While there’s no official word from NASA on this, the buzz around the blogosphere is that Voyager 1 has left the Solar System. The evidence comes from this graph, above, which shows the number of particles, mainly protons, from the Sun hitting Voyager 1 across time. A huge drop at the end of August hints that Voyager 1 may now be in interstellar space. The last we heard from the Voyager team was early August, and they indicated that on July 28, the level of lower-energy particles originating from inside our Solar System dropped by half. However, in three days, the levels had recovered to near their previous levels. But then the bottom dropped out at the end of August.
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"Opinions are like demo tapes, and I don't want to hear yours" -- Stephen Colbert
Just shows us how far away we are from traveling interstellar space, Voyager 1 has been traveling 35 thousand MPH for 35+ years and it's still only on the edge of our own solar system.
Voyager has traveled:
11,000,000.000 miles.
Closest star system to earth:
25,689,592,881,951.000 miles.
If my maths right Voyager could reach Alpha Centauri in about 73,000 years.
Mind boggling
Last edited by T@T; 10-11-2012 at 10:31 AM.
Reason: did math wrong
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Just shows us how far away we are from traveling interstellar space, Voyager 1 has been traveling 35 thousand MPH for 35+ years and it's still only on the edge of our own solar system.
Voyager has traveled:
11,000,000.000 miles.
Closest star system to earth:
25,689,592,881,951.000 miles.
If my maths right Voyager could reach Alpha Centauri in about 7,300 years.
Mind boggling
kind of wrecks the whole plotline for Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Thor. Your probably my favorite science poster but I have to ask...whats the difference between a universe (that we live in) and another or hundreds of others? My point is we live in a Universe we don't really know a whole lot about, how it came to be, it's age or what if any purpose it has to us "puny" humans.
I personally don't think we are capable of answering these questions just yet and the theory of multiverse just means at least twice the problem solving.
Well your right thats for sure, its going to be difficult to prove multiverse but theoretical physics is already hinting at it and its certainly something that we might find evidence for in a unexpected place, this horizon doc has one physicist suggesting a hint may already been found with the cosmic microwave background.
For me thinking of the multiverse when thinking about our universe helps my brain deal with the complex ideas and the discoveries we make in physics. I don't know why exactly, but for me the idea of just one universe from a young age really bothered me and now that we have started to delve into the idea there is some very slight promise that we might even find an answer or a tantalizing clue even in our lifetimes to this idea.
Also while we are at it, another excellent Horizon doc, these two were done back to back. BBC at its finest!
__________________ Allskonar fyrir Aumingja!!
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Petrol has been created by UK engineers from air and water:
"The technique involves extracting carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water, and combining them in a reactor with a catalyst to make methanol. The methanol is then converted into petrol."
Petrol has been created by UK engineers from air and water:
"The technique involves extracting carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water, and combining them in a reactor with a catalyst to make methanol. The methanol is then converted into petrol."
Maybe UK engineers are going to have an "accident".
- Big Oil
If they could just extract the hydrogen from water without a negative energy balance they would be billionaires without have to worry about any of the other messy steps.
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"Teach a man to reason, and he'll think for a lifetime"
They're not claiming to have a perpetual motion machine, they're claiming to be using energy to convert one set of chemicals into another set of chemicals (which happen to be able to store energy with useful properties like being liquid at regular temperatures unlike Hydrogen).
It isn't about creating energy, it's about storing it. A solar panel that creates gasoline which you can then use in an airplane (because batteries are too heavy) for example.
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
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This cosmological simulation follows the development of a single disk galaxy over about 13.5 billion years, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present time. Colors indicate old stars (red), young stars (white and bright blue) and the distribution of gas density (pale blue); the view is 300,000 light-years across. The simulation ran on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and required about 1 million CPU hours. It assumes a universe dominated by dark energy and dark matter. Credit: F. Governato and T. Quinn (Univ. of Washington), A. Brooks (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison), and J. Wadsley (McMaster Univ.).
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
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Our asteroid belt, which is situated between Jupiter and Mars, has traditionally been seen as something of a nuisance. Every once in awhile one of these rocks dislodges itself and heads straight for Earth, what often results in a cataclysmic impact. But ironically, as a new study from the University of Colorado suggests, we may owe our very existence to these chunks of displaced rocks. And according to the researchers, our asteroid belt appears to be unique as far as these things go — what may be contributing to the dearth of life in the galaxy.
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Despite the astronomical chaos produced by impact events, asteroids delivered water, organic compounds, and heavy elements to Earth — what are all crucial for the emerge of life. They were also likely responsible for the formation of our moon....
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And what’s fascinating about Martin and Livio’s analysis is their suggestion that every solar system has an asteroid belt at roughly the exact same location just beyond the snow line. What varies, however, is whether or not a solar system has a gas giant to mould its composition. The scientists theorize that, owing to Jupiter, our asteroid belt is 1% the size of its original mass — a kind of Goldilocks figure that may be a key factor to life emerging and prospering in the solar system.
