Astronomy and Cosmology

Ive taken a real big interest in the stars... space.. space travel what not, i want to know where to start, i no nothing, so i need real beginner... maybe some books mentiond or something, or some websites to check out that just give basic info. thanks.

I was watching a program on interstellar travel on the Science channel the other night and it made me angry. They were talking about traveling to planets that we might find in different star systems, but they never mentioned intelligent life, or life more advanced than us. Why the hell would we waste time traveling to planets to drop probes to find out what we already know, that there's no intelligent life there. Why is everyone so scared of finding something that makes us look stupid? Why the hell would we explore planets that are unlike ours? I can understand that they may do it for different reasons other than trying to find intelligent life, but to me that just seems…

Hello, I have been searching for forever to try and figure out this Kepler's law stuff. I know that planets don't follow circular paths around the sun, but rather their paths are eliptical, the same with moons and other things. My question is "Why?" The diagram that I looked at showed that one of the foci would be the sun (for a planet orbiting the sun) and the other would be some blank place in space, so what I want to know is why is that blank place in space so important that planets are attrated to it. The same goes for moons orbiting the planets. Any explainations or links on the topic would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot for all of your help.

The cosmic soup seems to be made of these three items... Can someone...briefly....explain them..and what percentage in the soup they comprise.

I was browsing cnn.com and according to australian astronomers they found 70 sextillion stars in a strip of sky. They say thats more than all the grains of sand on the earth. That's incredible. The universe is so huge its scary. There must be intelligent life on some planet out there, but what bothers me is we may never find them. It just seems that outer space is so vast and hostile that the chances of us ever communicating with them are very slim. Even 5000 years into the future. Sure we may be more advanced in our knowledge and technology, but then we have to start our journey, and I'm sure that won't be easy. The universe is just so huge, and there are so many stars, …

What do y'all think of the following: http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/dark-energy.html

Ok, be warned. Little of what I talk about is about the big bang, but is actualy evidence to prove my theory, (or some others theory. I haven't really read much into the subject. If what I put in here was thought of by someone else, will someone give me a reference.) And also, just as an added note, I don't believe one can go back in time by surpassing light speed... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ O-Cube Theory Say one was in a 3-D world, excluding time as a dimesnsion, and one has a perfect 2-D square, (S1). Then say one has an exact duplicate of S1, (S2). Then, if one put S2 "on top" of S1, one would have a …

This is a strange one.... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3052467.stm (sorry if I'm not allowed to post links to outside sites btw).

Hello, I am working on a project modeling the solar system and I am having quite a bit of trouble with this rotation thing. If I have a moon that could potentially rotate in three dimentions, how can I calculate the torques on the object. I found an example of how to do it for 2 dimensions that is really good, but I don't understand how I should model it for 3 dimensions. Do I need to keep track of its rotation around the x y and z axis or just its rotation in the xy plane and in the xz plane? And how would I go about computing the torques. The example shows how to do it easily with cross products and stuff, and I kinda understand that, but I can't seem to picture it in 3…

I didn't really know where else to put this, so I just put it here. Lately, I have been getting really interested in physics, and in almost everything I've read about the big bang, it doesn't say where the singularity came from. Could it be that it was a black hole from, I guess you would say, previous universe? Like, could everything from that universe have been sucked into one huge (well, you know what I mean) black hole? Now, the big bang part... I read somewhere that eventually black holes evaporate, and when they do, create an explosion equal to that of like a billion nuclear bombs. Now, imagine a black hole with everything in the universe in it... Couldn't …

From Kosmoi.com/Science/Cosmology/Big Bang "A critical further prediction was that the further away one looks, the hotter the universe should appear to be (as looking further away corresponds to looking backwards in time), and at some extremely distant point the radiation in the universe should be so thick as to become opaque." AND "In 1989, NASA launched the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE), and the initial findings (released in 1990) were a stunning endorsement of the Big Bang predictions regarding CMBR, finding a local residual temperature of 2.726 K, determining that the CMBR was indeed isotropic, and confirming the "haze" effect as distance inc…

do you guys belive that warp speed is possible.

Thought this was interesting: "In the movie, bright wispy structures can be seen moving outward at half the speed of light to form an expanding ring, visible in both X-ray and optical images. These wisps appear to originate from a shock wave that shows up as an inner X-ray ring. Dozen of knots in the ring brighten and fade. They jitter around and occasionally undergo outbursts that give rise to expanding clouds of particles. "These data leave little doubt that the inner X-ray ring is the location of a shock wave that turns the high-speed wind from the pulsar into extremely energetic particles," said Koji Mori of Penn State University, a coauthor of the paper. …

what do you guys think about blackholes

are you guys intreesed in anti matter

The below link is information and a picture of Earth from Mars. This is the first time this has ever been done. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0522_030522_earthmars.html

Just some opinions I'd like to collect regarding the 'structures' on mars ( displayed here: http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydonia/asom/artifact_html/default.htm ). I dont know what to believe, though some of the things displayed on this site seem pretty far fetched. Life on Mars? The potential evidence is there ...

A friend of mine brought this up in conversation and I want to find some educated answers, so where better to come? I was wondering if there have ever been any acctual attempts or theories for halting space and time in a contolled area?

Do you think that there is life on Mars? I think so because there are large icecaps at the poles.

OK this question isn't given very much thought, but I hope it will bring out some good conversation. Here goes: If there are black Holes sucking up mass, are there white holes spewing it out? If not how does anything escape from black holes? Its kind of depressing to me. Will our universe ever become all sucked into a black hole, and then if it does does it bang out again? Again I apologize for intelligence I lack in this, please don't insult me for it, just answer the question.

The Circulating Universe A New Dynamic For Today’s Cosmology There is a concept basic to string theory which holds that after the big bang, most of the eleven or more dimensions involved in it retreated and curled up somewhere leaving the four of space and time to carry on the creation process. The concept of ‘The Circulating Universe" simply stated, is that these "Lost" dimensions are a vital part of the universe's driving engine and function in a specific way that makes the role and mechanics of gravity more comprehensible than they have ever been before. What it postulates is that this central core although it is "central" only in a hyper-dimensional geometry, u…

I have a few questions on some of the particulars of our known universe. 1. What is the largest star we have observed? 2. What is the brighest object in the universe? 3. What is the largest galaxy we have detected? 4. Largest Black Hole? 5. Fastest traveling object? 6. Fastest spining galaxy? I have performed several searches for these topics only to discover several varying answers. If you are aware of any of these answers, please also put them into perspective with a common comparison. Thanks!

Do you think that there are more planets than the known 9??

When i looked at a star in the sky, its colour flickered as did its intensity. why does this happen?

Have scientists near enough gave up on space travel , e.g. traveling at light speed, just becuase Einstein said it wasnt possible? How much work do they do on this now days? (Im not dissing Einstein or anything, correct me if im wrong, i know nothing ).