In recent news, our closest Earth-like planetary neighbour, the snappily - named Alpha Centauri bb , a mere 4.3 light years away, has vanished.
Conspiracy a go - go !
Not really, it was only discovered in 2012, and that was due to the wobble of a star which indicated an Earth-sized planet nearby.
The fact is that it may have never existed, just one problem when trying to determine an objects existence based on vague data.
So there we have the disappearance of something that possibly never was.
Good thing we didn't send out a probe, eh?
With the current increase in better quality telescopes free of light pollution (i.e. in orbit), it's surely only a matter of time before some entrepeneur offers unique planetary names, perhaps as gifts for the person who has everything, and whose tastes are jaded by constant indulgence and a lack of restraint , - which makes me wonder , given the proposed joint lunar mission between Europe and Russia, how are they going to negotiate all those lunar land deeds that have been sold ?
In other news,astronomers have discovered the furthest object in the solar system , a small world known as V774104 in the Oort cloud .
If its orbit doesn't bring it closer to the sun, then apparently it will be of interest to astronomers (as a world from the beginning of the solar system) , but they're holding off until the orbit can be accurately determined - which takes a year.
Essentially they're hoping that its orbit has never been affected by Neptune.
Planetary scientist Michael Brown said :
"There's no reason to be excited yet".
Heady stuff, eh?
Meanwhile back on Earth...
A flurry of metallic balls have dropped from the sky, four at the last count, in Spain and Turkey.
Possibly man-made and pertaining to satellites or even a hoax (check the smiling people handling the strange, possibly toxic objects...) hmmm...
Oddly though, this is news the day before the landing of the space junk known as WT1190F.
I say landing, but it's actually scheduled to crash into the ocean a few kilometres south of Sri Lanka.
That's if there is anything left after re-entry.
Interesting and odd though, that it should be flagged in advance, when so many similar incidents occur without prior information.
In still other news, it is now believed that Pluto houses at least two cryovolcanoes, hinting at a subsurface ocean.
To reduce the scientific terms to reality : this means ice volcanoes.
The mind boggles.
Does this mean that they erupt in showers of snowballs ?
Or that, instead of molten lava slides, we have rivers of slush with dry-ice fog, for dramatic effect ?
Water is an element as much as fire, but how bizarre!
So, with Enceladus, Ganymede, possibly Europa and now Pluto, we have a slew of potential water worlds in our solar system.
Quite a change from the dry, rocky and cratered planets that were illustrated (artists depiction) in text books in my youth .
Infact, I remember being quite devastated that there was such a dissonance between tne exotic alien worlds presented in film and the likes of Star Trek, and the dull reality of our nearest neighbouring planets.
Wormholes are a great sci-fi staple as a method of taking shortcuts through 'spacetime', and the idea of wormholes providing a link between two 'entwined' particles would neatly eliminate gaps in the theory of relativity, as well as giving us an example of quantum mechanics at work in our universe-
Why not? After all, the signs are already here, on an almost hum-drum level.
Seriously - a daily occurence.
For instance, say you want to insert a usb cable into your pc.
Annoyingly, it doesn't fit first time.
So you flip it, and try again. No.
Flip it again - it works .
This implies a superposition - a third state of readiness for the cable.
But we know it only has two sides...in this dimension.
Let's not stop there - a recent discovery is the presence of the equation pi in the base state of the hydrogen atom, which, if true, hints at a level of prior knowledge that defies linear time .
Until next time!
Conspiracy a go - go !
Not really, it was only discovered in 2012, and that was due to the wobble of a star which indicated an Earth-sized planet nearby.
The fact is that it may have never existed, just one problem when trying to determine an objects existence based on vague data.
So there we have the disappearance of something that possibly never was.
Good thing we didn't send out a probe, eh?
With the current increase in better quality telescopes free of light pollution (i.e. in orbit), it's surely only a matter of time before some entrepeneur offers unique planetary names, perhaps as gifts for the person who has everything, and whose tastes are jaded by constant indulgence and a lack of restraint , - which makes me wonder , given the proposed joint lunar mission between Europe and Russia, how are they going to negotiate all those lunar land deeds that have been sold ?
 |
| Oort cloud © NASA jpg |
In other news,astronomers have discovered the furthest object in the solar system , a small world known as V774104 in the Oort cloud .
If its orbit doesn't bring it closer to the sun, then apparently it will be of interest to astronomers (as a world from the beginning of the solar system) , but they're holding off until the orbit can be accurately determined - which takes a year.
Essentially they're hoping that its orbit has never been affected by Neptune.
Planetary scientist Michael Brown said :
"There's no reason to be excited yet".
Heady stuff, eh?
 |
| V774104 in all its glory... © S Sheppard, C Trujillo & S Tholen |
Meanwhile back on Earth...
A flurry of metallic balls have dropped from the sky, four at the last count, in Spain and Turkey.
Possibly man-made and pertaining to satellites or even a hoax (check the smiling people handling the strange, possibly toxic objects...) hmmm...
Oddly though, this is news the day before the landing of the space junk known as WT1190F.
I say landing, but it's actually scheduled to crash into the ocean a few kilometres south of Sri Lanka.
That's if there is anything left after re-entry.
Interesting and odd though, that it should be flagged in advance, when so many similar incidents occur without prior information.
 |
| Cryovolcanoes on Pluto ©NASA/JPL/ Sci-News |
In still other news, it is now believed that Pluto houses at least two cryovolcanoes, hinting at a subsurface ocean.
To reduce the scientific terms to reality : this means ice volcanoes.
The mind boggles.
Does this mean that they erupt in showers of snowballs ?
Or that, instead of molten lava slides, we have rivers of slush with dry-ice fog, for dramatic effect ?
Water is an element as much as fire, but how bizarre!
So, with Enceladus, Ganymede, possibly Europa and now Pluto, we have a slew of potential water worlds in our solar system.
Quite a change from the dry, rocky and cratered planets that were illustrated (artists depiction) in text books in my youth .
Infact, I remember being quite devastated that there was such a dissonance between tne exotic alien worlds presented in film and the likes of Star Trek, and the dull reality of our nearest neighbouring planets.
 |
| It is a thing, apparently! |
Usb cable and quantum mechanics...
Bringing all this speculation down to an individual level - I read an interesting piece of conjecture which speculated that objects which are theoretically entangled - for instance, one in a black hole , and the other on the opposite side of the universe, could be conjoined by a wormhole.Wormholes are a great sci-fi staple as a method of taking shortcuts through 'spacetime', and the idea of wormholes providing a link between two 'entwined' particles would neatly eliminate gaps in the theory of relativity, as well as giving us an example of quantum mechanics at work in our universe-
Why not? After all, the signs are already here, on an almost hum-drum level.
Seriously - a daily occurence.
For instance, say you want to insert a usb cable into your pc.
Annoyingly, it doesn't fit first time.
So you flip it, and try again. No.
Flip it again - it works .
This implies a superposition - a third state of readiness for the cable.
But we know it only has two sides...in this dimension.
Let's not stop there - a recent discovery is the presence of the equation pi in the base state of the hydrogen atom, which, if true, hints at a level of prior knowledge that defies linear time .
Until next time!
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