Spyman

IMHO you just hit the head on the nail.

Touche! D H already posted that link in post #3.

You're being illogical. Either you think Yomomma is trying to hijack the thread with a own personal alien hypothesis, but then you shouldn't reply. Instead, you should report the post. You just helped Yomomma validate the post. Or else you think Yomomma speaks about binary companions to the Sun, but then you're being rude by insinuating it's about aliens. LOL - Just returning your 2 unhelpful cents.

An observer crossing a black hole event horizon can calculate the moment they've crossed it, but will not actually see or feel anything special happen at that moment. In terms of visual appearance, observers who fall into the hole perceive the black region constituting the horizon as lying at some apparent distance below them, and never experience crossing this visual horizon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon#Interacting_with_an_event_horizon

LOL - I would really like to see the evidence for binary companions residing at the Denver International Airport and causing people to disappear...

It was eventually rolled into S.1281, the NASA Authorization Act of 2005, passed by Congress on December 22, 2005, subsequently signed by the President, and stating in part: The U.S. Congress has declared that the general welfare and security of the United States require that the unique competence of NASA be directed to detecting, tracking, cataloguing, and characterizing near-Earth asteroids and comets in order to provide warning and mitigation of the potential hazard of such near-Earth objects to the Earth. The NASA Administrator shall plan, develop, and implement a Near-Earth Object Survey program to detect, track, catalogue, and characterize the physical characteristics of near- Earth objects equal to or greater than 140 meters in diameter in order to assess the threat of such near-Earth objects to the Earth. It shall be the goal of the Survey program to achieve 90% completion of its near-Earth object catalogue (based on statistically predicted populations of near-Earth objects) within 15 years after the date of enactment of this Act. The NASA Administrator shall transmit to Congress not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act an initial report that provides the following: (A) An analysis of possible alternatives that NASA may employ to carry out the Survey program, including ground-based and space-based alternatives with technical descriptions. (B) A recommended option and proposed budget to carry out the Survey program pursuant to the recommended option. © Analysis of possible alternatives that NASA could employ to divert an object on a likely collision course with Earth. The result of this directive was a report presented to Congress in early March 2007. This was an Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) study led by NASA's Program Analysis and Evaluation (PA&E) office with support from outside consultants, the Aerospace Corporation, NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC), and SAIC (amongst others). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance Collision avoidance strategies Various collision avoidance techniques have different trade-offs with respect to metrics such as overall performance, cost, operations, and technology readiness. There are various methods for changing the course of an asteroid/comet. These can be differentiated by various types of attributes such as the type of mitigation (deflection or fragmentation), energy source (kinetic, electromagnetic, gravitational, solar/thermal, or nuclear), and approach strategy (interception, rendezvous, or remote station). Strategies fall into two basic sets: destruction and delay. Destruction concentrates on rendering the impactor harmless by fragmenting it and scattering the fragments so that they miss the Earth or burn up in the atmosphere. This does not always solve the problem, as sufficient amounts of material hitting the Earth at high speed can be devastating even if they are not collected together in a single body. The amount of energy released by a single large collision or many small collisions is essentially the same, given the physics of kinetic and potential energy. If a large amount of energy is transmitted, it could heat the surface of the planet to an uninhabitable temperature. Collision avoidance strategies can also be seen as either direct, or indirect. The direct methods, such as nuclear bombs or kinetic impactors, violently intercept the bolide's path. Direct methods are preferred because they are generally less costly in time and money. Their effects may be immediate, thus saving precious time. These methods might work for short-notice, or even long-notice threats, from solid objects that can be directly pushed, but probably not effective against loosely aggregated rubble piles. The indirect methods, such as gravity tractors, attaching rockets or mass drivers, laser canons, etc., will travel to the object then take more time to change course up to 180 degrees to fly along side, and then will also take much more time to change the asteroids path just enough so it will miss Earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance#Collision_avoidance_strategies (Follow the Link for a more detailed list of methods.)

Under [My Settings] - the [Forums] tab and [Manage Watched Topics] option, you will find another list which contains your watched topics, most threads will be in both lists but depending on your participation and other settings not all of them. This list also have a time filter for how recent the latest post must be to be showed, which can be changed when searching for old threads.

First I have to say steve69 that you need to make it more clear where your quotes and your personal arguments starts and ends. There is nothing basically wrong with your idea but it has been tested and if we are observing the same objects more than once then their images are at least 78 billion lightyears apart, almost as big as our observabel universe with a diameter of around 93 billion lightyears. So if we look in one direction, the close to farthest objects we can see might be the same objects that are almost the farthest we can see in the opposite direction. We don't know how or if the Universe started or if it has always been, we also don't know what shape it has or if it's finite or infinite. The Big Bang theory starts out in an extremely hot and dense state that expanded rapidly but doesn't cover what was before that or how big this initial Universe was. If the Universe is infinite now then it was infinite right after the Big Bang also, and likewise if it was finite then it will always be finite too. The important thing to understand is that the Big Bang was huge, something could have been very far away at the event of the Big Bang and the light from that object might not have reached us yet. Secondly there is no limit on how fast the Universe might be expanding, so objects that where very close back then and sending out light towards the position Earth is in now, was brought away from us faster than light, making the travel time for their light to reach us much much longer than without expansion. Close to the Big Bang event, (~377 000 years after), space was filled with hot plasma which didn't let light through but later on when the desity and temperature falls hydrogen and helium atoms begin to form and captures electrons. This aera is called the Recombination and at the end of it photons where able to travel freely, the Universe had become transparent. The first free photons from this time still arrives here on Earth and we call it the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

You can choose to watch a topic without any notifications and then later view your list of watched topics.

When you have opened the thread there should be a button in the upper right corner called [Watch Topic].

Did you not read my post or the link inside it? It has been tested and within a radius of 39 billion lightyears we have not found any duplicated images of what we see.

If you throw a ball at a speeding car the ball will gain energy from the car during the bounce and the car will loose a slight amount, since the car is much heavier than the ball a small decrease for the car will be large on the ball. Likewise if a spacecraft makes a slingshot around the Moon, it will gain a small amount of energy from the Moon and the Moon will be slowed down a tiny amount, and in this case the difference in mass is much much greater.

I am not part of the staff but IMHO the question in the OP was answered in the very first posts and I personally don't think there is anything wrong with having threads evolve far off into off topic branches, as long as it's not due to a hijacking or otherwise intentionally disrupting tactics. If the discussion ends up splitted into several different sidetracks then a separation might help keep the discussion cleaner and easier to follow, but so far I think Michel's and Owl's inclinations seems to be close enough related to continue together in the same thread. AFAIK the usual practice is as long as everyone are happy with the development it's also appropriately to continue. If someone is displeased with the direction of the discussion they can always use the report function and have a moderator look into the situation. Off course if either you, Owl, Michel or anyone else want to split this thread or make a new fresh start thats good too...

LOL, seems like a lot of newbies don't like the etiquette suggestions... (I have already used up my only positive vote and it's still at -7.) And LOLz at foreign spammers.

It doesn't matter how many nukes we slap together, they still won't be able to eject anything faster than the speed of light. A Black Hole in General Relativity is not a simple Dark Star in Newtonian Mechanics, at the Event Horizon space is so warped that nothing moving with less speed than light is able to pass from the inside and out. If the nukes manages to explode behind the Event Horizon there might be "some pretty cool" effects on the inside, but the only thing we would notice on the outside is how the Black Hole silently grows slightly while consuming the added mass/energy from the nukes when they go through the Event Horizon. Typically an active Black Hole is feeding from a large Accretion Disc where energy is produced from a large amount of mass with an efficiency much much greater than in nuclear fusion, so even if the Nukes blows up somewhere outside of the Event Horizon they would likely still be to faint to be noticed.

Instead of saying "previously banned user" I think it would be nice if the name of the first banned account by this person was showed.

For the Sun or other objects in space to be forced into a teardrop shape by the accelerated expansion, the expansion must be unsymmetrical. The modern view of the Big Bang and the expanding Universe do NOT have any center but instead have a uniform and equally large expansion, in all directions and in all locations. As such the Sun is expanding equally everywhere inside, causing it to grow slightly before it's own gravity counters the accelerated expansion and a equilibrium is reached. ¤ The key to avoiding the misunderstandings is not to take the term "big bang" too literally. The big bang was not a bomb that went off in the center of the universe and hurled matter outward into a preexisting void. Rather it was an explosion of space itself that happened everywhere, similar to the way the expansion of the surface of a balloon happens everywhere on the surface. ¤ This difference between the expansion of space and the expansion in space may seem subtle but has important consequences for the size of the universe, the rate at which galaxies move apart, the type of observations astronomers can make, and the nature of the accelerating expansion that the universe now seems to be undergoing. http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/LineweaverDavisSciAm.pdf The Big Bang is not an explosion of matter moving outward to fill an empty universe. Instead, space itself expands with time everywhere and increases the physical distance between two comoving points. Because the FLRW metric assumes a uniform distribution of mass and energy, it applies to our Universe only on large scales - local concentrations of matter such as our galaxy are gravitationally bound and as such do not experience the large-scale expansion of space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang Local perturbations The expansion of space is sometimes described as a force which acts to push objects apart. Though this is an accurate description of the effect of the cosmological constant, it is not an accurate picture of the phenomenon of expansion in general. For much of the universe's history the expansion has been due mainly to inertia. The matter in the very early universe was flying apart for unknown reasons (most likely as a result of cosmic inflation) and has simply continued to do so, though at an ever-decreasing rate due to the attractive effect of gravity. In addition to slowing the overall expansion, gravity causes local clumping of matter into stars and galaxies. These stars and galaxies do not subsequently expand, there being no force compelling them to do so. There is no essential difference between the inertial expansion of the universe and the inertial separation of nearby objects in a vacuum; the former is simply a large-scale extrapolation of the latter. A uniform local "explosion" of matter can be locally described by the FLRW geometry, the same geometry which describes the expansion of the universe as a whole. In particular, general relativity predicts that light will move at the speed c with respect to the local motion of the exploding matter, a phenomenon analogous to frame dragging. This situation changes somewhat with the introduction of a cosmological constant. A cosmological constant has the effect of a repulsive force between objects which is proportional (not inversely proportional) to distance. Unlike inertia it actively "pulls" on objects which have clumped together under the influence of gravity, and even on individual atoms. However this does not cause the objects to grow steadily or to disintegrate; unless they are very weakly bound, they will simply settle into an equilibrium state which is slightly (undetectably) larger than it would otherwise have been. As the universe expands and the matter in it thins, the gravitational attraction decreases (since it is proportional to the density), while the cosmological repulsion increases; thus the ultimate fate of the ΛCDM universe is a near vacuum expanding at an ever increasing rate under the influence of the cosmological constant. However the only locally visible effect of the accelerating expansion is the disappearance (by runaway redshift) of distant galaxies; gravitationally bound objects like the Milky Way do not expand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space#Local_perturbations

If the universe is finite but unbounded, it is also possible that the universe is smaller than the observable universe. In this case, what we take to be very distant galaxies may actually be duplicate images of nearby galaxies, formed by light that has circumnavigated the universe. It is difficult to test this hypothesis experimentally because different images of a galaxy would show different eras in its history, and consequently might appear quite different. A 2004 paper [Link] claims to establish a lower bound of 24 gigaparsecs (78 billion light-years) on the diameter of the whole universe, meaning the smallest possible diameter for the whole universe would be only slightly smaller than the observable universe (and this is only a lower bound, so the whole universe could be much larger, even infinite). This value is based on matching-circle analysis of the WMAP data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

How do we know if it is you who are writing this and not "some bad men" intercepting your posts and editing/adding bad information?

IMHO, someone has badly managed to confuse the binary Kuiper belt object 1998 WW31 with the Nemesis hypothesis. 1998 WW31 is old news, it was discovered 1998 and that it has a satellite was found out 2001. This system are much much smaller than the Pluto & Charon system, it does NOT contain any Tyche star or a very large planet. Discovery of a satellite around the transneptunian object 1998 WW31 Alain Doressoundiram (Observatoire de Paris) and Christian Veillet (CFH Institute) have just discovered that the transneptunian object 1998 WW31 is in fact a double object. It is during their multi-color photometry and recovery of transneptunian objects program that they made this discovery. ... The transneptunian objects are small bodies of the Solar system located beyond the orbit of Neptune, at more than 30 astronomical units from the Sun (1 astronomical unit = distance Sun-Earth). They are icy bodies, very primitive as fossil remnants of the formation of the Solar system, 4.6 billion years ago. http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=4737 [EDIT] Maybe the thread should be moved to Speculations.

This article hints that our technological limit is still to low for such observations, after all Quasars are the most luminous, powerful, and energetic objects known in the universe and first generation stars are still only huge stars. Scientists See Light That May Be From First Objects in Universe 11.02.05 Scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope say they have detected light that may be from the earliest objects in the universe. If confirmed, the observation provides a glimpse of an era more than 13 billion years ago when, after the fading embers of the theorized Big Bang gave way to millions of years of pervasive darkness, the universe came alive. ... "This difficult measurement pushes the instrument to performance limits that were not anticipated in its design," said team member Dr. S. Harvey Moseley, instrument scientist for Spitzer. "We have worked very hard to rule out other sources for the signal we observed." The low noise and high resolution of Spitzer's infrared array camera enabled the team to remove the fog of foreground galaxies, made of later stellar populations, until the cumulative light from the first light dominated the signal on large angular scales. The team, which also includes Dr. Richard Arendt, Science Systems and Applications scientist, noted that future missions, such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, will find the first individual clumps of these stars or the individual exploding stars that might have made the first black holes. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2005/universe_objects.html

The Sun is estimated to contain ~99.8% of the total mass in our Solar System and Jupiter that has ~2.5 times of all the other planets mass put together takes up most of the rest. Since the lower limit for a Brown Dwarf is around 10 times the mass of Jupiter there are simply not enough comets. [EDIT] This has nothing to do with the thread just testing the editing expiring time.

Cloud collapse An interstellar gas cloud remains in hydrostatic equilibrium as long as the kinetic energy of the gas pressure is in balance with the potential energy of the internal gravitational force. Mathematically this is expressed using the virial theorem, which states that, to maintain equilibrium, the gravitational potential energy must equal twice the internal thermal energy. If a cloud is massive enough that the gas pressure is insufficient to support it, the cloud undergoes gravitational collapse. Once a region reaches a sufficient density of matter to satisfy the criteria for Jeans instability it begins to collapse under its own gravitational force. The mass above which a cloud undergoes collapse is called the Jeans mass. The Jeans mass depends on the temperature and density of the cloud, but is typically thousands to tens of thousands of solar masses. This coincides with the typical mass of an open cluster of stars, which is the end product of a collapsing cloud. Triggered star formation In triggered star formation, one of several events might occur to compress a molecular cloud and initiate its gravitational collapse. Molecular clouds may collide with each other, or a nearby supernova explosion can send shocked matter into the cloud at very high speeds. galactic collisions can compress and agitate gas clouds in each galaxy by tidal forces. The latter mechanism may be responsible for the formation of globular clusters. a strong wind through a collimated relativistic jet emits radio waves around the jet that agitates gas clouds, and a weaker jet may trigger star formation when it collides with a cloud. As it collapses, a molecular cloud breaks into smaller and smaller pieces in a hierarchical manner, until the fragments reach stellar mass. In each of these fragments, the collapsing gas radiates away the energy gained by the release of gravitational potential energy. As the density increases, the fragments become opaque and are thus less efficient at radiating away their energy. This raises the temperature of the cloud and inhibits further fragmentation. The fragments now condense into rotating spheres of gas that serve as stellar embryos. Complicating this picture of a collapsing cloud are the effects of turbulence, macroscopic flows, rotation, magnetic fields and the cloud geometry. Both rotation and magnetic fields can hinder the collapse of a cloud. Turbulence is instrumental in causing fragmentation of the cloud, and on the smallest scales it promotes collapse. Birth Stellar evolution may begin with the gravitational collapse of a giant molecular cloud (GMC). Typical GMCs are roughly 100 light-years (lyr) (9.5 x 1014 km) across and contain up to 6,000,000 solar masses (1.2 x 1037 kg). As it collapses, a GMC breaks into smaller and smaller pieces. In each of these fragments, the collapsing gas releases gravitational potential energy as heat. As its temperature and pressure increase, a fragment condenses into a rotating sphere of superhot gas known as a protostar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star-forming_region

If you try to force a big star to become a Black Hole by feeding it with more fuel its increased gravity will cause the internal nuclear energy production to rise the outward pressure at a higher rate than the accumulating mass can hold it together. The star will grow rapidly until it sheds enough mass to become stable again. The Eddington luminosity (also referred to as the Eddington limit) in a star is defined as the point where the gravitational force inwards equals the continuum radiation force outwards, assuming hydrostatic equilibrium and spherical symmetry. When exceeding the Eddington luminosity, a star would initiate a very intense continuum driven stellar wind from its outer layers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_limit Secondly a Black Hole is a Relativity phenomena and not like a Dark Star in Newton mechanics, photons are not increasingly limited by gravity to leave. Lightrays will be redshifted due to gravity but all photons emitted by a star on the limit to become a Black Hole can 'freely' continue outward. Once the Black Hole has formed no photons can longer pass from the inside of the Event Horizon to the outside and all photons moving towards the Event Horizon will be absorbed.

LOL - Déjà vu An event is not an object, events emerges from the future and vanishes into the past, objects however remains in the present. You can only see the event when I light up my flashlight and shine on you when the light reaches your eyes, that event will suddenly appear to you and you will not be able to view it either before or after that moment, but you can see me aiming at you before that event and my dark flashlight afterwards.