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

7,249 notes - posted 3 months ago - reblog

How many nights have you spent in contemplation of what could be out there? How many dark evenings have been spent staring in wounder in to your own insignificance?

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.

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

4 notes - posted 3 months ago - reblog

In a single hubble photograph there are approximetly 2000 galaxys. In each galaxy, there are approximetly 100 billion stars. In a single huble space telescope image, there are about 2000000000000 stars. This is a small fraction of the total in our universe. In the words of Stephen Hawking, it’s a mathematical impossibility that life only happened once.

1 note - posted 3 months ago - reblog

Need a vacation? Try these popular destinations.

Gliese 581-d (earth like, thought capable of hosting intelligent life)
Europa (possible sub-terrainean oceans hosting aquatic life)
Kepler 22-b (Earth like, thought capable of hosting intelligent life)
Cygnus x-1 (black hole (infinite possibilities)for the adventurous person)

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.

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