Aliens

1 note - posted 2 months ago - reblog

Think about this:

In schrodingers cat, we cause nature to collapse to one reality when we observe the cat either being dead or alive. What if someone else, who would never interact or communicate whether the cat was alive or dead, saw the cat alive or dead before we did. Is the experiment still valid? Can we still cause nature to collapse to possibly a different outcome than the first person witnessed? In this question I find myself considering each life, as its own reality. Each of us have our own physical and mental reality that we share with people in part but never in whole. Therefore, when we die, the entire universe ceases to exist. The universe cannot exist in a superstate of being, because it would be a contradiction to itself.

I may just have a lacking understanding of Schrodingers cat, but if you have any input I’m down for discussion.

64 notes - posted 2 months ago - reblog

ikenbot:

M35 & NGC2158: Open Star Clusters in Gemini
Copyright: Leonardo Orazi

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ikenbot:

Antarctica’s Lake Vostok is Test Case for Exploring Icy Jupiter Moon
Russian scientists in Antarctica have reached a lake that’s been buried in ice for more than 14 million years — a milestone that could provide hints of what to expect when the ocean under the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon, Europa, is similarly explored.
After more than a decade of drilling, the team broke through the ice on Feb. 5, reaching a hidden cache of water known as Lake Vostok that has been cut off from the surface since an ice sheet covered it between 14 million and 34 million years ago. The isolated lake bears similarities to features on Europa, whose icy surface is thought to hide a liquid ocean layer.
“When it comes to Europa, there’s no better analog on Earth than Lake Vostok,” Kevin Hand, deputy chief scientist of solar system exploration for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said. “In both cases, the liquid water envelope trapped beneath the ice is cut off from the sun,” he said.

87 notes - posted 3 months ago - reblog

ikenbot:

Anemic Galaxy NGC 4921 at the Edge
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Cook (LLNL)
Although presently estimated to be about 320 million light years distant, a more precise determination could be coupled with its known recession speed to help humanity better calibrate the expansion rate of the entire visible universe.
Toward this goal, this image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in order to help identify key stellar distance markers known as Cepheid variable stars.

180 notes - posted 3 months ago - reblog

ikenbot:

Inside the Eagle Nebula
Credit: Far-infrared: ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/Hill, Motte, HOBYS Key Programme Consortium;
X-ray: ESA/XMM-Newton/EPIC/XMM-Newton-SOC/Boulanger
In 1995, a now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula.
This remarkable false-color composite image revisits the nearby stellar nursery with image data from the orbiting Herschel Space Observatory and XMM-Newton telescopes.
Herschel’s far infrared detectors record the emission from the region’s cold dust directly, including the famous pillars and other structures near the center of the scene. Toward the other extreme of the electromagnetic spectrum, XMM-Newton’s X-ray vision reveals the massive, hot stars of the nebula’s embedded star cluster.
Hidden from Hubble’s view at optical wavelengths, the massive stars have a profound effect, sculpting and transforming the natal gas and dust structures with their energetic winds and radiation.
In fact, the massive stars are short lived and astronomers have found evidence in the image data pointing to the remnant of a supernova explosion with an apparent age of 6,000 years. If true, the expanding shock waves would have destroyed the visible structures, including the famous pillars. But because the Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, their destruction won’t be witnessed for hundreds of years.

72 notes - posted 4 months ago - reblog

ikenbot:

Searchlight Beams from the Egg Nebula

Nebulae are the star factories. There is an unknown vast amount of nebulae in the universe. Nebulae produce stars and stars occasionally host planets. By experience we know that planets can host life. Just more reasons why we can never determine, no matter how far in the future from now, that there is no other life in the universe.

45 notes - posted 2 months ago - reblog

exploringthecosmos:

Unexplained Mysteries of the Universe: From the present to the Big Bang
Astronomy and cosmology have come a long way in pursuing an understanding of the cosmos; peering into the depths of stars, the vastness of space and the wonders of time, we believe we understand a lot about the cosmos but there remain significant questions unanswered. Let’s start where we’re familiar. Home.
Planet formation: We’ve been living on this spaceship of a rock for about 200,000 years now and embarrassingly, we’re still not sure just how it got here. Astronomers believe that as interstellar gas cools and begins to collapse onto itself, a large disk forms around the protostar. It is in this disk that planetesimals are believed to form but there remain a couple issues. As these planetesimals orbit through the interstellar gas, drag (or friction, a physicist’s worst enemy) should cause these potential planets to lose energy and eventually fall into their host star. Furthermore, as these planetesimals acquire enough mass and become the size of large pebbles, electromagnetic forces can no longer account for their increasing size. The problem is that gravity, at this stage, is just not strong enough to cause these rocks to become any larger. It is not until they are in the range of a kilometer or so that gravity has a significant contribution to their increasing size. So how planets have grown larger than pebbles and survived the gravitational tug of its host star, we just don’t know.
Stellar formation: The nuclear processes that occur within the cores of stars are understood to quite a degree of detail but how it all started isn’t so clear. For interstellar gas to become the first stages of a star, the gas must be cooled to only a few degrees Kelvin above absolute zero (this is colder than any natural environment on Earth.) What astronomers believe is required to cause this cooling is carbon monoxide; without it, interstellar gas would not cool enough to collapse onto itself to begin the first stages of stellar evolution. We believe almost all “metals,” including carbon, were created in the interiors of stars, which means in the early Universe, there was no carbon. No carbon, no carbon monoxide. No carbon monoxide, no… stars? Without carbon monoxide in the early Universe, how did the first stars form? Your guess is as good as theirs.

Structure formation: In the early universe, there were slight disturbances in the temperature and mass distribution which is shown in the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR.) In the radiation era, strong coupling between radiation and matter stopped these non-uniformities from growing by a process called damping. Since photons were strongly coupled to matter, as the photons diffused from higher to lower concentrations, they dragged the matter along with them to maintain equilibrium. Photon damping seems to play an important role in the structure of the Universe, but not if the Universe if dark matter dominated. Since dark matter is believed to be collisionless, (see here,) dark matter candidates would travel larger distances and contribute significant collisionless damping, thus smoothing out these non-uniformities more than photon damping. If the Universe is baryonic matter dominated, photon damping would allow for small scale structures to form first, such as galaxies, whereas if the Universe is dark matter dominated, large scale structures such as superclusters could form first since the smaller non-uniformities would be quickly smoothed out. So what came first; the galaxy or the supercluster?
The Big Bang

The Horizon Problem: Out of the large number of solutions for Einstein’s equation, only one of them happen to be that of a homogeneous and isotropic universe. If this is the only universe, why did it choose such a special condition? Furthermore, how does the universe know that it is homogenous and isotropic? Measurements of the CBR by COBE shows that the universe must be isotropic by more than one part in 10^5. The Universe is so large that turning back time, light did not have time to travel across the entirety of space to “communicate” this information; the Universe thus did not have time to become so uniform. In models based on the Friedmann equations, any two objects that are currently separated by approximately 1 angular degree should not have been in causal contact with one another. To visualize this, the full moon is one half of a degree across. The standard Big Bang model does not explain why the Universe seems to have almost perfect isotropy nor homogeneity.
The Flatness Problem: The universe consists of a matter density of approximately 0.3 (the Universe consists of 30% matter and 70% energy.) This condition allows for the Universe to be almost perfectly geometrically flat, which quite a special condition. If the Universe were not flat, chances are, life would not exist. But for the Universe to be near perfectly flat currently, the Universe would have had to be flat to within 1/10^15! The Universe would have had to begun at almost complete unity for the Universe to be nearly flat now. Out of all the possible initial conditions, why did the Universe begin with such a special condition of almost perfect flatness to allow us to ask the question?
The Structure Problem: Closely related to the horizon problem (stated above,) the Universe began with non-uniformities that allowed for structures of all scales to look the same. Spiral galaxies, clusters of galaxies, even the voids all look quite the same. Why aren’t there spiral galaxies in one section of the sky, and ellipticals in another? Why did similar non-uniformities arise in causally disconnected areas to create such seemingly connected structures? Furthermore, how did these perturbations smooth out in the early Universe? If the Universe is baryonic matter dominated, damping would allow for small scale structures to form first, such as galaxies. On the contrary, if the Universe is dark matter dominated, large scale structures, such as galaxy clusters, would have originated. What came first; the galaxy or the supercluster?
These issues only scratch the surface of the unexplainables of our Universe, but they drive our curiosity to understand these cosmos and remind us how truly incomprehensible this place really is.
Sources: Foundations of Modern Cosmology: Hawley, Holcomb

5 notes - posted 3 months ago - reblog

$dogsarereal: Scientists find an alien world ‘like no planet we know of’ Hubble team detects a watery super-Earth enshrouded by thick atmosphere Scientists have discovered a new type of alien planet — a steamy waterworld that is larger than Earth but smaller than Uranus. The standard-bearer for this new class of exoplanet is called GJ 1214b, which astronomers first discovered in December 2009. New observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope suggest that GJ 1214b is a watery world enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. “GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of,” study lead author Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said in a statement. “A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.” To date, astronomers have discovered more than 700 planets beyond our solar system, with about 2,300 more “candidates” awaiting confirmation by follow-up observations. These alien planets are a diverse bunch. Astronomers have found one planet as light and airy as Styrofoam, for example, and another as dense as iron. They’ve discovered several alien worlds that orbit two suns, like Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine in the “Star Wars” films. But GJ 1214b, which is located 40 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus (The Serpent Bearer), is something new altogether, researchers said. This so-called ” super-Earth ” is about 2.7 times Earth’s diameter and weighs nearly seven times as much as our home planet. It orbits a red-dwarf star at a distance of 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers), giving it an estimated surface temperature of 446 degrees Fahrenheit (230 degrees Celsius) — too hot to host life as we know it. Scientists first reported in 2010 that GJ 1214b’s atmosphere is likely composed primarily of water, but their findings were not definitive. Berta and his team used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to help dispel the doubts. Hubble watched as GJ 1214b crossed in front of its host star, and the scientists were able to determine the composition of the planet’s atmosphere based on how it filtered the starlight. “We’re using Hubble to measure the infrared color of sunset on this world,” Berta said. “The Hubble measurements really tip the balance in favor of a steamy atmosphere.” Berta and his colleagues report their results online in the Astrophysical Journal. Since astronomers know GJ 1214b’s mass and size, they’re able to calculate its density, which turns out to be just 2 grams per cubic centimeter (g/cc). Earth’s density is 5.5 g/cc, while that of water is 1 g/cc. GJ 1214b thus appears to have much more water than Earth does, and much less rock. The alien planet’s interior structure is likely quite different from that of our world. “The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like ‘hot ice’ or ‘superfluid water,’ substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience,” Berta said. GJ 1214b probably formed farther out from its star, where water ice was plentiful, and then migrated in to its current location long ago. In the process, it would have experienced more Earth-like temperatures, but how long this benign phase lasted is unknown, researchers said. Because GJ 1214b is so close to Earth, it’s a prime candidate for study by future instruments. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is slated to launch in 2018, may be able to get an even better look at the planet’s atmosphere, researchers said. “Scientists have discovered a new type of alien planet — a steamy waterworld that is larger than Earth but smaller than Uranus.” I spent a good minute or two laughing at this sentence before I could continue reading. Like damn, my anus must be huge.$

1 note - posted 3 months ago - reblog

This one time I stole magnesium strips from the science lab. My brother and I then used vinegar with the magnesium metal to create hydrogen gas and we blew up a small plastic container.

111 notes - posted 3 months ago - reblog

ikenbot:

Alexander Leydenfrost (1888-1961)

This is sort of kool. It reminds me a lot of those golden space-suits they wear in the movie sunshine.

169 notes - posted 4 months ago - reblog

286 notes - posted 4 months ago - reblog

cwnl:

Milky Way Over Mauna Kea by Wally Pacholka

If each of those lit-up specks in our sky is a star or galaxy containing billions of stars, how could we suffer the unspeakable ignorance to consider that our sun and earth are the only capable hosts for intelligent life. We have found worms in the deepest ocean trenches able to sustain themselves on nitrites from volcanic vents at temperatures reaching 400 degrees Celsius. Bacteria can hibernate through the cold vacume of space and spring back to life in our atmosphere. If the criteria for habitability is so vast, how could it be that no other place in infinity managed to sprout life?

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