Astronomy

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 was again discussed last week. I will share my take-away conclusion so far. But first, why are such willing to put up such a spectacularly untestable, unobservable claim? Because, we first know that non-being has no causal powers so if there were ever utter nothing, such would forever obtain. That a world manifestly is implies that SOMETHING always was. The question is what, given that Read More ›

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 Penn State Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Assistant Professor Jason Wright and led by Louisiana State University’s Tabetha Boyajian, is one step closer to solving the mystery behind the “most mysterious star in the universe.” KIC 8462852, or “Tabby’s Star,” nicknamed after Boyajian, is otherwise an ordinary star, about 50 percent bigger and 1,000 degrees hotter than the Sun, and about than 1,000 light years Read More ›

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 forming around a low-mass star was due to the belief that there isn’t enough material in a cloud of dust and debris that form star systems such as this one. “Perhaps we’ve just been very lucky and found something that is very, very rare,” said Bayliss, lead author of the paper which will be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Read More ›

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 and then theorized about. “Of course, emission directly from black holes cannot be observed,” said Sandia researcher and lead author Guillaume Loisel, lead author for a paper on the experimental results, published in August in Physical Review Letters. “We see emission from surrounding matter just before it is consumed by the black hole. This surrounding matter is forced into the shape of a disk, called Read More ›

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 the Latinized version of his name, Alhazen. Born in Basra, in what in now Iraq, Al-Haytham spent most of his life in the Egyptian city of Cairo during the Fatimid Caliphate in the 11th century A.D. His great invention was named “Al-Bayt al-Muthlim” in Arabic (which translates to “the dark room” in English) — the earliest known “camera obscura,” where a bright external image, such Read More ›

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 substantial quantity of Zn in the Earth’s core, whereas previously there had been thought to be none. This implies that the building blocks of the Earth must be different to what has been supposed. The work is presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Paris. More. Paper presumably to follow. One of the nice things about science, when it actually works, is that it isn’t Read More ›

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 present when the larger parent body from which the meteorite broke off was formed. There are not many options for how an excess of iron-60 — which later decayed into nickel-60 — could have gotten into a primitive Solar System object in the first place — one of them being a supernova. While her research did not find a “smoking gun,” definitively proving that the Read More ›

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 problem: The canonical giant impact hypothesis rests on assumptions that do not match the evidence. If Theia hit Earth and later formed the moon, the moon should be made of Theia-type material. But the moon does not look like Theia — or like Mars, for that matter. Down to its atoms, it looks almost exactly like Earth. Confronted with this discrepancy, lunar researchers have sought Read More ›

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. Where, inductive here denotes arguments whereby evidence — typically empirical — supports but does not logically demonstrate a conclusion, as a rule provisionally. Such has been multiplied by Scientism, the view, assumption or implication that Science ring fences and monopolises reliable, serious knowledge. (Of course, such Scientism is self-referentially incoherent as this is an epistemological and thus philosophical claim; it fails its own test.) In Read More ›

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 skeptical view of “safe” science and government power. The frequently repeated claim that Fred Hoyle was an atheist has been greatly exaggerated. While Hoyle had been an atheist early in his career, he didn’t end that way. This is made clear in his book, The Intelligent Universe (1983) where he argued that “the information-rich” universe was guided and controlled by an “overriding intelligence,” and in Read More ›

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 prevailed for the past two decades. The latest result shows a 9 percent discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number called the Hubble constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding. But in a measure of how precise cosmologists think their science has become, this small mismatch has fostered a debate about just how well we know the cosmos. “If it is real, Read More ›

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 in this gallery. More. See also: Did Pluto get tipped over? Pluto has been resurfaced. But how? Pluto has ice mountains? and Weather Network: Slug-like object spotted on Pluto Follow UD News at Twitter!

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 lunar formation, which suggests that one giant impact led to the formation of the moon. More. See also: Space.com: Scientists finally know how old Moon is What’s surprising, really, is how little we know about the moon in general. And various current theories: Another moon origin theory: Epic crash How the Moon Formed: 5 Wild Lunar Theories (Mike Wall at Space.com, 2014) Our moon formed in Read More ›

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 when is unclear, from the jumbled rock samples available to be gathered by astronauts: “You don’t have pristine, old rock preserved on the moon,” Barboni said. “That’s one of the biggest problems — the whole-rock record on the moon is not there.” But zircon samples collected by Apollo 14 appear to provide reasonably clear information. The moon’s advanced age also makes sense from a dynamics Read More ›

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 names of two key new figures, NASA administrator and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy are not yet announced. Funding for NASA’s Earth science program has traditionally waxed and waned with changing administrations. Funding as a percent of NASA’s overall budget declined sharply from 2001 to 2006, the early years of the George W. Bush presidency, dipping from about 11 Read More ›