Despite some recent funding issues, NASA still supports space science, not only space exploration/engineering. I've currently got close to $1 million in grants, the largets being $620k over five years to study a particularly interest class of quasars. We've been getting Hubble Space Telescope images that are really spectacularly great.
Al Franken regularly points out Rush Limbaugh lies/errors on his show, and issues corrections when he makes mistakes himself. Limbaugh does make regular, clear, signficant errors of fact on a regular basis and rarely if ever corrects himself. Limbaugh is particularly bad when it comes to environmental science, going back years and years. Have whatever ideology you want, but you're fighting a losing battle if your information comes from Limbaugh.
Re:Watch a little more closely ...
on
Deep in the Core
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· Score: 1
I say "some" of Arp's systems because I don't know if every single stupid thing he ever pointed at and said "look at this" has been discredited. The examples he himself thought were the best clear ones have all fallen to closer scrutiny. If you don't get the point, and you don't seem to, let me use this analogy. Say I'm trying to show bigfoot exists, and every single case of hair/DNA/blood I put forward turns out to be from bears, moose, or llamas. Sure, bigfoot could still be out there, but should everyone pay attention and take it as seriously?
There isn't a whole lot of compelling evidence that there's any problem to me, and I've studied it quite a bit, attended talks by the Burbidges, and read some of Arp's journal papers. You might try to be open minded to accept that the resistance to new ideas isn't coming from the community, it's coming from a handful of people hanging on to their own old ideas from 30-40 years ago. THEY are the ones not being open-minded.
And you've missed the point about my own work. My stars are all at the same high-redshift as the quasar. That's not what Burbidge, Arp, etc., would expect at all. I'm getting some new data at Keck next week and if I see a mysterious redshift gradient running from 0.3 to 0, I'll be the first to convert.
It is good to have some contrary voices in science, sure, and when they can't convince people after decades that they're on to something, it's good for science that they die off. Ernst Mach was great in his time, but never could accept atoms or relativity. Einstein had issues with quantum mechanics. Scientists have issues with new ideas, so it's good that there's a generational turnover and that issues that are settled are put to bed so that new frontiers can be explored.
Re:Watch a little more closely ...
on
Deep in the Core
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· Score: 2, Informative
Most of the things you bring up have been discredited at some level. Some of Halton Arp's "associated" systems in particular have been quite strongly discredited. It's not a matter of wanting one thing or another, it's just that the evidence you cite isn't very compelling to most of us. And when it's a small handfull of folks crying about something, they die off and we don't worry about it anymore. If they really have something, they can make their case in a compelling way and people will listen. Arp, in particular, did some very good work in the distant past, but not so recently.
Some people can't give up their ideas, and some people like to be contrary. That's just not good enough.
If you take this stuff too seriously, you're being sucked in by a bunch of crap. My primary area of research these days is in quasar-host galaxy relationships, and I've got hundreds of examples of quasars with stars at exactly the same redshift. A lot of the things you cite just look stupid to most of us these days.
Re:Watch a little more closely ...
on
Deep in the Core
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· Score: 1
No, stellar age estimates are in line with universe age measurements these days. I don't believe we have any cases like the one you suggest. There was recently a paper discussed here on slashot (Mobasher et al. 2005, xxx.lanl.gov) about a very massive young galaxy at z=6.5. The best fit model for its energy distribution was consistent with the age of the universe at z=6.5, although the mass was large and a may pose a puzzle for current theories of galaxy formation.
The 13.7 Gyr age of the universe is properly regarded as a measurement.
Examples of the real images are readily available (from near-infrared speckle imaging). It would be a herky, jerky, incomplete mess to the general public, however, to make a video of the actual data, hence the rendered movie. You can see, in the zoom in, the data points of actual observations used to determine the orbit of the key star.
Scientists aren't trying to hide a thing. They're just trying to present their results in the clearest, most comprehensible way. Give them some credit for that. Scientists hide very little, as a general rule. We usually have to beg people to listen. Slashdot is a nice exception.
Hubble doesn't work at such a short wavelength. It's more like 110 nm and up. The wavelength you're talking about is in the extreme UV, and you need special optics to be reflective there.
This happened to Einstein when he took a job in Prague. He had to change "none" to "Jewish." Despite all the quotes mentioning "God," Einstein after he was 12 was as areligous as the biggest athiest out there. He just equated the natural world and its laws with "God" which seems a bit more fair than what organized religion does.
"None," and "none of the above" should always be options.
If it deserves a mention, it is to ridicule it as non-science. The "blind watchmaker" is NOT anything close to intelligent design. The reason that scientists like myself slam this so hard is because it's patently ridiculous as science. So, someone believes something...does that make it science? A lot of people believe people are good natured, so should we teach it as science? Of course not. You may think you're being fair, but the only responsible way to teach it is as junk, and that would cause even more problems than just ignoring it. Discuss it a sociology or philosophy class, if you must, but not science class. If you do, expect to be teaching kids that the holocaust might not have happened in history class.
The above post, and others, proves the point that we're "smarter" using computers. But ascribing a quote to someone isn't hard...
What's going to be harder in the future, and can be hard right now, is knowing how to verify and sift through the information you find on the internet. A "smart" person will be the one who can do this, and a "dumb" one is the one who gets their information from a bogus website full of crap.
That would have been a better and more interesting direction for the article to go.
The article is pretty obvious, I think anyway, and makes a lot of obvious
statements and conclusions. Am I smarter if I can calculate a cube root in
a few minutes with paper or a pencil than if I have to use a calculator? No,
probably not, just a different skill than others. However, the point that is
made, but not made strongly enough, is that our technology is now part of us.
A computer isn't smart -- it's a machine that executes commands. A human is
smart, at some level. A human with a computer full of software tied to a
database is very smart, capable of answering many questions accurately and
rapidly.
In the old days, astronomers used to laboriously reduce data and publish a
dissertation on one or a few spectra, learning a little bit about quasars,
for instance. Today, an astronomer of similar or even lesser intellect can
get the help of a computer and write a dissertation on the analysis of
thousands of spectra, and in principle learn a lot more, more quickly. That's not just intelligence, it's efficiency and power.
That's probably the case for the short duration bursts (there was one like this identified in April -- there's probably a NASA press release you cna find about it). The long-duration bursts like this one at z=6.3 have been associated with a type of supernova.
You're being a science bigot here at best, very insulting at worst, and should stick to fields you know. Origins science is very important and very difficult, but not impossible -- there is a lot of modeling and testing that can and is done. It really just sounds like you're jealous of other sciences getting more airplay than your own. Cure cancer, and we'll talk.
I talked with Cassandra this morning, and she indeed got a GRB last week, but not this one. The one they imaged wasn't at z=6.3, so there's no big news story about it. Some different observers at WIRO did try to image this GRB, and got nothing, which isn't surprising since hydrogen absorption wipes out all the optical light for an object at this redshift, and they were using an optical imager.
(Cassandra was amused/bemused by the trolling AC when I showed her the thread.)
No, because there's a difference between the gamma rays and the visible light. The optical afterglows last much longer, although they too fade relatively quickly. Robotic systems can get on some GRBs in ten seconds. But an optically bright GRB will be easy to spot from a professional telescope for hours and perhaps days. Most aren't so bright, however. Ideally someone at one of a number of telescopes with GRB programs will spot the afterglow in the first minutes or hours, put out a circular, and permit someone at a big telescope like Keck or Subaru (as in the press release) to get a spectrum to measure the redshift. Such spectra are normally obtained hours or even days after the GRB.
It's ironic that GRBs were first discovered by the military using systems designed to detect nuclear explosions. They turned the system on and got a steady stream of hits, except they weren't coming from Earth. Kind of interesting.
We've had NASA support for GRB followup at Wyoming's observatory, WIRO. We have someone on call every night who gets an alert seconds after SWIFT localizes a GRB. They in turn call the WIRO observers on that night who finish their current exposure and then point at the GRB field. When everything is working, and the right instruments are on (e.g. imagers), and the weather is clear, we can start taking data within five minutes of the GRB. It's kind of cool, especially given that the system is not robotic.
The space telescopes, in general, are much more difficult to reprogram quickly aside from the systems like SWIFT designed to detect these GRBs.
You're just being an obnoxious asshole. My information is public. Yeah, so what. I'm a published writer, and don't hide my identity. So please, buy my book. Please order it from amazon.com and leave a nice review. Then you can drop by my house and I'll sign it for you. Seriously.
I live in Wyoming, and while anything can happen anywhere, I can leave doors unlocked every day and nothing will get stolen. I'm also heavily armed and everyone knows in this part of the country you don't go fucking with people's homes.
The only one who has posted personal information here is you, the anonymous coward. That's obnoxious. You can find out who was observing at nearly any professional observatory on any given night going back years. It's public.
Now, this is all just obnoxious and way off topic, and should be dropped. Please don't be as obnoxious as you are anonymous.
We already have a million solar mass black hole at the center of the Milky Way and billions of stars have been fine for billions of years. We orbit at a very safe distance, as do most stars. Only stars in the core, or in highly elliptical orbits taking them into the core, are in any danger of disruption. The central black holes of galaxies are only about 1/1000 as massive as the galaxies they live within, and it is the total galaxy gravitational potential that primarily determines the motions of stars making it up.
Well, that's pretty obnoxious. Her picture and number are publically available on the internet, yes. So are mine. She's had her website up all of two days. Frankly, she'd probably be flattered you called her "hot" but putting her phone number here is crossing the line, don't you think? If you're trying to make the point that there are assholes in the world who abuse the internet, you have, and please pay your membership fee on the way out. Look, I'm proud of Cassandra and going to give her due credit for her professional activities. That's what advisors do. I can't protect her, or myself, from stalkers unless they show themselves.
Actually, there seem to be quite a high abundance of elements seen in quasars at these high redshifts. It's probably from very rapid evolution of many generations of stars very quickly in the cores of the first massive galaxies. The lifespan of a massive type O star is only a million years, and a billion years is plenty of time. There are some other subtle issues, but the high-redshift quasars show emission lines indicative of plenty of metals.
Having said all that, the environments in which the elemental abundances grow so quickly would also probably be inimicable to all life for quite some time, so I agree with the main point.
No. The effects of a black hole's gravity, even a supermassive one, are rather limited. We'd need to be within a few light years to have a problem with our sun being tidally disrupted. The radiation would destroy all life on Earth long before we got close enough to have problems associated with the supermassive black hole. We'd likely be fine with a weak quasar in the Milky Way as the gas and dust in the plane would block the vast majority of its radiative output in our direction.
What's your problem? Most observatories post public schedules with the times observers will be there, what instruments they're using, etc. When the papers are published, the dates and locations of the observations are recorded, and often the observers are noted (e.g., with footnotes about who was the visiting astronomer at Kitt Peak). There was already a circular that went out last week about these observations with her name on it, specifying exactly when and where she and another observer obtained the data. She was THRILLED to have her name on this.
I don't think you have a good idea about how this stuff works. If you're some sort of weird astronomer stalker local to Wyoming, let us know. We've never had a problem at our observatory other than the occasional minor accident or mountain lion, and no one is ever up there alone. The people here are few and far between, usually friendly, and usually armed.
Where are you from, because you're being weirdly paranoid?
Slashdot Mirror
I read his book on this topic. I was intrigued. I stole a few ideas for my science fiction novels, too.
Despite some recent funding issues, NASA still supports space science, not only space exploration/engineering. I've currently got close to $1 million in grants, the largets being $620k over five years to study a particularly interest class of quasars. We've been getting Hubble Space Telescope images that are really spectacularly great.
Al Franken regularly points out Rush Limbaugh lies/errors on his show, and issues corrections when he makes mistakes himself. Limbaugh does make regular, clear, signficant errors of fact on a regular basis and rarely if ever corrects himself. Limbaugh is particularly bad when it comes to environmental science, going back years and years. Have whatever ideology you want, but you're fighting a losing battle if your information comes from Limbaugh.
I say "some" of Arp's systems because I don't know if every single stupid thing he ever pointed at and said "look at this" has been discredited. The examples he himself thought were the best clear ones have all fallen to closer scrutiny. If you don't get the point, and you don't seem to, let me use this analogy. Say I'm trying to show bigfoot exists, and every single case of hair/DNA/blood I put forward turns out to be from bears, moose, or llamas. Sure, bigfoot could still be out there, but should everyone pay attention and take it as seriously?
There isn't a whole lot of compelling evidence that there's any problem to me, and I've studied it quite a bit, attended talks by the Burbidges, and read some of Arp's journal papers. You might try to be open minded to accept that the resistance to new ideas isn't coming from the community, it's coming from a handful of people hanging on to their own old ideas from 30-40 years ago. THEY are the ones not being open-minded.
And you've missed the point about my own work. My stars are all at the same high-redshift as the quasar. That's not what Burbidge, Arp, etc., would expect at all. I'm getting some new data at Keck next week and if I see a mysterious redshift gradient running from 0.3 to 0, I'll be the first to convert.
It is good to have some contrary voices in science, sure, and when they can't convince people after decades that they're on to something, it's good for science that they die off. Ernst Mach was great in his time, but never could accept atoms or relativity. Einstein had issues with quantum mechanics. Scientists have issues with new ideas, so it's good that there's a generational turnover and that issues that are settled are put to bed so that new frontiers can be explored.
Most of the things you bring up have been discredited at some level. Some of Halton Arp's "associated" systems in particular have been quite strongly discredited. It's not a matter of wanting one thing or another, it's just that the evidence you cite isn't very compelling to most of us. And when it's a small handfull of folks crying about something, they die off and we don't worry about it anymore. If they really have something, they can make their case in a compelling way and people will listen. Arp, in particular, did some very good work in the distant past, but not so recently.
Some people can't give up their ideas, and some people like to be contrary. That's just not good enough.
If you take this stuff too seriously, you're being sucked in by a bunch of crap. My primary area of research these days is in quasar-host galaxy relationships, and I've got hundreds of examples of quasars with stars at exactly the same redshift. A lot of the things you cite just look stupid to most of us these days.
Still a spiral, but very likely a barred spiral.
No, stellar age estimates are in line with universe age measurements these days. I don't believe we have any cases like the one you suggest. There was recently a paper discussed here on slashot (Mobasher et al. 2005, xxx.lanl.gov) about a very massive young galaxy at z=6.5. The best fit model for its energy distribution was consistent with the age of the universe at z=6.5, although the mass was large and a may pose a puzzle for current theories of galaxy formation.
The 13.7 Gyr age of the universe is properly regarded as a measurement.
Examples of the real images are readily available (from near-infrared speckle imaging). It would be a herky, jerky, incomplete mess to the general public, however, to make a video of the actual data, hence the rendered movie. You can see, in the zoom in, the data points of actual observations used to determine the orbit of the key star. Scientists aren't trying to hide a thing. They're just trying to present their results in the clearest, most comprehensible way. Give them some credit for that. Scientists hide very little, as a general rule. We usually have to beg people to listen. Slashdot is a nice exception.
Hubble doesn't work at such a short wavelength. It's more like 110 nm and up. The wavelength you're talking about is in the extreme UV, and you need special optics to be reflective there.
This happened to Einstein when he took a job in Prague. He had to change "none" to "Jewish." Despite all the quotes mentioning "God," Einstein after he was 12 was as areligous as the biggest athiest out there. He just equated the natural world and its laws with "God" which seems a bit more fair than what organized religion does. "None," and "none of the above" should always be options.
If it deserves a mention, it is to ridicule it as non-science. The "blind watchmaker" is NOT anything close to intelligent design. The reason that scientists like myself slam this so hard is because it's patently ridiculous as science. So, someone believes something...does that make it science? A lot of people believe people are good natured, so should we teach it as science? Of course not. You may think you're being fair, but the only responsible way to teach it is as junk, and that would cause even more problems than just ignoring it. Discuss it a sociology or philosophy class, if you must, but not science class. If you do, expect to be teaching kids that the holocaust might not have happened in history class.
The above post, and others, proves the point that we're "smarter" using computers. But ascribing a quote to someone isn't hard...
What's going to be harder in the future, and can be hard right now, is knowing how to verify and sift through the information you find on the internet. A "smart" person will be the one who can do this, and a "dumb" one is the one who gets their information from a bogus website full of crap.
That would have been a better and more interesting direction for the article to go.
The article is pretty obvious, I think anyway, and makes a lot of obvious statements and conclusions. Am I smarter if I can calculate a cube root in a few minutes with paper or a pencil than if I have to use a calculator? No, probably not, just a different skill than others. However, the point that is made, but not made strongly enough, is that our technology is now part of us. A computer isn't smart -- it's a machine that executes commands. A human is smart, at some level. A human with a computer full of software tied to a database is very smart, capable of answering many questions accurately and rapidly.
In the old days, astronomers used to laboriously reduce data and publish a dissertation on one or a few spectra, learning a little bit about quasars, for instance. Today, an astronomer of similar or even lesser intellect can get the help of a computer and write a dissertation on the analysis of thousands of spectra, and in principle learn a lot more, more quickly. That's not just intelligence, it's efficiency and power.
That's probably the case for the short duration bursts (there was one like this identified in April -- there's probably a NASA press release you cna find about it). The long-duration bursts like this one at z=6.3 have been associated with a type of supernova.
You're being a science bigot here at best, very insulting at worst, and should stick to fields you know. Origins science is very important and very difficult, but not impossible -- there is a lot of modeling and testing that can and is done. It really just sounds like you're jealous of other sciences getting more airplay than your own. Cure cancer, and we'll talk.
I talked with Cassandra this morning, and she indeed got a GRB last week, but not this one. The one they imaged wasn't at z=6.3, so there's no big news story about it. Some different observers at WIRO did try to image this GRB, and got nothing, which isn't surprising since hydrogen absorption wipes out all the optical light for an object at this redshift, and they were using an optical imager.
(Cassandra was amused/bemused by the trolling AC when I showed her the thread.)
No, because there's a difference between the gamma rays and the visible light. The optical afterglows last much longer, although they too fade relatively quickly. Robotic systems can get on some GRBs in ten seconds. But an optically bright GRB will be easy to spot from a professional telescope for hours and perhaps days. Most aren't so bright, however. Ideally someone at one of a number of telescopes with GRB programs will spot the afterglow in the first minutes or hours, put out a circular, and permit someone at a big telescope like Keck or Subaru (as in the press release) to get a spectrum to measure the redshift. Such spectra are normally obtained hours or even days after the GRB.
It's ironic that GRBs were first discovered by the military using systems designed to detect nuclear explosions. They turned the system on and got a steady stream of hits, except they weren't coming from Earth. Kind of interesting.
We've had NASA support for GRB followup at Wyoming's observatory, WIRO. We have someone on call every night who gets an alert seconds after SWIFT localizes a GRB. They in turn call the WIRO observers on that night who finish their current exposure and then point at the GRB field. When everything is working, and the right instruments are on (e.g. imagers), and the weather is clear, we can start taking data within five minutes of the GRB. It's kind of cool, especially given that the system is not robotic.
The space telescopes, in general, are much more difficult to reprogram quickly aside from the systems like SWIFT designed to detect these GRBs.
You're just being an obnoxious asshole. My information is public. Yeah, so what. I'm a published writer, and don't hide my identity. So please, buy my book. Please order it from amazon.com and leave a nice review. Then you can drop by my house and I'll sign it for you. Seriously.
I live in Wyoming, and while anything can happen anywhere, I can leave doors unlocked every day and nothing will get stolen. I'm also heavily armed and everyone knows in this part of the country you don't go fucking with people's homes.
The only one who has posted personal information here is you, the anonymous coward. That's obnoxious. You can find out who was observing at nearly any professional observatory on any given night going back years. It's public.
Now, this is all just obnoxious and way off topic, and should be dropped. Please don't be as obnoxious as you are anonymous.
We already have a million solar mass black hole at the center of the Milky Way and billions of stars have been fine for billions of years. We orbit at a very safe distance, as do most stars. Only stars in the core, or in highly elliptical orbits taking them into the core, are in any danger of disruption. The central black holes of galaxies are only about 1/1000 as massive as the galaxies they live within, and it is the total galaxy gravitational potential that primarily determines the motions of stars making it up.
Well, that's pretty obnoxious. Her picture and number are publically available on the internet, yes. So are mine. She's had her website up all of two days. Frankly, she'd probably be flattered you called her "hot" but putting her phone number here is crossing the line, don't you think? If you're trying to make the point that there are assholes in the world who abuse the internet, you have, and please pay your membership fee on the way out. Look, I'm proud of Cassandra and going to give her due credit for her professional activities. That's what advisors do. I can't protect her, or myself, from stalkers unless they show themselves.
Actually, there seem to be quite a high abundance of elements seen in quasars at these high redshifts. It's probably from very rapid evolution of many generations of stars very quickly in the cores of the first massive galaxies. The lifespan of a massive type O star is only a million years, and a billion years is plenty of time. There are some other subtle issues, but the high-redshift quasars show emission lines indicative of plenty of metals.
Having said all that, the environments in which the elemental abundances grow so quickly would also probably be inimicable to all life for quite some time, so I agree with the main point.
No. The effects of a black hole's gravity, even a supermassive one, are rather limited. We'd need to be within a few light years to have a problem with our sun being tidally disrupted. The radiation would destroy all life on Earth long before we got close enough to have problems associated with the supermassive black hole. We'd likely be fine with a weak quasar in the Milky Way as the gas and dust in the plane would block the vast majority of its radiative output in our direction.
What's your problem? Most observatories post public schedules with the times observers will be there, what instruments they're using, etc. When the papers are published, the dates and locations of the observations are recorded, and often the observers are noted (e.g., with footnotes about who was the visiting astronomer at Kitt Peak). There was already a circular that went out last week about these observations with her name on it, specifying exactly when and where she and another observer obtained the data. She was THRILLED to have her name on this.
I don't think you have a good idea about how this stuff works. If you're some sort of weird astronomer stalker local to Wyoming, let us know. We've never had a problem at our observatory other than the occasional minor accident or mountain lion, and no one is ever up there alone. The people here are few and far between, usually friendly, and usually armed.
Where are you from, because you're being weirdly paranoid?