FFS, here's another thread that is going to go down the pan!
FA, please don't rise to the bait!

Of course I didn't though; that was you:



You can debate your perceived theology and any metaphysical stuff in the delusionals thread. Or you can start a separate thread. Nobody is saying you can't debate it, with anyone who has the time or inclination for "debate" with you (which excludes me , as I have found you never "debate" anything).

But I digress. There may be a time and place for theological discussions but this thread isn't it. So please don't.

This picture is by ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope in Chile and shows a small galaxy, IC 1613

Discovered in 1906, IC 1613 is our close neighbour, a member of the Local Group of galaxies, and a mere 2.3 million light-years away.

It is an exceptionally useful galaxy to study, both due to its close proximity, and the unusual lack of dust both within it and in line of sight, so even individual stars can be resolved. As such it contributes greatly to science, in particular helping study and calibration of distances to objects in space.

[url=http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1603/ESO article here[/url

Graphic of the Local group:

A superb animated GIF comprising actual footage of the Moon crossing the face of the Earth. That side of the Moon is of course never visible from Earth, as the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth and we only ever see one face, give or take a few extra degrees with libration.



Text xtracts taken from [urlhttps://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/from-a-million-miles-away-nasa-camera-shows-moon-crossing-face-of-earth[/url

This animation features actual satellite images of the far side of the moon, illuminated by the sun, as it crosses between the DSCOVR spacecraft's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) and telescope, and the Earth - one million miles away.

EPIC maintains a constant view of the fully illuminated Earth as it rotates, providing scientific observations of ozone, vegetation, cloud height and aerosols in the atmosphere. Once EPIC begins regular observations next month, the camera will provide a series of Earth images allowing study of daily variations over the entire globe. About twice a year the camera will capture the moon and Earth together as the orbit of DSCOVR crosses the orbital plane of the moon.

These images were taken between 3:50 p.m. and 8:45 p.m. EDT on July 16 2015, showing the moon moving over the Pacific Ocean near North America. The North Pole is in the upper left corner of the image, reflecting the orbital tilt of Earth from the vantage point of the spacecraft.

Those pesky Chinese creating CGI pictures of the moon now: www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 46461.html

Those pesky Chinese creating CGI pictures of the moon now: www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 46461.html

Quote ="Doom&Gloom Merchant"Those pesky Chinese creating CGI pictures of the moon now: www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 46461.html'" Yeah, these are great images.

Quote ="Doom&Gloom Merchant"Those pesky Chinese creating CGI pictures of the moon now: www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 46461.html'" Yeah, these are great images.

An interesting article on the formation of the moon. Scientists have known for a while that the moon was formed from a collision with the Earth. It was long believed that it was a glancing blow, but it seems that new research points at a heavy head-on impact.

[url=http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/moon-was-produced-by-a-head-on-collision-between-earth-and-a-forming-planetClicky[/url

Yes, the Chinese generally play thgeir cards very close to their chest and so releasing the images they have really is special.

One of my favourites has to be this one:







Oddly enough, both cameras produces that weird 'globe' effect.

Scientists believe that Pluto has large hills of water ice, floating in a sea of frozen nitrogen, and move over time like icebergs, being carried along in nitrogen glaciers. www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-s-mys ... ting-hills

Scientists believe that Pluto has large hills of water ice, floating in a sea of frozen nitrogen, and move over time like icebergs, being carried along in nitrogen glaciers. www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-s-mys ... ting-hills

Pluto's icy plains - truly astonishing detail, the resolution is around 80 metres per pixel This is a screengrab of a partial image, but for the best view go to the page and click on the full length image and scroll. Awesome. www.nasa.gov/image-feature/pluto ... w-horizons

Pluto's icy plains - truly astonishing detail, the resolution is around 80 metres per pixel This is a screengrab of a partial image, but for the best view go to the page and click on the full length image and scroll. Awesome. www.nasa.gov/image-feature/pluto ... w-horizons

Unveiled today, this is the Crew Module pressure vessel of the Orion spacecraft, a key component now being tested.

Orion is scheduled to be launched in 2018, and will go on an unmanned proving mission that will fly thousands of miles beyond the Moon and back, in a 3 week mission.

Before then, over the next two years there are over 100,000 components to be installed, and that's just in this bit. Over many years, the scientists are of course considering every conceivable issue, testing meticulously and developing/improving as they go along. Like their Apollo predecessors, the spaceflights will only be the final part after many years of exhaustive development and by then the scientists will have considered and planned for a million eventualities, tested them all, and built the final craft and written procedures accordingly.

Orion's first manned flight might be as soon as 2012, though budget cuts are the problem, but sooner or later this is the system that will send men to Mars.

As part of the process, a new launch system is also being developed. Sadly gravity continues to be a pest, but the new SLS (Space Launch System) is also well under development, this will be by some margin the world’s most powerful rocket, and will launch Orion on missions to an asteroid and eventually to Mars, being able to provide enough fuel to allow deep space (well, by solar system standards, that is) travel for bigger craft, and life support for astronauts on long journeys.

I have been to see Space Shuttle launches, but hope to travel to see SLS go up as it will be just an awesome sight and sound. I'd recommend watching a live launch to anyone.

Seems rumours that Einstein's predicted gravitional waves have been detected are correct and an announcement has now been made.

Quote ="Dally"Seems rumours that Einstein's predicted gravitional waves have been detected are correct and an announcement has now been made.'" Live video feed of update on the expected announcement 17 15:30 UK time will be here: www.space.com/17933-nasa-televis ... ce-tv.html

Quote ="Dally"Seems rumours that Einstein's predicted gravitional waves have been detected are correct and an announcement has now been made.'" Live video feed of update on the expected announcement 17 15:30 UK time will be here: www.space.com/17933-nasa-televis ... ce-tv.html

Truly historic stuff. A detailed, but not too detailed, report on proceedings: https://www.newscientist.com/article/20 ... irst-time/ Quoting from that page: =#0000BF"This historic signal was produced by a pair of black holes roughly 1.3 billion light years away, one 29 times the mass of the sun and the other 36 times, orbiting each other and then merging into a single black hole. “The closer they get, the faster they spin.” Near the end, they were whirling so fast that each orbit lasted just a few milliseconds. "When they eventually merged, the single black hole that remained was 62 times the mass of the sun – three solar masses lighter than the two original black holes combined. That missing mass all went into creating gravitational waves that fluttered space-time like a sheet. “The total power output of gravitational waves during the brief collision was 50 times greater than all of the power put out by all the of the stars in the universe put together,” You can actually hear a recording of the sound of the gravitational waves being produced, made by translating the frequency of the gravitational waves into sound waves, via the link on the page

Truly historic stuff. A detailed, but not too detailed, report on proceedings: https://www.newscientist.com/article/20 ... irst-time/ Quoting from that page: =#0000BF"This historic signal was produced by a pair of black holes roughly 1.3 billion light years away, one 29 times the mass of the sun and the other 36 times, orbiting each other and then merging into a single black hole. “The closer they get, the faster they spin.” Near the end, they were whirling so fast that each orbit lasted just a few milliseconds. "When they eventually merged, the single black hole that remained was 62 times the mass of the sun – three solar masses lighter than the two original black holes combined. That missing mass all went into creating gravitational waves that fluttered space-time like a sheet. “The total power output of gravitational waves during the brief collision was 50 times greater than all of the power put out by all the of the stars in the universe put together,” You can actually hear a recording of the sound of the gravitational waves being produced, made by translating the frequency of the gravitational waves into sound waves, via the link on the page

Amazing stuff.

It will really open a new window into what astronomers and physicists can do, measure, and test in the universe. Historic.

To be honest it’s all above my head.

They’ve picked up this gravitational wave from 1.3 billion light years away. If the Universe is 13.7 billion years old how will they pick up the wave from the Big Bang, won’t it have gone past already?
Or is the centre of the Big Bang shedloads further away than this merged black hole?

Thanks, in advance.

It's misleading to think of the Big Bang as something that happened far away and the gravitational waves at some later point reach us. All our universe was within the Big Bang singularity and that singularity expanded and continues to expand.

If you think of the expanding universe as the surface of an expanding balloon - which it isn't, but it's not a bad analogy - you can see that radiation doesn't go from the centre "out" and eventually hit a boundary, it travels indefinitely, because the universe is infinite. Think of a wave going round and round a balloon.

We can only see so far back in time using other forms of radiation and our view is obstructed or blocked by intervening matter, but gravitational waves are not affected by matter - they pass straight "through", if you like) so in theory if you can devise good enough detectors, you can see all the way back to the Big Bang itself.

Thanks for that F.A, I’ll try & divulge it when I’m more lucid.

I’m still struggling with all the Quantum Physics stuff I’ve watched lately, the weirdest one being a parallel universe theory & you're just a figment of my imagination or I am yours.

Figment of imagination is maybe a bit too far but it's close. The space you occupy is 99.99999whatever% empty. You're basically a loosely assembled energy field which improbably somehow works. Each atom if enlarged would consist very roughly of a tennis ball sized nucleus, and then the nearest orbiting electron would be maybe speck of dust size, 1km away. Sure, there may be a number of other electrons but basically that's it. And no connections between any of these distant specks. And the nucleus, far from being solid, is really an assembly of various exotic particles whizzing around.

How this astonishingly disorganized assemblage of basically empty space with occasional tiny energy quanta operates as a functioning human (or a daffodil, or a rock) is hard to get your head around but certainly nothing is remotely what it seems. It's why astronomy and philosophy have always been very good partners.

I have always thought of the universe as a giant's fart - a big bang, then expansion as the gas rushes and then diffuses away. I suppose some bright spark could disprove (without igniting!) my idea?

ESA's LISA Pathfinder is another part of the search for gravitational waves, and this has now passed a milestone, which is just an amazing feat of technology. :28yv7qvs [ (c) [size=85:28yv7qvsCopyright ESA/ATG medialab[/size Basically, the plan was, to have two detectors, in perfect and permanent freefall through space, so effectively completely "weightless", taking the measurements. T How they did it (very briefly) was 1. Position the satellite at a point approx 1.5m km towards the Sun, where the gravity from Earth and Sun balance out (orbiting the first Sun–Earth ‘Lagrangian point’, L1.) 2. Release the two detectors so that they float freely within their respective containers 3. Using an incredibly sensitive steering mechanism, "fly" the spacecraft around the detectors! - no force will ever be applied to the free-floating detectors again, save the gravity that keeps them in orbit, and the spacecraft will when necessary make minute adjustments to its position, to keep the freefalling detectors in the centre of their housings. So, the theory goes, the only thing that can cause a disturbance of the detectors would be a passing gravitational wave. A fuller explanation of this amazing experimental mission here: m.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_S ... Pathfinder

ESA's LISA Pathfinder is another part of the search for gravitational waves, and this has now passed a milestone, which is just an amazing feat of technology. :28yv7qvs [ (c) [size=85:28yv7qvsCopyright ESA/ATG medialab[/size Basically, the plan was, to have two detectors, in perfect and permanent freefall through space, so effectively completely "weightless", taking the measurements. T How they did it (very briefly) was 1. Position the satellite at a point approx 1.5m km towards the Sun, where the gravity from Earth and Sun balance out (orbiting the first Sun–Earth ‘Lagrangian point’, L1.) 2. Release the two detectors so that they float freely within their respective containers 3. Using an incredibly sensitive steering mechanism, "fly" the spacecraft around the detectors! - no force will ever be applied to the free-floating detectors again, save the gravity that keeps them in orbit, and the spacecraft will when necessary make minute adjustments to its position, to keep the freefalling detectors in the centre of their housings. So, the theory goes, the only thing that can cause a disturbance of the detectors would be a passing gravitational wave. A fuller explanation of this amazing experimental mission here: m.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_S ... Pathfinder

That's an incredible feat of engineering and science. Hopefully, they'll get some results back in the future.

Awesome new images of the plane of our galaxy, the Milky Way, from the Southern hemisphere Quote A spectacular new image of the Milky Way has been released to mark the completion of the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL). The APEX telescope in Chile has mapped the full area of the Galactic Plane visible from the southern hemisphere for the first time at submillimetre wavelengths — between infrared light and radio waves — and in finer detail than recent space-based surveys. [urlhttp://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1606/[/url '" To the right of the main page are links to various sizes of image, zoomable etc. A number of images released including this superb mp4 in ultra HD cdn2.eso.org/videos/ultra_hd/eso1606a.mp4

Awesome new images of the plane of our galaxy, the Milky Way, from the Southern hemisphere Quote A spectacular new image of the Milky Way has been released to mark the completion of the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL). The APEX telescope in Chile has mapped the full area of the Galactic Plane visible from the southern hemisphere for the first time at submillimetre wavelengths — between infrared light and radio waves — and in finer detail than recent space-based surveys. [urlhttp://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1606/[/url '" To the right of the main page are links to various sizes of image, zoomable etc. A number of images released including this superb mp4 in ultra HD cdn2.eso.org/videos/ultra_hd/eso1606a.mp4

Some nice pics of the recent spectacular Northern Lights display. [urlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35741589[/url

Europe's newest climate satellite Sentinal-3A is sending back some stunning images of our planet. Check these out...

[url=http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/03/07/sentinel_3a_returns_incredible_photos_of_earth.htmlClick me[/url