Space and astronomy news
[/caption] Holographic Dark Information Energy gets my vote for the best mix of arcane theoretical concepts expressed in the shortest number of words – and just to keep it interesting, it’s mostly about entropy. The second law of thermodynamics requires that the entropy of a closed system cannot decrease. So drop a chunk of ice …
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[/caption] Most gamma-ray bursts come in two flavors. Firstly, there are long duration bursts which form in dense star-forming regions and are associated with supernovae – which would understandably generate a sustained outburst of energy. The technical definition of a long duration gamma-ray burst is one that is more than two seconds in duration – …
Continue reading “Astronomy Without A Telescope – Small Bangs”
[/caption] The Sloan Low-mass Wide Pairs of Kinematically Equivalent Stars (SLoWPoKES) catalog was recently announced, containing 1,342 common proper motion pairs (i.e. binaries) – which are all low mass stars in the mid-K and mid-M stellar classes – in other words, orange and red dwarves. These low mass pairs are all at least 500 astronomical …
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[/caption] The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia counted 548 confirmed extrasolar planets at 6 May 2011, while the NASA Star and Exoplanet Database (updated weekly) was today reporting 535. These are confirmed findings and the counts will significantly increase as more candidate exoplanets are assessed. For example, there were the 1,235 candidates announced by the Kepler mission …
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[/caption] The mention of cosmic-scale magnetic fields is still likely to met with an uncomfortable silence in some astronomical circles – and after a bit of foot-shuffling and throat-clearing, the discussion will be moved on to safer topics. But look, they’re out there. They probably do play a role in galaxy evolution, if not galaxy …
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[/caption] Recently, some researchers speculated on what types of observational data from distant planetary systems might indicate the presence of an alien civilization, determined that asteroid mining was likely to be worth looking for – but ended up concluding that most of the effects of such activity would be difficult to distinguish from natural phenomena. …
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[/caption] The current standard model of the universe, Lambda-Cold Dark Matter, assumes that the universe is expanding in accordance with the geometrical term Lambda – which represents the cosmological constant used in Einstein’s general relativity. Lambda might be assumed to represent dark energy, a mysterious force driving what we now know to be an accelerating …
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[/caption] Recent modeling of Sun-like stars with planetary systems, found that a system with four rocky planets and four gas giants in stable orbits – and only a sparsely populated outer belt of planetesimals – has only a 15 to 25% likelihood of developing. While you might be skeptical about the validity of a model …
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[/caption] The universe is a big place – and getting bigger all the time – so at a large scale all unbound structures are all moving away from each other. So when we look out at distant objects, we need to remind ourselves that not only are we seeing them as they appeared in the …
Continue reading “Astronomy Without A Telescope – Our Inferred Universe”
[/caption] The hypothetical dark flow seen in the movement of galaxy clusters requires that we can reliably identify a clear statistical correlation in the motion of distant objects which are, in any case, flowing outwards with the expansion of the universe and may also have their own individual (or peculiar) motion arising from gravitational interactions. …
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