The Astronomy Thread

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fucker_sl

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Vvoid_sl said:
Thank you so much for that. I've always been a fan of his of course, but every time I hear him speak on a topic I'm even more amazed. If he were just in charge of funding projects, the world would soon be a much different place.

It is interesting to me that he mentions 1989 and the Berlin Wall, Soviet union crumbling, etc. as one of the major turning points, and his example of an aerospace engineer designing a 10% more efficient plane vs. the airfoil used on another planet. I was in my junior year of college by then, in Aeronautical Engineering, and by the time I graduated the job market for my field went from 90%+ employment rate after graduation to under 20%. I came back home to Sacramento and Aerojet laid off 2000+ people. It was amazing just how quickly everything stopped. Even non-defense oriented jobs came to a screeching halt. I mean, it wasn't like passenger airline technology was solely dependent upon whether or not the Soviets were going to nuke us, but once the threat wasn't there, even that research plummeted in importance. Not to mention all the other things he talks about, like particle physics and the like.

I would give my left nut to live in the world he and I both envision. Or at least the one that he mentions where politicians would be required to pass a law or bill every year that wouldn't have tangible benefits until far after the reelection terms of those politicians. Thank you again for linking that, I hadn't seen it before.
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it's his most recent video, so probably that's why you didnt see it. i personally check youtube for his new videos once every month. He is one of the greatest cultural personality i have ever seen in my life

he doesn't simply "teach" you stuff for the sake of teaching, but actually try at his best to transmit you the feeling of wonder about scientific discoveries. Check out the way he talks about our connection to stars in the video with Stephen Colbert. You can see how he get passionate about this stuff

3 days ago a person like him died. Her name was Margherita Hack. A leading astronomy figure here in italy. The first woman to lead an astronomic observatory. One of the VERY few ppl to publicly declare herself atheist and to directly accuse faith as the stupid delirium it is (and trust me, here in italy a woman with such ideas who managed to reach a position of rispect in the scientific community it's a fucking cultural revolution by itself)

she was one of the very few figure who tried to breach the barrier of public stupidity torward astrophysic and science in general pushing her audience to not just "learn" or memorize facts her or someone else tell them, but to find the curiosity to go beyond and look for it by yourself

we need more ppl like them

and about particle physic....i think it was in the science video thread where i said i'm fucking pissed off with you americans for scraping the SCSC. Yeah sure, there are lot of italian scientists who work at CERN, and both the experiments that discovered the higgs boson have italians as leading figure, so i should be all about "Italy fuck yeah" but personally i dont give a shit about national borders in stuff like this. It should be a worldwide scientific enterprise
 
Julian The Apostate

Julian The Apostate

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Ripped Apart by a Black Hole: Gas Cloud Makes Closest Approach to Monster at Center of Milky Way
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0717095320.htm


This article got me thinking about what it would look like if the super-massive black hole in the center of our galaxy starting feeding on matter and turned into a quasar. Would we be able to see it with the naked eye from earth? If so, how bright would it be?
 
Furry

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Julian the Apostate_sl said:
Ripped Apart by a Black Hole: Gas Cloud Makes Closest Approach to Monster at Center of Milky Way
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0717095320.htm


This article got me thinking about what it would look like if the super-massive black hole in the center of our galaxy starting feeding on matter and turned into a quasar. Would we be able to see it with the naked eye from earth? If so, how bright would it be?
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Quasars basically challenge most excepted theories. If you really care to know how little we know about quasars, I believe steven hawking (One of the few papers of his I care for) wrote an article about how quasars could requires us to rethink physics. Search for something along the lines of anomalous time dilation in quasars.

Basically, we don't know what they are or how they work. We have some ideas, but they aren't based in fact or observation in any provable way.

Edit: To throw onto the fray what I think quasars are, its seeing jets from black holes directly down the barrel. That theory is as good as any of the others, and the answer would essentially be no. We could see the jet, but the quasar itself would be invisible. If we happened to be directly in the jet, the radiation would likely kill us.
 
Gavinmad

Gavinmad

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Julian the Apostate_sl said:
Ripped Apart by a Black Hole: Gas Cloud Makes Closest Approach to Monster at Center of Milky Way
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0717095320.htm


This article got me thinking about what it would look like if the super-massive black hole in the center of our galaxy starting feeding on matter and turned into a quasar. Would we be able to see it with the naked eye from earth? If so, how bright would it be?
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You should be able to see it with your naked eye in about thirty to forty thousand years, which is about how long it would take light from the center of our galaxy to reach earth. Also, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that if the milky way became a quasar, you potentially wouldn't be able to see anything else but the light. The luminosity of even a weak quasar is just tremendous.
 
Lenas

Lenas

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Don't quasars happen at the beginning of a galaxy's formation, before everything settles and becomes stable? Interesting question though.
 
gogusrl

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Some of the numbers in thewikipediaarticle about quasars are pretty mind blowing :

To create a luminosity of 1040watts (the typical brightness of a quasar), a super-massive black hole would have to consume the material equivalent of 10 stars per year. The brightest known quasars devour 1000 solar masses of material every year. The largest known is estimated to consume matter equivalent to 600 Earths per minute.
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WTB 1 x TARDIS
 
ShakyJake

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Lenas_sl said:
Don't quasars happen at the beginning of a galaxy's formation, before everything settles and becomes stable? Interesting question though.
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That was my understanding. There are no close-by quasars, only very distant ones. Which, obviously, means many billions of years ago that it occurred.
 
Cad

Cad

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ShakyJake_sl said:
That was my understanding. There are no close-by quasars, only very distant ones. Which, obviously, means many billions of years ago that it occurred.
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Isn't that by necessity? A close-by quasar would flood galaxy with radiation wouldn't it? I sunburn easily enough as is.
 
iannis

iannis

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Yeah, I think we'd all be dead in the time it took for the radiation to get to us.

I forget what it was, but I remember a show with Tyson where they asked the scariest way for the earth to blow up. And Tyson mentioned something about some sort of radiation event, I forget exactly what. But basically if a nearby star blew up just right it would microwave the entire earth and there's not a damn thing that anyone could do about it. Like everything just catches on fire. Everything. Just because.

A quasar within the galaxy would be even worse, from what I understand.
 
Julian The Apostate

Julian The Apostate

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I think that they normally happen in new galaxies because there is a lot of matter floating around for the black hole to feed on. In older, more stable galaxies, something strange would have to happen for a black hole to have enough matter to feed on to turn into a quasar, like the milky way merging with the Andromeda galaxy.
 
Furry

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Quasars have observable facts about them. If you assume that quasars are black holes at center of galaxies, these observable facts and their consequences basically disprove at least one major tenant of physics.

1. Quasars have massive red shifts
2. They have no observable time dilation
3. Their brightness and distance combine to give information about how much matter they must be absorbing

One and two are completely contradictory as it they go hand in hand, and 3 doesn't hold up if 1 and 2 are true. As for all the claims about black holes are absorbing x amount of solar masses per year, this sounds great on paper, but nobody has really offered a good reason for how. It sounds great to the mind, a black hole is this huge and powerful thing that vacuums up everything, but there's a gigantic problem with that in real physics. Its hard for matter to enter a black hole, really really hard. Stuff does hit them and clouds do go in, but usually the majority of whatever it is misses and flies off. There's so many problems with the idea of gas just tumbling into black holes that it makes absolutely no sense and doesn't work with physics at all. Every reasonable model that shows that much gas flying toward a black hole will also show that the gas will develop its own pressure and fly off with most of it not getting absorbed. Gravity is surprisingly weak, and the force of heat expanding out from the light created as that matter contracts will far out power the force of gravity. Additionally, when you're talking about gas on the scale required for the quasars, its likely stars will form quickly. The stars would the certainly miss, and it would take millennia for their orbits to decay into the black hole, and not create the immediate intense power that we see.

I won't even get into problems about how most theories require conditions which should and do exist in the local universe, so theories saying quasars just decided to go extinct recently are downright silly.
 
Lenas

Lenas

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Iannis_sl said:
A quasar within the galaxy would be even worse, from what I understand.
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Kind of a redundant statement isn't it? Quasars can only be in the center of galaxies and there can only be one per galaxy, because they require supermassive black holes, right? Since they happen so early in a galaxy's creation, I doubt that any quasars even have very many habitable solar systems / planets within their galaxies while active, because shit is still so turbulent at that point.
 
iannis

iannis

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Well, as opposed to a nearby quasar which was not part of our galaxy.

It is kind of redundant, but kind of makes a distinction.
 
Cybsled

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http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/19/tech/i...html?hpt=hp_t2

Seems Bezos found the Apollo 11 rocket engines after they were able to verify serial numbers. Very nice find
wink.png
 
iannis

iannis

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We could go to the moon again man. Remember how we shot a missile at it and trolled the entire world cause we forgot to mention we were gonna do that?

We just don't bother cause we're full up on moon rocks. That and we don't want anyone to find our lazer installations.
 
Lithose

Lithose

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Big Phoenix_sl said:
Rather sad we went to the moon using 60 year old tech and cant do that today.
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From what I understand, due to computers and the ISS, it would be significantly easier to do it today. We just don't because we don't have Russians to compete with anymore. Until the moon becomes profitable, it's just going to be shit. (I wish they would have found something ridiculously valuable up there...I wanted a moon colony.)
 
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