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A-L-E-X
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03 Nov 2019 04:05

I watch PBS a lot and I highly recommend the latest NOVA episode where a fossil hunter found the first fossilized mammals after the K-T event in Colorado.  He was able to reconstruct the entire ecosystem and show how it rapidly evolved within 300,000 years after the big asteroid strike.  I cannot recommend it enough- it showed how flora evolution directly tied in to fauna evolution and how mammals rapidly grew in size from mouse sized to wolf sized when plants with legumes came into being.  I wonder how this would fit in with theoretical models of how life might evolve on exoplanets?

Excellent thread on CN here where we discussed the possibilities for extraterrestrial life:

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/681831-updated-drake-equation/page-3#entry9745441

I publicized SE a bit there:

I've always wondered about a few (probably very low) possibilities ever since the Trappist-1 system was discovered:

 

1) What are the chances of sentient life developing on multiple worlds in the same system?

 

2) What are the chances of two different branches of life occurring on the same planet (even Earth)- like organic and inorganic?

 

3) What are the chances of life transferring between worlds by means other than technological (like panspermia or even a planet and a moon that share an atmosphere and life traveling back and forth between the two?)

 

4) What are the chances of sentient life developing on a planet that orbits a star inside a globular cluster (a la Nightfall) or a star that has a black hole as a binary or multiple star partner (a la Interstellar)?

 

5) What are the chances of sentient life existing on a rogue planet?

 

6) What are the chances of sentient life existing in interstellar space?

 

I use a program called Space Engine that models the known universe in 3D (including exoplanets and their atmospheres).  A lot of it is procedural since we dont know very much of course, but even so, the possibilities are truly mind-blowing!

 

I also use exoexplorer which does some of the same things and has an updated list of exoplanets.
 
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midtskogen
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03 Nov 2019 10:12

Since we have no observations indicating life outside Earth, I think the answer to all such questions is "very or extremely low, but we don't know exactly how low".
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JackDole
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30 Nov 2019 04:51

Astronomers Find ‘Impossible’ Stellar Black Hole in Milky Way
http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/lb-1- ... 07855.html
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.11989.pdf

I did some scripts for it:
This belongs in 'addons\catalogs\stars':
LB-1.sc
(611 Bytes) Downloaded 187 times
And this in 'addons\catalogs\planets':
LB-1_S.sc
(1.88 KiB) Downloaded 192 times
It may also be two black holes.
I also did a script for it.
If you prefer, replace the script in 'addons\catalogs\planets':
LB-1_D.sc
(3.68 KiB) Downloaded 191 times
Attachments
scr00470.jpg
scr00471.jpg
scr00472.jpg
JackDole's Universe 0.990: http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=546
JackDole's Archive: http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=419
JackDole: Mega structures ... http://old.spaceengine.org/forum/17-3252-1 (Old forum)
 
A-L-E-X
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01 Dec 2019 03:20

Wow you definitely are the Asimov of Space Engine add-ons JD!  I wish there was a way to download all your add-ons at once, maybe there will be an add-on page for SE one day!

Also, can the single and double black hole scripts both be used or does it need to be one or the other?
 
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JackDole
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01 Dec 2019 04:20

Also, can the single and double black hole scripts both be used or does it need to be one or the other?
You should only use one of the files. Not both at the same time.
JackDole's Universe 0.990: http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=546
JackDole's Archive: http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=419
JackDole: Mega structures ... http://old.spaceengine.org/forum/17-3252-1 (Old forum)
 
A-L-E-X
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01 Dec 2019 04:34

Also, can the single and double black hole scripts both be used or does it need to be one or the other?
You should only use one of the files. Not both at the same time.
I have an issue of trying to use all your files at the same time lol.  Which of the two scenarios is more likely JD, the single or double black holes?
 
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JackDole
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01 Dec 2019 05:13

Which of the two scenarios is more likely JD, the single or double black holes?
I do not know. As far as I know, one assumes that it is one black hole. (Probably more interesting.) But it can also be two black holes (or more?).
JackDole's Universe 0.990: http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=546
JackDole's Archive: http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=419
JackDole: Mega structures ... http://old.spaceengine.org/forum/17-3252-1 (Old forum)
 
A-L-E-X
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01 Dec 2019 05:39

Which of the two scenarios is more likely JD, the single or double black holes?
I do not know. As far as I know, one assumes that it is one black hole. (Probably more interesting.) But it can also be two black holes (or more?).
I wonder what would happen if the event horizons of two black holes overlapped ;-)
 
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JackDole
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01 Dec 2019 13:12

I wonder what would happen if the event horizons of two black holes overlapped
Then two black holes become one.
And gravitational waves are generated.
Which are then received by LIGO.
JackDole's Universe 0.990: http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=546
JackDole's Archive: http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=419
JackDole: Mega structures ... http://old.spaceengine.org/forum/17-3252-1 (Old forum)
 
A-L-E-X
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01 Dec 2019 13:42

I wonder what would happen if the event horizons of two black holes overlapped
Then two black holes become one.
And gravitational waves are generated.
Which are then received by LIGO.
I read that some computer simulations hint that the merger of two supermassive black holes may provide the impetus to generate a new universe (because it would have two horizons, and the new universe would be inside that second horizon.)
 
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Watsisname
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03 Dec 2019 01:51

I read that some computer simulations hint that the merger of two supermassive black holes may provide the impetus to generate a new universe (because it would have two horizons, and the new universe would be inside that second horizon.)
Where did you read that?
 
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03 Dec 2019 04:47

I read that some computer simulations hint that the merger of two supermassive black holes may provide the impetus to generate a new universe (because it would have two horizons, and the new universe would be inside that second horizon.)
Where did you read that?
I think we discussed it before- It was an observation about early universe black holes being much more massive than they should be, considering how young the universe was back then Roger Penrose used to back up his conjecture that those black holes must've been a holdover from a previous universe.
https://www.livescience.com/63392-black-holes-from-past-universes.html
It wouldn't be a surprise considering the tremendous amount of energy released in mergers (more than the rest of the observable universe combined?)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ligos-latest-black-hole-merger-confirms-einstein-challenges-astrophysics1/
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-incalculable-waveform-of-two-colliding-black-holes-has-now-been-calculated
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191108155440.htm
https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/gravitational-waves-biggest-black-hole-merger-ever-detected-revealed
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/five-surprising-truths-about-black-holes-from-ligo-2977a961cd24
When the black holes we’ve detected collide, they release more energy at their peak than all the stars in the Universe combined. Our Sun is the standard by which we came to understand all other stars. It shines so brightly that its total energy energy output — 4 × 10²⁶ W — is equivalent to converting four million tons of matter into pure energy with every second that goes by.

With an estimated ~10²³ stars in the observable Universe, the total power output of all the stars shining throughout the sky is greater than 10⁴⁹ W at any given time: a tremendous amount of energy spread out over all of space. But for a brief few milliseconds during the peak of a binary black hole merger, every one of the observed 10 events outshone, in terms of energy, all the stars in the Universe combined. (Although it’s by a relatively small amount.) Unsurprisingly, the most massive merger tops the charts.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.09566
I also found this interesting piece:
http://www.astronomy.com/news/2019/11/how-could-we-find-a-wormhole-in-the-milky-way
 
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Watsisname
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03 Dec 2019 15:22

A-L-E-X, it's no secret or surprise that black hole mergers release a lot of energy in gravitational waves.  Detailed simulations of mergers and the gravitational waves they emit have been performed for about a decade, largely so that scientists can interpret the results of LIGO detections and test general relativity's predictions.  But the radiated energy has nothing to do with the idea that they would form a new universe inside.  There are no simulations showing what happens inside the merged black hole.  If there were, they would be wrong anyway, because we do not know the initial conditions for the spacetime geometry in the original black holes.  The Kerr metric does not correctly describe the interior of a real black hole. 

In fact you don't need to do anything as fancy as numerical relativity simulations to compute how much gravitational wave energy can be released.  As I described here, the minimum energy that can be radiated is zero, if the combined mass equals the direct sum of the initial masses, while the maximum happens if the combined mass is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the initial masses (just like the Pythagorean theorem).  That limit comes from the laws of black hole thermodynamics, and specifically that the horizon area, being proportional to the entropy, cannot decrease in the merger.

Example:  Combine two 1-million solar mass black holes, and the resulting mass can be anywhere between 1.414 million solar masses and 2 million solar masses, meaning anything up to about 586,000 solar masses worth of gravitational waves can be emitted.  That is a huge amount of energy.  But again it says nothing about what happens inside.  All it says is the mass of the final black hole was less than you'd get by directly adding them.  Mass-energy is conserved, so the difference is what was radiated.
I think we discussed it before- It was an observation about early universe black holes being much more massive than they should be, considering how young the universe was back then Roger Penrose used to back up his conjecture that those black holes must've been a holdover from a previous universe.
Yes, I said back then that this conjecture was absurd, like proposing that anything unexplained must be due to aliens.  And thanks to newer research, we do have a good understanding of how those black holes grew so large so quickly, without being remnants of a previous universe.
 
A-L-E-X
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03 Dec 2019 15:48

A-L-E-X, it's no secret or surprise that black hole mergers release a lot of energy in gravitational waves.  Detailed simulations of mergers and the gravitational waves they emit have been performed for about a decade, largely so that scientists can interpret the results of LIGO detections and test general relativity's predictions.  But that's not what you said you read, and the radiated energy has nothing to do with the idea that they would form a new universe inside.  There are no simulations showing what happens inside the merged black hole.  If there were, they would be wrong anyway, because we do not know the initial conditions for the spacetime geometry in the original black holes.  The Kerr metric does not correctly describe the interior of a real black hole. 

In fact you don't need to do anything as fancy as numerical relativity simulations to compute how much gravitational wave energy can be released.  As I described here, the minimum energy that can be radiated is zero, if the combined mass equals the direct sum of the initial masses, while the maximum happens if the combined mass is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the initial masses (just like the Pythagorean theorem).  That limit comes from the laws of black hole thermodynamics, and specifically that the horizon area, being proportional to the entropy, cannot decrease in the merger.

Example:  Combine two 1-million solar mass black holes, and the resulting mass can be anywhere between 1.414 million solar masses and 2 million solar masses, meaning anything up to about 586,000 solar masses worth of gravitational waves can be emitted.  That is a huge amount of energy.  But again it says nothing about what happens inside.  All it says is the mass of the final black hole was less than you'd get by directly adding them.  Mass-energy is conserved, so the difference is what was radiated.
I think we discussed it before- It was an observation about early universe black holes being much more massive than they should be, considering how young the universe was back then Roger Penrose used to back up his conjecture that those black holes must've been a holdover from a previous universe.
Yes, I said back then that this conjecture was absurd, like proposing that anything unexplained must be due to aliens.  And thanks to newer research, we do have a good understanding of how those black holes grew so large so quickly, without being remnants of a previous universe.
I thought Penrose got a bit absurd when he "found" evidence of the gravitational effect of other universes in the CMBR but when you and I discussed this previously we also brought up dark flow and the possible evidence that could present.  Do you think that we could find decent evidence of a previous universe if our instruments were delicate enough?  It's actually central to the theory of Loop Quantum Cosmology and uses that to deal with the singularity presented at the Big Bang (which Stephen Hawking added to with the concept of Imaginary Time, another axis of time which runs perpendicular to the time we know.)  Loop Quantum Cosmology has an interesting alternative to what you stated that the universe must either collapse in on itself or expand forever.  According to LQC there is a minimum size of 10 planck lengths (thus there are no singularities since density can never be infinite if there is a minimum volume) and when the universe reaches that size (if it is collapsing) it will bounce back.  

Wat i LOVED your graphics here the best, they are exactly like the ones I've seen for LQC!

http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?t=47&start=1125#p23915

I'm now going to throw a curveball at you ;-) Did you see the articles purporting that researchers had recently discovered a fifth force?  What do you think of that and what would that do to our cosmological models?


Oh and my apologies for the inundation of posts in the off topic thread, but there was some very interesting research in there from various universities connecting both chlorpyrifos and PFOA to both autism and ADHD, among other conditions.  The validity of industry-backed research and its shortcomings was also discussed.
 
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midtskogen
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03 Dec 2019 22:01

meaning anything up to about 586,000 solar masses worth of gravitational waves can be emitted.  That is a huge amount of energy
Indeed, yet it takes an extremely sensitive instrument to detect it!  How much energy could be "hidden" in frequencies we can't realistically measure?  And if so much energy can become hidden, the conservation of energy principle seems difficult to verify.
Is there any mechanism that can convert energy in the form of gravitational wave into another form of energy?
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