The Astronomy Thread

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Sanrith Descartes

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meStevo said:
science.nasa.gov

NASA’s Webb Depicts Staggering Structure in 19 Nearby Spiral Galaxies - NASA Science

It’s oh-so-easy to be absolutely mesmerized by these spiral galaxies. Follow their clearly defined arms, which are brimming with stars, to their centers, where there may be old star clusters and – sometimes – active supermassive black holes. Only NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope can deliver...
science.nasa.gov science.nasa.gov


View attachment 512389
The James Webb Space Telescope observed 19 nearby face-on spiral galaxies in near- and mid-infrared light as part of its contributions to the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) program. PHANGS also includes images and data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, which included observations taken in ultraviolet, visible, and radio light.​


Bigger image and comparisons to hubble versions:

webb.nasa.gov

James Webb Space Telescope - NASA Science

Space Telescope
webb.nasa.gov webb.nasa.gov
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All this tells me is that Sauron is everywhere.
 
Cybsled

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Lambourne said:
Nobody owns anything in space, this was settled back in the 60s under the UN Outer Space Treaty which every space-faring country has signed. How long this will hold up once there is a significant human presence on the Moon or Mars is another question.
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Since China seems to be legitimate in their desire to make a base there, that means the US base is less likely to get canceled. However, both countries want to make bases at the South Pole since that seems to be the best starting spot and first manned mission there in a serious capacity is going to get dibs. If an issue does arise, it will probably be about water access, which is going to be contingent on how much water there is and how much each respective base is using it. Even then, there are so few players in the game, presumably they could work out some sort of deal.

But once you get private industry going nuts up there or lots of other countries, you're going to need a much stronger international legal framework AND the means to actually enforce and back up that framework. The "no one owns space" thing will fly out the window once people can actually make money up there and legitimate habitats start to spring up
 
Lambourne

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Cybsled said:
Since China seems to be legitimate in their desire to make a base there, that means the US base is less likely to get canceled. However, both countries want to make bases at the South Pole since that seems to be the best starting spot and first manned mission there in a serious capacity is going to get dibs. If an issue does arise, it will probably be about water access, which is going to be contingent on how much water there is and how much each respective base is using it. Even then, there are so few players in the game, presumably they could work out some sort of deal.

But once you get private industry going nuts up there or lots of other countries, you're going to need a much stronger international legal framework AND the means to actually enforce and back up that framework. The "no one owns space" thing will fly out the window once people can actually make money up there and legitimate habitats start to spring up
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Beachhead to colony to independence seems to be the natural order of progression, although there really is quite a lot of room so there's no reason for conflict in the near term. The rim of Shackleton crater, which is what is currently seen as the prime location for a base, is over 65km long so plenty of space for multiple cities.

It'd be good to designate some areas as protected, I remember reading some sci-fi story that had an entire city on the Moon built around the Apollo landing site where people could go and still see the original footprints in the dust. Would be a shame to have it destroyed.

WEF already on the case too...

 
Tuco

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Kharzette said:
Some good talk on Dark Matter:
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"Did we get it all wrong on dark matter?"

As a layman, I'd be money that yes, they have it all wrong and will have it all wrong for the foreseeable future. Nothing against the physicists involved, it's just the further science gets from observable phenomena the more wackadoo they get.
 
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Kharzette

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Agreed. Dark energy as well. I think there are some very strong indicators that redshift is not only caused by stuff moving away.

The dark enthusiasts seem to just handwave away stuff like galaxy sizes being off etc.

There's a channel called LPT fusion or something like that on youtube that has people working on real science to explain this stuff. They make terrible videos though :emoji_laughing:
 
Kajiimagi

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Tuco said:
"Did we get it all wrong on dark matter?"

As a layman, I'd be money that yes, they have it all wrong and will have it all wrong for the foreseeable future. Nothing against the physicists involved, it's just the further science gets from observable phenomena the more wackadoo they get.
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Also a layman and totally agree. Every book I try to read about quantum mechanics inevitably turns into it's FM (fucking magic) and I give up. The ride is fun at least.
 
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Burns

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If your reading Dark Mater as anything more than "this is our best guess because all of our other ideas have failed in some way" you are doing it wrong.

Of course it's "wrong" because it's just a placeholder for future discoveries. As in, all our current models, which have fewer errors in them than other proposed models say there should be this large amount of matter that we can not account for and we need to call it something, so we all know what we are talking about when we write about it.
 
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BrutulTM

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Yeah, dark matter and dark energy are just fudge factors to make the math work. I think everyone would agree that it's just a bullshit term so we can keep talking about stuff until we figure out how it actually works.
 
Araysar

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Burns said:
If your reading Dark Mater as anything more than "this is our best guess because all of our other ideas have failed in some way" you are doing it wrong.

Of course it's "wrong" because it's just a placeholder for future discoveries. As in, all our current models, which have fewer errors in them than other proposed models say there should be this large amount of matter that we can not account for and we need to call it something, so we all know what we are talking about when we write about it.
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I don't disagree with that in general but I think that lets them off the hook too easy.

If they needed a place holder, they didn't have to separate it into dark energy and dark matter.

Clearly they believe it's not just a generic name for a placeholder, they distinguish that part of it is matter and part is energy, despite the current explanation for either one being "its magic"

Anyways, I always found the DE/DM concepts one of the most unsatisfying in astronomy
 
Kajiimagi

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Araysar said:
I don't disagree with that in general but I think that lets them off the hook too easy.

If they needed a place holder, they didn't have to separate it into dark energy and dark matter.

Clearly they believe it's not just a generic name for a placeholder, they distinguish that part of it is matter and part is energy, despite the current explanation for either one being "its magic"

Anyways, I always found the DE/DM concepts one of the most unsatisfying in astronomy
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Agreed and sadly it probably will not get resolved in our lifetimes. I'm supposed to go see NDT give a lecture in April and if he's taking questions I'm going to ask something along this line. I've always assumed that Dark energy was something they can see the effect of but cannot see why (like the wind) and Dark matter was something that helped explain mass.
 
Araysar

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Kajiimagi said:
Agreed and sadly it probably will not get resolved in our lifetimes. I'm supposed to go see NDT give a lecture in April and if he's taking questions I'm going to ask something along this line. I've always assumed that Dark energy was something they can see the effect of but cannot see why (like the wind) and Dark matter was something that helped explain mass.
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Dark matter is what they use to explain how galaxies maintain form, because at current observable mass, galaxies should be flinging everything out of them because the current amount doesn't provide enough gravity to hold it all together.

Dark energy is supposedly responsible for expansion of universe, so it's 2 very different things they are trying to solve with these placeholders
 
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Kiroy

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Kajiimagi said:
Agreed and sadly it probably will not get resolved in our lifetimes. I'm supposed to go see NDT give a lecture in April and if he's taking questions I'm going to ask something along this line. I've always assumed that Dark energy was something they can see the effect of but cannot see why (like the wind) and Dark matter was something that helped explain mass.
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he’s a quack
 
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Kharzette

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It isn't really that the matter is a "stuff we don't know yet". It's that it has to be in this perfect halo surrounding the galaxy. Nothing in physics behaves like that.
 
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Lambourne

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Dark matter isn't some done deal in physics, there are plenty of competing theories that attempt to explain the observations without invoking the existence of dark matter. Maybe the speed of light or the gravitational constant weren't always the same, or maybe gravity doesn't work the same at extreme distances. The latter is a core concept of MOND, one of the most well known alternative theories.

It's interesting to read about, but I have to be humble and admit that this stuff is so far beyond my skill level in mathematics that I can't really form a meaningful opinion.

Modified Newtonian dynamics - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Kharzette

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There's also the modified inertia stuff. I'm really beginning to doubt the big bang. Dark energy is stupid and inflation is even more silly.

There's a picture out there somewhere of 2 galaxies in view, one with a vastly higher redshift, and they are connected by a little filament of stars. My guess is that something odd is contributing to redshift in addition to things expanding (or maybe there is no expansion).

My wild uneducated guess is that the central black hole has some kind of extending effect on the distance squared dropoff of gravity. Or maybe there's a magnetic / electrical factor to it all.
 
Araysar

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Kharzette said:
There's also the modified inertia stuff. I'm really beginning to doubt the big bang. Dark energy is stupid and inflation is even more silly.

There's a picture out there somewhere of 2 galaxies in view, one with a vastly higher redshift, and they are connected by a little filament of stars. My guess is that something odd is contributing to redshift in addition to things expanding (or maybe there is no expansion).

My wild uneducated guess is that the central black hole has some kind of extending effect on the distance squared dropoff of gravity. Or maybe there's a magnetic / electrical factor to it all.
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Very much in agreement. Big Bang Theory and the ever increasing speed of expansion of the universe also seems nonsensical. Something is off here, either the distance estimates or the dating process. Or maybe both.
 
C

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Araysar said:
seems nonsensical
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The universe has no obligation to conform to our intuitions. The current best theories are weird, yes, but they're what best explain the evidence and have been verified by our best science and engineering to an absolutely stupid degree of precision.
 
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