Arch2008

Yes it is amazing considering that we are going to let Hubble burn up upon re-entry. With the 100 meter telescope and the use of interferometry with other large telescopes we may one day be able to image the surfaces of exoplanets (and perhaps the distant glow of city lights). Here's a short clip from Yahoo with Kalas explaining his discovery: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/sci_new_planets

I don’t know if this was the discovery, but the German magazine Bild has a story that a team of astronomers have actually taken IR pictures of an exoplanet system around HR 8799, about 130 light years away. There are three planets, all larger than Jupiter, visible as three specks in the pictures. In addition, a team from the University of California has Hubble pictures in visible light of a triple Jupiter mass exoplanet orbiting Formalhaut, which is 25 ly away. Both discoveries are firsts for the exoplanet hunt. Here's a link to a story in Astronomy about this: http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=7599 and in Science Express: http://www.sciencemag.org/sciencexpress/ Actual pictures of an exoplanet! Bravo!

Thanks! I have the same attitude about MOND, MACHOS and SUSY.

Thanks Martin, but I once again require some of your insight. I thought that Weakly Interactive Massive Particles that were the candidate for DM were, well, massive (relatively speaking). This states that the plausible particle is perhaps the lightest SUSY partner of known particle species. So I'm guessing that it can be both relatively massive in comparison to known particles and still be the lightest SUSY partner? With these discoveries, are MOND and MACHOS also still in consideration?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20081106/sc_space/mysteriousdarkmattermightactuallyglow This caught my eye.

At least every few minutes: http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20081103/sc_space/strangeportalconnectsearthtosun;_ylt=AhD9_RNgj1Q0N.EfOQfQYPkiANEA

Got an answer back from Ned Wright: "This statement is correct: > Martin-No, he says we don't know whether it is finite or infinite, but > we do know that in either case it is really big." I guess he really should change his FAQ to be more exact.

Exactly. I'm open to evidence that time existed before the BB. It just doesn't change the fact that it hasn't been an infinite amount of time since the BB.

We know that time existed at the point of the Big Bang. We do not have evidence of anything before the BB, yet. So that is what I base that on. Besides, if there was time before the BB, it still would not have an effect on the expansion time of the universe since the BB.

Martin, the LCDM is a model of the universe. It predicts a flat, infinite universe because it is a model, and one of the parameters of the model is the infinite spatial volume start point. It just states that the parameters create a model universe that remains flat even all the way out to an infinite point. Wright says that the model is infinite, but that what we know about the universe is that it is really big. These are Wright’s words. I’m not putting words in his mouth. You need to set aside the model and consider the real universe. The real universe is literally really big, but not infinite. Wright’s site states that he answers questions over the weekend, so I may have his answer for you by Monday.

The WMAP5 reports that the universe is 13.72 billion years old (give or take), which is considerably less than infinite.

(Martin, we have to stop meeting this way ) Well the cosmologist who did that FAQ I linked to says otherwise. © 1996-2008 Edward L. Wright. Last modified 07 April 2008 http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/intro.html (I believe he is "the Ned Wright" of Wright's calculator and the WMAP5 paper you linked to in the other post, too) Professor Wright is saying that as of April 7, 2008, i.e., after the WMAP5 paper, the universe is not spatially infinite, just really big. Our models of the universe may be infinite, but they are only models. As I pointed out, a finite universe expanding at a finite rate for a finite amount of time cannot suddenly become infinite. People have forgotten that over the last 10 years and that is why so many people get confused when they hear “infinite universe”. An open universe expands forever, i.e. is spatially infinite at an infinite point in the future. That’s what Professor Wright seems to have heard recently. Martin, what part of- "This model is infinite, but what we know about the Universe is that it is really big." is unclear to you? Your models are infinite, the universe is not. A finite universe that expands at a finite rate for a finite time does not make an infinite universe. The product of three finites doesn't equal an infinite, that's basic middle school math. I'll e-mail Professor Wright and ask him what he meant.

To avoid confusion agentchange, the value for omega determines the fate of the universe. An infinite universe in the contex of this value means that it expands forever. That doesn't mean that it is now infinite in size. A universe that starts as a finite space smaller than an atom and expands at a finite rate for 13.7 billion years is not going to suddenly be inifinite in size. "Is the Universe really infinite or just really big? We have observations that say that the radius of curvature of the Universe is bigger than 70 billion light years. But the observations allow for either a positive or negative curvature, and this range includes the flat Universe with infinite radius of curvature. The negatively curved space is also infinite in volume even though it is curved. So we know empirically that the volume of the Universe is more than 20 times bigger than volume of the observable Universe. Since we can only look at small piece of an object that has a large radius of curvature, it looks flat. The simplest mathematical model for computing the observed properties of the Universe is then flat Euclidean space. This model is infinite, but what we know about the Universe is that it is really big." http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#RB (P.S., this is obviously a quote, not plagiarism.)

And for folks in a hurry, here is a brief but easy to understand summary where you don’t have to sound out every other word http://www.oakland.edu/physics/mog32/mog32.pdf

http://www.universetoday.com/guide-to-space/mercury/what-color-is-mercury/ http://www.universetoday.com/2008/01/23/mercury-in-living-color/ I couldn't find a reference to the OP's pictures, but the text at these links describe pretty much all pics of Mercury.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Lippershey I read an article in Astronomy magazine that described how Lippershey tried to get a patent for the first telescope (Greek tele = 'far' and skopein = 'to look or see') in September-October 1608. Lippershey’s telescope could magnify a whopping three-fold. His request was turned down after it was found that lots of crude telescopes were being sold at carnivals. His was however the first actual recorded design and his patent ignited scientific curiosity in the device worldwide. Of course, Gallileo claimed to have discovered the telescope to get funds to improve them and was the first to point it at the sky. The design indirectly led to the microscope. Many scientific fields would involve a lot of guesswork without these. So happy 400th anniversary!

http://www.astronomycast.com/transcripts/AstroCast-080309_transcript.pdf Bettina, is this the text of the Astronomy cast? If so, then I would like to point out that on page 9, Dr. Gay states that the universe is 100 times larger in each direction than the visible universe. Using the formula for a sphere (4/3*pi*radius cubed) she then states that 100 cubed is ten thousand, when it is actually one million (as she says, one with six zeros). So she should have said that we see 4% of the mass of 1/1,000,000th of the universe. She doesn't elaborate on exactly where this ratio comes from, but the million fold larger space is what she means by the whole universe.

http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/chips_epo/hotgas_tour_slide4.htm This says that shockwaves caused by supernovae do it. With apologies to Star Trek fans, space travel would be a really dangerous business.

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/03/31/lhc-magnet-test-failure/ Apparently, something like this happened over a year ago in a test. If the magnets don’t remain supercooled during operation, then the immense electrical charge passing through suddenly meets resistance. The magnets overheat as a “quench” happens, with catastrophic effect.

Thanks Martin! I'm really not trying to be a troll or something like that. I am very interesting in learning about this, but I have a skeptical mind (which you may have already gathered about me). Also Severian, someone at another site thinks that the prediction of high energy light waves having a different speed may be a prediction the can be tested via GRB's. http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=257483

Well, this is what we are talking about: http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-2005-11/ And of course, the “rants” are what we apparently don’t want to talk about. Someone is choosing what gets researched, as we’ve already addressed. If LQG/LQC is a path to enlightenment that is beyond answering any criticism, then that doesn’t sound very scientific to me. Rants and vague criticism should be simple to address, if this is indeed a viable theory. If answers cannot be explained to wide audiences, then maybe they are not answers. So, why is this the path?

I posted elsewhere that Neil Turok reasoned that the cosmological constant was lower than it should be and that a cyclic universe would explain this. As for LQG, I think its proponents have to answer some serious criticism: http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/07/loop-quantum-cosmology.html

Actually, there still persists a misunderstanding of the question made by Joshuam168. If one says that the universe is everything, this isn’t commonly understood to mean anything before the Big Bang or beyond our space-time. Scientists are going to use WMAP to attempt to determine events before the BB and Lisa Randall has an unproven theory for dimensions beyond our space-time. So this is what is meant by “outside the universe”. If these efforts indeed turn out to be unfalsifiable, then the question becomes meaningless…but not until then. Remember, it’s the question that drives us.

To avoid confusion, here’s the link to my post #21 in this thread: http://www.interactions.org/quantumuniverse/qu/questions/sb_equations.html I thought that putting it in quotes was pretty clearly not attempted plagiarism, but I have been admonished.

The Equations Remember "We live in a cold and empty universe, in a time when energies are so low that we can no longer see what space contained in the fiery instants when the universe was born. But every kind of particle that ever existed is still there, in the equations that describe the particles and forces of the universe. And we can use accelerators to make the equations come alive: not just as metaphor but as reality. The universe today contains only the stable relics and leftovers of the big bang. The unstable particles have decayed away with time, and the perfect symmetries have been broken as the universe has cooled. But the structure of space remembers all the particles and forces we can no longer see around us. Particle accelerators pump energy into empty space to create the particles and uncover the symmetries that existed in the earliest universe. As accelerators go to higher energies, we probe ever closer to the beginning. Ultimately we must combine what we learn from accelerators with what we learn by detecting the surviving relics of the big bang, using telescopes on the ground and in the sky. It is by synthesizing what we learn from each of these approaches that we will make the two ends meet and develop a comprehensive picture of the universe and how it evolved."