News Briefs: Astronomy, Astophysics & Space Exploration

A well known polymath whose published works range far and wide, including (but not limited to) Archaeology, Paleontology, Astronomy, Space Propulsion systems, and Science Fiction.

Official Website: http://www.charlespellegrino.com

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violetblue
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Post by violetblue »

That "Face of Mars" mentioned in the first link of the article you linked, MT, certainly inspired a lot of sci-fi since it was first seen in 1976. I remember seeing that as a kid and wondering what it was.
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Post by wolfspirit »

The transit of Mercury:

Today mercury is/was transiting the Sun, resulting in a small black dot across the surface, visible with most home telescopes, **WITH A SUN FILTER**.

http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/hilo/MercTransit06.html

A group of people in hawaii are doing some time-laspe photography and other interesting imaging on this event. It last happened in 2003, and will next happen in 2012(I believe, it may be further out than that).

There are also a number of talks given by various professors/astronomers from Hawaii that have been given today, for your downloading pleasure.

Those of us on the east coast couldn't see anything because it was cloudy. However, the weather must be nicer in Hawaii, as they are getting some nice photography.

Scott
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Post by tollbaby »

geez, I don't think we saw the sun at *all* yesterday :)

Nifty site! Thanks Scott ;)
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Post by Darb »

I hear that the next generation GOES satellite(s) will have highly advanced sensors that will image the sun and give high-accuracy scans of solar weather. Sounds fascinating.

I'll have to see if I can scounge up some linkage ...
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Post by Mr. Titanic »

Solar Weather is the most facinating thing about our Solar System next to Neptune. At least in my opinion. There are too few images of the Sun in my opinion. I strongly support researching it, since it is the closest star we can study and understand from its data the nature of other stars in our universe. I just love the Storms of space (well, storms in general) like the Great Dark Spot, or even Solar wind (which I believe the voyagers are still studying?). Thanks for telling us, Brad, I can't wait to see some of those images. Did your source mention a time frame?

Also - The government apparently seeks to mask Global Warming threats from the Public, by getting involved in scientific work.
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Post by Darb »

I think it was GOES-13 ... you should be able to google that.

Incidentally, the main hubble imaging system is apparently down for good. :cry:
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Post by wolfspirit »

Brad wrote:Incidentally, the main hubble imaging system is apparently down for good. :cry:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/sci ... 201101.ece

for an article.

This is sad. Very sad. The replacement for Hubble is not going to be up until 2013, and I have no idea if they can even do this repair during the planned mission in 2008.

I assume over-exposure to radiation was the cause of death, which means that most of the other electronics on there are going to be close to death as well (because the amount of radiation exposure does not change if it is on or off.

Scott
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Post by wolfspirit »

There is a lunar eclipse for much of the US (the farther east, the better), all of Europe, and most of Asia that will happen on March 3th.

http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/L ... Mar03T.GIF <-- This is the diagraming showing where and when you can see teh lunar eclipse.

Fro those of us in the US/Canada, teh lunar eclipse scheduled for feb 2008 will be even better, as we will be able to see all of it.

For those of us on the East coast, moonrise is going to correspond with the greatest period of lunar eclipse (nearly), and the moon will slowly emerge from that point. Should be really cool to watch.

Scott
Last edited by wolfspirit on Thu Feb 22, 2007 7:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by laurie »

wolfspirit wrote:There is a lunar eclipse for much of the US (the farther east, the better), all of Europe, and most of Asia that will happen on March 4th.
The sun, moon and earth's birthday gift to me. :)
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Post by wolfspirit »

laurie wrote:
wolfspirit wrote:There is a lunar eclipse for much of the US (the farther east, the better), all of Europe, and most of Asia that will happen on March 4th.
The sun, moon and earth's birthday gift to me. :)
Sorry laurie, but I misstyped, it is the night of March 3rd.

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Post by laurie »

wolfspirit wrote:Sorry laurie, but I misstyped, it is the night of March 3rd.

Scott

Meanie :deviate:


You also misstyped mistyped
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." -- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

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Post by tollbaby »

oooh she gets NASTY when you play games with her ;)

That being said, I saw an interesting article on Yahoo News this morning :)

http://news.yahoo.com/i/585
And what manner of jackassery must we put up with today? ~ Danae, Non Sequitur
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Post by Mr. Titanic »

You all are a riot. :lol:

Very interesting though, Tollbaby. I found an interesting article as well while reading your own. Quite interesting actually, considering my obsession with space. It was about identifying 200 planets outside our solar system (link provided below). The lack of water on them, or lack of detectable water further amplifies my thoery that life is restricted to just Earth within the universe. It makes for interesting debate. :D

Article
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Post by wolfspirit »

Mr.Titanic wrote:You all are a riot. :lol:

Very interesting though, Tollbaby. I found an interesting article as well while reading your own. Quite interesting actually, considering my obsession with space. It was about identifying 200 planets outside our solar system (link provided below). The lack of water on them, or lack of detectable water further amplifies my thoery that life is restricted to just Earth within the universe. It makes for interesting debate. :D

Article
My any chance, Mr. T, have you looked at the size of the planets? Even if there was water on them, the combined size &distance from their stars would make it nearly impossible for anything like our current known life to survive.

In reality, the instruments are not fine enough to detect anything close to earth size, at earth distance (I'm not sure we can really dectect things earth size, period). There are two (I think there is actually three, but the third escapes me) main methods for finding an exoplanet.

1. Occluding the star. As we saw by the transit of Mercury in November, planets do cross inbetween stars and us. There are a couple of problems with this method however.
A) The orbital plane of the planet has to be lined up so that it actually crosses in front of the star.
B) The size of the planet is large enough to make a measureable difference in the stars brightness.
If A & B are met, we can use the combination of the amount it dimmed the star, the rotational period, and the time it took to dim the star completely (time it takes for the planet to go from being tangental to the edge of the star, to being wholly contained within the star), to create an estimate of the size and location of the planet.
2. Measuring the change in velocity of a star. As you probably know, gravity works in both directions, i.e. there is a force both pulling you to the earth, and pulling the earth to you. Because of this, we can measure the change in velocity for the star (the velocity is generally -200 to 200 m/s, a microscopic amount when dealing with the distances we are). Using the amount of pull a planet has on it, we can determine it's size, based on it's period (a velocity-time curve will eventually look like a sine wave, giving us a period), as well as our estimates of star size. We can also use this method to see multiple exoplanet systems, I'll explain more on this if you want later, but I need to kinda wrap this up before I head to sleep.

The problem with both of these is how fine our instruments can go. Up until a few years ago, we really had very few devices that could measure fine enough details to see exoplanets this way. The finer the instruments, the smaller planets we can find. I don't know the smallest exoplanet known right now (and I don't feel like looking it up till tomorrow or later), but it is still several (10-15x) larger than the Earth. I wouldn't count out ET yet.

I cannot believe that we are a fluke in the universe. I have huge problems believing any theory that states that we are a special exception, because in general, they are proven wrong.

Scott
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Post by Darb »

tollbaby wrote:I saw an interesting article on Yahoo News this morning :)

http://news.yahoo.com/i/585
Not to get too far astray from the thread topic, but what's their evidence for pre-clovis people in the 15k-25kbc timeframe ? The linked article didn't say.
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Post by Darb »

Mr.Titanic wrote:You all are a riot. :lol:

Very interesting though, Tollbaby. I found an interesting article as well while reading your own. Quite interesting actually, considering my obsession with space. It was about identifying 200 planets outside our solar system (link provided below). The lack of water on them, or lack of detectable water further amplifies my thoery that life is restricted to just Earth within the universe. It makes for interesting debate. :D

Article
You might want to read Issac Asimov's Treatise on that particular topic ... the multi-disciplinary science and statistics in there make for some interesting reading. It's always good to give one's ideas and preconceptions a good shake every once in a while.

And yes, Charlie's clearly read the book I linked, because some of the information in his "Flying to Valhalla" novel are taken almost verbatim from there.
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Post by tollbaby »

Brad wrote:
tollbaby wrote:I saw an interesting article on Yahoo News this morning :)

http://news.yahoo.com/i/585
Not to get too far astray from the thread topic, but what's their evidence for pre-clovis people in the 15k-25kbc timeframe ? The linked article didn't say.
No clue, since I didn't read that particular article. Funny, since there's a book in this year's Folio Society catalog that deals with that topic :)
And what manner of jackassery must we put up with today? ~ Danae, Non Sequitur
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Post by tollbaby »

Numerous large "seas" found on Titan :)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070313/sc_ ... ssini_dc_1
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Post by Darb »

If I can be flippant for a moment ... that's probably enough methane to run every gas BBQ, and heat every home on Earth, for many many millennia. ;)
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Post by tollbaby »

Brad wrote:If I can be flippant for a moment ... that's probably enough methane to run every gas BBQ, and heat every home on Earth, for many many millennia. ;)
you mean there are times when you aren't? ;)
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Post by Darb »

I try to limit my natural impulses a bit, when participating in OADFs. Especially this one.

Back on topic.
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Post by voralfred »

wolfspirit wrote: Because of this, we can measure the change in velocity for the star (the velocity is generally -200 to 200 m/s, a microscopic amount when dealing with the distances we are).
Well, in fact measuring the change of velocity of the star is one of the very few things that we can do with the same ease (or difficulty) irrespective of the distance of the object, since it is done by measuring the Doppler effect (that's how police radars measure your speed to give you a ticket, for my misfortune...). But if a Jupiter-sized planet gives a pull large enough to be measurable, a mere Earth-size planet will give such a small pull that the Doppler effect may be too small to be measurable: Jupiter's mass is about 300 times larger than Earth, and unless I am mistaken most exoplanets that have been discovered are rather more heavy than Jupiter, so the mass ratio with Earth is rahter in the thousands! We do need more delicate instruments if we want to see an Earth-sized planet by Doppler effect! And by occultation it is even worse: the size of the shadow will be so small compared to that of the star, the change in luminosity will be well below not just the sensitivity of the instruments, but even the intrinsic variability of the star's luminosity (any ordinary flare would more than compensate the effect of the shadow). Occultation only works for really huge planets, in fact almost small stars themselves.
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Post by wolfspirit »

http://www.dailycal.org/sharticle.php?id=23829

[quote] “If one believed that the universe had a beginning, the obvious question was, what happened before the beginning,â€
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Post by Darb »

The 'bubble' universe concept is not entirely new ... it's merely being bandied about in larger academic circles, over time. For example - one possible paradigm for the increase in the cosmological constant is the idea that the universe is expanding because it's elastically contracting or rather 'bursting' in higher dimensions. Dark matter/energy may factor into that, in some as yet incompletely theorized fashion. Yeah, that hurts my 'n-brane' (sorry ... superstring theory nomenclature pun)
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Post by voralfred »

[quote="wolfspirit"]http://www.dailycal.org/sharticle.php?id=23829

[quote]A few “bubbles,â€
Human is as human does....Animals don't weep, Nine

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