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24 Jul 2021 01:03

Did anyone see the second real image of an black hole? This time the main protagonist was Centaurus A galaxy. 

Here´s the image if you didn´t :)
Is that what it looks like in SE too?
 
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Khorrah
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24 Jul 2021 06:12

Did anyone see the second real image of an black hole? This time the main protagonist was Centaurus A galaxy. 

Here´s the image if you didn´t :)
Is that what it looks like in SE too?
Nope, I don´t see hot gas ejections from the black hole´s poles, but an accretion disk.
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My Specs: Intel Core I5 12600K, Corsair Vengeance Pro SL 32GB, MSI Z690-A WIFI DDR4, GIGABYTE NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 3070 AORUS MASTER 8G.
 
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29 Jul 2021 04:44

Water vapor has been discovered in the atmosphere of Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon and the largest moon in the solar system!  Also my favorite moon if there can be such a thing lol.
 
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29 Jul 2021 06:27

Astronomers see the back of a black hole for the first time (and x rays being emitted from the backside of the black hole.)

 
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09 Aug 2021 06:24

New IPCC report is out- it's pretty bleak
 
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09 Aug 2021 15:32

On the anniversary of the Nagasaki bomb drop which many say was the worst single weapon crime in the history of humanity..... and which the greatest scientists of the time period, like Einstein, opposed.

Have a read, this story just dropped about how Blacks worried that racism was the reason this was dropped on civilians.  This journalist uncovered the lie the war dept had been spewing.  



https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/scie ... -bomb.html
 
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26 Aug 2021 09:50

Physicist Challenges the Idea That Time Had a Beginning

TOPICS:AstronomyAstrophysicsBig BangBlack HoleCosmology

By AGÊNCIA FAPESP NOVEMBER 27, 2017

Researchers Propose to Eliminate the Need for Cosmological Spacetime Singularity

Physicist publishes paper in General Relativity and Gravitation proposing to eliminate need for cosmological spacetime singularity and arguing that the current expansion phase was preceded by contraction (image: NASA / CXC / M. Weiss)

“I believe the Big Bang never happened,” said Juliano César Silva Neves, a physicist at the University of Campinas’s Mathematics, Statistics & Scientific Computation Institute (IMECC-UNICAMP) in São Paulo State, Brazil.

Although for five decades, the Big Bang theory has been the best known and most accepted explanation for the beginning and evolution of the Universe, it is hardly a consensus among scientists, according to Neves, part of a group of researchers who dare to imagine a different origin.

In a study recently published in the journal General Relativity and Gravitation, Neves suggests the elimination of a key aspect of the standard cosmological model: the need for a spacetime singularity known as the Big Bang.

In raising this possibility, Neves challenges the idea that time had a beginning and reintroduces the possibility that the current expansion was preceded by contraction.

For Neves, the fast spacetime expansion stage does not exclude the possibility of a prior contraction phase. Moreover, the switch from contraction to expansion may not have destroyed all traces of the preceding phase.

“Who knows, there may be remains of black holes in the ongoing expansion that date from the prior contraction phase and passed intact through the bottleneck of the bounce,” Neves told Agência FAPESP.

It is precisely in black holes that Neves locates the starting point for his investigations into what he calls the “bouncing Universe”, in which contraction is followed by expansion.

“The inspiration for the bouncing Universe came from a mathematical trick to avoid the formation of singularities in black holes,” he said. “There are two kinds of singularity in the Universe. One is the alleged cosmological singularity, or Big Bang. The other hides behind the event horizon of a black hole.”

Black holes are the most mysterious cosmic objects. A black hole consists of the imploded core remaining after a giant star explodes. The core contracts to form a singularity, a point with infinite density and the strongest gravitational attraction known to exist. Nothing escapes from it, not even light.

The singularity is located at the center of the black hole, hidden behind the event horizon, a membrane that indicates the point of no return from which nothing escapes the inexorable destiny of being swallowed up and destroyed by the singularity.

“But not all black holes have to contain a singularity. At least, not in theory. There are no singularities in so-called regular black holes,” Neves said.

In 1968, US physicist James Bardeen used a mathematical trick to modify the solution to the general relativity equations that describe black holes.

The trick consisted of thinking of the mass of a black hole not as a constant, as had previously been the case, but as a function that depends on the distance to the center of the black hole. With this change, a different black hole, termed a regular black hole, emerged from the solution to the equations.

“What defines a black hole isn’t a singularity but an event horizon,” Neves said. “Outside the event horizon of a regular black hole, there are no major changes, but inside it, the changes are deep-seated. There’s a different spacetime that avoids the formation of a singularity. Regular black holes are permitted, since they don’t violate general relativity. The concept isn’t new and has frequently been revisited in recent decades.”

If the insertion of a mathematical trick into the general relativity equations prevents the formation of singularities in regular black holes, could a similar artifice be created to eliminate the singularity in a regular bounce?

“In order to measure the rate at which the Universe is expanding with the standard cosmology, the model in which there’s a Big Bang, a mathematical function is used that depends only on cosmological time,” Neves explained.

This is where the mathematical trick comes in. Neves and his postdoctoral supervisor Alberto Vazques Saa, Full Professor at IMECC-UNICAMP, introduced a “scale factor” that makes the rate at which the Universe is expanding depend not only on time but also on cosmological scale into the solutions to the general relativity equations that describe the geometry of the cosmos.

This is the proposal presented in the recently published article, which is part of the Thematic Project “Physics and geometry of spacetime”, with Saa as principal investigator. Neves’s postdoctoral research was supported by a scholarship from FAPESP.

Vestiges of contraction

What are the consequences of the mathematical trick involving the scale factor? The cosmological singularity, or Big Bang, ceases to exist. It ceases to be a necessary condition for the cosmos to begin universal expansion.

“Eliminating the singularity or Big Bang brings back the bouncing Universe on to the theoretical stage of cosmology. The absence of a singularity at the start of spacetime opens up the possibility that vestiges of a previous contraction phase may have withstood the phase change and may still be with us in the ongoing expansion of the Universe,” Neves said.

“Did the Universe have a beginning, or did it not? Does the world end inside a black hole? Today, we know the theory of general relativity permits a non-singular cosmology, with no Big Bang, at least in theory.”

In modern science, a theory is worthless if cannot be verified, however beautiful and inspiring it may be. How do you test the hypothesis of a Big Bang that did not start with a singularity?

“By looking for traces of the events in a contraction phase that may have remained in the ongoing expansion phase. What traces? The candidates include remnants of black holes from a previous phase of universal contraction that may have survived the bounce,” Neves said.

Big Bang

The Big Bang theory began to be formulated in the late 1920s, when US astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that almost all galaxies are moving away from each other at ever-faster velocities.

This means they were much closer together in the remote past. More precisely, 13.8 billion years ago all the matter and energy in the Universe were compressed into an initial state with infinite density and temperature, where the traditional laws of physics no longer apply.

To define this state cosmologists paradoxically borrowed the concept of singularity from mathematics, where it refers to indefinition. In this case, there was a primordial cosmological singularity that began expanding 13.8 billion years ago. The initial singularity became known as the Big Bang. The hundreds of billions of galaxies in the cosmos were formed from the matter and energy ejected by this initial explosion.

Guided by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which is used to explain cosmic phenomena, from the 1940s onward, scientists constructed a detailed model of the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang. The model was based on the assumption that the expansion might eventually decelerate in response to the gravitational attraction exerted by the mass of the Universe.

This assumption could lead to three possible outcomes: the Universe would expand infinitely at ever-higher velocities; the expansion would cease, and the Universe would thereafter remain static; or the expansion would go into reverse, giving way to a contraction in which the galaxies would move closer together at ever-higher velocities until they merged in a future Big Crunch.

If this were the case, when matter and energy reached an extreme temperature and density in the Big Crunch, the process might again go into reverse, giving way to expansion in another bounce and producing a new cycle in the Universe, and so on without end.

“This image of an eternal succession of universes with alternating expansion and contraction phases was called the cyclical Universe, which derives from bouncing cosmologies,” Neves said.

Publication: J. C. S. Neves, “Bouncing cosmology inspired by regular black holes,” General Relativity and Gravitation, 2017; doi:10.1007/s10714-017-2288-6
 
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21 Sep 2021 23:19

Hi! I thought this would have been mentioned here already but there's been a lot of buzz about a Space Engine-y database called Uchuu. Uchuu was recently unveiled and involved a massive collaboration lasting more than 5 years. Uchuu is a simulation and explorable universe map involving millions of galaxies and 2.1 trillion data points. While Uchuu only allows exploration down to the galaxy level, it models most of all known galaxies and even includes data on dark matter distributions in the universe, and most importantly includes the grandest scale simulation of the universe yet involving how the universe evolved over billions of years. 
Main database: http://skiesanduniverses.org/Simulations/Uchuu/
Main article: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.14720 (released July 13 2021)
Review Article: https://www.livescience.com/simulation- ... uchuu.html

After looking at these articles I immediately thought about SpaceEngine and wondered how the two could interrelate. The creator of SpaceEngine would probably need to get permission to use the database in the program. In addition, the database seems to be enormous (kind of like the Gaia database). Still, merging Uchuu and SpaceEngine in any way possible could have many benefits. It could increase awareness of SpaceEngine among the astrophysicist community even further, which would be helpful. In addition, it makes the visualization of the Uchuu database much more accessible to the lay person. Also, SpaceEngine has not as of yet focused too much on cosmology or cosmological scales and evolution, instead focusing more on planetary and stellar evolution. With Uchuu this could change since Uchuu could allow SpaceEngine to predict how galaxies move over long timescales which will greatly add to the simulation experience. Lastly, the dark matter data component of Uchuu could be invaluable to improving galaxy, galaxy cluster, and large scale structure models on SpaceEngine.
 
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22 Sep 2021 22:31

Wow I would love to see a large galaxy collection in SE that was like the GAIA database and on the scale of the PGC database or even larger!
 
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06 Oct 2021 02:14

The study is published in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. In their article, the authors suggest that a planet unknown to us may be located behind Neptune, in fact, the "second Earth". The idea itself is not new. Astronomers around the world have been searching for the so-called "Ninth Planet" for several years. However, the new study is interesting because, in its framework, scientists have simulated the process of birth and evolution of the solar system. Researchers write that existing models and the data we have are not yet able to fully explain the current configuration of the solar system. The second scenario assumes that the hypothetical planet was displaced into interstellar space and went on a long single journey. By the way, in August 2021, American astronomers Michael E. Brown and Konstantin Batygin presented new calculations that narrow the scope of the search for the mysterious "Ninth Planet". The results indicated that its orbit could be much closer to the Sun than previously thought.
 
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18 Oct 2021 12:25

https://twitter.com/i/events/1450139634437083148

White dwarf star is spotted 'switching on and off' in 30 minutes
Researchers used a NASA planet-hunting telescope to observe a white dwarf. It is 1,400 light years from the Earth in a binary pairing with a smaller companion. The white dwarf is pulling hydrogen and other matter from its partner star. The team observed a strange abrupt change from feeding to not feeding
Photo via @MailOnline
 
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18 Oct 2021 15:12

Apologies if this is old news, I am trying to get active again on here.

https://www.space.com/jupiter-moon-euro ... ater-vapor
Just a random user on the internet, nothing to see here.
 
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17 Nov 2021 17:32

lunar eclipse reaches maximum around 4:07 am my time Friday morning, 97% so very close to total (actually better in some ways since more easily visible and yet still red.)


if you wanna be up with me to see it, let me know :)
 
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26 Nov 2021 14:36

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podc ... r-decades/

They found that teflon produced very few organic compounds. There were more compounds in the teflon with glass pieces. But the glass container, by far, created the greatest number and largest variety of organic molecules.

The mechanism of exactly how the silica helps catalyze the reaction is not clear yet--but it is very clearly does.

The obvious question then is: Was there silica available in the early earth environment?

Saladino: The water is not suspended in a vacuum. No? The water is in geochemistry, it is surrounded by minerals. Borosilicate and silica are the most abundant minerals surrounding the water.

Vitak: The team has two next major objectives in mind. First, to try updating the experiment to model more closely the amount of silica that would have been available in the early Earth.

Second, they want to try replacing the silica with extraterrestrial minerals like, pieces of meteorite or rocks from other planets. Apart from just being very cool, that could give a more concrete idea of how to look for life in space. 

But here on Earth, coming one step closer to fully understanding why we exist is that much more satisfying. Even after nearly 70 years, a key discovery in our complex origin story still carries new revelations. As the authors say in the paper: "The role of the rocks was hidden in the walls of the reactors."
 
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09 Dec 2021 07:20

https://twitter.com/i/events/1468675617356861443


Scientists have discovered a massive planet that shouldn’t exist

The new planet orbits around two stars in the b Centauri system 325 light-years away. This finding marks the first discovery of a gas giant planet around a star that is more than three times the mass of the Sun.


Questions:  When will this be added to SE and are there any procedural worlds that mimic this system that challenges ideas on how planets form?

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