"Astronomy"

Jan 1, 2015
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"astronomy" is another term for astrology and is of the devil.
The stars dont influence us at all, look at them, they're so damn tiny!
 
Granny wantin' to know if ya can use it to wave Hi! to her lil' green buddies?...

Hoping to find life on other planets, astronomers start on giant Chile telescope
12 Nov.`15 - Chilean President Michelle Bachelet put hammer to stone on an Andean mountaintop on Wednesday evening to mark the start of construction for one of the world's most advanced telescopes, an instrument that may help shed light on the possibility of life on distant planets.
The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), scheduled to be completed by 2024, will have a resolution 10 times that of the Hubble spacecraft. Experts say it will be able to observe black holes in the distant cosmos and make out planets in other solar systems with unprecedented detail. Such technology, astronomers say, will help humans determine how the universe formed and if planets hundreds of light years away could support life. "With this science, there are no limits to the possibilities that are open," said Bachelet, standing on the GMT's site, a wind-buffeted, 8,250-foot (2,500-meter) mountaintop. "What it does is open the door to understanding," she said. The GMT - a collaboration of institutions in the United States, Chile, South Korea, Brazil, and Australia - will rely on seven intricately curved lenses, each almost 28 feet (8.5 meters) wide.

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Artist's illustration of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), which will be built atop Las Campanas Peak in Chile. The groundbreaking ceremony for GMT, which will feature seven mirrors arranged to form a light-collecting surface 80 feet​

For the system to work, no one lens can have a blemish of more than 25 nanometers, which is some four thousand times smaller than the average width of a human hair. "Astronomy is like archaeology; what we see in the sky happened many years ago," said Yuri Beletsky, a Belarussian astronomer for the GMT. "The biggest expectation is that we find something that we don't expect," he added on a bus driving up sinuous switchbacks to the planned observatory. Two other massive instruments - the European Extremely Large Telescope, also in Chile, and the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii - are scheduled to be completed in the 2020s as well. But GMT President Patrick McCarthy says the telescope's massive single lenses and wider observation field will allow for more precise measurements.

Among the phenomena he hopes to observe is dark matter, mysterious invisible material that makes up most of the universe's mass. Astronomers say Chile's bone-dry Atacama Desert, host to the GMT and dozens of other high-powered telescopes, is uniquely suited to space observation as it has dry air, high mountains, and little light pollution. McCarthy also points out that another advantage for astronomers in Chile is that the airflow from the nearby Pacific Ocean is smoother than that over continental deserts, meaning scientists have to contend with less atmospheric interference.

Hoping to find life on other planets, astronomers start on giant Chile telescope
 
Is there any point to this thread? The commonality between Astronomy, which is a branch of science and Astrology which is a belief that events on earth can be predicted by celestial observation is they both involve the study of heavenly bodies.
 
Granny wantin' to know if dat's what's been muckin' up her TV reception when she watchin' Charlie Rose?...

First gamma-ray pulsar found outside Milky Way galaxy
Nov. 13, 2015 | J0540 is 20 times more powerful than the next most luminous gamma-ray pulsar.
A newly discovered pulsar, called PSR J0540-6919, is the first gamma-ray pulsar to be found outside the Milky Way galaxy. The pulsar, which was imaged by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, is also the most luminous gamma-ray pulsar astronomers have ever seen. The newly discovered pulsar is 163,000 light-years away from our solar system, located on the outer edge of the Tarantula Nebula, an oft-studied region of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

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The newly discovered gamma-ray pulsar, J0540, is one of two pulsars identified within the Tarantula Nebula. The other is PSR J0537−6910.​

The Tarantula Nebula is so frequently studied because it's one of the closest and most active star-forming regions. In fact, scientists have known about this impressive source of gamma rays for some time. But until now, astronomers had misunderstood the source. Scientists thought the gamma rays were the result of subatomic particles colliding in the wake of violent supernova explosions. The bursts are not a cumulative effect, it turns out. They are generated by a singular source.

"It's now clear that a single pulsar, PSR J0540-6919, is responsible for roughly half of the gamma-ray brightness we originally thought came from the nebula," lead scientist Pierrick Martin, an astrophysicist at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France, said in a press release. "That is a genuine surprise." Researchers announced the newly discovered gamma-ray pulsar in a paper published in the journal Science.

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Scientists record 5,400-mile-per-hour winds on faraway planet
Nov. 13, 2015 - "We are tremendously excited to have found a way to map weather systems on distant planets," said study co-author Peter Wheatley.
Scientists at the University of Warwick in England have built the first weather map of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet hosts winds measuring upwards of 5,400 miles per hour. "Whilst we have previously known of wind on exoplanets, we have never before been able to directly measure and map a weather system," Tom Louden, Warwick astrophysicist and lead researcher on the project, said in a press release. The exoplanet is HD 189733b, a hot Jupiter-like world that lies 63 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula, the Fox.

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The day side of the exoplanet likely looks blue, as light becomes scattered from the atmosphere's silicate haze. The planet's high temperature causes the night side to glow a deep red.​

The combination of spectroscopy and the scientists' understanding of the Doppler Effect made it possible to measure the velocity of winds in the faraway planet's atmosphere. Using the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, a telescope in La Silla, Chile, researchers were able to detail the exoplanet's atmosphere by plotting sodium atoms' absorption of the host star's radiation -- that's the spectroscopy part.

By analyzing the way these spectroscopy results changed as the planet moved across the face of its sun -- its atmosphere moving away from Earth and towards Earth -- researchers were able to pick up the signatures of the Doppler Effect and ascertain the atmosphere's velocity on both sides of the planet. "As parts of HD 189733b's atmosphere move towards or away from the Earth the Doppler effect changes the wavelength of this feature, which allows the velocity to be measured," Louden explained. "The surface of the star is brighter at the center than it is at the edge, so as the planet moves in front of the star the relative amount of light blocked by different parts of the atmosphere changes. For the first time, we've used this information to measure the velocities on opposite sides of the planet independently, which gives us our velocity map."

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A planet is born...

Scientists observe cosmic dust evolve into a planet
Fri, Nov 20, 2015 - LOOKING FOR LIGHT: Astronomers have seen for the first time a massive gas planet taking shape out of microscopic dust particles 450 light-years from Earth
The primordial process that turns enormous clouds of cosmic dust into newborn planets over millions of years has been observed directly for the first time. Astronomers caught sight of a planet in the making around a young star in the neighborhood of Taurus 450 light-years from Earth. The discovery is a boon for scientists who have never before had a real star system against which they can check theories of how the universe came to be dotted with different worlds. “This is our first chance to watch the planet formation process happening,” University of Arizona graduate student Stephanie Sallum said. “We can go and look at this and do more detailed studies now, to try to understand how planets are built,” she said.

Although nearly 1,900 alien worlds have been spotted beyond our solar system, none are still forming. And with no growing planets to gaze at, scientists can only compare their models for how planets are born with the end results, such as fully mature rocky worlds and gas giants. That leaves an enormous gap in astronomers’ understanding. The latest ideas on planetary formation put broad margins on the time the process takes, ranging from one to 10 million years. What happens between the start and finish is hazy. Princeton University astrophysicist Zhaohuan Zhu said: “Little is known about how microscopic dust particles can grow 14 orders of magnitude to become a giant planet.”

What is known is that particles left over from the dusty disc that surrounds a newborn star coalesce and coalesce until eons later, a nascent planet takes shape. It grows as material from its own dusty disc rains down on the surface, forming a huge sphere under its own gravity. Sallum and her colleagues commandeered two different telescopes in their search for a planet in the making. They used the large binocular telescope in Arizona to look at infrared light coming from the vicinity of LkCa 15, a 2 million-year-old star around which astronomers had spotted a candidate protoplanet, LkCa 15b, in 2012. Infrared light received by the telescope pointed to two, perhaps three, young planets in orbit around the star. The team then turned to another telescope, the Magellan adaptive optics system in Chile.

This time, they looked for light that is known to be released by hydrogen atoms when very hot material falls on to a growing planet. They picked up the signature emissions from the closest body to the star, the suspected protoplanet LkCa 15b. It was strong evidence yet that the planet was in the midst of forming. From past observations, the team went on to reconstruct the movement of the new planets and found that their orbits looked circular. “We can’t say much about their size, but you could have stable orbits for millions of years if these planets were somewhere between half as massive as Jupiter and three times as massive as Jupiter,” Sallum said. The planets are likely to be gas giants that orbit between 12 and 24 times further from their star than Earth is from the sun.

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Background lighting could be blinding...

Progress disrupting astronomy hub
Wed, Dec 16, 2015 - When some of the world’s leading astronomers scaled a frosty Chilean peak in the middle of last month to break ground on a state-of-the-art US$1 billion telescope, they were stunned by an unexpectedly hazy glow.
On the floor of the Atacama Desert, about 1,700m below the planned Giant Magellan Telescope, new streetlights lining Chile’s north-south highway shone brightly. To the naked eye, the Milky Way still looked sharp. However, to a sensitive state-of-the-art telescope scouring the deepest reaches of the known universe, the new ground light could be blinding. “It’s like putting an oil rig in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef,” said University of Chile astronomy professor Guillermo Blanc, who first saw the lights at the opening. “It’s insane,” he added. “Why are they trying to light up the Andes?”

Over the past 30 years, Chile has carved out a niche as the global hub for observational astronomy. More than a dozen major research telescopes have already been built, and by 2020, the South American country is to boast about 70 percent of the world’s astronomical infrastructure. The low humidity and smooth airflow in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert create unrivaled visibility for the high-tech telescopes that scientists hope will shed light on the formation of the universe and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

However, scientists say light pollution has increased sharply in the Atacama as mining cities swell and tourist numbers mushroom. “There is an ongoing concern that ground-based astronomy is at risk long term. There just are not that many pristine sites left,” said Patrick McCarthy, the president of the Giant Magellan Telescope, which is to be constructed at the Las Campanas Observatory in the southern Atacama. “As these cities and highways grow, you start to wash out the faintest objects. The thing is, the faintest objects are the reason we’re building these telescopes in the first place,” McCarthy added. Just more than 100km southwest of the Giant Magellan Telescope, the populations of Coquimbo and La Serena ballooned by almost 70 percent from 1992 to 2012. Nightclubs, sports arenas and sprawling suburbs all spew bright artificial light into the night sky.

Scientists at the Gemini Observatory, located on an ocher mountaintop more than 60km southeast of those cities, said increasing light pollution has already had a measurable effect. “You can already detect streetlights at certain wavelengths,” Gemini astronomer Rene Rutten said. “If you were to stand up here on a dark, moonless night, you would see urban areas in the distance, and even what you can see just by the naked eye is very, very significant.” The expansion of nearby Route 41 linking La Serena to Argentina is another threat, said Chris Smith, Chile mission head for a US-based research group currently constructing the US$665 million Large Synoptic Survey Telescope adjacent to the Gemini. If the proper measures are not taken, creeping light pollution could materially degrade the region’s skies in as little as a decade, he said.

Progress disrupting astronomy hub - Taipei Times
 
"astronomy" is another term for astrology and is of the devil.
The stars dont influence us at all, look at them, they're so damn tiny!

They're far away, not tiny. Compared to our host star, the Sun, the average star is the size of a basketball to a pea. And the biggest star so far discovered the size of a hot air balloon to a pea. Or in computer terms, the size and width of our monitor's resolution to a single pixel.

Astronomy is looking up as they say. Astrology is making the mistake that connect-the-dots makes sense even if it only makes that sense viewed head-on. Alter the angle enough and every constellation ceases to be. In reality, constellation stars are no where near one another and only appear close together viewed head-on. From the sides, they're unrelatedness is then apparent.

No one but a true fool dismisses the sciences in favor of religion. If educated in the US, the chance you have a faith that has you convinced gods exist is less than one percent. What people say, and what they're thinking are radically different. Thank goodness. If people who go to church, say they're a given faith, and design airplanes really believed in gods and not sciences, I'd never get in car or fly on a plane.
 
Mebbe dat was a spark from the Big Bang?

Radio flash tracked to faraway galaxy
Wed, 24 Feb 2016 - Astronomers pinpoint the source of an explosive 'fast radio burst' for the very first time, and use it to measure the density of the cosmos.
For the first time, scientists have tracked the source of a "fast radio burst" - a fleeting explosion of radio waves which, in this case, came from a galaxy six billion light-years away. The cause of the big flash, only the seventeenth ever detected, remains a puzzle, but spotting a host galaxy is a key moment in the study of such bursts. It also allowed the team to measure how much matter got in the way of the waves and thus to "weigh the Universe". Their findings are published in Nature.

Wake-up call

Fast radio bursts last only milliseconds but in that moment, whatever makes them blasts as much energy into space - in the form of radio waves - as our Sun emits in days or even weeks. To follow this particular signal home, an international team did rapid detective work with multiple telescopes and ultimately snapped an image of the source galaxy in visible light. Lead author Evan Keane had set up an alert system to trigger this flurry of activity, by running live data from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia directly into a supercomputer. "The goal was to reduce the lag from the thing hitting the dish, to us knowing that it hit the dish, from months - to nothing," he told the BBC.

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Sure enough, when one of these mysterious bursts hit Parkes' famous 64m dish on April 18 2015, alarm bells rang and emails quickly circled the planet. By way of contrast, the first fast radio burst (FRB) ever detected struck the same dish in 2001 but was only reported in 2007. "A decade ago, we weren't really looking for them - and also our ability to handle the data and to search it in a reasonable time was significantly poorer," said Dr Keane, who now works for the Square Kilometre Array Organisation in Jodrell Bank, UK. "Whereas with this one, I was awoken by my phone going crazy a few seconds after it happened, saying: Evan, wake up! There was an FRB!"

Two hours later, the six 22m dishes of the Australian Telescope Compact Array, a 400km drive from Parkes, were already homing in on the culpable corner of the sky. They caught an afterglow of the flash, which took six days to fade. It was much fainter than the burst itself but allowed the team to zoom in on the source of the burst with 1,000 times more precision than ever before. Knowing exactly where to look, they next went hunting in optical light using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, run by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. "Right where the Compact Array tells us there should be something, there is a galaxy," Dr Keane said. Close examination of the Subaru data showed the galaxy to be elliptical - an off-spherical blob of stars that is well past its prime, in galactic terms.

Cosmic weigh-in
 

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