Hubble Space Telescope Spots the Farthest Known Star (engadget.com) 74
Researchers using Hubble space telescope data have spotted Icarus (aka MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1), a blue supergiant whose light was emitted when it was 9 billion light years away from Earth -- over 100 times farther than the previous record-setter. According to Engadget, "They captured the star thanks to a rare, ideal gravitational lensing effect where the star's light was magnified not only by the gravity of an in-between galaxy cluster 5 billion light years from Earth, but by a star inside that cluster." From the report: Observers had been keeping close watch on the cluster since 2014, when they'd detected a supernova that turned out to be present in a galaxy 9 billion light years away. They realized Icarus was present in April 2016, when a point of light near the supernova seemed to change brightness. Don't get too attached to this new discovery. With this kind of distance, Icarus has long-since turned into a neutron star or black hole. The findings are still advancing science in ways you might not expect, however. As the Guardian noted, the Icarus study ruled out a theory that dark matter consists of black holes. If that had been the case, they would have brightened Icarus even more. And if nothing else, this proves that humanity can detect more than just the largest and brightest celestial objects at these kinds of distances.
The Hubble saw _THAT_?! (Score:5, Insightful)
If that old thing can see something so unique and far away, I can only imagine what the James Webb Space Telescope is ultimately capable of.
If it ever launches.
Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Hubble isn't the telescope doing 99% of the magnification work here. The galaxy cluster and the star within are the two powerful telescopes being used.
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Modding needs a confirmation box, selected redundant instead of insightful. Sorry man. Posting to undo..
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I wonder how long the alignment between Icarus, the intermediate galaxy cluster and our observation point will remain. Things move in space. How does the 'field of view' of the gravity lens compare with the motion of our solar system around the Milky Way?
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Yeah, and I'm one of them.
Blasted diet.
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My monthly deduction goes to help feed a child in Cambodia.
...or so you were told. (possibly...)
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WFIRST
We are going to rename it USAFIRST. So Trump will support it.
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If it ever launches.
It's better to thoroughly test it while it's still on the ground . . . instead of having to send up a Geek Squad repair crew on the Space Shuttle, like we had to do with the Hubble.
Oh, yeah . . . we don't have the Space Shuttle anymore.
If there's trouble with the Webb, we'll have to politely ask our good friends the Russians for help.
Or maybe the Chinese.
Has India done any manned flight yet . . . ?
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Why? They can't get to the Earth/Sun L2 point with any manned vehicle they've ever built.
Neither have they.
No. And if they had, they wouldn't be capable of going beyond LEO either.
Note that since the retirement of Apollo, NOONE has had the ability to send people beyond LEO. And even Apollo wasn't capable of going to the Earth/Sun L2.
Note
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Note further that NOONE is even planning such capability anytime soon (by "soon" I mean before 2050 or so).
That's not really true; I'm pretty sure that all three of NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin are planning such capability before 2050. Only the latter two plan it to have a reasonable price tag, though.
Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Hubble saw _THAT_?! (Score:5, Interesting)
If that old thing can see something so unique and far away
I still don't understand how they can determine distances of such far-out objects. Yes I am aware of standard candles, and that we "know" how far away they are based on observed brightness. But observed brightness isn't just impacted by distance, it is also impacted by the size of the object. So how can we be so sure that these standard candles are not bigger or smaller than we assume they are?
Are the distances simply so large, that a standard candle would need to be exponentially larger/smaller than our assumed size in order to significantly impact the calculated distance?
Standard candles are things that have a fixed total brightness (or at least a brightness that we can work out independent of their size).
For instance a certain type of supernova is believed to happen when a white dwarf star, slowly accreting matter from a companion, finally gets too massive to support itself and collapses into a neutron star. Regardless of the mass of the original white dwarf, this mass at which this collapse happens is pretty much the same, and so the total brightness of this type of supernova is more or less constant.
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Slashdot should avoid linking to such silly sites. (Score:2)
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WTF?
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I for one welcome our new I.T. closet cleaner [youtu.be] overlord.
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It seems to be due to the use of a click-jacking defense best-practice: https://www.owasp.org/index.ph... [owasp.org]
Unfortunately this is inconvenient for NoScript users.
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Unfortunately this is inconvenient for NoScript users.
Noscript users? In 2018?Who wouldn't want to trust javascript?
Re:No grav lensing (Score:5, Informative)
Re: No grav lensing (Score:1)
Space is bent by gravity, not light. Light then takes the shortest path through the curved space time.
Please take Astrophysics 101 before ever posting again.
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1. There is no Astrophysics 101, Astrophysics is a 400 level course. 2. I have taken that course. 3. Space curvature is something you learn in Physics, when you learn special and general relativity.
Mod parent up! Reinmannian space FTW!
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I have to thank you for that link, the Flat Earthers have really become stale (I mean, let's be honest here, they just circle-jerk around the same arguments just like the religious nuts) and debunking them is starting to bore people. This should provide material for at least a few months.
Re:No grav lensing (Score:4)
It's curious to watch people pretending today like there is only one way to bend starlight. The current craze over gravitational lensing actually began with a panic by mainstream astronomers ...
Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science
Halton Arp
If you actually review discussions of the original observation, it's very clear that the astronomers were not considering any alternative hypotheses ...
The Impact of Gravitating Lensing on Astrophysics, Martin J. Rees Institute of Astronomy, Madingley Road, Cambridge, CB3 OHA
The problem, of course, is that Halton Arp -- Edwin Hubble's protege -- very much was able to produce an alternative hypothesis (based upon ejection from active galactic nuclei), and once he suggested it in a published work, he was removed from his telescope time.
The following quote seems to reveal the secret sauce of micro-lensing:
Gravitational Lensing: An Astrophysical Tool
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There's a big difference between "there might be another reason" and "let's listen to a crackpot tell us his fairy tales that will fundamentally change what we know about the universe".
The whole shit is based on the ideas of a psychiatrist, I wouldn't be surprised if he pulled it off knowing more about how to trick humans into believing you than astronomy.
Re:No grav lensing (Score:4)
Halton Arp was hardly a "crackpot". He was Edwin Hubble's protege, and both Arp and Hubble were together skeptical of the now-accepted interpretation for redshift. The mainstream moved ahead with that interpretation regardless.
Up to the point where Arp published his paper demonstrating that the assumption that redshift must have only one interpretation was wrong (of course removing the most important argument for the Big Bang), he was considered the world's leading authority on disrupted galaxies. In fact, those galaxies are still labeled by their "Arp number" to this day.
Once he started pitching the argument that galaxies also have an intrinsic redshift value which from observations appears to derive from their age, he was removed from his telescope time. This was actually part of a much larger historical context where Caltech seized the Palomar telescope which was up to that point jointly operated with the Carnegie Foundation. Once they took control of that machine, they made sure that only research which supported the Big Bang hypothesis could be done on it ...
Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science
Halton Arp
You might consider looking more carefully at the actual history for how we've arrived at this conclusion of a Big Bang.
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The crackpot I'm talking about is the person the site cites as its authority, David Talbott. A man so important that he didn't even get his own Wikipedia page, so I can only link to other sources. Let's not take the ones that "slander" him as the crackpot he is, let's use his entry in the Velikovsky Encyclopedia [velikovsky.info].
Velikovsky [wikipedia.org] was by the way the psychiatrist who invented the woo we're talking about here.
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David Talbott is the only person -- academics included -- to ever tell the complete history for how astrophysicists came to adopt magnetohydrodynamics as the model of choice for explaining cosmic plasmas [coincider.com]. This single act, alone, is profoundly historical, because the story is sufficiently awkward that academics refuse to tell it.
Velikovsky was the first person to predict that Venus' temperature should be hot, and he did so at a time when the entire scientific community assumed Venus should be much like the
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Ya know, orbital mechanics isn't dealing with working on the car that SpaceX launched...
How, tell me, should a planet not only move across the orbits of several other planets without disturbing them AT ALL but then suddenly change its velocity enough to actually change its orbit? Do you have a faint idea just how much energy is necessary for something like this?
And sorry, backing up this woo with some Chinese woo doesn't make it any better. If you dig deep enough, you find all sorts of stories in the variou
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Re: "How, tell me, should a planet not only move across the orbits of several other planets without disturbing them AT ALL but then suddenly change its velocity enough to actually change its orbit? Do you have a faint idea just how much energy is necessary for something like this?"
Who says that the planets were not disturbed at all? Plato clearly states the fact that they were indeed disturbed, and further, that all of mythology is an attempt to convey this event [google.com]:
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You honestly base the hypothesis of a movement of planets on mythological stories written by a people that could not even have identified such a movement as what it would have been even if they had seen it?
Sorry, but I'll leave you here.
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It really seems, from conversations with people who have been on Slashdot since the early years, that the low quality of discussions which have dominated for the past 10 years or so has caused the best contributors to leave this platform. Here's an example of the kind of conversations we see in other places on the topic of the Electric Universe. This comment was attached to a Thunderbolts Project video on youtube ...
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I was not aware of this fascinating field of pseudoscience. Those refractive lensing/electric universe topics seem to be confined to the echo-chambers of a few websites, linking to papers by authors with degrees in irrelevant fields, posted in pay-to-publish journals.
These topics have creationism's alternate simplified explanations for everything, global warming deniers' hubris, with the ludicrousness and conspiratorial thinking of Flat Earth proponents. It's a sort of trifecta of pseudoscience.
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Umm, I can see that you've pasted that quote in various forums before, as are most of your posts -- mainly a mashup of tangentially related quotes. But regardless, I'll bite...
From what I can tell, that quote -- which originates from https://www.marxist.com/crisis... [marxist.com] -- goes on to mention dark matter, then completely misrepresenting its evidence. For sake of convenience, Wikipedia lists some of the major ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. If the Electric Universe model wants to be taken as real scienc
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It isn't lazy - it is a really common pattern in "conspiracy theory" arguments. It's nuts.
A lot of his argument is about people-problems rather than physics.
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Re: " If the Electric Universe model wants to be taken as real science then it needs to have the explanatory and predictive power necessary to account for all of these evidences at least as well as dark matter."
The answer to the riddle of dark matter is as follows:
(1) At the interstellar scale, gravity is a localized force. This should be common sense, for if the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, the next nearest star would generally be around 4 miles away (this analogy goes by the name of the "Burnham [controvers...cience.com]
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1) This is why individual stars far apart don't orbit each other, just like planets far apart don't orbit each other. Stars orbit around that which is gravitationally dominant to them, which is either the gravitational center if a compact star cluster, or the gravitational center of the galaxy it resides in.
2) You're confusing proofs with an inability to falsify. Proofs are for mathematics and philosophy. Science deals with evidence, and progresses by making theories successively better approximate observed
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(1) Notice what neither you nor anybody else in the mainstream ever talks about: There must be some typical distance between stars at which they stop interacting with one another. What is this distance? I, and some others, have argued that the typical force of 1.5 x 10-14 Earth gee's meets this requirement. This is a completely inconsequential force, and nobody should be attempting to construct a cosmology based upon forces like this. All of you are wasting your time. We can already see that nothing wi
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1) Everybody in the field understands the strength of gravity. Cosmology is based on it. It's hard to grasp the quantities involved, because they can be extremely large or extremely small. The attraction of one star for another is extremely small, but there's a lot of stars, and a lot of time for a small acceleration to act on a star.
What you are saying is that cosmology is improperly derived. Not just that it's wrong in fact, but that the math is wrong. To do this, you need to look at the math and
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Re: "What we have is theories that have made lots of verified predictions, and which have survived lots of falsification attempts."
You are pointing to the accuracy and precision of the mathematics of Relativity, while glossing over the fact that Einstein lifted all of this math from the aether theorists. The debate over Relativity has always been over the physical inference, not the accuracy and precision of the mathematics. There are countless examples, but here is just one:
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To take one obvious issue, relativity is self-consistent. It can logically be true. It does require ditching or modifying concepts like time, space, and simultaneity, but that's perfectly logical. Einstein fit his physical inference to the mathematics, and then had a theory of physics based on that math. Physics has been based on assumptions and mathematics before and since.
The basic thing is that relativity has made a good many predictions about the physical world, and has been confirmed time and ag
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Re: "People claim relativity's true because it explains and has predicted a lot of things, and nobody's come up with anything that contradicts it."
The truth of the situation is that there is no real need for absolute consensus upon an inference which exists at the very edge of our ability to sense and judge what is going on.
To provide a very real-world example, I have a close (surprisingly young) electrical engineer friend who has been working tirelessly towards the full unification of aether with the Elect
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Science is built by people with differing views, and physics in particular has been interested in new ideas. If you can't get any acceptance, you need to ask yourself what you're doing wrong.
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1) Hmm, I used the algorithm you mentioned earlier for reaching that number, and the gravitational force between Alpha Centauri A+B and Proxima Centauri came out as 4.40 x 10E-13 "Earth gee's" at their current distance of about 13,000 AU. It's a magnitude above what you call "a completely inconsequential force," yet Proxima seems to be in orbit around them as per this paper: https://www.aanda.org/articles... [aanda.org]. I don't see how gravitational interactions would cease shortly after this point, especially as star
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Re: "But for the paradigm-shifting hypotheses to deserve serious attention they need to be robust enough to explain and predict what the current leading theory does, and preferably some of its shortcomings, in a falsifiable manner. So I find the Electrical Universe model trying to explain way too much with sporadic and tangentially related data."
All ideas obviously begin in an archaic state. I try to focus on scientific controversies more broadly, so I don't really want to leave the impression that the Ele
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It seems that we can neither convince each other through arguments, nor come to much of an agreement. I tried to explain why I think the scientific community regards Electric Universe as yet another pseudoscience, and will continue to do so until its proponents changes their approach to research.
See you around.
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Ultimately, there is no need to agree. And if you look at how the history of science has played out, what you will clearly observe is that science benefits enormously from the existence of rational disagreement and debate. My general approach is to delay judgment on controversies for as long as possible, because what I observe as an anti-pattern in domains like cosmology where uncertainty abounds is that people trend towards judging prematurely. The better approach in such cases is to systematically trac
me too (Score:2)
*shows picture of a small dot*
"Don't get too attached" (Score:2)