Space News thread

[Sumbitch]

But isn't the universe fourteen billion years old and still expanding? Doesn't it have to stop expanding and then take the same amount of time to collapse back to a single point?

How the universe will end: We could collapse, be ripped apart or decay into nothing - and the process may have started

• Munich group, Kurzgesagt, has created a video of the leading scenarios
• In the 'big crunch', gravity would be most powerful force in the universe
• Rate that universe expands would decrease and it would start to collapse
• In the 'big freeze' scenario, matter would decay as the universe expands
• During the 'big rip' galaxies would tear apart as dark energy warps matter

Many theoretical physicists believe the universe could end someday – and the process is likely to have already begun.

While no one knows for certain how it will happen, there are three leading theories dubbed the big crunch, the big rip and the big freeze, that could lead to our demise.

Now a Munich-based group, called Kurzgesagt, has put together a video explaining how exactly these theories will bring to end the world as we know it.


The 'big rip' his would start once the pull of the universe's expansion gets stronger than gravity. Galaxies would tear apart, followed by black holes, planets and stars

They claim all humanity will either slowly decay into radiation, completely vanish after collapsing in on itself or be ripped apart as the universe’s expansion speeds up.

In the ‘big rip’ scenario, dark energy could be warping the universe’s scaffolding causing galaxies to tear apart first, followed by smaller black holes, planets and stars.

This, according to Business Insider, would take place once the ever-increasing pull of the universe's expansion gets stronger than the gravity holding galaxies together.

The universe could eventually expand at the speed of light, and when this happens, the forces holding substances together would break down.

As a result, the universe will be empty, holding only single particles that are unconnected to anything else in existence.



Several years ago, researchers said the universe is expanding at a rate comparable to a rollercoaster, after they mapped the galaxies for the first time as they were 11 billion years ago.

Dr Mat Pier from the University of Portmouth explained that the universe's growth when it was young was slowed by the effects of gravity.

But in the past five billion years it has begun to rapidly expand because of a mysterious force which scientists have called dark energy.

Another potential end to the universe could be through something nicknamed the ‘big crunch’.

This could happen if, instead of expanding, matter in the universe decreases over time, causing gravity to become the dominant force.

Gravity would cause the universe to shrink. The result would be colliding stars, galaxies and planets as the universe collapses in on itself.

And the process could already be taking place somewhere in our cosmos and is eating away at the rest of the universe, according to theoretical physicists.

The mind-bending concept has been around for a while, but last year researchers in Denmark claimed they have proven it is possible with mathematical equations.


Another potential end to the universe could be through something nicknamed the ‘big crunch’. This could happen if matter in the universe decreases over time, causing gravity to become the dominant force

This violent process is called a ‘phase transition’ and is similar to what happens when, for example, water turns to steam or a magnet heats up and loses its power.

According to something known as the Higgs theory, a phase transition such as this took place one tenth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, causing a shift in the fabric of space-time.

During this transition, empty space became filled with an invisible substance that we now call the Higgs field.

Some elementary particles interact with this field, gaining energy in the process, and this intrinsic energy is known as the mass of a particle.

By using mathematical equations, researchers at the University of Southern Denmark have discovered that the Higgs field could exist in two states, just like matter can exist as a liquid or a solid.

In the second state, the Higgs field is billions of times denser than what scientists have already observed.


In the 'big crunch', gravity would cause the universe to shrink. The result would be colliding stars, galaxies and planets as the universe collapses in on itself

If this ultra-dense Higgs field exists, then a 'bubble' of this state could suddenly appear in a certain place of the universe at any time, similar to when you boil water.

The bubble would then expand at the speed of light, entering all space, and turning the Higgs field from the state it is in now into a new one.

The final scenario – and the most likely to take place according to current physics knowledge - humanity could either see a ‘big freeze’ or ‘heat death’.

In this scenario, matter would slowly decay into radiation as the universe expands.

After trillions of years, even the atoms making up the remaining matter would start to degrade and disintegrate.

Stars would dissolve, black holes would evaporate and eventually even light particles would vanish.

Ultimately, further advances in fundamental physics are required before it will be possible to know the ultimate fate of the universe with any level of certainty.


The final scenario – and the most likely to take place according to current physics knowledge - humanity could either see a ‘big freeze’ or ‘heat death’. In this event, matter would slowly decay into radiation as it expands

source: How the universe will end and the process may have already started | Daily Mail Online

[Takeovers]

“We’re talking about five billion years,” he said.

How the fook do they know this?...Especially since they are often wrong about a lot of their previous suppositions...

This is a very common supposition. For another example, see: Time Will End in Five Billion Years, Physicists Predict

It's not a prediction. It is one of a huge number of possibilities that comes out of one of the more exotic possible models of the universe.

[Neo]

“We’re talking about five billion years,” he said.

How the fook do they know this?...Especially since they are often wrong about a lot of their previous suppositions...

This is a very common supposition. For another example, see: Time Will End in Five Billion Years, Physicists Predict

The problem with a multiverse is that anything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times, and that makes calculating probabilities—such as the odds that Earth-size planets are common—seemingly impossible.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see

In other speculative space news, a possible alien megastructure has been discovered orbiting a distant sun.

[Takeovers]

In other speculative space news, a possible alien megastructure has been discovered orbiting a distant sun.

Oh good. I am not the first one reporting this.

Here another article about it with a few more details.

Search For Intelligent Aliens Near Bizarre Dimming Star Has Begun

This signal is really weird. It was tried to come up with explanations. Some can be ruled out by the data, like a dust cloud. A dust cloud could cause the dimming but it would send out its own infrared signature which is not present. Planets can also be ruled out. A planet cannot be that big. At that size it would become a sun itself. There is no such sun. Kepler would have detected it. It also cannot be a very large number of Jupiter sized planets because they could not coexist so near to their sun.

It could be a huge, a really really huge number of comets. But comets could exist that near to a sun only for a very short time before they dissipate. So something would have happened to get them there right while we are looking that direction.

Explanations are that elusive that serious scientists actually consider the possibility it could be an artificial structure built by a super civilization. But really it is still much more likely it is something else. If it is comets they should mostly disappear within years or decades so we would see that. Not with Kepler, it does not live long enough. But this is interesting enough to build something similar in a few decades to repeat the observation. The article I linked mentions that a large array of radiotelescopes is now trained on that star just for the faint chance radio signals from a super civilization can be found. It is very unlikely IMO even if there would be a super civilization that they use that kind of detectable radio signals.

[BaitongBoy]

Interesting stuff...Really no end to it...And only limited by the imagination...

[Sumbitch]

Interesting stuff...Really no end to it...And only limited by the imagination...

And technology, goddammit. Imagination is an everyday thing. Having the fucking technology to closely observe or visit even close extra-solar planets is beyond are limited lifetimes.

Unless we start concentrating out technology efforts more heavily on extending human lifetimes...

[harrybarracuda]

Interesting stuff...Really no end to it...And only limited by the imagination...

And technology, goddammit. Imagination is an everyday thing. Having the fucking technology to closely observe or visit even close extra-solar planets is beyond are limited lifetimes.

Unless we start concentrating out technology efforts more heavily on extending human lifetimes...

Wormholes mate. The answer is wormholes.

[Neo]

Imagine we send a ship out there to investigate and it doesn't come back, then we send another ship to find it and it plays out like the script from Event Horizon...



wha.... we don't need eyeballs where we're going..!?

[Neo]

Behold VFTS 352, the hottest and most massive “overcontact binary” star system ever discovered. The two stars, which are so close that they’re touching, feature a combined mass 57 times that of our Sun. Astronomers say it’s a unique stellar relationship that will culminate in a rather dramatic finish.

[Neo]

Most Earth-Like Worlds Haven't Been Born Yet

By Maddie Stone on 22 Oct 2015 at 6:45PM

With NASA’s Kepler mission still turning up cosmic wonders, and a slew of exoplanet-hunting scopes on deck, the chance of finding a second Earth has never seemed higher. And yet, time may be against us when it comes to meeting our squishy galactic brethren: according to a new theoretical study, 92 per cent of Earth-like worlds haven’t been born yet.

Using data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Kepler mission, a team of astronomers at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute has, for the first time, estimated when Earth-like worlds (small, rocky planets in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold habitable zone of their star) are likely to appear on the scene throughout the lifespan of the Universe.

Apparently, this Blue Marble is early to the party.

When our solar system was born 4.6 billion years ago, only eight per cent of Earth-like planets existed. When our Sun winks out a couple eons down the road, many future Earths will have yet to coalesce.

How did the astronomers arrive at these conclusions? Basically, by staring off into really faraway space. Looking at distant galaxies is like peering back in time, and by collecting snapshots of the early Universe, we can reconstruct all sorts of interesting things, including rates of star formation.

Turns out, while galaxies were churning out stars very rapidly in the aftermath of the Big Bang, this early burst of productivity only used up a small fraction of the Universe’s hydrogen and helium, the elements needed to create more complex forms of matter. The cosmic fuel tank is still nearly full, so to speak. That means new stars — and new rocky plants — will continue to form far into the future. In fact, the researchers estimate that most of the remaining 92% of planets will emerge between 100 billion years and 1 trillion years from now. We are the cosmic forerunner.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we should all stick ourselves in a cryobank and time travel to a less lonely future. Thanks to the Kepler mission, astronomers now estimate that today, there are a billion Earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone. If we’re lucky, one of them contains some slimy alien microbes, or at least an atmosphere we can terraform. Who knows, maybe there’s even a giant alien megastructure or two somewhere winking at us from across the light years.

Still, I can’t help but image that billions of years from now, archaeologists will convene to discuss the strange fragments of space junk found in the vicinity of the Sol system, and wonder who those ancient people were.

[Read a pre-print of the scientific paper at arXiv h/t NASA]

[Sumbitch]

[Sumbitch]

[Luigi]

'Space News Thread' Blaney boy.

Please keep it for that.

May I suggest that you start a thread titled 'Space stuff, such as photoshopped pics and educational videos for high-schoolers'.


Then any Space News you come across can be posted in here.


Thanks for understanding.

[BaitongBoy]

Imagination is an everyday thing

I'm gonna frame that saying and hang it next to my first Yankee Dollar...

[Sumbitch]

...But a real good imagination would copy that dollar...

[BaitongBoy]

My point exactly...Technology comes second, "goddammit"...

[Sumbitch]

No, no, no. Without Xerox I'd never have imagined copying that dollar.

[BaitongBoy]

So start a new thread and I'll hand you your ass there...

[Sumbitch]

I'm threadbare.

[Neo]

By Ria Misra on 24 Oct 2015 at 10:00PM

This is the most complete photo of the Milky Way ever taken. How big is this photo?
So big that just by taking it, astronomers found over 50,000 new stars and other bright space objects. Read More >>

[Neo]

See the complete set of images patched together in a 'google map' style browser here http://astro.vm.rub.de/

[Neo]

Solar Storm Defence Plans are Finally Hotting Up

By Maddie Stone on 02 Nov 2015 at 7:00PM

Earthquakes, droughts, and hurricanes are all-too-familiar global occurrences to which societies have grown defensive by educating citizens and coming up with clever infrastructure design.

But space weather represents a growing threat to our tech-driven society and it seems finally that the issue is being taken seriously by the world's governments.

Space weather scientists over at the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA have warned for years that if a massive solar storm were to strike the Earth, the effects could be catastrophic. Think worldwide power and telecommunications outages, lasting weeks to months. Everything that relies on electricity, from computers to fridges to the water supply, could break down. “Frankly,” space weather consultant John Kappenman told Gizmodo last month, “this could be one of the most severe natural disasters that the country, and major portions of the world, could face”.

Apocalypse preppers have been stocking their EMP bunkers for years, but yesterday, the United States government released the very first National Space Weather Strategy and Action Plan.

These two documents outline goals and strategies for improved space weather modelling, forecasting, and response coordination. Ultimately, they represent a roadmap toward a future where the unfortunate arrival of a giant solar storm doesn’t spell the end of modern society.

What’s Space Weather and Why Do We Care?

Space weather is a fairly broad term encompassing lots that the Sun hurls our way, including high-energy x-rays, magnetised plasma, and charged particles. All of these can interact with Earth’s magnetic field, causing geomagnetic disturbances that light up the northern and southern skies with dazzling auroras. Most of the time, these cosmic light shows are beautiful and harmless.


An aurora, looking not at all like a harbinger of destruction. Image Credit: Joshua Strang / Wikimedia

Sometimes, however, things can get nasty, especially when the Sun releases a large burst of plasma known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). Large CMEs are unusual, and it’s even more unusual for our planet to line up directly in their path. But when that happens, CMEs cause geomagnetic storms that generate tremendous electric currents in the upper atmosphere.

Some of this current makes its way into the ground, where it’s channelled by any and all conductive materials, including certain rocks, pipes, and electric cables. Currents from large geomagnetic storms can ultimately feed into power grids, melting transformers at the heart of power distribution centres.

Artist’s depiction of the solar wind colliding with Earth’s magnetosphere. Image Credit: NASA / Wikimedia

Because our power supply has become more aggregated and interconnected over the last decades, the effects of an outage at one distribution centre could spread far and wide, impacting millions of people. “In the case of electric power grids, both the manner in which systems are operated and the accumulated design decisions engineered into present-day networks around the world have tended to significantly enhance geomagnetic storm impacts,” writes Kappenman in a report on the dangers of space weather. To illustrate his point,
Kappenman cites a geomagnetic storm that occurred across Earth’s northern hemisphere in March of 1989:

This [storm] started a chain of power system disturbance events that only 92 seconds later resulted in a complete collapse to the entire power grid in Quebec. The rapid manifestation of the storm and impacts to the Quebec power grid allowed no time to even assess what was happening to the power system, let alone provide any meaningful human intervention. Over the course of the next 24 hours, additional large disturbances propagated across the continent, the only difference being that they extended much further south and came, at times, arguably close to toppling power systems from the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions of the U.S. to the Midwest.

Again, geomagnetic storms of this magnitude are rare, but it’d be unwise to assume we won’t see another in the years to come. In fact, a CME roughly four times larger than the one that caused the 1989 Quebec outages narrowly missed us in 2012. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado told NASA two years later. A report estimated that the cost of such an event could exceed two trillion dollars; that's the economic equivalent of 20 Hurricane Katrinas.

The Road Forward

Clearly, it’s high time we to start thinking about how to prepare for the possibility of a monster solar storm. The National Space Weather Action Plan released yesterday describes how the US government will coordinate efforts on space weather forecasting, infrastructure preparation and education. Here are some highlights.

Establishing the “Godzilla” Storm: On the science front, a key component of the White House’s new plan is figuring out just how big these suckers can get. To this day, the largest solar storm recorded on Earth was the 1859 Carrington Event, a series of powerful CMEs that ignited the northern lights as far south as Cuba, causing global telegraph outages.

The Carrington Event has always been our benchmark for really big storms, but in recent years, observations of Sun-like stars beyond our solar system have shown that “superflares”—1,000 times larger than the Carrington Event—can and do occur. In 2012, a study published in Nature estimated that such a flare could strike the Earth every 800 to 5,000 years. That’s a pretty wide margin of uncertainty for such a potentially devastating event. Clearly, we need to get a better handle on the upper size limit of our own Sun’s eruptions and the actual risk superflares pose.

Monitoring Vulnerability on the Ground:

While we know that large pulses of electric current pose a danger to power grids, experts don’t agree on just how vulnerable our infrastructure is. The White House Action Plan calls for a nationwide assessment of vulnerability that includes factors like the age and design of grid infrastructure and the underlying geology. The US energy department has also been tasked with developing a grid monitoring system that would “display the status of power generation, transmission, and distribution systems during geomagnetic storms.” Real-time monitoring tools like this could be used by grid operators who need to make fast decisions about when to shut things off.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Improved Forecasting:

A big aspect of our vulnerability to space weather is the fact that we have almost no lead-time before a large storm strikes. If a CME is heading straight for us, our first notice comes from the space weather monitoring satellites situated at the L1 Lagrange point a million miles in front of Earth. At best, these satellites give us about an hour’s notice. There’s a lot of room to improve our forecasting, and it starts with a better understanding of when and how large solar flares and CMEs occur. The White House Action Plan calls for more research on solar dynamics. Just as we can use weather models to predict the onset of tropical storms, with better solar models we might be able to forecast days, or even weeks in advance, when the Sun’s gearing up to punt a a giant blob of plasma our way.

An large solar flare captured by NASA on March 6th, 2012. Image Credit: NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center / Flickr

Cooperation:

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of a large geomagnetic storm is that its effects could be felt globally. This makes space weather unique among all natural disasters humans face, and it underscores the need for international coordination. To that end, the White House Action Plan outlines a number of goals and targets, including 1) an international meeting on the social and economic impacts of a large solar event, 2) multi-national acknowledgement of space weather as a global challenge, 3) facilitating open-access to space weather data across agencies and countries, 4) developing international standards for solar storm measurements and scales, and 5) developing a set of “mutual-aid arrangements” to facilitate response efforts worldwide.

The last thing we want is for hoards of power-hungry humans to panic. We’re all in this together, and it’d be nice if we didn’t devolve into a society of cannibalistic road warriors overnight.

***
The new space weather action plan is just a roadmap, and we’ve got a long way to go before our IT-driven world can consider itself safe from the ravages of a monster solar storm. While I personally would have liked to see more focus on tangible ways we can improve our infrastructure—for instance, Kappenman has already developed low-cost capacitors that could be used to block current from flowing into a grid—I’m happy that our government is starting to pay attention to the threat. Perhaps one day, we’ll live in a world where we don’t all need Faraday cages, solar bunkers, DIY radios and farming knowledge to survive this cosmic disaster.

But hey, if you’re into those things, more power to you (literally). You’ll probably outlast us all.
[Read the National Space Weather Action Plan here.]

[Luigi]

EM Drive Thruster is in the news again this week, with Nasa testing again, and again finding that it creates 'unexplained' thrust.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-te...ts-of-emdrive/

[Takeovers]

EM Drive Thruster is in the news again this week, with Nasa testing again, and again finding that it creates 'unexplained' thrust.

I follow that one closely but do not dare to get my hopes up yet. The latest tests were NOT a confirmation it works. They were a new data point though that it MAY work. Data were good enough that another well reputed laboratory now takes it up to verify the results.

Yes, if it works it will revolutionize space travel. With advanced compacat nuclear reactors - certainly possible - or compact fusion reactors - may become possible and would be even better - the whole solar system up to Pluto and beyond would be in reach of manned spaceflight.

[Neo]

New Horizons is Officially Off to the Kuiper Belt!



By Maddie Stone on 06 Nov 2015 at 11:00PM

With Pluto receding into the distance, New Horizons is speeding merrily along toward its next destination. On Wednesday, the spacecraft completed its fourth and final engine burn, placing it on course for 2014 MU69, an ancient, frozen body located more than a billion miles beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt is like a vast fossil bed, filled with primordial, icy debris that hasn’t heated or changed much in the last few eons. All along, the plan has been for New Horizons to explore this frozen badlands after completing its Pluto flyby. Getting up close and personal with a Kuiper Belt Object could shed light on the birth and evolution our Solar System.

To do so, New Horizons needed to make four propulsive manoeuvres with its hydrazine-fuelled thrusters. These manoeuvres—the most distant trajectory corrections ever performed by any spacecraft—caused New Horizons to veer sideways, giving it a 57 metre per second (128 mile per hour) nudge toward MU69. That’s enough of a boost to ensure the spacecraft intercepts its target in just over three years

NASA still needs to formally approve the extended mission, but it’s got plenty of time to do so—again, New Horizons isn’t going to zip past MU69 until 2019. Meanwhile, the spacecraft will continue sending back data from its Pluto flyby until next September, so expect plenty more glorious images and scientific revelations to come.

[New Horizons]