Hubble
 

This week should be the launching of what may be the most important Shuttle Mission in ten years. Complete with two shuttles on the pads. The rescue of Hubble was probably the result of a small rebellion in the astronaut corp. I believe the launch is Monday 1800 hrs GMT - 2 PM for the astronauts.

This will be the first manned science mission since Columbia was lost. And such a risky mission that two shuttles must be made ready complete even with a second mission control in Houston.

Isn't there a new space telescope in the works?

Hey, you're a smart guy so maybe you can answer this question. I read where the Hubble captured a pic of an object 13B light years away so they figure its almost as old as the universe itself.

So if it took 13B years for the light to reach earth, doesn't that mean it was in that location 13B years ago? That would seem to be impossible since, it would not be possible for any two objects to be 13B light years apart 13B years ago.

I can't figure that one out.

It was on a treadmill. :cool:

That assumes they are not the same source? Welcome to why we need this research and (if America wants to be #1) also need to be doing quantum physics in America. Especially in the past decade, most fundamental research had been leaving the US due to extremists who hate what is not justified by their political agenda.

I believe the other scope is named Webb. Scientists are very excited to have both observatories working simultaneously. Work performed by Hubble can be calibrated against future work by Webb. And other techniques (including combining both images into a super telescope) are expected. The waiting list for access to Hubble has been massive. A traffic jam that Webb alone cannot alleviate.

I believe Webb is still something like four years away. But science expects great things from both scopes in combination with a constellation of other gamma ray, X-ray, and infrared observatories. Basic science that was being killed by some stupid fools who found glory in "Man to Mars".

Value of Hubble was a surprise. Hubble could very well be the greatest science experiment in 20 years in everything from deep space study to sub-atomic quantum physics to understanding the very nature of what Einstein desperately wanted to solve - the fundamental relations of all matter (ie dark matter) and energy (including time and gravity).

Webb is expected to provide a decade improvement on the results from Hubble.

I don't even try to answer a 13billion light year question since even the best of minds have numerous and contrasting theories. We can only go with what we know – follow the evidence. And keep getting more facts.

Meanwhile, based upon what we have learned, Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek concept has held up surprisingly well. Compare that to Jules Verne's Nautilus.

I want a Porter Garden telescope, which I saw on CBS Sunday Morning.

I don't fully understand you question. You write

Which two? Object X (as seen by Hubble) and ... what, Earth? If so, why not?

Perhaps this might help confuse the shit out of you:

The universe is appx 14B years old. It is MUCH more than 14B light years across. Matter is scattered at least as far as we can see in BOTH directions, vastly more than 14B light years from side to side. How could this be, if nothing can move faster than C, the speed of light?

The answer, (and I hope it answers your questions too) is "inflation"; the idea that the universe underwent an incredibly rapid expansion very early in its existence.
Imagine a few flies crawling about the surface of an infinitely stretchy balloon. Neither can crawl faster than C. After one second, they might be two light seconds apart. But if someone is blowing up the ballon (really really fast and big) you might go back and measure the distance and find it a lot more than two light seconds, because the skin of the balloon has stretched because of the inflation.

Got that? This will be in the exam next week.



Bruce ... you're evil :lol:

Yep - that answers my question.

And replaces it with a bigger one. But at least I now know what the explanation is even if I don't quite understand how it works.

The only way I can understand that is to ... well, let me ask this: Has the amount of gravity in the universe changed since inception? If yes, then that would make inflation a little more comprehensible. I think.

Alas, I understood the universe a lot better when I didn't know anything about it.

Inflation is just a theory that some whitecoats were twisted into to explain the observable facts. It is not clear what could drive it.

The really weird thing is that the expansion of the universe seems to be speeding up.

I was about to post a general link to New Scientist magazine which regularly runs accessible articles about this kind of stuff, but I went and checked and their lead story RFN is about exactly this stuff. The European Space Agency is about to launch the Plank satellite to study it.


There is a chance that this will even give us a means of testing string theory.

That's 10 to the minus 34, and ten to the minus 20. Should be in superscript.

:head explodes:

That is how I understand it.

rebellion in the astronaut corps?

Back then, George Jr's administration was using science for their greater glory. One political agenda was to redirect all space programs; to put a man on the moon and 'Man to Mars'. Numerous other space projects were being killed or canceled (including eight satellites to perform earth atmospheric research - one that was soon to launch) to pay for that political agenda.

When Columbia was destroyed (the only shuttle that did any science), the administration had plenty of reason (excuses) to eliminate the expensive Hubble rescue / upgrade.

Deep inside NASA, hundreds (mostly astronauts) began a campaign to save Hubble. What you now see is the all but outright rebellion in NASA to save science. These people were rumored to divert funds at any opportunity to fund studies on how to save Hubble. Of course, it had to be performed covertly because a political agenda had replaced science as the important objective.

Meanwhile, science no longer uses man for its greatest discoveries. Best space science is now done by machines. In fact, almost all NASA's science is done in the less than 10% of budget spent only on non-manned missions. Mars Rover being a perfect example. ISS being the perfect example of massive expenditures and almost no science.

In deep ocean research, Ballard also came to the same stunning concluson while maybe a mile under the ocean. He suddenly noticed crew members would rather view outside on cameras rather than use viewing ports. Even deep sea research is better conducted by machines - not by man.

Same applies to sub-atomic research. Or space. Even astronomers no longer go to the telescopes. Work is better conducted elsewhere while telescopes - machine operated - do the work.

Hubble, hubble toil and trouble.

Especially when we sought advise by looked into its mirror.

"Mirror mirror. Out in space"
"What can you tell me about this place."

'No poison apples grow out here?"

Well, that's going on my list of really cool but tremendously impractical, expensive things I want to own some day.

Hubble Pictures Too Crisp, Challenging Theories of Time and Space

http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...ts_030402.html

There are pretty good arguments for doing science with unmanned probes, not the least of which being bang for the buck. However, *nothing* can capture the public imagination, elevate the morale and interest of the public in science, like manned spaceflight and real live humans doing on the spot science. There is a need for both, and both should be done.

God is screwing with us, in much the same way that He put dinosaur fossils in the ground to test our faith. He does shit like this all the time. I mean, haven't you ever tied a balloon to your dog's tail, or put tape on your cat's feet to freak them out? It's pretty much the same kind of thing.

:lol2:

Something is obviously missing. Galaxies dispersing at increasing rates of speed, way more gravity than visible mass accounts for, huge regions of void where there ought to be millions of galaxies, objects farther apart than they would be if they traveled at light speed... Inflationary theory would seem to indicate that space expanded at what amounts to faster than light speed, then slowed down and now its speeding up again. I think I like Bruce's explanation better.

Even if the big bang theory is accurate, it still doesn't explain where all this stuff came from or why it acts the way it does.

Sometimes I think we are missing a force that exists out there somewhere only a derivative of which is expressed in dimensions we are able to observe. Sort of like the vibration caused by thunder caused by lightning that may or may not ever touch the ground.

There's something else out there. Either right in front of us, or just beyond the edge of the universe. And the way things seem to work, forces exert until their energy supply gets used up. So where is the energy coming from and what happens when it expires? Dark matter? Dark energy? I doubt it - too convenient an explanation that exactly explains that which is otherwise unexplainable - a mere placeholder for what's really going on.

I agree with your views on dark matter and dark energy as they are currently defined, as mere placeholders for "whatever-the-hell-it-is-that-is-causing-this-messy-result". Dark energy sounds better. But these probes are investigating and we might get a bit clearer about what DM and DE are.

But, your thoughts about us missing something important is exactly what motivated the Whitecoats to come up with the idea of Dark Matter/Energy. There is indeed at least one big gap still in our understanding of the world, and a nobel prize awaits the clever bunny who figures it out.

I do wonder about one thing.

What if what we think is happening is not what's really happening? What if the universe isn't accelerating outward? If our observations are wrong about that then there is no need to create 'dark energy' to come up with the missing force to explain the observed acceleration.

Light can play games as it traverses over vast distances. And isn't red shift the only real 'evidence' of the increasing acceleration? And unless we are exactly in the center of the universe, wouldn't celestial objects at similar distances in opposite directions display differing degrees of red shift or, if they are moving with a lateral component, substantially less red shift?

I checked out a book to read the other day - I actually requested it be delivered to my branch: Warped Passages by Lisa Randall. Problem is, its 512 pages of thick, dense material and I just can't manage a book that big right now so I grudgingly returned it and its been nagging at me ever since.

I bet there's some good information in there. She's leaning towards the multi-dimensional model which ties in with string theory and all that. I've read some good articles about that but have to confess that I don't think I really get it.

First, let me say, i think I am getting out of my depth here. I studied philosophical metaphysics, I teach critical thinking. Astrophysics and cosmology are just hobbies. But .... here goes:


That would be called "being wrong". Learned that in Philosophy of Science.

The red shift is mostly uniform in all directions, increasing with apparent distance. It is primarily NOT due to galaxies rushing apart through space, but due to space itself stretching. Remember the balloon inflating.
If you want you can draw a smiley face on a ballon and watch how it stretches uniformly as the balloon inflates. We are at any randomly chosen point on that image. All points are moving away from us, in proportion to the distance they already are from us.


That does sound a bit weighty. Try that New Scientist article, and browse through the links of related articles. There are always plenty and most are digestible, bite-size and fairly accessible. I think they have a cosmology page to organise all of them. You won't get all the discussion all at once, but that is probably a good thing.

That and maybe this idea of a God.

When I took astronomy in college, this concept really blew me away. It's so counter-intuitive when you are thinking about it, but if you grab an actual balloon and do it, you can see it happening clearly.

Since the surface of a balloon is two-dimensional... does that mean our universe is on the three-dimensional surface of a four-dimensional balloon?

Or the 3-dimensional surface of a 10-dimensional string. Whatever.

Ten Things You Don’t Know About Hubble, by Phil Plait, one of the guys who actually used it for years. You have to click through the ten but it's worth it.

On a treadmill?

Excellent link

I heard when they were changing the camera one of the bolts was frozen. Gave them a WTF moment until they went and got the big wrench to finally break it free.

There was a good article in the Post this morning about it. They were using a kind of torque wrench that was set up to not exert too much force on the bolts so they wouldn't get sheared off. The bolt wasn't budging at that torque setting. So they somehow adjusted it to get rid of the torque setting and applied more force to the bolt with the same wrench, finally getting it out without stripping it. Apparently the bolt was so deep in the camera housing that you couldn't see it. They had a long extended bit that could reach way back in there and engage the bolt. If they hadn't been able to get that bolt out, the entire mission would pretty much be for nothing. Half a billion dollars down the drain.

Article here.

There's been some thirteen gigayears of expansion of the spacetime, too. And frankly, anything that ancient is expected to look subtly weird somehow, too. Analysis of spectral features is probably going to lead to a number of "hmm, that's really fucking odd" moments.