• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Astronomical News

Are we considering instantaneous 'point-to-point' transportation (which would be FTL) as also being possible of travelling backwards in time?
I mean, if I stepped into some kind of portal which had 'the other end' in Sydney (or anywhere else in the universe), and then stepped back through it to emerge back here just moments later, quite clearly I have managed to go FTL, but I have not arrived back before I left.
Possibly best left for musing on in an appropriate other thread though.
 
A gaseous bridge.

The Milky Way has a “feather” in its cap.

A long, thin filament of cold, dense gas extends jauntily from the galactic center, connecting two of the galaxy’s spiral arms, astronomers report November 11 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. This is the first time that such a structure, which looks like the barb of a feather fanning off the central quill, has been spotted in the Milky Way.

The team that discovered our galaxy’s feather named it the Gangotri wave, after the glacier that is the source of India’s longest river, the Ganges. In Hindi and other Indian languages, the Milky Way is called Akasha Ganga, “the river Ganga in the sky,” says astrophysicist Veena V.S. of the University of Cologne in Germany.

She and colleagues found the Gangotri wave by looking for clouds of cold carbon monoxide gas, which is dense and easy to trace, in data from the APEX telescope in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. The structure stretches 6,000 to 13,000 light-years from the Norma arm of the Milky Way to a minor arm near the galactic center called the 3-kiloparsec arm. So far, all other known gas tendrils in the Milky Way align with the spiral arms (SN: 12/30/15).

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/astronomy-milky-way-galaxy-feather-gas-spiral-arms-gangotri-wave
 
Objects at the Solar System’s Edge Are Being Influenced by Something Mysterious
Don't suppose there might be a connection.... :eek:

Could our Universe be Someone’s Chemistry Project?

Source: universetoday.com

"...“It explains the Big Bang as an infinite series of baby universes born inside each other, just like chicks hatching out of eggs and laying new eggs later in their life. If something predated this series of generations – it would have been something else, just as in the ‘chicken and egg dilemma"...”

"..."As a result the creator of the baby universe will never know which type of civilization formed in it and will also not be able to intervene. Creating a baby universe might not consume energy because the negative gravitational energy cancels out the positive energy of matter and radiation in our universe, which is characterized by a flat geometry"..."

(...)

https://www.universetoday.com/153107/could-our-universe-be-someones-chemistry-project/amp/


'Tis all enough to make Mr Fort himself justifiably gleeful...:)
 
Rugby Ball Shaped Planet

With the help of the CHEOPS space telescope, an international team including researchers from the Universities of Bern and Geneva as well as the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS, was able to detect the deformation of an exoplanet for the first time. Due to strong tidal forces, the appearance of the planet WASP-103b resembles a rugby ball rather than a sphere.

The planet WASP-103b is located in the constellation Hercules, is almost twice the size of Jupiter, has one and a half times its mass and is about fifty times closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun. "Because of its great proximity to its star, we had already suspected that very large tides are caused on the planet
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope had already observed the planet. In combination with the high precision and pointing flexibility of CHEOPS, these observations enabled the researchers to measure the tiny signal of the tidal deformation of the planet light years away. In doing so, they took advantage of the fact that the planet dims the light of the star slightly each time it passes in front of it. "After observing several such so-called "transits," we were able to measure the deformation. It's incredible that we were able to do this -- it's the first time such an analysis has been done," reports Babatunde Akinsanmi, a researcher at the University of Geneva, co-author of the study and NCCR PlanetS associate.

The researchers' results not only allow conclusions to be drawn about the shape of the planet, but also about its interior. This is because the team was also able to derive a parameter called the "Love number" (named after the British mathematician Augustus E. H. Love) from the transit light curve of WASP-103b. It indicates how the mass is distributed within the planet and thus also gives clues about its inner structure. "The resistance of a material to deformation depends on its composition," explains Akinsanmi. "We can only see the tides on Earth in the oceans. The rocky part doesn't move that much. Therefore, by measuring how much the planet is deformed, we can determine how much of it is made up of rock, gas or water."

WASP-103b's Love number is like Jupiter's, our Solar System's biggest gas giant. It suggests that the internal structures of WASP-103b and Jupiter are similar -- even though WASP-103b is twice as large. "In principle, we would expect a planet with 1.5 times the mass of Jupiter to be about the same size. Therefore, WASP-103b must be highly inflated due to heating by its nearby star, and perhaps other mechanisms," says Monika Lendl, professor of astronomy at the University of Geneva and co-author of the study.
 
The work on the European Extremely Large Telescope, now only known as the Extremely Large Telescope, continues. Webcam link.

1645402286101.png


1645402527184.png
 
There is always going to be a problem, in a relativistic universe. If you do manage to travel faster than light, it is also possible to travel backwards in time, thanks to the Lorenz transformation and the hypersurface of the present. So you could potentially travel backwards and kill your own grandfather clock (etcetera). In a universe where time travel is possible, causality may be impossible, and if causality is somehow conserved then freewill is impossible. Because of these effects we are much better off in a universe where FTL is impossible.

Better to get used to long travel times and extreme message latency than live in a universe without causality or freewill.
Also 'eburacum,' how do we know if time only goes forwards or backwards, could it not also be multidirectional?
 
Well, a universe with multiple timelines ( a multiverse) implies some dimensional separation between the timelines, and it is easiest to imagine this as an extra dimension in time. Hence the concept of travelling 'sideways in time' to reach other, alternate realities.

The concept of a 'closed timelike curve' also implies a certain amount of dimensional freedom in the time dimension.

If time really exists in two (or more) dimensions, the reality of our multiverse could be very strange indeed. I suspect that if you started to wander into multiple temporal dimensions you would never find your way back to your original timeline; it would be like trying to find a particular page in a book with an infinite number of pages.
 
"it would be like trying to find a particular page in a book with an infinite number of pages."
(Just throwing this into the mix). . .
That is a very thought provoking sentence ~ lost spirits; ghosts, sounds/visions from the past, 'visiting' life forms from who knows where, etc etc?
 
Last edited:
Dang, Space is big.
In the immortal words of Douglas Adams:

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
 
Astronomers have captured a close-up image of a rare and mysterious space object, prompting a renewed push to discover its origin. Odd radio circles (ORCs) are gigantic rings of radio waves. Only five have ever been sighted, and never in such spectacular detail.

... The new MeerKAT radio data shows that the ORC’s large outer circle is possibly more than a million light years across, ten times the diameter of the Milky Way, with a series of smaller rings inside. “It really reminds me of a Fabergé egg or a soap bubble,” says Bärbel Koribalski, a radio astronomer at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Sydney.

... Most of the ORCs have a galaxy at their centre, which astronomers suggest might have something to do with their creation. Also puzzling to scientists is the fact that ORCs have been spied only in radio wavelengths and have not been detected by optical or X-ray telescopes.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1648743032
 
In the immortal words of Douglas Adams:

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
Peanuts at the Chemist's? Isn't space wonderful:)
 
Getting back to the old stargazing methods.

Two boys brought the M1 to a standstill when police found them lying in the central reservation "stargazing".
Officers were called to reports of pedestrians near junction 34 for Meadowhall, Sheffield, at 03:30 BST.
South Yorkshire Police tweeted: "When we arrived, having stopped all traffic, we found two young males laid on the central reservation 'stargazing'."
The Highway Code says pedestrians must not be on motorways except in an emergency.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61038055
 
Last edited:
Getting back to the old stargazing methods.

Two boys brought the M1 to a standstill when police found them lying in the central reservation "stargazing".
Officers were called to reports of pedestrians near junction 34 for Meadowhall, Sheffield, at 03:30 BST.
South Yorkshire Police tweeted: "When we arrived, having stopped all traffic, we found two young males laid on the central reservation 'stargazing'."
The Highway Code says pedestrians must not be on motorways except in an emergency.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-61015960
Think that's the wrong link, try:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61038055
Shouldn't think they'd see a lot on a well lit junction!
 
Getting back to the old stargazing methods.

Two boys brought the M1 to a standstill when police found them lying in the central reservation "stargazing".
Officers were called to reports of pedestrians near junction 34 for Meadowhall, Sheffield, at 03:30 BST.
South Yorkshire Police tweeted: "When we arrived, having stopped all traffic, we found two young males laid on the central reservation 'stargazing'."
The Highway Code says pedestrians must not be on motorways except in an emergency.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-61015960
Suggested excuse could be - "Sorry ociffer, we were just emergency stargazing." Said with a twinkle in their eyes.
 

Nasa scientists spy 'largest ever comet'

Nasa's Hubble telescope has determined the comet's icy nucleus has a mass of about 500 trillion tonnes and is 85 miles (137km) wide - larger than the US state of Rhode Island.

But not to worry. The closest it will get is one billion miles away from the Sun, and that won't be until 2031.
It was first spotted in 2010 but only now has Hubble confirmed its existence. And it's larger than any comet ever seen by astronomers before. "We've always suspected this comet had to be big because it is so bright at such a large distance," said David Jewitt, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). "Now we confirm it is."

Nasa, which describes the icy dirtball as a behemoth "barrelling this way", has named it Bernardinelli-Bernstein after its discovery by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein.

They first sighted it while working at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile over a decade ago when it was three billion miles from the Sun.

Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein has been following a three-million-year-long elliptical orbit, taking it as far from the Sun as roughly half a light-year.

The comet is now less than two billion miles from the Sun, falling nearly perpendicular to the plane of our Solar System.
 
Uranus mission a priority? (Quiet at the back)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61155725

About time; most exo planets are Uranus/Neptune size "Ice giants" although that may be a product of the limitations of our search methods and we've only had the Voyager fly by.

Fascinating place, axial tilt, ice moons etc. Neptune and Triton as well.
 
What mysterious webs we weave ?

European Southern Observatory and the Event Horizon Telescope will announce this Thursday groundbreaking information about our Milky Way from Germany.

Scientists are guessing it is about the black hole in the center of our galaxy.
Sure enough, they've imaged the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*. It's a fuzzy blob, like the M87 image from 2019. But it is the first direct image of Sgr A*. The press conference was interesting.
 

Mystery issue experienced on NASA's Voyager 1 probe​

The Voyager 1 probe is still exploring interstellar space 45 years after launching, but it has encountered an issue that mystifies the spacecraft's team on Earth.
Voyager 1 continues to operate well, despite its advanced age and 14.5 billion-mile distance (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth. And it can receive and execute commands sent from NASA, as well as gather and send back science data.
But the readouts from the attitude articulation and control system, which control the spacecraft's orientation in space, don't match up with what Voyager is actually doing. The attitude articulation and control system, or AACS, ensures that the probe's high-gain antenna remains pointed at Earth so Voyager can send data back to NASA ... ... So far, the Voyager team believes the AACS is still working, but the instrument's data readouts seem random or impossible.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/18/world/nasa-voyager-1-issue-scn/index.html
 
Back
Top