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Re: The WOW Science Thread

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Absolutely great news IMHO!! :thumb:

Boring and a great waste of money to the vast majority of people, but I really do find things like this truly amazing.. Hats off to those who made it possible :bow:

Philae Comet Lander Wakes Up

"The European Space Agency (Esa) says its comet lander, Philae, has woken up and contacted Earth.
Philae, the first spacecraft to land on a comet, was dropped on to the surface of Comet 67P by its mothership, Rosetta, last November.
It worked for 60 hours before its solar-powered battery ran flat.
The comet has since moved nearer to the sun and Philae has enough power to work again, says the BBC's science correspondent Jonathan Amos.
The probe tweeted the message, "Hello Earth! Can you hear me?""


Full Report: - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33126885

"Hello Earth! Can you hear me?" - MAGIC!! :cheers: :cheers:
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Re: The WOW Science Thread

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"NASA discovers Earth-like planet in ‘habitable zone’"

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https://news.yahoo.com/nasa-discovers-e ... 12073.html
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Astronomy, cosmology and space thread

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Giant comets may threaten Earth: astronomers

Something else to worry about... :shock: :wink:

"Paris (AFP) - Planet Earth could be at higher risk of a space rock impact than widely thought, according to astronomers who suggested Tuesday keeping a closer eye on distant giant comets.

Most studies of potential Earth-smashers focus on objects in the asteroid belt roughly between Mars, Earth's outside neighbour, and Jupiter on its other flank, said the researchers.

But they noted that the discovery in the last two decades of hundreds of giant comets dubbed centaurs, albeit with much larger orbits, requires expanding the list of potential hazards.

These balls of ice and dust, typically 50-100 kilometres (31-62 miles) wide, have unstable, elliptical orbits that start way beyond Neptune, the most distant planet from the Sun.

Their paths cross those of the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, whose gravity fields occasionally deflect a comet towards Earth -- once about every 40,000-100,000 years.

As they draw closer to the Sun, the comets would gradually break up, which is what causes the trademark cometary debris tail -- "making impacts on our planet inevitable".

"The disintegration of such giant comets would produce intermittent but prolonged periods of bombardment lasting up to 100,000 years," the research team wrote in the Royal Astronomical Society journal, Astronomy and Geophysics.

And they argued that "assessment of the extraterrestrial impact risk based solely on near-Earth asteroid counts, underestimates its nature and magnitude."

They noted that a single centaur contains more mass than the entire population of Earth-crossing asteroids discovered to date.

"In the last three decades, we have invested a lot of effort in tracking and analysing the risk of a collision between the Earth and an asteroid," said co-author Bill Napier of the University of Buckingham.

"Our work suggests we need to look beyond our immediate neighbourhood too, and look out beyond the orbit of Jupiter to find centaurs.

"If we are right, then these distant comets could be a serious hazard, and it's time to understand them better."

Scientists believe a comet bombardment may have kickstarted life on Earth by bringing water and organic molecules.

A comet strike is also a leading contender for having ended the reign of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The team said no risk was "known to be imminent", although cometary encounters were largely unpredictable."

"A centaur arrival carries the risk of injecting, into the atmosphere... a mass of dust and smoke comparable to that assumed in nuclear winter studies," wrote the researchers, referring to the hypothesised climate effects from the soot that would be released by firestorms caused in an atomic war.

"Thus, in terms of magnitude, its ranking among natural existential risks appears to be high," they said."

https://news.yahoo.com/giant-comets-may ... 25835.html
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This is what the entire universe looks like in one image

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Re: The WOW Science Thread

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Possible detection of Gravitational waves:

http://www.iflscience.com/physics/gravi ... unning-hot

There is alos rumour that it is not correct. I guess in 2016 we qwill know if there is break through or not. Understanding the cause of gravitation and confirming it's nature in my mind must be the first step on the road to find ways to affect gravitational force. The practical and economic consequence to me is mind boggling. There woudl be such a thing as a free lunch
One Day I'm gona die. I can live with that.
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Evidence of huge ninth planet found in solar system

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Scientists have found evidence of a ninth planet in the solar system which is travelling on a bizarre elongated orbit.

The body, which has been dubbed ‘Planet Nine’ is 10 times the mass of Earth and takes between 10,000 and 20,000 years to orbit the Sun. It is so big that researchers have branded it ‘the most planety planet of the solar system.’

It was found by researchers at the California Institute of Technology who were puzzled as to why 13 objects in the Kuiper Belt – an area beyond Pluto – were all moving together as if being ‘lassooed’ by the gravity of a huge object.

After running computer simulations to see what was having an effect they found that only a massive planet could be causing the strange movement.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science ... ystem.html
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Re: Evidence of huge ninth planet found in solar system

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buksida wrote: ‘the most planety planet of the solar system.’
I hate it when scientists use complex terminology...
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Re: Evidence of huge ninth planet found in solar system

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"People Are Saying The New ‘Planet 9’ Is Going To Kill Us All - Here’s Why"

https://news.yahoo.com/people-are-sayin ... 49567.html
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Scientists Just Discovered a Solar System Larger Than Our Own — Much Larger

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"Science has discovered a solar system much larger than our own — much, much larger. On Tuesday the Royal Astronomical Society announced that a team of scientists from the U.S., the U.K. and Australia had linked a hulking planet — 2MASS J2126 — to a star called TYC 9486-927-1. The star sits some trillion kilometers away from 2MASS J2126, or 7,000 times as far as we are from the sun. The planet is thought to be between 11.6 and 15 times the mass of Jupiter.

"This is the widest planet system found so far, and both the members of it have been known for eight years," the paper's lead author, Niall Deacon, said in the announcement, "but nobody had made the link between the objects before. The planet is not quite as lonely as we first thought, but it's certainly in a very long-distance relationship."

With his subtle relationship wordplay, Deacon is referencing 2MASS J2126's previous status as a lonely planet — a rogue world without a star to circle, which instead floats freely around the Milky Way. 2MASS J2126 would, the announcement said, take about 900,000 Earth years to complete one orbit of its "sun." The two are so far away from one another that no one had ever connected them.

Image
Artist's rendering of a Jupiter-sized lonely planet
Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech

But now that we know about this tremendous, if mostly empty, solar system, another question arises: Might this formerly lonely planet be home to extraterrestrial life? In a 2014 episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Twitter-savvy astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson discussed lonely planets.

"They're orphans, cast away from their mother stars during the chaotic birth of their native solar systems," he said. "Rogue planets are molten at the core, but frozen at the surface. There may be oceans of liquid water in the zone between those extremes. Who knows what might be swimming there?"

In order for a planet to support life, it needs water. Some lonely planets might have that, if they're shrouded in an insulating layer — like ice or atmosphere — thick enough to trap the heat generated at their cores. But the RAS thinks that the chances of 2MASS J2126 hosting alien life are slim.

"There is little prospect of any life on an exotic world like this," the announcement said, "but any inhabitants would see their 'sun' as no more than a bright star, and might not even imagine they were connected to it at all."

Once a lonely planet, always a lonely planet.

https://news.yahoo.com/scientists-just- ... .html?nf=1
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Re: Evidence of huge ninth planet found in solar system

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"The People Who Are Saying" are the people who frequently are being kidnapped by UFOs, who are The Prophets of various and sundry Immediate Apocalypses, who in their Past Lives were emperors, kings, nobles and shamans, who are excellent compasses towards latest, most fashionable, most improbable, weird religious cult and who from time to time see both Kennedy and Elvis alive in some remote, obscure country store way out in the Boondocks.
"There's no plausible or convincing reason, certainly no evidential one, to believe that there is such an entity (= deity) and that all observable phenomena, including the cosmological ones... are explicable without the hypothesis; you don't need the assumption."
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Re: Evidence of huge ninth planet found in solar system

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js_planet-9-comp.jpg
js_planet-9-comp.jpg (120.48 KiB) Viewed 10369 times
Don't Panic!

Meanwhile, astrologer Jonathan Cainer has taken a (slightly) calmer view, saying, ‘Planet 9, I believe, is a herald of positive transformation, not a portent of doom.
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Our Galaxy Might Have Already Died - We Just Don’t Know It Yet, Scientist Warns

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It sounds fairly alarming - but a scientist claims that our galaxy may not just be in the process of dying, but already be dead.

Kevin Schawinski of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, explains that galaxies ‘die’ when they stop forming new stars from gas.

And it’s quite possible that our Milky Way is already dead.

Writing on The Conversation Schawinski says, ‘It’s entirely possible that the Milky Way galaxy is a zombie, having died a billion years ago.’

‘The crossroads of galaxy evolution is a place called the ‘green valley.’

‘This may sound scenic, but refers to the population between the blue star-forming galaxies (the 'blue cloud’) and the red, passively evolving galaxies (the 'red sequence’).

‘Galaxies with 'green’ or intermediate colors should be those galaxies in which star formation is in the process of turning off, but which still have some ongoing star formation – indicating the process only shut down a short while ago, perhaps a few hundred million years.

‘The glacial slowness of using up the remaining gas reservoir means that by the time we realize that a galaxy is in terminal decline, the 'trigger moment’ occurred billions of years ago.

‘The Andromeda galaxy, our nearest massive spiral galaxy, is in the green valley and likely began its decline eons ago: it is a zombie galaxy, according to our latest research.

‘It’s dead, but keeps on moving, still producing stars, but at a diminished rate compared to what it should if it were still a normal star-forming galaxy.

‘Working out whether the Milky Way is in the green valley – in the process of shutting down – is much more challenging, as we are in the Milky Way and cannot easily measure its integrated properties the way we can for distant galaxies.

‘Even with the more uncertain data, it looks like the Milky Way is just at the edge, ready to tumble into the green valley."
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Earth Is Made Up Of Two Planets, Say Scientists

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"A ‘violent, head-on collision’ between Earth and a developing planet called Theia formed the planet that we live on today and also created the moon, according to new research.

A ‘planetary embryo’ called Theia, thought to be around the same size as Earth or Mars, collided with Earth 4.5 billion years ago with the two being effectively melded together to form a single planet, says the study.

The head-on smash took place approximately 100 million years after the Earth was formed.

While it was already known that the two planets collided, it was previously thought that Theia merely grazed Earth, causing the former to break up, with a piece of the fledgling planet forming the moon.

If that were the case, the moon would have a different chemical composition to Earth because it would be made up predominantly of Theia.

Researchers at the University of California studied moon rocks brought back to Earth by the Apollo 12, 15 and 17 missions, along with volcanic rocks from the Earth’s mantle, found in Hawaii and Arizona.

They found that the rocks from the moon and Earth had almost identical oxygen isotopes, turning the previous theory on its head.

“Theia was thoroughly mixed into both the Earth and the moon, and evenly dispersed between them,” said lead researcher Edward Young. “This explains why we don’t see a different signature of Theia in the moon versus the Earth.”

While Theia ended up incorporated into Earth, Young says that it would probably have become a planet in its own right if the collision hadn’t taken place.

The research was published in the journal Science."

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Re: Earth Is Made Up Of Two Planets, Say Scientists

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i think the researchers got it wrong.

there are still two planets. one called Earth, the other called Thailand. :D
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Astronomy, cosmology and space thread

Post by buksida »

I've merged all of the astrophysics/cosmology topics into one thread for ease of reading.

hhfarang, it seems you have a genuine interest in astrophysics, I'm currently working my way through these courses at ANU to gain a better understanding of the field. They are free (50 bucks for the verified certificate), highly informative, and very challenging! https://www.edx.org/xseries/astrophysics
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