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Space Telescope Reveals Weird Star Cluster Conundrum
astroengine (1577233) writes "We thought we had star formation mechanisms pinned down, but according to new observations of two star clusters, it seems our understanding of how stars are born is less than stellar. When zooming in on the young star clusters of NGC 2024 (in the center of the Flame Nebula) and the Orion Nebula Cluster, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory teamed up with infrared telescopes to take a census of star ages. Conventional thinking suggests that stars closest to the center of a given star cluster should be the oldest and the youngest stars can be found around the edges. However, to their surprise, astronomers have discovered that the opposite is true: 'Our findings are counterintuitive,' said Konstantin Getman of Penn State University, lead scientist of this new study. 'It means we need to think harder and come up with more ideas of how stars like our sun are formed.'"
A couple of billion years ago, stars *did* form from the gravitational collapse of vast clouds of dust and gas. But around that time, the Tenctonese in Andromeda went through their 3D printing revolution and ever since then, most stars are 3D printed. It's the future, and only Luddites would think otherwise.
The universe is spooky and weird! We don't want to know that shit!! Ban telescopes immediately!!!
This reminds me of one of favorite Isaac Asimov quotes:
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka" but "That's funny..."
I hope this leads them to go get more data in addition to thinking harder and coming up with ideas.
it seems our understanding of how stars are born is less than stellar.
A shining example of +1 Punny.
in the eyes of doubters of science, this is taken literally and used to discredit science, time and time again.
Why write that shit? To the untrained eye it says "this just in: science WRONG again!".
Why the fuck should we care about the eyes of doubters of science?! Under no circumstance should we change our behavior to please those who refuse to think.
If someone believes science is wrong it's his problem, not ours.
Suppressing information to not disturb the flimsy grasp of reality makes no sense. Let our knowledge be seen, the successes and the mistakes, and let those who cover their eyes live in their puerile fantasies.
Cue the electric universe people to come tell us their magnetic-dynamo repulsion theory.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Wait, what is science supposed to know? And why should science be against admitting that half the stuff they 'know' they don't really 'know'? Isn't that the whole point, to show that science is constantly approaching a workable approximation of reality, which it couldn't do if it actually 'knew' anything?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
To the untrained eye it says "this just in: science WRONG again!".
And isn't it awesome? More stuff to learn, new things to unearth! One of the coolest science shows I've seen recently is Neil deGrasse Tyson's "the inexplicable universe" lectures - all about things we do not understand yet.
It doesn't matter all that much that quite a few people think that science being wrong is a bad thing, as long as enough actual scientists know that science being wrong is how it works. Without science finding wrong bits or inexplicable bits how would we know where to keep digging and looking for better explanations?
And in the mean time, those of us who know how it works can keep enlightening those that don't with stories of the coolness of our universe and science. Every kid I know is fascinated by many cool things they can find out about in science. Dinosaurs, flight, space travel, the variety of life forms, menthos bottle rockets, slow motion explosions and car crash physics, growing things in the garden, there is SO MUCH out there that doesn't even take an effort to get them interested in. Take a 6-year old around the Science Museum in London, and you'll find their curiosity will inspire you to learn more about everything. They'll come up with questions you can't answer, and you'll have to look things up together and figure it out, and it's just totally awesome.
Mankind is inherently curious. Don't let a minority of (admittedly very vocal) conservative (lifestyle, not politics) old fogeys drain you of your curiosity and excitement about being wrong.
Of course they need to re-evaluate how our sun was formed. It' 5000 years old!
Curiously yours, crip.
Keep beating that dead horse!
Required reading for internet skeptics
Physicists (whether it be on the cosmos or climate change) are starting to sound like Richard Nixon spin doctors. Which is it?
The reporters who present the physicists findings are usually the ones putting a spin on it.
Can we have one science article that doesn't essentially say "everything we ever knew is wrong"... stop sensationalizing this crap. It's more than just annoying, it's anti-intellectualist
This just proofs that science is not a religion, it is not expected to have all the answers.
If you think it should have then you are pretty clueless about it.
If I have a spinning thing, and objects form near the center then get spun out I would observe both affects discussed here.
A) objects form near the center
B) older objects are toward the outside (younger objects near the center)
Since we've been observing expansion of the galaxy it would be logical to assume "these things expand in general". I don't see a problem.
So in conclusion, the assumption that older objects would be in the center was the flawed logic.
I refuse to sign
I have always wondered if we would find out we are wrong about star mechanics. If this is enough of a problem that the process of star birth ends up being heavily revised, I am left wondering if we will also have to revise our theories on the properties of a main sequence star, and star death. It is said that the current estimate for the sun's ability to sustain life on Earth is around a billion years and that it will puff up and finally go nova in about five-billion years. It would be disappointing to find out that the life of our sun is overestimated by five-billion years.
Anyway, I am really not qualified to even have that thought, but at least it would probably make for a good science-fiction story.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Why the fuck should we care about the eyes of doubters of science?! Under no circumstance should we change our behavior to please those who refuse to think.
Unfortunately,as an actual science working on a federal grant, you have to care about doubters because they can affect public policy and funding decisions even for non-controversial work. Even if most of the politicians aren't actually in that category, they'll feign interest in such people to help their own agenda. And in the bigger picture, part of a scientists job should be trying to make their work accessible to as many people as possible.
It also doesn't help that a large amount of the general population has a very twisted sense of what actual science work and progress is like due to hyperbole in news covering science...
Except that simulation mentioned yesterday didn't have the resolution to see processes discussed here, wasn't claiming to be perfect, and wasn't published in Science.
I think the point they were making was not to stop doing science, or publishing. Instead its the problem with the reporting of science. Everything has to have drama and conflict.
The news makes it seem like every new paper is a paradigm changing event. Where as from the point of view of people who are doing this work its another piece of information to help improve our understanding.
The biggest problems is when popular news makes people think science is just stories, it seems to change every other week from one extreme to the other, so with overwhelming scientific facts like evolution and climate change people think its just some "theory" that is just as likely to be proven wrong tomorrow.
Its a difficult balance to find the best match between the public's hunger for science news and the sensational nature of reporting.
Then we physicist put our own spin on it :).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
And, to a scientist's eye (or anyone who knows how science works), saying "the established science is wrong" is very exciting. Unlike the bible which never changes* despite new evidence, science adapts. As old theories are proven to be incomplete or wrong, they are either fixed or ditched entirely to make way for new theories. Science is never considered "100% right", but it is always "the best approximation we have at the time given the available evidence."
Unfortunately, as I've seen first hand, some religious types consider changing to adapt to new evidence as scary and a weakness and staying the same no matter what to be safe and a strength. Thus, the unchanging bible* is good and changing science is bad/scary.
* While these religious folks like to think of the bible as unchanging and the text is (in most cases over short-term history) unchanging, the interpretations of it can change wildly. Case in point: Slavery is condemned by most religious folks now but, pre-Civil War, many religious people rationalized slavery saying that the bible clearly showed how some people were supposed to be slaves to other people. In short, the "bible is unchanging" argument is garbage because the bible can say pretty much anything you want it to say.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The day that science has all the answers all the time will be a very sad day indeed. Half of the fun of science is finding new things and saying "That shouldn't be doing that..." (Of course, while science doesn't have *all* the answers, it is much closer to the answers than anything else we have.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Does anyone understand why this conventional wisdom took hold?
These are open clusters. Over time, stars will leave the region of their birth. That would suggest to me that the oldest stars would be on the edges, and the newest, in the center, which was exactly what was observed. So why, exactly, was the prior belief the opposite?
Believing that no gods exist does not necessitate the belief that science (or anything else for that matter) can come up with "all of the answers".
Happy people make bad consumers.
I'm not going to push this too much as it's an astro heresy ... but I found it an interesting read:
http://www.haltonarp.com/articles
According to /. moderation, it's "insightful". Very different from "funny" - it means Hazem is gaining karma for posting something positive and meaningful.
Science figures it out. Engineers figure out how to use it without burning our fingers.
And, to a scientist's eye (or anyone who knows how science works), saying "the established science is wrong" is very exciting. Unlike the bible which never changes* despite new evidence, science adapts. As old theories are proven to be incomplete or wrong, they are either fixed or ditched entirely to make way for new theories. Science is never considered "100% right", but it is always "the best approximation we have at the time given the available evidence."
Unfortunately, as I've seen first hand, some religious types consider changing to adapt to new evidence as scary and a weakness and staying the same no matter what to be safe and a strength.
If anyone thought "science knew everything" or anything like that, then they need to take a long, hard look at science and realize that it does not.
Thus, the unchanging bible* is good and changing science is bad/scary.
* While these religious folks like to think of the bible as unchanging and the text is (in most cases over short-term history) unchanging, the interpretations of it can change wildly. Case in point: Slavery is condemned by most religious folks now but, pre-Civil War, many religious people rationalized slavery saying that the bible clearly showed how some people were supposed to be slaves to other people. In short, the "bible is unchanging" argument is garbage because the bible can say pretty much anything you want it to say.
And now to digress...
1) Your point on slavery has nothing to do with the "bible changing" or even its interpretation. The bible still says the same thing it always has regarding slavery, and the interpretation is the same. The difference is the popular opinion that slavery in any form is bad; the American Civil War occurred as the world-wide opinion on slavery was changing.
2) It's been shown that the Greek and Hebrew texts have been shown to be unchanged for quite a long time. The greek texts have more contraversy around them as they didn't have the same practices; but the Hebrew texts for the Old Testament have been shown to have not changed for well over 2000 years. They have yet find a canonical Hebrew text (one that is not known to be writing error or a commentary) that has a change. Per the Greek texts - they have been shown to mostly be unchanged and the contraversy is around areas where people suspect that a copier put in some commentary and another copier couldn't tell whether it was or not, or what someone at sometime may have considered a grammatical correction, etc - even in those cases, there's very little of it and its nearly all of it doesn't change the meaning, or translation/interpretations (e.g grammatical changes are usually additions of articles that could have been implied).
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
1) I know that the "bible changing" on slavery was interpretation only. Unfortunately, too many religious folks confuse "what the bible says" with "what some person interprets it to say." The former (exact wording) doesn't change except in exceptional circumstances (translations, mostly). The latter changes all the time. In fact, you could go to five different religious scholars and get five different answers as to what a section of text means. But those same religious folks who tout the bible as being so good because (in part) it is unchanging are usually the same ones who will tout their interpretation of the bible's text as being the "unchanging truth."
2) When I said "in most cases over short-term history", I was thinking specifically about translations of the text. I can go into my local synagogue and pick up five printed versions of the Torah. The Hebrew will be the same in each but the English will vary in spots. Then you get things like the King James Bible where people look at the "Old Testament" and don't read/study the original Hebrew but study a translation made hundreds of years ago.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Who thought science had all the answers? I don't know anybody who thinks that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Integral or non-integral spin?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Reporters with integrity are few and far between.
If anyone thought "science knew everything" or anything like that, then they need to take a long, hard look at science and realize that it does not.
I don't think I've met in person anyone over the age of 12 that thought science knew everything. But I've met quite a few people who thought scientists and/or pro-science types believed science knew everything.
Outside of /. and the media, I'd say that's generally true.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The latter changes all the time. In fact, you could go to five different religious scholars and get five different answers as to what a section of text means.
If you only get 5 different translations you may be doing good. More likely than not, each will have their own translation but will also provide one or more alternate translations. This is the case whenever any kind of translation is involved namely because translating language is not a 1:1 translation - more likely than not the words in one language will have nuances that are not existent in the other language, or will have a one to many translation.
But those same religious folks who tout the bible as being so good because (in part) it is unchanging are usually the same ones who will tout their interpretation of the bible's text as being the "unchanging truth."
Mostly because the majority of people reading the Bible know absolutely nothing about translating and the original texts. They'll be lucky if the pastor/reverend/preacher/minister they are listening to even references the original language of the text in the sermons.
And all too often those same pastors/reverends/preachers/ministers rely on whatever they were taught in seminary was the "one true translation" and just stick with it and not really dig into the original language much if at all, again relying on commentaries and others to do the majority of the work for them. Now contrast this with their equivalents 200-400 years ago and those were people that generally read and understood the original texts.
While the propogation of the Bible in numerous languages has certainly brought it to many more people to read and understand, it has also lead to many preaching from it professionally (e.g. ministers, preachers, etc) not understanding the original text.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
But I think he's living at his mother Jan Kowalski's basement at:
At least, that's where he wants users of his hostfile manager to send him money.
But I think he's living at his mother Jan Kowalski's basement at:
At least, that's where he wants users of his hostfile manager to send him money.