ESA's Long-Term Plan To Investigate the Invisible Universe 26
xiox writes "The European Space Agency (ESA) have decided that its next two large astronomy missions (costing 2bn Euros) will be to study two aspects of the "invisible universe". The first will be a very large X-ray telescope to be launched in 2028. It will study the physics of the hottest and largest structures in the universe, investigating how they formed and evolved. It will also investigate how black holes grow and affect the universe. The second mission, launched in 2034, will be an observatory capable to measure gravitation waves, the stretches and compressions in space-time caused by massive moving systems, such as merging pairs of black holes. Although the final designs are not yet chosen, the two proposed observatories Athena and eLISA are likely choices. BBC News has more information."
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Where? I just don't see them.
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Where? I just don't see them.
You won't, it's a double blind study.
Re:News for Nerds.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, stuff that matters because you're working on it between now and when you're 54. Designing, building, and running big science projects --- in space! --- mean jobs for nerds, whose central career will consist of getting this stuff done. If you think these things don't matter to nerds until the final answer pops out on Slashdot's front page in two or three decades, then you're missing out on a lot of good nerding.
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are you really budgeted 14 years in advance?
no (Score:1)
The Universe: Some Information... (Score:5, Informative)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition of the word "infinite".
Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow, that's big," time. Infinity is just so big that, by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.
It is impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things in from.
See Imports
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there most be a finite number of inhabited worlds. And finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any person you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altarian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. It exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Nigis are not negotiable currency, because Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination.
The Function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn't a mirror big enough- see point one.
Well, in fact there is an awful lot in this, largely because of the total lack of money, trade, banks, art or anything else that might keep all the nonexistent people of the Universe occupied. However, it is not worth embarking on a long discussion of it now because it really is terribly complicated. For further information see Guide chapters seven, nine, ten, eleven, fourteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-one to eighty-four inclusive, and in fact most of the rest of the Guide
Cheap (Score:2)
Of course, it will get derailed by administration, cancelled, resurrected, countractors default, go vastly over budget, etc., etc,
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By giving short-sighted idiots like you an earlier death from stress over the "waste" of effort on aspiring to expand the depth of human knowledge for its own sake rather than simply for some billionaire's profit?
LISA Pathfinder and MOND (Score:5, Informative)
eLisa (a toned-down, less costly, version of the original LISA) requires LISA Pathfinder [wikipedia.org] (a technology demonstration mission). It turns out that LISA Pathfinder can be used to perform the first solar system test [arxiv.org] of MOND [arxiv.org]. This subsidiary test, largely flying under the radar, could potentially confirm (or rule out) the MOND / TeVeS hypothesis, providing an important test of fundamental physics for remarkably little expense.
Re:Gravitational waves (Score:5, Interesting)
Gravitational waves are still theoretical, but an experiment that solidly and unambiguously fails to find them in regions where general relativity predicts they've got to be would itself be a huge discovery (current experiments are still on the margins of "maybe we won't see anything here anyway."). Gravitational waves are "only theoretical," but part of the same theoretical framework that has powerfully predicted a bunch of other stuff with incredible accuracy. Ruling out gravitational waves would require a major overhaul of how we understand gravity works, discarding big chunks of general relativity. I think not finding gravity waves would be a really exciting result for physics, since it would be the first time in a while now that a deeply-entrenched fundamental theory would be overturned.