Arch2008

The wait is over: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepler-5-exoplanets.html Deja vu, 5 new exoplanets!

Dos vidanya, Apophis! http://ph.news.yahoo.com/ap/20091230/twl-eu-russia-asteroid-encounter-c8e2916.html

Yes, but what happens then? In a globular cluster that most likely consists largely of hydrogen to begin with, the bigger, brighter stars strip away smaller stars’ dusty disks that should initially be low in metallicity. These bigger stars then go SN and pepper the surrounding stars with many solar masses of material consisting of all the elements. A low mass star that originally attracted a dusty disk by its gravity will continue to attract material for the life of the star for the same reason. Right? Stars like our Sun will also expand to Red Giant size and lose mass, to the point where their outer planets will simply no longer orbit their parent star. Where might these rogue planets end up? A globular cluster is not only a stellar nursery it is a planetary nursery as well. IMHO, I don’t see how over a period of billions of years somehow random events could conspire to such a degree that the perfectly attractive mass of a star would never…ever…attract a planet. (Merry Christmas to all!)

Precisely! I’m not privy to the models being used, but why should a star have no exoplanets at all? I get the part where originally there was only hydrogen, helium and a dash of lithium in the early universe, so no possibility of planet formation. However, in a typical globular cluster huge stars form first and then go supernova in just a few million years. Each such SN spews out many solar masses of heavier elements, i.e., tens of thousands of Earth masses that then fill the surrounding space. So the stars like our Sun form thereafter with at least the opportunity for the elements common to planets. IMHO, I think that it is more likely that lithium is more prevalent in stars that have only a few small exoplanets or a certain low percentage of exoplanetary mass to star mass.

From what I’ve read, exoplanets would exert gravitational influence on their parent star. This causes internal changes in the star (perhaps with the convection currents) so that lithium is “destroyed”. The researchers seem pretty confident of this as they state: “Using our unique, large sample, we can also prove that the reason for this lithium reduction is not related to any other property of the star...“ Exactly how some stars may end up without exoplanets is still an unknown.

“There are several ways in which a planet can disturb the internal motions of matter in its host star, thereby rearrange the distribution of the various chemical elements and possibly cause the destruction of lithium. It is now up to the theoreticians to figure out which one is the most likely to happen,” http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2009/pr-42-09.html FYI, a lack of lithium in a star may indicate the presence of exoplanets. This could be a short cut for exoplanet hunters.

http://vixra.org/disclaimer

Most excellent! I remember that Carl Sagan had to argue to get a camera added to the instrumentation put on the first probes. The bean counters couldn’t see any scientific reason for taking pictures of another world.

I think that the OP means Loop Quantum Cosmology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_cosmology I believe that Martin is a real fan of this, so I will defer to his expertise.

Here is the Kepler mission site: http://kepler.nasa.gov/about/news.html Supposedly by next year they will start releasing results.

This story caught my eye: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091019/ap_on_sc/us_sci_new_planets Nothing has been posted at Planetquest yet, so no data. I did find this: http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2009/pr-39-09.html

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/jupiter_stripes_020913.html There's apparently no friction with any Jovian surface, so small forces can grow to "zonal jets". Zonal jets get bands moving in alternate directions.

Here’s the entire paper: http://www.depts.ttu.edu/gesc/Fac_pages/Yoshinobu/Published_pdfs/Chatterjee%20et%20al.%202006.pdf Great stuff, I guess (not a geology buff), and here is a diagram of the suspected impact crater: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091015102246.htm The sequence of events is supposedly Deccan volcanoes, Chicxulub impact and then about 300,000 years later, the Shiva impact. From his paper, it doesn’t seem as though it is conclusive that the structure is in fact an impact crater. I think that Chatterjee has been working on this since 1996 and hopes to go there and take some geological samples. I knew that the Chicxulub impact theory was in trouble. We’ll see. Maybe the dinosaurs just said, “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

I think that crashing asteroids together to construct artificial planets is wrong. It's like making a huge pile from the building materials for thousands of skyscrapers, then trying to live on top of the pile. Asteroids are even better building materials for space habitats than planets, because you don't have to beat as much gravity to get them where you want them.

Yes, where might the Human Genome project lead?

I guess you mean something like what Dr. Lisa Randall proposes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warped_Passages http://www.warpedpassages.com/ Three of the four fundamental forces (the Weak and Strong nuclear forces and Electromagnetism) are each thousands of times stronger than the last fundamental force, gravity. Randall explored whether it was possible that gravity was leaking out of the universe, perhaps into the theoretical extra compacted dimensions of string theory. However, none of the math worked. Then one day she had an epiphany. Perhaps gravity is leaking into our universe from a huge, nearby dimension. To her surprise, the math worked. Now all she and her proponents have to do is come in from the limb and prove it.

Okay, we don’t have a way to interact with something that is hypothetically “outside” the universe, so a theory about a force “pulling outward from outside” would be total conjecture. If something cannot be disproved, then it may sound interesting, but it will never be science. So the only scientific approach is to deal with a force from within. There is a Dr. Randall who asks if gravity might be leaking into our universe from another dimension and I really hope that she will find a way to prove this;). As for the time when the rate of expansion of the universe began increasing, I believe that the best indicator was data from Type 1a Supernovae. SN’s in galaxies farther away were dimmer than they should have been. It was determined that this dimness could only be accounted for if the SN’s were actually farther away than expected. Instead of the expansion of the universe slowing, as expected, it was actually accelerating. If the effect of DE continues to increase, some think that in about 22 billion years the atoms may fly apart in a “Big Rip”. Negative pressure is quantum mechanics and not my hobby. That said, here goes. Think of the fabric of space time not as something solid, like a brick, but instead as something more like a sponge. Energy for VPP is “squeezed” out of it and then the energy is again “soaked” back up. In this scenario, space time is elastic. Theoretically, General Relativity shows how space time can be bent and twisted by gravity, particularly near a black hole. So an anti-gravitational force like DE “stretches” space time. Any random, minute overstretching temporarily causes more space time that is then filled with DE. The more DE you have, the greater the rate of expansion. Perhaps there was ever only one small speck of space time. Gravity and DE have “molded” it over billions of years into the universe we see today. I hope that this helps.

My pleasure. P.S. The arXiv.org has lots of scientific papers and a search tool. The papers are pe-prints that have not been peer reviewed yet, so a bit of scrutiny is advised. http://arxiv.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv

Do you mean something like this? "Dark Energy Detected with Supervoids and Superclusters" http://arxiv.org/abs/0805.2974

Question 1: General Relativity indicates that the universe must expand or contract. Hubble discovered that it was in fact expanding. When the rate of expansion was measured, it was discovered that the universe was not slowing down as was expected due to the gravitational forces in play, but that the rate of expansion was actually increasing. From the observed rate of expansion and the estimated mass of the known universe, a value for the amount of energy that could cause this phenomenom was calculated. The observations and calculations seem to be more than substantiated by the WMAP results, so Dark Energy's effect is more than just assumed. Question 2: Dark Energy has not "overpowered" the effect of Dark Matter on a galaxy's spin. Dark Energy may be the energy of empty space. As the amount of empty space increases due to the expansion of the universe, so does the amount of Dark Energy. The greater the amount of DE, the greater the expansion. If DE doesn't "decay" into something with normal mass, then in about 22 billion years it will be stronger than the nuclear force that binds atoms together. Currently, DE is not strong enough to overpower atoms or galaxy spin. Question 3: Supposedly, if you think of a unit of space as an energy grid, when a virtual particle pair is created, the particles temporarily "borrow" energy from the grid and the energy of the grid slumps. When the particles recombine and annihilate, the energy is returned to the grid, sort of like a wave function. As this continues, a "negative pressure" is created that stretches or inflates the space. So the existing space time is bent by the effect of gravity and stretched or inflated by the effect of DE.

The problem with "reviving" Mars is that it is dead for a reason. At about one tenth of the Earth's mass, any atmosphere manufactured there will simply not stay there. If we were somehow able to revive Mars and it became a sort of Earth II, then how much would be gained by our investment? The surface area of Mars is about equal to the land area of the Earth, so we could reasonably expect to support the Earth's population again on Mars, another 6 billion people. However, instead of a massive, planet-wide terraforming project, if you used the material on Mars to build say 500 billion Island Three space habitats by deconstructing the planet, then you could support about one hundred million times the Earth's population. Terraforming Mars might conservatively be done in about a millenium, so the space habitats might be completed in the same time frame. All the cities in the Western Hemisphere were built in half that time with much less technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Neill_cylinder IMHO, I think that we should explore Mars, but colonizing/terraforming it is a mistake.

http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2009/pr-32-09.html Ever wonder where the Eagle Nebula is in our galaxy? Check it out.

You're welcome. Einstein was a patent clerk, so never underestimate what you might figure out for the rest of us.

Well the existing small, under-funded program plans on finding 90% of all NEO's over the next decade. This page has a report on how to deflect an identified NEO using Apophis as a test case: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/pdc_paper.html The report considers a Gravity Tractor for NEO's where decades are available to deflect them. A Kinetic Energy impactor deflection approach is recommended when more urgency is required and the two methods can be combined. So wheels are turning and what you propose is not beyond our means. Would a 9% greater discovery rate make an NEO "Czar" necessary? Would an untested "NEO killer" on the launch pad right now make us any safer? The existing system did not find/warn of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Mediterranean_Event or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitim_event So your more articulate argument can certainly be made.

You're welcome. The problem with lecturing starving people about population control, global warming and environmental degradation is that they are starving. Also, malaria kills over 800,000 people a year, every year. If world opinion can affect population control, global warming and environmental degradation, then maybe we should use it to get warlords to feed their people. We have a program to search for NEO's. We have not identified a specific, dangerous threat, and certainly not a pending catastrophic impact, requiring a Manhattan type program to secure this planet. I think that it is important to do science, and everything else, until we do. BTW, I don't have a crystal ball, but fusion power may come in my lifetime. So why not have wind, solar and fusion?