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  1. #1
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    Astronomy.

    Let me know if there is somewhere else on the forum, other than the bin, that this thread should be placed.

    I've been having a good old gander at the night sky lately, in the western sky right now there are two bright stars that I think might be planets but I am not sure. I have very little knowledge of the subject but am trying to brush up before my little girl starts asking questions. I'm very keen on providing her with some decent facts about the universe to go along with all the religious crap that she is likely to encounter.

    I have been very much enjoying BBC's Wonders of the Universe with Brian Cox, who manages to explain to a simpleton like me exactly how he believes the Universe works.

    Last night, after watching the second episode, I convinced myself that I could indeed locate Orion and could work out which star is Betelgeuse.

    This page leads me to believe that the two bright stars that have been out first in the western sky are Jupiter and Venus. Anyone here know for sure?

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    Correct mate.

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    Thanks very much, reaching round and patting myself on the back as I type!

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    Yep and the planets move across the sky during the night. The ancient greeks called them 'wandering stars'.

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    Thanks, I watched the 'Wonders of the 'Solar System' series which I thought was excellently produced and made, but that he became a bit of an annoying twat after 30 minutes of listening to him.

    D/Ling this now, cheers.

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    It's a good series. If religion is getting thrown down your kids throat may as well throw in 'Ancient Aliens', they've revamped in the 3rd season, still going over the same old shit, but it's entertaining and a good alternative to religion with plenty of astronomy thrown in.

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    I agree that he could easily becoming an annoying twat. I think he uses an simple analogy to introduce every concept because he's trying to explain some pretty complicated shit to the masses.

    I'm sure he would love to explain it all fully but he would lose half the audience, me included, and the effort he is making to give us all an understanding of the Universe gives him a gold star in my book.

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    You got an android device Sabai?
    Download Google Sky Map. It's bloody great for star spotting and the like.

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    Do you have a telescope to view the skies, if so what should one look for, in selecting one?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Bogon View Post
    You got an android device Sabai?
    Download Google Sky Map. It's bloody great for star spotting and the like.
    You just made the most convincing argument yet for me to go buy an Android device. Am I right in thinking it uses GPS to work out where you are on the planet and then gives info on the sky that is above you?

    If so, combined with the telescope that I am also yet to buy hours of tedious study can be replaced buy instant awe. Must say I'm loving the technological age in which we live.

    EDIT. Bloody hell

    What can I do with Sky Map?

    Sky Map enables users to identify stars and planets by pointing their devices towards these objects in the sky. Sky Map automatically adjusts to identify on the device's screen the objects it is facing. Users can zoom in and out, and switch various layers such as constellations, planets, grids, and deep sky objects, on and off, choosing to make these elements visible or not. Users can also determine the locations of planets and stars relative to their own current locations with the search function. Inputting the name of a planet or star will direct users towards this object. A user may also explore the cosmos manually and move through the sky by touching the screen instead of having it adjust automatically.

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    Thailand Expat OhOh's Avatar
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    If it's a Google device you and every other bugger in the world knows where you are.

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    They are not planets, there is no "Universe" there are were no Dinosaurs, God just made these to test our faith!

    Creationism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Can you believe a substantial portion of Americans and their government representatives believe this SHIT? Really?

    Good luck with explaining the universe to your little girl, I am sure you will make a more convincing statement than those IDIOTS!

    Thank god she isn't in a school that subscribes to that drivel.

    It does make you wonder about the mentality of some American politicians though.

    Take a look here, it is quite interesting, I am sure your daughter would enjoy!

    http://neave.com/planetarium/

    This one is a bit more complex, but even more spectacular.

    http://www.stellarium.org/

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    Thankyou very much for that.
    My fucking eyeballs are scorched.

    Why couldn't you at least tell us that this looking should be done at night?

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    Thailand Expat DrWilly's Avatar
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    What do we know about Sagittarius A*, the monster black hole in the heart of our galaxy?

    ABC Science
    / By science reporters Genelle Weule and Belinda Smith
    Posted 1h ago1 hours ago

    This image, taken by a few telescopes, was the sharpest infrared shot of the centre of our galaxy when it was released in 2009.(Supplied: NASA, ESA, SSC, CXC, STScI)
    Help keep family & friends informed by sharing this article

    xxx.xxx.xx/news/black-hole-milky-way-sagittarius-a-event-horizon-discovery/101050908




    COPY LINK

    SHAREThere's a monster lurking in the heart of our galaxy, and we may get our first glimpses of it tonight.
    An international team of scientists has announced it will reveal a "groundbreaking" discovery at our galactic centre at 11pm AEST (you'll be able to ).
    There are rumbles the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) will unveil images of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole in the middle of the Milky Way.
    In 2019, the EHT captured the first-ever images of the swirling mass of superheated dust and gassurrounding a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy 55 million light-years away called M87.


    The supermassive black hole at the centre of M87 is bigger and brighter than the black hole at the centre of our galaxy.(Supplied: Event Horizon Telescope)The image of M87's black hole silhouetted by a bright "ring" of emissions bent by gravity was a "huge day in astrophysics", according to France Córdova, director of the US National Science Foundation at the time.
    "We're seeing the unseeable."
    But top of the bucket list for the EHT — a planet-wide network of 12 observatories — is the black hole lurking at the centre of our galaxy.




    YOUTUBEHow the Event Horizon Telescope works.
    Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, lies 26,000 light-years away, and is a lightweight in the supermassive stakes, at only about 4 million times the mass of our Sun.
    Will we see its event horizon? If so, will it look like the image snapped of M87?
    Getting a glimpse of our cosmic monster will help us understand the evolution of our galaxy, says Joss Bland-Hawthorn, an astrophysicist at the University of Sydney who studies Sgr A* but is not involved with the EHT.
    "No-one knows for sure [what the image] will be, but everyone imagines it's going to be different from just seeing a shadow," Professor Bland-Hawthorn said.
    Here's what we know so far about the behemoth parked in the middle of our galaxy.
    How do we know a black hole is there at all?





    YOUTUBEBuckle your seatbelt: We're zooming into Sagittarius A*.
    Most galaxies have asupermassive black hole more than a million times the mass of our Sun at their heart.
    While astronomers suspected for decades our galaxy might harbour one, it was not pinned down until two separate teams in the US and Germany started studying the precise movements of stars around our galactic centrein the 1990s.
    "They tracked these stars over the course of 20 or so years, and realised that the stars were moving under the influence of a very, very massive, dense, dark blob," Professor Bland-Hawthorn said.
    Their measurements indicated the blob was about 4 million times the mass of our Sun.
    "They got that region down to such a tiny region, it could only be a black hole or something that behaves like a black hole."
    Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel, who led the teams, shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.
    What do images we already have tell us?

    We cannot see black holes directly. At their centre,gravity is so strong that not even light can escape.
    To snap a portrait of a black hole, the EHT detects light beamed out byhot gas swirling around the edge of the black hole's disc.
    But until now, our view of the black hole at the centre of our galaxy has been limited tothe effects of its immense gravitational tugon material whizzing around it and explosive jets of X-rays ejected from the spinning disc.
    In 2010, we got the best look at the centre of our galaxy when the Chandra X-ray Observatory took a snapshot that showed the remains of a massive explosion near Sgr A* and large bubbles of hot gas extending for a dozen light-years on either side of the black hole, as well as mysterious X-ray filaments.


    Hot gas captured by and pulled towards the black hole emitted X-rays, which were detected by the Chandra Observatory.(Supplied: NASA/UMass/D.Wang)While our galaxy's central black hole flings nearby stars back out into space, and there may be a weak jet of X-rays coming from its centre, it is relatively quiet compared to other black holes.
    But the large bubbles first identified in X-rays by Professor Bland-Hawthorn's research, then in gamma rays by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, show it wasn't always like this.
    Professor Bland-Hawthorn saidthese billowing clouds, known as Fermi bubbles, showed something happened at the centre of the galaxy 2 to 3 million years ago.


    Massive bubbles of X-rays and gamma rays tower over the centre of the Milky Way.(Supplied: NASA Goddard)"The evidence is overwhelming that [the bubbles were] powered by a past explosion from the black hole," he said.
    How does Sgr A* compare to the black hole in M87?

    At 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, the black hole in the centre of M87 is one of the largest supermassive black holes in our neck of the universe.
    So how does it compare to Sgr A*?
    "Our black hole is nothing like the black hole in M87," Professor Bland-Hawthorn said.
    For one, M87's black hole is more massive — way more.
    Generally, the bigger the galaxy, the heftier its central black hole. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about half the size of M87 and contains about a 10th of the stars, so it follows that our supermassive black hole would be smaller too.
    Sgr A* is also nowhere near as active as M87, which is feeding on gas and stars and blasting out radiation.
    "So we don't have a lot of radiation that helps us generate some kind of a shadow," Professor Bland Hawthorn said.
    And because SgrA* is changing much faster than the lumbering M87*, it has been much more challenging to get images that aren't blurred.
    What might we see tonight, then?






    The EHT team previously modelled what it suspected the black hole might look like in short radio wavelengths of 1.3 millimetres.
    Like the image of M87's black hole, the simulation of Sgr A* is fuzzy due to the distortion of gas and dust around the black hole and its crushing gravity.
    Given the hype, images of Sgr A* will likely be more than the gold-and-orange donut of M87's emission ring, Professor Bland-Hawthorn said.
    "I'm going to predict some kind of a jet phenomenon or some kind of focused collimated something, like a jet or a bubble blasting off right from the black hole region."
    Professor Bland-Hawthorn and colleagues have published evidence of a weak jetcoming from the centre of the Milky Way.
    Jets are a phenomenon seen in other galaxies, including M87 and Centaurus A's central black hole, as captured by the EHT and reported last year.


    The jet launching from Centaurus A's supermassive black hole features a hollow centre and bright edges. (Supplied: R. Bors; CSIRO/ATNF/I. Feain et al., R. Morganti et al., N. Junkes et al.; ESO/WFI; MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A. Weiß et al.; NASA/CXC/CfA/R. Kraft et al.; TANAMI/C. Müller et al.; EHT/M. Janßen et al..)James Miller-Jones, an astrophysicist at Curtin University and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, expects to see images of a supermassive black hole with a more dynamic environment than what the EHT captured in 2019.
    That's because the timescales during which a black hole's surrounds change — such as variations in the hot, turbulent gas swirling around it — get longer the more massive the black hole is.
    For hefty M87*, changes in its environment are predicted to happen on the scale of days to weeks.
    ABC Science on YouTube


    Want more science — plus health, environment, tech and more? Subscribe to our channel.
    The more diminutive Sgr A*, on the other hand, should experience changes in the order of minutes, Professor Miller-Jones said — certainly fast enough to be detected during a handful of hours of observation.
    "It is unclear whether the observed emission will come from the hot gas swirling around it, or from a low-level jet, either of which could vary with time."
    Yet another possibility is that the supermassive black hole is not one, but two black holes, circling each other in a colossal waltz.
    Pairs of black holes dwelling in galactic centres are not unusual, says Alister Graham, a Swinburne University astrophysicist who studies supermassive black holes.
    For instance, last year he and colleagues reported that the galaxy NGC 4424 houses a pair of supermassive black holes, brought together during a galactic merger.
    "Typically, astronomers do not have the spatial resolution to see if there are two or more black holes in close orbit [in the centre of the Milky Way], so for simplicity's sake we just refer to the total central mass as a single mass," Professor Graham said.
    So if more than one supermassive black hole was found in the centre of our galaxy, "it would be a remarkable measurement and one that has long been expected", he added.
    "Our Milky Way has many debris trails from smaller galaxies … which have been captured and torn apart.
    "Some of these captives may well have delivered massive black holes that are now on their way to, or already at, the centre of our galaxy."


    https://www.xxx.xxx.xx/news/science/...very/101050908







  15. #15
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    If astronomy is your bag, its hard to go past Carl sagans' Cosmos series.

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    ^^ according to Prof Brian Cox it will one day consume the Milkyway but you can relax for a bit

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    I don't know if Sky Map does it, but there's even an app to help you spot the ISS. You can actually see it flying overhead with the naked eye (although I need to don the bins these days).

    ISS Detector Satellite Tracker - Apps on Google Play

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    If you go and buy an Andriod device make sure it has a compass built in.

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    Quote Originally Posted by wtf View Post
    the two bright stars that have been out first in the western sky are Jupiter and Venus
    ...they aren't stars: they're planets...

  20. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by tomcat View Post
    ...they aren't stars: they're planets...
    Tom you are a bit late, wtf has been staring at those stars for 6 years in blissful ignorance

  21. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by malmomike77 View Post
    wtf has been staring at those stars for 6 years in blissful ignorance
    ...they aren't stars: they're planets...

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    yes, but he still thinks they are unless he's reading this.

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    Quote Originally Posted by tomcat View Post
    ...they aren't stars: they're planets...
    Gustav Holst got it all wrong. It should have been The Stars suite.

  24. #24
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    Anton Petrov's YouTube channel had a live event on the Sagittarius A announcement. I think I've had my dose of astrophysics for the day.
    Last edited by thailazer; 12-05-2022 at 10:53 PM.

  25. #25
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bogon View Post
    You got an android device Sabai?
    Download Google Sky Map. It's bloody great for star spotting and the like.
    Or this awesome little app.
    Point it at the sky and ittle tell you what you're looking at

    Star Tracker - Mobile Sky Map & Stargazing guide - Apps on Google Play

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