I don't know of nibiru or whatever, but I thought I read somewhere that they're pretty sure there is a ninth planet way beyond the orbit of Pluto that affects the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, just hasnt been officially discovered yet. This isn't the article I remember reading, but here's one http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/...ew-giant-planet-may-lurk-beyond-pluto/7103838
Yes, they believe that there is a Planet X, but it's not going to just suddenly decide to come crashing through the regular orbits of the other planets in the solar system after 4 and a half billion years of cruising out on the periphery. That would just be rude.
Who the fuck knows. It's entirely made up (like bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or Canada), so I'd guess it can probably do whatever the hell it wants.
Likes awarded. I'm with you guys on this, it's just a bunch of BS that keeps getting recycled and people keep claiming to have "proof" without any actual evidence. Supposedly they claim that the planet may not hit earth, but all of the meteors/meteorites traveling with it would pummel us.
And they claim that it happens every 3,500 years, yet we have no human records (oral or written) of it happening in the past and I don't think there's any geologic evidence of any major cataclysmic events from that time period.
Does your wife believe in chem trails, flat earth, dinosaurs never existed, moon landing hoax, JFK assassination theories outside the norm, aliens, lizard people, etc etc etc?
If only Alex Jones and his ilk would come up with a useful conspiracy theory. Something like, "Lack of blowjobs causes cancer" or something.
My understanding is that there is at least one other planet beyond Pluto. However that planet is not making a b-line to destroy the Earth.
That's not necessarily true. Not in a little green men sense, but I think it is foolish to completely discount the possibility that a higher life form has visited/is visiting/observing us.
Like, it's possible that there's more to the JFK assassination or plenty of other things. The point is that the people who fixate on these things usually pick up a bunch of them and dive head first into crazy land.
My favorite conspiracy theory is the "Black Knight" satellite that was photographed by NASA in '98. NASA said it was a thermal blanket that came loose during an EVA mission. The other side claim it is an extraterrestrial satellite that's been orbiting Earth for thousands of years.
Makes sense. I knew Arrival had to be based on a true story but I didn't know it took place thousands of years ago
I really like how saturn's ringlet moons clear out a small lane in the rings. Those moons arent but a few hundred miles, if that, either
This engineering technique will be a massive advantage to large scale space structures in the future. Researchers create 3-D printed tensegrity objects capable of dramatic shape change June 14, 2017 Researchers at Georgia Tech 3-D printed an object made with tensegrity, a structural system of floating rods in compression and cables in continuous tension. Credit: Rob Felt A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a way to use 3-D printers to create objects capable of expanding dramatically that could someday be used in applications ranging from space missions to biomedical devices. The new objects use tensegrity, a structural system of floating rods in compression and cables in continuous tension. The researchers fabricated the struts from shape memory polymers that unfold when heated. "Tensegrity structures are extremely lightweight while also being very strong," said Glaucio Paulino, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "That's the reason there's a heavy amount of interest right now in researching the use of tensegrity structures for outer space exploration. The goal is to find a way to deploy a large object that initially takes up little space." The research, which was reported June 14 in the journal Scientific Reports, was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The researchers used 3-D printers to create the struts that make up one of the primary components of the tensegrity structure. To enable the struts to be temporarily folded flat, the researchers designed them to be hollow with a narrow opening that runs the length of the tube. Each strut has an attachment point on each end to connect to a network of elastic cables, which are also made with 3-D printers. Glaucio Paulino, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Jerry Qi, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, hold objects 3-D printed that use …more Once the struts were heated to 65 degrees Celsius, the researchers could partially flatten and fold them into a shape resembling the letter W. The cooled structures then retain the temporary shape. With all cables attached, the objects can be reheated to initiate the transformation into tensegrity structures. "We believe that you could build something like an antenna that initially is compressed and takes up little space, but once it's heated, say just from the heat of the sun, would fully expand," said Jerry Qi, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. A key component of making 3-D printed objects that can transform into tensegrity structures was controlling the rate and sequence of expansion. The shape memory polymers enable the researchers to fine-tune how quickly each strut expands by adjusting at which temperature the expansion occurs. That enables structures to be designed with struts that expand sequentially. Researchers at Georgia Tech 3-D printed an object made with tensegrity, a structural system of floating rods in compression and cables in continuous tension. Credit: Rob Felt "For bigger and more complicated structures, if you don't control the sequence that these struts expand, it tangles and you have a mess," Paulino said. "By controlling the temperature at which each strut expands, we can have a phased deployment and avoid this entanglement." The term "tensegrity" comes from a combination of the words "tensional integrity," and the concept has been used as the structural basis for several notable projects through the years, including a large pedestrian bridge in Brisbane, Australia, and stadium roofs such as the Georgia Dome stadium in Atlanta and the Olympic Gymnastics Arena in Seoul, South Korea. The researchers envision that the new 3-D printed structures could be used for super light-weight structures needed for space exploration or even shape-change soft robots. "These active tensegrity objects are very elegant in design and open up a range of possibilities for deployable 3-D structures," Paulino said.
NASA releases Kepler Survey Catalog with hundreds of new planet candidates June 20, 2017 NASA’s Kepler space telescope team has identified 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and in the habitable zone of their star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA's Kepler space telescope team has released a mission catalog of planet candidates that introduces 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and orbiting in their star's habitable zone, which is the range of distance from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet. This is the most comprehensive and detailed catalog release of candidate exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system, from Kepler's first four years of data. It's also the final catalog from the spacecraft's view of the patch of sky in the Cygnus constellation. With the release of this catalog, derived from data publicly available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive, there are now 4,034 planet candidates identified by Kepler. Of which, 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets. Of roughly 50 near-Earth size habitable zone candidates detected by Kepler, more than 30 have been verified. Additionally, results using Kepler data suggest two distinct size groupings of small planets. Both results have significant implications for the search for life. The final Kepler catalog will serve as the foundation for more study to determine the prevalence and demographics of planets in the galaxy, while the discovery of the two distinct planetary populations shows that about half the planets we know of in the galaxy either have no surface, or lie beneath a deep, crushing atmosphere – an environment unlikely to host life. The findings were presented at a news conference Monday at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near Earth-analogs – planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth," said Mario Perez, Kepler program scientist in the Astrophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "Understanding their frequency in the galaxy will help inform the design of future NASA missions to directly image another Earth." The Kepler space telescope hunts for planets by detecting the minuscule drop in a star's brightness that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it, called a transit. NASA's Kepler space telescope was the first agency mission capable of detecting Earth-size planets using the transit method, a photometric technique that measures the minuscule dimming of starlight as a planet passes in front of its host …more This is the eighth release of the Kepler candidate catalog, gathered by reprocessing the entire set of data from Kepler's observations during the first four years of its primary mission. This data will enable scientists to determine what planetary populations – from rocky bodies the size of Earth, to gas giants the size of Jupiter – make up the galaxy's planetary demographics. To ensure a lot of planets weren't missed, the team introduced their own simulated planet transit signals into the data set and determined how many were correctly identified as planets. Then, they added data that appear to come from a planet, but were actually false signals, and checked how often the analysis mistook these for planet candidates. This work told them which types of planets were overcounted and which were undercounted by the Kepler team's data processing methods. "This carefully-measured catalog is the foundation for directly answering one of astronomy's most compelling questions – how many planets like our Earth are in the galaxy?" said Susan Thompson, Kepler research scientist for the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and lead author of the catalog study. One research group took advantage of the Kepler data to make precise measurements of thousands of planets, revealing two distinct groups of small planets. The team found a clean division in the sizes of rocky, Earth-size planets and gaseous planets smaller than Neptune. Few planets were found between those groupings. Using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the group measured the sizes of 1,300 stars in the Kepler field of view to determine the radii of 2,000 Kepler planets with exquisite precision. "We like to think of this study as classifying planets in the same way that biologists identify new species of animals," said Benjamin Fulton, doctoral candidate at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, and lead author of the second study. "Finding two distinct groups of exoplanets is like discovering mammals and lizards make up distinct branches of a family tree." It seems that nature commonly makes rocky planets up to about 75 percent bigger than Earth. For reasons scientists don't yet understand, about half of those planets take on a small amount of hydrogen and helium that dramatically swells their size, allowing them to "jump the gap" and join the population closer to Neptune's size. The Kepler spacecraft continues to make observations in new patches of sky in its extended mission, searching for planets and studying a variety of interesting astronomical objects, from distant star clusters to objects such as the TRAPPIST-1 system of seven Earth-size planets, closer to home.
We have these amazing videos, plus great evidence of what our planet looks like from outer space, and yet there are people who think Earth is flat.
The star closest to the black hole achieves a speed of around 11,000,000 mph, which is around 1/60 the speed of light. Our sun travels at around 483,000 mph by comparison.
The video is the cool part. Motion of the stars in the Milky way for the past million + years. Artificial brain helps Gaia catch speeding stars June 26, 2017 Stars speeding through the galaxy. Credit: ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO With the help of software that mimics a human brain, ESA's Gaia satellite spotted six stars zipping at high speed from the centre of our galaxy to its outskirts. This could provide key information about some of the most obscure regions of the Milky Way. Our galactic home, the Milky Way, houses more than a hundred billion stars, all kept together by gravity. Most are located in a flattened structure – the galactic disc – with a bulge at its centre, while the remaining stars are distributed in a wider spherical halo extending out to about 650 000 light-years from the centre. Stars are not motionless in the galaxy but move around its centre with a variety of velocities depending on their location – for example, the sun orbits at about 220 km/s, while the average in the halo is of about 150 km/s. Occasionally, a few stars exceed these already quite impressive velocities. Some are accelerated by a close stellar encounter or the supernova explosion of a stellar companion, resulting in runaway stars with speeds up to a few hundred km/s above the average. A new class of high-speed stars was discovered just over a decade ago. Swooping through the galaxy at several hundred of km/s, they are the result of past interactions with the supermassive black hole that sits at the centre of the Milky Way and, with a mass of four million suns, governs the orbits of stars in its vicinity. "These hypervelocity stars are extremely important to study the overall structure of our Milky Way," says Elena Maria Rossi from Leiden University in the Netherlands, who presented Gaia's discovery of six new such stars today at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Prague, Czech Republic. "These are stars that have travelled great distances through the galaxy but can be traced back to its core – an area so dense and obscured by interstellar gas and dust that it is normally very difficult to observe – so they yield crucial information about the gravitational field of the Milky Way from the centre to its outskirts." Unfortunately, fast-moving stars are extremely difficult to find in the stellar haystack of the Milky Way, as current surveys list the speed of at most a few hundred thousand stars. To find them, scientists have been looking for young, massive stars that would stand out as interlopers in the old stellar population of the galactic halo. Given away by their out-of-place age, these stars are likely to have received an extra kick to reach the halo. Further measurements of their speeds and estimates of their past paths can confirm if they are indeed hypervelocity stars that were shoved away from the centre of the Milky Way. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC So far, only 20 such stars have been spotted. Owing to the specific selection of this method, these are all young stars with a mass 2.5 to 4 times that of the sun. However, scientists believe that many more stars of other ages or masses are speeding through the galaxy but remain unrevealed by this type of search. The billion-star census being performed by Gaia offers a unique opportunity, so Elena and her collaborators started wondering how to use such a vast dataset to optimise the search for fast-moving stars. After testing various methods, they turned to software through which the computer learns from previous experience. "In the end, we chose to use an artificial neural network, which is software designed to mimic how our brain works," explains Tommaso Marchetti, PhD student at Leiden University and lead author of the paper describing the results published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "After proper 'training', it can learn how to recognise certain objects or patterns in a huge dataset. In our case, we taught it to spot hypervelocity stars in a stellar catalogue like the one compiled with Gaia." As part of Elena's research project to study these stars, the team started developing and training this program in the first half of 2016, in order to be ready for the first release of Gaia data a few months later, on 14 September. Besides a map of over a billion stellar positions, this first release included a smaller catalogue with distances and motions for two million stars, combining observations from Gaia's first year with those from ESA's Hipparcos mission, which charted the sky more than two decades ago. Referred to as the Tycho–Gaia Astrometric Solution, or TGAS, this resource is a taster for future catalogues that will be based solely on Gaia data. "On the day of the data release, we ran our brand new algorithm on the two million stars of TGAS," says Elena. "In just one hour, the artificial brain had already reduced the dataset to some 20 000 potential high-speed stars, reducing its size to about 1%. "A further selection including only measurements above a certain precision in distance and motion brought this down to 80 candidate stars." Gaia's first sky map. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC. Acknowledgement: A. Moitinho & M. Barros (CENTRA – University of Lisbon), on behalf of DPAC The team looked at these 80 stars in further detail. Since only information on the star's motion across the sky are included in the TGAS data, they had to find additional clues to infer their velocity, looking at previous stellar catalogues or performing new observations. "Combining all these data, we found that six stars can be traced back to the galactic Centre, all with velocities above 360 km/s," says Tommaso. Most importantly, the scientists succeeded at probing a different population from the 20 stars that were already known: the newly identified stars all have lower masses, similar to the mass of our sun. One of the six stars seems to be speeding so fast, at over 500 km/s, that it is no longer bound by the gravity of the galaxy and will eventually leave. But the other, slightly slower stars, are perhaps even more fascinating, as scientists are eager to learn what slowed them down – the invisible dark matter that is thought to pervade the Milky Way might also have played a role. While the new program was optimised to search for stars that were accelerated at the centre of the galaxy, it also identified five of the more traditional runaway stars, which owe their high speeds to stellar encounters elsewhere in the Milky Way. "This result showcases the great potential of Gaia opening up new avenues to investigate the structure and dynamics of our galaxy," says Anthony Brown from Leiden University, a co-author on the study and chair of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium. The scientists are looking forward to using data from the next Gaia release, which is planned for April 2018 and will include distances and motions on the sky for over a billion stars, as well as velocities for a subset. Dealing with a billion stars, rather than the two million explored so far, is an enormous challenge, so the team is busy upgrading their program to handle such a huge catalogue and to uncover the many speeding stars that will be lurking in the data. "The sheer number of stars probed by Gaia is an exciting but also challenging opportunity for astronomers, and we are glad to see that they are happily embracing the challenge," says Timo Prusti, Gaia project scientist at ESA.
Betelgeuse captured by ALMA This orange blob shows the nearby star Betelgeuse, as seen by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). This is the first time that ALMA has ever observed the surface of a star and this first attempt has resulted in the highest-resolution image of Betelgeuse available. Betelgeuse is one of the largest stars currently known — with a radius around 1400 times larger than the Sun’s in the millimeter continuum. About 600 light-years away in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter), the red supergiant burns brightly, causing it to have only a short life expectancy. The star is just about eight million years old, but is already on the verge of becoming a supernova. When that happens, the resulting explosion will be visible from Earth, even in broad daylight. The star has been observed in many other wavelengths, particularly in the visible, infrared, and ultraviolet. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope astronomers discovered a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System. Astronomers have also found a gigantic bubble that boils away on Betelgeuse’s surface. These features help to explain how the star is shedding gas and dust at tremendous rates (eso0927, eso1121). In this picture, ALMA observes the hot gas of the lower chromosphere of Betelgeuse at sub-millimeter wavelengths — where localised increased temperatures explain why it is not symmetric. Scientifically, ALMA can help us to understand the extended atmospheres of these hot, blazing stars. Links: Size comparison: Betelgeuse and the Sun Scientific paper http://www.eso.org/public/unitedkingdom/images/potw1726a/?lang
NASA spacecraft to fly over Jupiter's Great Red Spot July 10, 2017 This is Jupiter's Great Red Spot in 2000 as seen by NASA's Cassini orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute An unmanned NASA spacecraft is about to fly over a massive storm raging on Jupiter, in a long-awaited a journey that could shed new light on the forces driving the planet's Great Red Spot. The flyby of the Juno spacecraft, surveilling the 10,000-mile-wide (16,000-kilometer-wide) storm, is scheduled for 9:55 pm Monday (0155 GMT Tuesday). "Jupiter's mysterious Great Red Spot is probably the best-known feature of Jupiter," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "This monumental storm has raged on the solar system's biggest planet for centuries." The storm looks like a churning red knot on the planet's surface. It has been monitored since 1830, and may have existed for more than 350 years, the US space agency said. Juno, which earlier this month marked its first year in orbit of the gas giant, will offer "humanity's first up-close and personal view of the gigantic feature," NASA said in a statement. Equipped with instruments that can penetrate clouds to measure how deep the roots of this storm go, scientists hope to learn more about the workings of the raging tempest. All eight of Juno's instruments, including its camera, will be on when the spacecraft passes about 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers) above the Giant Red Spot clouds, NASA said. Juno launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in August, 2011, on a mission to learn more about Jupiter's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-nasa-spacecraft-jupiter-great-red.html#jCp
That'd be really impressive if the world wasn't flat and all space travel wasn't a conspiracy by the round earthers to turn us into food for the lizard people.
If you haven't heard of it, check out Space Engine. Procedurally generated universe with all celestial bodies made to a 1:1 scale, and there are actually trillions of planetary systems to visit. You can zoom in and land on the surface of every planet, moon, and asteroid. There's not much in the way of gameplay, but it is super beautiful and fun to fuck around with for a bit. Also it's free.
Interactive visualizations of nasa programs, solar system, coming eclipse, etc. https://eyes.nasa.gov/
I don't know if the chances of this working out are good or not, but it can't be long before someone achieves this. Their timeline seems pretty ambitious though. My main take away from this whole article is how expensive moon rocks are. https://arstechnica.com/science/201...ring-moon-rocks-back-to-earth-in-three-years/
July 12, 2017 NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Spots Jupiter’s Great Red Spot This enhanced-color image of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was created by citizen scientist Jason Major using data from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Jason Major Full image and caption This enhanced-color image of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was created by citizen scientist Kevin Gill using data from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin Gill Full image and caption This enhanced-color image of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was created by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt using data from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt Full image and caption Images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot reveal a tangle of dark, veinous clouds weaving their way through a massive crimson oval. The JunoCam imager aboard NASA's Juno mission snapped pics of the most iconic feature of the solar system’s largest planetary inhabitant during its Monday (July 10) flyby. The images of the Great Red Spot were downlinked from the spacecraft’s memory on Tuesday and placed on the mission’s JunoCam website Wednesday morning. “For hundreds of years scientists have been observing, wondering and theorizing about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Now we have the best pictures ever of this iconic storm. It will take us some time to analyze all the data from not only JunoCam, but Juno’s eight science instruments, to shed some new light on the past, present and future of the Great Red Spot.” As planned by the Juno team, citizen scientists took the raw images of the flyby from the JunoCam site and processed them, providing a higher level of detail than available in their raw form. The citizen-scientist images, as well as the raw images they used for image processing, can be found at: https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing “I have been following the Juno mission since it launched,” said Jason Major, a JunoCam citizen scientist and a graphic designer from Warwick, Rhode Island. “It is always exciting to see these new raw images of Jupiter as they arrive. But it is even more thrilling to take the raw images and turn them into something that people can appreciate. That is what I live for.” Measuring in at 10,159 miles (16,350 kilometers) in width (as of April 3, 2017) Jupiter's Great Red Spot is 1.3 times as wide as Earth. The storm has been monitored since 1830 and has possibly existed for more than 350 years. In modern times, the Great Red Spot has appeared to be shrinking. All of Juno's science instruments and the spacecraft's JunoCam were operating during the flyby, collecting data that are now being returned to Earth. Juno's next close flyby of Jupiter will occur on Sept. 1. Juno reached perijove (the point at which an orbit comes closest to Jupiter's center) on July 10 at 6:55 p.m. PDT (9:55 p.m. EDT). At the time of perijove, Juno was about 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) above the planet's cloud tops. Eleven minutes and 33 seconds later, Juno had covered another 24,713 miles (39,771 kilometers), and was passing directly above the coiling, crimson cloud tops of the Great Red Spot. The spacecraft passed about 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers) above the clouds of this iconic feature. Juno launched on Aug. 5, 2011, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. During its mission of exploration, Juno soars low over the planet's cloud tops -- as close as about 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers). During these flybys, Juno is probing beneath the obscuring cloud cover of Jupiter and studying its auroras to learn more about the planet's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere. Early science results from NASA's Juno mission portray the largest planet in our solar system as a turbulent world, with an intriguingly complex interior structure, energetic polar aurora, and huge polar cyclones. “These highly-anticipated images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot are the ‘perfect storm’ of art and science. With data from Voyager, Galileo, New Horizons, Hubble and now Juno, we have a better understanding of the composition and evolution of this iconic feature,” said Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary science. “We are pleased to share the beauty and excitement of space science with everyone.” JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena. More information on the Juno mission is available at: https://www.nasa.gov/juno http://missionjuno.org