Nothing can go faster than light. It's a rule of physics woven into the very fabric of Einstein's special theory of relativity. The faster something goes, the closer it gets to its perspective of time freezing to a standstill.

Go faster still, and you run into issues of time reversing, messing with notions of causality.

But researchers from the University of Warsaw in Poland and the National University of Singapore have now pushed the limits of relativity to come up with a system that doesn't run afoul of existing physics, and might even point the way to new theories.

What they've come up with is an "extension of special relativity" that combines three time dimensions with a single space dimension ("1+3 space-time"), as opposed to the three spatial dimensions and one time dimension that we're all used to.

Rather than creating any major logical inconsistencies, this new study adds more evidence to back up the idea that objects might well be able to go faster than light without completely breaking our current laws of physics.

On September 22, 2022 NASA and SpaceX announced that they were investigating the possibility of using a Dragon spacecraft—of the kind used to ferry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station—to go visit Hubble. On Dec. 22 NASA issued a request for other commercial space companies to get involved. //

The idea is that Hubble could be boosted to a higher orbit to continue its work for many more years. There’s also the tantalising prospect that it could also be serviced and refurbished—and its optics improved. //

A general servicing would be crucial because whether or not Hubble avoids re-entry this decade it is getting old. Launched in 1990 and last serviced by a space shuttle crew in 2009, it’s beginning to have technical problems. The latest was in July 2021 when it spent a month out of action because its payload computer failed before the problem was fixed.

However, from a science point of view an upgrade to its optics would be a game-changer. The reflecting telescope has a 2.4 meter mirror that can’t be upgraded, but its cameras could be. //

If the feasibility studies suggests it’s a go-er it would be the sixth time Hubble has been visited since its launch from Space Shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. //

Almost immediately after its launch it was discovered that its mirror had an aberration causing images to be blurry, so it was visited in orbit by astronauts aboard NASA’s Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1993. They installed corrective optics. More servicing missions took place in 1997, 1999, 2002 and 2009 to upgrade various components, notably adding the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3.

Hubble now has six cameras and sensors to gather data on and take spectacular images of deep sky targets previously beyond the reach of astronomers. There are larger ground-based telescopes, but their view of the cosmos is limited by Earth’s atmosphere, which blocks infrared and ultraviolet light.

Hubble remains valuable to astronomers—and continues to make incredible observations—because it sees the universe in ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light. The new James Webb Space Telescope deals only in near and far-infrared light. Since Webb orbits the Sun a million miles from Earth it can likely never be serviced—despite repeated strikes by micrometeoroids already.

This stellar nursery is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Listen and watch as Jupiter’s moons transform from rhythms
into musical notes while creating hypnotic, face-melting patterns…
…or play them yourself!

On Feb. 22 2017, astronomers announced the discovery that 7 Earth-sized planets orbit a nearby red dwarf star known as TRAPPIST-1, (Gillon et al 2017, Luger et al 2017). At least two of them should have the right temperatures to host liquid water making them prime targets in the search for life beyond the solar system.

The planets of TRAPPIST-1 are locked in the longest known chain of resonances ever discovered, with each planet’s orbital period forming simple ratios with those of its neighbours. For every 2 orbits of the outermost planet, the next planet inward orbits 3 times, the next one 4, then 6, 9, 15 and 24 times. We have recently shown in a research paper that the planets can settle into this configuration while drifting in their birth disk, and this fine tuning is likely the main reason the system has managed to survive to the present day (Tamayo et al. 2017).

Since musical harmony and repeating rhythms are also a result of simple period ratios, the orbits of the TRAPPIST-1 planets can be translated into musical form. For each planet, we play one note per orbit using the pitches that result from bringing the planet’s frequencies into the human hearing range. We then add drums for every time a planet passes its neighbour to hear the rhythms of their repeated gravitational tugs. To add a little more flair, we converted the fluctuating brightness data of the star itself directly into sound. Continue reading to learn about the creation of each element of TRAPPIST Sounds or play TRAPPIST-1 for yourself!

COSMIC VIEW - THE UNIVERSE IN 40 JUMPS
by KEES BOEKE

Downloadable PDF, MOBI, EPUB

Published in 1957, John Day Company, New York

COSMIC VIEW
The Universe in 40 Jumps
Kees Boeke

ISS High Definition Live Streaming Video of the Earth (HDEV)

Currently, live video of Earth is streaming from an external HD camera mounted on the ISS. The camera is looking toward Earth with an occasional solar panel passing through the view.

Welcome to Solar System Live, the interactive Orrery of the Web. You can view the entire Solar System, or just the inner planets (through the orbit of Mars). Controls allow you to set time and date, viewpoint, observing location, orbital elements to track an asteroid or comet, and a variety of other parameters. Click on the title of any control to display a help page explaining it, or go directly to the help table of contents. You can compose a request with custom settings and save the results in your browser's hotlist or bookmark table, allowing direct access to Solar System Live with all the controls preset to your own preferences. You can plot the orbit of an asteroid or comet by choosing it from the object catalogue and clicking the “⊚” (orbit) button.

Other astronomy and space software available from Fourmilab includes:

• Earth and Moon Viewer
• Terranova: a new terraformed planet every day, and Terranova Planet Maker
• Your Sky makes custom star maps for any location on Earth at any date and time

The idea: Making scale models of the solar system is a useful way to learn about it. Here are various related pages.

This is a copy of Kees Boeke's book, COSMIC VIEW: The Universe in 40 Jumps (1957).

Kees Boeke's Cosmic View is a classic on learning about the scale of things. It is similar to the Morrison's Powers of Ten, but aimed at a younger audience. Its legacy includes Charles Eames's film Powers of Ten, the resulting book by Philip and Phylis Morrison, and several similar books which followed. Unfortunately, the problems Kees hoped to address, including peoples' understanding being fragmented by scale, remain as pressing today as they were in 1957. I place it online in the hope of encouraging awareness and activity in this area. Comments welcome - Mitchell Charity.

If you enjoy this book, you might also like my A View from the Back of the Envelope. http://www.vendian.org/envelope/

A note on copyright. I have placed this book online without permission. It has been 4 decades since Cosmic View was written, 3 since Kees Boeke died, and perhaps 2 since the last printing. Out of print, difficult to find, and largely forgotten. My hope is this noncommercial posting will further Kees's goal that every child and grownup develop a "cosmic view". If the current copyright holder, whomever that now is, should ever raise objection, the attached pages may go away.

This is the deepest, sharpest infrared image of the cosmos so far. The view of the early Universe toward the southern constellation Volans was achieved in 12.5 hours of exposure with the NIRCam instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope. Of course the stars with six visible spikes are well within our own Milky Way. Their diffraction pattern is characteristic of Webb's 18 hexagonal mirror segments operating together as a single 6.5 meter diameter primary mirror. The thousands of galaxies flooding the field of view are members of the distant galaxy cluster SMACS0723-73, some 4.6 billion light-years away. Luminous arcs that seem to infest the deep field are even more distant galaxies though. Their images are distorted and magnified by the dark matter dominated mass of the galaxy cluster, an effect known as gravitational lensing. Analyzing light from two separate arcs below the bright spiky star, Webb's NIRISS instrument indicates the arcs are both images of the same background galaxy. And that galaxy's light took about 9.5 billion years to reach the James Webb Space Telescope.

Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. //

Images on the Golden Record

The following is a listing of pictures electronically placed on the phonograph records which are carried onboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, et. al. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music. Once the Voyager spacecraft leave the solar system, they will find themselves in empty space. It will be forty thousand years before they make a close approach to any other planetary system.

Images on the Golden Record

The following is a listing of pictures electronically placed on the phonograph records which are carried onboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, et. al. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music. Once the Voyager spacecraft leave the solar system, they will find themselves in empty space. It will be forty thousand years before they make a close approach to any other planetary system.

What are all those streaks across the background? Satellite trails. First, the foreground features picturesque rock mounds known as Pinnacles. Found in the Nambung National Park in Western Australia, these human-sized spires are made by unknown processes from ancient sea shells (limestone). Perhaps more eye-catching, though, is the sky behind. Created by low-Earth orbit satellites reflecting sunlight, all of these streaks were captured in less than two hours and digitally combined onto the single featured image, with the foreground taken consecutively by the same camera and from the same location. Most of the streaks were made by the developing Starlink constellation of communication satellites,

A 10,000 Kilometer Galactic Bridge

The images released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team last week aren’t officially ‘first light’ images from the new telescope, but in a way, it feels like they are. These stunning views provide the initial indications of just how powerful JWST will be, and just how much infrared astronomy is about to improve.

The images were released following the completion of the long process to fully focus the telescope’s mirror segments. Engineers are saying JWST’s optical performance is “better than the most optimistic predictions,” and astronomers are beside themselves with excitement. //

“It hasn’t broken the laws of physics, but does lie at the very best end of possibilities thanks to the extraordinary efforts of many over decades,” said Mark McCaughrean, the European Space Agency’s Senior Advisor for Science & Exploration and part of JWST’s Science Working Group, on Twitter.

In their excitement, astronomers began posting comparison images — from previous telescopes to JWST in the same field of view — showing the evolution of improvement in resolution.

Astronomer Andras Gaspar, who works with JWST’s mid-infrared instrument, MIRI, compiled images from the WISE (Wide Infrared Survey Explorer) telescope to JWST’s image of the same field of view, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. //

“To be fair, WISE with its 40 cm diameter telescope was only half the size of Spitzer’s [85cm primary] but both of them are tiny compared to JWST [6.5 meter primary]” Gaspar said on Twitter. “This is what you get with a large aperture! Resolution and sensitivity. And MIRI gives mid-IR! HST [Hubble Space Telescope}] can’t get this wavelength.”

In addition to flying, landing, and returning from the moon in 1969 — NASA's Apollo 11 crew helped with a series of scientific experiments. One of them was to leave a special instrument with lots of little reflectors on the surface of the moon. The goal of that experiment was to beam a laser at the moon. Today on the show, Scientist-In-Residence Regina G. Barber talks to host Aaron Scott about the lunar laser ranging experiment — and how shooting that laser helped us better understand one of Einstein's theories.

The truth is, solar flares as large as the one that caused the 1859 Carrington Event happen fairly regularly. Since we started monitoring the Sun’s solar cycle, we’ve gotten lucky on a number of occasions — CMEs that would have hit us even harder than 1859 have merely glanced us due to a non-ideal trajectory. Meanwhile, the United States’ grid is more vulnerable to such events than ever before — our transformer grid is, on average, nearly 40 years old, high-voltage power lines are carrying far more energy than they used to on a day-to-day basis, and there’s virtually no way to quickly repair the damage such a storm would cause.