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Pillars of Creation Destroyed
anthemaniac writes with news about the Pillars of Creation, an iconic structure in the Eagle Nebula some 7,000 light-years distant. The Hubble Space Telescope's image of this structure is one of the most widely recognized astronomy images ever captured. Now a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggests that the pillars probably toppled 6,000 years ago. From the article: "Astronomers think [a] supernova's shock wave knocked the pillars down about 6,000 years ago. But because light from that region of the sky takes 7,000 years to reach us, the majestic pillars will appear intact to observers on Earth for another 1,000 years or so.'"
Astronomers think [a] supernova's shock wave knocked the pillars down about 6,000 years ago.
Just as the the Earth was being created!
Trolling is a art,
that's it, pack up the space program, nothing left to see out there
I wonder if any of us (that is, humans) will be around to see the destruction, or if anyone alive then will ever know what they looked like today?
Meta, Meta, Meta
There was a gimmicky sign left by the pillars of creation:
If you lived in the Eagle Nebula, you'd be destroyed by now.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
i find the idea that anything in space can "topple" or "fall down" highly amusing
:)
some of these reporters need to check their gravity
Even on Planet Earth light speed delays can be noticible (it is the bulk of a ping time that goes any significant distance, a highly impressive achievement), but once you leave Earth, everything has a significant light speed delay. The moon is just over a light-second away and the sun roughly eight and a half light minutes. (The exact distance varies over the course of the year.)
They willan on-have collapsen.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
This article takes the cake! This has to be the oldest story I've seen posted on Slashdot!
The value is in knowing. The more we know about the universe, the more we can make use of it. Especially when it comes to the point that we *need* to get off this rock. At that point all the AIDS vaccines, wells and roads all over the world become worth squat. Of course I don't think it will happen in our lifetime, and you can certainly debate if it will happen. But I'm sure that more primitive societys saw mucking around with plant extracts as pointless when it was more useful to gather food for the tribe. Of course some of those plant extracts are now medicines.
The farther away anything is, the more it is going to differ from what we're seeing now.
6000 light years doesn't even make it halfway to the galaxy core ... much less to nearby galaxies (2million light years only gets us to Andromeda -- the nearest major galaxy). For all we know, it was imploded by some master race 1 million years ago, and the creatures who get to watch that explosion will be digging up our fossils and wondering what we had to do with the mass extinction we're in the middle of.
It takes us up to 20 minutes to figure out if a mars probe went 'poof' during it's last maneuver.
Voyager is about 10 light-hours out.
The North Star (one of the brightest stars in the sky until a few years ago), is over 400 light years out.
Basically, just about nothing is close to us in human terms (under relativistic rules). In fact, The Pillars of Creation are about as close as things can get.
-- But also remember that as things get closer, we can see more detail so Jupiter at 4 light hours has way more detail than any thing extrasolar. The stuff in andromeda can only be resolved to a resolution of a few light years.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Basic research often has no short term value that we can see. A hundred years ago a couple of guys tried to measure our speed through the "ether". They found that there was no ether. This lead to the idea that light must travel at the same speed no matter what reference frame you're in. This (and a few other things) lead to the ideas of quantum physics. This ultimately lead to several inventions already with many more on the way.
But a hundred years ago, did anyone see the point in measuring our speed through the ether (which pretty much everyone accepted had to exist)? What would be the point? Just a waste of money.
Astronomical measurements are used to test basic theories of physics. The basic theories of physics are then used to create new and wonderful things. These things save lives and make us more comfortable. Just because we don't know what we'll end up using the information for doesn't mean we should stop searching for it.
It's actually made of plasma in the glow discharge state. That's the same state of plasma that you see within a neon sign. Plasma can also exist in the arc state, which is like an arc welder (very bright) and in a dark state, which you cannot see (like the electricity that flows through your lamp cord; notice the cord does not brighten). It's resistivity changes throughout these modes depending upon the current density. Plasma is the fourth more common state of matter next to gas, solid and liquid. Thing is, 99%+ of the universe's matter is in the plasma state, which makes it a pretty big deal to understand it. You'd think, in fact, that our theories about how the universe operated would be based upon how plasma acts to a great extent, but astrophysicists have oddly convinced themselves that accurately modeling the properties of plasma is not all that important to understanding the universe.
... hey, it's fluid! Unfortunately, for the past several decades, astrophysicists have been refusing to admit that plasma can transfer electricity and it's led to all sorts of weird results within astronomy like black holes, neutron stars, dark matter, dark energy, the Big Bang Theory, etc.
Since astrophysicists like to incorrectly model plasma as a *fluid* (magnetohydrodynamics), they tend to just vaguely call it "gas and dust" even though it is by definition filled with charged particles like ions and electrons. As you may know, ions and electrons can carry electricity, which makes plasma a very special type of matter. The electricity that flows through plasma can affect its shape, and vice-versa. So, its electrical and mechanical energies are interdependent, and this makes it very complicated. If you've ever seen a novelty plasma globe at Spencer's in the mall, the first thing that probably came to your mind was not
This whole article is actually complete bullshit because contrary to what it states, supernovae are likely electrical phenomenon as well. We've imaged many remnants of supernovae (like 1987A) that are bipolar symmetric like an hourglass. This isn't anything like what astrophysicists told us that they should be -- a spherical shell of expanding gas. In fact, it corresponds better to something called Birkeland Currents, which is a plasma physics term that astrophysicists aren't very familiar with. The supernova can become extremely energetic because it is the confluence point for energy arriving from foreign energy sources in the same way that energy created at your power plant ends up being used at your house.
Of course, this isn't the *standard* view and I'm sure that there are people who would consider me to be heretical, or at least misleading you. But so long as the filaments within a novelty plasma globe do not appear to you to act like the water in a similarly shaped fishbowl, then you should not buy much into the rest of astronomy either because this single assumption is so devastating to all of the calculations that are done for the universe that the end result is pretty much garbage. We know enough about space to get probes out to the planets, but that's pretty much it these days. Very few of the pretty pictures we see through our amazing telescopes were actually expected by the theories that we've been pursuing for the past few decades. The scientists spend a bunch of time, in fact, trying to figure out ways to create those pictures *without* electricity because it's considered more appropriate for some strange reason to invent mysterious matters than to assume that electricity can flow over plasma in space (which we can do in the laboratory). You'd never know any of this from the public relations releases though for space articles because people tend to believe whatever it is they are told when it comes to space stuff and there are no "investigative journalists" asking the tough questions in the space industry.
We live in a very strange world. Our reality is basically what we tell ourselves that it is and will continue to be so until a day whe
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
All of the comments about time travel, light cones, ect are a complete and utter waste of time. While the article doesn't do a very good job of explaining it, the light from the proposed super nova that will cause changes in the Pillars of Creation has already reached us. What hasn't reached us yet is the light from the changed Pillars of Creation. This difference is due to two factors, one small and one huge. The small one is that fact that the star that went nova is closer to us than the Pillars are. The largest factor is the difference in the progagation of the light from the super nova and that of the wave that will physically re-arrange the Pillars. A simple model is the light and sound from an explosion. You'll see the light flash before you hear the bang.
A philosophical position is not the same thing as an article of faith. While you could argue that a given philosophical position is not "proven", inasmuch as you (or perhaps someone besides yourself) may not be convinced by the arguments in it's favor, others may find the argument absolutely convincing such that any disagreement with it seems necessarily irrational.
I wouldn't call myself an atheist exactly (I'm a sort of pantheist), but I'm certainly a naturalist, so lets look at that first "article of faith" you listed:
1) that nothing exists but natural phenomena (matter)
I assume by "natural" or "material" phenomena, you (or they) mean observable phenomena, as in 'observable in principle'; you could by some means, perhaps not *yet* technologically possible, empirically tell whether or not that phenomena in fact occurred. That is, there is some observation you could make, some experiment you could do, that perhaps we are presently unable to do due to practical limits, which would tell you whether the sentence describing that phenomenon was true.
Given that that is what is meant by that, it seems patently absurd to conclude that anything non-natural exists (which is the same thing as to say that there are unknowable truths), on the basis that:
(A) Conceivability is possibility (and vice versa). Something is logically possible if and only if it could be conceived of; if you couldn't even conceive of what it would be for something to be the case, then you clearly have no idea what it even is that is in question, and so that non-idea cannot possibly be true.
(B) One can only conceive what one could, hypothetically, perceive. Consider someone asks you to conceive of "a foo upon a fweep". You have some rough notion of something placed on something else, but in order to conceive of these things, you have to ask "what is a foo?" and "what is a fweep?", and the descriptions which follow in response must ultimately cache out in some sort of perceptual terms (it looks like this, it sounds like this, it feels like this, etc). So to conceive of something, you must understand what it woud be to perceive it; thus, you could only conceive what you could (if such a thing existed) perceive. (As an aside, this does not mean that you must undertake the act of consciously imagining something every time you are asked to conceive of it; it is merely enough to note that "yes, that is a sort of perception I could have; now what about it?")
From A and B, it deductively follows that the only things logically possible are things which are perceivable (a.k.a. observable); so if "natural" or "material" phenomena are understood to be just such observable phenomena, as it seems they are, then it deductively follows that only natural/material phenomena are logically possible. From there, the atheist can perhaps derive his other two items of doctrine, but my point here is not to defend atheism; it is to defend philosophy from the accusation that it is mere baseless comparison of different articles of faith.
Now... maybe you can find some flaw in my argument there. Maybe my premises A and B are false somehow, and I've overlooked something. Maybe my understanding of "natural" or "material" phenomena is not correct, and those terms rightly denote something other than what I take them to. Maybe you can't find any flaws but you just don't buy it anyway. The point is, there is good, some (like I) would say irrefutable evidence to support such a position. I certainly consider such a thing quite easily proven; I have just done so. So to accept naturalism is hardly an article of faith; and it seems that something like atheism - or at least, something quite unlike the supernaturalist theism common to most modern major religions - logically follows from such a position. So the atheist (of a certain variety at least) has good grounds by which to claim that his position is not one of faith.
Now, there are some logical arguments for the existence of God as well, which I'm sure you're aware of; the ontol
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