Author: Sarah Salviander

Space researchers likely to benefit from space tourism

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For every problem, there is almost always a free-market solution

Science, perhaps even more than tourism, could turn out to be big business for Virgin and other companies that are aiming to provide short rides above the 62-mile altitude that marks the official entry into outer space, eventually on a daily basis.

A $200,000 ticket is prohibitively expensive except for a small slice of the wealthy, but compared with the millions of dollars that government agencies like NASA typically spend to get experiments into space, “it’s revolutionary,” said S. Alan Stern, an associate vice president of the Southwest Research Institute’s space sciences and engineering division in Boulder, Colo.

I think it has escaped the general consciousness that up until the last one hundred years or so scientific research was privately funded. It looks like technical advancements combined with economic forces are driving research back in that direction, however slowly. Personally, I couldn’t be happier about that, because private funding disengages science from whatever government orthodoxy happens to be in place at the moment*.

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Aussie physicists produce the first cold-atom laser

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This is quite a year for laser breakthroughs. First we had the anti-laser, and now Australian physicists have created an atom laser from extremely cold helium atoms. Conventional lasers (LASER = Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) produce coherent light, that is light comprised of photons that are evenly spaced instead of clustered together in groups. The Aussie physicists have managed to produce atoms that behave the same way by super-cooling them to a millionth of a degree above absolute zero (even outer space isn’t that cold). Atom lasers can be applied to nifty things like holography, which means we’re one (tiny) step closer to every Trekkie’s fantasy of visiting a Holodeck.

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Some galaxies grow like snowflakes

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Massive elliptical galaxy M87

Astronomers have found further evidence that some galaxies grow in a way similar to snowflakes. A snowflake grows by building up ice crystals around a tiny grain of dust in the atmosphere. Likewise, some galaxies start off as modest “seed” galaxies within a cluster and then build up by acquiring stars from other galaxies in the cluster. This brief computer simulation shows the process (the bright dots in the simulation are the luminous cores of galaxies; notice how the one in the center grows to enormous proportions by grabbing stars from the other galaxies).

The authors of the new study observed the massive elliptical galaxy, NGC 1407, also commonly known as M87. Their case relies on measurements of the proportion of heavy elements in M87’s stars as a function of where they are located in the galaxy. The stars in the outer part of the galaxy have a different chemical composition than stars near the core, so it’s likely the galaxy wasn’t built all at once, but from the inside out like a snowflake. Not a gentle, delicate snowflake mind you: M87 is the most massive galaxy in the local universe, with a powerful black hole-driven jet of particles shooting out of its core at near-light-speed.

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Last flight

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The Scholar Redeemer (my friend and colleague, Dr. Robb Wilson) eloquently commemorated the last space shuttle flight yesterday

… it was truly awesome to witness so much power under complete control, doing exactly what was expected. It was amazing to have a human made device that went from sitting completely still in Florida to being over 100 miles up and over the Indian Ocean less than an hour later. Watching such a complicated machine with so much demonstrated explosive capability safely carry fellow humans completely off of our planet so quickly… there just aren’t words for it.

Please pay him a visit and read the whole thing.

The shuttle had become a bit of a dinosaur, but I couldn’t help but be moved every single time I watched one launch into space: to me there are fewer sights more awe-inspiring than a 2,000-ton spacecraft slipping the bonds of the Earth, and realizing that it is powered almost entirely by human ingenuity.

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Science faction

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The Scientific Curmudgeon ponders whether theoretical physics is going soft:

Roger Penrose and V. G. Gurzadyan recently proposed that minute ripples in the cosmic microwave background- the afterglow of the big bang- originated from the collision of monster black holes in another universe that preceded our cosmos, and may have spawned it; moreover, our universe might be just one of an infinite series spawned by such cataclysms.

My reaction to reading about this idea was: Far out! Penrose, one of the most famous, creative physicists in the world, along with Gurzadyan had dusted off the old oscillating universe theory of the cosmos, which I always liked. But not for a nanosecond did I think their proposal was true. The proposal is literally too far out; it can never be confirmed in the way that the existence of quarks has been confirmed or the big bang itself.

This is the problem I’ve always had with the various proposed “theories” of the multiverse: if a proposal can’t be confirmed, it’s not science.

Physics is at a real crossroads with the multiverse. If the majority of physicists accept it as science, the field of physics is doomed; if the majority relegate it to speculation, physics will continue on the path of genuine science.

Stay tuned for a mega-post on the multiverse in the coming months.

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Possible baby planet discovered

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Astronomers may have spotted a baby planet around a star called T Cha, which is estimated to be 7 million years old — still in its diapers, compared to the 4.5-billion-year-old Sun. What makes this an unusual discovery is that it may be the first time astronomers have witnessed an individual planet in the process of forming. The evidence hinges on a suspicious gap in the dusty disk surrounding the newborn star, suggesting that some kind of object has formed and swept out the material in its orbit.

Astronomers have dubbed dusty planet-forming disks “proplyds,” short for “proto-planetary disks.” The Hubblecast video below shows astonishing images of several proplyds observed in the Orion Nebula.

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Billions of planets in the Milky Way?

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About 50 billion, to be specific. If you take the results from the Kepler Mission and do a bit of math, that’s the implication. Hundreds of millions of those planets are predicted to be in the habitable zone, too.

I’ve seen a moderate amount of hubbub about the theological implications of finding life elsewhere in the universe, especially intelligent life. I’ll likely post on this in the future, but for now I’ll just point out two things: 1) the Bible is mute on the subject; and 2) the great Christian apologist, C. S. Lewis, had no problem with the prospect of intelligent life out there. (He did, however, express concern about humankind’s likely behavior toward any alien life we might encounter. Unfortunately, he’s probably right, but I’ll keep watching Star Trek and hoping for the best anyway.)

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