In this fascinating sequel, watch a team of creation scientists discover amazing new evidence for a recent global Flood. You’ll stare up at folded rock layers, peer into microscopes, climb high mountains, and fly over the Grand Canyon. By the time the journey is over, you’ll have a completely new understanding of what the Flood did to create the world we live in today.

Thought Icelandic glacier water was rare? How about chugging down some Moon water. //

Scientists in China have found glass beads contained in lunar soil might hold enough water to provide a resource for future lunar missions.

The results, published in Nature Geoscience this week, stem from data collected by China's Chang'e-5 mission, and suggest the Moon's surface holds much more trapped water than previously thought and the liquid compound vital to continuing life could be relatively easy to extract.

Small glass beads created when meteorites smash into the lunar surface have long been considered a candidate for water storage. Using samples from the Apollo 11 mission, a US study published in 2012 found between 200 and 300 parts per million of water and hydroxyl (OH) in the glass beads they contained. //

Water made it into the beads via the solar winds, the reasoning goes. Solar winds are a plasma emitted from the sun containing hydrogen ions. On earth, they cause the aurora borealis and aurora australis, owing to an interaction with the Earth's magnetic field in the upper atmosphere. As the Moon has no magnetic field, the solar winds can reach its surface and interact with minerals in the soils containing oxygen. Because the solar wind is always, erm, blowing, the water in the beads is replenished.

The James Webb Space Telescope discovers enormous distant galaxies that should not exist

By Tereza Pultarova published 4 days ago

Giant, mature galaxies seem to have filled the universe shortly after the Big Bang, and astronomers are puzzled.

Nobody expected them. They were not supposed to be there. And now, nobody can explain how they had formed.

Galaxies nearly as massive as the Milky Way and full of mature red stars seem to be dispersed in deep field images obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) during its early observation campaign, and they are giving astronomers a headache.

These galaxies, described in a new study based on Webb's first data release, are so far away that they appear only as tiny reddish dots to the powerful telescope. By analyzing the light emitted by these galaxies, astronomers established that they were viewing them in our universe's infancy only 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang.

Images and spectra from the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that the first galaxies in the universe are too many or too bright compared to what astronomers expected. //

Evidence is building that the first galaxies formed earlier than expected, astronomers announced at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.

As the James Webb Space Telescope views swaths of sky spotted with distant galaxies, multiple teams have found that the earliest stellar metropolises are more mature and more numerous than expected. The results may end up changing what we know about how the first galaxies formed.

In science, ideas require experimental or observational validation

Out in the depths of space, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is already revolutionizing what we thought we'd find as far as distant galaxies go. However, the claim that "This disproves the Big Bang" isn't being made scientifically, but rather by a crackpot attempting to prop up his long-discredited ideas. Here's what we know, based on their actual scientific merits and in context, so you won't get fooled: not now, and not ever. //

A recent revolutionary assertion has gone viral, claiming that the Big Bang never happened, and that the latest data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has proven it. The notion of the Big Bang has never sat well with many — all the way from its earliest incarnations in the 1920s (via Georges Lemaître) and the 1940s (from George Gamow; apparently you had to be named “George” to realize this) — and has been continuously challenged since its inception. However, the evidence has remained overwhelmingly in its favor ever since the 1960s, and no other serious competitors have ever been able to reproduce its successes. Which leads one to wonder: what are the merits, if any, of this latest claim? Could it be true, and if so, how and why? //

The modern Big Bang

Originally, the Big Bang was a simple idea that grew out of three facts, all put together.

1. In Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a Universe filled with any uniform distribution of matter and/or energy will not be stable in a static configuration: the fabric of space in that Universe must either contract or expand.
2. Observationally, there are spirals and ellipticals in the sky, and they lie well beyond the Milky Way; their distances can be measured.
3. Also observationally, the light from these spirals and ellipticals appears to be shifted, with more distant objects exhibiting a greater redshift in direct proportion to their distance: consistent with an expanding Universe.

By combining these three facts, we’d conclude that the Universe — if it’s expanding and becoming less dense today — must have been smaller and denser in the past. We can extrapolate this back farther and farther, to even very early times if we like, and recognize that our modern Universe must have emerged from a denser, smaller, more uniform state in the very distant past.

The first person to synthesize this information together was Georges Lemaître, who did it in 1927, although others would independently come to the same conclusion, including Howard Robertson in 1928, Edwin Hubble in 1929, and Arthur Walker a few years later. //

It might be hard to believe, but we only started seeing our very first science results from the JWST in mid-July, 2022. (That recently, really!) Perhaps the biggest surprise — other than the astounding technical performance of the telescope, which is arguably twice as good as it was designed to achieve on many fronts — is what it’s seen in the realm of galaxies. While we knew JWST would push far past what Hubble’s limited capabilities have seen, we had no idea its performance would be so revolutionary in such an early stage of its observation campaigns.

• There are greater numbers of galaxies out there than Hubble ever saw, including at distances that Hubble would never be sensitive to.
• Some of these galaxies appear more evolved, more massive, and at earlier stages than not only we’d previously seen, but than many models and simulations had expected.
• Some of them might even be massive and quite evolved at epochs between 200 and 350 million years after the Big Bang; the current confirmed record-holder, from Hubble, was already 407 million years after the Big Bang.
• Many of these galaxies, even the earliest ones, are shaped like disks, rather than being irregular. JWST’s superior resolving power and imaging capabilities have shown this even for galaxies that previously, with Hubble, looked like irregular blobs.
• And finally, nearby galaxies, in contrast to what Hubble saw, appear smaller and more compact with JWST’s improved resolution.

New stars are not formed from the nebulae created when a parent star explodes.

In space there is thin interstellar gas and plasma. This gas is buffeted and blown by the solar winds of stars, and the shockwaves of supernovae. The gas is mostly Hydrogen and Helium.

Stars die in two ways. The most common way is for their outer layers to be blown out into space in a fairly gentle way. This process forms a "planetary nebula" The outer layers are formed mostly of hydrogen and helium, but are enriched by other elements. Or stars can die as supernovae. These are much more energetic. Even so, much of the gas blown out is Hydrogen and Helium as it comes from the outer layers of the star, but it will be further enriched by heavier elements. There are different kinds of supernovae with different mixtures of elements.

The elements blown off of dying stars mixes with the interstellar gas, enriching it and compressing it. This mixture of gas is still mostly hydrogen and helium and hydrogen is the main fuel for stars!

If the gas is sufficiently compressed (for example by a supernova shockwave) then its own gravity can start to pull it together, ultimately forming stars.

So stars are not formed from the iron "ashes" of dead stars, but from a mixture of the original Hydrogen fuel that has never been in a star, and the outer layers of stars that are made of "unburnt" hydrogen that was blown off the star as it died. //

New stars aren't directly born in the exploded remnants of massive stars. Star formation does not occur in newly produced supernova remnants.

Instead what happens is that, over the course of millions of years, the gas in the supernova remnant is mixed into the gas that is already part of the interstellar medium, and which is composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. The dilution factor is large, such that after mixing, the gas contains (currently) just 1-2% by mass of elements heavier than helium.

Star formation may then take place if this gas is compressed or otherwise becomes unstable to collapse.

Highly relevant:

How can there be 1,000 stellar ancestors before our Sun?
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/16311/how-can-there-be-1-000-stellar-ancestors-before-our-sun?noredirect=1&lq=1

Parent stars of our Sun - Where are its remains?
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/22694/parent-stars-of-our-sun-where-are-its-remains?noredirect=1&lq=1

How could a supernova seed solar nebula?
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/30103/how-could-a-supernova-seed-solar-nebula

Plate tectonics may have its origins in impacts, based on new data from Australia.

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

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.

Benji XVIArs Praetorianreplya day agoreportignore user
Veritas super omens wrote:
show nested quotes
Because their equations make remarkable predictions (about the future!) that hold true time and again against a plethora of different hypothesis postulated to break their equation.

Von Neumann wrote an interesting essay open-mindedly discussing how the concept of mathematical (and scientific) rigour has changed many times. He himself jokes that he had changed his mind about it three times!

So it’s worth noting that even the idea of what constitutes mathematical rigour can and does evolve.

As he points out, too, the prevailing view of physicists in the 20th century came to be that a theory was a good theory if it either unified a set of previously disparate laws, or made predictions outside of existing observations that were then empirically validated. ie the idea that “physical laws” or theoretical models answer the “why” questions in a deep philosophical sense does not feature. (Hence the famous video where Feynman lectures the interviewer for asking a “why” question about magnetism.) That mindset does not preclude inserting terms into models where necessitated by the empirical facts. The resulting equations are merely our best models. //

phred14Ars Praetorianet Subscriptorreplya day agoreportignore user
Voix des Airs wrote:

I can't tell if this post is for real or not (sorry if it isn't - but in these threads I can't always tell) but if it is then: No. It doesn't work like that. External shells have no gravitational effect.

One of our early exercises in calculus / physics was the Newtonian version of the same effect. Basically as you descend into the Earth (assuming even distribution - close enough) gravitational attraction from any mass at a greater radius than you cancels out. Shoots the Hollow Earth people all to pieces - in Freshman year.

Fermilab's TeVatron just released the best mass measurement of the W-boson, ever. Here's what doesn't add up.

The Standard Model, our most successful theory of elementary particles of all-time, has some very deep and intricate relationships between the properties of the different particles baked into it. Based on the measured properties of the other particles, the rest mass energy of the W-boson ought to be 80.35 GeV, but the latest results from the CDF collaboration reveal a value of 80.43 GeV, at a remarkable 7-sigma significance. This marks the first experimental particle physics result that disagrees with the Standard Model at such high significance. If there's no mistake, it could be our first clue to what lies beyond the known frontiers of physics.

In the entire history of science, no theory has been more successful, in terms of predictions matching the results of experiments and observations, than the Standard Model of particle physics. Describing all of the known elementary particles as well as three of the fundamental forces relating them ⁠— electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force ⁠— we’ve never once conducted an experiment whose results contradicted this theory’s predictions. Particle accelerators from Brookhaven to SLAC to LEP to HERA to Fermilab to the Large Hadron Collider have tried again and again, but have never once found a robust anomaly that’s held up to further scrutiny.

And yet, in a new paper published in the April 8, 2022 issue of Science, the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experimental collaboration just released their latest results, which offer the most precise measurements of the mass of one of those fundamental particles, the W-boson, ever. Although the Standard Model predicts its rest mass energy, exquisitely, to be 80.36 giga-electron-volts (GeV), the CDF collaboration instead found 80.43 GeV, with an uncertainty of just 0.0094 GeV attached to it. This represents a 7-sigma discrepancy from the Standard Model’s predictions: the most robust experimental anomaly ever seen. Here’s the science behind this incredible result, and what it means for the Universe.

The Standard Model is, in a nutshell, our modern theory of particle physics. It includes:

six flavors of quark with three colors each, along with their anti-quark counterparts,
three types of charged leptons and three types of neutral, left-handed leptons (the neutrinos), along with their anti-lepton counterparts,
the photon, which is the massless boson that mediates the electromagnetic force,
the eight gluons, which are the eight massless bosons that mediate the strong nuclear force,
the three weak bosons — the W+, the W-, and the Z — which have large masses and mediate the weak nuclear force,
and the Higgs boson, which is a scalar particles that couples to, and gives mass to, all particles that have a non-zero mass.
The Standard Model itself details the relationships between these various particles, such as what couples to and interacts with which other particles. However, there are some properties that can only be determined from measuring them, such as the masses of the individual fundamental particles.

One very important property that the Standard Model doesn’t give you wiggle-room for, however, is how the particles affect one another. If the top quark was much more massive than it is, for example, it would increase the mass of the proton, because the particles inside the proton couple to particles which also couple to the top quark. As a result, if you can measure the masses of all-but-one of the Standard Model particles, the rest of the Standard Model will tell you what that last particle’s mass ought to be.

"The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the Universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning."
So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe. The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch. All matter will eventually be consumed by monstrous black holes, which in their turn will evaporate away into the dimmest glimmers of light. //

let's take a look at how "material" – physical matter – first came about. If we are aiming to explain the origins of stable matter made of atoms or molecules, there was certainly none of that around at the Big Bang – nor for hundreds of thousands of years afterwards.

Physically speaking, our Universe seems uncannily perfect. It stands to reason that if it wasn't, life as we know it – and planets, atoms, everything else really – wouldn't exist.

We don't even know everything we don't know – a fact that's been made evident in a new discovery. While running equations for quantum gravity corrections for the entropy of a black hole, a pair of physicists found that black holes exert pressure on the space around them.
Not much pressure, to be sure – but it's a finding that's fascinatingly consistent with Stephen Hawking's prediction that black holes emit radiation and therefore not only have a temperature, but slowly shrink over time, in the absence of accretion.
"Our finding that Schwarzschild black holes have a pressure as well as a temperature is even more exciting given that it was a total surprise," said physicist and astronomer Xavier Calmet of the University of Sussex in the UK.
"If you consider black holes within only general relativity, one can show that they have a singularity in their centres where the laws of physics as we know them must break down.
"It is hoped that when quantum field theory is incorporated into general relativity, we might be able to find a new description of black holes." //

the finding could have interesting implications for our attempts to square general relativity (on macro scales) with quantum mechanics (which operates on extremely small scales).
Black holes are thought to be key to this undertaking. The black hole singularity is mathematically described as a one-dimensional point of extremely high density, at which point general relativity breaks down – but the gravitational field around it can only be described relativistically.
Figuring out how the two regimes fit together could also help tp solve a really thorny black hole problem. According to general relativity, information that disappears beyond a black hole could be gone forever. Under quantum mechanics, it can't be. This is the black hole information paradox, and mathematically exploring the space-time around a black hole could help resolve it.

It is hard for humans to wrap their heads around the fact that there are galaxies so far away that the light coming from them can be warped in a way that they actually experience a type of time delay. But that is exactly what is happening with extreme forms of gravitational lensing, such as those that give us the beautiful images of Einstein rings. In fact, the time dilation around some of these galaxies can be so extreme that the light from a single event, such as a supernova, can actually show up on Earth at dramatically different times. That is exactly what a team led by Dr. Steven Rodney at the University of South Carolina and Dr. Gabriel Brammer of the University of Copenhagen has found. Except three copies of this supernova have already appeared – and the team thinks it will show up again one more time, 20 years from now.

Finding such a supernova is important not just for its mind bending qualities – it also helps to settle an important debate in the cosmological community. The rate of expansion of the universe has outpaced the rate expected when calculated from the cosmic microwave background radiation. Most commonly, this cosmological conundrum is solved by invoking “dark energy” – a shadowy force that is supposedly responsible for increasing the acceleration rate. But scientists don’t actually know what dark energy is, and to figure it out they need a better model of the physics of the early universe.

Traces of rare forms of iron and plutonium have been found at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, after some kind of cataclysm in outer space created this radioactive stuff and sent it raining down on our planet.

The extraterrestrial debris arrived on Earth within the last 10 million years, according to a report in the journal Science. Once it hit the Pacific Ocean and settled to the bottom, nearly a mile down, the material got incorporated into layers of a rock that was later hauled up by a Japanese oil exploration company and donated to researchers. //

In his view, the new findings add to other evidence that the heaviest elements, such as plutonium, can't be generated by just regular old supernovas. "It must be some rare event, something else," says Schatz. "There are a lot of pieces of evidence that point to multiple sources. Neutron star mergers are probably one of the more important sources, but at this point it doesn't look like they can explain all the observations."

Voyager 1—one of two sibling NASA spacecraft launched 44 years ago and now the most distant human-made object in space—still works and zooms toward infinity. //

The craft has long since zipped past the edge of the solar system through the heliopause—the solar system's border with interstellar space—into the interstellar medium. Now, its instruments have detected the constant drone of interstellar gas (plasma waves), according to Cornell University-led research published in Nature Astronomy.

Examining data slowly sent back from more than 14 billion miles away, Stella Koch Ocker, a Cornell doctoral student in astronomy, has uncovered the emission. "It's very faint and monotone, because it is in a narrow frequency bandwidth," Ocker said. "We're detecting the faint, persistent hum of interstellar gas."

This work allows scientists to understand how the interstellar medium interacts with the solar wind, Ocker said, and how the protective bubble of the solar system's heliosphere is shaped and modified by the interstellar environment. //

Voyager 1 left Earth carrying a Golden Record created by a committee chaired by the late Cornell professor Carl Sagan, as well as mid-1970s technology. To send a signal to Earth, it took 22 watts, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The craft has almost 70 kilobytes of computer memory and—at the beginning of the mission—a data rate of 21 kilobits per second.

Due to the 14-billion-mile distance, the communication rate has since slowed to 160-bits-per-second, or about half a 300-baud rate.