stillaig.com

Galaxies, the cosmos, astrophysics, observatories, telescopes: How do we possibly comprehend the reality that the universe is beyond measure, infinite, and endlessly mesmerizing?

We can’t; that is why astronomy remains so completely fascinating. It is the things in life we do not understand that most often draw our interest; that is simply a natural human impulse — to be curious, to wonder & to want to be in awe of something far beyond & outside ourselves.

We know that stars, like everything else, live & die & that there’re scientifically “correct” patterns in the remote sky that both perplex & bewitch us. Clear? If astronomy fascinates, it’s because there exists in virtually everyone a profound empathy with a world that is inaccessible in its complexity. Who among us has not felt, even fleetingly, spellbound by the immensity of this cosmos, this universe?

Modern observatories regularly function as educational centers, providing this feeling of entrancement by presenting the wonder of the cosmos directly to the audience, short-circuiting the intellect for an hour or so & uncovering the wonder at the magic of theuniverse; promoting a sensory, visceral feeling for the human condition & its place in the great book of the cosmos.

Astronomy, the science of stars, planets, galaxies, and black holes, is the oldest science, yet it’s the most intriguing because the study of the universe will help answer the most important questions human beings can ask, such as:

How did the universe begin?

What is the structure of the universe?

How will the universe change in the future?

How do the planet Earth & its inhabitants fit into the larger universe of space & time?

Though we may never know the answers to these kinds of questions in our lifetime, we are always thankful for all those who will follow us, prepared, with a scientific brain, to one day provide answers — & maybe more — to humankind.

It is hard to understand our own galaxy, & we are constantly “adding to it,” or discovering new frontiers & small, more distant planets than those we are already familiar with. The sun, & the concept of the planets just in our galaxy alone, provoke wonder & all kinds of speculation. It is food for our brain; it is one of those applications of learning that so enthrall, it does not seem like we are “studying” anything. It is an effortless exercise in the Unknown Sphere of the Universe.

What better way to pass the time, to postulate upon, to have an intellectually stimulating discussion, maybe with people you do not even know yet?

And what about the theories of particle physics that have been developed in conjunction with the standard Big Bang model to explain the origin, evolution and

present structure of the universe?

What about the origins, evolution, interiors, and energy production of the stars themselves? How are they formed? Why? And we have all heard of “interacting galaxies,” but just what, exactly, does it mean? It all sounds like, well, a kind of heaven — a place we know exists, but that we can not quite see or understand.

Then, there’s Newton’s laws, the concept of work & energy, momentum, gravitation, sound & light waves.

If you have not felt a slight thrill yet, it is eitherbecause you already know about these atmospheric wonders, or you have been living under a local rock.

So get out there & Observe the Universe! It is absolutely spellbinding!

Yvonne Volante, the author, is a big fan of astronomy & writes for yesastronomy.com, which is the premier astronomy resource on the internet. You can see all of the articles over at http://www.yesastronomy.com

Go Here

Harald Anderson

It is in the latest Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix, that readers get the confirmation that the Boy who lived is indeed interested in a science that even some Muggles are good at: Astronomy, the study of celestial objects, of space & of the physical universe as a whole. Maybe the awful Dursleys did do some good things with Harry when they let the wizard, who did not yet know he was one, learn Astronomy.

At Hogwards School of Witchcraft & Wizardry though, Harry & his two best friends, Ron & Hermione, seemed to be going on more with the giant of the giants: Jupiter but to be more precise with its moons.

But unluckily for the wizards & witches, Astronomy was making life difficult… As Harry & his friends would be sitting for their O.W.L.S (Ordinary Wizarding Level) at the end of the year, they were bombarded with homework. This was fortunately corrected by Hermione before being actually handed to the teachers. And believe me, this was a good thing too as both Harry & Ron were making terrible mistakes. Clear? If it were not for Hermione, both boys would be getting a D standing for Dreadful on the top corner of their parchment rolls. An would be:

Harry, you must have misheard Professor Sinistra, says Hermione,

Europas covered in ice not mice!

Europa as you might have guessed is way too cold for mice. And so… Spacecrafts have taken photos of this natural satellite & Europa does look lifeless.

If you’re a Harry Potter fan though, you may well say that Harry went on Europa by magic & then saw living organisms there. And so… So far so good. Well coming to think of it, maybe he did find life on Europa if of course he ever went there.

This is because below Europas ice coating, scientists think that there may well be a big ocean of liquid water. The biggest ocean in the Solar System in actual fact & that says something. Here on Earth, life & water appear to go together. So it’s logical to think that there may be life in that ocean of Europa, is it not? Of course life in the form of microbes or some sort of alien fish is expected. And maybe swimming mice!

Unfortunately the mystery of life in Europa can not actually be solved by this generation & I personally think nor can the next. This is because of the technology which still needs to take a big step forwards.

Back at Hogwarts, Hermione who was correcting one of Rons essay about Io, another of Jupiters numerous satellites, when she spotted yet another mistake. And so… She remarked,

And its Io thats got the volcanoes.

She was right again. Some people (Ill say including Ron) say that Io looks like a pepperoni pizza because the satellite is dotted with volcanoes.

Io has more pepperoni-coloured volcanoes than Ron Weasley has freckles, says Dr. Tony Phillips.

At this very moment dozens of these volcanoes are vomiting the hottest lava in the Solar System. The plumes rise so high into space that volcanic ash freezes before falling back to the ground as sulphurous snow. NASAs spacecrafts have actually flown through these plumes & survived.

Back on Earth & at Hogwarts more precisely where Hermione told Ron over the latters shoulder,

Jupiters biggest moon is Ganymede, not Callisto.

Ganymede is the largest known satellite discovered in the entire Solar System. It’s a little wider than Mercury, which is the closest planet to the Sun in the Solar System.

Rons mistake isn’t of those terrible ones though because Callisto is only a little smaller than Ganymede. Like Europa, Callisto may be concealing an ocean.

These four satellites were all discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1960. Galilei was astounded when he observed Jupiter through his primitive telescope as he saw four little stars near the giant planet. He was even more amazed when he discovered that these stars were moving in what seemed to be an orbit around Jupiter from night to night. Astronomers now call these four natural satellites the Galilean satellites.

Almost everything that is known about the Galilean satellites comes from NASAs spacecraft, especially the two Voyager probes.

But Hogwarts is a school of magic whereas Astronomy is simply magic.

K.A.Cassimally is the editor in chief of Astronomy Journal, a small publication of the RCPL Astronomy Club, Mauritius.

Check out the new website (to be launched in February 2004): http://www.rcplastronomyclub.zik.mu

Go Here

K.A.Cassimally

IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON brings together for the first, and possibly the last, time surviving crew members from every single Apollo mission that flew to the Moon along with visually stunning archival material re-mastered from the original NASA film footage. The new documentary In the Shadow of the Moon attempts to redress this oversight, giving eight of the nine surviving moonwalking Apollo astronauts a chance. “In the Shadow of the Moon” is the perfect primer for the entire world to tell us all how important space exploration is to ourfuture as a species. Their story, as captured in the riveting documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon,” is an unexpected knockout.

With humor, humanity, & staggering images, In The Shadow of the Moon brings home the sheer guts it must have taken to ride a rocket to a barren rock in the sky, & it effectively conveys the impact the experience had on the only people in history who have ever seen the Earth as a whole. The spellbinding documentary In the Shadow of the Moon recalls the fierce pride & determination of the Apollo mission astronauts.

Moon

“Some of the more interesting comments come from an astronaut who never actually walked on the surface of the moon, Apollo11 Command Module pilot, Michael Collins.

Shadow

The new documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, reminds us all that America’s space program is nothing short of astonishing & that humankind’s venture into the vast, freezing abyss of outer space is one of the most extraordinary & significant moments in the history of our species. There’s magic on the moon; most critics are enchanted by David Sington’s doc about the moon missions, “In the Shadow of the Moon,” which includes previously unseen footage from space. While the interviewees in In the Shadow of the Moon describe their experiences with verve & eloquence, Armstrongs absence looms over it.

Space

Around the story of Apollo 11 the documentary spins a sketchy history of the NASA space program, beginning with its cold war origins. We follow the journeys of the astronauts as they cross cislunar space, drop down onto that forbidding surface, conduct scientific experiments that have laid the foundation for our present understanding of our place in the universe, then blast off the moon to return to Earth. The timing of this movie’s release is perfect in that itwill be entering theaters around the country close to the 50th anniversary ofthe first-ever spaceflight (Sputnik 1). Six-time astronaut & Apollo16 moonwalker, John Young puts some of this in perspective when he tells usof his view from space. “Seeing our Earth from space, then moving beyond that, is oneof the best ways to understand our home planet & to make it safe for future generations.

Armstrong

Conspicuously absent is the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, the most reclusive & publicity shy of the astronaut corps. The vulnerability that the astronauts felt is there in the homespun eloquence of their recollections: the intensity with which their bodies vibrated during liftoff, in a way the simulator never came close to preparing them for; the scary moment, as Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin were about to touch down on the moon, when their module’s computer got overloaded; the way Earth looked from space (”The overriding sensation I got,” says Mike Collins, his eyes glowing like Yoda’s, ”was ‘My God, that little thing is so fragile. Using never-seen NASA archive footage of the nine moon missions attempted from 1968 to 1972 & fresh interviews with all the surviving astronauts, save the elusive Neil Armstrong, the film is a bracing reminder of a moment in history in which pride is justified.

In the Shadow of the Moon is one of the best science documentaries in recent memory, & also much more.

Valuable Resources

Music News - http://tinyurl.com/2ah8ry

http://hplour41.themovdwn.hop.clickbank.net?glid=&ovid=

Go Here

Allen Lewis

What child hasn’t looked up into the night sky & marveled at the sight? These tiny specs of light painted against the infinite background of space have inspired poets to rhyme, composers to pen classics, scientists & philosophers to ponder our very origins.

Astronomy continues to be one of the more popular hobbies. One of the major reasons is because you can stargaze just about anywhere. Even though country settings away from city lights are best, virtually everyone can see the moon. And even though the closest star (after our sun), Alpha Centauri is over 4 light years away, can be seen easily with the naked eye.

While simple stargazing with the naked eye is great fun, using a telescope can be awe inspiring. Do you follow? The view of the heavens through even a small telescope is something that has to be experienced to be appreciated. Even though modern technology allows us to view the celestial realm with images on tv & through the internet, there is nothing quite like seeing it though a telescope.

Different Telescopes

There’re basically three kinds of telescope. The refractor & reflector & catadioptric. The refractor telescope collects & bends light with a convex lense & eyepiece. This bending or refracting concentrates the light rays to a small focal point making things appear larger or brighter. The reflector telescope on the other hand, as its name suggests, reflects light from a convex mirror in the back of the telescope to another mirror in the front & finally to the eyepiece. The convex shape of the mirrors “scoop up” & concentrate the light to a focal point thereby magnifying an object. Caution: Objects in a telescope appear closer than they really are!

The third type, called Catadioptric, combines features from both reflecting & refracting telescopes.

Which one is best? For image quality & portability, my choice is the catadioptric. It is easily transported & has the best features of both the reflector & refractor telescopes. Because of the design, catadioptric telescopes are almost completely free of the coma found in reflectors & the chromatic aberration in refractors. Chromatic aberration is the distortion of color due to a lenses inability to bring various colors in the light into focus. Coma is the distortion of an object at the edge of your field of view.

Convenience is another factor to consider. If you have to transport your telescope as I do you will appreciate the catadioptric’s compact size, light weight & how easy it’s to set up & take down.

Travel Through Time

We all know light travels at an unimaginable speed of 186,000 miles per second. Even our sun’s light takes about 8 minutes to reach us once it is left the surface. Now think about our closest neighbor, Alpha Centauri. It is over 4 light years away so the light from its’ surface began its’ journey over 4 years ago. We are actually seeing it as it was more than 4 years in the past. In a very real sense we’re looking back in time. Think back to what you were doing 4 years ago. Whatever it was, while you were doing it, light eminated from the surface of Alpha Centauri & came screaming along at 186,000 miles per second on the long journey toward earth, arriving here just a few minutes ago. Alpha Centauri is actually part of a star system. 3 separate stars, Alpha Centauri A & B form a binary while Alpha Centauri C is 13,000 Astronomical Units (AU) away. This is part of the reason it is easily seen with the naked eye, you’re actually looking at 3 stars instead of 1.

Closer To Home

One need not look outside our own solar system to find amazing sites in the night sky. The moon may look smooth when seen with the naked eye but train a telescope on it & prepared to be wowed. The level of detail will depend on your telescope but the craters & jagged mountains are clearly visible. The best viewing, in my opinion is when the moon is in a crescent stage as the shadow created by the earth allows for much more detail to be seen. I saw the moon for the first time through a telescope years ago. I watched as it slowly drifted past my field of view & could almost feel its’ movement. Of course I knew it moved along its’ orbit around the earth but to actually see it moving was an incredible experience.

Saturn, probably the most fun to observe because of the rings, makes for spectacular stargazing. Depending on the time of year, the rings of Saturn are visible & to this observer, quite breathtaking. While I could not discern any colors or variations in the rings, they appear quite distinctly from the planet itself, something I had seen only in books prior to that.

Stand on the shores of any ocean on earth & get a sense of the sheer enormity of it… Then realize that it is not even a drop in a bucket by comparison to the size of the sky it sits beneath. Looking up at the stars at night makes you realize just how massive everything really is. There is no number that can truly measure or even estimate its’ size or dimensions. The only thing that can even remotely compare to the wonder of space is the imagination of those who view it.

Ron Berry is a freelance journalist who writes for Essay Street - & operates ScopeDoggie.com - The universal choice for telescopes online.

Ron Berry

For thousands of years, human beings have used the night sky to navigate, keep track of the seasons, and inspire myths & legends. The tradition of naming stars is as old as history itself… Before modern times, how ever, humans could only name the stars that were visible in the night skya tiny fraction of the number of stars we can see today with powerful telescopes. So… Some stars have beautiful & evocative names, while some stars are designated by unimaginative-sounding groups of numbers & letters. So… So how do stars get their names?

Today, most stars are not given proper names. However, a few stars have kept names given many years ago. Here are a few ways a star may have come by its name.

Tradition. Some stars stand out from the rest. These stars among stars have been singled out with traditional names for centuries. Polaris, for example, is the one star that seems to occupy a fixed position in the heavens. People have been using it as a navigation aid for millennia, & it has had many different names in various cultures. Clear? In addition to Polaris, Western culture occasionally refers to it as the North Star or the Pole Star.

Ancient star catalogues. So… Some star names have been preserved in the works of ancient astronomers. Perhaps the earliest star catalogue we know of was written by Gan De, a Chinese astronomer who lived in the 4th century BC. The Western worlds first star catalogue was written by Timocharis, an astronomer from Alexandria, about a hundred years later.

Most of the ancient star names still in use today, how ever, can be traced to the 2nd century AD. Ptolemy, a Greek mathematician & astronomer who lived in Egypt almost two thousand years ago, wrote a star catalogue in The Almagest, a mathematical & astronomical document outlining star & planetary motions & mechanics.

Ptolemys catalogue contains over a thousand stars. Most of these are identified first by their position within a certain constellation; second by their longitude & latitude; & third by their magnitude, or brightness. He did give a few stars special names, most of which are in common use today. These include Arcturus, Sirius, Regulus, Capella, & Spica.

Medieval Arabic translations. Clear? In the Middle Ages, Ptolemys Almagest was adopted by Arabic astronomers, who translated many of the original Greek names into Arabic. Most of the Arabic names were derived from Ptolemys descriptions of the locations of the stars within their constellations. For example, Arab astronomers named a star within the left foot of Orion the Hunter Rigel, which is Arabic for foot. Other stars whose names derive from Arabic include Deneb, Betelgeuse, Vega, & Altair.

Prominent astronomers. A very few stars are named after the astronomers who studied them. Barnards Star, for example, is a red dwarf named after E. E. Barnard, who discovered it in 1916. Van Maanens Star is the second white dwarf star ever found, & it was named after Adrian Van Maanen, its discoverer. Bessels Star is named after George Friedrich Bessel, who measured its distance from Earth in 1838.

Powerful people. Even more rarely, a star can be named after an important figure in history. By example, the brightest star in the Canes Venatici (Hunting Dogs) constellation is named Cor Caroli, meaning Heart of Charles. Historians are not sure whether it was named in honor of King Charles I or King Charles II of England.

Bayer designations. During the early 17th century, German astronomer Johann Bayer traveled by ship to different hemispheres in search of stars to observe. Bayer compiled a star catalogue in which he named stars by designating first a lower-case Greek letter, such as alpha or gamma, & then the Latin name of the constellation each star could be easily found in. The Latin constellation names were usually given in the possessive form, to indicate the star belonged to that constellation. Many of these names are still in use today, including Alpha Centauri, Alpha Canis Majoris, and Beta Persei.

Modern sky catalogues. The situation gets a bit complicated when it comes to the way stars are named today. Astronomers are performing new sky surveys & compiling star catalogues to record new discoveries every day. Some of these catalogues are very largethe Guide Star Catalogue II, for example, contains over 998 million stars. There are too many stars to give each one a completely unique proper name. As a result, most naming conventions depend on a series of numbers indicating the stars location, brightness, and other factors. An example is SDSSp J153259.96-003944.1. The lettered section (SDSSp) shows that the designation is from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey of preliminary objects, and the numbers give the stars location in the sky.

The stars we see when we look into the sky on a clear night are only a tiny fraction of the number we can see through a powerful telescopeand those in turn represent only a tiny amount of the total number of stars too far away to see. And so… So far so good. With the billions of stars in existence, its not practical to give each one a special name of its own. That makes the few stars with proper names almost completely unique in the universe.

By: Janette Vince

J Vince is managing director of the E-Commerce London based experience days company www.thanksdarling.com For lots more articles as well as a range of gifts where you can name your own star visit www.thanksdarling.com/categories/out-of-this-world.htm

Janette Vince

Heralding a new age in the cosmos, Norwegian Kristian Birkeland predicted that the universe likely consisted of an exotic component that would later be called dark matter. His comments about this subject matter appeared in a description of the Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition (1902-1903). Birkeland’s ideas about the Expedition were published in the fateful year of 1913 which would see the rise of the socialist Federal Reserve System & the Income Tax in the United States of America, two key components of the communist manifesto. Evolutionary processes were in motion throughout all fields of endeavor. Economics, politics, science & the hearts & minds of men & women were in the balance whilst relativism not truth held sway over the modern imagination. Cosmology would suffer from the same ‘evolutionary’ mindset & Birkeland wrote as much:

“We have assumed that each stellar system in evolutions throws off electric corpuscles into space. It doesn’t seem unreasonable therefore to think that the greater part of the material masses in the universe is found, not in the solar systems or nebulae, but in “empty” space.”

In this fashion, Birkeland predicted that because of the ‘evolutions’ present within the cosmos most of the matter in the universe must be easily found in ‘empty’ space rather than that which is observable in stellar objects. Clear? It’s currently believed that only four percent of the universe is of this ordinary visible stellar type. Further, about a ¼ of the universe is made up of the ubiquitous dark matter with the rest of the cosmos being filled with the even more bizarre dark energy. It was Fritz Zwicky, a swiss astrophysicist working for Caltech, who would further the concept of dark matter through the aegis of the Virial Theorem.

This mathematical relation is a formula which bounds the energy of a set of particles. Clear? In another dark year in the steady evolution to slavery since 1933 saw the removal of gold from the accounts of american citizenry, Zwicky used the Virial Theorem in an attempt to ascertain the validity of the dark matter hypothesis. He focussed his attention on the Coma galactic cluster & his analysis provided prima facie confirmation for the existence of dark matter. By evaluating the amount of movement of those galaxies at the periphery of the cluster he was able to approximately surmise the aggregate of all the matter therein.

He was astonished to learn that this sum total of mass is different from a separately computed estimate. This other value was obtained by analyzing the sum total of galaxies & the brightness of the Coma cluster. Juxtaposing this value with the periphery computation he observed that there was a discrepancy of at a minimum four hundredfold. Since the galaxies were insufficiently massive to cause the computed orbital velocities there must be some other mechanism to explain this phenomena. This conundrum became in the scientific lexicon the missing mass problem. Zwicky had established the need for the existence of an invisible source of mass hitherto unknown which must provide the necessary gravitational effect for the cluster.

Thus, it’s a fact of the current state of cosmology that the greatest set of evidence for dark matter comes from this galactic gravitational data. Scientists have even made galactic curves describing the rotational properties of stars versus the distance from the galactic center. When the gravitational data is plotted it can be shown that only a small portion of the observed speeds are explicable by classical computations. Clear? In other words, there is a scarcity of visible mass in the observed galaxies to attribute the sum total of gravitational effects to visibly observable stars planets & galaxies. Thus, the simplest way to explain this galactic mystery of insufficient mass is to hypothesize a non-detectable type of mass known as dark matter which can be the cause for the gravitational effects.

As more & more data is collected on these & other aspects of the universe, formulae & cosmological postulates are generated describing the results so obtained. Fulfilling the requirements of the aforementioned aspects leads some scientists to propose many different types of dark matter. The four main types of dark matter are called 1- baryonic dark matter; 2- warm dark matter; 3- cold dark matter & 4- hot dark matter. Dark matter ranges from the known to the predicted, from black holes to brown dwarfs to the massive compact halo objects (MACHOs), the neutrino, axions, WIMPS or weakly interacting massive particles & the esoteric neutralino. However, there is an alternative explanation for the gravitational effects which originally created the dark matter concept.

If an incomplete understanding of gravitation is factored into the picture, then it can be asserted that the dark matter interpretation is incorrect because some other cause is generating these phenomena. Several different contending theories have been developed to describe the observed galactic data. In particular, one of the main competing explanations is given by scalar tensor theories which attempt to combine the teachings of quantum mechanics with gravity. Amplifying these ideas leads to a variety of exotic ideas which challenge our most fundamental notions of physics & astronomy. Other concepts go even further & have been the subject of interest for astronomers like Dr. Riccardo Scarpa since these allow for a cosmology without the inclusion of the enigmatic dark matter.

Dr. Scarpa works at the European Southern Observatory in Santiago Chile using the Very Large Telescope Array at Paranal. With all of his experience in this field, it’s interesting to note some of his most recent comments on the superfluous dark matter:

“Dark matter is the craziest idea we have ever had in astronomy. It can appear when you need it, it can do what you like, be distributed in any way you like. It is the fairy tale of astronomy.”

In view of these comments one should ask if another scientific idea might be on the verge of collapsing. Indeed, astronomers are routinely using these other theoretical principles on a daily basis in infrared observatories around the world. Thus, it’s very likely that we’re simply wrong about all of this dark matter. It’s within all probability that the only dark matter that we will ever find is that ignorant dark matter between our ears.

Michael Strauss is an engineer & author of Requiem for Relativity the Collapse of Special Relativity, a serious critique on the fallacies of Special Relativity. To contact the author visit: www.relativitycollapse.net or www.relativitycollapse.com

MStrauss