has offered a reward for a photograph or videotape of the mysterious object.

About 200 UFO sightings are reported each month, mostly in California, Colorado and Texas, according to the Mutual UFO Network, which plans to go to the 17,000-resident town of Stephenville to investigate.

Fourteen percent of Americans polled last year by The Associated Press and Ipsos say they have seen a UFO.

Erath County Constable Lee Roy Gaitan said that he first saw red glowing lights and then white flashing lights moving fast, but that even with binoculars could not see the object to which the lights were attached.

"I didn't see a flying saucer and I don't know what it was, but it wasn't an airplane, and I've never seen anything like it," Gaitan said. "I think it must be some kind of military craft — at least I hope it was."

Source : Google News

NASA to Beam Beatles' 'Across the Universe' Into Space

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:18:00 +0000

For the first time ever, NASA will beam a song -- The Beatles' "Across the Universe" (Listen) -- directly into deep space at 7 p.m. EST on Feb. 4.

The transmission over NASA's Deep Space Network will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the day The Beatles recorded the song, as well as the 50th anniversary of NASA's founding and the group's beginnings. Two other anniversaries also are being honored: The launch 50 years ago this week of Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, and the founding 45 years ago of the Deep Space Network, an international network of antennas that supports missions to explore the universe.

The transmission is being aimed at the North Star, Polaris, which is located 431 light years away from Earth. The song will travel across the universe at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney expressed excitement that the tune, which was principally written by fellow Beatle John Lennon, was being beamed into the cosmos.

"Amazing! Well done, NASA!" McCartney said in a message to the space agency. "Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul."

Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, characterized the song's transmission as a significant event.

"I see that this is the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe," she said.

It is not the first time Beatles music has been used by NASA; in November 2005, McCartney performed the song "Good Day Sunshine" during a concert that was transmitted to the International Space Station (› Related Story). "Here Comes the Sun," "Ticket to Ride" and "A Hard Day's Night" are among other Beatles' songs that have been played to wake astronaut crews in orbit.

Feb. 4 has been declared "Across The Universe Day" by Beatles fans to commemorate the anniversaries. As part of the celebration, the public around the world has been invited to participate in the event by simultaneously playing the song at the same time it is transmitted by NASA. Many of the senior NASA scientists and engineers involved in the effort are among the group's biggest fans.

"I've been a Beatles fan for 45 years – as long as the Deep Space Network has been around," said Dr. Barry Geldzahler, the network's program executive at NASA Headquarters, Washington. "What a joy, especially considering that 'Across the Universe' is my personal favorite Beatles song."

Source : NASA

Astronomers' Findings Portray Odd, Violent Universe: Rogue Black Holes, Orphaned Baby Stars

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:53:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) - The deeper astronomers gaze into the cosmos, the more they find it's a bizarre and violent universe. The research findings from this week's annual meeting of U.S. astronomers range from blue orphaned baby stars to menacing "rogue" black holes that roam our galaxy, devouring any planets unlucky enough to be within their limited reach.

"It's an odd universe we live in," said Vanderbilt University astronomer Kelly Holley-Bockelmann. She presented her theory on rogue black holes at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Austin, Texas, earlier this week.

It should be noted that she's not worried and you shouldn't be either. The odds of one of these black holes swallowing up Earth or the sun or wreaking other havoc is somewhere around 1 in 10 quadrillion in any given year.

"This is the glory of the universe," added J. Craig Wheeler, president of the astronomy association. "What is odd and what is normal is changing." Just five years ago, astronomers were gazing at a few thousand galaxies where stars formed in a bizarre and violent manner. Now the number is in the millions, thanks to more powerful, telescopes and supercomputers to crunch the crucial numbers streaming in from space, said Wheeler, a University of Texas astronomer.

Scientists are finding that not only are they improving their understanding of the basic questions of the universe such as how did it all start and where is it all going they also keep stumbling upon unexpected, hard-to-explain cosmic quirks and the potential, but comfortably distant, dangers.

Much of what they keep finding plays out like a stellar version of a violent Quentin Tarantino movie. The violence surrounds and approaches Earth, even though our planet is safe and "in a pretty quiet neighborhood," said Wheeler, author of the book "Cosmic Catastrophes."

One example is an approaching gas cloud discussed at the meeting Friday. The cloud has a mass 1 million times that of the sun. It is 47 quadrillion miles away. But it's heading toward our Milky Way galaxy at 150 miles per second. And when it hits, there will be fireworks that form new stars and "really light up the neighborhood," said astronomer Jay Lockman at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia.

But don't worry. It will hit a part of the Milky Way far from Earth and the biggest collision will be 40 million years in the future.

The giant cloud has been known for more than 40 years, but only now have scientists realized how fast it's moving. So fast, Lockman said, that "we can see it sort of plowing up a wave of galactic material in front of it."

When astronomers this week unveiled a giant map of mysterious dark matter in a supercluster of galaxies, they explained that the violence of the cramped-together galaxies is so great that there is now an accepted vocabulary for various types of cosmic brutal behavior.

The gravitational force between the clashing galaxies can cause "slow strangulation," in which crucial gas is gradually removed from the victim galaxy. "Stripping" is a more violent process in which the larger galaxy rips gas from the smaller one. And then there's "harassment," which is a quick fly-by encounter, said astronomer Meghan Gray of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.

Gray's presentation essentially showed the victims of galaxy-on-galaxy violence. She and her colleagues are trying to figure out the how the dirty deeds were done.

In the past few days, scientists have unveiled plenty to ooh and aah over:

Photos of "blue blobs" that astronomers figure are orphaned baby stars. They're called orphans because they were "born in the middle of nowhere" instead of within gas clouds, said Catholic University of America astronomer Duilia F. de Mello.

A strange quadruplet of four hugging stars, which may eventually help astronomers understand better how stars form.

A young star surrounded by dust, that may eventually become a planet. It's nicknamed "the moth," because the interaction of star and dust are shaped like one.

A spiral galaxy with two pairs of arms spinning in opposite directions, like a double pinwheel. It defies what astronomers believe should happen. It is akin to one of those spinning-armed flamingo lawn ornaments, said astronomer Gene Byrd of the University of Alabama.

The equivalent of post-menopausal stars giving unlikely birth to new planets. Most planets form soon after a sun, but astronomers found two older stars"Intellectually and spiritually, if I can use that word with a lower case 's,' it's awe-inspiring," Wheeler said. "It's a great universe.", one at least 400 million years old, with new planets.

Source : PR-inside.com

Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:29:00 +0000

By Dennis Overbye

Correction Appended

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however. And so in the last couple of years there has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers, replete with references to such esoteric subjects as reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

Alan Guth, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who agrees this overabundance is absurd, pointed out that some calculations result in an infinite number of free-floating brains for every normal brain, making it “infinitely unlikely for us to be normal brains.” Welcome to what physicists call the Boltzmann brain problem, named after the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who suggested the mechanism by which such fluctuations could happen in a gas or in the universe. Cosmologists also refer to them as “freaky observers,” in contrast to regular or “ordered” observers of the cosmos like ourselves. Cosmologists are desperate to eliminate these freaks from their theories, but so far they can’t even agree on how or even on whether they are making any progress.

If you are inclined to skepticism this debate might seem like further evidence that cosmologists, who gave us dark matter, dark energy and speak with apparent aplomb about gazillions of parallel universes, have finally lost their minds. But the cosmologists say the brain problem serves as a valuable reality check as they contemplate the far, far future and zillions of bubble universes popping off from one another in an ever-increasing rush through eternity. What, for example is a “typical” observer in such a setup? If some atoms in another universe stick together briefly to look, talk and think exactly like you, is it really you?

“It is part of a much bigger set of questions about how to think about probabilities in an infinite universe in which everything that can occur, does occur, infinitely many times,” said Leonard Susskind of Stanford, a co-author of a paper in 2002 that helped set off the debate. Or as Andrei Linde, another Stanford theorist given to colorful language, loosely characterized the possibility of a replica of your own brain forming out in space sometime, “How do you compute the probability to be reincarnated to the probability of being born?”

The Boltzmann brain problem arises from a string of logical conclusions that all spring from another deep and old question, namely why time seems to go in only one direction. Why can’t you unscramble an egg? The fundamental laws governing the atoms bouncing off one another in the egg look the same whether time goes forward or backward. In this universe, at least, the future and the past are different and you can’t remember who is going to win the Super Bowl next week.

“When you break an egg and scramble it you are doing cosmology,” said Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology.

Boltzmann ascribed this so-called arrow of time to the tendency of any collection of particles to spread out into the most random and useless configuration, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics (sometimes paraphrased as “things get worse”), which says that entropy, which is a measure of disorder or wasted energy, can never decrease in a closed system like the universe.

If the universe was running down and entropy was increasing now, that was because the universe must have been highly ordered in the past.

In Boltzmann’s time the universe was presumed to have been around forever, in which case it would long ago have stabilized at a lukewarm temperature and died a “heat death.” It would already have maximum entropy, and so with no way to become more disorderly there would be no arrow of time. No life would be possible but that would be all right because life would be excruciatingly boring. Boltzmann said that entropy was all about odds, however, and if we waited long enough the random bumping of atoms would occasionally produce the cosmic equivalent of an egg unscrambling. A rare fluctuation would decrease the entropy in some place and start the arrow of time pointing and history flowing again. That is not what happened. Astronomers now know the universe has not lasted forever. It was born in the Big Bang, which somehow set the arrow of time, 14 billion years ago. The linchpin of the Big Bang is thought to be an explosive moment known as inflation, during which space became suffused with energy that had an antigravitational effect and ballooned violently outward, ironing the kinks and irregularities out of what is now the observable universe and endowing primordial chaos with order.

Inflation is a veritable cosmological fertility principle. Fluctuations in the field driving inflation also would have seeded the universe with the lumps that eventually grew to be galaxies, stars and people. According to the more extended version, called eternal inflation, an endless array of bubble or “pocket” universes are branching off from one another at a dizzying and exponentially increasing rate. They could have different properties and perhaps even different laws of physics, so the story goes.

A different, but perhaps related, form of antigravity, glibly dubbed dark energy, seems to be running the universe now, and that is the culprit responsible for the Boltzmann brains.

The expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating, making galaxies fly away from one another faster and faster. If the leading dark-energy suspect, a universal repulsion Einstein called the cosmological constant, is true, this runaway process will last forever, and distant galaxies will eventually be moving apart so quickly that they cannot communicate with one another. Being in such a space would be like being surrounded by a black hole.

Rather than simply going to black like “The Sopranos” conclusion, however, the cosmic horizon would glow, emitting a feeble spray of elementary particles and radiation, with a temperature of a fraction of a billionth of a degree, courtesy of quantum uncertainty. That radiation bath will be subject to random fluctuations just like Boltzmann’s eternal universe, however, and every once in a very long, long time, one of those fluctuations would be big enough to recreate the Big Bang. In the fullness of time this process could lead to the endless series of recurring universes. Our present universe could be part of that chain.

In such a recurrent setup, however, Dr. Susskind of Stanford, Lisa Dyson, now of the University of California, Berkeley, and Matthew Kleban, now at New York University, pointed out in 2002 that Boltzmann’s idea might work too well, filling the megaverse with more Boltzmann brains than universes or real people.

In the same way the odds of a real word showing up when you shake a box of Scrabble letters are greater than a whole sentence or paragraph forming, these “regular” universes would be vastly outnumbered by weird ones, including flawed variations on our own all the way down to naked brains, a result foreshadowed by Martin Rees, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, in his 1997 book, “Before the Beginning.”

The conclusions of Dr. Dyson and her colleagues were quickly challenged by Andreas Albrecht and Lorenzo Sorbo of the University of California, Davis, who used an alternate approach. They found that the Big Bang was actually more likely than Boltzmann’s brain.

“In the end, inflation saves us from Boltzmann’s brain,” Dr. Albrecht said, while admitting that the calculations were contentious. Indeed, the “invasion of Boltzmann brains,” as Dr. Linde once referred to it, was just beginning.

In an interview Dr. Linde described these brains as a form of reincarnation. Over the course of eternity, he said, anything is possible. After some Big Bang in the far future, he said, “it’s possible that you yourself will re-emerge. Eventually you will appear with your table and your computer.”

But it’s more likely, he went on, that you will be reincarnated as an isolated brain, without the baggage of stars and galaxies. In terms of probability, he said, “It’s cheaper.”

You might wonder what’s wrong with a few brains — or even a preponderance of them — floating around in space. For one thing, as observers these brains would see a freaky chaotic universe, unlike our own, which seems to persist in its promise and disappointment.

Another is that one of the central orthodoxies of cosmology is that humans don’t occupy a special place in the cosmos, that we and our experiences are typical of cosmic beings. If the odds of us being real instead of Boltzmann brains are one in a million, say, waking up every day would be like walking out on the street and finding everyone in the city standing on their heads. You would expect there to be some reason why you were the only one left right side up.

Some cosmologists, James Hartle and Mark Srednicki, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have questioned that assumption. “For example,” Dr. Hartle wrote in an e-mail message, “on Earth humans are not typical animals; insects are far more numerous. No one is surprised by this.”

In an e-mail response to Dr. Hartle’s view, Don Page of the University of Alberta, who has been a prominent voice in the Boltzmann debate, argued that what counted cosmologically was not sheer numbers, but consciousness, which we have in abundance over the insects. “I would say that we have no strong evidence against the working hypothesis that we are typical and that our observations are typical,” he explained, “which is very fruitful in science for helping us believe that our observations are not just flukes but do tell us something about the universe.”

Dr. Dyson and her colleagues suggested that the solution to the Boltzmann paradox was in denying the presumption that the universe would accelerate eternally. In other words, they said, that the cosmological constant was perhaps not really constant. If the cosmological constant eventually faded away, the universe would revert to normal expansion and what was left would eventually fade to black. With no more acceleration there would be no horizon with its snap, crackle and pop, and thus no material for fluctuations and Boltzmann brains.

String theory calculations have suggested that dark energy is indeed metastable and will decay, Dr. Susskind pointed out. “The success of ordinary cosmology,” Dr. Susskind said, “speaks against the idea that the universe was created in a random fluctuation.”

But nobody knows whether dark energy — if it dies — will die soon enough to save the universe from a surplus of Boltzmann brains. In 2006, Dr. Page calculated that the dark energy would have to decay in about 20 billion years in order to prevent it from being overrun by Boltzmann brains.

The decay, if and when it comes, would rejigger the laws of physics and so would be fatal and total, spreading at almost the speed of light and destroying all matter without warning. There would be no time for pain, Dr. Page wrote: “And no grieving survivors will be left behind. So in this way it would be the most humanely possible execution.” But the object of his work, he said, was not to predict the end of the universe but to draw attention to the fact that the Boltzmann brain problem remains.

People have their own favorite measures of probability in the multiverse, said Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley. “So Boltzmann brains are just one example of how measures can predict nonsense; anytime your measure predicts that something we see has extremely small probability, you can throw it out,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

Another contentious issue is whether the cosmologists in their calculations could consider only the observable universe, which is all we can ever see or be influenced by, or whether they should take into account the vast and ever-growing assemblage of other bubbles forever out of our view predicted by eternal inflation. In the latter case, as Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University pointed out, “The numbers of regular and freak observers are both infinite.” Which kind predominate depends on how you do the counting, he said..

In eternal inflation, the number of new bubbles being hatched at any given moment is always growing, Dr. Linde said, explaining one such counting scheme he likes. So the evolution of people in new bubbles far outstrips the creation of Boltzmann brains in old ones. The main way life emerges, he said, is not by reincarnation but by the creation of new parts of the universe. “So maybe we don’t need to care too much” about the Boltzmann brains,” he said.

“If you are reincarnated, why do you care about where you are reincarnated?” he asked. “It sounds crazy because here we are touching issues we are not supposed to be touching in ordinary science. Can we be reincarnated?”

“People are not prepared for this discussion,” Dr. Linde said.

Source : The New York Times

Spectacular Sky Show: Venus, Jupiter and the Moon

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:43:00 +0000

By Joe Rao

SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist

The most spectacular celestial sights over the next couple of weeks are reserved for the early morning sky. Two bright planets will converge, then be joined by the moon.

Kenneth L. Franklin (1923-2007), the former Chairman and Chief Astronomer at New York's Hayden Planetarium, would often make reference to our "dynamic and ever-changing sky."

Such an eloquent description certainly fits our current morning sky, for these final days of January and the first days of February will be an exceptional time for predawn sky watchers with a beautiful pairing of the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter. They will appear closest together in the dawn sky of Friday, Feb. 1, and a few mornings later, the waning crescent moon will later drop by to join them.

Dazzling "double planet"

For the past several months, dazzling Venus has been prominent in our morning sky. And about a week ago, brilliant Jupiter also began to emerge from out of the glare of the Sun.

The two planets are currently rising out of the east-southeast horizon about two hours before sunrise.

From now through the end of January, the gap between the two will noticeably close, until on Feb. 1 they'll be separated by just over one-half degree, which is roughly the apparent width of the moon (The width of your fist, held at arm's length roughly corresponds to 10 degrees). Jupiter will shine brilliantly at magnitude -1.9, yet it will appear only 1/7 as bright as Venus, which will gleam at magnitude -4.0.

Together they will make for a spectacular "double planet" low in the dawn twilight. In the mornings thereafter they will appear to slowly separate, but before they have a chance to get too far apart the moon will join the picture.

Celestial summit meeting

At last quarter (half) phase on Jan. 30, the moon will stand alone, high toward the south at sunrise. But with each passing morning, as it wanes to a slender crescent, it will shift toward the east, ultimately into the same region of the sky as our two planets.

Early on Sunday morning, Feb. 3, the moon will sit well off to the west (right) of the planets. On the following morning, Monday, Feb. 4, the show will reach its peak when, about 45 minutes before sunrise, Venus, Jupiter and the moon — the three brightest objects of the night sky — will form a striking isosceles triangle, with the two planets 3 degrees apart and the moon marking the vertex of the triangle just over 5 degrees below the "dynamic duo."

Imagine the astrological significance that the ancients might have ascribed to a celestial summit meeting such as this!

You might want to check your southeast horizon in advance to make sure that there are no tall trees or buildings that might obstruct your view of the moon which will be sitting very low to the horizon.

Like a painting, this celestial tableau might, at first glance may appear rather flat and one-dimensional. But by gazing at this scene long enough, our minds can perhaps picture these objects strung out across the solar system, along our line of sight as they really are.

Beyond our moon — figuratively a stone's throw away at 247,000 miles (397,000 kilometers) — we first reach Venus, about 510 times farther out, or 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) from Earth. The lesser gem flanking Venus — Jupiter, largest of all the planets — is nearly 4 and a half times more distant than Venus at a distance of 560 million miles (901 million kilometers).

Generally speaking, at least for the immediate future, conjunctions between Venus and Jupiter will come in pairs. The first conjunction takes place in the morning sky, followed about 10 months later by another in the evening sky. Then, after about two and a half years, Venus and Jupiter are again in conjunction, again in the morning sky.

When Venus and Jupiter next get together, it will be in the evening sky late next fall, on Dec. 1. After that, we'll have to wait until May 2011 (morning sky) and Mar. 2012 (evening sky) for the next set of Venus-Jupiter conjunctions.

Source : Space.com

Probing the Cosmic Web of the Universe

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:52:00 +0000

Astronomers have used ESO’s Very Large Telescope to measure the distribution and motions of thousands of galaxies in the distant Universe. This opens fascinating perspectives to better understand what drives the acceleration of the cosmic expansion and sheds new light on the mysterious dark energy that is thought to permeate the Universe.

“Explaining why the expansion of the Universe is currently accelerating is certainly the most fascinating question in modern cosmology,” says Luigi Guzzo, lead author of a paper in this week’s issue of Nature, in which the new results are presented. “We have been able to show that large surveys that measure the positions and velocities of distant galaxies provide us with a new powerful way to solve this mystery.”

Ten years ago, astronomers made the stunning discovery that the Universe is expanding at a faster pace today than it did in the past.

“This implies that one of two very different possibilities must hold true,” explains Enzo Branchini, member of the team. “Either the Universe is filled with a mysterious dark energy which produces a repulsive force that fights the gravitational brake from all the matter present in the Universe, or, our current theory of gravitation is not correct and needs to be modified, for example by adding extra dimensions to space.”

Current observations of the expansion rate of the Universe cannot distinguish between these two options, but the international team of 51 scientists from 24 institutions found a way that could help in tackling this problem. The technique is based on a well-known phenomenon, namely the fact that the apparent motion of distant galaxies results from two effects: the global expansion of the Universe that pushes the galaxies away from each other and the gravitational attraction of matter present in the galaxies’ neighbourhood that pulls them together, creating the cosmic web of large-scale structures.

“By measuring the apparent velocities of large samples of galaxies over the last thirty years, astronomers have been able to reconstruct a three-dimensional map of the distribution of galaxies over large volumes of the Universe. This map revealed large-scale structures such as clusters of galaxies and filamentary superclusters ”, says Olivier Le Fèvre, member of the team. “But the measured velocities also contain information about the local motions of galaxies; these introduce small but significant distortions in the reconstructed maps of the Universe. We have shown that measuring this distortion at different epochs of the Universe’s history is a way to test the nature of dark energy.”

Guzzo and his collaborators have been able to measure this effect by using the VIMOS spectrograph on Melipal, one of the four 8.2-m telescopes that is part of ESO’s VLT. As part of the VIMOS-VLT Deep Survey (VVDS), of which Le Fèvre is the Principal Investigator, spectra of several thousands of galaxies in a 4-square-degree field (or 20 times the size of the full Moon) at epochs corresponding to about half the current age of the Universe (about 7 billion years ago) were obtained and analysed.

“This is the largest field ever covered homogeneously by means of spectroscopy to this depth,” says Le Fèvre. “We have now collected more than 13,000 spectra in this field and the total volume sampled by the survey is more than 25 million cubic light-years.”

The astronomers compared their result with that of the 2dFGRS survey that probed the local Universe, i.e. measures the distortion at the present time.

Within current uncertainties, the measurement of this effect provides an independent indication of the need for an unknown extra energy ingredient in the ‘cosmic soup’, supporting the simplest form of dark energy, the so-called cosmological constant, introduced originally by Albert Einstein. The large uncertainties do not yet exclude the other scenarios, though.

“We have also shown that by extending our measurements over volumes about ten times larger than the VVDS, this technique should be able to tell us whether cosmic acceleration originates from a dark energy component of exotic origin or requires a modification of the laws of gravity,” said Guzzo.

“VIMOS on the VLT would certainly be a wonderful tool to perform this future survey and help us answer this fundamental question. This strongly encourages our team to proceed with even more ambitious surveys of the distant Universe,” says Le Fèvre.

Source : RedOrbit

The Expanding Universe
In 1929, Edwin Hubble, an astronomer at Caltech, made a critical discovery that soon led to scientific answers for these questions: he discovered that the universe is expanding.

How Fast is the Universe Expanding?
The expansion or contraction of the universe depends on its content and past history. With enough matter, the expansion will slow or even become a contraction.

What is the Universe Expanding Into?
I am very confused about things my science book says about the expanding universe. Every book I have seen has defined the universe as "everything". If the universe is expanding what is it expanding into?

Hubble's Guide to the Expanding Universe
Think you've established your place in the universe? Think again. Your position right now isn't the same as it was just a second ago.

Cosmology Primer: The Expanding Universe
Hubble's second great discovery is that the universe is expanding. The concept of an expanding universe can be a tricky one, so it is worth being careful about what we mean.

Universe's First Stars May Have Been Dark

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:15:00 +0000

By Maggie McKee

The universe's first stars may have been bloated behemoths powered by dark matter, suggests an intriguing, if speculative, new study. These 'dark stars' might have delayed the creation of heavy elements, which make up everything from planets to people, as well as cosmic reionisation, which made the universe transparent to light billions of years ago.

Theorists believe the first stars formed in cradles of dark matter, condensing from clouds of gas until their cores became so dense that nuclear fusion ignited.

But previous research did not consider how the dark matter cradles themselves might affect star formation, say Douglas Spolyar of the University of California in Santa Cruz, Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Paolo Gondolo of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, all in the US.

When they accounted for dark matter, they discovered it could have had a profound influence on the first stars.

Just what that effect is is still unclear, since no one knows what dark matter is – astronomers merely detect its gravitational pull on normal matter. But if it is made of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, as many scientists believe, Spolyar and his colleagues say it could alter our understanding of the early universe.

They used a candidate WIMP called a neutralino in their calculations and found that as a primordial gas cloud contracted, it reached a threshold density in which the dark matter particles swaddling it began to interact with each other. They annihilated on contact, producing particles such as electrons as well as photons of light that then deposited energy into the cloud.

Infrared glow

This could heat up the cloud so much that it would stop contracting, so that it was supported by the annihilation of dark matter rather than by nuclear fusion, like normal stars. Such a 'dark star' would be about as massive as the Sun and would glow at infrared wavelengths. But it would be much larger – depending on the mass of the neutralino used, the star could span anywhere from the distance between the Sun and Uranus in our solar system to nearly 60 times that size.

"To call it a dark star is a bit of a misnomer – it simply has a different source of internal energy to support the star against gravity," says Volker Bromm of the University of Texas in Austin, US, an expert on the universe's first stars who is not a member of the study. "It would be a ball of gas that would have a reddish glow."

Could any of these stars still survive today? Possibly, depending on the neutralino mass, say the researchers. "They could be flying around our galaxy," Spolyar told New Scientist. In that case, the very first generation of stars in the universe – so-called 'population III' stars – would have been "very different beasts" than previously thought, the team says.

Nearly all of the elements in the universe aside from hydrogen and helium were forged inside stars, and "the first stars are the first step in that process", team member Freese told New Scientist. If the first stars were dark, "there could be a major delay or even a stopping of this process", she says.

Primordial cloud

"It may turn out that the early star formation and consequently the synthesis of elements went differently than we thought," comments Igor Moskalenko of Stanford University in California, US. "If so, we have evidence of the dark matter presence literally in every cell of our body."

Other 'pop III' stars – which formed inside early galaxies rather than isolated dark matter cradles – would thus have been responsible for seeding the universe with its first heavy elements.

That suggests that heavy elements may not be spread evenly throughout space, since the stars in early galaxies would have enriched their surroundings in these elements and left voids of relatively empty space unenriched, says Bromm. If astronomers ever find a truly primordial cloud of gas in the universe, then it might hint that the first stars were dark.

Similarly, the first stars are thought to have helped ionise the universe within a few hundred million years after the big bang, making it transparent to ultraviolet light. (This phenomenon is actually referred to as 'reionisation', since the universe was a scalding soup of charged particles immediately after the big bang. It then cooled down enough for ions to coalesce into neutral atoms after 370,000 years or so.)

Micro and macro

If the first stars were dark, then that suggests the stars in early dwarf galaxies would have been responsible for reionising the universe, says Bromm.

"Another thing that's exciting to me is that we may have a new type of star and we can go look for these things," says Freese. Neutrinos produced by the annihilation of dark matter in the stars might turn up in detectors such as AMANDA and IceCube at the South Pole, and gamma-ray photons produced in the same process could be picked up by NASA's GLAST spacecraft, due to launch in mid-2008.

Bromm says the research is quite speculative, since there are "incredibly many degrees of freedom when it comes to the properties of dark matter". But he adds that the work helps to bridge the gap between studies of dark matter on a particle physics scale and its effect on astronomical objects. "This paper is one of the first in this very interesting line of convergence between micro and macro physics," he told New Scientist.

Source : New Scientist Page

The First Stars in the Universe
Exceptionally massive and bright, the earliest stars changed the course of cosmic history.

Dark Matter May Have Powered Universe's First Stars
Dark matter may have fueled the formation of the universe's first stars—vast, invisible giants totally unlike the blazing suns of today—scientists say.

Universe's Earliest Stars May Hold Clues to the Nature of Dark Matter
The universe's earliest stars may hold clues to the nature of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up most of the universe's matter but doesn't interact with light, cosmologists report.

First Stars (and other beginnings)
Computer simulations suggest that many, if not all, of the universe's first generation of stars (Population III) were brighter, hotter, and more massive than even today's luminous blue variable stars.

First Stars Were Brutes, but Died Young, Astronomers Say
The first stars in the universe were short-lived brutish monsters, and they changed the nature of the cosmos forever, blazing away a dark fog that had smothered space for 300 million years and beginning to enrich the cosmos with the stuff of life.

God vs. Science

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:38:00 +0000

By David Van Biema
With reporting by David Bjerklie, Alice Park/New York, Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Jeff Israely/Rome

There are two great debates under the broad heading of Science vs. God. The more familiar over the past few years is the narrower of the two: Can Darwinian evolution withstand the criticisms of Christians who believe that it contradicts the creation account in the Book of Genesis?

In recent years, creationism took on new currency as the spiritual progenitor of "intelligent design" (I.D.), a scientifically worded attempt to show that blanks in the evolutionary narrative are more meaningful than its very convincing totality. I.D. lost some of its journalistic headart last December when a federal judge dismissed it as pseudoscience unsuitable for teaching in Pennsylvania schools.

But in fact creationism and I.D. are intimately related to a larger unresolved question, in which the aggressor's role is reversed: Can religion stand up to the progress of science? This debate long predates Darwin, but the antireligion position is being promoted with increasing insistence by scientists angered by intelligent design and excited, perhaps intoxicated, by their disciplines' increasing ability to map, quantify and change the nature of human experience. Brain imaging illustrates--in color!--the physical seat of the will and the passions, challenging the religious concept of a soul independent of glands and gristle. Brain chemists track imbalances that could account for the ecstatic states of visionary saints or, some suggest, of Jesus. Like Freudianism before it, the field of evolutionary psychology generates theories of altruism and even of religion that do not include God. Something called the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology speculates that ours may be but one in a cascade of universes, suddenly bettering the odds that life could have cropped up here accidentally, without divine intervention. (If the probabilities were 1 in a billion, and you've got 300 billion universes, why not?)

Roman Catholicism's Christoph Cardinal Schönborn has dubbed the most fervent of faith-challenging scientists followers of "scientism" or "evolutionism," since they hope science, beyond being a measure, can replace religion as a worldview and a touchstone. It is not an epithet that fits everyone wielding a test tube. But a growing proportion of the profession is experiencing what one major researcher calls "unprecedented outrage" at perceived insults to research and rationality, ranging from the alleged influence of the Christian right on Bush Administration science policy to the fanatic faith of the 9/11 terrorists to intelligent design's ongoing claims. Some are radicalized enough to publicly pick an ancient scab: the idea that science and religion, far from being complementary responses to the unknown, are at utter odds--or, as Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has written bluntly, "Religion and science will always clash." The market seems flooded with books by scientists describing a caged death match between science and God--with science winning, or at least chipping away at faith's underlying verities.

Finding a spokesman for this side of the question was not hard, since Richard Dawkins, perhaps its foremost polemicist, has just come out with The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin), the rare volume whose position is so clear it forgoes a subtitle. The five-week New York Times best seller (now at No. 8) attacks faith philosophically and historically as well as scientifically, but leans heavily on Darwinian theory, which was Dawkins' expertise as a young scientist and more recently as an explicator of evolutionary psychology so lucid that he occupies the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science at Oxford University.

Dawkins is riding the crest of an atheist literary wave. In 2004, The End of Faith, a multipronged indictment by neuroscience grad student Sam Harris, was published (over 400,000 copies in print). Harris has written a 96-page follow-up, Letter to a Christian Nation, which is now No. 14 on the Times list. Last February, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett produced Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which has sold fewer copies but has helped usher the discussion into the public arena.

If Dennett and Harris are almost-scientists (Dennett runs a multidisciplinary scientific-philosophic program), the authors of half a dozen aggressively secular volumes are card carriers: In Moral Minds, Harvard biologist Marc Hauser explores the--nondivine--origins of our sense of right and wrong (September); in Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (due in January) by self-described "atheist-reductionist-materialist" biologist Lewis Wolpert, religion is one of those impossible things; Victor Stenger, a physicist-astronomer, has a book coming out titled God: The Failed Hypothesis. Meanwhile, Ann Druyan, widow of archskeptical astrophysicist Carl Sagan, has edited Sagan's unpublished lectures on God and his absence into a book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience, out this month.

Dawkins and his army have a swarm of articulate theological opponents, of course. But the most ardent of these don't really care very much about science, and an argument in which one party stands immovable on Scripture and the other immobile on the periodic table doesn't get anyone very far. Most Americans occupy the middle ground: we want it all. We want to cheer on science's strides and still humble ourselves on the Sabbath. We want access to both MRIs and miracles. We want debates about issues like stem cells without conceding that the positions are so intrinsically inimical as to make discussion fruitless. And to balance formidable standard bearers like Dawkins, we seek those who possess religious conviction but also scientific achievements to credibly argue the widespread hope that science and God are in harmony--that, indeed, science is of God.

Informed conciliators have recently become more vocal. Stanford University biologist Joan Roughgarden has just come out with Evolution and Christian Faith, which provides what she calls a "strong Christian defense" of evolutionary biology, illustrating the discipline's major concepts with biblical passages. Entomologist Edward O. Wilson, a famous skeptic of standard faith, has written The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, urging believers and non-believers to unite over conservation. But foremost of those arguing for common ground is Francis Collins.

Collins' devotion to genetics is, if possible, greater than Dawkins'. Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993, he headed a multinational 2,400-scientist team that co-mapped the 3 billion biochemical letters of our genetic blueprint, a milestone that then President Bill Clinton honored in a 2000 White House ceremony, comparing the genome chart to Meriwether Lewis' map of his fateful continental exploration. Collins continues to lead his institute in studying the genome and mining it for medical breakthroughs.

He is also a forthright Christian who converted from atheism at age 27 and now finds time to advise young evangelical scientists on how to declare their faith in science's largely agnostic upper reaches. His summer best seller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press), laid out some of the arguments he brought to bear in the 90-minute debate TIME arranged between Dawkins and Collins in our offices at the Time & Life Building in New York City on Sept. 30. Some excerpts from their spirited exchange:

TIME: Professor Dawkins, if one truly understands science, is God then a delusion, as your book title suggests?

DAWKINS: The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

TIME: Dr. Collins, you believe that science is compatible with Christian faith.

COLLINS: Yes. God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer. From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God's existence is outside of science's ability to really weigh in.

TIME: Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard paleontologist, famously argued that religion and science can coexist, because they occupy separate, airtight boxes. You both seem to disagree.

COLLINS: Gould sets up an artificial wall between the two worldviews that doesn't exist in my life. Because I do believe in God's creative power in having brought it all into being in the first place, I find that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God's creation.

DAWKINS: I think that Gould's separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it's a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf. Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.

TIME: Professor Dawkins, you think Darwin's theory of evolution does more than simply contradict the Genesis story.

DAWKINS: Yes. For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection. Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.

COLLINS: I don't see that Professor Dawkins' basic account of evolution is incompatible with God's having designed it.

TIME: When would this have occurred?

COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

DAWKINS: I think that's a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

COLLINS: Who are we to say that that was an odd way to do it? I don't think that it is God's purpose to make his intention absolutely obvious to us. If it suits him to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?

TIME: Both your books suggest that if the universal constants, the six or more characteristics of our universe, had varied at all, it would have made life impossible. Dr. Collins, can you provide an example?

COLLINS: The gravitational constant, if it were off by one part in a hundred million million, then the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance. But if you are willing to consider the possibility of a designer, this becomes a rather plausible explanation for what is otherwise an exceedingly improbable event--namely, our existence.

DAWKINS: People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill. The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.

COLLINS: This is an interesting choice. Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor--Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward--leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.

DAWKINS: I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. What I can't understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you're shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.

COLLINS: My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else. God is the answer to all of those "How must it have come to be" questions.

DAWKINS: I think that's the mother and father of all cop-outs. It's an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now Dr. Collins says, "Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this." Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don't do that. Scientists say, "We're working on it. We're struggling to understand."

COLLINS: Certainly science should continue to see whether we can find evidence for multiverses that might explain why our own universe seems to be so finely tuned. But I do object to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation. That's an impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as "Why am I here?", "What happens after we die?", "Is there a God?" If you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world because it doesn't convince you on a proof basis. But if your mind is open about whether God might exist, you can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion.

DAWKINS: To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God--it's that that seems to me to close off the discussion.

TIME: Could the answer be God?

DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

COLLINS: That's God.

DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small--at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case.

TIME: The Book of Genesis has led many conservative Protestants to oppose evolution and some to insist that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

COLLINS: There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe's age or of how living organisms are related to each other. St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.

DAWKINS: Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it. However, what Dr. Collins has just been--may I call you Francis?

COLLINS: Oh, please, Richard, do so.

DAWKINS: What Francis was just saying about Genesis was, of course, a little private quarrel between him and his Fundamentalist colleagues ...

COLLINS: It's not so private. It's rather public. [Laughs.]

DAWKINS: ... It would be unseemly for me to enter in except to suggest that he'd save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply ceased to give them the time of day. Why bother with these clowns?

COLLINS: Richard, I think we don't do a service to dialogue between science and faith to characterize sincere people by calling them names. That inspires an even more dug-in position. Atheists sometimes come across as a bit arrogant in this regard, and characterizing faith as something only an idiot would attach themselves to is not likely to help your case.

TIME: Dr. Collins, the Resurrection is an essential argument of Christian faith, but doesn't it, along with the virgin birth and lesser miracles, fatally undermine the scientific method, which depends on the constancy of natural laws?

COLLINS: If you're willing to answer yes to a God outside of nature, then there's nothing inconsistent with God on rare occasions choosing to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous. If God made the natural laws, why could he not violate them when it was a particularly significant moment for him to do so? And if you accept the idea that Christ was also divine, which I do, then his Resurrection is not in itself a great logical leap.

TIME: Doesn't the very notion of miracles throw off science?

COLLINS: Not at all. If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events.

DAWKINS: If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen which we by the lights of today's science would classify as a miracle just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Francis keeps saying things like "From the perspective of a believer." Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific--really scientific--credibility. I'm sorry to be so blunt.

COLLINS: Richard, I actually agree with the first part of what you said. But I would challenge the statement that my scientific instincts are any less rigorous than yours. The difference is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is.

TIME: Dr. Collins, you have described humanity's moral sense not only as a gift from God but as a signpost that he exists.

COLLINS: There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years--some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology--relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes. But if you believe, and Richard has been articulate in this, that natural selection operates on the individual, not on a group, then why would the individual risk his own DNA doing something selfless to help somebody in a way that might diminish his chance of reproducing? Granted, we may try to help our own family members because they share our DNA. Or help someone else in expectation that they will help us later. But when you look at what we admire as the most generous manifestations of altruism, they are not based on kin selection or reciprocity. An extreme example might be Oskar Schindler risking his life to save more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers. That's the opposite of saving his genes. We see less dramatic versions every day. Many of us think these qualities may come from God--especially since justice and morality are two of the attributes we most readily identify with God.

DAWKINS: Can I begin with an analogy? Most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes. Copulation in nature tends to lead to reproduction and so to more genetic copies. But in modern society, most copulations involve contraception, designed precisely to avoid reproduction. Altruism probably has origins like those of lust. In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. It doesn't matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn't cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups. But that seems to me to be a highly plausible account for where the desire for morality, the desire for goodness, comes from.

COLLINS: For you to argue that our noblest acts are a misfiring of Darwinian behavior does not do justice to the sense we all have about the absolutes that are involved here of good and evil. Evolution may explain some features of the moral law, but it can't explain why it should have any real significance. If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil. But for me, it is much more than that. The moral law is a reason to think of God as plausible--not just a God who sets the universe in motion but a God who cares about human beings, because we seem uniquely amongst creatures on the planet to have this far-developed sense of morality. What you've said implies that outside of the human mind, tuned by evolutionary processes, good and evil have no meaning. Do you agree with that?

DAWKINS: Even the question you're asking has no meaning to me. Good and evil--I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil. I think that there are good things that happen and bad things that happen.

COLLINS: I think that is a fundamental difference between us. I'm glad we identified it.

TIME: Dr. Collins, I know you favor the opening of new stem-cell lines for experimentation. But doesn't the fact that faith has caused some people to rule this out risk creating a perception that religion is preventing science from saving lives?

COLLINS: Let me first say as a disclaimer that I speak as a private citizen and not as a representative of the Executive Branch of the United States government. The impression that people of faith are uniformly opposed to stem-cell research is not documented by surveys. In fact, many people of strong religious conviction think this can be a morally supportable approach.

TIME: But to the extent that a person argues on the basis of faith or Scripture rather than reason, how can scientists respond?

COLLINS: Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation. So such discussions between scientists and believers happen quite readily. But neither scientists nor believers always embody the principles precisely. Scientists can have their judgment clouded by their professional aspirations. And the pure truth of faith, which you can think of as this clear spiritual water, is poured into rusty vessels called human beings, and so sometimes the benevolent principles of faith can get distorted as positions are hardened.

DAWKINS: For me, moral questions such as stem-cell research turn upon whether suffering is caused. In this case, clearly none is. The embryos have no nervous system. But that's not an issue discussed publicly. The issue is, Are they human? If you are an absolutist moralist, you say, "These cells are human, and therefore they deserve some kind of special moral treatment." Absolutist morality doesn't have to come from religion but usually does.

We slaughter nonhuman animals in factory farms, and they do have nervous systems and do suffer. People of faith are not very interested in their suffering.

COLLINS: Do humans have a different moral significance than cows in general?

DAWKINS: Humans have more moral responsibility perhaps, because they are capable of reasoning.

TIME: Do the two of you have any concluding thoughts?

COLLINS: I just would like to say that over more than a quarter-century as a scientist and a believer, I find absolutely nothing in conflict between agreeing with Richard in practically all of his conclusions about the natural world, and also saying that I am still able to accept and embrace the possibility that there are answers that science isn't able to provide about the natural world--the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I'm interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.

DAWKINS: My mind is not closed, as you have occasionally suggested, Francis. My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable--but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don't see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

Source : Time.com

Basics of Creation Versus Evolution
Welcome to the Creation Science home page! Here you will find many resources related to the study of origins and science from a creationist perspective.

Defender's Guide to Science and Creationism
The Internet contains many good resources for those who wish to defend science. This Defender's Guide is my own small contribution, in which I try to offer brief and readable analysis not only of nominally "scientific" creationist assertions, but of moral, philosophical, and theological ones as well.

Creation Versus Evolution
We compare the theory of evolution with the Bible’s creation account in easy-to-understand terms, using evidence from the fields of paleontology, geology, biology, and astronomy.

Creation versus Evolution
The Creationist-Evolutionist controversy represents a clash of paradigms, of two ways of relating to the world. This clash is like a mighty battle between the two pillars of our Western society.

Creationism Vs. Evolution
The controversy over evolution rages on. Win all your debates against creationists with the science in our special report.

Out There

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:31:00 +0000

By Richard Panek

Three days after learning that he won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, George Smoot was talking about the universe. Sitting across from him in his office at the University of California, Berkeley, was Saul Perlmutter, a fellow cosmologist and a probable future Nobelist in Physics himself. Bearded, booming, eyes pinwheeling from adrenaline and lack of sleep, Smoot leaned back in his chair. Perlmutter, onetime acolyte, longtime colleague, now heir apparent, leaned forward in his.

“Time and time again,” Smoot shouted, “the universe has turned out to be really simple.”

Perlmutter nodded eagerly. “It’s like, why are we able to understand the universe at our level?”

“Right. Exactly. It’s a universe for beginners! ‘The Universe for Dummies’!”

But as Smoot and Perlmutter know, it is also inarguably a universe for Nobelists, and one that in the past decade has become exponentially more complicated. Since the invention of the telescope four centuries ago, astronomers have been able to figure out the workings of the universe simply by observing the heavens and applying some math, and vice versa. Take the discovery of moons, planets, stars and galaxies, apply Newton’s laws and you have a universe that runs like clockwork. Take Einstein’s modifications of Newton, apply the discovery of an expanding universe and you get the big bang. “It’s a ridiculously simple, intentionally cartoonish picture,” Perlmutter said. “We’re just incredibly lucky that that first try has matched so well.”

But is our luck about to run out? Smoot’s and Perlmutter’s work is part of a revolution that has forced their colleagues to confront a universe wholly unlike any they have ever known, one that is made of only 4 percent of the kind of matter we have always assumed it to be — the material that makes up you and me and this magazine and all the planets and stars in our galaxy and in all 125 billion galaxies beyond. The rest — 96 percent of the universe — is ... who knows?

“Dark,” cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender. This is not “dark” as in distant or invisible. This is “dark” as in unknown for now, and possibly forever.

If so, such a development would presumably not be without philosophical consequences of the civilization-altering variety. Cosmologists often refer to this possibility as “the ultimate Copernican revolution”: not only are we not at the center of anything; we’re not even made of the same stuff as most of the rest of everything. “We’re just a bit of pollution,” Lawrence M. Krauss, a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel on cosmology in Chicago. “If you got rid of us, and all the stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. We’re completely irrelevant.”

All well and good. Science is full of homo sapiens-humbling insights. But the trade-off for these lessons in insignificance has always been that at least now we would have a deeper — simpler — understanding of the universe. That the more we could observe, the more we would know. But what about the less we could observe? What happens to new knowledge then? It’s a question cosmologists have been asking themselves lately, and it might well be a question we’ll all be asking ourselves soon, because if they’re right, then the time has come to rethink a fundamental assumption: When we look up at the night sky, we’re seeing the universe.

Not so. Not even close.

In 1963, two scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey discovered a microwave signal that came from every direction of the heavens. Theorists at nearby Princeton University soon realized that this signal might be the echo from the beginning of the universe, as predicted by the big-bang hypothesis. Take the idea of a cosmos born in a primordial fireball and cooling down ever since, apply the discovery of a microwave signal with a temperature that corresponded precisely to the one that was predicted by theorists — 2.7 degrees above absolute zero — and you have the universe as we know it. Not Newton’s universe, with its stately, eternal procession of benign objects, but Einstein’s universe, violent, evolving, full of births and deaths, with the grandest birth and, maybe, death belonging to the cosmos itself.

But then, in the 1970s, astronomers began noticing something that didn’t seem to fit with the laws of physics. They found that spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way were spinning at such a rate that they should have long ago wobbled out of control, shredding apart, shedding stars in every direction. Yet clearly they had done no such thing. They were living fast but not dying young. This seeming paradox led theorists to wonder if a halo of a hypothetical something else might be cocooning each galaxy, dwarfing each flat spiral disk of stars and gas at just the right mass ratio to keep it gravitationally intact. Borrowing a term from the astronomer Fritz Zwicky, who detected the same problem with the motions of a whole cluster of galaxies back in the 1930s, decades before anyone else took the situation seriously, astronomers called this mystery mass “dark matter.”

So there was more to the universe than meets the eye. But how much more? This was the question Saul Perlmutter’s team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory set out to answer in the late 1980s. Actually, they wanted to settle an issue that had been nagging astronomers ever since Edwin Hubble discovered in 1929 that the universe seems to be expanding. Gravity, astronomers figured, would be slowing the expansion, and the more matter the greater the gravitational effect. But was the amount of matter in the universe enough to slow the expansion until it eventually stopped, reversed course and collapsed in a backward big bang? Or was the amount of matter not quite enough to do this, in which case the universe would just go on expanding forever? Just how much was the expansion of the universe slowing down?

The tool the team would be using was a specific type of exploding star, or supernova, that reaches a roughly uniform brightness and so can serve as what astronomers call a standard candle. By comparing how bright supernovae appear and how much the expansion of the universe has shifted their light, cosmologists sought to determine the rate of the expansion. “I was trying to tell everybody that this is the measurement that everybody should be doing,” Perlmutter says. “I was trying to convince them that this is going to be the tool of the future.” Perlmutter talks like a microcassette on fast-forward, and he possesses the kind of psychological dexterity that allows him to walk into a room and instantly inhabit each person’s point of view. He can be as persuasive as any force of nature. “The next thing I know,” he says, “we’ve convinced people, and now they’re competing with us!”

By 1997, Perlmutter’s Supernova Cosmology Project and a rival team had amassed data from more than 50 supernovae between them — data that would reveal yet another oddity in the cosmos. Perlmutter noticed that the supernovae weren’t brighter than expected but dimmer. He wondered if he had made a mistake in his observations. A few months later, Adam Riess, a member of a rival international team, noticed the same general drift in his math and wondered the same thing. “I’m a postdoc,” he told himself. “I’m sure I’ve messed up in at least 10 different ways.” But Perlmutter double-checked for intergalactic dust that might have skewed his readings, and Riess cross-checked his math, calculation by calculation, with his team leader, Brian Schmidt. Early in 1998, the two teams announced that they had each independently reached the same conclusion, and it was the opposite of what either of them expected. The rate of the expansion of the universe was not slowing down. Instead, it seemed to be speeding up.

That same year, Michael Turner, the prominent University of Chicago theorist, delivered a paper in which he called this antigravitational force “dark energy.” The purpose of calling it “dark,” he explained recently, was to highlight the similarity to dark matter. The purpose of “energy” was to make a distinction. “It really is very different from dark matter,” Turner said. “It’s more energylike.”

More energylike how, exactly?

Turner raised his eyebrows. “I’m not embarrassed to say it’s the most profound mystery in all of science.”

Extraordinary claims,” Carl Sagan once said, “require extraordinary evidence.” Astronomers love that saying; they quote it all the time. In this case the claim could have hardly been more extraordinary: a new universe was dawning.

It wouldn’t be the first time. We once thought the night sky consisted of the several thousand objects we could see with the naked eye. But the invention of the telescope revealed that it didn’t, and that the farther we saw, the more we saw: planets, stars, galaxies. After that we thought the night sky consisted of only the objects the eye could see with the assistance of telescopes that reached all the way back to the first stars blinking to life. But the discovery of wavelengths beyond the optical revealed that it didn’t, and that the more we saw in the radio or infrared or X-ray parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, the more we discovered: evidence for black holes, the big bang and the distances of supernovae, for starters.

The difference with “dark,” however, is that it lies not only outside the visible but also beyond the entire electromagnetic spectrum. By all indications, it consists of data that our five senses can’t detect other than indirectly. The motions of galaxies don’t make sense unless we infer the existence of dark matter. The brightness of supernovae doesn’t make sense unless we infer the existence of dark energy. It’s not that inference can’t be a powerful tool: an apple falls to the ground, and we infer gravity. But it can also be an incomplete tool: gravity is ... ?

Dark matter is ... ? In the three decades since most astronomers decisively, if reluctantly, accepted the existence of dark matter, observers have eliminated the obvious answer: that dark matter is made of normal matter that is so far away or so dim that it can’t be seen from earth. To account for the dark-matter deficit, this material would have to be so massive and so numerous that we couldn’t possibly miss it.

Which leaves abnormal matter, or what physicists call nonbaryonic matter, meaning that it doesn’t consist of the protons and neutrons of “normal” matter. What’s more (or, perhaps more accurately, less), it doesn’t interact at all with electricity or magnetism, which is why we wouldn’t be able to see it, and it can rarely interact even with protons and neutrons, which is why trillions of these particles might be passing through you every second without your knowing it. Theorists have narrowed the search for dark-matter particles to two hypothetical candidates: the axion and the neutralino. But so far efforts to create one of these ghostly particles in accelerators, which mimic the high levels of energy in the first fraction of a second after the birth of the universe, have come up empty. So have efforts to catch one in ultrasensitive detectors, which number in the dozens around the world.

For now, dark-matter physicists are hanging their hopes on the Large Hadron Collider, the latest-generation subatomic-particle accelerator, which goes online later this year at the European Center for Nuclear Research on the Franco-Swiss border. Many cosmologists think that the L.H.C. has made the creation of a dark-matter particle — as George Smoot said, holding up two fingers — “this close.” But one of the pioneer astronomers investigating dark matter in the 1970s, Vera Rubin, says that she has lived through plenty of this kind of optimism; she herself predicted in 1980 that dark matter would be identified within a decade. “I hope he’s right,” she says of Smoot’s assertion. “But I think it’s more a wish than a belief.” As one particle physicist commented at a “Dark Universe” symposium at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore a few years ago, “If we fail to see anything in the L.H.C., then I’m off to do something else,” adding, “Unfortunately, I’ll be off to do something else at the same time as hundreds of other physicists.”

Juan Collar might be among them. “I know I speak for a generation of people who have been looking for dark-matter particles since they were grad students,” he said one wintry afternoon in his University of Chicago office. “I doubt how many of us will remain in the field if the L.H.C. brings home bad news. I have been looking for dark-matter particles for more than 15 years. I’m 42. So most of my colleagues, my age, we are kind of going through a midlife crisis.” He laughed. “When we get together and we drink enough beer, we start howling at the moon.”

Although many scientists say that the existence of the axion will be proved or disproved within the next 10 years — as a result of work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — the detection of a neutralino one way or the other is much less certain. A negative result from an experiment might mean only that theorists haven’t thought hard enough or that observers haven’t looked deep enough. “It could very well be that Mother Nature has decided that the neutralino is way down there,” Collar said, pointing not to a graph that he taped up in his office but to a point below the sheet of paper itself, at the blank wall. “If that is the case,” he went on to say, “we should retreat and worship Mother Nature. These particles maybe exist, but we will not see them, our sons will not see them and their sons won’t see them.”

The challenge with dark energy, as opposed to dark matter, is even more difficult. Dark energy is whatever it is that’s making the expansion of the universe accelerate, but, for instance, does it change over time and space? If so, then cosmologists have a name for it: quintessence. Does it not change? In that case, they’ll call it the cosmological constant, a version of the mathematical fudge factor that Einstein originally inserted into the equations for relativity to explain why the universe had neither expanded nor contracted itself out of existence.

After the discovery of dark energy, Perlmutter concluded that the next generation of dark-energy telescopes would have to include a space-based observatory. But the search for financing for such an ambitious project can require as much forbearance as the search for dark energy itself. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much of Washington as I have in the last few years,” he says, sighing. Even if his Supernova Acceleration Probe didn’t now face competition from several other proposals for federal financing (including, perhaps inevitably, one involving his old rival Riess), delays have prevented it from being ready to launch until at least the middle of the next decade. “Ten years from now,” says Josh Frieman of the University of Chicago, “when we’re talking about spending on the order of a billion dollars to put something up in space — which I think we should do — you’re getting into that class where you’re spending real money.”

Even some cosmologists have begun to express reservations. At a conference at Durham University in England last summer, a “whither cosmology?” panel featuring some of the field’s most prominent names questioned the wisdom of concentrating so much money and manpower on one problem. They pointed to what happened when the government-sponsored Dark Energy Task Force solicited proposals for experiments a couple of years ago. The task force was expecting a dozen, according to one member. They got three dozen. Cosmology was choosing a “risky and not very cost-effective way of moving forward,” one Durham panelist told me later, summarizing the sentiment he heard there.

But even if somebody were to figure out whether or not dark energy changes across time and space, astronomers still wouldn’t know what dark energy itself is. “The term doesn’t mean anything,” said David Schlegel of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory this past fall. “It might not be dark. It might not be energy. The whole name is a placeholder. It’s a placeholder for the description that there’s something funny that was discovered eight years ago now that we don’t understand.” Not that theorists haven’t been trying. “It’s just nonstop,” Perlmutter told me. “There’s article after article after article.” He likes to begin public talks with a PowerPoint illustration: papers on dark energy piling up, one on top of the next, until the on-screen stack ascends into the dozens. All the more reason not to put all of cosmology’s eggs into one research basket, argued the Durham panelists. As one summarized the situation, “We don’t even have a hypothesis to test.”

Michael Turner won’t hear of it. “This is one of these godsend problems!” he says. “If you’re a scientist, you’d like to be around when there’s a great problem to work on and solve. The solution is not obvious, and you could imagine it being solved tomorrow, you could imagine it taking another 10 years or you could imagine it taking another 200 years.”

But you could also imagine it taking forever.

“Time to get serious.” The PowerPoint slide, teal letters popping off a black background, stared back at a hotel ballroom full of cosmologists. They gathered in Chicago last winter for a “New Views of the Universe” conference, and Sean Carroll, then at the University of Chicago, had taken it upon himself to give his theorist colleagues their marching orders.

“There was a heyday for talking out all sorts of crazy ideas,” Carroll, now at Caltech, recently explained. That heyday would have been the heady, post-1998 period when Michael Turner might stand up at a conference and turn to anyone voicing caution and say, “Can’t we be exuberant for a while?” But now has come the metaphorical morning after, and with it a sobering realization: Maybe the universe isn’t simple enough for dummies like us humans. Maybe it’s not just our powers of perception that aren’t up to the task but also our powers of conception. Extraordinary claims like the dawn of a new universe might require extraordinary evidence, but what if that evidence has to be literally beyond the ordinary? Astronomers now realize that dark matter probably involves matter that is nonbaryonic. And whatever it is that dark energy involves, we know it’s not “normal,” either. In that case, maybe this next round of evidence will have to be not only beyond anything we know but also beyond anything we know how to know.

That possibility always gnaws at scientists — what Perlmutter calls “that sense of tentativeness, that we have gotten so far based on so little.” Cosmologists in particular have had to confront that possibility throughout the birth of their science. “At various times in the past 20 years it could have gotten to the point where there was no opportunity for advance,” Frieman says. What if, for instance, researchers couldn’t repeat the 1963 Bell Labs detection of the supposed echo from the big bang? Smoot and John C. Mather of NASA (who shared the Nobel in Physics with Smoot) designed the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite telescope to do just that. COBE looked for extremely subtle differences in temperature throughout all of space that carry the imprint of the universe when it was less than a second old. And in 1992, COBE found them: in effect, the quantum fluctuations that 13.7 billion years later would coalesce into a universe that is 22 percent dark matter, 74 percent dark energy and 4 percent the stuff of us.

And if the right ripples hadn’t shown up? As Frieman puts it: “You just would have thrown up your hands and said, ‘My God, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board!’ What’s remarkable to me is that so far that hasn’t happpened.”

Yet in a way it has. In the observation-and-theory, call-and-response system of investigating nature that scientists have refined over the past 400 years, the dark side of the universe represents a disruption. General relativity helped explain the observations of the expanding universe, which led to the idea of the big bang, which anticipated the observations of the cosmic-microwave background, which led to the revival of Einstein’s cosmological constant, which anticipated the observations of supernovae, which led to dark energy. And dark energy is ... ?

The difficulty in answering that question has led some cosmologists to ask an even deeper question: Does dark energy even exist? Or is it perhaps an inference too far? Cosmologists have another saying they like to cite: “You get to invoke the tooth fairy only once,” meaning dark matter, “but now we have to invoke the tooth fairy twice,” meaning dark energy.

One of the most compelling arguments that cosmologists have for the existence of dark energy (whatever it is) is that unlike earlier inferences that physicists eventually had to abandon — the ether that 19th-century physicists thought pervaded space, for instance — this inference makes mathematical sense. Take Perlmutter’s and Riess’s observations of supernovae, apply one cornerstone of 20th-century physics, general relativity, and you have a universe that does indeed consist of .26 matter, dark or otherwise, and .74 something that accelerates the expansion. Yet in another way, dark energy doesn’t add up. Take the observations of supernovae, apply the other cornerstone of 20th-century physics, quantum theory, and you get gibberish — you get an answer 120 orders of magnitude larger than .74.

Which doesn’t mean that dark energy is the ether of our age. But it does mean that its implications extend beyond cosmology to a problem Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life trying to reconcile: how to unify his new physics of the very large (general relativity) with the new physics of the very small (quantum mechanics). What makes the two incompatible — where the physics breaks down — is gravity.

In physics, gravity is the ur-inference. Even Newton admitted that he was making it up as he went along. That a force of attraction might exist between two distant objects, he once wrote in a letter, is “so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” Yet fall into it we all do on a daily basis, and physicists are no exception. “I don’t think we really understand what gravity is,” Vera Rubin says. “So in some sense we’re doing an awful lot on something we don’t know much about.”

It hasn’t escaped the notice of astronomers that both dark matter and dark energy involve gravity. Early this year 50 physicists gathered for a “Rethinking Gravity” conference at the University of Arizona to discuss variations on general relativity. “So far, Einstein is coming through with flying colors,” says Sean Carroll, who was one of the gravity-defying participants. “He’s always smarter than you think he was.”

But he’s not necessarily inviolate. “We’ve never tested gravity across the whole universe before,” Riess pointed out during a news conference last year. “It may be that there’s not really dark energy, that that’s a figment of our misperception about gravity, that gravity actually changes the way it operates on long ranges.”

The only way out, cosmologists and particle physicists agree, would be a “new physics” — a reconciliation of general relativity and quantum mechanics. “Understanding dark energy,” Riess says, “seems to really require understanding and using both of those theories at the same time.”

“It’s been so hard that we’re even willing to consider listening to string theorists,” Perlmutter says, referring to work that posits numerous dimensions beyond the traditional (one of time and three of space). “They’re at least providing a language in which you can talk about both things at the same time.”

According to quantum theory, particles can pop into and out of existence. In that case, maybe the universe itself was born in one such quantum pop. And if one universe can pop into existence, then why not many universes? String theorists say that number could be 10 raised to the power of 500. Those are 10-with-500-zeros universes, give or take. In which case, our universe would just happen to be the one with an energy density of .74, a condition suitable for the existence of creatures that can contemplate their hyper-Copernican existence.

And this is just one of a number of theories that have been popping into existence, quantum-particle-like, in the past few years: parallel universes, intersecting universes or, in the case of Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog just last summer, a superposition of universes. But what evidence — extraordinary or otherwise — can anyone offer for such claims? The challenge is to devise an experiment that would do for a new physics what COBE did for the big bang. Predictions in string theory, as in the 10-to-the-power-of-500-universes hypothesis, depend on the existence of extra dimensions, a stipulation that just might put the burden back on particle physics — specifically, the hope that evidence of extra dimensions will emerge in the Large Hadron Collider, or perhaps in its proposed successor, the International Linear Collider, which might come online sometime around 2020, or maybe in the supercollider after that, if the industrial nations of 2030 decide they can afford it.

“You want your mind to be boggled,” Perlmutter says. “That is a pleasure in and of itself. And it’s more a pleasure if it’s boggled by something that you can then demonstrate is really, really true.”

And if you can’t demonstrate that it’s really, really true?

“If the brilliant idea doesn’t come along,” Riess says, “then we will say dark energy has exactly these properties, it acts exactly like this. And then” — a shrug — “we will put it in a box.” And there it will remain, residing perhaps not far from the box labeled “Dark Matter,” and the two of them bookending the biggest box of them all, “Gravity,” to await a future Newton or Einstein to open — or not.

About the Author

Richard Panek is the author of “The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud and the Search for Hidden Universes.”

Source : The New York Times

What is Dark Matter?
Dark Matter is weird stuff -- "non-baryonic matter," as Scientific American editor George Musser puts it in this minute and a half take on the nature of the mystery substance that makes up the majority of the mass in our universe.

Dark Energy, Dark Matter
By fitting a theoretical model of the composition of the Universe to the combined set of cosmological observations, scientists have come up with the composition that we described above, ~70% dark energy, ~25% dark matter, ~5% normal matter. What is dark matter?

What Is Dark Matter? How Can We Make It In The Laboratory?
Most of the matter in the universe is dark. Without dark matter, galaxies and stars would not have formed and life would not exist. It holds the universe together. What is it?

What is Dark Matter and Dark Energy?
It makes up the majority of the mass of the Universe, yet it's invisible...so what is it?

Dark Matter
We "see" visible matter because it is able to emit and reflect visible light. However, imagine matter that did not interact with light at all and was therefore, quite literally, invisible. This is what scientists today believe to be Dark Matter (DM).

Universe

noreply@blogger.com (rgl76) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:36:00 +0000

The term Universe has a variety of meanings based on the context in which it is described. In philosophical terms, the Universe is the summation of all that exists and the space in which all events occur. In cosmological terms, the Universe is thought to be a finite or infinite space-time continuum in which all matter and energy exist. (It has been hypothesized by scientists that the Universe is part of a system of many other universes, known as the multiverse.) The terms known Universe, observable Universe, or visible Universe are often used to describe the part of the Universe that can be seen or otherwise observed by humanity. Those who believe it is impossible to observe the whole continuum may use our Universe, referring only to that knowable by human beings in particular.

Expansion and age and the Big Bang theory

The most important result of cosmology, the understanding that the Universe is expanding, is derived from redshift observations and quantified by Hubble's Law. Extrapolating this expansion back in time, one approaches a gravitational singularity, a rather abstract mathematical concept, which may or may not correspond to reality. This gives rise to the Big Bang theory, the dominant model in cosmology today. The age of the Universe from the time of the Big Bang, was estimated to be about 13.7 billion (13.7 × 109) years, with a margin of error of about 1 percent (± 200 million years), according to NASA's WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe). However, this is based on the assumption that the underlying model used for data analysis is correct. Other methods of estimating the age of the Universe give different ages.

A fundamental aspect of the Big Bang can be seen today in the observation that the farther away from us galaxies are, the faster they move away from us. It can also be seen in the cosmic microwave background radiation which is the much-attenuated radiation that originated soon after the Big Bang. This background radiation is remarkably uniform in all directions, which cosmologists have attempted to explain by an early period of inflationary expansion following the Big Bang.

Size of Universe and Observable Universe

There is disagreement over whether the Universe is indeed finite or infinite in spatial extent and volume.

However, the observable Universe, consisting of all locations that could have affected us since the Big Bang given the finite speed of light, is certainly finite. The edge of the cosmic light horizon is 13.7 billion light years (4.19 gpc) distant. The present distance (comoving distance) to the edge of the observable Universe is larger, since the Universe has been expanding; it is estimated to be about 78 billion light years (7.8 × 1010 light years, or 7.4 × 1023 km). This would make the comoving volume, of the known Universe, equal to 1.9 × 1033 cubic light years (assuming this region is perfectly spherical). The observable Universe contains about 7 × 1022 stars, organized in about 100 billion galaxies, which themselves form clusters and superclusters. The number of galaxies may be even larger, based on the Hubble Deep Field observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope discovered galaxies such as Abell 1835 IR1916, which are over 13 billion light years from Earth.

Both popular and professional research articles in cosmology often use the term "Universe" when they really mean "observable Universe". This is because unobservable physical phenomena are scientifically irrelevant; that is, they cannot affect any events that we can perceive. See also Causality (physics).

We live in the center of the Universe that we observe, in apparent contradiction to the Copernican principle which says that the Universe is more or less uniform and it has no distinguished center. This is simply because light does not travel infinitely fast, and we make observations of the past. As we look further and further away, we see things from epochs (times) closer and closer to the limit of time, which equals zero, according to the Big Bang model. Since light travels at the same speed in any direction towards us, it is reasonable to suggest that we live at the center of our observable Universe.

Shape of the Universe

An important open question of cosmology is the shape of the Universe. Mathematically, which 3-manifold represents best the spatial part of the Universe?

Firstly, whether the Universe is spatially flat, i.e. whether the rules of Euclidean geometry are valid on the largest scales, is unknown. Currently, most cosmologists believe that the observable Universe is very nearly spatially flat, with local wrinkles where massive objects distort spacetime, just as a lake is (nearly) flat. This opinion was strengthened by the latest data from WMAP, looking at "acoustic oscillations" in the cosmic microwave background radiation temperature variations.

Secondly, whether the Universe is multiply connected, is unknown. The Universe has no spatial boundary according to the standard Big Bang model, but nevertheless may be spatially finite (compact). This can be understood using a two-dimensional analogy: the surface of a sphere has no edge, but nonetheless has a finite area. It is a two-dimensional surface with constant curvature in a third dimension. The 3-sphere is a three-dimensional equivalent in which all three dimensions are constantly curved in a fourth.

If the Universe is indeed spatially finite, as described, then traveling in a "straight" line, in any given direction, would theoretically cause one to eventually arrive back at the starting point.

Strictly speaking, we should call the stars and galaxies "views" of stars and galaxies, since it is possible that the Universe is multiply-connected and sufficiently small (and of an appropriate, perhaps complex, shape) that we can see once or several times around it in various, and perhaps all, directions. (Think of a house of mirrors.) If so, the actual number of physically distinct stars and galaxies would be smaller than currently accounted. Although this possibility has not been ruled out, the results of the latest cosmic microwave background research make this appear very unlikely.

Fate of the Universe

Depending on the average density of matter and energy in the Universe, it will either keep on expanding forever or it will be gravitationally slowed down and will eventually collapse back on itself in a "Big Crunch". Currently the evidence suggests not only that there is insufficient mass/energy to cause a recollapse, but that the expansion of the Universe seems to be accelerating and will accelerate for the whole of eternity (see accelerating Universe). Other ideas of the fate of our Universe include the Big Rip, the Big Freeze, and Heat Death of the Universe theory.

Multiverse

There is some speculation that multiple universes exist in a higher-level multiverse (also known as a megaverse), our Universe being one of those universes (lower case). For example, matter that falls into a black hole in our Universe could emerge as a Big Bang, starting another universe. However, all such ideas are currently untestable and cannot be regarded as anything more than speculation. The concept of parallel universes are understood only when related to string theory.

Other terms

Different words have been used throughout history to denote "all of space", including the equivalents and variants in various languages of "heavens", "cosmos", and "world". Macrocosm has also been used to this effect, although it is more specifically defined as a system that reflects in large scale one, some, or all of its component systems or parts. (Similarly, a microcosm is system that reflects in small scale a much larger system of which it is a part.)

Although words like world and its equivalents in other languages now almost always refer to the planet Earth, they previously referred to everything that exists—see Copernicus, for example—and still sometimes do (as in "the whole wide world"). Some languages use the word for "world" as part of the word for "outer space", e.g. in the German word "Weltall".

Source : The Global Oneness Commitment

The Birth of the Universe
What started the big bang? How did space, time, matter and energy take the forms that we see today? Can we work backward to unravel the history of the universe?

When and How Did This Universe Begin?
Closer To Truth is the definitive television series on Cosmos, Consciousness and God, a global journey in search of the vital ideas of existence.

How Did The Universe Start?
A basic look at the Universe and the Big Bang for the non-specialist.

How Did This Universe Begin?
Humanity's ancient and perpetual fascination with the universe's beginnings is discussed in light of recent, revolutionary discoveries in cosmology, and what they mean for human understanding.

Did the Universe Have a Beginning?
Despite the widespread acceptance of the big bang theory as a working model for interpreting new findings, not a single important prediction of the theory has yet been confirmed, and substantial evidence has accumulated against it. Here, we examine the evidence for the most fundamental postulate of the big bang, the expansion of the universe.