Search the Community

I thought some of you might enjoy this deep dive....

….. with all the silly oneupsmanship that goes on here, I was inspired by an account in the news today that Elon Musk has challenged Vladimir Putin to single combat, the winner to take Ukraine. It was a one sentence challenge, worth more that 3,000 pages of the drivel here. ….. inspirationally.

.

Space the Frontier Beyond Our Imagination! What of the Future? The Hubble telescope promises greater revelations for the immediate future. One astronomer wrote: “With the Hubble Space Telescope, we’ll see the shapes of many galaxies around the vicinity of quasars [quasi-stellar radio sources, the most luminous objects in the universe].” As to understanding the origin of galaxies, Richard Ellis of the University of Cambridge, England, says: “We’re about to enter a very exciting time.” Human curiosity will continue to spur the search for knowledge of the universe, its beginnings, and its purpose. Such knowledge should awaken in our hearts reverence for the Creator of the vast universe, Jehovah God, who said: “Raise your eyes high up and see. Who has created these things? It is the One who is bringing forth the army of them even by number, all of whom he calls even by name. Due to the abundance of dynamic energy, he also being vigorous in power, not one of them is missing.”—Isaiah 40:26; Psalm 147:4. JW.Org

Let me attempt to blow your mind: “Now” travels at the speed of light. When the light turns green, I don't concern myself with the fact that the light actually turned green a nanosecond earlier than I saw it. As far as the distances we're used to, “now” might just as well be universal. On interstellar distances, you might expect that the lag start mattering. Except it really doesn't. Maybe Sirius isn't there anymore. Maybe it went supernova five years ago, and the shockwave is riding towards us as you read, and it will hit us in another three years. There's no way we'd know. We look up and see the old faithful Sirius sitting right where it's always been. And we can measure its gravitational influence on us and neighboring stars. There is no knowing it's actually gone, and that's because it actually isn't. To someone in the neighborhood of Sirius, the star is no more, but, to us, it still exist. “Existence” travels at the speed of light. If the sun was spirited away by a species of prankster kardashev 3 aliens, it would keep “being there” for 8 minutes as far as we'd be concerned. And those 10 billion light years away stars we see through our telescopes, they are there. Because we can see them. - Julien Boyer

http://nypost.com/2016/09/27/elon-musk-to-reveal-how-he-plans-to-colonize-mars/

Artwork: Gaia is making the definitive map of our Milky Way Galaxy Europe’s Gaia space telescope has been used to clock the expansion rate of the Universe and - once again - it has produced some head-scratching. The reason? The speed is faster than what one would expect from measurements of the cosmos shortly after the Big Bang. Some other telescopes have found this same problem, too. But Gaia’s contribution is particularly significant because the precision of its observations is unprecedented. “It certainly ups the ante,” says Adam Riess from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and the Johns Hopkins University, both in Baltimore, Maryland, US. The inability to lock down a value for the expansion rate has far-reaching consequences - not least in how we gauge the cosmic timescale. If the Gaia speedometer is correct, it would mean having to reduce the estimated 13.88-billion-year age of the Universe by perhaps a few hundred million years. Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37438458