The Enlightening Science Thread

This is quite interesting No Gentle Galaxy Collision the video is really so well done.

Three planets in habitable zone of nearby star: Gliese 667c reexamined

Ten thousandth near-Earth object discovered in space

"At the heart of Davis' paper is the principle — supported by rigorous scientific theory — that faster-than-light travel is a real and even tangible possibility. "


Why Warp Drives Aren't Just Science Fiction

Oh to see this before I die. Maybe my grandchildren though.........

indianacarnie said:

"At the heart of Davis' paper is the principle — supported by rigorous scientific theory — that faster-than-light travel is a real and even tangible possibility. "


Why Warp Drives Aren't Just Science Fiction

Oh to see this before I die. Maybe my grandchildren though.........

ell Indy I saw quite a while ago theories et out for drives that involved the ejection of photons that were supposedly made to provide the "opposite" force to the direction of travel (rocket like) but have heard nothing for some time.

The other interesting thing about light is the ability of large masses being able to "bend" the light that passes relatively close to them hence the light from a star/s behind our sun being seen but not in a direct line of vision.

The story behind the island that wasn’t there

Last November, an oddball news story caught attention around the world. A research vessel in the Coral Sea, northeast of Australia, discovered that a small island on the map didn’t actually, well, exist. It wasn’t a victim of sea level rise or a David Copperfield illusion—there just wasn’t anything there. A lot of the news coverage at the time was (quite appropriately) of the “Gee—whaddya know?” variety, but the researchers who “undiscovered” (de-scovered?) Sandy Island recently published a paper in Eos detailing answers to deeper questions—how did the island get on the map in the first place and what can we learn from its undiscovery?

Source

A Guy

35 years later, Voyager nears our solar system's boundary

It took 35 years but Voyager 1 is about to cross the boundary from our solar system into interstellar space.

New data revealed today in the journal Science suggest that the craft is now more than 11 billion miles from the sun.

The big moment is still in the offing -- there have been previous false reports -- but this time scientists believe that it is only a matter of time before the spacecraft leaves the region around our sun known as the heliosphere and enters interstellar space. Three papers described the elevated presence of charged particles from outside the heliosphere as well as the absence of any charged particles from inside the heliosphere.

Source

A Guy

The Voyagers are really amazing considering it's 1977 tech that built them. If only that tech could be used to build cars.
I seem to remember some hoopla then about the fact they use nuclear power to run.

Spiral Galaxies Like Milky Way Bigger Than Thought

Let's all fist bump: Spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way appear to be much larger and more massive than previously believed, according to a new University of Colorado Boulder study by researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope.

CU-Boulder Professor John Stocke, study leader, said new observations with Hubble's $70 million Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, or COS, designed by CU-Boulder show that normal spiral galaxies are surrounded by halos of gas that can extend to over 1 million light-years in diameter. The current estimated diameter of the Milky Way, for example, is about 100,000 light-years. One light-year is roughly 6 trillion miles.

Source

A Guy

NASA to flip ion engine's 'OFF' switch after brilliant 5.5 year burn

NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT), an ion-propulsion engine that has been firing continuously for five and one-half years, is due to be shut down at the end of this month.

Source

A Guy