Category: Astronomy
“Opaque research” has some astronomers concerned.
| April 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Cosmology, Peer review |
From Sarah Wild at Physics Today: Irreproducibility and the black box nature of machine learning plague many fields of science, from Earth observation to drug discovery. But astronomy represents a notable case study because the quantity of data is burgeoning at an unprecedented rate. The installation of new data-churning telescopes, combined with marked improvements in […]
My conclusion (so far) on the suggested infinite past, beginningless physical world: not plausible, likely not possible, here’s why
One of the more astonishing points of debate that has come out at UD is that at least some defenders of the evolutionary materialistic view are prepared to argue for or assume as default that we have had a beginningless past for the physical world. This has come up several times in recent years and […]
“Alien Megastructure Is Not The Cause Of The Dimming Of Tabby’s Star ” (Design Inference filter in action; Sci Fi Fans disappointed)
According to SciTech Daily in a January 3, 2018 article, Tabby’s star, aka KIC 8462852, has had a mysterious brightening and dimming cycle. (Such a cycle, of course raises the interesting thought of the erection of a Dyson Sphere or a similar megastructure.) As the article reports: >>A team of more than 200 researchers, including […]
Newly discovered giant planet does not follow the rules
| November 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Exoplanets, Intelligent Design |
From Nicole Mortillaro at CBC: The star is a red M-dwarf, the most common star in our universe. But until now, it wasn’t believed that a gaseous planet of such a size, would ever exist orbiting this type of low-mass star. … The reason astronomers believed that a gas giant this large wasn’t capable of […]
Researchers: Hands-on tests contradict black hole model
| August 31, 2017 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Cosmology |
From ScienceDaily: A long-standing but unproven assumption about the X-ray spectra of black holes in space has been contradicted by hands-on experiments performed at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine. Z, the most energetic laboratory X-ray source on Earth, can duplicate the X-rays surrounding black holes that otherwise can be watched only from a great distance […]
Eclipse info and trivia
| August 21, 2017 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design |
Make it look like you are working… From Time and Date, how much eclipse you can see from where you live and the date of the next eclipse (moon). Here’s a compendium of historical eclipse information from LiveScience, including: One of the greatest eclipse observers in history was the Persian scholar Ibn al-Haytham, also known by […]
Is our current theory of Earth’s formation mistaken?
| August 19, 2017 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Intelligent Design, Physics |
From ScienceDaily: New geochemical research indicates that existing theories of the formation of the Earth may be mistaken. The results of experiments to show how zinc (Zn) relates to sulphur (S) under the conditions present at the time of the formation of the Earth more than 4 billion years ago, indicate that there is a […]
New evidence of supernova shock wave as origin of our solar system
| August 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Intelligent Design, Physics |
From ScienceDaily: Because all the iron-60 from the Solar System’s formation has long since decayed, Telus’ research, published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, focused on its daughter product, nickel-60. The amount of nickel-60 found in meteorite samples — particularly in comparison to the amount of stable, “ordinary” iron-56 — can indicate how much iron-60 was […]
Textbook theory of moon’s origin is challenged
| August 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Physics |
From Rebecca Boyle at Quanta: Textbooks say that the moon was formed after a Mars-size mass smashed the young Earth. But new evidence has cast doubt on that story, leaving researchers to dream up new ways to get a giant rock into orbit. In the past five years, a bombardment of studies has exposed a […]
Is Mathematics a Natural Science? (Is that important?)
| July 11, 2017 | Posted by kairosfocus under Animal minds, Astronomy, brains and computation vs contemplation, Logic and First Principles of right reason, Mathematics |
In our time there is a tendency to treat Mathematics as though it is a natural science. This reflects in part the shift in meaning of the term Science in recent centuries, from knowledge and systematic bodies of more or less established knowledge, to the natural sciences based on inductive reasoning on observation and experiment. […]
Fred Hoyle thought that there is design in nature
| May 20, 2017 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Atheism, Design inference, Intelligent Design |
Science historian Michael Flannery offers a vid link below. He notes, Two things are important to bear in mind: first, nothing in Hoyle’s rejection bears upon a teleological universe (Hoyle’s steady state can–and did–coexist with a purposeful and intelligently guided universe); and second, Hoyle’s rejection of the big bang still allows him to have very […]
Crisis in cosmology: Universe expanding too fast?
| February 25, 2017 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, News, Physics |
From Dennis Overbye at New York Times: There is a crisis brewing in the cosmos, or perhaps in the community of cosmologists. The universe seems to be expanding too fast, some astronomers say. Recent measurements of the distances and velocities of faraway galaxies don’t agree with a hard-won “standard model” of the cosmos that has […]
New pics from Pluto, including strange, icy haloes
| January 21, 2017 | Posted by News under Astronomy, News |
At Space.com: NASA’s New Horizons probe has visited a place never before visited by a robotic probe from Earth: Pluto. In July 2015, the spacecraft completed a nearly-decade-long journey to fly by Pluto, and reveal humanity’s first close-up look at the distant dwarf planet. See photos and images from the New Horizons mission to Pluto […]
Moon formed from smashed moonlets?
| January 16, 2017 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Intelligent Design, News |
From Hanneke Weitering at LiveScience: Earth’s moon may be the product of many small moonlets that merged after multiple objects as big as Mars collided with Earth, leaving disks of planetary debris orbiting the planet, a new study suggests. This idea that multiple impacts led to the moon’s birth challenges the most prevalent theory of […]
Space.com: Scientists finally know how old Moon is
| January 14, 2017 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Intelligent Design, News |
From Mike Wall at Space.com: A new analysis of lunar rocks brought to Earth by Apollo astronauts suggests that the moon formed 4.51 billion years ago — just 60 million years after the solar system itself took shape. Astronomers think the Moon took shape from a collision between Earth and a Mars-size body but just […]
NASA: Calm down, Earth scientists
| January 1, 2017 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, News |
In the fact of changes at NASA. Release your inner adult. From Debra Werner at SpaceNews: “You are leaders in your community, please be a source of signal, not a source of noise,” Zurbuchen said Dec. 12 during the annual Earth Science Town Hall meeting at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. The […]
Astrophysicist: Knowledge of the cosmos has increased rapidly but understanding very little
| December 23, 2016 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Cosmology, News, Physics |
Thanu Padmanabhan asks: Our knowledge about the universe has increased tremendously in the last three decades or so — thanks to the progress in observations — but our understanding has improved very little. There are several fundamental questions about our universe for which we have no answers within the current, operationally very successful, approach to […]
Hoyle (with updates from Walker and Davies) on Cosmological Fine Tuning: “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has “monkeyed” with the physics as well as the chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature”
| December 1, 2016 | Posted by kairosfocus under Astronomy, Cosmology, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design |
Sometimes, it is important to go back to key sources, if we are to break through deep misconceptions. This is particularly relevant for the design view of science, including on cosmological fine tuning. So, first Sir Fred (a key discoverer of the phenomenon): >>[Sir Fred Hoyle, In a talk at Caltech c 1981 (nb. this […]
NASA to spend less on climate change, more on space exploration?
| November 21, 2016 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, News |
From Nick Allen at Telegraph: US President-elect Donald Trump is set to slash Nasa’s budget for monitoring climate change and instead set a goal of sending humans to the edge of the solar system by the end of the century, and possibly back to the moon. … According to Bob Walker, who has advised Mr […]
With a signal (at last!), mystery around fast radio bursts only deepens
| November 18, 2016 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Cosmology, News |
Most perplexing mystery in astronomy. From Elizabeth Gibney at Nature: What causes split-second blasts of radio waves that appear in the sky from billions of light years away is one of the most perplexing mysteries in astronomy. Now, for the first time, astronomers have seen a flash of high-energy γ-rays [gamma rays] that looks as if […]
