The bible has been made redundant by 21st century science

[KTJ]

from The Washington Post....

Speaking of Science

NASA's Kepler telescope confirms a record-breaking 1,284 new planets

By RACHEL FELTMAN | 2:50PM EDT - Tuesday, May 10, 2016


This artist's concept depicts select planetary discoveries made to date by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope.
— Picture: W. Stenzel/NASA Ames.

NASA scientists announced 1,284 new exoplanets at a news conference on Tuesday — candidates found by the Kepler Space Telescope that have now been confirmed with 99 percent certainty. This is the largest dump of new planet discoveries in history, and it more than doubles the count of confirmed planets for the intrepid space telescope.

On Monday, earthlings watched as Mercury passed between our planet and the sun, all three celestial bodies lining up in just the right way for Mercury to appear as a small black dot creeping over our bright host star. That phenomenon — one planet passing in front of its star, from the visual perspective of another planet — is known as a “transit”. And that's how Kepler finds new, alien worlds.


This animation shows how NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has been able to detect
more than a thousand new planets. — Video: NASA's Ames Research Center/YouTube.

Kepler (which is technically broken, but still finds new planets in its second life as “K2”) tracks the subtle dimming of distant stars to detect possible planets that orbit them. It's our best method for detecting exoplanets, even though it can only hunt down worlds that are set up to “transit” from Earth's perspective.

Even though the data collection of the K1 mission is over, scientists are still working on parsing out the primary mission's data. They have to weed out false positives from the thousands of potential planets — star dimming actually caused by mischievous companion stars or other objects:


Graphic: W. Stenzel/NASA Ames.

In a paper published on Tuesday in the Astrophysical Journal, a team led by Princeton University's Timothy Morton presents a new statistical method for calculating the likelihood that a given candidate is, in fact, a planet. Their analysis yielded 1,284 confirmations. Another 1,327 planets from the Kepler catalogue are almost certainly planets, according to the researchers, but these worlds don't reach the 99 percent probability threshold — so more study will be needed to adequately confirm their existence. The other 707 potential worlds are likely nonexistent, according to the analysis.

Of the newly confirmed planets, nine are thought to be rocky planets (like Earth, as opposed to gas giants or tiny worlds made of ice) in the habitable zone — meaning that they're the right distance from their host stars to potentially host liquid water, a necessary ingredient for life as we know it.

“Planet candidates can be thought of like bread crumbs,” Morton said in a statement. “If you drop a few large crumbs on the floor, you can pick them up one by one. But, if you spill a whole bag of tiny crumbs, you're going to need a broom. This statistical analysis is our broom.”

The statistical method could allow scientists to decide which “planets” to set aside as false positives or doggedly pursue as potential sites for alien life using less time and fewer resources.

“They say not to count your chickens before they're hatched, but Tim's numbers allow us to do exactly that,” Natalie Batalha, Kepler mission scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, said during Tuesday's news conference. “This is going to be very important for Kepler's most valuable planet discoveries, those small planets found orbiting in the habitable zone.”

As of today, NASA knows of 21 exoplanets that it considers likely to be rocky, potentially wet worlds. And based on Kepler data, Batalha said, our galaxy probably has more than 10 billion rocky planets that live in the habitable zones of their stars.

That's a lot of Earths.

Before Kepler, we had no idea of how common these kinds of planets might be. The fact that they seem to be run-of-the-mill is great news in the search for life: The less special we are, the more likely we are to have company somewhere in the galaxy or beyond.

Scientists could further explore the habitability of these worlds by measuring the way their host stars' light changes as it passes through planetary atmospheres. The molecular signatures analyzed using this method could reveal the presence of water and other life-giving molecules, showing us which worlds are closest to Earth on the planetary family tree.

• Rachel Feltman runs The Washington Post's Speaking of Science blog.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

• These three Earth-like planets may be our best chance yet at detecting life

• This broken space telescope keeps spotting new planets

• This strange, tailless comet could teach us about Earth’s origins

• Scientists have a wild idea for hiding us from evil aliens

• It turns out this planet has three suns in its sky

• Uranus might be full of surprises

• The new biggest thing in the universe, and why it's a headache for scientists

• The hunt for extraterrestrials turns to the ‘dim bulbs of the universe’

• The most likely theories about where ‘Planet Nine’ came from are still pretty crazy

www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/05/10/nasas-kepler-telescope-confirms-a-record-breaking-1284-new-planets

[pim]

So your mother told you there's no tooth fairy or santa clause when you only 3 and you never got over it. Poor diddums ... I wonder ... are you as boring as batshit at Christmas?

[KTJ]

I'll take that as a sneer, but I won't add the counter to the post...........yet.

[pim]

Bless you my son ...






So...did your mum tell you at age 3 there was no tooth fairy or santa claus? Are you over that devastating bit of brutal candour yet? Are you a blast at Christmas?

[KTJ]

I actually luuuuurve Xmas.

'cause it's the one day of the year when trains don't run between Wairarapa and Wellington, so I always KNOW I'll never have to go to work on that day.

So because of that, I get pissed on champagne (usually Bollinger) to celebrate my day off.

[pim]

Bollinger eh? I'm impressed!

[KTJ]

Er....why? It's only champagne.

Actually, it's rather a nice drop. Good stuff for getting pissed on during a hot day when one doesn't feel like drinking beer.

Plus, the local supermarket five minute's walk down the road from my place sells the stuff and their price for Bollinger is not only heaps cheaper than any of the liquor outlets around here, but they also sell it on “special” a couple of times of the year for about half-the-price of the liquor outlets. So about twice a year, I grab a case of the stuff while it is even cheaper. I've currently got an un-opened case, plus about half-a-dozen loose bottles of Bollinger stashed in my spare bedroom, along with a shitload of other wines, plus a shitload of top-quality single-malt.

[pim]

TMI

[Occam's Spork]

Well if you can Google it, it must be true.

[slartibartfast]

Do you have proof to the contrary?

[KTJ]

from The Washington Post....

Scientists say they've found a planet orbiting
Proxima Centauri, our closest neighbor

By RACHEL FELTMAN | 1:00PM EDT - Wednesday, August 24, 2016


Artist's impression of the planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. — Picture: G. Coleman/ESO.

SCIENTISTS have discovered what they believe to be a new planet, the closest one ever detected outside our solar system. It is a small, rocky planet not unlike our own, orbiting the sun's closest stellar neighbor.

Astronomers have long suspected that the star Proxima Centauri would be home to a planet, but proof had been elusive. Dim red dwarf stars like Proxima have been found to host billions of small, closely orbiting planets throughout the galaxy. Now a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature provides the best evidence yet for a tantalizingly close target on which to seek alien life.

“It's so inspiring, it's our closest star,” Lisa Kaltenegger, a Cornell astronomer who wasn't involved in the new study, told The Washington Post. “A planet next door. How much more inspiring can it get?”

Located about 4.25 light years from the sun, Proxima is less famous than the Alpha Centauri binary star system it hangs around with. But while Alpha Centauri is made up of two rather sun-like stars, Proxima is actually closer. It used to be that scientists were far more interested in stars like our own sun than in dim little dwarves like Proxima, but the times are changing — these types of stars are far more common in the galaxy, and scientists now believe they might be just as capable of hosting life as more familiar looking suns.

The proposed planet comes to light not long after a would-be-world orbiting Alpha Centauri B was determined to be nothing but a fluke in the data. Scientists know that most stars in the galaxy harbor planets, but we've had difficulty finding our closest companions in the cosmos.

Proxima b will no doubt be dubbed “Earthlike” by many, but let's not jump the gun. Here's what we know: The planet, based on statistical analysis of the behavior of its star, is quite likely to exist. Beyond that, we know very little.


This animation shows what it may be like to travel from our planet to the nearest
Earth-like planet. — Video: European Southern Observatory.

Proxima b orbits its parent star every 11 days. Because of the method used to detect it, we don't actually know how massive the planet candidate is — but we can say with confidence that it's at least 1.3 times as massive as the Earth. It's just over 4 million miles away from its cool, tiny red dwarf of a star (much closer than we are to our own sun), so it is blasted with enough radiation to maintain a balmy surface temperature of around minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Based on what we know about the planets that form around red dwarf stars, it's probably rocky — like Earth, Venus and Mars — and is likely tidally locked, meaning that one face of the planet constantly stares at the sun while the other half is left in darkness.

To call a planet “Earthlike”, scientists have to show that a planet is likely to be rocky and capable of holding liquid water. If Proxima b has an atmosphere — a question unlikely to be answered anytime soon — then it could have a temperature quite close to Earth's, meaning it would at least be capable of maintaining liquid water on its surface.

Even if Proxima b has (or once had) an atmosphere and held water, the evolution of life is far from guaranteed. For one thing, we're working with a sample size of one (the Earth) and have no idea how common the spark of life really is — even on planets that have all the same ingredients as the ones found at home.

Then there's Proxima itself: Known as a flare star, the red devil lashes huge flares of radiation out into space every few hours. Anything that evolved on a nearby planet would have to live deep underground or underwater to survive — unless it evolved some level of protection from radiation that scientists on Earth can scarcely imagine.


Artist's impression of the surface of Proxima b. — Picture: M. Kornmesser/ESO.

The discovery of this planet, be it Earth-like or not, has been a long time coming. Led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé from Queen Mary University of London, 31 scientists from eight different countries spent several months collecting data on Proxima. They were looking to build on previous indications of planetary presence, studying the “wiggle” in the star's light that would be caused by the seesaw gravitational pull between it and an orbiting planet (this is known as the Doppler method). Such a wiggle had been seen before, but the signal wasn't strong enough to prove a planet was there.

Anglada-Escudé and his colleagues applied for several months of observation time on the European Southern Observatory's HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) spectrograph, allowing them to collect 54 nights worth of data on this telltale stellar wiggle.

“There had previously been claims of other planets, so we had to be really careful here,” Anglada-Escudé said during an embargoed news briefing held by Nature on Tuesday. The data from those 54 nights made a pretty strong case for the presence of a planet, but “it wasn't enough.” The researchers weren't satisfied until they combined their data with the older signals, the ones that hadn't made enough of a case on their own.

“And then the [statistical] significance goes sky high,” he said.

Others agree that while the planet has yet to be confirmed using direct observational methods, the researchers have likely found something special. ESO astronomer Henri Boffin, who previously worked as HARPS's instrument scientist but wasn't involved in the new research, told The Washington Post that Proxima b's signal looked to be about three times as strong as that of Alpha Centauri Bb, the “planet” that turned out to be nothing but noise.

“It is quite amazing that our closest stellar neighbor would harbor a low-mass planet,” Boffin said. “Even if this is not so surprising after all, as it now seems established that the vast majority of stars host at least one planet, it is still nice to have apparently found the closest to us.”



Now the researchers will look for other methods to help confirm the planet's existence and learn about its composition. Direct observation — staring at the planet with a telescope — isn't possible with current technology. The star is just too bright and close to the planet for any telescope to see the latter. There's a small chance — something like 1.5 percent probability — that the planet “transits” in front of its star, or passes in front of the star from the perspective of Earth's telescopes. If that's the case, scientists will be able to study the planet's mass and atmosphere by analyzing the way Proxima's light passes around it.

“That's the first thing we're going to go look for,” John Brown Paul Strachan, a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London who contributed to the study, told The Washington Post. “If it does transit, then that opens a whole field to us, where we might be able to start seeing details about the atmosphere of the planet.”

But Strachan and his colleagues aren't giving up hope of a direct observation in the near future. They believe that instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2018, will allow them to glimpse Proxima b in no time.

If Proxima b proves to be a real planet — and one particularly worthy of study — a visit wouldn't be totally outside the realm of possibility. But even though Proxima is our closest neighbor, it's still awfully far: NASA's New Horizons probe had to travel 3 billion miles to get to Pluto, and took nearly a decade to do so. At around 25 trillion miles away, a trip to Proxima b would be more than 8,000 times as long. At least one well-funded group is trying to develop the technology needed to propel a tiny probe into the Centauri system, but don't hold your breath.

Then again, the detection of an Earthlike atmosphere on Proxima b would provide some excellent motivation.

As Anglada-Escudé said in a statement, “The search for life on Proxima b comes next.”

• Rachel Feltman runs The Washington Post's Speaking of Science blog.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

• You wouldn't be a happy camper if you relocated to Proxima Centauri's planet

• NASA just found a spacecraft that's been lost for two years

• Astronaut Chris Hadfield's lifelong mission is to show us the Earth

• 16 fascinating science stories eclipsed by Donald Trump

• Why NASA still believes we might find life on Mars

• The most likely theories about where ‘Planet Nine’ came from are still pretty crazy

• Scientists have a wild idea for hiding us from evil aliens

• Study: Maybe we can't find aliens because they've all died already

• Stephen Hawking announces $100 million hunt for alien life

• PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY: Fascinating photos of our solar system and beyond

www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/08/24/scientists-may-have-found-a-planet-orbiting-proxima-centauri-our-closest-star

[slartibartfast]

Jun 19, 2016 2:11:46 GMT 10 Occam's Spork said:

Well if you can Google it, it must be true.

Jun 19, 2016 17:14:40 GMT 10 slartibartfast said:

Do you have proof to the contrary?

Well, the answer appears obvious.

[pim]

Then again, the detection of an Earthlike atmosphere on Proxima b would provide some excellent motivation.

As Anglada-Escudé said in a statement, “The search for life on Proxima b comes next.”


Read more: newstalkback1.proboards.com/thread/5326/bible-redundant-21st-century-science#ixzz4INyuke3c

That’s what I call the Star Trek myth, not only of space exploration, but of all exploration: that we humans (particularly whitefellas) have some sort of "explorer gene" that impels us onward and outward and gives us an insatiable curiosity to cross that river or climb that mountain just to see what's on the other side. If anything it's given the English language that most famous of split infinitives: "to boldly go etc etc" (to go boldly? boldly to go?) but as a working principle of exploration in history it's codswallop.

Push factors, pull factors? Push factors are always much more important than pull factors when you leave the known in order to venture into the unknown. Would the Vikings have become Vikings if their Scandinavian homeland had been rich and fertile instead of rocky, barren and mountainous with a toxic home culture of warring clans and chiefs? They were after all farmers and having discovered the farming possibilities of England's green and pleasant land they decided to stay and revert to farming instead of raping and pillaging. If Constantinople had held out against the Turks and had remained the great global centre of Eastern Rite Christianity, a rival to Rome, instead of becoming Muslim Istanbul, the overland spice trade and the Silk Road, would have remained open and Venice would have remained the Mediterranean superpower instead of declining into obscurity as a modern day tourist attraction with the spice trade mantle passing to the Atlantic seaboard to find a sea route around the Turks and Arabs so that the very lucrative spice trade could continue. Did I say lucrative? Do you know what sort of profit was realised as the first Dutch shipment of cloves made it to Amsterdam in the 1500s? A whopping 2000% Think of it. You invest a dollar and make two grand. There's only one commodity these days that makes that sort of money - illegal drugs. No wonder people risked their lives in wooden sailing ships with no way of calculating longitude.

Fast forward to today. Space travel? It used to be called the "space race". Now that implies a competition between different countries and that's exactly what it was. Up until the fall of the Soviet Union it was all Cold War driven. Sounds very "push factor" to me. Not much scope there for going boldly where no-one has gone before. More a case of get there first before the Russians so that they don't get a base from which they can fire missiles at us. And I'd argue that's still the case. Maybe more the Chinese these days but I'm not so sure that the Russians are completely out of the equation. Nothing new in this. Back in the late 1700s Cook's brief was to explore the Pacific from top to bottom and to plant the flag before the French got there. Which he did in three magnificent voyages. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of James Cook and I'm in awe of his achievements. For my money he's the greatest of all the navigators who ventured out in wooden sailing ships. But I know what his push factors were and they weren't about seeking new life and new civilisations. They were about following orders as a British naval officer to advance British security interests as determined by the British Government of Lord North who was British PM at the time. Fast forward to today and NASA isn’t all that different.

[KTJ]

We need to discover where the “stargate” is hidden on planet Earth.

Then we'll be able to travel throught the galaxy to our heart's desire.

Who knows? We may even be able to discover an alien fraudulently masquerading as a god/allah and sucking in gullible human beings on planet Earth...

[pim]

Aug 26, 2016 10:37:53 GMT 10 Gort said:

And yet, and yet ... there is no commercial / political/ military imperative for the Voyager project.

The desire to explore is probably innate.

I agree more than I disagree, Yorick. I just disagree with your conclusion. There is no commercial imperative but you never know with NASA. One of the most telling objections to the Australian approach to R & D is that it's too much a slave to beancounting and there's a hint of that in your post. The thing about R & D is that the benefits are often apparent after the event rather than beforehand. An example is the technology behind microwave ovens. Nobody actually set out to design a microwave oven for the kitchen. Microwave ovens are a good example of serendipity at work. As regards political/military everything about NASA is political and the links between NASA and the military are too close for any given NASA endeavour to be said to be 100% objective science and an exercise in an enlightened and disinterested seeking out of new life and new civilisations. With several science PhDs in my extended family it's considered a given that the majority of scientific research has a defence/security dimension. Sorry but I disagree that the Voyager project, much as I enjoy the pics that the 2 Voyager probes send back and much as I admire the scientific achievement that Voyager represents, is nothing more than disinterested science motivated entirely by the Star Trek mission statement.

However, as I keep harping on about ... the distances to other planets in other star systems are so very much more "tyrannical" compared with the voyages of discovery on this planet ...you may as well just give up on any thoughts of human exploration at those distances.


Sadly, this little rock is all we have and all we will ever have. Although human habitation on a small scale to Mars will become a reality, even that is enormously expensive, extremely dangerous and most likely will be the limit of human "space hopping".

No argument from me there!

[Yassir Rebob]

Eventually, we will travel beyond the stratosphere and into the stars. Colonising Mars be first, but it will also be the beginning of humanities venture into the final frontier. Once we figure out to re-establish an atmosphere on Mars, then the next step will be to use a Mars base as the launching pad for further expedition.

Why ?

Because the yearning to explore the universe is innate, Galileo, for instance, didn't risk his life for any type of "military" imperative, he risked it for his desire for knowledge. 

[pim]

A "certainty"? Yorick that's not a statement of fact, it's a declaration of faith. Warms my heart to see you make an argument from a deeply held and cherished faith!

[pim]

Blimey you took umbrage, you really did! As we say on the Religion Board ... O M G!

[KTJ]

from The Washington Post....

Scientists caught black holes swallowing stars
— and burping energy back up

By SARAH KAPLAN | 11:00AM EDT - Friday, September 16, 2016


This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive black hole
in a tidal disruption flare. — Picture: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech.

SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES are voracious beasts. Their tremendous gravitational pull sucks in everything that gets too close, including stars.

For the first time, astronomers have clearly observed at infrared wavelengths what happens after a black hole eats a star: it burps back up a brilliant flare of light that echoes through space.

Two studies published this week — one by scientists at NASA, the other by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China — describe these “tidal disruption flares” using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a space telescope that has photographed the entire sky in infrared light.

“This is the first time we have clearly seen the infrared light echoes from multiple tidal disruption events,” Sjoert van Velzen, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the NASA study, said in a statement. Van Velzen's study caught three black holes in the act of star swallowing; researchers in China documented a fourth.

The technical term for these celestial phenomena is “stellar tidal disruption events.” When a star gets too close to a black hole's event horizon (the “point of no return,” at which not even light can escape), it gets stretched and torn apart by variations in the black hole's gravitational pull. Scientists call the process “spaghettification” for the way that it elongates everything that has the misfortune of enduring it.

As it devours the star, the black hole emits an enormous amount of energy, including ultraviolet and X-ray light, that destroys everything in its immediate neighborhood.

“It's as though the black hole has cleaned its room by throwing flames,” van Velzen said.

But beyond the reach of the most intense radiation, a patchy web of dust swirls. At this distance — a few trillion miles from the black hole — the dust particles can absorb the light released during the death of the star without being destroyed by it. The particles then re-emit the light at longer, infrared wavelengths. Scientists recently detected several X-ray emissions from black holes that seemed to be signatures of this phenomenon, but the new studies are the first to catch the event in infrared.

The WISE telescope, which is attuned to infrared radiation, can capture these “echoes” of the star's destruction; by measuring the delay between the original light flare and the subsequent echoes, scientists on the ground can figure out how much energy was released as the star got consumed.

The studies also let astronomers figure out the exact location of the dust web and understand some of its most basic characteristics. This material isn't only the outskirts of black hole — it represents the nucleus of the galaxy for which the black hole forms the center. That makes observations of tidal disruption flares doubly interesting: They can help scientists understand not just the dark, dense mysteries of black holes, but also the bright, swirling places that surround them.

• Sarah Kaplan is a reporter for Speaking of Science at The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

• A new class of galaxy has been discovered, one made almost entirely of dark matter

• Are black holes really all that black? A new study supports Stephen Hawking's theory.

• This is what it looks like when a black hole tears a star apart

www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/09/16/scientists-caught-black-holes-swallowing-stars-and-burping-energy-back-up

[Occam's Spork]

Sept 17, 2016 15:29:03 GMT 10 Gort said:

Yes, well, ideas about black holes need a fair bit more development eh?

So massive, nothing can escape ... not even light?

Yet now they claim light does escape ...

Are the amounts escaping equal to the amounts consumed?