Official Space is Awesome Thread

[chickenpotpie]

For me, the idea that we are (1) placed in exactly the sweet spot for life (distance from star, water, oxygen, magnetic field) and (2) spaced very far from any other such star seems intentional to me.

 

On point #2, I like to think that there's life on a planet like ours millions of light years away, and time passes on there just like here. But, if we ever set out to go there using conventional means, we'd never get there in time to meet them (most likely one or both civilizations would be gone by then). That tells me either a) we're not supposed to go there at all or b) we are, but only once we advance to a certain social/technological state.

[Argonne69]

I'm thrilled by the idea of life in "frozen" worlds. All this time we've focus on the "habitable zone", well, because that describes us. However, as we've seen near thermal vents deep in the ocean, life can thrive with the heat from the core of a planet or possibly moon. The evidence of geologic activity on Pluto makes me smile, thinking that there could be life on these frozen balls of rock and ice.

 

The size of things also blows my mind. Looking at the Pillars of Creation, how does one begin to grasp the fact that it's roughly 10 light-years across. In addition, the Pillars are part of the larger Eagle nebula, which is more than 100 light years across. Of course, all of this is completely dwarfed by the size of the Milky Way, and Virgo Supercluster, and the universe itself.

 

[Argonne69]

There's an exhibit at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago called "A beach (for Carl Sagan)". It consists of seven tons of sand piled in a darkened room. The sand contains approximately 100 billion grains of sand, or roughly one for every star in the Milky Way.

 

[Noke]

There's an exhibit at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago called "A beach (for Carl Sagan)". It consists of seven tons of sand piled in a darkened room. The sand contains approximately 100 billion grains of sand, or roughly one for every star in the Milky Way.

 

 

Awesome. Thanks for posting. That's a conservative amount of sand there, though I'm not sure how you represent 'up to 400 billion stars' in that piece. ?

[Noke]

I get freaked out by thinking to much of the universe, because of the unknown and size.

If I think to much about the universe, it always boils down to that the things we humans are doing here on earth does not matter...

 

And I am always laughing about the size of VY Canis Majoris (biggest known star) and it's size of 2,800,000,000 km in diameter.

That it would take 1100 years travelling in jet aircraft at 900km/hr to circle it once!

Now that's a size :lol:

 

Yes, totally mind-boggling to think about the scale of our universe.

 

I found that once I began to realize what a tiny speck humanity is in the uncaring hugeness of space, my focus shifted to the choices I make in each moment of my daily life. It was empowering to know that I am the one in charge of creating meaning in my life, and each individual has the opportunity to determine the direction of their existence by their every choice instead of relying upon some outside force to do that for us.

 

Well, to the best we can given the illusory nature of free will. ?

 

Sean Carroll has some really eloquent thoughts on this topic.

 

Sorry if that rambling was too foofy for this hard science of a thread.

[Noke]

For me, the idea that we are (1) placed in exactly the sweet spot for life (distance from star, water, oxygen, magnetic field) and (2) spaced very far from any other such star seems intentional to me.

 

On point #2, I like to think that there's life on a planet like ours millions of light years away, and time passes on there just like here. But, if we ever set out to go there using conventional means, we'd never get there in time to meet them (most likely one or both civilizations would be gone by then). That tells me either a) we're not supposed to go there at all or b) we are, but only once we advance to a certain social/technological state.

 

Let's not get all metaphysical up in this hizzy. ?

[Argonne69]

'Not just size, but the scale of time. The (current) visible universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old. 'Sounds old, but it's just a blip compared to its life expectancy. If we don't wind up in a Big Rip, and drift apart in a Big Freeze, we're trillions of years away from the heat death of the universe. Imagine all the stars eventually burning out, and all the black holes evaporating. 'Just a mind numbing expanse of nothingness. We live in a golden time, as we can look skyward and see countless stars and galaxies. Of course, it took several generations of stars to produce the basic building blocks of life, i.e. the heavier elements. We couldn't have existed in the early universe, and eventually things will be too cold to support life as we know it.

 

Personally, I'm rooting for The Big Crunch. I like the idea of an endless repeating cycle of birth and death at the cosmic scale. C'mon gravity. Do your thing.

[L_L]

By the time we would understand everything we are not human beings anymore, but rather liquidated energy traveling around the space continuum or something! Lol

[Argonne69]

Newly released hi-res close-ups of Saturn's rings from Cassini.

 

Image: NASA

 

https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/

[Halebopp]

This is pretty interesting:

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nasa-announcement-today-trappist-1-alien-life-solar-system-latest-live-exoplanet-a7593941.html

[Argonne69]

30 years ago astronomers spotted one of the brightest supernovas in over 400 years in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. SN 1987A exploded with the brightness of over 100 million suns. To commemorate the 30th anniversary, new images, time-lapsed movies, and a 3D model have been released. (https://phys.org/new...sary-image.html)

 

[Argonne69]

I never grow tired of looking at photos of nebula. Here's the Crab Nebula.

 

[Argonne69]

Jupiter taken by NASA's JunoCam.

 

[driverwedge]

^^^ That's awesome!

[Gamble Gamble]

Space isn't just awesome, it's flat-out bodacious. Not literally flat of course. Ripples in space time mean space is in fact curved and anything but flat, but 'curved-out bodacious' doesn't really work for the purposes of the sentence.

 

Astrophysics and the cosmos is very much a favorite subject of mine. A good recent book I read on this topic was 'Parallel Worlds' by Michio Kaku. A fascinating read even if 85% of it went completely over my head.

 

Anyway not to dumb things but what I really want to know is how far the average WRXer would hit their drives on the moon? I'm guessing we would be measuring them in miles rather than yards.

 

I highly recommend interstellar (movie) and its accompanying field manual explaining the science by Kip Thorne.

[Argonne69]

Saturn taken by Cassini (12/18/2012)

 

[Argonne69]

Saturn and Titan taken by Cassini (8/29/2012)

 

[Argonne69]

Solar eclipse

 

[Argonne69]

Rings (2005). RIP Cassini.

 

[Argonne69]

Cosmic fireworks. A collision of two protostars. i.e. baby stars, in the Orion Molecular Cloud (OMC-1), releasing energy equivalent to our Sun's output for 10 million years.

 

 

Image: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), J. Bally/H. Drass et al.

[Argonne69]

Jupiter (taken on March 27th, 2017 by Juno)

 

 

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Roman Tkachenko

[i*windows]

massive news today folks :-)

 

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1712/

[Argonne69]

Earth (and Moon) viewed through Saturn's rings (4/12/2017 - Cassini)

 

[Argonne69]

A recent deep field photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. In the center of the image is the immense galaxy cluster Abell S1063, located 4 billion light-years away. Notice the gravitational lensing of the light coming from the galaxies behind the cluster. The cluster contains at least 51 galaxies, and may contain 400 or more.

 

[Qwiklap]

Awesome pics

[Argonne69]

Jupiter’s south pole (NASA - Juno spacecraft on December 11th, 2016)

 

[Argonne69]

Io, or should that be Eye Oh! :haha: (NASA - Juno spacecraft)

 

[Thrillhouse]

Wow you're doing a great job with these pics Argonne!

[MMB1500]

Space isn't just awesome, it's flat-out bodacious. Not literally flat of course. Ripples in space time mean space is in fact curved and anything but flat, but 'curved-out bodacious' doesn't really work for the purposes of the sentence.

 

Astrophysics and the cosmos is very much a favorite subject of mine. A good recent book I read on this topic was 'Parallel Worlds' by Michio Kaku. A fascinating read even if 85% of it went completely over my head.

 

Anyway not to dumb things but what I really want to know is how far the average WRXer would hit their drives on the moon? I'm guessing we would be measuring them in miles rather than yards.

 

I highly recommend interstellar (movie) and its accompanying field manual explaining the science by Kip Thorne.

 

Thanks for the recommendation! I saw Interstellar recently and really enjoyed it.

[Gamble Gamble]

Space isn't just awesome, it's flat-out bodacious. Not literally flat of course. Ripples in space time mean space is in fact curved and anything but flat, but 'curved-out bodacious' doesn't really work for the purposes of the sentence.

 

Astrophysics and the cosmos is very much a favorite subject of mine. A good recent book I read on this topic was 'Parallel Worlds' by Michio Kaku. A fascinating read even if 85% of it went completely over my head.

 

Anyway not to dumb things but what I really want to know is how far the average WRXer would hit their drives on the moon? I'm guessing we would be measuring them in miles rather than yards.

 

I highly recommend interstellar (movie) and its accompanying field manual explaining the science by Kip Thorne.

 

Thanks for the recommendation! I saw Interstellar recently and really enjoyed it.

 

some of the concepts like multidimensional beings were really difficult to grasp until i watched a few youtube videos showing our perspective (being 3 spacial dimensions) vs a 2 dimensional being and their perception on what we see as a sphere being a circle that grows then shrinks as it passes through their 2 dimensional world. (think cross sections of a sphere)