Space:The Final Frontier...

[Little Intruder]

Tsunami: Asteroid Impact - 66 Million Years Ago

https://sos.noaa.gov/catalog/dataset...table-features

Imagine a 2.5 mile high wave headed your way!

[Little Intruder]

Solar Polar Vortex: Tornado Of Fire On The Sun

https://www.ndtv.com/feature/huge-pi...tunned-3769985

[Elwood P.]

Tsunami: Asteroid Impact - 66 Million Years Ago

https://sos.noaa.gov/catalog/dataset...table-features

Imagine a 2.5 mile high wave headed your way!

Fascinating!

[Little Intruder]

EP, that it is! I've been into astronomy since I was a kid and even wanted to pursue astrophysics as a career but I just couldn't get past the math! I still love it and have my own telescopes to keep me entertained whenever the weather lets me. Plus now we got big eyes in the sky like Hubble and Webb to keep blowing our minds!

[bsbll4]

Did scientists figure out where Dark Energy finally comes from?

https://www.space.com/black-holes-cr...first-evidence

When astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, they theorized that some force must be pushing things farther apart and overcoming gravity, which should be slowing things down. That force was suggested to be dark energy, but no one has ever figured out from where it comes.

But a team of 17 international researchers led by the University of Hawaii has discovered the first evidence for the origin point of dark energy: Black holes.

Black holes acquire mass in two ways: accretion of gas and mergers with other black holes. But in studying nine billion years of black hole evolution in dormant giant elliptical galaxies, the researchers discovered that the older black holes are much larger than they should be based on those two methods of growth. That means there must be another way these black holes are acquiring mass. Researchers suggest the answer is dark energy in the form of vacuum energy, "a kind of energy included in spacetime itself ... [that] pushes the universe further apart, accelerating the expansion," according to a statement(opens in new tab).

Pretty interesting, although it had me a little confused at first. Dark Energy is the term we use to explain the accelerating of the expansion of the universe, so when they said the source of Dark Energy was the expansion of the universe I thought it was initially circular logic. I think what they are trying to say (and no article I've read yet has pointed this out), is that the initial expansion of the universe from whatever caused the Big Bang is considered base line expansion. That expansion then caused the vacuum energy inside black holes to increase which then created additional mass inside the black holes and driving what we call Dark Energy, accelerating the expansion of the universe exponentially as it continued in a feedback loop.

[Little Intruder]

BSB, thanks for the post! It does make for fascinating reading. Whether it's dark energy, dark matter, string theory, etc. I'm blown away! Our universe is truly beyond our comprehension but it's still fun to absorb all of these theories and speculations!

[Little Intruder]

Before he passed in 2018, Stephen Hawking issued a warning to our civilization: don't advertise our existence. In other words, we shouldn't be trying to call the universe as we might not like the answer.

[bsbll4]

It depends on how we actually received a first contact message of course, but the cat may already be out of the bag on announcing our existence. Between the Arecibo message that has been racing across the galaxy for the 45 years, other radio communications, and the changes advanced life has created on our ecosystem, any advanced civilization in the neighborhood is going to know about us first if they are actively looking. The one thing that could be the saving grace is the enormity of the universe. We may be able to communicate with other civilizations across vast distances assuming both are around for extreme lengths of time (like 5,000 years between messages), but the ability to actually travel to each other may be impossible, or at least not worth it. It's hard to imagine how such communication would actually play out since it would be like the Egyptians, freshly after completing the Pyramids and still not having invented the wheel, somehow announcing humanity's existence and the other civilization is just now getting it. Imagine another 5,000 years from now what kind of reply we get and whether it's even relevant to whoever receives it. It would be funny if they were like "One day you may invent machines, but whatever you do don't give them artificial intelligence!" The message gets back to us and the AI sentient overlords are like "too late guys, lol."

While I love the idea of a grand message us entering a new age of understanding our place in the universe, I think it's more likely we'll discover evidence for life on other planets by the changes in the atmosphere, most likely by single-cell like organisms. So we'll get an answer on whether life is unique or not, and that in and of itself will be profound, but we won't get much beyond that. Eventually we might see some sort of technical signature, but that could still be far off into the future.

[Elwood P.]

Universe as donut-shaped:

https://www.livescience.com/universe...nal-donut.html

[Little Intruder]

BSB, back when I was in jr. high I came across a book called The Search which detailed the work of Dr. Frank Drake and ever since then I've been interested in this field of astronomy. I always wanted to visit the Arecibo Observatory but unfortunately it collapsed! I have been to the Very Large Array near Socorro NM and it's always an impressive sight to see all of those beautiful radio telescopes. What's your opinion of SETI? And what about the WOW signal? One would think with all of our advanced technology these days we would be hearing more of these signals all the time. Unless, of course, the powers-that-be don't want the general public to know what's really going on!

[Elwood P.]

EP, that it is! I've been into astronomy since I was a kid and even wanted to pursue astrophysics as a career but I just couldn't get past the math! I still love it and have my own telescopes to keep me entertained whenever the weather lets me. Plus now we got big eyes in the sky like Hubble and Webb to keep blowing our minds!

True story. I’ve always been fascinated by meteors, asteroids and their impact craters. A few years back, 10-12 years or so, Google Earth was installed on my computer at work. Had a lot of fun playing around on it. Just really neat looking at the world from above. Anyway, one day while looking around the Big Bend park in Texas, about 12-15 miles or so up the Rio Grande from the park I saw what looked to me to be ancient impact structure. There was nothing labeled and I searched impact structures in Texas on the net, only 3 or so were listed but none anywhere close. Now I knew I couldn’t have discovered a crater but this was frustrating me. This thing was huge, about 10 miles across. It should be noted somewhere. Maybe old volcano remnants? Bugged me so bad about a week later I emailed and then called the McDonald observatory north of Ft Davis there in west Texas. Actually got some graduate student on the phone, told him the situation. He looked on his
Google earth where I told him and said, yeah thats weird. Not sure what it is. So he forwards my email to his boss at UT Austin. A couple of days later I get the response back. Its called El Solitario. It is a laccolith which is basically a volcano that never fully develops and eventually erodes over time leaving a concentric series of ridges.

Well for a few hours maybe, thought I might have found a big impact crater. Check it out on google earth. Just west of the BB Park just a few miles north of the Rio Grande.

http://www.corry.ws/Corry-10.htm

[Little Intruder]

EP, cool story!

[Little Intruder]

Chile's VLT Captures Direct Images Of Bright Exoplanet

https://www.upi.com/Science_News/202...5251676931396/

[bsbll4]

BSB, back when I was in jr. high I came across a book called The Search which detailed the work of Dr. Frank Drake and ever since then I've been interested in this field of astronomy. I always wanted to visit the Arecibo Observatory but unfortunately it collapsed! I have been to the Very Large Array near Socorro NM and it's always an impressive sight to see all of those beautiful radio telescopes. What's your opinion of SETI? And what about the WOW signal? One would think with all of our advanced technology these days we would be hearing more of these signals all the time. Unless, of course, the powers-that-be don't want the general public to know what's really going on!

I love the idea of SETI, but it's an enormous universe to search in. We haven't seen anything yet, but then again, the way we've been looking hasn't really been that effective. To effectively listen you would need to listen across all wavelengths (including visual) of the whole sky constantly and do it for decades, if not centuries. We just don't have the telescope coverage or time for that yet.

The WOW signal is fascinating, but I tend to think it was something more benign since that was really the first effort anyone made to listen and we haven't heard anything similar since from that system or anywhere else. That seems to be less like extraordinary timing and more like misunderstanding some local contamination of the signal. I did listen to an interview recently--I think it was with the scientists in the breakthrough listen project--that talked about using AI to scour the data they have. The interesting thing is they found 8 different one time events at different locations in the sky that show a signal of some sort came from those star systems, but they haven't heard them again. It is most likely not aliens, buuuuuut only has to be aliens once!

[bsbll4]

We visited Meteor Crater in Arizona a couple of years ago. They have museum attached to it that talks about the history behind it, some of the NASA stuff associated with it, such as how the Apollo astronauts trained there in preparation for the moon missions, etc. It's crazy to stand on the rim of that thing and look down into this giant hole and realize a rock from out there in space traveled hundreds of millions of miles across a few billion years to smack down on that very spot.