Astronomy and Cosmology

  • Thread starter Dotini
  • 182 comments
  • 16,715 views
Your link doesn't work but I hunted the correct one down.

I've got to admit that the Pluto images are more than a bit boring for 20 computers crunching for 4 years. :indiff:

While it appears that you are correct and we don't have a dedicated thread for astronomy, there are plenty of space related posts and threads floating around.
 
Since it's a Hobbies thread, let's hobby it up!

astronomy1.jpg

This are what I use:
Skywatcher telescope - F1000 D114 with Super 10 (100x) and Super 25 (40x) lenses and Barlow 2x adapter; Equatorial mount (ascension/declination axes)
Canon EOS1000D/Kiss F/Rebel XS camera - 10.1MP

Connected with Canon T-adapter/Revelation Astro T-piece.


For now I'm just practicing - where I live the skies are never clear and there's a huge puddle of sodium lights over to the west - but some clear night I'll sod off up the moors and see what I can shoot :D
 
Good luck 👍 I believe that astrophotography is quite a tricky art, even with alot of expensive equipment it still takes some effort to get decent shots. That said, I'm hopefully going to take my telescope out to some darker regions in the next month or two.

--

For reference, we also have this thread about buying telescopes: https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/showthread.php?t=102432 for anyone looking to get into amateur astronomy themselves.
 
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/p45a.jpg

Here is an interesting photo of the equatorial and northern portions of the lunar far side.The large dark area at the right is Mare Orientale, and the dark area on the right side is is the crater Grimaldi, which is on the visible side of the Moon. The picture was taken by the Soviet space probe Zond III on July 20, 1965, from an altitude of 11,570km and published in the large format book, Exploring Space With a Camera, NASA Publication SP-168, page 45 on my copy.

Notice the unusual structure in the lower right hand corner. This might be explainable as a TLP, or Transient Lunar Phenomenon, possible an outgassing or electrical discharge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_lunar_phenomenon
 
AM
'Tadpole' spiral galaxy? The 'head' looks quite big, so it could be combined by a collision between two galaxies earlier than any other tadpole galaxies. See, there is an orange-coloured nucleus without stars around it on the right of the galaxy.
Click to expand...

Hi, AM, and thanks for your comment and question. NGC 1097 is a barred spiral galaxy, and a Seyfert galaxy, which has a very bright and active core showing extensive variability, bright in infrared and X-ray. It is most notable for having the most extensive, low surface brightness optical jets of any galaxy known. Some 40 of the 1000 known quasars in the universe are associated with these NGC 1097 jets.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0911/NGC1097invert_gendlerJets.jpg

The dwarf elliptic galaxy NGC 1097A may be the one to which you refer, but I'm not clear on this point.

Many thanks,
Dotini

Edit: http://www.holoscience.com/news/img/NGC 1097.jpg

The core of this galaxy supposedly has a black hole which is 100,000,000 times the size of our Sun, although it might be more accurately described as "white" hole, as matter is being ejected from this galaxy. See it here.

Edit: http://www.universetoday.com/2009/07/23/spitzer-finds-a-cyclops-galaxy/

Here is an amazing shot which identifies the blue galaxy as the companion galaxy.
 
Last edited:
Saw a great documentary a couple weeks ago about the rings of Saturn which documented how the rings were formed and what theyre made of. It could be that over a period of time the rings will dissappear or dissipate. Not something you or I will experience but thats the theory atleast... There was also a weird hexagonal shape on one of the poles on Saturn believed to be some kind of storm, if I remember correctly... Really quite interesting. Anyway Astronomy is an interesting subject which has captivated me since I was little... But honestly I have not delved into it much in recent years as I did before... I will definitely pass by here more often to see whats on offer :D
 
"Redshifts: If we look at the light from an object after it has been spread out from short to long wavelengths, we see peaks and valleys due to emission and absorption from its atomic elements. One thing we can then measure is how much these features are displaced from their wavelengths in a laboratory standard.

It turns out when we observe galaxies and quasars, such features are generally shifted to longer wavelengths, in some cases by amounts up to 4 or 5 times the local laboratory values. This redward displacement of lines in the spectrum is considered to increase with distance and to be the most information we have about the faint smudges that are supposed to represent the most distant objects we can see in the universe. But if the cause of the redshifts is misunderstood, then distances can be wrong by factors of 10 to 100, and luminosities and masses will be wrong by factors up to 10,000. We would have a totally erroneous picture of extragalactic space, and be faced with one of the most embarrassing boondoggles in our intellectual history.

Because objects in motion in the laboratory, or orbiting double stars, or rotating galaxies all show Doppler redshifts to longer wavelengths when they are receding, it has been assumed throughout astronomy that redshifts always and only mean recession velocity. No direct verification of this assumption is possible, and through the years many contradictions have arisen and been ignored. The evidence presented here is, I hope, convincing because it offers many different proofs of intrinsic (non-velocity) redshifts in every category of celestial object - from stars through quasars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Moreover, this one key observable will ultimately lead us to consider a universe governed by the non-local effects of inertial mass and quantum mechanics rather than the local dynamics of general relativity.

Cosmology: Because it concerns our ultimate origins and our future destinies, most people are interested in the nature of the universe in which we live. We call this picture of our environment in its broadest possible sense cosmology.

There is now a fashionable set of beliefs regarding the workings of the universe, greatly publicized as the Big Bang, which I believe is wildly incorrect. But in order to enable people to make their own judgments about this question, we need to examine a large number of observations. Observations in science are the primary and final authority. In the present book I endeavor to discuss these observations in as much detail as necessary to understand them. If the basic data were not so fiercely resisted by conventional cosmologists, the details would not need to be extensively discussed. But as it is, each block in the edifice has to be defended against endless objections. Moreover, the link between many different results is what ultimately gives the whole new picture credibility."

The foregoing is from the Introduction of Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science, by Halton Arp

We will now continue our study of redshifts with a tutorial.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2010/arch10/100208clusters.htm
 
Dotini
Hi, AM, and thanks for your comment and question. NGC 1097 is a barred spiral galaxy, and a Seyfert galaxy, which has a very bright and active core showing extensive variability, bright in infrared and X-ray. It is most notable for having the most extensive, low surface brightness optical jets of any galaxy known.
The dwarf elliptic galaxy NGC 1097A may be the one to which you refer, but I'm not clear on this point.

Many thanks,
Dotini
Click to expand...

Hmmm....so the one (second nucleus) I saw was still contains stars, right? :confused: I didn't realize.

Blitz187
There was also a weird hexagonal shape on one of the poles on Saturn believed to be some kind of storm, if I remember correctly... Really quite interesting.
Click to expand...

Yes, on the north pole of Saturn there was an hexagonal-shaped hurricane-like storm, first noted by Voyager 1 and confirmed by Cassini-Huygens spacecraft. Here, you will see how it looks like.
 

Attachments

  • 688px-Saturn_hexagonal_north_pole_feature.jpg
    688px-Saturn_hexagonal_north_pole_feature.jpg
    59.4 KB · Views: 32
The following comments are all lifted directly from the article you cite:

This new image of Stephan’s Quintet is befogged with the same obsolete commentary as previous images
Click to expand...

facts seldom affect institutionalized belief systems
Click to expand...

Since it’s also believed (consensually) that HII regions tend to be of similar size, the consensus has simply ignored the fact.
Click to expand...

A characteristic of consensus astronomy is a flight into tunnel vision: attention is narrowed to single objects or even to parts of objects and larger connections are disregarded
Click to expand...

consensus astronomers blink in unison
Click to expand...

One could be forgiven for thinking that this site is less about science and more about attacking it. I find the tone of the article unnecessarily aggressive and borderline paranoic. The author is also guilty of committing the same degree of wilful ignorance as he is accusing those no-good 'consensus' scientists of, by vastly overstating the case in favour of his prefered view (clearly aligned along Arpian lines) and ignoring evidence that contradicts him. His assertion that a high z quasar lies infront of one of the galaxies in the quintet is completely false. Despite the fact that Arp published a paper stating that the quasar appeared to be interacting with gas in the galaxy (which obviously wouldn't happen if the quasar was at a cosmological distance away from the galaxy) has been seriously challenged and is very far from being established fact. Yet, you don't get that impression from the article - atleast I don't.
 
Thanks for engaging in the debate, Touring Mars.👍

Obviously, there is some kind of struggle going on in academic astronomy vis-a-vis redshift. Hubble himself was aware of the stakes, saying in his seminal book, "Realm of the Nebulae, "On the other hand, if the interpretation of velocity shifts is abandoned, we find in redshifts a hitherto unrecognized principle whose implications are unknown."

There are proponents on both sides. As the stakes - the implications for our understanding of the natural world - are so high - I find it worthwhile to follow the breadcrumbs. Yes, some folks looking to climb the academic ladder of tenure and publication are going to come into combat. But since we the public are paying for it, I say we should have a battle and let the best solution win.

Yours in exploration,
Dotini

Edit: One important thing we could do, is to actually look at the raw data ourselves. Look at the photos and the images taken in X-ray and infrared, et al; look at the tables and diagrams and actually draw our own conclusions instead of filtering things through the interpretation of those with a vested interest in the outcome. I don't have a vested interest in the outcome. Do you?
 
Last edited:
There is only so much that eyeballing photos and 'raw data' that a layperson can do, and is unlikely to be all that helpful in my opinion. The onus is on the scientists to publish their findings in the peer-reviewed literature and make their evidence sufficiently clear, and to minimise the amount of speculation, conjecture and fanciful hypotheses that their data barely justifies.

In the case of Arp's more controversial ideas, like the idea that quasars are local objects that are ejected from galaxies, he has shown very little in the way of evidence over and above mere line-of-sight coincidences - a phenomenon that has been subsequently explained by a detailed analysis of hundreds of thousands of quasars, and millions of galaxies, which indicates that distant quasars are made more apparent through "cosmic magnification" (or gravitational lensing), as predicted by General Relativity, which also explains why quasars are more likely to be observed in the same line-of-sight as foreground galaxies (or galaxy clusters) than you'd expect otherwise (see here, for example).

--

I notice that Geoffrey Burbidge passed away a few weeks ago. Aside from his association with Arp's hypotheses, and his alignment with non-standard cosmology (i.e. the 'no Big Bang' theory), he was still a force to be reckoned with. I just downloaded perhaps his most famous piece of work, "Synthesis Of The Elements In Stars".
 
Dear Touring Mars, I'm deeply appreciative of the tactfulness, skill and effort with which you discuss these controversial issues in astrophysics, cosmology and astronomy. It's a ton of fun for me to investigate, dig and explore, then get to bounce my notions off such a fine resource as yourself. GTPlanet is indeed a wonderful meeting place for the world.

Sad for the passing of Geoffrey Burbidge. He and his work are cited numerous times in Arp's work. Margaret Burbidge also has a long list of cited observations. Arp himself, who studied with and assisted Hubble, is likewise not getting any younger. Thankfully, he has a lot of followers and it seems that the controversies of intrinsic redshift, big bang, etc. are only getting more serious, and not going away.

I would draw your attention to the direct physical connection between the galaxy NGC 4319 and the Quasar Markarian 205. Here is a link which provides numerous photographs of an undeniable physical connection between a high redshift quasar and a low redshift galaxy which is obviously its place of origin.
http://www.discordancyreport.com/tag/markarian-205/

According to what I have read in Arp, the sheer statistical association between quasars and galaxies is well beyond chance. The gravitational lensing lensing idea seems unlikely to me, particularly in the famous case of the Einstein Cross, where 4 quasars closely surround one galaxy, while any lensing effect should produce only 2.

I would like to get you interested in reading Arp's book. I will go so far as to purchase a copy for you and mail it to you, all gratis, in the hopes you might read it.

Yours truly,
Dotini
 
I wouldn't say it was an "undeniable physical connection", not by any stretch of the imagination...

ngc4319_original.png

With reference to the above image and the alleged 'bridge', is it part of both objects, or just one of them, or indeed neither? It is impossible to say from the pictures alone. If it is a jet coming from (a distant) Mrk 205, surely NGC 4319 could simply be obscuring the rest of it from view? If it is an arm coming from NGC 4319, is there any evidence that it is actually touching Mrk 205, or does it just appear to? What about the other (admittedly smaller) branches from NGC 4319 that lead nowhere? From the pictures, we can't say which way it is pointing, is it towards us, or away from us? It is impossible to say - but the assumption is that it is pointing in the exact direction of Mrk 205 in three dimensions... that's one dimension more than the picture can possibly tell us. The bridge is so faint that it is barely visible before it reaches the point in the image where Mrk205 is, let alone beyond it - but does it disappear because Mrk 205 and it's companion are so bright thus rendering the bridge no longer visible infront of it, or does is it disappearing behind it? What is there to say that it actually "connects"?, and not one of these two (incredibly more likely in 3 dimensions) possibilities? And if there really is a bridge (which I think is very far from established) physically connecting the two objects, is it not possible that it is a giant filament of cosmological length? An incredibly rare and unusual object maybe?? Would a high-resolution map of the "bridge" reveal an incremental change in red-shift in the bridge itself??

The problem here is "visual literalism". Does Mrk 205 really have those giant spokes coming from it? No. Is the presence of a companion near Mrk 205 (but crucially facing NGC 4319) significant? Could it be the reason for the apparent bridge? Probably... (you can even recreate this effect in Photoshop using Lens Flare if you want). In visualising the bridge more clearly by using Photoshop (i.e. bringing the bridge above the noise artificially), does that mean that Mrk 205's halo is pentagonal? Is that real, or an artefact of the processing? Almost certainly the latter, I reckon.

Despite all the above possibilities - none of which I think are unfair or unrealistic, from the available images anyway - the assumptions seem to be that a) the apparent connection is real, and b) that the two objects are relatively close and therefore the apparent connecting bridge is relatively short. Neither claim is any more supported than those above... Unfortunately, these somewhat bold assumptions come at a tremendous cost - a complete abandonment of the vast body of evidence that suggests that the two objects really are incredibly distant (i.e. the standard cosmological interpretation of redshift), not to mention the spectroscopic evidence that places Mrk205 squarely behind NGC 4319 - a simple fact that one simply cannot verify from a mere visual inspection of the images in question.

-

Thanks for the kind offer of a copy of Arp's book - I'm not likely to buy it myself, but I won't stop you sending me a copy if you really want :sly: That said, given the power of the internet, and my privileged access to most of the relevant scientific journals via my work, it may be surplus to requirements.

---

Update, 26.02

Dotini
According to what I have read in Arp, the sheer statistical association between quasars and galaxies is well beyond chance.
Click to expand...
But this does not preclude the possibility that there is some other explanation for the observed "excess" other than that suggested by Arp (that quasars are intrinsically high-redshift objects ejected from low-shift parent galaxies and that they are physically close to each other). Gravitational lensing and cosmic magnification offers another explanation why distant bright point sources such as quasars are more likely found in the same line of sight as massive foreground objects (galactic nuclei, sueprmassive black holes).

Dotini
The gravitational lensing idea seems unlikely to me, particularly in the famous case of the Einstein Cross, where 4 quasars closely surround one galaxy, while any lensing effect should produce only 2.
Click to expand...
It is a pretty big assumption to make that "any" type of gravitational lensing effects should be exactly the same, and/or should behave in exactly the same way/produce the same results. There is already ample evidence to show that this is simply not the case. Modelling has shown that lenses can produce a wide variety of different results - pairs, quads, symmetrical, non-symmetrical etc. etc.

There is also the small matter of time delay measurements in gravitationally lensed images - that is, two or more separate images that exhibit the same variations but at different times. Here's an example of light curves from a very similar object to Einstein's Cross, the quadruply-imaged gravitationally lensed quasar WFI J2033-4723, to illustrate what I mean...

lightcurvestimedelaycou.jpg

This is exceptionally strong evidence that the separate images are not different objects at all, but are infact multiple images of the same object, in this case an intrinsically variable quasar. At the very least, these observations destroy the idea that multiple quasar images must be different objects, and that gravitational lensing is more than capable of generating objects such as Einstein's Cross.
 
Last edited:
The Sun's magnetic field is changing in interesting ways.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2009/arch09/090909polarity.htm
On June 3, 1999, the European Space Agency announced that the Sun’s magnetic field is getting progressively stronger. Thanks to the unprecedented overview of solar magnetism provided by the ESA-NASA spacecraft Ulysses, a team at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford has been able to work out the recent history of the Sun’s magnetic behavior. According to calculations by British scientists, the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field has doubled during the Twentieth Century alone. This finding may help to clarify the Sun’s contribution to climate change on Earth. The hydrogen → helium fusion model does not explain this phenomenon.
 
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/30oct_ftes/

The Sun is electrically connected to the Earth. Every 8 minutes a flux transfer event, or FTE, opens to transfer highly charged particles directly from the Sun to the Earth's surface. Is it conceivable that this is where some of the energy comes from to keep the Earth's magnetic field energized and the Earth itself to keep on spinning?

See also: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010100/a010106/index.html

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2009/arch09/090429stir.htm
 
Last edited:
"In a radical rethink of accepted geophysics, new research in the US links variations in the Earth’s magnetic field with the ebb and flow of the world’s oceans. Given the practical importance of these field variations in navigation and atmospheric modeling, the implications of this new research extend far beyond academia."
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/39469

The article also touches upon the origin of the Earth's magnetic field, and raises the question of whether the mainstream theory of an active core is either necessary or sufficient to explain it. I speculate that a charged spinning body, the Earth, would automatically generate a magnetic field - with or without an active core. But since there is no handy test reference, it's hard to say just how much charge the Earth is carrying.

Respectfully submitted,
Dotini
 
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/21apr_firstlight/

Here are some totally mind-ripping photos and videos taken of our Sun by the brand new NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory. Likely its observations and measurements will revolutionize our understanding of the Sun.

One of the many amazing things about the Sun is that its surface temperature is a relatively chilly 5000k, and its outer corona, thousands of km above the surface, measures in the million K It is a thermodynamic miracle to think that the heat of the Sun comes from inside a core of nuclear fusion, travels in slow convective currents to a cool surface of 5000k, then rises again to millions far above the surface.

Edit: When a hole, or sunspot, opens up on the photosphere, we can peer further into the Sun. Here we find temperatures of only 3000K. Astonishing to think that temperature could go from 35,000,000 C at the core to 3000/5000 at the surface, then rise again to the millions in the higher reaches of the corona.
 
Last edited:
Electron emissions increase as temperature lowers to -452 F.

http://www.physorg.com/news191686338.html

"This seems to be experimental proof that even cold "gas" throughout the universe can be in a plasma state of free electrons and ions. Meaning the whole of the universe is electrically active and conductive. Could an uneven distribution of cryogenic emissions be the "power source" that ultimately maintains charge separation in the coldest depths of the universe?"
-solrey
 
http://www.newscientist.com/article...sted-heart-changes-the-length-of-the-day.html

This is quite interesting. It seems cyclic variations in the Earth's rotation, i.e., the length of our day, are tied to interactions between the core and the Earth's surrounding magnetic field.

Some discussion found here, http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3267&p=35342#p35342, imagines that the arrangement is like that of a Faraday motor operating under the influence of solar cycles.

Respectfully yours,
Dotini
 

Latest Posts

Back