Science - strawberry float YEAH

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by False » Thu Jan 21, 2016 6:22 pm

Also the odds of something tiny (and fairly narrow in focus) like Voyager just happening across a planet when fired across an expanse as massive as the solar system are ridiculously low. Theres a reason we tend to fire our probes and aim our telescopes at 'something'.

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Moggy » Thu Jan 21, 2016 6:41 pm

Cal wrote:
Case made for 'ninth planet'

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American astronomers say they have strong evidence that there is a ninth planet in our Solar System orbiting far beyond even the dwarf world Pluto. The team, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), has no direct observations to confirm its presence just yet. Rather, the scientists make the claim based on the way other far-flung objects are seen to move. But if proven, the putative planet would have 10 times the mass of Earth. The Caltech astronomers have a vague idea where it ought to be on the sky, and their work is sure to fire a campaign to try to track it down. "There are many telescopes on the Earth that actually have a chance of being able to find it," said Dr Mike Brown. "And I'm really hoping that as we announce this, people start a worldwide search to go find this ninth planet."

The group's calculations suggest the object orbits 20 times farther from the Sun on average than does the eighth - and currently outermost - planet, Neptune, which moves about 4.5 billion km from our star. But unlike the near-circular paths traced by the main planets, this novel object would be in a highly elliptical trajectory, taking between 10,000 and 20,000 years to complete one full lap around the Sun. The scientists say they see distinct alignments among some members of the Kuiper Belt - and in particular two of its larger members known as Sedna and 2012 VP113. These alignments, they argue, are best explained by the existence of a hitherto unidentified large planet. "The most distant objects all swing out in one direction in a very strange way that shouldn't happen, and we realised the only way we could get them to swing in one direction is if there is a massive planet, also very distant in the Solar System, keeping them in place while they all go around the Sun," explained Dr Brown. "I went from trying very hard to be sceptical that what we were talking about was true, to suddenly thinking, 'this might actually be true'."


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35365323

That's the thing about science, I guess. Just when we think we might know all there is to know about something - I think they call it a 'scientific consensus', or something - we suddenly discover we don't. It will be interesting to find out if their theory is correct. How come Voyager never reported anything unusual out there on the fringes?


I don't think any scientists have ever claimed to know everything about the solar system and any that did are idiots. Our solar system is a vast vast area, we cannot possibly see everything.

Voyager 1 and 2 both went to the outer reaches of the solar system but they were nowhere near close to seeing it all, in fact they saw hardly anything.

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Oblomov Boblomov » Thu Jan 21, 2016 6:45 pm

A guy at work today was wondering why our telescopes can see things that are millions of light years away but we hadn't spotted this new planet until recently. I think he sees it as the equivalent of glimpsing a radio mast a few miles down the road from your house but not noticing the rosebush in your back garden.

When you begin to understand the scale of even our immediate neighbourhood within the universe it really strawberry floats with your head.

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Moggy » Thu Jan 21, 2016 6:55 pm

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:A guy at work today was wondering why our telescopes can see things that are millions of light years away but we hadn't spotted this new planet until recently. I think he sees it as the equivalent of glimpsing a radio mast a few miles down the road from your house but not noticing the rosebush in your back garden.

When you begin to understand the scale of even our immediate neighbourhood within the universe it really strawberry floats with your head.


Yeah, it's kind of like asking why no Europeans saw America before Columbus sailed there.

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by OrangeRKN » Thu Jan 21, 2016 7:07 pm

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:A guy at work today was wondering why our telescopes can see things that are millions of light years away but we hadn't spotted this new planet until recently. I think he sees it as the equivalent of glimpsing a radio mast a few miles down the road from your house but not noticing the rosebush in your back garden.


I think a good analogy is to suggest he stands at one end of a large room, with a single LED turned off just in front of him, and a single LED lit up against the far wall. When he turns off the light so that the room is pitch black, which is easier to see?

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Victor Mildew » Thu Jan 21, 2016 11:01 pm

BUT WHO WAS LED!

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Ironhide » Fri Jan 22, 2016 12:33 pm

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:When you begin to understand the scale of even our immediate neighbourhood within the universe it really strawberry floats with your head.


I'm reading the Expanse novels atm and they are great at describing the scale of the solar system, it makes you realise just how tiny and insignificant our planet really is.

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Meep » Sun Jan 24, 2016 12:07 pm

The sun contains over 99% percent of the total mass in this solar system, so once you realise that it becomes apparent just how tiny even supposedly 'large' planets are in relative terms to the size of the solar system. People don't seem to realise this because every published map of the solar system that most people see has the planets blown up to immense proportions just to make them visible and does not provide a good indicator of just how small the various bodies are and the real distance between them. Not noticing a ninth planet would not surprise me.

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Preezy » Sun Jan 24, 2016 12:17 pm

Sol, love you big guy :wub:

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Moggy » Sun Jan 24, 2016 4:49 pm

Preezy wrote:Sol, love you big guy :wub:


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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Preezy » Sun Jan 24, 2016 5:29 pm

Moggy wrote:
Preezy wrote:Sol, love you big guy :wub:


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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by False » Wed Feb 10, 2016 2:59 pm

A cryogenically frozen mammalian brain has been recovered in almost perfect condition, proving that fundamentally saving a brains structure may indeed be possible.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 401500245X
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/ ... tion-prize

Bretty good.

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Preezy » Thu Feb 11, 2016 10:58 am

Now all they have to do is stick electrodes in it ala Prometheus and see what happens.

7256930752

PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by 7256930752 » Thu Feb 11, 2016 3:45 pm

*edit* gooseberry fool. That didn't work.

Anyway, scientists have discovered gravitational waves. Old Alb was pretty clever.

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Victor Mildew » Thu Feb 11, 2016 10:26 pm

Starting to think Einstein was/will be a time traveller, he got way to much correct.

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by floydfreak » Thu Feb 11, 2016 10:47 pm

http://www.iflscience.com/space/gravita ... first-time

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States has detected gravitational waves for the first time. This is one of the most important astrophysical observations since the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background.

“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it!” said Daivd Reitze, Executive Director of the LIGO Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, at a press conference announcing the discovery

Gravitational waves are a prediction of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. According to Einstein, gravity bends space-time, and the more massive an object is, the larger the effect. When massive objects move they create an oscillation in space-time, gravitational waves, a bit like the waves that form in front of a moving ship.

The gravitational waves were observed on September 14, 2015, and they were produced by a pair of merging black holes, one of the few events thought powerful enough to produce gravitational waves that we can detect. The two objects are about 150 kilometers (95 miles) across and merged 1.3 billion years ago. They had similar masses, one weighing 36 times the mass of the Sun and the other 29. The discovery has a statistical significance of 5.1 sigmas, meaning that there’s only 1 chance in almost 6 million that the result is a fluke. The results will be published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The power released by the merging black holes was equivalent to 50 times the power of all the stars in the visible universe. In those 20 milliseconds, the energy of the waves was equivalent to annihilating the mass of three Suns.

It will bring to a head decades of searching by scientists, who have long sought evidence for gravitational waves. They are thought to move through the universe, squeezing and stretching the fabric of space-time, but the oscillations are incredibly small and thus very difficult to detect, requiring incredibly sensitive instrumentation such as LIGO.

"Detecting and measuring gravitational waves is the holy grail of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity," said Professor Bob Bingham, a physicist at the Science and Technology Facilities Council at Harwell Campus in the U.K. "This discovery leads the way to look back in time at the creation of the universe, with significant repercussions for ongoing astronomical research."



LIGO facility in Livingston, Lousiana. LIGO/NSF

LIGO is made up of two detectors, one in Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. Both detectors have a laser system that allows precise measurements of space-time. At each LIGO facility, a laser beam is split into two and sent down two perpendicular tunnels, each 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) long with a mirror at the end. The lasers are reflected and then combined back together. If a gravitational wave crosses one or both lasers, it will change the distance the light had to travel, and the reconstructed beam will look different from the original.

The LIGO teams from the two facilities compared notes to confirm if the observation was real or a fluke, and contacted astronomical observatories to follow up the detection with an observation of the possible cause of the gravitational wave, leading to the suspected merging black holes.

"The long-term goal for the LIGO detectors and its observations is to do astrophysics," Vicky Kalogera, said. "We want to use the gravitational-wave observations to learn about our universe for decades and centuries to come."

Another important piece of information to have come out of the announcement is that gravitational waves move at the speed of light. This was expected theoretically, but having this proven is important in constructing future theories. And this observation also confirms the first intermediate-mass black holes ever found. Stellar black holes are usually much smaller, reaching at most 15 solar masses. The objects observed are significantly bigger and they are believed to be a remnant of the first stars in the universe. The merger of intermediate mass black holes is thought to eventually produce the supermassive black holes we observe at the center of galaxies.

Later this year, the VIRGO facility (which is similar to LIGO) will re-open in Italy, and combining the data with LIGO will allow for triangulation of the source to find out the location of the black holes. And the LISA Pathfinder mission is currently investigating technologies that will be used on another gravitational wave experiment, the LISA observatory, which will be constructed in outer space to provide further information on this fascinating phenomenon.

The detection of gravitational waves is truly momentous, and heralds a completely new era in astronomy.

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Preezy » Thu Feb 11, 2016 10:52 pm

Hello, Mr Layman here. How will this knowledge be applicable to other research and what impact will it have on astronomy and astrophysics in general?

*sits down*

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Octoroc » Fri Feb 12, 2016 6:23 pm

Preezy wrote:Hello, Mr Layman here. How will this knowledge be applicable to other research and what impact will it have on astronomy and astrophysics in general?

*sits down*


It means that we are no longer limited to seeing the universe with electromagnetic waves (visible light, infra red, radio waves etc).

We can now look at the universe using gravitational waves which are not obscured by objects like dust clouds and stuff.

Which means we can look further. Which means further back in time.

Which means we can look at the Big Bang.

Which should be interesting.

So far this year, I have eaten NO mince pies.
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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Meep » Fri Feb 12, 2016 7:27 pm

Falsey wrote:A cryogenically frozen mammalian brain has been recovered in almost perfect condition, proving that fundamentally saving a brains structure may indeed be possible.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 401500245X
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/ ... tion-prize

Bretty good.

In order to conclusively prove this could work you would have do it on a living brain and take scans before and after the process to prove that no damage had occured.

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PostRe: Science - strawberry float YEAH
by Alvin Flummux » Fri Feb 12, 2016 7:29 pm

Meep wrote:
Falsey wrote:A cryogenically frozen mammalian brain has been recovered in almost perfect condition, proving that fundamentally saving a brains structure may indeed be possible.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 401500245X
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/ ... tion-prize

Bretty good.

In order to conclusively prove this could work you would have do it on a living brain and take scans before and after the process to prove that no damage had occured.


I'm sure that'll come soon.


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