Ongoing important Science news thread

[T@T]

Originally Posted by Hanni

Astronomers have achieved a big milestone in the search for another Earth: the two smallest confirmed planets ever found orbiting another star… and they’re both about the size of Earth!

Artist’s illustration of the Kepler-20 planets with Earth and Venus for size comparison.


Kepler is finding new planets constantly it seems, very exciting.

When launched Astronomers hoped to find planets around about .01% of the 150,000 stars Kepler would be peeking at. I think when the James Weeb goes up in a few years it will be extremly rare to find a star that doesn't have planets.

Gravity is king baby.

[T@T]

Originally Posted by handgroen

I have an ongoing debate with some friends over whether or not it is ethical to send objects or interfere with planets we believe to harbor life.

My contention is that because of the dramatic distance between our planet and other prospective "earths," exploration is and will always be impossible. Even if you were to send a probe, it would be thousands of years getting there and hundreds of years for the data to be beamed back. Which IMO is a fruitless albeit still somewhat noble pursuit.
Sooo I think it would be interesting to send physical objects to planets we believe could be home to sentient life. Sort of a message in a bottle scenario. A device to create fire for example, or a hand driven crank that lights an incandescent bulb. The particular objects i'm not quite sure of.

This seems to always draw the ire of someone in the conversation. This person feels an intense fear of "screwing" with something we don't understand. My question is do you guys think that it's totally reckless to undertake a mission of that kind? and if not what would you like to send?

btw if i really like to wind up the person I'm talking with about this, I say we could send large amounts of highly radioactive material. So as to encourage mutation and accelerate evolution on planet x.

Most people can't grasp the sheer distances on space, hell some think that aliens on other planets are probably laughing at our text messages

It probably wouldn't hurt to send something out to a planet that we find in a goldilocks zone but I would say before mankind ever got a reading back from it we will either figure out how to beat the speed of light problem and do our own exploring or we'll be extinct as a species.

[handgroen]

Originally Posted by T@T

Most people can't grasp the sheer distances on space, hell some think that aliens on other planets are probably laughing at our text messages

It probably wouldn't hurt to send something out to a planet that we find in a goldilocks zone but I would say before mankind ever got a reading back from it we will either figure out how to beat the speed of light problem and do our own exploring or we'll be extinct as a species.

my thinking is it will be the latter, i'm sure people felt the same about the speed of sound too, but i don't think matter will ever travel as fast as light period, making the vastness of space unmanageable for exploratory purposes. You can put me in the camp that refutes the "faster than light neutrino" test results.

[troutman]

Originally Posted by T@T

When launched Astronomers hoped to find planets around about .01% of the 150,000 stars Kepler would be peeking at

Did they say that? That seems very conservative.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by handgroen

I have an ongoing debate with some friends over whether or not it is ethical to send objects or interfere with planets we believe to harbor life.

My contention is that because of the dramatic distance between our planet and other prospective "earths," exploration is and will always be impossible. Even if you were to send a probe, it would be thousands of years getting there and hundreds of years for the data to be beamed back. Which IMO is a fruitless albeit still somewhat noble pursuit.
Sooo I think it would be interesting to send physical objects to planets we believe could be home to sentient life. Sort of a message in a bottle scenario. A device to create fire for example, or a hand driven crank that lights an incandescent bulb. The particular objects i'm not quite sure of.

This seems to always draw the ire of someone in the conversation. This person feels an intense fear of "screwing" with something we don't understand. My question is do you guys think that it's totally reckless to undertake a mission of that kind? and if not what would you like to send?

btw if i really like to wind up the person I'm talking with about this, I say we could send large amounts of highly radioactive material. So as to encourage mutation and accelerate evolution on planet x.

Lets be clear, we're going to send aliens fire. Sure we'll probably cause the great flaming stick war of Omicron Persi 6 and they'll remember, and they'll have a heightened sense of irony when they conquor us and roast us over the very fire that we gave to them.

[handgroen]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

Lets be clear, we're going to send aliens fire. Sure we'll probably cause the great flaming stick war of Omicron Persi 6 and they'll remember, and they'll have a heightened sense of irony when they conquor us and roast us over the very fire that we gave to them.

nice simpsons reference



i also do think fire would be most appropriate, the whole notion of retaliation is a bit moot in my mind. 1 we won't be around to be retaliated against 2 fire is a gift and 3 we could do it, doesn't that sound fun?

[Barnes]

Two more planets found that are even smaller than Kepler 20e and 20f.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/st...e.html?cmp=rss

The planets KOI 55.01 and KOI 55.02 have radii about 0.76 and 0.87 times that of the Earth, the researchers reported online in the journal Nature Wednesday.

That makes them slightly smaller than two planets billed by NASA earlier this week as the smallest ever found.

The two planets circle a type of star known as a sub-dwarf that is much hotter than our sun and located 3,900 light years away from Earth, near the constellations Lyra and Cygnus.

"They are the hottest planets by a long shot because they are so close to their star," Fontaine said. The distance between the planets and their star is just 0.60 per cent and 0.76 per cent of the distance between the Earth and the sun

[T@T]

Originally Posted by handgroen

my thinking is it will be the latter, i'm sure people felt the same about the speed of sound too, but i don't think matter will ever travel as fast as light period, making the vastness of space unmanageable for exploratory purposes. You can put me in the camp that refutes the "faster than light neutrino" test results.

Totally agree, as of right now I think the fastest spacecraft we ever built is traveling somewhere around 35,000 mph..far cry from light speeds 671,000,000 mph.

I would never say never though as in the last 100 years we have beat incredible barriers, I think there's a possibility of dreams such as bending space, worm holes..etc. but not in my lifetime that's for sure.

[T@T]

Originally Posted by troutman

Did they say that? That seems very conservative.

I should have been more clear, It was on Naked Science, not really conservative as they were not talking about big gas giants, (earth based teles can find those) they were hoping to find that many rocky earth sized planets (1/2 - 2x earth size) in the area they are searching.

They still have a long way to go to meet their goal.

[Knut]

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-...rcomputer.html

Supercomputer validates super-string theory ?

[T@T]

Originally Posted by Hesla

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-...rcomputer.html

Supercomputer validates super-string theory ?

After reading that I still can't understand how a computer could validate a 9th dimension that humans can't seem to understand. I know it's a "super computer" but it still uses human information in it's operation.

Maybe I'm missing something.

[ricosuave]

Originally Posted by Hesla

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-...rcomputer.html

Supercomputer validates super-string theory ?

[T@T]

Cool site.

http://www.planethunters.org/

[ShaolinFlame]

Originally Posted by Hesla

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-...rcomputer.html

Supercomputer validates super-string theory ?

It reads more as if the supercomputer has validated some of the mathematics of the 9+1 model. It has not proved string theory to be correct. They have successfully modeled the start of the expansion phase of the universe, and the model seems to agree with our current assessments obtained through more classical versions of physics.

Although this has not proved that string theory is correct by any means, it does seem to be an important step in the theory coming together. They have proved that the math of string theory can account for an expansion of 3 (out of the 9 total proposed) physical dimensions at the same time.

It's also a big step in computing that they have managed to model something this complex (the math of string theory is incredibly complex and time consuming). To have a computer be able to successfully model such a large matrix and perform that many calculations is a great step forwards in scientific computation (FYI the computer runs at a theoretical max of 90.3 TFLOPS).

If anyone is interested in reading the paper it can be found here: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...110.4803v1.pdf
Interestingly it was posted to arxiv on October 21st.

If anyone can understand the actual paper you probably have better things to do with your time than be on CP

[HPLovecraft]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1223114121.htm

Are Superluminal Neutrinos (faster-than-light neutrinos) Possible? Pions Don't Want to Decay Into Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos, Study Finds

"We've shown in this paper that if the neutrino that comes out of a pion decay were going faster than the speed of light, the pion lifetime would get longer, and the neutrino would carry a smaller fraction of the energy shared by the neutrino and the muon," Cowsik says.

"What's more," he says, "these difficulties would only increase as the pion energy increases.

[ . . . ]

In addition, he says, there's an experimental check on this theoretical conclusion. The creation of neutrinos at CERN is duplicated naturally when cosmic rays hit Earth's atmosphere.

[. . . ]

"IceCube has seen neutrinos with energies 10,000 times higher than those the OPERA experiment is creating," Cowsik says.."Thus, the energies of their parent pions should be correspondingly high. Simple calculations, based on the conservation of energy and momentum, dictate that the lifetimes of those pions should be too long for them ever to decay into superluminal neutrinos.

"But the observation of high-energy neutrinos by IceCube indicates that these high-energy pions do decay according to the standard ideas of physics, generating neutrinos whose speed approaches that of light but never exceeds it.

[HPLovecraft]

Holy ####e this is cool. Temporal cloaking, though for a very miniscule amount of time, is possible! An event can be effectively hidden in time.

http://www.zmescience.com/science/ph...time-cloaking/

Or a little more in depth:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0106111312.htm

The researchers created what they call a time lens, which can manipulate and focus signals in time, analogous to the way a glass lens focuses light in space. They use a technique called four-wave mixing, in which two beams of light, a "signal" and a "pump," are sent together through an optical fiber. The two beams interact and change the wavelength of the signal. To begin creating a time gap, the researchers first bump the wavelength of the signal up, then by flipping the wavelength of the pump beam, bump it down.

The beam then passes through another, very long, stretch of optical fiber. Light passing through a transparent material is slowed down just a bit, and how much it is slowed varies with the wavelength. So the lower wavelength pulls ahead of the higher, leaving a gap, like the hare pulling ahead of the tortoise. During the gap the experimenters introduced a brief flash of light at a still higher wavelength that would cause a glitch in the beam coming out the other end.

Then the split beam passes through more optical fiber with a different composition, engineered to slow lower wavelengths more than higher. The higher wavelength signal now catches up with the lower, closing the gap. The hare is plodding through mud, but the tortoise is good at that and catches up. Finally, another four-wave mixer brings both parts back to the original wavelength, and the beam emerges with no trace that there ever was a gap, and no evidence of the intruding signal.

[Thor]

Problem with any idea that tries to prove quantum physics is that the idea or theory starts at our brain, which is about as biased as can be in regards to understanding the surrounding universe.

I love the idea that our brains are not capable of comprehending the most difficult physics questions because of its evolution and circumstance, and I am incredibly irritated at the same time.

Which probably is the best way to describe physics that study quantum theory.

[HPLovecraft]

Uh, what?

[Thor]

Originally Posted by HPLovecraft

Uh, what?

So sorry, I hate this part of the discussion...

Ok, so lets say we take our brain, simply speaking how has evolved to not only survive in our world but how it has evolved to bring about language and much more advanced ideas such as curiosity, self awareness, etc..

But lets imagine that our brains exist int he matrix, for a lack of a better example. The matrix is our planet, we see plants, we see other people, tides go in, tides go out, no interruptions....

Our brains have evolved within this construct, we see for example a clear start and beginning to life, we see clear definitions of solid and not solid, we can explain things in relation to experience.

However, now we have reached some rather difficult points of our understanding, which is where quantum mechanics comes in. Ideas like, a universe from nothing, no beginning or end, time is a construct not a constant, etc.. These are very difficult ideas for our brains which have developed within a frame work of our very isolated and very small home on earth, which is a speck within a speck amongst a beach of sand more massive than we can imagine, and then x1000000000 to that which you can imagine.

Sorry just babbling, physics is the most fascinating field of research and I get all giddy considering its ideas and more importantly its consequences.

[Ducay]

Originally Posted by Thor

So sorry, I hate this part of the discussion...

Ok, so lets say we take our brain, simply speaking how has evolved to not only survive in our world but how it has evolved to bring about language and much more advanced ideas such as curiosity, self awareness, etc..

But lets imagine that our brains exist int he matrix, for a lack of a better example. The matrix is our planet, we see plants, we see other people, tides go in, tides go out, no interruptions....

Our brains have evolved within this construct, we see for example a clear start and beginning to life, we see clear definitions of solid and not solid, we can explain things in relation to experience.

However, now we have reached some rather difficult points of our understanding, which is where quantum mechanics comes in. Ideas like, a universe from nothing, no beginning or end, time is a construct not a constant, etc.. These are very difficult ideas for our brains which have developed within a frame work of our very isolated and very small home on earth, which is a speck within a speck amongst a beach of sand more massive than we can imagine, and then x1000000000 to that which you can imagine.

Sorry just babbling, physics is the most fascinating field of research and I get all giddy considering its ideas and more importantly its consequences.

Consider my mind blown