Slashdot Mirror

I would have expected it to oxidize the iron on the planet's surface (and everything else) until after billions of years, there wouldn't be much free oxygen left, but apparently, if a planet has enough titanium oxide, that might not be the case.

Correct. The original two partner institutions were

• The National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which operates the North American ALMA Science Center, a regional ALMA Research Center (ARC);
• The European Southern Observatory which similarly operates the European ARC.

Later, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan joined the consortium, to provide the ALMA Compact Array and a second correlator, among other things.

It's sometimes a bit bewildering working in this multi-site environment, but it's mostly just amazing :)

I wish I had known that complicated things can't be achieved when I was younger and it would have saved me and my friends a lot of time. What you are describing is like ray tracing and that is quite impossible I know, now that you have informed me.
Blender
As far as finding the hand of the ceiling cat, that is obvious in the wonderful lulz that illuminate us.
I know what you mean about the stars, every night I look up and they wander about like fireflies with no obvious pattern.
If these techniques were already employed in other wavelengths then I might refute your statement, but alas I have no proof.

Actually not true (see above post), but I did misspeak (also see above post). Phases are still quite pronounced on Mars (example), but are mild on Jupiter (example)

The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, in Mitaka, has a system called "4D2U" set up in a small building. It features dome about 20 meters wide with (if I recall correctly from my visit in the spring) 11 or 13 projectors. Most of the projectors face in one particular direction, the same direction which the seats face, so that the resolution and color balance are highest where people are looking. The team at Mitaka has written their own software to do real-time motion through space and time; it looks a lot like Celestia, and may be based in part on it.

You can see details and download code for your own use by going to

http://4d2u.nao.ac.jp/index_E.html

But does Netcraft confirm it?

No, but Stroustrup himself is reputed to have apologized for C++ as far back as 1998.

"It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book seriously."
- From the lost tapes of the legendary IEEE interview of 1998 :)

More than just simulations -- if you look at the SDSS data, you can clearly see the filaments. Mitaka is a good way to see a summary of the data on a PC; Switch to launch mode, and then zoom all the way out. You'll see the filament form as you get closer to the present (the center,) and see things more homogeneous at the edges (in the past.)

I don't think so; My understanding is that it's the force of gravity.

Here is the picture I have heard:

The universe basically, from any point, stretches out in all directions. Gravity pulls a given lump in all directions at a given time. But local things are more powerful by the law of gravity, than far things. So things start lumping with their neighbors.

Some lumpings occur earlier than other lumpings, which cause then to exert a stronger pull. These become the super-clusters (joining points between filament; such as the Virgo Cluster.)

So masses are basically pulled towards the closest super-cluster. But, ah-hah, some are pulled strongly by *two* super-clusters. These become the filament ("bubble walls.")

If you download Mitaka, you can see a lot of these things first hand, with data directly from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Oh; No, we- we actually see the Big Bang, today. We see not only the big bang, but the times between the big bang, and the present. It's sort of like looking at inverted tree rings-- the center tree rings are the present, and the outer tree rings are the past. We even see "bands" of history; For example, radio galaxies only appear within a certain radius. There are "growth stages" to the matter in the universe. You only see such-and-such at ye distance, and such-and-such things at ye further distance, and so on, all the way back to the very "beginning," the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. With Mitaka, you can see also the formation of the large scale structure of the universe, very clearly. The futher away you go, the more jumbled the matter is. As you get closer and closer and closer, you see more segregation, and then the nodal points and the filament and so on.

In a sense, the answer to your question is a "Yes!" We do see "space become very bright all around." That is, we see the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. That is what it is. It is the initial light from the Big Bang. Or rather, it is the surface of last scattering. The CMBR was predicted by the Big Bang model, (more or less by the reasoning you just gave,) and then observed, after the prediction.

We are conditioned to think that the big bang was "bright" in the sense of shining visible white light, but my understanding is that our eyes simply observe the wrong frequency range, to be able to see it. If you look with microwave vision, you do indeed see it.

Incidentally, there's some truth to what you are saying about "if the universe continues to expand..." We already see the initial light from the Big Bang, like I just explained, but, as time passes, there's less and less of the big bang that we can truely see. The end-game scenario of the expansion of the universe would be the big rip, where we can't even see beyond the end of our own galaxy, our own solar system, our own planet, 3 feet in front of us, our own body, our brain, individual molecules, atoms, subatomics, ...

So, we can see the Big Bang, we just see less and less of it as time goes by. Basically on the lines you were arguing.

Oh, one thing that may help to explain this, is that the big bang didn't happen at "a point." Rather, it happened everywhere. Or, rather, the entire observable universe fit into roughly the space of a point, (though the big bang may well have happened in infinite space, we have no idea,) and our observable universe is the only thing observable to us. We don't think the entire universe is shrinking; Only our field of vision. But it seems unlikely that the galaxies beyond our field of vision are actually disappearing. Just because I turn my head, doesn't mean my girlfriend goes away from the universe.

(shakes head)

No, here; Check this out, and check this out.

We know that the observable universe almost certainly came out of a volume roughly the size of a point, but we have no reason to believe (as far as I understand) that the entire universe came out of a single point, that a single point is all there was, and so on. It could be that there are "adjacent points," and next to them, more adjacent points, and so on, and that the points are a continuum, not discrete points.

It does not help that when astrophysicists say "universe," they almost always mean "observable universe."

If a scientist says, "The universe was a point," you don't know (without further conversation) whether they mean the entire universe or just the observable universe. We're pretty clear that the observable universe was pretty much point-like. Think like, Planck length, or perhaps whole centimeters, but definitely not light years. But scientists rarely conjecture beyond the observable universe. "We don't know" is the usual response.

This is, to me, really amazing. I only learned these things recently, after playing around with Mitaka, and then combining that with studies over Wikipedia and the Internet, and then asking some scientist friends, "Do you guys really believe that?!" It's all very different than the understanding I was given in the early 1990's, studying in school. I just was taught, learned, and assumed that the universe was closed, looped back around on itself, and was a few billion light years across, all exploding out from a point.

I now understand that that's an outdated view of things.

What I understand now, and what I see in Mitaka, makes it fairly clear to me that the universe is unknowably large. It's still possible that the universe "loops back," and there are groups of scientists researching that, looking for evidence, to see if it's true. But the sense I have, and the sense I have of what most astrophysicists have, is that it's much much larger than what we can observe, and very plausibly infinitely so.

Sure, the US could push for a multilateral approach to space exploration. Now, stop and think about the current state of affairs in the 'states and you'll see why this isn't likely to happen.

We do cooperate on some things, like the International Virtual Observatory Alliance.

Which amongst others includes contributions from :

• America
• Australia
• China
• Canada
• Europe
• France
• Germany
• Hungary
• India
• Italy
• Japan
• Russia
• Spain
• United Kingdom

I think of them as the wake of stuff (albeit big singularity-type stuff) dancing in space. To us a long distance away (many times the separation of the objects), the disruptions caused by the two things moving around should be something we can sense.

Of course there's a medium through which all things in the Cosmos move -- we have to label it and measure it; the rubber sheet metaphor is helpful for us to understand it. General relativity allows for all manner of funny space-time conditions but to do so uses maths from topology to communicate this. The key part of this maths is the Metric of the topological thingummy over which our Cosmic Bodies are dancing, which is an unavoidable indication of an invisible, insensitive substance behind our cosmology. Unfortunately, this is only the maths of the model of the cosmology, so it may not necessarily really be there (and I apologise for messing with your head).

The reason this is relevant to the news of LIGO/VIRGO/GEO/TAMA news: Michelson & Morley developed the interferometer which is the key part of all these GW observatories in order to show that the 'Ether' really existed, and had nothing positive to show after years of testing the thing. This isn't more expensive repetition of the same experiments because these devices seek something other than Michelson sought, and they are being used differently.

We play with lasers over on Mauna Kea, too... like this nice 20-watt sodium dye one. Which, for topicality, is located at the world's current largest optical telescope...

Japan also has several semiconductor fabrication plants. These plants require really really low amounts of vibrations to get profitable yields. The foundations for these things are typically 1-2 miles deep, such that they are anchored in the second layer of the earth's crust. And then there's all sorts of vibration damping material everywhere. I figure the gravitational wave detectors use some similar methods, only more so. Besides, all they have to isolate is their laser source and detectors, not the whole vacuum chamber.

And there's this page on the site to which you linked.

All of them I approve, but what's up with Japan? Japan gets some 1,200 minor earthquakes per DAY. how in the world do they expect to overcome the seismic noise floor (pun somewhat intended)?