Hubble Spots Long-Sought Intergalactic Gas 111
hubie writes: "NASA is announcing that Hubble has indirectly detected the long-expected existence of intergalactic hydrogen gas. This is important because it confirms some of the Big Bang models that predict how much hydrogen should have been created. Hubble used a quasar as a light source for spectroscopic measurements. "
If you really want intergalactic gas.... (Score:2)
NASA could have saved a lot of time and trouble looking for intergalactic gasses if they had checked the septic system near the local A&W...
The Second Amendment Sisters [sas-aim.org]
Nasa needs funding for designers (Score:2)
Fuel for Intergalactic Bussard Ramjets? (Score:1)
Re:Nasa needs funding for designers (Score:1)
Good! Another thing... (Score:1)
that's what's left.... (Score:2)
man did that stink.
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Programming, is like sex.
HTML Version (Score:3)
The press releases is available in HTML format (and with an active link to additional information on the Hubble website) here [spaceref.com]. As usual, Spaceref.com [spaceref.com] had this posted yesterday, Slashdot is tad slow on the uptake where space science and exploration is concerned.
Re:Fuel for Intergalactic Bussard Ramjets? (Score:3)
On second thought, that's not such a good idea. I don't think I could take hearing Shatner say "Shiver me timbers!"
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
Re: (Score:1)
That answers part of the question (Score:1)
Once this number is refined, we can calculate how much mass has been consumed by black holes because we think we know how much the universe weighs.
Once we understand how much mass black holes have consumed of our universe, we can plot the expected frequency of different classes of black holes.
Once we have THAT number, we can start figuring out how many black holes should be where, and we can use observed results to produce more evidence for and against theories such as quantum black holes.
This discovery could eventually refine our view of the entire universe! Hot damn!
Re:HTML Version Correction (Score:5)
Slashdot screwed up the links for me somehow (or I screwed up). The press release is here [spaceref.com].
one more down... (Score:1)
Another Step... (Score:2)
This is certainly a long-standing and very interesting question to have addressed (and a kool way to celebrate a ten-year anniversary).
FYI, more information/photos/etc can be found at the space telescope website here [stsci.edu]
us... (Score:1)
Yes I realize this post is just as bad as the rest of yours...
Jainith
kiss my ass "I love you"
Re:HTML Version (Score:1)
haha (Score:1)
lynx? (Score:1)
So Far, So Good... (Score:2)
"Previous observations show that billions of years ago this
missing matter formed vast complexes of hydrogen clouds -- but
since then has vanished. Even Hubble's keen eye didn't see the
hydrogen directly because it is too hot and rarified."
If much of the gas was in plasma form, it should be interesting to see if Chandra can fill in a few more details.
Umm, ahh, ahhh. . . Re:one more down... (Score:1)
He did it on the Monday after the first Sunday, which explains why he had to ask Adam what he and Eve were up to. He was off by M31 at the time.
Yeah, that's the ticket.
Seriously, you'll never convince a certain set of folks that the universe wasn't created, no matter what the evidence. Let 'em believe what they want, as long as they stay the hell out of schools.
Re:HTML Version (Score:2)
Okay, so it was a bit snobby of me. I have had a busy day, forgive me.
I have also submitted a few news stories to slashdot in the past that were posted on Spaceref.com, only to have them rejected, then appear a day later as submitted by someone else and linked to another site. /. is a wonderful website (and my default page) but it can be a frustrating experience. Sometimes I let the frustration get the better of me.
A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:1)
Lets suppose you're standing somewhere in outer space, and, for the sake of the story, we dont have to worry about the little details like food, and water, and oxygen to breathe, and all that.
You're standing somewhere in outer space, and in your hand, you're holding a gigantic steel pole, one light-day long. That is, in order to see the entire pole, you have to wait an entire day for the light from the opposite end of the pole to reach your eyes.
You point it away from you, and wait a day. 24 hours later, you see the entire length of the pole in a straight line..from where it begins in your hand, to the other end, billions of miles away.
You now turn in a complete circle in one spot.
From your point of view, what would the pole look like now? The light from the other end of the poll still has a day left go before it reaches your eyes! From someone else's point of view, what would it look like? And why would it look different to an outside observer?
I'll give a free gift to the first person who gives me a decent explanation to this puzzle. I've asked it of 3 different Astronomy teachers, and all three gave me different answers.
Lets hear some ideas!
Bowie J. Poag
An interesting solution to the dark matter problem (Score:4)
If large ammounts of not only interstellar but intergalactic hydrogen exist out there, it may eliminate the need for "dark matter" in explaining the continued expansion of the universe.
Since we've never been able to prove the existence of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) this does seem to be a more plausable explanation based on our current understanding of physics. However, we need much more information about the ammount of intergalactic hydrogen, it's distribution, and it's density before we can make that judgement.
Speed of Light (Score:1)
Spam the witch ---> sarah_ellis_19@hotmail.com
Re:one more down... (Score:4)
The business of science and scientists is thorough testing and skeptecism, and nearly every discovery/hypothesis/etc brings about published counterarguments probing its weak points and challanging its assumptions.
Not necessarily to put down creationists themselves, but their arguments given are usually just a latching-on to these skeptics criticisms, with only a pseudo-understanding of them or the original issue.
"Scientific" evidence/support articles/books about creation are usually a pretty quick read (though their entertainment value wore off on me some time ago...:).
News from the homefront (Score:2)
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:1)
The pole would have passed through every angle in a 360 degree arc surrounding you. That means that at any time during the next 24 hours, you would be recieving light from some part of the pole that passed through each and every one of those angles. As time progresses, the circle appears to be increasing it's radius, since light from farther parts of the pole is reaching you.
If you want to get technical, you would still be recieving light from when you held the pole in one place, which would appear as a point on the circle (assuming you pointed the pole directly away from your POV). Also, unless you rotated the pole instantly, circle would be more of an inward swirl because of the time difference. You would only be able to percieve this, however, if you moved above or below the plane of rotation.
Re:Fuel for Intergalactic Bussard Ramjets? (Score:1)
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:2)
Bowie, please think about how fast you would be trying to move the end of the pole. What is the half-circumference of a circle with a radius of one light-day? The answer to your puzzle lies in the fact that you just can't do it (not the way you've described).
--
Ian Peters
Oh yeah baby, anywhere in infinite time. (Score:2)
Probally not exactly the fastest way to get ther ("howd you get here? We left after you in a ship that was thought up of about 14 years after you left. Doh!") But it could be the first step to intergalatic conquest.
And the answer is: (Score:4)
If you're going to go ahead and disregard contraints like that and posit instantaneous transportation, then go ahead. But don't be surprised if you end up with a paradox. Nature has a wonderful tendency to resolve physical paradoxes before we get to see them.
Re:one more down... (Score:2)
Not like I subscribe to that theory, but billing off religion by saying science exists is not always a valid line of reason.
Re:An interesting solution to the dark matter prob (Score:1)
No it does not (Score:4)
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:2)
I'm not suprised you got three different answers, as it's not very definitive what you're asking. I can't tell from your post if you believe you yourself have the "answer" to the puzzle, (and you didn't say if you considered any of the answers "decent") but you could answer lots of things about it.... These gedanken experiments (esp. special relativity-related ones) tend to be very sensitive to the point you're trying to make. That is, you put bunch of physical laws on hold to illustrate another one or group of laws/theories. (Getting a person of superhuman speed aside, the pole-and-the-barn experiment requires you to assume some mechanism for closing the barn doors instantly, etc.) So, at the risk of having a long discussion of the barn doors, I'll take a couple angles on your question....
Of course, the pole doesn't matter for the physicist's take on a relativistic gedanken experiment (we just solve for the endpoints and any arbitrary point in between that you want to discuss), and the distance is on the order of 10^10 rather than 10^9 miles if you must refuse cgs.
The impossibility of the steel pole itself aside, you could make mass-energy, angular momentum arguments about the inertia of the pole and the requirements for accelerating it. And energy requirements partially aside, if you wanted to spin it at a human-normal rate, say a turn in a few seconds, relativistic effects/problems appear as you go out along the pole. So if you are referring to what a physicist means when you say what would the pole _look_ like," I could put the lorentz transformations into polar and spew, but I don't think anyone here want to listen to that. Many students/people are interested in, or think they are learning, how a relativistic object would actually _look_, whilst the example neglects relativistic doppler effects, apparent rotation, certain optics, the observers environment and attributes, etc.
As to how it would actually _look_, I'll offer that if you are turning slowly enough to keep the speed of the far end of the pole realistic, since you're looking down one end of it, to you, it _looks_ like a point (or a circle, or whatever the end/crossection of your pole is like). When you spin it around (and it would take you a long time, the time-to-travel of the light won't matter), it will still look like a point.
And the discussion of an outside observer is heavily dependent on assumptions like those above. And I've gone on long enough....
Cheers,
Kurtis
Re:And the answer is: (Score:1)
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:1)
But did the pole move? I could have turned with the pole rotating 360 degrees. Kind of like doing a cartwheel. If so, then nothing looks any different.
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Programming, is like sex.
Where's the joke? (Score:1)
There has to be a great joke in there some where although I can't think of it. Slashdot is letting me down, usually there would be a "Score 3: Funny" somewhere!
Geoff
Fully ionized hydrogen (Score:3)
Supertasks, and a better question: (Score:1)
It is interseting since while an instantaneously closing barn door is not a practical concept, an instantaneous switch (quantum well) is. So:
Suppose you have a light which state is determined by a switch that takes zero time to turn on or off, timed in a halving geometric progression. Thus, the lamp turns on for one second, then off for the next 1/2 second, then on for the next 1/4 second, then off for the next 1/8th and so on. At the end of two seconds, is the lamp on or off?
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:1)
--Ben
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:1)
If you have a pole that long, even the most infinitesimally small movement of your hand would cause some distant portion of the pole to exceed the speed of light, and presumably explode into a shower of x-rays.
So, the question now becomes "What portion of the pole remains visible, and of that part which remains visible, what does it look like?"
Bowie J. Poag
Re:one more down... (Score:1)
That wasn't really my point, tho; I was mostly making an idle comment on the amusing correlation of scientific cosmological arguments and the changing couter-arguments. That creationists have this knack for not only using _scientific_"truth"_ (theory) as the basis for arguments refuting it, but grabbing the latest scientific piece of the puzzle and jumping directly to the whole picture (rather than making predictions of probablilities of the shape of the final picture a la sci). Creationist arguments change with each new scientific discovery/hypothesis and usually contradict the last truth and worldview they had, and generally don't really help any. You can track, say, historical edicts of the Vatican, up thru todays evangelistic subculture. It's, well...reactionary. It's just that, heck, most scientists can make better creationist arguments that most creationists. (Not that those two are necessarily mutually exclusive....)
Nor was I billing off religion, nor even necessarily saying that science "exists" or is correct.
What topic was this on anyway...? <g>
Cheers,
K
Re:Where's the joke? (Score:1)
Sorry but with a subject like gas you are going to have to put up with toilet humor.
I hear the gas is left over from the last Terrance and Philip episode.
Blame Canada
Re:Supertasks, and a better question: (Score:3)
Even if you have an instantaneous switch, that is, a switch that turns on or off instantly once you get the photon (or whatever triggers the cahnge) to the switch, you will probably reach a saturation point at which the switch is actually faster than whatever you are switching with.
An easy way to imagine this is to rephrase the question as: "What if we make the switch toggle as fast as it can?" Somewhere there is going to be a limiting factor and the switch is going to oscillate at some frequency. Then you'll probably have some kind of light (or EMF) source.
However, another interesting take off from the idea of an instantaneous switch is the concept I like to think of as "instant eternity". What if, instead of a switch which toggles at increases rates, you have some space-time phenomena (a black hole maybe) which causes the observer to experience time twice at an exponential rate? This is somewhat the opposite of time dialation where time slows. So the first second I experience is 1/2 second to you, the next second I experience is 1/4 second to you, and so on. I would in effect experience an eternity or an infinite time passage while you would only experience a finite time passage.
The interesting thing about this is that it could happen. All that has to happen is that the entire universe has to accelerate away from me as I remain at rest such. That's pretty improbable, but maybe there is some shortcut to this. The point is, there is a physically possible way to do this, only we need a technology to make it practical. Suppose there is such a way. Now what if different people used this technology, but each one used it at a different time. Would they all wind up in the same place?
Re:Fuel for Intergalactic Bussard Ramjets? (Score:1)
*(Like Niven & Pournelle. You may flame when ready, Gridley.)
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:1)
Re:us... (Score:1)
Re:Supertasks, and a better question: (Score:1)
Hence, while your light switch is undeterminable at or past one second, there is a limit to how small the time between switches is, makeing a time a two seconds detminable, once you know that limit.
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:1)
Bowie J. Poag
Re:one more down... (Score:2)
Creationist arguments are always pretty amusing. They're a constant backpeddaling of partially-informed responses to old news as the science constantly pushes back the frontiers of understanding. A chronological summary of such arguments over the centuries is an interesting, and amusing study (particularly, for juxtaposition, if you know some astronomical and other scientific history).
Many creationists (myself included) do not view scientific discoveries as a threat to their faith.
If you think about it, there is little difference between the Big Big and any other creation story: a concentrated point of pure energy was the source of everything we see today.
The only difference betweeen the Big Bang and creationIST stories is that in the creationist's story, the "bang" was a form of conscienceness and expression. Proving or disproving this theory is impossible. I mean, if I argue that every sub-atomic particle is a piece of a vast conscieness, explaining to me the scientific reasons for the particle's behavior doesn't disprove my theory. Just like explaining the latest discovery in biochemistry to a thinking person doesn't disprove their theory that they are a conscience being, but it does explains how.
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:2)
The X-rays from a black hole are from some other mechanism; perhaps atoms banging into each other (which is how x-rays are created on earth).
...phil
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:1)
Yes, but once your pole is moving at the speed of light [heh], you aren't attempting to accelerate it any longer.
Also, once it's at the speed of light and has infinite mass, it therefore has infinite inertia and will continue to move at the speed of light forever. If I'm sadly mistaken, someone please explain to me why.
Re:NATALIE PORTMAN HOWTO (Score:2)
Re:Fuel for Intergalactic Bussard Ramjets? (Score:1)
How am I supposed to hallucinate with all these swirling colors distracting me?
So that's what that smell was (Score:1)
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:2)
Where is my free gift
Spyky
I am a creationist (Score:2)
How am I supposed to hallucinate with all these swirling colors distracting me?
What about that other "discovery"? (Score:2)
I always thought that the amount of mass in the universe was directly related to the curvature of the universe. Too little mass means the universe is open and will expand forever; too much mass means the universe will eventually collapse; just the right amount, and the universe will expand at a constantly decreasing rate, and end up effectively stable.
Physicists have always kind of hoped for the third option, because it makes the math easy. That's why they've been looking for the "extra mass", i.e. dark matter. Now it looks like they've found the extra mass, so we can prove that the universe is flat.
But didn't they just report [slashdot.org] last week that the universe is open, not flat? Doesn't that contradict this new result?
...
Ahem. And the answer is, no, the report last week also said that the universe is flat. I misremembered.
Well, I'll post anyway, just in case anyone finds it interesting. Besides, I'd like to know if my understanding of this whole question is correct.
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:1)
mass, and mass bends space through gravity, and
with an infinite mass, you would collapse the whole
universe. Do you even understand the word infinite?
Take a small object of about a gram. Now think about
how many atoms are in that object. It's on the order
of 10^23 or so. Bill Gates at his richest only had
about $10^11, so SQUARE his money. That's about
how many atoms are in a gram. Now think about how
many grams are in the earth. The earth weighs
about 6x10^21 tons, or on the order of 10^27 grams.
There's about as many atoms in a gram as there
are kilograms in the earth, making about 10^48 or
so atoms in the earth. Now look at the sun. Not
directly, we don't want to destroy your eyes. The
Sun is about 1,000,000 times the size of our
Earth. It's probably not as dense as the Earth since
it's mostly hydrogen and helium, or it might be more
dense since it's so compressed, but that puts us
at about 10^54 atoms in the sun. Now at night, go
out and look at the stars. If you live where it's
dark, you can probably see several thousand with
the naked eye, but one estimate I've heard for
our galaxy is about a billion stars, or 10^9,
which puts us up to about 10^63 atoms in our
galaxy, not counting dark matter. Then there's the
estimate that there are around a billion galaxies
in the known universe, or another 10^9, which
puts us at about 10^72 atoms. OK, so my numbers
aren't exact, but they're not for coming up with
an exact number. They're there to help give an
appreciation for how big our universe is (I think
I heard an estimate for the number of electrons
in the universe of 10^87, so I know my result is
pretty far off). My point? 10^72 is a huge number,
but it's nowhere close to infinity. In fact, you
can imagine a googleplex of universes (a googleplex
is so large it can't be written. It's represented
by 10^google, or 10^10^100), but it is still dwarfed
by infinity. Trying to claim something could have
infinite mass is preposterous, unless the universe
itself turns out to be infinite, in which case I
guess it would have infinite mass, but there would
be no way to prove that it is infinite. I hope that
makes sense.
It looks black (Score:1)
If the pole is thin, then it has a low surface area, and thus (assuming it is suffciently cool that it stays in one piece), it does not emit sufficient radiation to be visible beyond a few hundred miles, let alone an entire light day.
If the pole has sufficient surface area to be visible, it also has sufficient mass to collapse under its own weight to form a black hole, and so emits no visible radiation (yes it emits radiation, but it isn't visible to the human eye).
In either case, any portion of the pole beyond a short distance away from you looks completely black.
Long-Sought Intergalactic Gas... (Score:1)
Other preliminary research also indicates that the 'I Love You' worm mail was perpetrated solely to prevent the further distribuion of this 'Katz Gas', as it is known. One high level source, who wishes to remain anonymous claims, "It's only a theory right now, but it stands to reason that by bogging down the internet with more e-mails, and having the larger part of the 'Slashdot community' busy handling problems and bashing Microsoft, the spread of 'Katz Gas' could be minimized."
We'll continue monitoring this phemonenon, as it is noted that other 'Katz Gas' leaks will happen on a regular basis, often choking people with lack of wit and reason. Several
Sailing is okay for the bay, but... (Score:1)
You're better off with antimatter-driven rockets, laser-driven lightsails, or the like. With a proton-antiproton annihilation drive (they annihilate to 3 pi-mesons, of which two are charged and can be directed with a magnetic nozzle) you can go between Sol and Alpha Centauri in about a year ship-time (given enough fuel, of course). Using a microwave sail (Star Wisp) you could accelerate a tiny probe at hundreds of G's with a microwave beam and get it to a healthy fraction of c before leaving the solar system; this would get you data from the vicinity of other stars before the end of your academic career. Magsails and such would be great for getting around the Solar System, but utterly useless for travel between stars.
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This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic
Re:Supertasks, and a better question: (Score:1)
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Programming, is like sex.
hey! (Score:1)
That's a lame argument (OT) (Score:1)
All you have to do to accept a 12 billion year-old universe, a 4.3 billion year old Earth, and all that is to assume that God is not malicious and wouldn't play fast and loose with physical laws and other evidence so as to make the world appear to be something it is not. Why would you believe in a God who lies with His creation, anyway? Sounds more like the other guy.
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This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:1)
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This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic
Re:IMPORTANT UPDATE! (Score:1)
O.K.,O.K. This really was an important discovery.It'll have a lasting effect on theories
on how the universe was formed.It'll piss a lot of people off who disagree with science about creation.It'll provide science with fuel to continue more focused research and buy a lot o'
raisin pie for a lot of nearly out of work researchers.We now can tell how the universe was formed.
We can now also tell how the universe was deformed.16 years ago at that fateful beer and
chilli feed.I saw many a man burst into tears,grown women faint as the wallpaper peeled.
Far away on the horizon faerie penguins saw
a mushroom cloud appear as my flaming sphincter
poot fourth.Hell,fifth and sixth even.But,Praise Bob,as the ozone layer ruptured like a zit this methane entity was sucked into the vaccuum of space by Bobs own divine will.There to this day
it roams the universe destroying whole alien civilizations as it seeks the hydrogen
at the end of the universe.Oh the humanity!what noxious gasses passes from our asses.As tho' we'd
dined on turpentine and blackstrap molasses.Singes
your hair and cracks your glasses.
Re:Fuel for Intergalactic Bussard Ramjets? (Score:1)
The question, I suppose, is what you could use for a keel. I wonder if anything like this would be useful .... it seems mainly intra-solar system.
Re:Fully ionized hydrogen (Score:2)
Re:Fuel for Intergalactic Bussard Ramjets? (Score:1)
confirmation? (Score:1)
i'm not sure how this "confirms" the models.... isn't the probability that we have it right approximately 0.0000? it seems to me that "confirming" any theoretical hypothesis is impossible, given that there are infinitely many viable explanations for given phenomena.
predictive value may factor heavily in how much we value a given hypothesis, but it is only a value along with elegance, fit to the current data, ease of calculation, relevance to current research, etc.
jon
Re:No it does not (Score:2)
No WIMPS (Score:2)
Not true... (Score:1)
mh
acceptance (Score:2)
God does not lie.
Josh
Re:Fuel for Intergalactic Bussard Ramjets? (Score:1)
Re:Long-Sought Intergalactic Gas... (Score:1)
No it doesn't (Score:2)
For a start, this gas that they have detected is nothing to do with the requirement for dark matter of some kind at all - it merely means that we can detect all of the regular, baryonic matter that we believe to be present based on our calculations. We still need dark matter to account for the stability of galaxies and so on.
Anyway, dark matter doesn't have to be WIMPs in particular. There are other options - massive neutrinoes, MACHOs and so on. Don't get tied up into thinking there's only one alternative.
Re:Fuel for Intergalactic Bussard Ramjets? (Score:1)
Another small misconception... (Score:2)
What's new here is that they have detected highly-ionized oxygen without a substantial neutral couterpart. There must be a substantial amount of ionized hydrogen that is associated as a result.
Unlike star-forming regions (like the Orion nebula) where ionized hydrogen is more easily detected, the ionized hydrogen associated with this state of oxygen (it's missing 5 electrons!) is extremely difficult to detect directly. The high temperatures and low densities in these regions keep the protons and electrons from easily rejoining and producing the tell-tale cascade of light from an ionized gas that illuminates star-forming regions. Any neutral hydrogen which does manage to form is quickly rammed by high speed particles and re-ionized, escaping our detection by other techniques.
As a sidenote, these kinds of highly-ionized regions are found close by in our own galaxy. In the most obvious cases the gas has been heated to great temperatures by supernovae explosions. The sun is actually sitting in one, affectionately known as the Local Bubble [nasa.gov].
These new regions found in intergalactic space may be fossil remants of early, vigorous star-formation in distant galaxies that has been ejected into intergalactic space. Or, they maybe something entirely new!
mh
Re:Fully ionized hydrogen (Score:1)
But you are right, whether hydrogen is a proton or an atom is an issue, but it is mostly semantic.
A perfectly rigid body (Score:1)
Only problem with this is that it is very hard to find a perfectly rigid body that large...if nto impossible. Although I do believe that most sub atomic particles are considered to be totally rigid particles.
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:1)
For a more interesting effect, use a laser pointer and spin around quickly. Then look at the spiral of light reflected from the dust in your light-day wide environment.
Re:That's a lame argument (OT) (Score:1)
How am I supposed to hallucinate with all these swirling colors distracting me?
Re:Oh yeah baby, anywhere in infinite time. (Score:2)
Cartoon
French
Re:Good! Another thing... (Score:1)
Re:one more down... (Score:1)
I once read a creationist article ...
They are full of it, aren't they? If you want other hoots of laughter, check out the alt.origins archive;
The archive does treat the creationists with repect, though reading the details shows that they really do have a grasp of reality that lacks opposible thumbs!
Re:A brain puzzle for you.. (Score:2)
...phil
Not a new discovery at all (Score:2)
If large ammounts of not only interstellar but intergalactic hydrogen exist out there, it may eliminate the need for "dark matter" in explaining the continued expansion of the universe.
If there wasn't an appreciable amount of intergalactic hydrogen out there, my thesis would have been very dull indeed, since it hinged on imaging the distribution of high-temperature (around 10^9K) electrons trapped in the gravity well found in clusters of galaxies. There the group I was working with used radio interferometry techniques to produce maps of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect like this one [u-strasbg.fr] . This matter can also be 'seen' by it's effect on gravitational lensing, where the additional matter affects the strength of the lensing. So the presence of this ionized hydrogen is well known - those electrons had to come from somewhere! Using highly ionized oxygen as a tracer for fully ionized hydrogen is the interesting step here, and I hope they have some really solid connection between the two because this entire publication rests on the assumption that oxygen is accurately tracing the hydrogen.
There is a bias in astronomy that unless you prove it in the optical wavelengths you haven't proved it at all, and this looks like one of those announcements.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Actually 'posted' on /. at 7:47 AM Yesterday (Score:2)
I don't know what time Spaceref.com posted it, but I know that I posted it here [slashdot.org] on the already started Hubble Thread [slashdot.org] yesterday morning at 7:47am.
SlashDot is a community effort, you have to credit the posts to already started threads in addition to new threads announced by Rob & Hemos, et al.
Meanwhile, we now have two new Astronomy threads started this morning, but none on the REAL Astronomical (and Astrological!) story of the day [yahoo.com].
Re:That's a lame argument (OT) (Score:2)
The Noachian flood has too many problems to be an acceptable answer. This is the wrong venue to discuss them all (try talk.origins), but I'll name one - a flood of the scale you would need to handle the amount of water required would show a distinct amount of hydrologic sorting (heavy items like rocks moved less than light items like sand). That hydrologic sorting is evident nowhere. If you invoke another miracle to explain it's lack, then you're saying that God lied to cover up the evidence.
...phil
Question about ionized hydrogen (Score:2)
Gas in Space? Ethyl? It's BEER! Free Beer! (Score:4)
Well, not beer exactly. But they did find alcohol: ethyl alcohol, to be precise, the active ingredient in all major alcoholic drinks (antifreeze Jell-O shots, quite obviously, are exempted from this category). Three British scientists, Drs. Tom Millar, Geoffrey MacDonald and Rolf Habing, discovered this interstellar Everclear floating in a gas cloud in the contellation of Aquila (sign of the Eagle, the mascot of Anheuser-Busch! Hmmmmm).
Millar and his compatriots have estimated the size of this gas cloud at approximately 1,000 times the diameter of our own solar system; there's enough alcohol out there, they say, to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer. These guys are British, mind you; if you were to translate this in terms of American beer (which the British, with some justification, regard as fermented club soda), the amount of potential brewski just about doubles.
In human terms: remember that double-keg party you threw at the end of your Junior year in college (the second Junior year)? Imagine throwing that same party, every eight hours, for the next 30 billion years. You'd STILL have beer left over. And boy, would YOUR bathroom be a mess! Simply put, no one could ever drink 400 trillion trillion pints of beer, except maybe Buffalo Bills fans.
The sheer volume of all this alcohol begs the question of how it managed to get out there in the first place. Despite the simplifying effect it has on the human brain, ethyl alcohol is a reasonably complex molecule: two carbon atoms, five hydrogen atoms, and a hydroxyl radical, all cavorting together in beery camaraderie. It's not a compund that is going to spontaneously arise out of the cold depths of space. It can lead to speculation: What is this cloud?
1.It's God's beer. After all, He worked for six days creating the universe, and on the seventh day, He rested. And after you've had a hard week at the office, don't YOU grab a beer? Since man is made in God's image, it could be that this cloud is the remaining evidence of the first, and best, Miller Time.
2.It's Purgatory ("400 trillion trillion bottles of beer on the wall, 400 trillion trillion bottles of beer! Take one down, pass it around, three hundred ninety-nine septillion, nine hundred ninety-nine sextillion, nine hundred ninety-nine quintillion, nine hundred ninety-nine quadrillion, nine hundred ninety-nine trillion, nine hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine, bottles of beer on the wall!")
3.Proof of an undeniably highly advanced but chronically dipsomaniac alien society. This particular theory is shaky, however: it's reasonable to assume that if the aliens were going to construct a nebula of alcohol, they'd also have large clouds of Beer Nuts and pretzels nearby for snacking. Advanced spectral analysis has yet to locate them.
The truth of the matter, however, is far more prosaic. In the middle of this gas cloud is a young and no doubt quite inebriated star. As the star heats up and contracts, sucking the dust and gas of the cloud into a smaller area, complex molecules form as a result of greater interaction between the elements. Ethyl alcohol forms on small motes of dust in the cloud, and then, as the motes angle in closer towards the star and heat up, the alcohol is released from the motes in gaseous form.
And there you have it: an alcohol cloud. Or, as Dave Bowman might say, "My God! It's full of booze!"
Enough with the science lesson, you say. Just tell me how to GET there! Sorry, Chuckles. You can't get there from here. The gas cloud (which, by the way, has the utterly romantic name of "G34.3") is 10,000 light years away: 58 quadrillion miles. Even if you hijacked the shuttle and headed out with thrusters on full, by the time you got there, the guy in Purgatory would be done with his tune. You'd have had time to work up a powerful thirst, but you'd also be, in a word, dead.
No, the Space Beer Cloud will have to wait for the far future, when men can leap through the universe at warp speed. One can only imagine what they will do when they get there:
Captain Kirk: My....GOD! Sulu! What....is....THAT?
Sulu: It's a free floating cloud of alcohol, sir.
Kirk: And we've just run out of Romulan Ale! Could it be a trap, Bones?
Bones: Damn it, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a distiller of fine spirits!
Kirk: We need that booze! But if we fly through that cloud, we'll be too drunk to drive!
Spock: May I remind you, Captain, that I am a Vulcan. We are a race of designated drivers.
Kirk: Well, all righty, then. Spock, drive us through! Bones and I will be out on the hull. With our mouths... open!
To boldly drink what no man has drunk before.
More details (Score:3)
The problem is that we can only directly see matter which is giving off light (i.e. stars). How do we study the cold, non-glowing matter in the universe? The solution is that you find a very bright, very far away source to act as a light bulb. In this case it is a quasar. The quasar itself it not important. If there is anything in between us and the quasar, it might block some of the light. However, this is tricky because different matter aborbs different light.
Normal hydrogen (one proton and one electron) is good at absorbing some visible light. When the light hits, it energizes the electron. After some random time, the electron calms down and re-emits the light, but usually not in the same direction from which it came. Thus, you lose a lot of light along the original line of sight.
However, in hot gas, there is thermal energy to knock the electrons entirely free. (picture hydrogen atoms smacking into each other very hard) In this case, the protons and electrons alone are terrible at blocking incoming light: they are nearly transparent. The trick that many spectroscopists use is to look for "tracers." A tracer is a substance that coexists with hydrogen but is much less transparent.
In this case, oxygen is the tracer. Oxygen is usually about 1500 times less common than hydrogen in our solar system and about 6000 times less commmon in typical interstellar gas clouds in our galaxy. One of the difficulties in this work is to figure out what is the ratio of oxygen to hydrogen. For intergalactic gas it is almost certainly lower than the above numbers (because oxygen comes primarily from stars and there are virtually no stars in intergalactic space). If you think you know this number, you can extrapolate how much hydrogen is there by measuring the amount of oxygen. We can guess this ratio by looking at the ratio of oxygen to other elements, like iron, nitrogen, etc -- whatever is available to be seen. But it's *very* difficult work.
Previous studies found tons of cold, normal hydrogen, but this one is special because it looked for the hot gas and found it.
Chris Dolan, astro grad student
Re:Another Step... (Score:2)
the _quantities_ of the interglalactic gas
On the contrary, the whole point is to study the quantities of of the gas. For many, many years folks have been studying neutral (cold) hydrogen and measuring its quantity by seeing how much quasar light was absorbed.
This work is special because it extends to hot hydrogen as well. The problem is that hot hydrogen is almost totally transparent, so instead of looking for the hydrogen itself, you look for other matter whoch co-exists with the hydrogen. This study (by Todd Trip [my former officemate], Ed Jenkins and Blair Savage [who is down the hall from me]) found intergalactic oxygen. They measured the abundance of the oxygen and, by estimating the ratio of oxygen to hydrogen, they computed the quantity of hydrogen. One of the hardest parts is getting this ratio, but Todd is a very smart guy and hard worker, so I'll bet he's done it well.
Chris Dolan
Re: epistimlogical certainity (Score:2)
You should read about the "Sokal affair" [nyu.edu] - you'd find it entertaining.
Links galore (Score:2)
Chris Dolan
actually, that's why this is cool (Score:2)
If you're really interested in this stuff, check out the paper "Where are the baryons?" by Cen and Ostriker -- sorry I can't give you a better reference, but hunt on astro-ph or the Harvard abstract service [harvard.edu] and you'll find it.
Re:What about that other "discovery"? (Score:2)
Remember that we already "know" (or have strong constraints) on the overall baryon density from Big Bang nucleosynthesis (from measurements of the ratios of certain light elements). That's how we can make a statement like "a big fraction of the baryons in the universe are in this gas."
Re:No it doesn't (Score:2)
it merely means that we can detect all of the regular, baryonic matter that we believe to be present based on our calculations.
Actually this is suggesting that there may be still baryonic mass out there that we _can't_ detect. I've always considered WIMPs to be a hack at describing something we obviously don't fully understand. They're pretty much using patch-work to show how everything operates. I personally believe that the majority of the mass in the Universe is just dead white dwarves that are so cool that we can't detect them. I believe this because the halos of quasars (which didn't really have "halos" since they weren't barred or spiralled) were so active with young zero age main sequence stars that they had to have gone somewhere. It may be just as radical a theory, but I saw a talk a couple weeks ago that has me convinced.