releases.jhu.edu/2012/12/21/wmap ... ervations/

releases.jhu.edu/2012/12/21/wmap ... ervations/

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pzbjb

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pzbjb

There's plenty of info about what's going on up in space here:- www.spaceweather.com/ Also, ever wanted to see the Northern Lights? Well, you can register for e-mail or SMS alerts here to give you every chance when they can be seen from the UK (Cloud cover permitting ):- aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk/

There's plenty of info about what's going on up in space here:- www.spaceweather.com/ Also, ever wanted to see the Northern Lights? Well, you can register for e-mail or SMS alerts here to give you every chance when they can be seen from the UK (Cloud cover permitting ):- aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk/

Well, Asteroid Apophis missed us, so there went another doomsday scare. But while it passed at a relatively comfy 18m km away, on Friday 13 (naturally) April 2029, it will make a close pass at a distance of about 30,000km. That's about 10% of the Earth-Moon distance.

And if you are still about in 2036, that might be it. Genuinely, for once. There is a small "keyhole" of space which there is a 200,000-1 chance it could go through and if it passes through that keyhole in 2029, it will come back and hit Earth on 13 April in 2036. Note the word "will". The boffins will be able to say with absolute certainty, one way or the other, once they have tracked the precise path on the 2036 fly-by. This is because it will be close enough to bounce a radar signal off, and from that they will get the exact speed and exact distance.

Maybe there's a job for Bruce or Clint after all.

If you want to watch the asteroid live right now go here: [urlhttp://events.slooh.com/[/url

A year before my 40th Birthday - no midlife crisis for me. Interesting stuff though.

I doubt i ll be alive then, but if i am i ll be 76 and would be good to see if the end really is nigh then.

It might not be the end, but there's a chance property prices in the impact zone may be affected from 2029.

So my idea for 2036 would be to dig a bloody great hole at the impact epicentre, and install a big feck-off trampoline.

Great shot of the hexagon on Saturn, courtesy of the Cassini spacecraft. Nobody still ha sa clue how the hexagon is formed, but it's been stable, on a rotating gas planet, for the 20 years since first observed.

Well, looks like I'm never going to see Comet PanSTARRS as it seems to be permanently cloudy, but it's still a big day for humanity as NASA has announced that the Voyager I spacecraft has become the first man-made object to leave the Solar System and fly into interstellar space.

Now travelling at about 17 km per second (away from the Sun), it will still take around 40,000 years to get within 2 light years of a nearby star, but its power source will run out in 10-15 years so it will be silenced.

It is incredible we still receive data and communicate with it - the strength of signal is about a millionth of a billionth of 1 watt, and a signal now takes over 17 hours to reach Earth.

Maybe one day some alien will pick it up and decipher our message. One of mankind's greatest achievements.

Sounds excellent, so we'll get seven years notice of the death star returning ?

Easily enough time to stock up on tin hats and baked beans.



Somewhere, sometime, on a planet far, far away some alien lifeform is listening to that very faint signal and trying to work out what the looped tape of Lionel Richie's "Hello" song all means.

This is where I make you all gain an inkling of how utterly insignificant we are (except to ourselves) and why some alien lifeform is not (yet) listening.

The Solar Syatem is, in space terms, NOTHING.

And the only aliens who could hear us would be any within our "communications bubble"; that is, how far our earliest broadcasts have travelled, at the speed of light, since radio communication was invented.

And that, if you look at a picture of our galaxy, is again, NOWHERE AT ALL. The overwhelming majority of even our own poxy little galaxy could not possibly have any inkling at all that we are here.

Here you go, sit yer throats: that tiny, insignificant blue dot is in fact The Bubble. That's how far our signals have got.

www.washingtonpost.com/world/eur ... id=wp_ipad

www.washingtonpost.com/world/eur ... id=wp_ipad

How do you know this?

All you can measure is how far we have transmitted our broadcasts.

You have absolutely no way of knowing whether a superior intelligence has devised a means of "collecting" broadcasts from a further distance than that which they have been transmitted.

In other words: just because we can't reach them doesn't mean that they can't reach us.

I don't. I'm kind of working on the basis that the laws of physics apply.


Well, there is always that to consider, but they'd have to be pretty fookin clever to collect broadcasts which pre-collection by definition they didn't have any reason to believe existed.

Mind you I also have absolutely no way of knowing whether the universe is ruled by the Flying Spaghetti Monster and I accept this limitation and give it the due weight it deserves, as I do to your proposition.

So , by your logic, we should have never discovered that dinosaurs existed because until we discovered that they existed we had no reason to believe that they existed.

You are placing artificial barriers on what may or may not exist by only considering any possibility that lies within the limitations of your (i.e. our) current understanding.

As for the laws of physics applying: surely you must have seen that viral Personal Statement in which a prospective student unequivocally stated that they don't apply to him. And Sheldon Lee Cooper posits that there might be an infinite number of universes in which case there will almost certainly be one governed by a flying spaghetti monster.

That is to logic what Toulouse Lautrec was to pole vaulting.


No I'm not, it is just that the chances of your proposition being correct are so vanishingly small that there is no reason to treat it as a serious contender for fact. More precisely, there is no reason to suppose on the known laws of physics that any such feat could be achieved.


Sadly, though, the one I serendipitously inhabit isn't.

I ask you to reflect on the importance of the word that I have emboldened and to consider a teensy-weensy adjustment to your mindset. Just enough to acknowledge that there are things which we don't yet know and that the construction of barriers which merely serve to accommodate our current state of ignorance is self-defeating.

Wow. A teensy-weensy bit pompous, not to mention presumptuous. Don'y you need to lighten up and stop being such an ass?

And how ludicrous to infer I think "we know everything". I would be the last person to throw such an accusation at. Are you on the ale or something?

Sticking politely to the point, I have not constructed any barrier to anything, it is just that you are suggesting distant aliens could collect broadcasts before they are received. In other words you suggest it is possible that the communications could - whether pushed or pulled - considerably exceed light speed. I believe that the electromagnetic transmissions will propagate at light speed and before they get to Planet X, there isn't the slightest reason to suppose anyone on Planet X can receive them. This is NOT the same thing as 100% excluding any possibility that the entire laws of physics are wrong, or that there might be discovered some weird and wonderful way to defeat them or get round them to achieve this, but that I believe that the odds of this having been done are vanishingly small.

Given such aliens would not have known of our existence prior to receiving the transmissions, why would they be using their faster-than-light collection device to look this way? Or do I have to allow for aliens whose kit is so powerful that it isn't directional, but has already collected every transmission that there has ever been from any given point in the entire universe?

And if I assume that they do have this Whole Universe 100% Transmission Receiver and have somehow pulled our transmissions in - why haven't they replied in the space of 200 years? Or do they just go to all the trouble of constantly monitoring a quadrilliterabillimegazilligoogolgigabyte of transmissions per second just for amusement?

I suppose they may. And they may use the Flying Spaghetti Monster to do it. But I don't believe they do.

Oops. Sorry. I didn't realise that your ego was so fragile that it would require you to over-react in quite such a volatile manner simply because someone might dare to suggest that you might not be omnipotent. My bad.

BTW: you ended a sentence with a preposition.

LBWR - this is my thread about Astronomy, where I occasionally inform anyone who might be interested about astronomy related stuff they might not know about, not a discourse with fools and trolls. You appear to be trying to hijack it into some personal pis-sing contest by making increasingly mad claims. You are behaving like an idiot and a boor, and nobody wants to discuss your lunatic theories, so please go away.

So, in the big scheme of things, how many other asteroids/comets etc have come as close as 30,000km that we know about? Should I blow the pension fund now?

Here's a piccy of all known asteroids. The red ones are all near-earth asteroids. That we know of.



"It is estimated that there a likely to be bet. 100,000 to 1,000,000 similar asteroids as yet undiscovered with Earth-crossing orbits".

So all that pious hand wringing a few years ago about leaving all sorts of man-made cr@p floating around in space would be the equivalent of dropping one chewing gum wrapper at your local rubbish tip and worrying that it made the place look untidy ?

Yes and no, it's a different problem. Practically none of the known asteroids pose a threat whereas practically every piece of spce junk does simply because it is in or close to the orbits of satellites, the ISS and of course the occasional manned craft.

There are estimated to be tens of millions of bits of space debris, including about 600,000 objects larger than 1 cm orbiting Earth, and at least 16,000 larger than 10 cm. The problem is they don't need to be that big. This is the damage caused by a paint fleck that collided with a Space Shuttle window:

About a week ago the crew of the ISS actually hid in the Soyuz escape vehicle as one known piece of junk approached. Luckily it missed. But it's a huge problem.