Slashdot Mirror

ESO has also issued a press release on this topic, which IMHO is better than the NASA press release (more facts, less marketspeak).

All these archives are searchable from the web site, and (if you've registered with them) available for download. Images from HST and CADC are restricted to only the primary researcher(s) for a period of time (I think it's a year).

So the speed of RX J1856.5-3754 (about 85-100 km/s) is more in the lower range. What make this star interesting is not its velocity, but the fact that it is rather unique, because it does not show any activity (e.g. pulsations), unlike most other known neutron stars.

Also, as there is no gaseous shell from the supernova left, thus it must be quite old (at least 100000 yrs), but nevertheless the neutron star is still rather hot (as evidenced by its X-ray emission). This is puzzling because neutron stars have no internal energy source (unlike "normal" stars that are powered by thermonuclear reactions), and therefore should cool down continuously from the moment of birth.

There is an ESO Press Release about this object which offers much more info than the CNN article, yet is still written for non-scientists.

Although the prospect of such a exciting new approach to gravity and the dark (or rather 'transparent' since it does not absorp light) matter problem, it needs to be stressed that lack of theories and ideas is not the problem.

The actual limit on progress in this field is lack of relevant data, obtained either from super colliders or from deep cosmological observations. Currently it is possible to make many models consistent with the observational constraints because it is these constraints themself which are so loose.

Everybody knows the US killed the giant supercollider program, and the state of affairs in observational cosmology learns that it is very difficult to calibrate measurements of (dark) matter.

To so something more about the last point, since I've researched this last year, it is far from trivial to yield reliably answers on galactic cluster potentials via dynamic or gravitational lens measurements, especially because you need to go into the Infrared to observe (optical) light emitted by stars in the deep universe. Only recently with instruments like ISAAC on one of the VLT telescopes we are able to obtain high quality near-infrared data. For the far infrared imaging space based missions like the NGST are required, because of the polluting thermal radiation from the earths atmosphere. The NGST is still under study and not expected to be launched until 2010!

Until then we can only speculate aboute the nature of dark matter.

Ivo

It never got off the ground.

The question I have is for timothy and the other slashdot operators. Why did you pick McKinstry to answer questions about telescopes? I gather that he happens to work at an observatory as a night assistant. Perhaps he has a good deal of knowledge about giant telescopes, but none of the supplied links demonstrate that.

As for hacking consciousness, his idea of minimal intelligence appears to be anything that responds in a non-random fashion. I propose the sequence "11111111111111..."

And we're supposed to ask him serious quesitons? Might as well ask Lars.

I guess I do have a question for Chris. He says that he entered a program in Loebner's Turing Test but withdrew because "Hugh Loebner stated that to win, a program must respond to audio/visual input and not just text." But that is only to win the $100,000 grand prize. Why wouldn't Chris leave his program to compete for the $2,000 (text-only interface) prize?

Steve Robbins

i think even if you spend 1 billion $ for a 100m aperture telescope on earth, that a e.g. 20m telescope in orbit will be better. Also i think that there's too much "competition" in the huge telescope market, we've got the GTC, the LBT, the SALT, the VISTA, the LAMOST, the DMT, the CELT, the XLT, the OWL, the LSST, the GSMT, the MAXAT, the ELT. Why? why not make only one bigger/better on earth, or even in space? the 2.4m HST proved the bettest scope is in space.
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

I operate the VLT (Very Large Telescope) for ESO. The ESO/ESA ASTROVIRTEL is a similar idea, and it is working now.

Don't worry about the resolution. Ordinary US/RUSSIAN/[INSERT COUNTRY] spy-sats have 1-2 feet resolution, that's about diffraction limited (ie you just need bigger mirrors for improved resolution). Atmospheric disturbance plays a minor role, but even if it did, you cant compute the interference away (because you have to know the exact interference to deconvolve it... basic image processing). Just statistics is certainly not enuff. The solution is active optics, such as used in the new eso VLT telescopes. But bringing active optics into space.... hmmm, think not, for now.

Ivo