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Thread: The universe continues to amaze

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    Default The universe continues to amaze

    For most of my life, I lived a delusion



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    Just been reading about it....more here....hard to fathom






    Wed Aug 15, 2012 7:42pm EDT

    * Phoenix credited with forming about two stars a day

    * Black holes linked to low star formation rates

    Aug 15 (Reuters) - A massive so-called galaxy cluster, one of the largest structures in the universe, has been discovered about 5.7 billion light years from Earth and credited with setting several important new cosmic records, U.S.-based researchers said on Wednesday.

    The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in a news release that observations of the cluster, which has shown a prodigious rate of star formation, may force astronomers to rethink how such colossal structures and galaxies that inhabit them evolve over time.

    Known officially by an alphabet soup of numbers and letters as SPT-CLJ2344-4243, the cluster has been nicknamed "Phoenix," after the mythological bird that rose from the dead.

    That's partly due to the constellation in which it lies. But Michael McDonald, a Hubble fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the Phoenix was also a great way of thinking about the latest astronomical marvel.

    "While galaxies at the center of most clusters may have been dormant for billions of years, the central galaxy in this cluster seems to have come back to life with a new burst of star formation," said McDonald, the lead author of the paper on Phoenix, appearing in the Aug. 16 issue of Nature.

    Based on observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the U.S. National Science Foundation's South Pole Telescope and eight other observatories, researchers said the center of the Phoenix cluster had been linked to the creation of about "740 solar masses" or stars a year.

    By comparison, the Perseus cluster forms stars at a rate about 20 times slower than Phoenix.

    "This is just an enormous rate," said Marie Machacek, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. She said huge clusters like Phoenix are thought to host thousands of galaxies and there was still a lot to learn about what goes on within them.

    Supermassive black holes in the central galaxy of a cluster have long been associated with low observed star formation rates, as they pump energy into the system and prevent the cooling of gases needed for the creation of stars.

    But researchers said the "massive starburst" seen in Phoenix, as it gave birth to about two stars per day, suggested that its central galaxy's black hole had failed to interfere with an extremely strong cooling flow.

    "Stars are forming in the Phoenix cluster at the highest rate ever observed for the middle of a galaxy cluster," the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in its press release.

    "The object also is the most powerful producer of X-rays of any known cluster and among the most massive. The data also suggest the rate of hot gas cooling in the central regions of the cluster are the largest ever observed," it said.
    Last edited by tony; 16-08-12 at 11:09 AM.

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    The worst thing about some of these articles is that the journalists that write them contaminate them with their own ignorance. I call it "dumbing up" the article.
    A scientist would dumb down an article to make it easier for lesser life forms to understand.
    E=mc^2, There, the complexity of relativity is simplified so even a high school student can understand it.

    Dumbing up is what journalists do.
    Like this; "twenty-five hundred thousand million times more than our sun."
    Is that even a real number ?
    25 x 100 x 1000 x 1000000 = 2,500,000,000,000

    Or as a your garden variety idiot would say it; "2.5 trillion."

    And just to make the article look interesting dvice employed a graphic designer to paint a picture of the central galaxy. Very pretty, though there are several similar designs of galaxies hanging up in on the classroom wall of my local kindergarten. Most of them are also better representations of real galaxies than the piece of fiction in that article.

    Damn it... I'm getting old and grumpy !
    I want some more sensible scientific articles.

    And is it just me, or are the people at TED up to something sinister.
    I get the feeling that somebody like hill$ong is trying to evangelise science.

    Anybody that wears a microphone headset and pitches something like a late night TV info-mercial is instantly suspicious and is on my short list of skinflints.
    Yes I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

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    2.5 trillion is pretty big LOL

    I will say no more :P
    When you do things right, people won't be sure that you have done anything at all

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    How many bazzillion is that?

    I'm only good to 10 then I run out of fingers.

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    Hehehe.... I suspect a Bazillion was named after the bloke who discovered it first. Barry.
    But then a bloke called Garry came along for another order of magnitude.
    Yes I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

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    It seems an anniversary of a 1970's Voyager launching was yesterday and it was the one the brilliant scientist scifi writer Carl Sagen insisted on a copper LP record be attached for ET to play and listen to the sounds of the Earth.
    I don't think they included a player tho so hopefully 'THEY' would be at a level of intelligence to have a player to use it but give it another 50 years or so and no one here will have any idea what to do with it either.
    I remember that SETI program where signals were beamed to outer space to see if anyone would 'pick up the phone' until the question was asked, what if whatever answers, fancies us for Lunch?????
    I was outside a few minutes ago looking at a 'New Moon' in a brilliantly clear night sky with the Sun just below the horizon and soon the sky will be an impressive array of star light because there is very little light interference.
    The 'Milky Way' has 'Turned' because of the time of year and the Southern Cross goes low on the Southern Horizon as its done for Millenia and will continue to do so long after Planet Earth has managed to expell that pestilential human species it foolishly allowed to spawn uncontrollably across the surface.
    Will we ever get to Mars? maybe but not today and as for anywhere else in this universe, not ever in this human time frame we exist in which make much of the knowledge of Astronomy not much more than fascinating reading.
    I stand unequivicably behind everything I say , I just dont ever remember saying it !!

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    The voyager and pioneer recordings are analog.
    Chances are that if you can find them.... then it's a pretty good chance that you're a space faring species because not much is going to survive a smack into a planet or star.

    The Klingons instead of shooting the bugger find the metal disc and wonder what to do with it
    Yes I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

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