Astronomy and Cosmology

I would like to show how it is possbile to create a red shift without requiring relativistic speeds. If we took a balloon of nitrogen gas into space, that is heat to give off a certain IR signiture, and then popped the balloon, the expansion into space will be endothermic, due to the entropy expansion, and the IR wavelength signature would expand to reflect the lowering in temperature. Even nitrogen gas heading toward us would appear pseduo-red shifted. If we use superheated water vapor instead and popped the balloon, the expansion will also show a pseudo-red shift. If there was enough water, the hydrogen bonding would cause a smaller scale enthalpy contraction into …

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060404/sc_afp/spaceastronomyoffbeat_060404000657

The CMB is generally is considered a remanant of the eariest expansion of the universe. There is another explanation for the CMB. In simplest terms, it stemmed and is still stemming from the stars and the galaxies. This would also explain why it is everywhere, with irregularities being due to the distribution of stars and galaxies within the universe. Below is a microwave image of a galaxy. Microwaves work similar to electron fields and affect charged atoms, molecules, ions, and particles. When we microwave water, the dipole charges (oxygen and water) cause the water molecules to rotate in the microwave field creating friction heating. If we look at our sun, the…

I read that people can measure stars using paralax , but only if the stars are within 400 light years away. But How do we measure stuff further away. Is there more then one method to measure far away objects? Reason i am asking is that a guy i was talking to told me, that scientists can only measure stars accurately using the parallax method, and anything further then that are just "guesses". I knew he was wrong, but i didnt know how to reply to him. So yeh i would really like to know some info. ps Does redshift have much to do with it?

the astronomical distance scale is established step by step in a kind of ladder the lowest rung is parallax and each lower rung is used to calibrate the rung above it Wikipedia does not have an entry for "astronomical distance scale" yet. Wiki has a STUB. Someone should write them an article. the distance scale is very important and a lot of different kinds of physics and astronomy went into establishing and checking the various steps on the way up the ladder. Many people know about the H-R diagram (Herzsprung-Russell) gauge of distance and the Hubble-law redshift gauge of distance, and the Type IA supernova standard candle gauge of distance. but the thin…

If two bodies of roughly equal mass coalesce into a condensed form (neutron star or black hole) would we experience dipole waves? If the masses are different are there then quadrupole components?

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/04/05/supernova.blast.ap/index.html This in perticular was always my personal speculation: "It shows that planet formation is really ubiquitous in the universe. It's a very robust process and can happen in all sorts of unexpected environments," said lead researcher Deepto Chakrabarty, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/03/14/stardust.results/index.html Im a little confused here... what does this all mean? Were the comets part of cataclysmic collisions between planets and they broke off, thus creating the "fire" part to them, and then floated around collecting cooled off pieces of debree creating the "ice" part? Im so lost...

Here is an apparent paradox They say that everything was created by the big bang whıch was a single point event. So both big bang background radiation and we the viewers of this radiation were created by the big bang. The radiation is travelling at the speed of light Then surely we must have travelled faster than the speed of light in order to get in front of it to be in a position to view it. sorry about the lack of punctuation. Im in a turkish internet cafe with funny characters ığüçö

Very Cool. Check out this article on Fox News.

Gravitational Redshift *************************** Could it be that the gravitational redshift is an obvious fact and can in no ways be used to prove GR. If we only use the following facts we can derive the gravitational redshift ; 1.The conservation of energy-matter. 2.The potential energy on earth PE=m*g*h (or that of a star G*M/r ) 3.The energy of a photon E=h*f. 4.E=mc^2. There are no other theories or facts that we need to prove the gravitational redshift. To show this we make a thought experiment with Alice and Bob. Alice and Bill have decided to do something unhonest. They wa…

In a recent article in the magazine New Scientist (on 25 March 2006) they taked about these gravitational "Tubes" that allow easy travel through the solar system. These tubes lie along the gravitational contours of the solar system. What I was wondering is could these "Tubes" exist between stars? and could they give a means to easily send a spaceship to another star (of course it would still take time to get there, but would these allow a ship to get there faster and with less fule needed)?

Here is the question - How/why/when has Universe appeared? The only thing i can think about is that It has appeared from The Nothing You will say that was all about the singularity but from what, then, the singularity appeared? If our Universe appeared from nothing (and without a purpose/reason), then I can say that there are infinite number of "Universes" (in our perspective) appear every "moment" with totally different laws of nature, logic, constants etc which we are never gonna understand, because we weren't born there and having different brain. Very probably that all the universes aren't interconnected so technically we can say they all don't exist (in our perspect…

There is a website http://www.worldjumpday.org It says that if 600000000 people jump at the same time, our planet's orbit will be a little bit further from the Sun. I wanna hear a scientific opinion about that? Can it really be true?

If you know any rare astronomy events, post them here. Make sure you include dates, specific times, locations, where to look, what to look for, and links. Mine: Catch Mercury While You Can http://space.com/spacewatch/060217_night_sky.html Location: Northern Hemisphere When: The best time to see it is February 24, 2006. But it is visible until March 3rd. Time: About 45 minutes after sunset. Where to look: Just south of due west. What to look for: A very bright "star" with a trace of a yellow-orange tinge. Start posting some events!

the March 2006 issue of the DUTCH version of the Scientific American has an interview with physicist Renate Loll called "The Bubblebath of the Universe" http://www.phys.uu.nl/~loll/Web/press/RLoll_in_Sciam.pdf is there anybody here at SFN who can read Dutch and would take a look to see where the good parts are? the interview is 4 pages, if we could focus down onto a few paragraphs that have the main message then we could use the Babelfish translator and see what they say.

Now that we also sending more digital TV around. I was wondering would it be easier, or more difficult for an other intelligent lifeform to reconstruct an image from it.

Padren posted this picture on the news forum yesterday of a double helical nebula - orignally published in nature last week. does anyone know what its chirality is?

I think I have an idea that would make the Big Bang theory impossible. First, I think the Big Bang theory says that all the matter in the universe was once compressed into a small sphere. Now, can you imagine how much mass that small sphere must have had? If a sphere with that much mass really did exist, I don’t understand how it could possibly expand into the universe. A black hole would contain much less mass than the small sphere in the Big Bang theory. Yet, a black hole has so much gravity that light itself cannot escape. If matter cannot exceed the speed of light, wouldn’t that also mean that matter couldn’t escape from a black hole? If matter isn’t able to…

It's a thought I had earlier today and I've done no research on it at all, so if it's wrong, be sure to tell me. But I was reviewing the String Theory and the way many physicists view the way our solar system as sitting on a large bedsheet, the planets are weights in the bedsheet causing pull on other objects. Well I had a thought and recalled some information. There seems to be no real corellation between planet size and gravitational pull. Saturn has the same mass as 95.162 Earths but has a gravitational pull of 8.96 m/s^2 or .914 g's. The thought was that the all these factors came into play to determine the amount of gravity. Size, mass, and age all play a…

starting Thursday I will be checking these websites http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/ http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/map/current/ right now the "current" site only has "first year data"---it should soon be updated to show "third year data" the WMAP is the satellite at Earth-Sun L2 which gives us an accurate map of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The three-year data from WMAP are due to be released this week, around Thursday 16 March. Most of what we can say about cosmology---overall outlines of the universe---depends on measurements of the CMB. So it is a big deal. People have been waiting for 3 years for this data. I have heard a lot of impa…

I'm reading that photons get absorbed by electrons which then emit new photons. (electrons in cosmic gasses or other mediums) So the photons that reach us are not the photons that started out the journey. Is this true?

First of all I am not claiming that I have a new theory or something.What I am just saying is that I have another viewpoint of looking at the things which will follow.Before that,I request you all that if you read the post please leave a reply,may be a comment,a flaw that you find,some criticism,if you want you can put that I am a jerk but please discuss and guide.So here goes. When I first learnt that G relativity puts gravity as space-time geometry then my response was that other forces must also be space-time geometry as nature can't be biased to one force.That was just an intuition.No other reason for believing that.Then I came to know about kaluza-klain theory an…

How do you think things would be affected in space, like lets say fish considering they swim or birds being that they fly? Or what about coldblooded animalsl?

Check this out: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/science/28prof.html I just have to say, "!" Does anyone have any more info on this? I, personally, had always assumed that black holes were inherently unvisualizable, seeing as how no light would actually reach the eyes (not only that, but the "tearing" of space wouldn't fit into our 3D mental frameworks). Was I mistaken, or am I missing something?