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Astronomical News

Christmas Day 2022 all the planets align in the night sky with most being visible without binoculars.
With all the planets on the same side of the sun, will there be earthquakes. ?

The visible planets will be on display throughout December, but they're not especially close to each other (in terms of alignment).

https://earthsky.org/tonight/see-all-5-bright-planets-in-december-2022/
https://astronomy.com/magazine/sky-this-month/2022/12/sky-this-month-december-2022
 
With all the planets on the same side of the sun, will there be earthquakes. ?
There are earthquakes every day. And there will be today, tomorrow and every day afterwards. But none will be due to the alignment of planets, the gravitational effects of which are about as likely to be noticeable here on earth as a fly deciding to land on an apple on the left side of an apple tree than on the right side.
I expect some incredibly sensitive piece of equipment, most likely fixed to a spacecraft of some sort, will detect some minor fluctuation in the space-time of the whole Solar System, but beyond that the simple answer is .....No.
 
"About as likely to be noticeable here on earth as a fly deciding to land on an apple."
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Earthquakes may have a loose correlation with the orbit of Jupiter, but all the other planets are insignificant in effect compared to that world. Too small, or too far away.

John Gribbin wrote a book about it in 1974, but the effect does not seem to be as significant as he predicted, and he now largely dismisses his earlier concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jupiter_Effect
In his book, The Little Book of Science (pub. 1999), Gribbin admitted about his "Jupiter Effect" theory "...I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.
Gribbin is a very clever bloke, and I suspect he is right.
 
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All solar system's planets visible in night sky
There will be a chance to see all the planets in the solar system in the night sky on Thursday.
Five should be visible with the naked eye, while the two furthest away, Uranus and Neptune, will be better viewed with binoculars.
It will be challenging to see Mercury and Venus in the UK due to their low position in the sky.
The best time to see the spectacle is shortly after sunset.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64082159
 
You should feel special !

A site called SpaceAlert takes about the University of Warwick, UK study that even though many exoplanets have been discovered, none of these exoplanets probably will not support life as we know it.

The University calls our solar system a freak of nature !

There, so far, no solar system that has been found in the Milky Way has the right planet sizes and spacing for life.

If any of our planets in our solar system were of the wrong size or wrong distance, we would not exist.

Again, don’t you feel special !

Was our solar system artificially set up by someone ?
 
There has been in the past on this website many discussions about the oddities about the moon speculating the moon is an artificial satellite.

I not saying this is so, but it makes you think outside of the box.
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You should feel special !

A site called SpaceAlert takes about the University of Warwick, UK study that even though many exoplanets have been discovered, none of these exoplanets probably will not support life as we know it.

The University calls our solar system a freak of nature !

There, so far, no solar system that has been found in the Milky Way has the right planet sizes and spacing for life.

If any of our planets in our solar system were of the wrong size or wrong distance, we would not exist.

Again, don’t you feel special !

Was our solar system artificially set up by someone ?
But our detection methods aren't that great at the moment. Earth and Mars sized words are harder to detect than gas and ice giants. Earth sized worlds with moons the size of ours are probably not that common but I doubt we could detect one; or Titan sized moons round hot Jupiters etc. It wasn't that along ago that astronomers were speculating about planetary systems being rare!

Also detecting worlds with wide orbits is less easy because of the need to check gravitational wobbles or occultations and if they are a year or more apart that takes time.

More and more are being found and ice giants seem quite common ( given the caveats above) and we have two. What we don't have is hot Jupiters but we probably used to. IMO far too early to say.
 
Substitute flea with creator perhaps?

"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum."

Which still begs the question Where did the first flea come from?
 
According to Carl Sagan book Contact, the sci-fi story goes something like technology was built by unknowns billions of years earlier.
 
I have trouble thinking inside the box.
I have trouble trying to think what exactly this 'box' is - and if "it" is thought of as being a box, then where is the lid (the escape route) as every box has a lid, otherwise it becomes a container where nothing else gets in, and nothing can escape from?
Anyway, it probably has no corners - which means it might well be just a rather puny bubble, or a "splat" sitting somewhere in the dark ether, or, on the edges of something that we have no hope to understanding the conception of?
 
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As an amateur worldbuilder, I recognise the attraction of a made-to-measure or bespoke solar system. Lots of things about our solar system are unique, and it is appealing to think that someone set it up this way.

Imagine, if you will, what the process of creating a bespoke solar system might look like. You'd need to start early, in the protoplanetary cloud phase, when the planets are still forming; a protoplanetary cloud is a very resource-rich, energy-rich environment, and I expect that it would be very attractive for a suitably-advanced civilisation. There would be yottatonnes of material just flying around which could be used for construction purposes, as well as vast amounts of potential and kinetic energy (on top of the luminosity of the protostar).

After this hypothetical civilisation was finished with the process of creation, I expect there could have been at least one habitable planet in the system; maybe in the earliest eons of our system's existence both Mars and Venus were habitable as well. Additionally to this, I would anticipate that the rest of the newly-finished solar system would include numerous artificial habitats, perhaps in the form of rotating habitats and rings, and domed habitats on the surface of many or most moons and smaller bodies. This would leave behind lots of archaeological evidence in the form of ruins.

We don't see any evidence of surviving structures from the primordial era, but maybe we haven't looked hard enough yet. If the Solar system was the result of deliberate engineering there may be plenty of evidence out there for us to find. On the other hand, just about every other system we have observed is unique in its own way, so our system is probably just the result of random processes.
 
"So our system is probably just the result of random processes?"
Well, it seems to have finished up living within a sort of 'orderliness form of randomness' - being the main general direction of all. :huh:
 
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Thinking out side of the box is equal to asking the question “ what if “ ?

In my early years I saw such strange bizarre paranormal, so I have to think the impossible is true.
 
In the southern U.S. states it that time of the year.

To have good luck in the coming new year one must eat black-eyed peas and ham or ham and Collard Greens or Turnip Geens.

I still have not won the lottery so I am still optimistic !
 
In the southern U.S. states it that time of the year.

To have good luck in the coming new year one must eat black-eyed peas and ham or ham and Collard Greens or Turnip Geens.
Where's Polk Salad Annie when you need her?
 

Asteroid lights up sky above English Channel​

The International Meteor Organization, a Belgium-based non-profit organisation, said the object would have entered about 4km (2.5 miles) from the French coast, and would create a "fireball" effect.
The last asteroid predicted to enter the Earth's atmosphere in advance was seen in the sky above Ontario, Canada in November last year.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-64621721
 

Asteroid lights up sky above English Channel​

The International Meteor Organization, a Belgium-based non-profit organisation, said the object would have entered about 4km (2.5 miles) from the French coast, and would create a "fireball" effect.
The last asteroid predicted to enter the Earth's atmosphere in advance was seen in the sky above Ontario, Canada in November last year.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-64621721
It was just the Mothership, taking @Swifty home....


main-qimg-cd3b838a3d30ff432a14947ae48c151a-lq.jpeg
 
Interesting sequence of nomenclature here.

The object was first observed in deep space, so it was technically an asteroid at that moment. Then it hit the top of the atmosphere, and started to glow; at this point it became a meteor.

If any of the debris survived and hit the ground, then this debris would be called a meteorite.
 

Astronomers detect water molecules swirling around a star

Scientists observed a young star, called V883 Orionis, located 1,300 light-years away using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes, or ALMA, in northern Chile.

The star is surrounded by a planet-forming disk of cloud of gas and dust leftover from when the star was born. Eventually, material in the disk comes together to form comets, asteroids and planets over millions of years.

A team of researchers used ALMA to measure chemical signals in the planet-forming disk, and they detected gaseous water, or water vapor.

Their findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that comets formed from the sun’s planet-forming disk could have brought water to Earth. That means the water on Earth could actually be older than our sun, which is 4.6 billion years old.
“We can now trace the origins of water in our Solar System to before the formation of the Sun,” said lead study author John J. Tobin, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in a statement.

“The composition of the water in the disc is very similar to that of comets in our own Solar System. This is confirmation of the idea that the water in planetary systems formed billions of years ago, before the Sun, in interstellar space, and has been inherited by both comets and Earth, relatively unchanged.”

Detecting water molecules in planetary disks can be a difficult task.

“Most of the water in planet-forming discs is frozen out as ice, so it’s usually hidden from our view,” said study coauthor Margot Leemker, a doctoral student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, in a statement.

Gaseous water is easier to detect than ice because the molecules emit radiation as they move.

The disk around V883 Orionis is unusually warm due to outbursts of energy released by the star, which turned the ice to gas and enabled the researchers to detect it, Tobin said.

The team detected at least 1,200 times the amount of water in Earth’s oceans in the planet-forming disk.
 
Just let that sink in for a minute.
That glass of water you have in front of you may be comprised of molecules that first formed before our sun ignited.
mind-blown.gif
 
Just let that sink in for a minute.
That glass of water you have in front of you may be comprised of molecules that first formed before our sun ignited.
mind-blown.gif
Or were part of a piss Cleopatra took in 41 BCE

:puke2:

I'm always available to lower the tone!
 
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