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Just common sense.


Just common sense.

ghostgotcha Loc: The Florida swamps

In our endless search for answers we discover more and more about the cosmos. Mainly it shows just how little we really know.:

The earliest estimates of the number of galaxies in the Universe were very small. For centuries, astronomers thought there might be just one—our own. Most recent estimates built off observations from 1995, when NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope stared at a dark patch of sky for hours and returned a picture of thousands of glittering galaxies no one had ever seen before. Further measurements led astronomers to believe there are between 100 billion and 200 billion galaxies in the observable Universe that human-made technology can detect.
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And that was the working estimate for the next two decades. Now; Astronomers at the University of Nottingham say the number of galaxies in the observable Universe is 2 trillion, more than 10 times as many as previously thought.

To reach this figure, researchers studied decades of images of galaxies—clusters of millions or billions stars, gas, and dust—taken by Hubble and other powerful telescopes. Their research, just announced, will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

There’s only one way to count galaxies with existing technology: Point a telescope at a small chunk of sky, tally up the number you see, and then extrapolate that across the whole sky. But when the Nottingham researchers examined the masses of the galaxies in those patches of sky, they realized there must be missing galaxies that are “too faint and too far away” to be imaged by modern technology, even the most powerful telescopes in the world.

The light from distant galaxies takes billions of years to reach us; the most distant galaxy Hubble has ever imaged left 13.4 billion years ago, about 400 million years after the Big Bang.

“It boggles the mind that over 90 percent of the galaxies in the [observable] Universe have yet to be studied, Who knows what interesting properties we will find when we discover these galaxies with future generations of telescopes?

Mind-boggling, indeed. Two trillion is, to put it in scientific terms, a lot.

And it won’t take another 20 years for astronomers to come up with a new estimate. The next decade will see a host of new observatories come online. The Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be launched into orbit in 2018. One hundred times more powerful than Hubble, the Webb will be able to peer further in the history of the Universe, to see the earliest stars and galaxies.

In 2020, the European Space Agency will launch the Euclid probe into space, where it will map the shapes, positions, and movements of 2 billion galaxies to study dark matter and energy.

In 2022, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a ground-based telescope currently under construction in northern Chile, will spend 10 years photographing the sky every night, detecting billions of stars and galaxies.

In 2024, the European Extremely Large Telescope, another ground-based telescope in Chile, will begin surveying the sky, looking for pretty much everything.

As humans see further, and with greater clarity, billions more sparkling galaxies may yet come into view. For now, the best prediction is probably like the one Ed Churchwell, an astronomy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gave in an interview with Universe Today last year. “We don’t know,” he said. “We know it’s a very large number.”

With that said; might I suggest we just sit back and enjoy the mystery or it all, for all of us are just tiny specs drifting through space and wondering of the origins of it all. I guess you could say we wander and wonder -- what?

ghostgotcha Loc: The Florida swamps

Closer to home, yet so very far away......

In the Northern hemisphere’s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations—Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word “lyric.”

Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope, which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.

“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.

The Kepler Space Telescope collected a great deal of light from all of those stars it watched. So much light that Kepler’s science team couldn’t process it all with algorithms. They needed the human eye, and human cognition, which remains unsurpassed in certain sorts of pattern recognition. Kepler’s astronomers decided to found Planet Hunters, a program that asked “citizen scientists” to examine light patterns emitted by the stars, from the comfort of their own homes.

In 2011, several citizen scientists flagged one particular star as “interesting” and “bizarre.” The star was emitting a light pattern that looked stranger than any of the others Kepler was watching.

The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation. That would be expected if the star were young. When our solar system first formed, four and a half billion years ago, a messy disk of dust and debris surrounded the sun, before gravity organized it into planets, and rings of rock and ice.

But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.

It appears to be mature.

And yet, there is this mess of objects circling it. A mess big enough to block a substantial number of photons that would have otherwise beamed into the tube of the Kepler Space Telescope. If blind nature deposited this mess around the star, it must have done so recently. Otherwise, it would be gone by now. Gravity would have consolidated it, or it would have been sucked into the star and swallowed, after a brief fiery splash.

Can you see it?

ghostgotcha Loc: The Florida swamps

Are we really alone ?

After all, this light pattern doesn’t show up anywhere else, across 150,000 stars. We know that something strange is going on out there.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

When showed the data, you could be fascinated by how crazy it looked, “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The three of them are writing up a proposal. They want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.

If they see a sizable amount of radio waves, they’ll follow up with the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which may be able to say whether the radio waves were emitted by a technological source, like those that waft out into the universe from Earth’s network of radio stations.

Back to the movie "Contact" which I recently reviewed on another thread -- here?

In the meantime, Boyajian, Siemion, Wright, the citizen scientists, and the rest of us, will have to content ourselves with longing looks at the sky, aimed between the swan and the lyre, where maybe, just maybe, someone is looking back, and seeing the sun dim ever so slightly, every 365 days.

Think about it!

Docadhoc Loc: Elsewhere

And studying a small arc of motion and extrapolating only allows a guess at best. We know that the densities of areas occupied by galaxy's varies so the best that can be done is to create an average density and work from it.

The combined mass of all that exists is beyond our scope of understanding and I do not believe that out of nothing, came everything without divine intervention.

ghostgotcha Loc: The Florida swamps

You are correct. It goes without saying that man (here on earth) do not have the ability and have not created much of anything in the overall scheme of things. Interesting how so many who know so little (think atheist by example) promote themselves as all knowing, while discounting the power which does.

If their heads keep swelling they too may create a big bang.

Poor things.

crazylibertarian Loc: Florida by way of New York & Rhode Island

Atheists, like progressives with whom they so often align, cannot imagine higher minds than their own.

thinksense

Have you ever met a true atheist?

I don't believe I have ever met one. Every person of intelligence I know understands that there is something out there that created all we can sense, and much more.

Mainly I see religionists labeling those who don't believe the religionst's personal church doctrines to be atheists.

Kind of like people who call other people they don't know, "racists" in an attempt they think will demean them.

Or maybe I'm wrong.

ghostgotcha Loc: The Florida swamps

Docadhoc Loc: Elsewhere

I have pondered atheism for decades and have come to two conclusions regarding the more vocal and critical portion of them.

I understand that many atheists are wired to need logic to apply in all things and they reject religion at the intersection of logic and faith. Faith does not compute for them.

However the vocal/critical group seem to have two major attributes in common.

For one, they seem to see themselves at the top of the foodchain/evolutionary ladder in that they refuse to acknowledge even the possibility of a supreme being.

And the 2nd trait that group shares is the near hysteria they exhibit when they can't back down a Christian. It is like if they admit the possibility of a supreme being, they are admitting they will have nothing after death compared to Christian afterlife, and the thought is too much for them to entertain.

A good example is PeteS. He works far too hard to deny what he says doesn't exist and by doing so he validates the existence.

As you say, poor things.

thinksense

To me, in discussing the different faiths, I have long been amused by the way religionists demonstrate the “trait that group shares is the near hysteria they exhibit when they can't back down” a person who asks them to sensibly (logically, as you say) explain how they could develop blind faith in such superstitious beliefs as they espouse. These people, if exposed to these myths on a nonreligious basis would find them unbelievable.

For example if you read in tomorrow’s paper that someone who had been murdered several days ago, had come back to life, and that the author of the story had actually seen this happen. But this corpse back to life had then risen into the sky and disappeared. So of course you would have to take the reporter’s word for it.....Would you really believe it, or would you question the story?

If you really examined the writings that religionists keep repeating, and the background of the origin of those myths, some of which go back to the time of the Egyptians, which were cherry picked and used to make their Holy Book, “which answers all”, you readily see why they were chosen to be included in their Holy Book.

The adherent becomes an accepted member of a group, having inside information that is hidden from all the rest of humanity, which many people seem to need. They become the chosen. This appeals to people with certain mental characteristics requiring a feeling of belonging to a group and craving strong controls over them by the group’s leadership, telling them how to live their lives..

In my area, there was a cult that had very strict rules among which were worship if a leader, who called himself The Adi Dah (if you can believe it,) rubbing their noses in the fact that this “spiritual advisor” who’s real name was something like Joe Jones from Brooklyn, was putting them on. To join the cult, I understand , you had to give all your worldly goods to the cult. Wives (women) lived in certain huts, and men (their husbands) lived in separate huts. Etc. Etc.

I know you will say, “Well, that’s different than a recognized Religion.” My answer to that is , How so?”



My main problem with Organized Religion, is that the religions take their adherents for fools, who will give of their labors to the religionist, who is conning the adherents blatently. Do you really think the church leaders believe their blather?

Docadhoc Loc: Elsewhere

What church leaders believe is not important to me. What I believe is.

How many things in life that you don"t believe exist do you spend time on talking about let alone debunking? Anything I consider not real is irrelevant to me so why should I waste my time on anything not real?

It is faith that atheists object to. The details are meaningless. It boils down to someone having faith that the atheist can't handle and the details are window dressing.

I have no problem with someone not having faith other than feeling sorry for them, but they have a problem with me because I know my future, where they have none.

I have lost count of the number of times I've witnessed an atheist calling heaven/hell a threat. If they do not exist, they cannot be a threat and that simple truth tells me that it is my faith they can't handle because it threatens them.

This is why I feel sorry for an atheist. They contain an empty place where I have none.

crazylibertarian Loc: Florida by way of New York & Rhode Island

I think you're wrong. They may understand 'that there is something out there that created all we can sense, and much more' but they will never ascribe it to a higher power. They can not accept that any higher power exists and instead will ascribe it to something they can't explain based upon current knowledge. And when that current knowledge is replaced by something that can explain it but then, as it always does, when it can't explain new phenomena, they ascribe it once again to principles not yet understood. It's a never ending process.

thinksense

I wonder if the ant I just accidently stepped on wondered why I did that? Did the ant that witnessed the death think I was angry? Will it now genuflect whenever it comes into my house?

HMMM!

crazylibertarian Loc: Florida by way of New York & Rhode Island

I am not sure if that's supposed to be some kind of a joke response to what I posted. If it is, I missed the connection to what I posted.