Well of Souls Forums

Technically, they can use the drill. But it risks sending the probe spinning away, so they want to try that after doing all the other experiments it's fitted with, when the battery has almost run out and there's nothing to lose.

hi hi

The Rosetta lander (Philae) ran out of power. Maybe it'll wake back up when it gets closer to the sun, but I have a feeling the solar panels will be too mucked up with vapors by then, even if it gets good exposure. Still, at least they got the majority of what they were after.

I just leave that one here: http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/26/eart ... iss-video/
A nice timelapse video showing earth as viewed from the ISS.

the aurora are awesome to look from above

pretty cool from below too...
but the night time lightning shows how damn powerful those discharges really are.

1.5 billion pixel image of Andromeda by Hubble.

when your picture cant fit on a 4GB flash drive...

Karst45 wrote:when your picture cant fit on a 4GB flash drive...

... you realize you can't grasp the immensity of the universe.

We've hit on relativity and dark matter a number of times on this forum, so I know we have a few people with the high level education needed to be able to poke holes in this. I just ran into some work that purports to solve both the expansion/collapse of the universe and the need for dark matter/energy while giving the universe an infinite age through the use of quantum mechanics.

http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantu ... e.html#jCp

No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning wrote: The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once...

In their paper, Ali and Das applied these Bohmian trajectories to an equation developed in the 1950s by physicist Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri... Using the quantum-corrected Raychaudhuri equation, Ali and Das derived quantum-corrected Friedmann equations, which describe the expansion and evolution of universe (including the Big Bang) within the context of general relativity... In addition to not predicting a Big Bang singularity, the new model does not predict a "big crunch" singularity...

I think I mentioned it before, that this is precisely the sort of thing I wanted to be true, but it seems entirely too neat and tidy. I have to question the feasibility of such a seemingly simple correction fixing all these issues at once. And since I wanted it to be true I don't trust myself to look into it correctly. Well, that and because I am terrible at the math involved at this level.

hi hi

It will be interesting to see how they account for entropy.

Except it seems to ignore everything else we know about how the universe came into existence?

I'd like to know how "QUANTUM" explains cosmic background radiation.

Milky Way may be bigger than we thought.

article wrote:
Surprising new research suggests that our home galaxy is about 50 percent bigger than previously thought, spanning some 150,000 light-years across rather than the 100,000 light-years that has been the generally accepted number.

We know quite a lot about the Milky Way, so how can it be that we're just now realizing that we were so wrong about its size? It turns out that what seemed to be concentric rings of stars surrounding our galaxy's bulging center are instead concentric ripples--and that means the galaxy doesn't end where we thought it did.

Good News Everyone! There's now more galaxy to blow up than ever before!

Not so terribly surprising; when we look at other large spiral galaxies, they often have enormous dim outer components.

I wonder if this extra mass tips the balance in favor of the Milky Way instead of the Andromeda Galaxy.

If it's similar to NGC4911 (pictured above), then I would guess that the mass of the outer section is a tiny percentage of the total mass of the galaxy.

The elliptical galaxy at upper right (PGC 83751, a.k.a. "NGC 4911A") is thought to be an actual companion to NGC 4911 and gravitationally interacting with it, and so it's at roughly the same distance.

What always freaks me out in deep sky images like this (aside from the amazing complexity and beauty of the foreground galaxy itself) are the thousands of galaxies you can see in the background.

Arioch wrote:The elliptical galaxy at upper right (PGC 83751, a.k.a. "NGC 4911A") is thought to be an actual companion to NGC 4911 and gravitationally interacting with it, and so it's at roughly the same distance.

What always freaks me out in deep sky images like this (aside from the amazing complexity and beauty of the foreground galaxy itself) are the thousands of galaxies you can see in the background.

Yeah, that always gets me too. You really get a sense for how unbelievably, mindbogglingly, incomprehensibly enormous the universe really is. It's both belittling and humbling, yet comforting and reassuring at the same time.

Ah who am I kidding. Sagan said it best, even if it was in reference to just Earth and not the sheer number of galaxies and stars we can see.

hi hi

I have been waiting for years for this, but the moment is finally here. Dawn is at Ceres and is starting to take good resolution pictures of the surface.

Apparently we have some farseeing of our own. gas giant HALF the mass of Jupiter detected 13000 light years away!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... -away.html