Astronomy and Cosmology

I can't remember the exact figure, I think that it was 5 million years, but isn't that when the sun goes out? Well, I obvously don't know much about astronomy or anything as you can tell by my technical terming but I just thought of something. Two things 1) Isn't there a time delay for the light/heat radiation from the sun to get to earth? 7 seconds is it? 2) When the sun "goes out" or colapses or crunches or what ever it will do, by this I mean when it ceases to produce the heat and light necessary for life on earth to continue, how long will it take before our earth completely cools to 0 Kelvin when taking into consideration the specific heat of all of t…

I read that inside a blackhole time stops. So wouldn't that mean that gravity would stop since time has to stop for something to fall? Also, when you enter a blackhole wouldn't you simply freeze?

Do all planets have magnetic field? What determines the strength of the magnetic field.

In Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" he states that there may(should) be as many as 10 to 26 differant dimentions to space-time but that most are either infinitely small or millionths of an inch in diameter. Will someone please explain this to someone who has no grasp of dimentions past the 4th?

My SETI station (http://www.SETI.Net) came up with a hit in the direction of the Orion star Nair al Saif this morning. You can watch the follow up here... Regards....... Jim

Hello folks I'm new in these forums so please don't judge me. I have been thinking about could there be any place in the Universe in which the time-space itself would just dissapear or vanish (If I were right this would be called as a Collapse of the time-space in one specific region of time-space) Is there any analogies for this kind of phenomenon in the Universe or could it happen in some kind of high-energy particles collision?

So des the univers bud into other universes. or are they just there, and have they been thre since the begging? its so had to comprehend please give me some ideas.

Why is the sun rising so early this year (5:42am)? It's also setting earlier this year than the previous few years (8:02PM), the last few years it was setting at around 8:45PM during the summer. Anyone else happen to notice this?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2008/06/25/national/a100115D10.DTL&type=printable Here's something old that's now news.

Having just come to the end of a 11 year solar cycle ,and being in the southern hemisphere at the winter equinox of the 21st of december i felt the effects of a slight shudder in the effect of gravity a momentary blip.It became apparent that in the chilean region the had been an earthquake and a eruption of volcano llama in the december period . Having located the fault line closest to chile which runs up the west coast ,so the techtonics are moving east In trying to understand the effects of continenetal drift could this "conjunction shudder effect " be due to the electromagnetic effect of the sun at a given point in a solar cycle and the earths position in its rotationa…

http://fawkes3.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?gID=1349&cID=35 some words about it are here http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/05_31_pr.php ==quote from press release== Camera On Arm Looks Beneath NASA Mars Lander May 31, 2008 -- TUCSON, Ariz.-- A view of the ground underneath NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander adds to evidence that descent thrusters dispersed overlying soil and exposed a harder substrate that may be ice. The image received Friday night from the spacecraft's Robotic Arm Camera shows patches of smooth and level surfaces beneath the thrusters. "This suggests we have an ice table under a thin layer of loose soil," said the lead scientist for the …

Aren't atoms only in matter? If so, what does space consist of? I know there are gases, but that's not the actual space itself. I mean, does space contain anything in and of itself? I'm referring to outer space and/or any space you may experience on Earth. If you look out into a room and observe all of the empty areas without objects, what does that space consist of? Besides any gases, the space itself is just nothingness, right? There are no atoms etc. contained within empty space, correct? I know this may sound like a dumb question, but it's something I've ever thought of before.

I don't know if anyone else saw this but, I just came across this article and found it quite amazing: "Mon Jun 16, 7:53 AM ET European researchers said on Monday they discovered a batch of three "super-Earths" orbiting a nearby star, and two other solar systems with small planets as well.... The planets are bigger than Earth -- one is 4.2 times the mass, one is 6.7 times and the third is 9.4 times. They orbit their star at extremely rapid speeds -- one whizzing around in just four days, compared with Earth's 365 days, one taking 10 days and the slowest taking 20 days." (Quote from article)

Could a Black Hole theoretically eat itself? Say if it were possible that there was a Black Hole in a contained environment, for the sake of discussion, once it pulled in everything it possibly could from the space it was in, what would happen to it? If yes, then could it be Possible, that in a previous Universe, after it's maximum expansion, it could have broken down to the point that a dominant Black Hole consumed everything and then itself? The singularity that was left over could have created our universe and it could just be a big never ending cycle. If energy cannot be destroyed, only transfered then it has to go somewhere. If a Black hole is made up of th…

I was reading about the theories of a tenth planet or even a companion star for the Sun existing somewhere out in the Oort Cloud. And I was just wondering whether or not they could actually exist. I mean I guess that a tenth planet isn't so farfetched (or at least not impossible) when you consider that there are supposed to be trillions of objects in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/main/index.html http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080611143818.htm Any further news? This page has some tutorials about why gammaray astronomy is especially interesting http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/science/index.html here is an example of one of them http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/science/blazers.html which is about the jets sent out (by a mechanism not fully understood) from the supermassive black holes at the center of some galaxies here is another of their tutorials, about gammaray bursts (GRBs) http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/science/gammay_ray_bursts.html For me, I gu…

A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang. The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old. Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow. Details of the work have been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters. More at BBC News... Ahhh, a hint of support for my own speculation of multiverses...

NASA's Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) is a powerful space observatory that will open a wide window on the universe. Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light, and the gamma-ray sky is spectacularly different from the one we perceive with our own eyes. With a huge leap in all key capabilities, GLAST data will enable scientists to answer persistent questions across a broad range of topics, including supermassive black-hole systems, pulsars, the origin of cosmic rays, and searches for signals of new physics.

space is 3D (so i'm told), but models of the planets all seem to be revolving around the sun (more or less) on the same horizontal plane. what's "above" or "below"?

If the universe originated with say the big bang why is dark energy and or matter so exotic compared to the rest of the universe. I mean to suggest that physical laws are constants of nature suggests a very strong homogenous universe then in regards to such Which connects with the big bang right? So basically I just don’t understand why dark matter and or dark energy happens to be so exotic then such as basically impossible to observe outside of us thinking it exists for various reasons.

I just registered today and have a lot of 'new' science posts in Cosmology and Astronomy. I am an amateur cosmologist but thouroughly familiar with what I write and studied. I have a personal library of one large bookcase filled with scienc, physics and astronomy books as my references.. I belonged to the now disbanded Detroit Astronomical Society and was a member of the Warren Astronimncal society this year. I have studied, discussed these above subjects in our local club groups for more than 20 years and on the internet for about 5+ years. I welcome criticisms of what I post and will post my best article here now. Thank you for your comments. New Scie…

What do you guys think the implications would be if we actually did find some sort of life form on Mars or in some meteorite, and I'm not talking about UFO's or little grey men, I'm talking about any form of life not born on earth, be it viruses, bacteria, fungus, protists, etc. I mean virtually every scientific book ever written would have to be rewritten. And what if that life form was nothing like anything we've ever seen before? After all, since we've never found any sort of non-terrestrial life (at least that's what the government tells us), how could we possibly say with certainty that extraterrestrial life forms would even have DNA, of if that is to far-fetched, ma…

I'm not sure if this question has been asked before, apologies if it has but where did the Supermassive Black Hole(SMBH) that resides at the centre of our (and other) Galaxy originate? I appreciate that "ordinary" black holes are the remnants of massive stars that have burnt out and collapsed but are SMBHs the same? If so then did the precursors of SMBHs exist before the formation of galaxies?

I was just wondering, let's say NASA were to install a large electromagnet inside the floor of the ISS, if the astronauts were to wear some kind of magnetic materials in their shoes and around their wrists and torso, wouldn't that theoretically be able to perfectly mimic gravity? Since the electromagnet would be under the floor not the floor itself, the astronauts would simply be pulled towards the floor, but not get stuck to it. This would obviously affect their lower bodies more than their upper bodies since their feet would be closer to the floor, but still; I can't think of a reason that this shouldn't be able to work, at least to some degree.

After several years will the universe end in a small particle which is called big crunch?