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Visions of the Universe

 
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alexkhan



Joined: 10 Sep 2004
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Location: Chino, CA

PostPosted: Wed Nov 03, 2004 2:16 am    Post subject: Visions of the Universe Reply with quote

Space talk, anyone? Always been a fan of astronomy and the great outer space for as long as I can remember. I remember wanting to become an astronomer as a kid for awhile. The star-filled sky has always been a fascination for me.

Took my kid to a book store a few weeks ago and while he was checking out the kiddie books, I wandered to the science section and saw this recent hard-covered book called "Visions of the Universe". After browing through for only a few minutes, I decided I had to take a copy home. It has some of the most spectacular astronomy photos EVER - the most recent shots being sent down from the Hubble Space Telescope and more photos from other super powerful telescopes and composite imagery using X-ray and radio telescopes.

Most of the photos are absolutely stunning: a shot of an area towards the center of the galaxy with more than 2 million stars nestled together in an area of the sky no bigger than the size of your fist held at arm length, a photo of galaxies 30 million light-years away colliding, a totally sick two-page photo of the deepest space that shows over 10,000 galaxies with some as far away as 13 billion light-years from Earth, etc. Also photos of stuff much closer to us like the Titan moon circling Saturn, the Sun, supernovas and nebulaes, stars being gobbled up by Black Holes, and on and on and on... Really mind-altering kind of stuff...

You look out into space and you quickly realize how tiny, how fleeting, how almost pathetically insignificant our existence is in the grand scheme of things. Do you know that our Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy that is 2 million light-years away are hurtling towards each other at a speed of 300,000 miles per hour? Yeah, eventually, the Milky Way with its 150 billion stars or so and the Andromeda with its 300 billion stars will collide... about 5 billion years from now. But the collision won't even go noticed if our descendants are still around to observe it. The bigger concern will be that our Sun will have evolved into a Red Giant that will likely have engulfed Venus and turned our Earth into a lifeless chunk of slag with the oceans boiled and evaporated a long while ago.

Then our Sun will collapse into a White Dwarf star the size of the Earth while retaining more than 3/4 of its current mass - its only energy and heat being generated by massive compression of mass into a very limited area of space. The Sun will shine like a little diamond in the sky in the Earth sky which will by then have become a frozen wasteland and it will float around like a large meteor and they say the Sun should remain a White Dwarf for another 30 billion years or so. Really interesting stuff. Man, they're really finding out a LOT about what the hell is going on out there.

I also recommend another book called "The Universe and Beyond" - a great all-around book to learn about outer space. I've also been getting into cosmology and astrophysics stuff about how our Universe came to be and how it will end. Obviously, a lot of theories abound. The latest is that our Universe with its hundreds of billions of galaxies and many trillions of stars covering trillions of cubic light years is probably one of a countless number of universes that were born with the Big Bang and that a new Universe may be hatching at a rate of one per second in another dimension - a colossal structure so mind-bogglingly huge that it's simply beyond our comprehension.

I love it though. Every now and then, I grab these books and just ponder about nature at its absolute biggest scale and wondering where it all came from and where it's going, etc. We're in the Golden Age of Astronomy and they're going to discover many more amazing things out there in the years ahead with even more powerful telescopes and other kinds of sensitive instruments. Stay on top of this stuff if you can and you are inclined. It really expands the mind.
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tafolla-howe-govan



Joined: 20 Sep 2004
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 04, 2004 6:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

That sounds like a really cool book, I'll have to pick it up...

I've been interested in space and the universe ever since I had a "sighting." It was of 3 balls of light (which were very bright, almost like a star) moving independently, and then they formed a straight line and came together into one ball Exclamation . The ball just hovered there for a second, and then took off out into space within a split second Shocked . The speed this object achieved was far greater than anything I have ever and will ever see. I'll put it this way, the ball seemed to be at a maximum of 30-40 ft away, if you would have blinked your eyes when it had took off, it would already be out of your vision. Me and my mother saw this, and it happened in daylight. This type of encounter really gives you a harsh reality check. I have no doubts in my mind that there are extremely advanced and intelligent beings that inhabit the universe. The universe is so vast and billions upon billions, maybe even trillions of years old. I don't understand how people can think that we are the only things here and scoff at the idea of something else being out there. There is so much evidence that we have been visited by something for thousands of years. There are cave paintings in Pakistan that are 7,000 years old that show a creature that is eerily reminiscent to what a modern day alien looks like. The picture shows this thing holding what appears to be a gun. The Great Pyramids and the Sphinx are another example of something that defies explanation. No one has been able to show just how these people were able to move these 70 ton slabs and stack them and arrange them with such precision. What I find interesting is that there are pictures taken of Mars' Cydonia region which show a face that appears very similar to the Sphinx face and also what appears to be pyramids. I personally think that these structures were created by a group of interplanetary explorers and that is like there mark. Maybe having something to do with religion or something to that effect. I wouldn't be surprised though if we ended up finding pyramids and faces like that on other planets around here
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alexkhan



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PostPosted: Thu Nov 04, 2004 6:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I don't know about alien life visiting Earth, but I believe they are out there. The astronomers are reasonably sure that the Universe is about 14~15 billion years old. Based on all the evidence they have out there, that's when the Big Bang should have happened. Our Sun and Earth are both about 5 billion years old, formed almost simultaneously during Sun's birth. Life has been around on Earth for 3.6 billion. So when you take these things into account and that Sun is just one of hundreds of billions of stars in this galaxy alone (and then there are hundreds of billions known galaxies), it's mathematically impossible for there not to be other lifeforms out there, including some that may be millions or even billions of years more advanced than we are (assuming they didn't destroy themselves as we humans seem to be in danger of doing).

It's not conceivable what aliens thousands, millions, or billions of years more advanced than we are. Look at how far we've come along in the last few hundred years. My thoughts are that they are out there and are observing us with interest. To me, it doesn't make sense that they'd fly around in flying saucers or that they'd play peek-a-boo with us. Why? Are they smart enough to conduct interstellar travel but then not quite smart enough to avoid detection by the natives? Highly unlikely. What would be the purpose of them making contact with us? If we discovered some lowly lifeforms in space, would we try to communicate with amoebas or microbes or try to enslave them? It'd be the same kind of thing with beings that may be millions of years more advanced than we are. I think just interested observation would be the most logical thing to do. Life must be rare in this Universe. The conditions that breed life happening must have astronomical odds, so aliens observing us would just let us be. Would we interfere with another planet's life development? What would be the point?

But when I see the photos of thousands of galaxies in what would cover a speck in sky, it's fascinating to ponder all the other worlds out there. Do you know there are more stars out there than the grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth? I've read a bunch of articles about how this particular Universe we live in and observe would end. As you know, the Universe is expanding. Observations (studying the effects of gravity, matter that we can observe, quantum physics, etc.) indicate that the Universe will literally expand forever and become an unimaginably large and desolate place as galaxies rush away from each other and stars flicker out and all that are left are black holes roaming around. And even black holes are supposed to degenerate in time and "evaporate": something like 100 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years. Remember that each billion is a thousand million and that each trillion is a thousand billion.

Isaac Asimov wrote a novel in which he envisioned an end of our Universe in this manner and that all that was left was some disembodied intelligence that interceded all areas of the Universe - sort of like our ultimate descendents only in the form of intelligence, the ultimate mind over matter. Realizing that nothing is left, this super intelligence decides to graft the matter on hand and form a new Big Bang. That's a pretty incredible imagination bubbling 40 or so years ago when he was at his creative peak.
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tafolla-howe-govan



Joined: 20 Sep 2004
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

alexkhan wrote:
Well, I don't know about alien life visiting Earth, but I believe they are out there.


I'm not so sure about that. There are just too many credible witnesses out there to disprove. I believe they are out there and they are visiting here also. I've read up alot about abductions, and there are some remarkable things going on here. Think about this, if we were being watched by a highly advanced race, do you think they would sit back and observe or be more intrigued and actually physically examine us. I personally think they would do the latter. There are so many people who have had an encounter with a UFO and forgot all about it, then years later they start having nightmares of the event. Most of these people end up going under regressive hypnosis and describe creatures medically examining them and whatnot. Of course some of these people are lying, but not all of them are.
It doesn't help that the government is so secretive about these topics, too secretive. It's 2004, it's time for real answers to be given to the people

www.thewhyfiles.net This is an excellent website that deals with the UFO phenomena, I highly recommend it
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alexkhan



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PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2004 2:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think the UFO matter is a subject of its own. It's not really being discussed anymore by the scientific community. There may still be some unexplained things about 'em but most of the sightings of the past have been proven to be something other than alien visitors. Many astronomers and scientists have looked extensively into this matter and the great majority have come away doubtful that the UFO sightings are alien visitations. It used to be a phenomena of mainstream significance in the 60's and the 70's, but you don't read about new sightings these days.

Why is our government and the scientific community spending so much money on new telescopes and instruments (as well as space flights to other planets and moons in our Solar System) to detect any signs of life out there if they have these aliens and flying saucers locked up in some underground bunker? To me, it just doesn't add up. And why would USA be the only nation who harbors this secret? Why not other advanced nations who have the same type of military equipment that we do? Why not UK? Why not Russia? Why not Japan? Why not China?

In any case, I'd prefer to discuss about what are known quantities based on scientific facts and observations about outer space - the Sun, the Milky Way galaxy we inhabit, other stars and galaxies, supernovas and nebulaes, truly weird stuff like Pulsars and Black Holes, Quasars (the most distant objects in the Universe that shed a glimpse into the early Universe), the structure of galaxy clusters, dark matter, dark energy that propels the Universe on an accelerating expansion rate, and all kinds of other stuff that truly boggles the mind. The discussion about life out there is interesting as well, but I really don't think we'll ever know about it in our lifetimes. They're just trying hard to find an Earth-like planets in some distant star systems and that may be at least 10~15 years off because we simply don't have the technology to find them yet.
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shredrulez
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2004 9:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

cool non-music topic, ed. yeah, i need to catch up on all the new things they're discovering out there. been too lazy to do it. what do you know about stars and our own sun? how do these massive balls of fire come to be?
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alexkhan



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PostPosted: Sat Nov 06, 2004 8:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

shredrulez wrote:
cool non-music topic, ed. yeah, i need to catch up on all the new things they're discovering out there. been too lazy to do it. what do you know about stars and our own sun? how do these massive balls of fire come to be?


Hmmm... yes, you should go to the local Borders or Barnes & Noble and pick up a copy of "The Universe and Beyond" by Terence Dickinson.

Essentially, stars form when gases (mainly hydrogen, helium, etc.) and dust floating around in space coalesce with other roaming clouds and compression of these gases ignite a nuclear reaction. The Sun is basically a nuclear reactor. At the core, 655 million tons of hydrogen are fused into 650 million tons of helium at a temperature of 15 million degrees C every second. The remaining 5 million tons are converted into 400 trillion trillion watts of energy and make their way towards the surface and that may take about a million years. That energy ends up being dispersed into space, mostly as light.

It's been like this for a little less than 5 billion years and should continue as is for another 5 billion. But eventually, the Sun will deplete hydrogen at the core and start burning the less efficient helium. So the temperature will rise and the Sun will start ballooning outwards. Eventually, all the helium will be exhausted and the Sun will start burning other elements up the periodic table - carbon, magnesium, oxygen, etc. By then, the Sun will have expanded to swallow up Mercury and possibly even Venus. It probably won't expand enough to swallow up Earth, but by then, Earth will be an airless scorched piece of rock. When the Sun's nuclear furnace burns up everything up to iron, it will start choking on the wastes of its burnt fuel and that's when it will start collapsing. Iron doesn't burn - it'd be like trying to burn stones and the Sun is now toast.

Sun will only be left with a core of its former self radiating energy only through the white hot compression of about 3/4 of its mass squeezed into a ball the size of the earth. The Sun is now a white dwarf. There are billions of white dwarfs out there and the astronomers are pretty sure that this is the fate of our Sun. For all intents and purposes, it's really a dead star by then as there is no more nuclear burning going on. Other massive stars (at least 4 times the mass of the Sun) die spectacular deaths exploding in supernovas and end up being Pulsars (also called neutron stars) and Black Holes. Pulsars and Black Holes are, obviously, the two most bizarre objects out there. But I'll get into those in my next "issue". Wink
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shredrulez
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 10, 2004 10:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

thanks for the info. fascinating stuff. and mind-numbing as well... Shocked need to get my lazy butt over to the bookstore to read up more on these things. Embarassed
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Noise Epidemic



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PostPosted: Wed Nov 10, 2004 2:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Here's an article talking about the Universe being finite. Until I read this I always just thought the entire thing was infinite. I mean, if it wasn't, what would be AFTER? It's just something I can't fathom. This explanation seems to somewhat kill the possibility of there BEING an outside...It's really weird.

I came across this article a while ago, and since this topic of discussion came up, I thought it'd be interesting to discuss it. I don't really remember much about it, and when I DID read it, I was kind of confused. I'm going to look at it again when I get home, I'm at school right now - supposed to be working on an architecture project, which I plan on doing after I post this. Laughing

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994250
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frankus



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PostPosted: Wed Nov 10, 2004 3:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tuffnell wrote:

When we die, do we haunt the sky?
Do we lurk in the murk of the seas?
What then? Are we born again?
Just to sit asking questions like these?


Laughing

BBC have a cool series on at the moment, what space exploration would be like if we didn't have self serving politicians at the wheel Wink called Sapce Odyssey

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/

First episode was okay in a formulaic BBC docudrama type way Wink
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alexkhan



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PostPosted: Wed Nov 10, 2004 9:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Noise Epidemic wrote:
Here's an article talking about the Universe being finite. Until I read this I always just thought the entire thing was infinite. I mean, if it wasn't, what would be AFTER? It's just something I can't fathom. This explanation seems to somewhat kill the possibility of there BEING an outside...It's really weird.

I came across this article a while ago, and since this topic of discussion came up, I thought it'd be interesting to discuss it. I don't really remember much about it, and when I DID read it, I was kind of confused. I'm going to look at it again when I get home, I'm at school right now - supposed to be working on an architecture project, which I plan on doing after I post this. Laughing

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994250


Yeah, this is a fascinating subject because I used to think the space was infinite but I've come to understand that it isn't. What you need to understand is that space itself is a part of the Universe that we observe around us. We all know now that the Universe is expanding, born from the crucible of the Big Bang that occurred around 13.7 billion years ago. When we look out at distant objects like galaxies and quasars, they are all rushing away from us.

In a way, the Universe is sort of like an elongated sphere and space is part of it. The picture in this article shows what the Universe is like with matter (galaxy clusters, galaxies, dark matter, clouds and dust, etc.) distributed rather unevenly at moments after the Big Bang:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993375

You may ask, "Well, what is outside of that sphere?" and the answer is that there's no way to know since it's not part of our Universe. The condition that the Big Bang sprung from is known as "quantum space-time foam" where extreme conditions outside of our present physics theory existed and when the four fundamental forces of nature - gravity, electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force were all united as one. At the moment of the Big Bang, all the matter in the Universe was squeezed into an area smaller than a proton - something the size of the Sun would have been like an atom. The temperature was many trillions and trillions of degrees. Then some many-trillionths of a second later, gravity was released from the four fundamental forces, then some trillionths of a second later, the nuclear forces, and so on. In the process, the Universe expanded from the size of an atom to a ball the size of a grapefruit and it has been expanding ever since.

A good analogy of all this would be a raisin bread being baked in an oven. Let's say we are on one of the raisins on the dough of the bread. As the dough expands the other raisins all seem to be rushing away from each other. The raisin that is one inch away expands to two inches away while the one that is two inches away expands to four inches away in the same time period. The dough is the "space". The galaxies that are hurtling away from us many millions or billions of light-years away from us are being "carried" away by the expanding Universe - they themselves are not rushing away as though they had some "engine" that propelled them outwards. The trick is in understanding that aspect of the Universe. I used to think that space itself was infinite and that Universe only comprised of the matter moving outwards, but space is a part of the Universe and there is definitely a "boundary", so to speak that continuese to expand outwards.

Now quantum-physics and its inflation theory predicts that our Universe is probably one of billions or trillions or more of other universes hurtling away from each other in other dimensions that are totally disconnected from ours that we observe around us. It's also quite possible that new universes are being hatched every second in new big bangs in other dimensions. What makes all of this plausible is the realm known as singularity that exists in Black Holes. Essentially, this realm is outside of physics and other sciences that we use to understand what's going on out there. Singularity is a realm of infinite density, gravity so powerful that not even light can escapce. It's a realm where time and space does not exist.

So what's beyond the edge of space? It's really like before the beginning of time and space, or singularity. When we look out to the furthest edges of space, we are looking back into time. When we look at a galaxy that's 200 million light-years away, we are looking at how it looked when dinosaurs were roaming the Earth. We are not seeing how it looks now - the light leaving there now will reach here 200 million years later. When we look at quasars and the most distant galaxies in the Universe that are as far as 12 or 13 billion light-years away, we are looking at them when the Universe was only a billion or less years old - in its infant stage.

With more powerful telescopes and instruments being developed, I think we'll get an amazing bonanza of information about our Universe in the coming years ahead.
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Noise Epidemic



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PostPosted: Thu Nov 11, 2004 3:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

That's all so amazing. It's just like Shocked

And to think there are people against space exploration and funding for it Evil or Very Mad
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alexkhan



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PostPosted: Thu Nov 11, 2004 6:26 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Noise Epidemic wrote:
That's all so amazing. It's just like Shocked

And to think there are people against space exploration and funding for it Evil or Very Mad


Oh, don't even get me started about the people against space exploration or those who say that the Universe is 6,000 years old. Rolling Eyes Do you know that some 20% of the people in America still think that the Sun orbits the Earth? But let's not get into this since that's a whole another subject matter that we probably don't want to get into in this forum!

I'm particularly fascinated by the thought of the "Multiverse", a Universe of Universes. That is a really head-spinning subject being debated by some of the brightest astrophysicists and cosmologists from universtities like CalTech, MIT, Yale, etc.

I guess what makes sense about it is the question of why our Universe has the properties that it does for life to develop. If the force of gravity in this Universe was only 0.00000001% or whatever minuscule number stronger than what it is now, stars would have burned up their nuclear fuels too quickly for planets, like our Earth, to develop life. That's just one example. There are so many factors that made it just right for there to be life. If the composition of various matters was not within one-quadrillionth of what it is now, life would have been impossible. It's impossible to explain a lot of these properties that made it amicable for life to eventually develop and evolve over so many billions of years.

But, now, the thinking is, "Well, if it happened once (the Big Bang of our own Universe), it could surely happen again and again and again... and probably have happened again and again..." At the moment of the Big Bang, a trillion other Universes may have been born that are all expanding out just like ours is. Some of those Universes may have different physical properties from our own. Some may have stronger or weaker electromagnetic forces than our own. Some may have stronger or weaker gravity forces than our town. Same with the nuclear forces. These Universes would be very different from our own and life as we know it may not be possible.

This scenario explains, on a pure chance basis, of a Universe like ours having its very particular physical characteristics and properties for life to develop and have beings like us ponder the beginning and the fate of the Universe and how and why Guthrie was blessed with such amazing musical talents! Wink Laughing
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