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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.
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.
Of course they need to re-evaluate how our sun was formed. It' 5000 years old!
Curiously yours, crip.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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)