What's happening in space (that's interesting)

RichVR · 2016-02-11T08:35:55.000Z

This is a really big deal:

Why bother at all?

Because gravity waves can answer questions about the moment of creation. Astronomers look back in time as well as space. To see something 13 billion light years away, they capture light that began its journey 13 billion years ago. But no matter how perfect the telescope, an optical astronomer could never peer into the first 400,000 years of the universe, because it would have been so dense and murky that even light could not break free of the primeval soup. But gravity waves must have been there, right from the beginning.

zx81-Amd64 · 2016-02-11T10:53:24.000Z

the Guardian – 11 Feb 16

Gravitational waves: breakthrough discovery after a century of expectation

Scientists announce discovery of clear gravitational wave signal, ripples in spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein

lots of fat articles about the gravitational waves stuff :)

TheWombat · 2016-02-11T15:43:44.000Z

Djscman:

A man was killed and three others wounded by a meteorite impact in India, the first fatality in “modern history”.

Keep watching the skies!

I saw somewhere that NASA debunked that, and said it wasn’t a meteor after all. http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/10/asia/india-meteorite-man-killed/

RichVR · 2016-02-11T16:16:36.000Z

I just had a wonderful discussion about gravity waves with the wife. It started at, what does this mean? Then it got into the concept of the “big bang”. Then it went to how can we “see” the creation of the universe. Ultimately we were at the part where there was nothing before everything happened. This was the part where we decided that we’d agree to disagree.

We both agree on one point. No god necessary.

TheWombat · 2016-02-11T17:26:49.000Z

Everything is simply a cat’s dream.

ToastedBread · 2016-02-12T08:19:36.000Z

I just watch “The Martian” (late to the game, I know), and can’t help but be amazed and yet scared of the amount of knowledge that would be required of the individuals who will lead the colonization of other planets.

Timex · 2016-02-12T08:27:41.000Z

RichVR:

Ultimately we were at the part where there was nothing before everything happened.

Technically, there is no “before” the big bang, since that event was the initial expansion of space-time itself.

It’s very difficult to talk about using words, since it’s the only point in existence where the perception of time can only go in one direction.

Djscman · 2016-02-12T09:03:07.000Z

TheWombat:

I saw somewhere that NASA debunked that, and said it wasn’t a meteor after all. http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/10/asia/india-meteorite-man-killed/

Well, shoot, now I don’t know what to think. If it was merely frozen human waste dropped from a plane passing overhead, or orbital junk deorbiting, I’m surprised it would leave a crater at all. There were other physical phenomena accompanying the explosion, as per other descriptions of the impact:

the New York Times and the BBC:

The explosion left a crater on the ground [measuring about five feet deep and two feet wide], blew out the window panes of nearby buildings, the windshields of parked buses, shattered a water tank and sent debris flying. The victim, a bus driver, was reportedly standing near the site of impact and was killed.

There appear to be no eyewitnesses to the moment of impact [other reports say three other people were wounded], but the college principal was among those who reached the spot first after hearing a loud blast.

“I was in my office at that time, and we felt a vibration in the building for nearly a minute. All the students and faculty members came outside and we saw a cloud of dust. Such was the intensity that a water tank exploded, killing the bus driver who had gone to drink water,” G Baskar told The Hindu.

I guess since this occurred at an engineering college campus we can’t rule out experiments performed without proper safety procedures or fraternity pranks gone tragically awry. Or perhaps it was terrorism.

I tried using that asteroid impact tool to see what would create comparable effects, but I couldn’t jiggle the data effectively enough to match the observed damage. If the original meteorite is below a certain size, it would break up causing a debris field, not a crater. The meteorite has to be pretty big and then the crater is also comparatively big. On the other hand, the scientists behind the scientific paper they based the impact tool on couch their article with phrases like “The formation of an impact crater is an extremely complicated and dynamic process” and “this method is beyond the scope of our simple program.” They also use a bunch of equations that is beyond me but maybe you guys can figure it out.

What could it have been?

Daagar · 2016-02-13T13:19:33.000Z

zx81-Amd64 · 2016-02-15T01:58:16.000Z

An alien probe, with a self destruct mechanism?

Woolen_Horde · 2016-02-18T05:02:44.000Z

Black hole 21 billion times the mass of the sun detected. It terms of size, imagine Pluto’s orbit x 17!!!

http://www.iflscience.com/hubble-takes-new-look-gigantic-black-hole-and-its-quiet-host

Scott123 · 2016-02-18T06:50:40.000Z

Woolen Horde:

Black hole 21 billion times the mass of the sun detected. It terms of size, imagine Pluto’s orbit x 17!!!

http://www.iflscience.com/hubble-takes-new-look-gigantic-black-hole-and-its-quiet-host

Thanks for the link. Mind blown.

Dan_Theman · 2016-02-18T07:36:55.000Z

I love how it says “one of the largest” … because there are larger black holes that we’ve apparently already found. Truly astounding.

zx81-Amd64 · 2016-03-05T01:26:14.000Z

‘NASA may have found snow-covered mountains on Pluto’:

Ars Technica

NASA may have found snow-covered mountains on Pluto

Don't book your ski vacation yet; we hear airfare to Pluto is exorbitant.

cool!

zx81-Amd64 · 2016-03-07T00:23:43.000Z

And some lakes of Titan stuff:

’
Spacecraft finds “magic island” in hydrocarbon seas of Titan’:

Ars Technica

Spacecraft finds “magic island” in hydrocarbon seas of Titan

World's tantalizing oceans may teem with "weird life" we cannot begin to imagine.

zx81-Amd64 · 2016-03-08T02:19:18.000Z

‘Stopping killer asteroids costs less than you think’:

Ars Technica

Stopping killer asteroids costs less than you think

But NASA has dithered on detection and deflection for more than a decade. Why?

zx81-Amd64 · 2016-03-23T01:43:16.000Z

‘Kepler watched two supernovae burst out of the surface of stars’:

Ars Technica

Kepler watched two supernovae burst out of the surface of stars

In red supergiants, the core's explosion takes time to reach the surface.

JFrazer · 2016-03-23T07:28:21.000Z

zx81-Amd64:

‘Kepler watched two supernovae burst out of the surface of stars’:

http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2016/03/kepler-watched-two-supernovae-burst-out-of-the-surface-of-stars/

CNN had this story as well. The annoying part of the CNN story is that they had a Vine of the explosion without a notation that it was an “artist’s rendition”. My mom, of all people, texted me to say “omg, NASA recorded a star exploding”. Yes, technically they did, but it was just the rate of light production, not the detailed view of plasma fountaining out followed by a massive shedding of the outer later that is shown in the CNN article.

Still, it’s impressive that they managed to record the moment of collapse in 2 different stars. Should help to refine the supernovae models that we have today.

RichVR · 2016-03-23T07:40:42.000Z

zx81-Amd64:

‘Kepler watched two supernovae burst out of the surface of stars’:

http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2016/03/kepler-watched-two-supernovae-burst-out-of-the-surface-of-stars/

At first I thought this was referring to the astronomer Johannes Kepler. I thought, “Wow, what kind of 15th century telescope allowed him to see that?” No coffee yet. That’s my excuse.

Ginger_Yellow · 2016-03-23T08:13:52.000Z

It’s super cool, assuming it stands up. It’s been the holy grail of supernova astronomy for some time to catch one in the act. I remember the excitement a few years ago when they caught one hours after it happened* and were able to train telescopes on it.
As a layperson, though, I’m a little bit worried about the slightly circular evidence, at least as it’s been described. The model defined the search parameters and then when they found a matching signal, they used assumptions from the model to make inferences about the stars. I’m not really seeing independent support for the model. But I haven’t read the original paper so I’m not really judging.

*You know what I mean.