S G Collins looks at the claim the moon landings were faked from a different angle. Namely: how easy would it have been in the late sixties and early seventies to fake the moon landings? His argument is refreshing.
No diamond geysers
More follow up. It turns out that the planet made of diamond (and graphite, never forget the graphite) may in fact not be made of diamond.
“In theory, 55 Cancri e could still have a high carbon to oxygen ratio and be a diamond planet, but the host star does not have such a high ratio,” stated University of Arizona astronomy graduate student Johanna Teske, who led the study. “So in terms of the two building blocks of information used for the initial ‘diamond-planet’ proposal – the measurements of the exoplanet and the measurements of the star – the measurements of the star no longer verify that.”
Ohyeahalmostforgot…
It's just possible, however unlikely, that in the last surviving handheld data crystal which contains the entire contribution to the internet made in the third millennium, this website will be the only uncorrupted portion. So I since I mentioned last year that Voyager 1 and 2 were on their way out of the Solar System I had better mention that Voyager 1 has now left.
While there is a bit of an argument on the semantics of whether Voyager 1 is still inside or outside of our Solar System (it is not farther out than the Oort Cloud — it will take 300 more years reach the Oort cloud and the spacecraft is closer to our Sun than any other star) the plasma environment Voyager 1 now travels through has definitely changed from what comes from our Sun to the plasma that is present in the space between stars.
Interstellar space sounds like someone tuning a theramin.
This is NASA's announcement of Voyager 1's position.
My God, it's full of galaxies…
A while ago Adam Wood at the Chant Café posted a video about the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. From 1995 Astronomers have been using the Hubble telescope to look at apparently empty patches of sky. Apparently empty. In fact little spots appeared on the image:
Every single spot, smear and dot was an entire galaxy; and each one containing hundreds of billions of stars.
To Mars, in an RV
Space exploration is going a little Heinleinian. Tito Wants to send Married Couple on Mars flyby mission. [No. Not this Tito.]
Read MoreApparently Star Wars got something wrong
The London Daily Telegraph today has a story illustrated by a picture with the following caption: "The "hyperdrive" featured in Star Wars enables Han Solo's Millennium Falcon spaceship to take short cuts between stars through a higher dimension of space." I am sorry to say that I know that of all the space ships in the picture, none of them are the Millennium Falcon.
That said I was shocked, shocked, I tells you, to discover that the stretched stars from many scenes in those films are total fantasy.
Racing through hyperspace at near light speed [past light speed I think, but never mind], the ship's crew sees the stars appear to radiate out from a central point and stretch past them [actually this happens as they enter hyperspace, but, again, never mind]. But in reality, the view through the Millennium Falcon's cockpit window would probably consist of a fuzzy luminous fog surrounding a bright central disc. There would be no sign of stars because the wavelength of their light would be shortened to the invisible X-ray range, say the team of four young scientists from the University of Leicester. … The luminous disc would be due to Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation being shifted into the visible part of the light spectrum. The CMB is radiation left behind by the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe. … One of the students, Riley Connors, 21, from Milton Keynes, said: ''If the Millennium Falcon existed and really could travel that fast, sunglasses would certainly be advisable. On top of this, the ship would need something to protect the crew from harmful X-ray radiation.''
So instead of this
it would be more like the artist's impression here:
More cricket pitches!
36-Dish Australian Telescope Array Opens for Business
The Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is now standing tall in the outback of Western Australia, and will officially be turned on and open for business on Friday, October 5, 2012 . This large array is made up of 36 identical antennas, each 12 meters in diameter, spread out over 4,000 square meters but working together as a single instrument. ASKAP is designed to survey the whole sky very quickly, and astronomers expect to do studies of the sky that could never have been done before.
Just think. Thirty-six dish based cricket matches going on at once (at 40 secs):
The gentlemen at Parkes never actually used the dish for cricket, since despite its size it is actually a precision instrument.
The size of Curiosity
Why didn't they take the tram?
The Curiosity Rover seems to have missed Mars by a long way and has ended up in Adelaide. Its now heading for Glenelg.
(Loving the name of the reporter).
Voyager 1 and 2 are Leaving
(This is not an update, I am just very late.)
Given how easily everyone zips around space in SciFi and how many planets they can visit which are 100% like specific parts of Earth (but not Earth as a whole), it is surprising that no extra-solar planets had been certainly observed until 1992 (an early candidate found in 1988 was not confirmed until 2003) and so far nothing made by man has actually left the Solar System.
Voyager 1 at the Final Frontier
NASA – Voyager from the main NASA site.
Given how easily everyone zips around space in SciFi and how many planets they can visit which are 100% like specific parts of Earth (but not Earth as a whole), it is surprising that no extra-solar planets had been certainly observed until 1992 (an early candidate found in 1988 was not confirmed until 2003) and so far nothing made by man has actually left the Solar System.
Voyager 1 at the Final Frontier
For nearly 35 years, NASA’s Voyager 1 probe has been hurtling toward the edge of the solar system, flying through the dark void on a mission unlike anything attempted before. One day, mission controllers hope, Voyager 1 will leave the solar system behind and enter the realm of the stars—interstellar space.Voyager – The Interstellar Mission from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech.
NASA – Voyager from the main NASA site.
The economics of recycling
When my workplace replaced its computers I volunteered to take them to be recycled. (I was the boss, it was a political campaign organisation, that was the sort of stupid thing you do). They sat in my flat in Homebush Bay. Then when I moved to much smaller accommodation they took up a corner of my parents' place before coming with me when I moved to my present home. Eventually I got round to finding a good place to recycle them...which turned out to be in Homebush Bay a short drive from my old flat.
While I was living there, in a block that was pretty much the last building on the road before the Parramatta River (and no bridge at the end of it) I was puzzled by the amount of traffic that went past at all hours. I surmised there was a brothel or something tucked away in the industrial estate at the end of the road. It turned out there was in fact a collection of recycling depots* down there and the traffic was trucks taking stuff to be saved from wastage.
*(A grove of recycling depots?)
A brief primer on the merits of recycling from The Corner at National Review by Veronique de Rugy. She refers to an article in the Washington Examiner, this is a more up to date link.
Some more links:
"Recycling is the philosophy that everything is worth saving except your time." – Bryan Caplan.
While I was living there, in a block that was pretty much the last building on the road before the Parramatta River (and no bridge at the end of it) I was puzzled by the amount of traffic that went past at all hours. I surmised there was a brothel or something tucked away in the industrial estate at the end of the road. It turned out there was in fact a collection of recycling depots* down there and the traffic was trucks taking stuff to be saved from wastage.
*(A grove of recycling depots?)
A brief primer on the merits of recycling from The Corner at National Review by Veronique de Rugy. She refers to an article in the Washington Examiner, this is a more up to date link.
Some more links:
"Recycling is the philosophy that everything is worth saving except your time." – Bryan Caplan.
I Recycle! by Donald J. Boudreaux.
After I awaken, I shower and dry myself with a towel that I’ve had for a few years. I use this towel day after day. I don’t discard it after one use. When it gets dirty, I toss it in the washing machine to clean it for further use. I recycle my towel.
Recycling from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Recycling Is Garbage by John Tierney, in The New York Times, yes, The New York Times. It was 1996, a different age.
Higgs boson
The first thing to say about the Higgs boson is that the stress is on the first word. Boson is a thing named after a person, not a person who was Higgs' colleague. More importantly it should never have been called the God particle as Br Consomalgno sj explains.
"The name 'the God particle' was given to it as a joke by Leon Lederman," the Vatican astronomer recalled. "It was basically a provocative title for book he was writing on particle physics. He said that if there was a particle that could exist that could explain all the little things we wanted to explain, it would be a gift from God. It is a metaphor and has nothing to do with theology."
(If you click through to that story you will see a picture of something even harder to find than a Higgs boson – a Jesuit brother in a dog collar).
I watched two videos meant to explain the significance of the possible find. They start from different ends. One goes through everything and then arrives at a discussion of the Higgs field. The other starts with the Higgs field and conveys the same information form there. I learnt a few things and learnt more things I would never understand. I also learnt that young physicists like stop motion animation. Some prefer it digital, some prefer it real.
LHC = Large Hadron Collider.