Airbrush

Then you haven't seen the new video of activity on our Sun. The prominances, flares, coronal mass ejections, and generally boiling surface are only visible thru extreme filtering, and they are very "fancy".

Yes, we are seeing the light rays on the telescope glass, not actually on the star. The light you see has traveled from the star.

Have you tried wikipedia.org and look up Sun? I would think they have that data. Skim thru it and let us know if you find it or not.

Funny how these wild speculations stands without getting debunked by more of the experts around here. David Levy, what is your first language? Your comments are written with a foreign sound. Your misimpressions resulted because you misinterpreted Wikipedia describing the metallicity of stars in a galaxy. Stars do not move from the center of a galaxy outward. Galaxies do not fly apart, or after Billions of years their stars would be spread far from their galaxy centers. Your declaration that the Big Bang is "pure fantasy" is your pure delusion. You have nothing to support your wild speculations.

There is always something there. The most rarified region I can think of is the region between the event horizon and singularity of a black hole. But even that will have particles getting pulled towards the singularity at near light speed.

What can Curiosity do that Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity could not do? And if you could put it into plain language that would be appreciated. People are wondering what 2 Billion dollars can accomplish, the science folks should be differentiating Curiosity from her predecessors. She doesn't depend upon solar panels that can stop functioning when they get totally covered by the nasty, attractive Mars-dust.

Thank you Captain for that great summary! The media hasn't been reporting how improved Cusiosity is over her predecessors Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity. Don't you think they need to travel down lava tubes or dig into the polar caps in order to find life? The cool thing about nuclear powered is you don't have solar panels that get covered by nasty Mars dust in a short while. They can map the entire area (the whole planet for that matter) into a CGI grid, so controllers on Earth can sit in a virtual reality simulation of the surface that updates constantly giving more precise photo-realistic pictures. The operator of the rover feels like he is actually on Mars even picking up objects. And 3D.

What is Curiosity capable of compared to the many rovers that already explored Mars over the past few decades?

"I take the Stance that on one side we say that there is no absolute knowledge, that knowledge is amendable when new observations warrant, but yet we still call it knowledge and argue that we know. Call people who don't think they know ignorant because they haven't unquestionably accepted the current version of "know"." Scientists are generally very quick to admit what they don't know. Current knowledge is simply the best we know at this time. That can change. We don't know hardly anything about dark matter and dark energy, that is why we call them dark. There is a term for clusters of clusters of galaxies. That is a "supercluster". We are members of the Virgo Supercluster which is gravitationally bound. Outside the Virgo Supercluster, all the other superclusters are moving away from us at an accelerating rate. There is something called "dark flow" which is an anomaly to expansion, which may be of interest to you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_flow "Telescopes cannot see events earlier than about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe became transparent (the Cosmic Microwave Background); this corresponds to the particle horizon at a distance of about 46 billion (4.6×1010) light years. Since the matter causing the net motion in this proposal is outside this range, it would in a certain sense be outside our visible universe; however, it would still be in our past light cone."

"The stars are getting older as move outwards. "Across the Milky Way, metallicity is higher in the galactic centre and decreases as one moves outwards". Hence, the direct outcome is that the stars are moving outwards as they became older. The sun is an example of a middle age star. It also moves outwards as all the stars do." You are misinterpreting Wikipedia. You think the stars themselves are moving outwards. Wiki does not say that. As YOU move outwards observing the stars the metallicity is lower. That is only a figure of speech in the English language. As WE move outwards (in our analysis) we find lower metallicity stars. That does not mean we are flying outwards, our inspection moves outwards. Wiki is speaking figuratively. You are taking Wiki literally. What is your first language?

What this tells us is that older stars, with lower matallicity, are found around the outer galaxy, while younger, higher metallicity stars are found closer to the center of the galaxy. That does not mean stars are moving from the center outward. It means closer to the center of the galaxy the stars are more densely packed and are formed from supernovas that create metals when they explode. The older stars are lower metalicty because the are not formed from supernova remnants.

Telescopes today can see clear enough to determine star distance from us for the stars of OUR galaxy on OUR side of the galaxy. You are correct that we cannot see thru the dust to the other side. But we can infer that the other side is nearly the same. The stars on OUR side of our galaxy are not seen drifting into intergalactic space (as they should given their high velocity). They are bound, and always have been bound, within the current circle with a diameter of roughly 100,000 light years across for Billions of year. If they were not, the stars would be seen diffused out much further from us, and the Andromeda galaxy would not have a clear size, but be more of a blur around the perimeter. All stars in all galaxies are all moving around their galactic centers at a speed too great to explain without adding 6 times more matter in the form of dark matter. Andromeda, and all other galaxies that we can see, are contained within a FIXED size that is not expanding. Stars are generally not drifting into intergalactic space, except for occasional hypervelocity stars sling shot out of binary systems of 2 or more stars. I'm not an expert, and I would appreciate an expert's opinion.

I assure you, if the stars in our galaxy (or any galaxy) were moving outward, scientists would know it. It would be VERY noticeable. Over time, stars would be scattered much farther out than they are. That would also be seen in all other galaxies. That is not seen. The puzzle is why do stars not drift outward? The best answer they have is dark matter holds galaxies together.

The explanation as to why the universe is expanding is the Big Bang theory. The Big Bang was so great that it overcame the gravitational effect of all the matter in the universe. And the expansion is observed to be accelerating.

But the stars are NOT moving outwards in galaxies. They are gravitationally bound, and only dark matter explains why. Have you ever thought of that? You logic goes like this: "IF water flowed up hill, that would mean there is no gravity. So, there must be no gravity."

The universe is here and now, and there and then. And I haven't even mentioned infinity.

David Levy, you are not making sense. This should all be moved to speculations. BTW, whydo you oftenomit aspace betweenwords? Oh, now I get it! Those letters (like matter) appeared between words to illustrate your strange idea.

Supernovae happen very often, maybe one will be seen every few days. Does anyone know how often they happen? "Although no supernova has been observed in the Milky Way since 1604, supernovae remnants indicate that on average the event occurs about once every 50 years in the Milky Way." Since Billions of galaxies are visible to telescopes, supernovae are seen frequently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova

Maybe the Large Hadron Collider will tell us if there are multiple dimensions in this universe, or overlapping dimensions like string theory, or if there is a multiverse of universes.

Stephen Hawking already conceded that he lost his bet that the Higgs would never be discovered. What are the implications to cosmology? Any spinoffs like atomic energy? Or is it just the satisfaction of knowing the standard model is correct? "Wednesday’s announcement was also an impressive opening act for the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest physics machine, which cost $10 billion to build and began operating only two years ago. It is still running at only half-power." "The December signal was no fluke, the scientists said Wednesday. The new particle has a mass of about 125.3 billion electron volts, as measured by the CMS group, and 126 billion according to Atlas. Both groups said that the likelihood that their signal was a result of a chance fluctuation was less than one chance in 3.5 million, “five sigma,” which is the gold standard in physics for a discovery." "Finding the missing boson was one of the main goals of the Large Hadron Collider. Both Dr. Heuer and Dr. Gianotti said they had not expected the search to succeed so quickly." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/science/cern-physicists-may-have-discovered-higgs-boson-particle.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

I've heard scientists speculate it might take a few hundred years to create the atmosphere, by manufacturing greenhouse gasses from the soil to heat up the planet. Then get algae or other critters to exhale oxygen. And if it could last for millions of years before getting blown away, then all you need to do is continually manufacture atmosphere.

To put it as simple as I can, because they have learned that the 1a type supernova always explodes when it reaches the same critical mass, so the explosion is always the same brightness, as already explained above more than once.

Interesting. That means that if Earth got thrown away from the Sun and froze in deep space, and if someone returned to the frozen Earth, and they tunnelled into it all the way to the core, there would be no heat anywhere, including the center of the core.

"Nothing" is an absurd term to use when discussing cosmology. Empty space is not as empty as you might think. The universe popped out of something. Nothing never existed, nor will it ever exist.

How can the core of Earth ever lose all its' heat. Doesn't the pressure of gravity constantly create heat?