Over the past month, I’ve been doing volunteering for two NASA projects online. I spend two hours every other day, ten hours a week, viewing photos of space objects and classifying them. This volunteering gig is open to the public and you need not a science degree to participate! The benefits are: helping scientists with their research data and you gain awesome science experience! ^o^/
I learned about such programs from a YouTube channel that I follow daily called “Sci-show” in this video: The Awesome Power of Citizen Science. Links to the volunteering programs are in the video’s description! Immediately after the video, I decided to check it out, as I sometimes have a few hours to spare way early before dawn. I could spend that time writing longer blog posts, but I opted to do something really cool instead.
The two projects that I participate in is finding and classifying comets in space and identifying planet-forming disks. It was pretty easy to follow the tutorials on what I am to search for and it’s easy to check off what I’ve found within an image and then send in a report. There are forums, which are manned by scientists of NASA, who will answer any questions and give tips to volunteers. And other volunteers can discuss or socialize about their findings.
I very much wish to work for NASA or a local science lab in Minnesota someday, so this kind of volunteering work appeals to me and I enjoy every moment of it. I’ve learned so much and feel confident that I can successfully identify a comet from a star or a planet-forming disk from space debris.
I’m also interested in biology, so I do plan to join a cam-capture wildlife project as well, when it is approved for the site. Within the peer review sample (as all new funded projects must be approved by the community first), I enjoyed spotting animals that I’ve never seen before in the US and reading the data on each identifying clue of that animal.
Science is cool! ^o^/
Today’s song is: David Bowie – Space Oddity. Thanks for reading, as always!


NASA Asks World 'What Should We Do With Astronaut Poop?'
By Shelby RogersNovember 26, 2016Crap happens, even in space. However, NASA has no idea what to do with poop once it happens.NASA is offering a $30,000 to whoever can develop an idea for the poop problem. In a video posted to Vimeo, Astronaut Rick Mastracchio implores the public to help. Innovation challenge and prize platform HeroX partnered with NASA to promote the problem-solving competition.Read More


Near future no in the medium to far range future (Say 500 years)sure. We could setup manufacturing facilities on Mars and allow them to spew Carbon dioxide as well as Ozone and Oxygen into the atmosphere. Once there Oxygen would go through the Ozone-oxygen cycle eventually turning into Ozone while carbon would just help thicken the atmosphere increasing Atmospheric pressure on the surface. The increase in Carbon dioxide could over time allow for some species of plants to survive on the surface of Mars. This in turn would jumpstart the Carbon-Oxygen cycle which will reinforce the Ozone-Oxygen cycle.
Edit Note: The Ozone layer would require continuous engineering to maintain due to the reduced gravity of Mars that allows for more of the atmosphere to escape into space.
If you are interested, I highly recommend the speculative [Mars trilogy by K.S. Robinson] (http://amzn.com/0553560735). More than just about the colonization and terraforming, the books go deep into the geopolitical ramifications of having a new colony.
Plus, Robinson is a kickass author. My second favorite after Asimov.
In Red Mars, they use a combination of techniques to enrich the atmosphere. The most effective was to aerobrake a series of comets through the atmosphere, melting the ice and adding gases.
There are a few serious issues that stand in the way of humans being able to colonize Mars.
- No atmosphere. You’ll need the right balance of gasses in very large quantities. Also getting some water onto the planet is a good idea.
No magnetic field to keep the atmosphere to the planet. Mars supposedly used to have an atmosphere (there is evidence of this, but we don’t know for sure yet) but without a magnetic field it was all blown away by solar wind. In addition, humans will need sheilding from cosmic rays and solar radiation.
It is cold. Real cold. You would need a power source to keep it warm enough for life as we know it.
No nutrients in the soil. No plant life will grow
No water (see point 1)
Really fine sand on the surface that makes running machinery difficult.
As far as advances towards addressing those problems, it looks like the only options we have at this stage is to ship over the things we need like air, water, heat sources and electromagnetic sheilding. Certain molds have been found to live in very harsh environments on earth, like the Arctic or the bottom of the ocean, so those may be useful in establishing an ecosystem on Mars. Until we have the technology to create a massive magnetic field around the planet, our best hope is to create something like Bio Dome.
No, and it has very, very little to do with magnetic fields (Venus has no magnetic field to speak of and has an atmosphere twice as dense as ours).
Mars gravity is only 38% that of Earths which means that if we could snap our fingers and give it the same density, temperature, and chemical makeup atmosphere that Earth has, most of it would just boil off into space Very quickly. We’re talking whole percentage points a day the first few days. It would only take a few hundreds to thousands of years to loose so much it would not be dense enough to support human life. After a million or 10 million it would be so thin that water would be rare (because it would boil immediately, even at very low temperature) Eventually, it would reduce to what it has now, about 1% of Earth’s atmosphere density (but that would take a few billion years).
If you’re thinking we can just keep making more atmosphere, no we can’t; it’s a huge volume of matter. If we converted Mars rock into atmosphere it would need to be at a rate comparable to a major coal mining operation. So doable, if we could magically convert rocks into air and wanted to waste all that effort doing it.
Of course, the easy thing to do is to dig a VERY deep hole so all the atmosphere falls in (like the reverse of climbing a mountain, the atmosphere would get a lot denser at the bottom of the hole). That’s the only real strategy for maintaining outside conditions that could support non-microscopic life.
EDIT: More realistic timeline
EDIT2: Acknowledged that lack of magnetic field does have an effect, however minuscule compared to thermal loss it would be.
EDIT3: Current loss rate of Martian atmosphere is about 100 tons per day. It would increase exponentially based on the distance of the upper atmosphere from the planet and the temperature of the atmosphere. If you put our atmosphere on Mars as it is right now, the loss rate would be in the billions or even trillions of tons per day, but quickly taper off as the density and temperature dropped.
I’m not sure about the ability to create an ozone, but if we could it would still get blown away by the Sun’s solar wind like it’s original atmosphere. Mars has a weak magnetic field, because the core is too cold to create a strong enough one that would protect the outer layers of the atmosphere from being blown off by the sun or protect us on the surface from harmful radiation. Maybe at the point that it would be practical to try to colonize the planet we may have a way to create a new magnetic field or substitute. I doubt we could even jump start it’s core, though if we did, it would cause massive volcanic and earthquake activity, though that’s pretty much a guess on my part.
I say we start smashing icy bodies into it until it is way bigger with a hot rotating core and lots of water. Sure it would take thousands of years for it to stabilize enough for proper colonization but the improvements would be so worth it. It would really only cost a few trillion dollars. Just takes a long time.
Edit: This isn’t layman speculation here. Many qualified people have proposed doing exactly that. It just so happens to be my favorite plan because it has the most foresight and permanence and it is even remarkably cheap and easy compared to other methods.
Mars has several problems that contribute to it’s environment, a complete lack of a magnetic field due to a solidified or non moving core offers no protection to atmospheric gasses to the solar wind. Because of this, Mars has almost no atmosphere, the density is about 1% of earths and composed of all carbon dioxide. We would have to add massive amounts of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses to change the climate there. Due to no magnetic field, it would be slowly lost to solar wind, so we would have to constantly replenish it.
You know I’ve thought about this and I don’t think it would be that hard. In the future I would think that force field use will be quite prevalent and so, if you used a force field as we use piping nowadays we could “pipe” gases from the gas giants in the solar system to mars. Now, the question I don’t know the answer to that I just thought of is what about an Ionosphere and the magnetic field of mars? Isn’t the ionosphere what protects earth from all the dangerous radiation emitted by the sun? Well, we might have to fix that too? Short answer, yes, most likely.
- Helium is one of the least soluble gases. For comparison, you can get about 2.5g of CO2 into 1 kg of water at 10C. Under the same conditions, you’ll get about 0.0016g of He.
- No, helium is non-reactive. With everything. It is not toxic, nor is it used in any biological process (that I know of) in the human body.
- Yes, but as soon as you break that seal, the Helium is going to come out of solution. Quickly. And messily.
The obvious gas to mix into beer instead of CO2 is N2O, nitrous oxide, which would give you a drink you might call a brew ha-ha. Wiki notes that you can dissolve 1.5 g N2O into 1 liter of water, and that it is soluble in alcohol. I found one reference of someone who tried it. He said that drinking the beer didn’t give him any nitrous buzz.
CO2 dissolves in water. Nitrogen largely does not. Typically a “nitrogenated” beer such as guinness is pressurized with a 25%CO2 75%N2 gas blend, called beer gas. The CO2 will dissolve and the N2 is used to force the beer out of a special tap called a restrictor tap. The tap forces the beer through several pin holes, causing the CO2 to come out of solution and form small, very stable bubbles.
WRT He, a quick google search indicated that He is even less soluble in water than N2 is, so you could use He as a stand in replacement for N2 in a nitrogenated beer with no effect on flavor. The only difference would be on your wallet.
Tl;dr. Go have a Guinness.
At moderate temperatures and pressures, such as those in your delicious beverages, Henry’s Law reasonably describes how much gas dissolves in a solution (at constant T). The relationship is directly related to the partial pressure of the species of the vapor headspace:
where p is the partial pressure, k is the Henry’s Law Constant and c is the concentration of the gas in the solution. Assuming the vapor space pressure is constant between normal carbonated beer and your Helium beer, the amount of He that will dissolve in solution (k = 3.7E-4) is nearly 100 times less than the amount of CO2 (k=3.4E-2) that has dissolved. You would expect there to be much less He to be dissolved, therefore I’d expect a smaller volume of bubbles to be released when compared to CO2.
If you increased the He pressure in the headspace, more He would dissolve. However, it would be a packaging nightmare to get a high enough equilibrium pressure to see any appreciable increase in concentration.
I don’t know enough about the surface tension between He and water to tell you how big you would expect the bubbles. Maybe I’ll get back to it after a little research…
I’ve never had this helium beer, but I’d imagine it would be close to Guinness, which is packaged with a low CO2/high N2 mix. N2 will dissolve just about as well (k=6E-4) as He, and is pretty inert as well. You’ll probably get close to the same feel and probably the same type as head as a Guinness.
Not a packaging engineer for a brewery so I don’t know what technology they use for seals, but I do know that helium-tight testing is the gold standard for determining a good seal on housings–so they better be good. I’d be more certain of cans holding their seal than any cap, compression, or screw lid. Plastic bottles–forget about it. Even CO2 diffuses across the thin plastic wall. Helium would make this beer go flatter faster.
Just sealing helium in a container is difficult. Helium will leak through solid glass for example. Helium will zip right through the bottle cap to glass seal joint. Source: I have patents on how to seal the stuff in containers.
Complete aside, but it’s worth noting that the CO2 providing carbonation in beer is a natural byproduct of the beer-making process (unlike in say soda where CO2 is added as a separate step).
During fermentation, you add yeast to the wort, and the yeast converts the starch and sugar of the wort and produces alcohol and CO2. Granted, I’m sure that some beer manufacturers also add in extra carbonation or nitrogen in some situations.
Adding helium to a liquid displaces all the other dissolved gasses (including oxygen and carbon dioxide). I used to do this with our HPLC mobile phases. It’s called sparging and it would ruin the beer.
There are many good replies here so I will make it brief. Nitrogen is added to beer now precisely because it is not soluble. When it gets trapped inside a bubble on the head of the beer it is less likely to diffuse out, therefore long lasting head on a well poured Guinness. I expect helium would act similarly, except it might float away.
It really depends on the species. Those species that depend more heavily on smaller color features are more likely to be affected by bands. It’s an important consideration in the design of bird tracking studies! Here’s an interesting study on zebra finches that found a preference in female individuals for males with red beaks or red identification tags:
Another consideration is how the tag or band might affect their physical movement. For example, with microbats we have to be very careful with radio tags to ensure they don’t substantially impede flight– even if the transmitter only weighs half a gram.
I worked with a group tagging monkeys, and we had to put quite a lot of instrumentation on the poor guys. They were immediately ostracized from the group because of their unfashionable ‘jackets’, but we would capture and release then back into the group no problem in a few days.
Yes! You are absolutely right! Even small tags have shown to affect mortality and breeding rates n penguins in this landmark 2011 study: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110112/full/news.2011.15.html
A general rule of thumb is to use a tag or collar no heavier than 2-5% of the individuals body weight. Everyone tagging an animal has hopefully considered all possible costs, including a litany of behavioral costs (foraging, interacting with the same species, raising young, etc). interestingly, lots of reptilian or amphibian tags are actually implanted into body cavities (hellbenders, for example: https://ag.purdue.edu/fnr/discover/HerpetologyLab/Documents/StoufferSurgicalImplantation.pdf) or even sewn on to the back of the animal with dissolving sutures (http://www.herpconbio.org/volume1/issue1/Bull2006.pdf). Wildlife biologists often have to resort to these seemingly invasive methods due to the body shape and skin type of reptiles/amphibians. These methods are usually used only when everything else has been ruled out as more damaging or a greater hinderance.
This is something discussed by statisticians as well as biologists when considering what are called capture-recapture methods. You capture some amount of animals, tag them, release them back into their habitat, and then later recapture some new amount and this will give you a good amount of information with which you can make an estimate on how many total animals there are in this habitat.
Now, what you are asking if whether the tags we place on animals have any effect on their “lifestyle”. Well the answer is: it depends! It definitely can have an effect on the things you mentioned but since we are aware of this we, as statisticians or biologists or what have you, try to minimize the impact of the tags on the animal. It won’t help us estimate the total population if any of the tags go missing unexpectedly (ie: a colorful tag making some animal very visible to predators is bad).
TL;DR: Yes the tags do affect them but we try to make the tags such that the effect will be minimized.
Not directly related to color, but it was found that certain penguin tags could increase drag when the birds where swimming and hurt their survival chances, source
What about the selective process of capturing animals to tag? A priori I would wager that in general a researcher would be catching less fit individuals. For example, if a researcher is trapping birds, he / she is more likely to trap a sick, unfit bird than a fit, fast, intelligent (and sexually selected) bird.
I was watching a show the other day about tagging lions. They chose to tag & also give a birth control to the lioness, since her male companion would stay with her. What was interesting is that the reason they don’t do the male (for birth control reasons) is that he will lose his mane, therefore losing his stance in the pack.
Short answer, yes! (with some assumptions)
According to these lecture slides, the stellar density near the Galactic center is ~100 stars per cubic parsec (compared to ~1 star per cubic parsec in the stellar neighborhood). This corresponds (assuming I did my math right) to an average distance between stars of 0.13 parsecs (0.42 lightyears). If a star like the Sun were that far away, it would have an apparent magnitude (in V-band) of -4.6 mag. Wikipedia lists -4.0 as the faintest magnitude at which one can see things in the daytime sky with the naked eye. Since -4.6 is brighter than -4.0 (because smaller magnitude means brighter object) you could see a star like the Sun at 0.13 parsecs away (although, probably only if you have good eyesight). If you have stars in the sky that are brighter than the Sun or closer to you than the average distance between stars, then you’ll have a better chance of seeing them.
> A 2.2 micron animation of the stellar orbits in the central 0.5 arcsec. Images taken from the years 1995 through 2013 are used to track specific stars orbiting the proposed black hole at the center of the Galaxy. These orbits, and a simple application of Kepler’s Laws, provide the best evidence yet for a supermassive black hole, which has a mass of 4 million times the mass of the Sun. Especially important is the star S0-2 as it has has been observed for more than one full orbital period, which is only 16.17 years.
Because stars are so closely packed together near the galactic center, the night sky for inhabitants there would be spectacular. Near the galactic center, the average distance between neighboring stars would be only 1000 AU (about a light-week). If the Sun were located within a parsec (=3,2 light year) of the galactic center, there would be a million stars in our sky with apparent brightness greater than Sirius. The total starlight in the night sky would be about 200 times greater than the light of the full moon; you could easily read the newspaper at midnight, relying on starlight alone.
Within a parsec of the galactic center, the estimated number density of stars is about 10 million stars per cubic parsec. The number density of stars here in the Sun’s neighborhood is a only 0.2 star per cubic parsec.
The nearest star to the sun is about 4 light years away. In the galactic center, the average distance between neighboring stars would be only 1000 AU (about a light-week). Not only would the starlight to be bright enough to read by at night, many of those stars would be visible during the day. However, I doubt anyone is looking up into those spectacular skies. Most of the stars are young and hot and will explode as a supernova within a few million years. Between the supernova and any outbursts from the nearby supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center, most of the planets in the region have been sterilized from the radiation.
Hopefully, this is a acceptable reply. Try downloading Space Engine.
Its a universe simulator. It has procedural generation of every star in every galaxy so you can visit all of them. (Yes, every star in every galaxy). All types of planets are simulated so you can find one with water and atmosphere go down to the surface.
For what you ask, I would fly to the center of the galaxy and search for a star with a planet system. Then I’d land on the planet on the day side and see what the sky looked like.
mouse wheel for speed and forward and back arrows to travel
click to lock, “g” to go to the selectged object
“F2” to identify planets around a star
The center of this image is the site of Sagittarius A*, a point containing an extremely dense mass widely thought to be the supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way, with stars in very tight orbits. The orbits of a few objects in our solat system is provided for scale.
A quick wiki search gives you the following:
> A typical mass density for a globular cluster is 70 MSun pc−3, which is 500 times the mass density near the Sun.
Apparent magnitude, or how bright we see objects here on earth, is on a logarithmic scale. log(500)= +/- 2.7
> Brightest star (except for the Sun) at visible wavelengths: Sirius at -1.47
> Faintest objects observable during the day with naked eye when Sun is high at –4.00
Note that the lower the value, the higher the brightness. E.g. the sun has -26.74. Now I feel like I’m cheating a little bit by equating the mass density to apparent magnitude, but I suspect it is at least a good indicator.
-1.47 -2.7 = -4.17 which is just bright enough to see when the sun is high.
Therefore my answer to this question would be yes, but barely.
*Edit: That said, if you are anywhere near a star like R136a1, you are very likely to see them during the day. It has a luminosity of 8.700.000 times that of the sun.
Apparently, stars are packed very close together. 10 million stars per cubic parsec; around our neck of the galaxy, it’s about 0.2 stars per cubic parsec. Source.
A cubic parsec is roughly 3 x 10^49 cubic meters. If we assume the stars are evenly distributed, that’s 3 x 10^42 m^3 for each star. Which would mean that the stars are about 1.5 x 10^14 meters apart from one another. The distance from the earth to the sun is 1.5 x 10^11 meters, so these stars are separated by about 1000 AU. So I’d hypothesize that you probably wouldn’t be able to see other stars during the day. However, the night sky would probably be really really cool looking. You’d have 10 million stars within half a parsec of you (1.6 ly). From earth, the closest star is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.3 ly away.
An assumption of special relativity is that light travels at c in every frame.
Going by that assumption, there’s no such thing as light’s rest frame (point of view) – because if there was, light would not be travelling at c in that frame. In a way, I suppose you can take this as confirmation that a beam of light’s frame exists for zero time and spans zero distance, as it were.
If photons do not in fact move at c and have a tiny, tiny mass (which is not ruled out but would be surprising), then indeed they would not experience much time at all during travel.
> For example, in modifications of the double-slit experiment the state of the photon can appear to be changed in the past.
I’ll leave this bit to other people (I still haven’t heard a good explanation of those experiments), but I suspect you’re just gonna get a lot of “that’s not actually what happens”.
>However, according the photon, it’s departure, detection, and arrival may happen simultaneously, and therefore no “time travel” is actually occurring.
This is a given: time in something’s frame always, always ticks forward, even inside closed time loops in general relativity. So that’s unrelated to time travel.
>Does this have implications in quantum entanglement when information seems to have traveled faster than the speed of light?
If you are careful about what you mean when you say information, no FTL happens. That “seems” is a trap, a pitfall.
Relativity isn’t necessary to talk about quantum entanglement, nor does it dramatically modify it.
For what it’s worth, entanglement makes perfect, intuitive sense in the many worlds interpretation…
This video on the Relativity Paradox and Muons by Sixty Symbols[8:35] really helped me visualize the problems in imagining these things.
It illustrates the compression and dilation over the professor talking. After reading the comments here, I think it will be a good supplement.
>For example, in modifications of the double-slit experiment the state of the photon can appear to be changed in the past.
What you’re referring to here, is the Delayed Choice Eraser. It goes like this:
Particles which go through a diffraction grating will be detected on the other side as a single particle which followed a single path. (This is what is seen when attempting to catch out the interference patterns of electrons.)
Waves which go through a diffraction grating, will travel through all possible paths at once, resulting in an interference pattern on the other side, with no way to tell which part of the detected wave followed which path.
The idea is that if you change your parameters when the light is between your detector and the grating, then you can affect what form the light is detected in. If you change it’s form, then surely you changed the way it interacted with the grating, thus effectively changing the past.
However. that’s not really how light works. Rather than “choosing” to be either a wave or a particle and then sticking with it, the light exists as a constant superposition of the two. And which one you detect can be affected even after it has been diffracted, resulting in no apparent reversal of causality.
Note: Everything, every wave and particle in the whole universe exists in this manner. And the only reason we even use those terms any more is that our puny human brains haven’t evolved to understand complex wave functions.
No, it always propagates at the same speed. If its path was warped by another gravitational field, it might appear to travel slower because it’s taking a longer route.
edit: see here for a very small effect due to absorption of gravitational waves in different media.
Sort of off topic. If gravity can be slowed going through a medium, can it ever be 1/2 phase off and cancel out the gravity in an area in a similar way to active acoustic noise cancellation? What would be the wavelength of a gravity wave? Would it depend upon the medium?
Just a Question: do Forces move with the speed of light?
I thought they were instant. So that there is no time needed for any Force to work? Or do I missunderstand that totally?
And to my knowledge gravity is one Force.
The proper question if my assumption is true would be:
do gravitational waves do travel at different speeds in different mediums?
Gravity travels at the universal constant which is the same speed that light travels at regardless of the medium. This is the same as light by the way. It travels at the same speed but it may appear to slow down in mediums such as water because of refraction but in reality it’s still traveling at the same speed it’s just harder to move in a straight line when you’re bouncing off things.
The speed of light is the maximum speed, the speed of all information and massless things (including gravity) , it is the universal constant and not “just the speed of light”. Information may take some minor detours in denser mediums but it never slows down. space and time are relative and bendable while the universal constant is the same, regardless of your point of view and reference point.
The speed of light is THE universal constant and all information propagates at that speed. We are just to small to notice it as much, but it takes some dozens of minutes between earth and mars and 1,4 seconds to earths moon. If we would be planet-sized we would notice the universal constant and bending of space time more easily. You could move your extremely long arm and it would take a few seconds for any noticeable effect.
some high rated answers here are just wrong, it is sad.
Light doesn’t travel at different speeds. The photons get interacted with by the matter of the medium, the main example of this is photons getting adsorbed by the atoms then re-emitted a shot time after. This appears to slow down the light when in fact, photons generally travel at c.
Until somebody can give you a more thorough answer:
Comets, like everything else form by a bunch of dust gradually getting clumped together by their gravity.
What distinguishes comets is their composition.
Water, dust, and ice make up comets because they can only form a certain distance from a sun, star or hot celestial body, whereas rocks can clump up together and stay intact in much hotter areas.
Source: memory from intro to astronomy
Here’s an article that may shed some light on the process of water formation in space:
In short, it appears it’s possible for water to form from hydrogen interacting with solid oxygen at very low temperatures.
/u/IBrokeMyCloset, this is why you should watch Cosmos (Fox, 9PM, Sundays), last night’s episode was all about comets.
Like people here are saying, it’s basically a combination of nature’s forces. Gravity and Electro-Magnetism start pulling dust together. Electrostatic Attraction gets small particles to stick together at first, and when they reach a certain minimum combined mass, gravity takes over from there as the dominating ‘growth driver’. From there it’s just a function of time, location, and available material.
Think “Ice’ as in frozen liquids, not Ice as in frozen water. It’s a bunch of rocky debris that gathered under its own gravity and froze together in space with equally cold (think really close to absolute zero) gas molecules (co2, methane, ammonia, etc.). In space, the lack of air between the particles lets them find enough molecular bonding points to sort of stick together, like you would get if you had two really flat surfaces and slid them together-what they call vacuum welding. So, this collection of junk ends up making a kind of rock, like an asteroid, and, if it’s orbiting a star, when it gets close enough, light and solar wind heat it up to where those same gasses start to melt, then boil. It’s in space, no gravity, right? So the gas goes out in all directions. If it’s BIG enough, it obscures/picks up enough sunlight that it appears as a cloud from far away. Since the suns light and solar wind has pressure, this cloud is “blown” away from the Sun, which is why a comets tail always points away from the Sun, not away from the direction of travel. Eventually, after enough passes around a star, the comet loses enough cohesiveness or gets small enough that just falls apart and, without outgassing, becomes nearly invisible.
The elements came from a supernova before the sun was born. After the supernova, the material began swirling around and collecting. The supernova before the sun produced a lot of oxygen which mixed with hydrogen to make water. Since they were far from our sun, they froze together to make icy comets.
I’ll do my best to remember what I can from Astronomy 150.
Water-ice can only exist, In our solar system as a solid, outside the snow-line. This snow line lies roughly at 3.8 AU from the sun, any water ice that comes inside that line will quickly evaporate into gas. When we see comets from earth, this is exactly what we are seeing, water evaporating off the comets surface.
Comets form on the very edges of our solar system in a giant sphere called the Oort Cloud. They form by accretion, gravity forcing smaller objects together to form bigger ones. Thus, since the only material in the Oort Cloud is dust and particulate water-ice, comets are mainly composed of just that.
Comets have massive orbits. Hence why we only see some comets once every few decades. However, each time they enter the snow line, they loose a little bit of mass. Eventually, after entering the snow line over, and over, comets perish. They either disintegrate or, in the case as of recent with the comet Io, they travel too close to the sun and are burned up completely.
Sorry for grammar or spelling errors. Typed this out on my phone.
Source: Memory from Astronomy 150
Comets formed along with everything else in our solar system. They are the left over material made up of frozen matter, and can vary in composition. Comets have a dark surface made up mostly of carbon, think of a hard candy shell. What is inside of the comet, depends on how old it is and its distance to the sun. Most of the time, the comet has a frozen solid chunk of matter on the inside, but as it begins falling towards the sun it goes through a process called sublimation. This is when the solid chunk of matter skips the liquid phase and turns directly into gas. Gas is less dense than solid and the comet starts ejecting the gas. That is how comet trails are formed and why there might be water traveling around the comet.
Now if you wondering how water is even present in the comet, that’s a much bigger answer that involved the life cycle of stars.
Three important things:
Water is thought to be common throughout the universe. So, there’s likely a fair bit of it in a pre-star nebula scattered about. The water is made during supernovae where there is plenty of energy, hydrogen, and oxygen around.
Water molecules will attract to each other due to gravity and their polar electromagnetic composition. This explains how comets can form in space.
During the formation of a solar system, areas close to the sun where rocky planets form is too hot for liquid water. What happens is the forming star heats up the water near the star to more than the water’s gravity or electromagnetic attraction can keep it together. The added heat generally pushes the water away from the sun. If/when the water is in a cooler part of the solar system it will condense, and start attracting to each other. You get asteroids with water, planets with water (like Uranus), and also just icy things like Pluto or comets way out there.
Here’s a question that we haven’t quite answered yet, though. If the inner area of a solar system is too hot for water to coalesce, where did Earth’s water come from? We don’t know for sure. Our best guess is that asteroids or comets brought water to the planet after Earth’s formation.
is the question related to why is there water at all in the comet-making part of the solar system? what created all that water? is possible that there was lots of water throughout the disc that surrounded the proto-Star and only the water far away was able to survive the solar-system making process because of the temperature or other processes? did earth’s water collect together from this water that was everywhere, or did that water burn off and earth’s oceans were delivered to it by comets? i get that comets have ice because its cold in the oort cloud.. but why water? is that the question that is being asked? as opposed to solid etOH or whatever.
don’t comets also have the basic organics and amino acids and they are all the left-handed versions as well that we find so many of here on earth? isn’t that a rather cool thing? comets can pepper a planet with all the necessary ingredients for life to start up.
So people are saying that comets form out of dust from electrostatic and gravitational attractions, but how does a small ball of dust become a solid rock from just those two things? It seems that a large body like a planet or star can accomplish this throught its large gravitational forces, but why isn’t a comet just a loosely bound clump of dust?
Comets and asteroids are leftover planetismals that never accreted into planets. About 4.5 billion years ago, the nebula from which we spun out began to collapse, probably as a result from a supernova shockwave. This nebula was about 98% H and He, 1.4% H-compounds (water, ammonia, ethane), .4% rocks and minerals and 2% metals. Now, H and He are gasses in space and gasses cannot build planetismals. Most of the remaining material was H-compounds. The center of collapse (to become our sun one day) was hot. Around 5AU away, the temperature was cool enough for the H-compounds to become solid. There’s more than twice as much “ices” as there is metals and minerals. This is where comets formed and this is why they have water. They formed in a region where it was cool enough for H-compounds to become solid. Inside of this region is where the rocky asteroids and, later, the terrestrial planets formed.
Basically billions of years ago Jupiter and Neptune became a 2:1 resonance which basically threw all of the rocket bodies inwards and the icy bodies outwards. Between Mars and Jupiter there is a think called a snow ice line where anything formed outside is of ice and snow. Basically over billions of years the snow and Ice pieces slowly begin to accrete to each other (stick together by gravity) and over time become larger and larger and create comets.
It’s simple really. Supernova nucleosynthesis creates the “soup” that solar systems are built off of. When a star goes supernova, these elements are sent outward into the cosmos, creating great big clouds of gas and dust, which are basically just mixtures of these elements. Gravity takes over, the gas and dust clumps, and begins to spin. The spin causes a flat disc to form, and at the center, gravity continues to build a protostar. Enough gravity and pressure, and hydrogen atoms begin to fuse, creating helium. After a while, the fusion takes over, and you have a star. The remaining gas and dust is then projected outward. This gas and dust in turn clumps under gravity as it orbits the new star. The farther out you go, the less likely these clumps find each other (in the Oort cloud, each object is as far away from each other as Earth is to the sun.) There’s also less heat, so water stays frozen. Comets are basically a mixture of all kinds of things, but water is a common element, and so it happens to be part of them. Notice: water is not just “on” comets, it exists throughout the clump, along with many other elements.
Earth has so much water from luck. No joke.
And comets can be form from many things.
* Stars exploding (Gravity and unstable cores help on that),
* heavy impacts by other comets may cause parts of the “body”/planet to detach creating other comets
* or they just lucky keep drifting in the void of space from the big bang.
This is the general idea. Hope i didn’t confused you further.
Comets are primordial debris from the original existence of the solar system. They may also include a percentage of captured objects from interstellar space. They exist because the cross section of interaction with other objects inside the solar system is reduced, both by comets long orbital period and short portion of their lifespan near the sun, and the fact that the inner solar system has largely been cleared of gas and most objects for several billion years. The Jovian planets clear the inner solar system.
In some ways the question of how did comets form is, “why are there so few things orbiting the sun with highly elliptic orbits and why are they all icy?” Comets are mostly icy and they’re in long period orbits that graze the sun.
The dust and clumps of gas inside the orbit of Jupiter mostly formed into rocky planets, not because rock is attracted to rock, but because most of the lighter gases evaporated away. Those volatiles were only able accumulate in the outer part of the solar system in Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and their moons and trojans. As Jupiter formed it established a sequence of resonant modes with the other planets and the asteroids. Almost all the bodies in our solar system, the inner planets, trojan satellites, moons and asteroids inside the orbit of Saturn have some type of resonant behavior associated with a Jovian sized planet. Everything that isn’t in a type of stable relationship gets tossed out and eventually impacts a planet.
So the long term history of our solar system has left rocky planets near the sun, gas giants further out and lots of rocks, asteroids, trojans and moons locked in resonant orbits. Comets are what’s left over from the original forming of the solar system. There just the lucky strange rogues that never were able to impact enough junk early on to shed their ellipticity and get stuck in the inner or gas giant part of our system. If they had they would have become resonant locked with something or fall into a planet. The long period ones probably aren’t in resonance with a Jovian planet, they don’t get near the sun for long enough to boil off their water so they stay icy. They have ice because they don’t have enough gravity to retain more volatile gases like Hydrogen.


NASA International Space Apps Challenge is going to happen in 5 major cities of Pakistan this year from 18th-20th October 2019. NASA Space App is the hugest global hackathon that occurs over 48 hours in cities all around the globe The teams of technologists, scientists, engineers, physicists, designers, coders, programmers, entrepreneurs, problem solvers, idealists, creative minds, artists, musicians, mathematicians, historians, educationalists, lawyers and students works with NASA open data in designing innovative solutions and to develop answers to some of the most pressing global issues and problems. It’s really amazing what ideas and solutions people from various backgrounds come up with. Space Apps 2018 included over 18,000 participants at more than 200 events in 75 countries across the 6 continents.
The World Needs Ideas and Solutions To The Global Challenges:
NASA Space App brings personalities from diverse backgrounds and fields to produce open source solutions through code, conception, visualization, design, hardware or an app in 48 hours. It gives the chance to engage with publicly available NASA data to design and present innovative solutions for global challenges of that year specifically. Part of the Open Government Partnership, Space Apps is an annual event that pulls citizens together regardless of their background or skill level. It’s not just about apps! They tackle a challenge using robotics, data visualization, hardware, design and many other specialties! They inspire each other while learning and creating using stories, code, design and, most of all, their ideas. They display problem-solving skills and share their talents with the world!
Who Can Participate?
Anyone, absolutely anyone can participate. Work alone or with a team to solve challenges that could help change the world and get the chance to be recognized as the biggest problem solver of the world. Team RaheQamar is making this hackathon consecutively for the 3rd time in Pakistan and this time in 5 major cities of Pakistan that includes Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta and Islamabad. Team RaheQamar is excited to continue the tradition of inviting students and professionals, beginners and veterans from all corners of the globe to join in.
Why NASA does holds Space Apps:
Space Apps introduces problem-solvers worldwide to NASA’s free and open data. NASA missions to Earth, our Sun, Moon and solar system, and out into the universe – all gather data in pursuit of new knowledge, to expand our understanding through new scientific discoveries, and to help us to improve life on Earth. By using NASA data to solve each year’s challenges, Space Apps teams learn about NASA’s data, and share in the creation and application of the knowledge that results. NASA is leading this global collaboration along with a number of government collaborators and 100+ local organizations.
This Year Challenges:
This year there are 5 challenges that comprise:
- Earth’s Ocean
- Our Moon
- Planets Near and Far
- To The Stars
- Living In Our World
Many of this year’s challenges require participating teams to use and incorporate NASA data. These data represent some of the most complex and diverse Earth and space science datasets, and are acquired from satellites, telescopes, aircraft, field measurements, and numerous other programs.
Register yourself for the most exciting challenges and become a world renowned problem solver.
Here are the links to the official page of each local of NASA Space App Pakistan:
Link to the global challenges of NASA Space App:
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The Bauman Moscow State Technical University (MSTU) in cooperation with the Peter Lebedev Physical Institute (PI) and the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) have developed nanosatellites for the Yarilo project to study the Sun.
In 2020, it is planned to launch the device with the help of a carrier rocket to the sun-synchronous orbit (about 600 kilometers) as an additional load, as the Youth Space Center of MSTU reported.
Nanosatellites are designed to register solar activity in the X-ray range and obtain operational forecasts of the state of the interplanetary environment. Relevant data will be transmitted to Earth three to four times a day.
The device will consist of two microsatellites, which are supposed to be orbited via solar sails. Communication with satellites will be maintained by the MSTU Flight Control Center. X-ray spectrophotometer will be a contribution of RAS Physics Institute to the project.


The Pi-angleIt has been assumed for eons that the universe could be explained as containing dimensions and that these dimensions were sequential. One dimensional space is an indivisible point, two dimensional space is at least two one dimensional points connected by a line and three dimensional space is at least three of these two dimensional lines on at least two planes. There may be other dimensions but they're too hard to explain so I'll just ignore them. There is a problem however: There is no two dimensional space, it's just a convenient abstraction. The absence of a second dimension is only apparent with an object having some curved component, a circle for instance. We are taught that circles are derived by multiplying the diameter of a circle by pi which will give us that circle's circumference. Thing is, pi is ugly. It's an irrational number not only because the decimal portion of the number continues forever, but also because it makes no sense. The fractional part of pi assumes that there really are two dimensions when it actually comes from trying to render a two dimensional object in three dimensions.
Since we try to force three dimensional shapes into a fictitious two dimensional space, things never fit together quite right. A "round" shaft, for instance, is made to rotate in a "circular" bearing. Since neither the shaft nor the bearing are fabricated in three dimensions, there is always friction, leading to heat and finally, failure. If these rotating parts had been manufactured without resorting to pi, they would be frictionless and would last forever.
The 4.7197551% rendering error also exactly matches the ratio of Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the universe to that fraction of the universe that can be "observed" by science. The 95.2802449% of the universe we can't observe occupies that part of "space" we think of as empty. All of everything we thought was in between "things" (sub-atomic particles, atoms, elements and molecules, people), is actually filled with dark matter and dark energy. The universe is really a solid mass. The part we see is just a frothy mass bubbling up from the underlying dark matter and dark energy.
What we think of gravity is really the exact opposite of attraction, it is the absence of a force holding things apart. We don't fall because there's a force pulling us down but rather the lack of a force holding us up. The tides we believe are caused by the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon are really the result of the earth's spin. As the earth rotates on its axis, the oceans bulge upward at a right angle to the spin. The land masses move into that bulge to create tides. The whole universe works the same way.
The visible universe "floats" in a sea of dark matter and energy and, since there is no force (gravity) to affect movement, things settle into stable trajectories (orbits) determined by sea of dark matter and dark energy. Is any of this important, are there any practical consequences of this delusion? Not really. All it shows is that the impossible is commonplace and we will never understand it because we think it's impossible (see this).
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Our class value is WISDOM
Our topic this term is
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Age related expectations
To find out more about what your child should be able to do by the end of their year in Year 2 please click here - Year 2 national age related, end of year expectations.
We spent a day in school at a workshop learning about the Great Fire of London
We went to the Science Museum to find out more about space.
We looked at lots of different model rockets and a replica of Apollo. We also saw a genuine space suit and learnt how astronauts survived in space. We took part in a workshop where we got to blast off the class’ rocket into space and filter water of impurities so we could all survive in space. We even tried some anti gravity experiments with a hair dryer and a ping pong ball!


EXPLORE is an odyssey to the planet Mars, seen through a lens of human history and scientific development. Three years in the making, the show skillfully illustrates ancient astronomy and the motions of celestial objects that fascinated Johannes Kepler. Explore is a beautifully visualized trip through the history of astronomy and shows the story of humanity's fascination with the stars — from ancient stargazers and astrologers to the breakthrough discoveries of Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler.
Runtime: 25 min | Suitable for: general audiences, age 6+ | Preview Trailer
Fun for the Whole Family | 10:00 AM & 2:00 PM | Tuesday, April 2nd | $4 EACH
Purchase tickets by clicking HERE


The other Thursday Mr Z and I went to the NASA Kennedy Space Center in northern Florida to view a rocket launch. It was my first time to ever see a NASA space station. When I was living in the Philippines, I’d never thought I’d touch NASA soil and here I am. We all gathered in the bleachers to watch the launching. We heard a rumble in the air, a slight tingling of the atmosphere and whoosh!! the rocket blasted off to space — so to speak.
It went by pretty fast. I thought it would be more of an epic slow motion – the stuff you see in the movies where the rocket spectacularly blasts off mountains of fire and fuel and gradually lifts off releasing plumes of smoke and ashes as it flies to an Icaresque arc into the skies. Then I realized if that happened in real life, the rocket might as well collapse on its side if it ever lifts off that slow.
NASA rocket launching actually happens once every month as they either blasts spy satellite or cargo into space. That kind of took the fun and wonder out of it as I thought rocket launching was like a once-in-a-lifetime thing. But still, I’m pretty glad I saw a rocket launch for the first time ever in my life. Something to tick off the bucket list aside from being in North Korea.
In the wee hours of Tuesday, I saw a blood moon for the second time in my life. It was actually the first of the lunar Tetrad – a series of 4 lunar eclipses in a 6 month interval that will occur from April 2014 to September 2015. That’s pretty cool!
The blood moon could only be seen in North and South America. Luckily, we were in South Florida. At 4am, Mr Z and I groggily got ourselves out of bed and climbed up to the roof to see our moon the color of red bean with the shining mustard colored Mars (the brightest I’ve ever seen the Red Planet) dancing alongside the moon.
Coincidentally, the first blood moon occurred during the first day of Jewish Passover Seder which I celebrated for the first time that day (“Come in Elijah!). And you can tell the newspapers were having a field day with the apocalyptic doom and gloom.


The humble bicycle reflector works on the principle of corner cube retro-reflection. Incident light bounces off the orthogonally placed, reflective plastic surfaces and emerges in the opposite direction, parallel to the incident ray. Its totally and internally reflected. I have shown this for you in the following image. Additionally, you can play around with this cool applet from a Taiwanese education website to simulate corner reflection.
I call it humble because it is cheap and sustainable. Think about it. You hardly need an external power source to make this thing work. As long its clean and there is a good source of light shining on it directly behind, it signals back its presence faithfully. And if you have three wide paneled reflectors, you can extend the range of the light horizontally.
This simple concept was so beautiful to scientists that an array of 100 of these corner cubes were left on the moon as part of the Apollo Moon mission of 1969. The idea? By shooting laser pulses from an earth based telescope, you can measure the round-trip travel time and hence the earth-moon distance to an accuracy of mere centimeters!
Most people may think all Neil Armstrong left on the moon was a U.S flag and his footprints. Not quite. In addition, there's also these corner cubes and it has served scientists with lunar laser ranging for over 35 years! If you want to learn more on lunar laser ranging, read this.
Speaking of which, I hear now they have found water on the moon's surface after the whole "bombing mission" last month. I think in a few years, the Giro d'Italia should dream bigger and hold its first stage on the moon instead of sticking to earth. Hey, there's water for aid stations!
P.S : Don't forget to catch the Leonid Meteor shower on Nov 17! I'm going to be headed out in the wee hours of Tuesday morning on my bicycle to see if I can spot any.
ADDITIONAL READING :
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Cosmicslot is a bright blue and orange site with a strong space theme. Everything on the site is related to the stars, plants or moons, which makes the whole experience a really fun one. It is clean and neat too, so you can find your way around the site easily.
All the main sections are listed in a convenient menu bar along the top of the main page. Once you click into the different areas, you're presented with more options. So, let's take a leap into this exciting casino and see if it's the one for you.


|Credit: KIBO Robot project|
The project is aimed to create a humanoid communication robot that will be a companion for the Japanese astronauts, who will be living and working in the Kibo Experiment Module. The 34 cm (13 inches) large KIBO robot will be used to communicate with the astronauts via autonomous actions and remote operations. The robot will also transmit information from the Kibo module to Earth.
In winter 2013 the robot will come face-to-face with Koichi Wakata, the first Japanese commander of the ISS, and will take part in the world’s first conversation experiment held between a person and a robot in outer space. A second robot with the same specifications will be built to serve as a backup and for demonstration purposes on Earth. Koichi Wakata, born 1 August 1963) is a Japanese engineer and a JAXA astronaut. Wakata is a veteran of four NASA Space Shuttle missions and a long-duration stay on the International Space Station. During a nearly two decade career in spaceflight he has logged five months in space. Wakata is currently assigned to the Soyuz TMA-11M/Expedition 38/Expedition 39 long duration spaceflight scheduled for 2013-2014. He will be the first Japanese commander of the Space Station during Expedition 39.


Many years ago, when the Hubble Space telescope was lifted into space, amid all the hoopla of it being a technological marvel, one of the largest satellites to that date, and having the ability to see further into space than an optical telescope had ever seen, there arose one small problem. When they flipped the switch into the ‘ON’ position, it was blurry.
The image was blurry. And distorted. Not at all a true representation of what lay out there, further than we had ever seen before. It turns out that when the lens fabricated, the curvature was miscalculated. By less than 1%. (Expensive mistake.) The view into space was compromised because of a problem with the lens.
Our spiritual lives, too, can be compromised by the lens we use to view ourselves. (Yes, a cheesy intro, but I needed something to warm up.) In my experience, people (including myself) have three main lens defects. We view ourselves through the lens of what we do, the lens of what we have, and the lens of what people think us. That’s how we tend to generate our identity, by using defective lenses.
When Satan tempted Jesus, he tempted the identity of the Son of God. “Jesus, your identity is in what you do, turn these stones into bread”, “Jesus, your identity is in what you have, call down angels from heaven”, and finally “Jesus, your identity is is what people think of you, they will worship you if you just bow before me.” Jesus knew who He was, and what God intended Him to be. His identity was secure because His lens never faltered.
The Hubble telescope was eventually fixed by correcting the error in the lens. It took a lot of looking at the data to see where the error was, and then more effort to make the proper adjustments. Just like the Hubble, our lenses may need adjustment. Maybe as we evaluate our lives, make resolutions, and try to be better, it is possible we are attacking the wrong problem. Rather than worry about the uncomfortable behaviors that are the fruit of our identity first, we may need to examine the lens that we get that identity from.
And make adjustments. So that we can see clearly to fix the real problem.


The balloon’s gone up
After several postponements due to atmospheric conditions following a week of unsettled upper-atmospheric and surface weather in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Pam, NASA launched its pressure balloon from Wanaka on the morning of 27 March. It has reached the designed float altitude and pressurised.”
So reads the official announcement relating to the launch of the very special NASA balloon that caught the imaginations of the people of Central Otago and indeed the whole of the South Island.
Once launched, the pumpkin-shaped balloon, made from 22 acres (8.9ha) of material and as large as a football stadium when fully inflated, ascended to a constant float altitude of 110,000ft (33.5km).
The balloon is now travelling eastward carrying a 5000lb (2267 kg) payload consisting of tracking and communications instruments. NASA expects the super pressure balloon (SPB) to circumnavigate the globe once every one to three weeks, depending on wind speeds in the stratosphere.
The science and engineering communities have previously identified ultra long-duration balloon flights at stable altitudes as playing an important role in providing low cost access to the near-space environment for science and technology.
Maintaining a constant float altitude in the stratosphere is a formidable challenge for airborne systems, including balloons. Most standard heavy-lift zero pressure balloons can vary in altitudes as much as 45,000ft due to the alternating warming and cooling of the day and night cycle.
In response, mission operators typically release excess weight in the form of ballast to maintain altitude. However, the SPB is designed to maintain a positive internal pressure and shape irrespective of its environment, keeping the balloon at a constant float altitude. Put another way, in much the same way a car tyre pressure changes based on the environment around it while maintaining its volume, so does the SPB.
This March test mission is set to validate the SPB technology, which has been under development by NASA for 15 years, according to Debbie Fairbrother, chief of NASA’s Balloon Programme Office and principal investigator for the SPB.
NASA’s scientific balloons offer low-cost, near-space access for scientific payloads weighing up to 8000lb for conducting scientific investigations in fields such as astrophysics, heliophysics and atmospheric research.
Ralph Fegan, long-time general manager of Wanaka Airport from where the launch was made, had an insider’s perspective of just how NASA went about preparing for and then activating the launch. He was there from the time the countdown started at midnight before launch and was the first outsider to be present at the launch pad when the balloon finally became airborne.
Ralph says there was a meteorology presentation at midnight and everyone gathered at the launching site and back in the United States was very aware that the decision on whether the launch went ahead or was aborted was in the hands of project meteorologist, Ross Hay.
According to Ralph it was not until after 5am on the morning of the launch that Ross was prepared to endorse the action. Until then he had been launching a series of trial balloons which he tracked using sophisticated technology.
One of the problems causing previous cancellations of the flight had been that while the weather at higher levels was suitable for the launch, the close proximity of mountain ranges to Wanaka Airport had produced turbulent winds.
While NASA had prepared a meticulous timeline with a launch scheduled for 8am, doubts about the weather meant about an hour was added to the launch time.
Ralph says there was an aspect of danger for people. However, “This only related to the balloon failing to gain altitude or alternatively something becoming detached from the gondola unit that could fall on somebody on the ground. There is no danger from the helium gas itself as it is inert, that is, non-explosive.”
Because of the danger to people if the balloon or its fuel were to explode, all non-essential personnel and other people working at the airport were moved under shelter. The road past the airport was closed and the fire service began to prepare for any possible danger to people or property.
Indeed, the balloon was finally prepared for launching just 20 minutes before liftoff. A clearance was requested and received by air traffic control and permission to launch was given. With all personnel in position was balloon was then launched.
Ralph says he is very proud that the gondola slung beneath the balloon, which was carrying technological equipment for NASA, was topped by a red Anzac Day poppy.
While the balloon did not look very impressive at first, it soon swelled to the size of two rugby fields, and Ralph says only a short time afterwards he received word that the balloon was clearly visible in Ashburton, close to where it crossed the New Zealand coast.
As the balloon travels around the Earth, it may be visible from the ground, particularly at sunrise and sunset, to those who live in the southern hemisphere’s mid-latitudes, such as New Zealand, Argentina, Australia and South Africa. NASA seeks to fly the balloon for an ultra-long-duration, potentially up to 100 days, at a stable float altitude. The current record for an SPB flight is 54 days.
The science and engineering communities have previously identified ultra-long-duration balloon flights at stable altitudes as playing an important role in providing low-cost access to the near-space environment for science and technology.
Ralph Fegan is proud to have been associated with NASA in this memorable project. He says that although NASA is commendably cautious in its predictions of the duration of the flight, he believes it will encircle the earth for “more than five times” before its descent.
- Report by Peter Owens, photograph by Ralph Fegan.
» Summer success at the Walsh
» The luxury of living in the Ivory Tower
» Comper moves swiftly
» UAV usefulness increasing
» Woodville’s even dozen
» 60th birthday party for ZK-BNL
» New airline MRO facility
» Hands across the Southern Alps
» Praise earned in tough place


Nature And Origin Of Sun Space Com
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Let your smart phone navigate you around the nights sky, to find stars, planets, constellations and the moon. Download the SkyView app (for iPhone & Android) for free and mount your smartphone onto the binoculars to start viewing the nights sky. They have x7 magnification with a 50mm high quality glass objective lens. They come with a carry case, lens cloth, neck strap and instruction manual. Centre focussing to allow you to quickly and easily adjust to different focal ranges. Porro prism. Lens diameter...


It was a very early wake up call for me and Aim. We woke up at 3:00am so we were still sleepy to go there.
We were going to a place called University of the Philippines or UP to visit the PAGASA ( Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Service Administration ) Astronomical Observatory for our stargazing. There were so many kids there and some are from my CFA school. There were even some camping tents there because there were people that went to the UP early and slept there to wait for the early morning stargazing.
There was a big telescope for us to see stars and planets like Saturn, Mars and Jupiter. As my father and I walked towards our car, I saw a giant telescope that looked like a turret. My father said that the telescope was inside the building and not going out there. We went inside the reception area where there were posters of the universe and parts of the telescope and how it works. We also learned about the time differences of the other countries.


You do know that mankind first landed on the Moon way back in 1969, right? If you were born after 2005, there's a good chance that this INCREDIBLE fact may have passed you by in the storm of other facts that compete for space in our heads.
Just imagine the worldwide excitement that was generated by this amazing feat back on that July day in the late 1960's. This was the first time a human being had stood on another planetary body other than the Earth. Imagine how the world will react when we discover life that originated somewhere other than on our home planet? That's probably going to be similar to the global reaction of mankind seen on the days around the Moon landings.
I wasn't born until 1972, the year that the last lunar mission, Apollo 17 took place. Just the thought of astronauts taking steps up there, 238,857 miles away fills me with awe and wonder. How does it make you feel? Does it seem as amazing to you? I hope so.
Man hasn't set foot on the Moon since those days. But on December 7th 2018 an unmanned Chinese mission set off to somewhere that a robotic probe, let alone a human being has never been. The lunar dark-side.
We shouldn't really refer to the landing site in that way though as it's not always dark. Because of the way the moon rotates as it orbits the Earth, from our point of view, when we look up, we always see the same side. The near side. The far side is where the latest chinese probe has touched down and although people often call it the dark-side of the moon, its not always facing away from the sun and receives sunlight just like any other area of the surface.
A funny thing though. A few years ago, I was on a trip to central India. One night, a full Moon bathed the evening in reflected starlight. It was beautiful as always. But to me, and maybe it's just looking at the Moon from a vastly different spot on the Earth, it did look different. If you're ever lucky enough to go globe trotting - see what you think.
Why not try an experiment to recreate the Moon's orbit around the Earth next time you're at the park? Jump on the roundabout and set it going. Not too fast. Then, get a friend to try and keep up with you while spinning themselves. Can you recreate the same effect so your friend is always facing you? It's a recipe for dizzyness so be careful!
One of the interesting things about the latest lunar mission is the fact that a satellite had to be put into orbit in such a position that it acts as a relay for communication between mission control in China and the Moon lander. This is because... you guessed it, the space-probe touched down on the side of the Moon facing away from us.
The radio signals carrying pictures and other data are bounced off the artificial moon back down to Earth and vice-versa. Although it took 5 days for the Chang'e 3 lander to reach the Moon the communications are fortunately a little faster as can be seen from the amazing images received only hours after touchdown.
The mission aims to study the huge crater that the craft touched down in as its believed a huge and ancient impact has exposed rocks usually hidden deep below the ground. Also experiments to see if a Radio Telescope could be placed on the Moon are being carried out.
The Chinese Lunar Exploration Program also hope to land men on the Moon in years to come and are working on their own equivalent to the International Space Station.
Do you want to go to the Moon? If you do, wait for the next clear night and get a good look at where you're headed. Borrow a pair of binoculars or if you are lucky enough to have a telescope, get it trained on the Lunar surface. Check out the BBC Sky at Night Website for more tips.
In the next episode of the Winter Family Saga, Oliver will get to travel to the far-side of the moon, where The Order of Saint Nicholas have a secret hidden from mankind for over a thousand years. And that's just the start of a whole new adventure.


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A kids Cosmos : Space Exploration
A kids cosmos explores the fascinating story of how fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution transformed matter and life into consciousness. It brings the reader on an adventure to explore and learn from the cosmos. To question where we came from and to discover what our place in the vast cosmos is.
The aim of this project was to identity and explore a way in which to get children interested in space. The book brings the child on their first adventure led by the character ‘Astronaut Carl’. It will bring them on a discovery mission of all the planets and teach them about each of their landscapes, their formation and lots of other very interesting information. The book itself features 30 illustrated pages for the kid to learn from along with unique illustrations of each planet and humorous body text.


Think about how frightening it would be to float around in space without being able to get back to the base ship. Okay it’d be fun for a minute or two, but then it’d be terrifying.
Instead, imagine being adrift in space unable to re-reach the ship, and then pressing a button that automatically guides your suit back. That idea is what Draper Labs is trying to make a reality. Their engineers are trying to develop technology that can locate your suit’s position relative to the ship, and have the suit create an optimal return trajectory to get you back safe.
This could be especially useful if an astronaut is feeling dizzy or disoriented and can’t guide themselves back. The self-return system could even be activated by crew aboard the ship or by mission control on the ground.
Sounds like some amazing tech, and even NASA is interested, though it could be a while before it becomes real. Now, if only I had a ‘Take Me Home’ button I could press right after I clock out at work.
[ Gizmodo ]


- Uchuu Project Overview: Uchuu is a simulation of the formation of the Large Scale Structure of the Universe based on the mutual gravitational interactions between the dark matter particles, and it can resolve smaller features to depict the Universe in greater detail. Uchuu has 2,097,152,000,000 (two trillion) particles! It was run with GreeM3 N-body code by Tomoaki Ishiyama at the ATERUI II supercomputer in Japan. The Uchuu simulation has delivered 4PB of raw data! All Uchuu data products will be made publicly available. "Uchuu" is a Japanese word meaning "Universe".


Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1915 showed the freedom in the local experience of space and time, is universally compensated for by an exact displacement of space and time through matter. This universal law of compensation is shown to be gravity resolving the freedom in space and time of each observer. The local view is relative, while the universe compensates for that local freedom. Gravity is synchronising all those local freedoms, so that everyone with their mass, has a unique space and time because of their relation to other masses. The universal law of matter is synchronising all the individual local freedoms in a unique way. Even though there is the local freedom of the observer, there is a unique way in which that local freedom is embodied so that everyone has a unique path relative to everyone else, which is gravitational attraction.
To understand this freedom of local reality better, we can take the example of empathy.
Empathy is the universal law that lets us address the freedom of the other, in a way that does not presume what the other is thinking. It is like gravity. It is a universal attitude or universal quality. When we are empathetic we feel that universality that lets us meet the other, allowing them their freedom. And that is very different from trying to impose our own view on the other in their difference, saying our view is right or to passively accept the view of another.
When we allow difference at a local level, we recognise the universal quality that synchronises all differences. It is not a synchronisation that fixes the other. It is a synchronisation that brings us into a certain kind of behaviour with respect to the other.
To take this analogy further I wonder whether the 2015 discovery of gravitational waves by the LIGO detector reporting the heavenly omen of a black hole merger 1.3 billion years ago, might be mirrored internally by an empathetic wave, across the globe. We become part of an experiment seeing alongside the unveiling of our outer universe in the record of darkness, the challenge of our inner nature, in a test of light. .
As the LIGO Observatory returns to operation in 2017, we all participate in the inner detection of empathetic waves. These detections are ripples on the constitutive basis of our nature, both in external and internal sense.
Between the news of dark forebodings, there begins to ripple through our global sensitivity another type of awareness, coming from of old. Do share with me your experience of this ripple of empathy?


Each zodiac sign is about 30 degrees long or you think of it as 30 feet long. In those 30 feet section you can cramp up to nine planets. Since there are 12 zodiac signs which are 30 degrees long, it equals to the sky around us 12 x Image In image one you see the zodiac sign of Aries which is 30 degree long, and in that zodiac sign you have two planets: Venus and Mars.
Each of those planets are standing at a certain position inside the zodiac sign of Aries.
The way you can tell exactly at what position they are standing at is by looking at their degrees. This way you can safely say that Venus is in the sign of Aries at 10 degrees while Mars is Aries at 15 degrees. Planets have been moving through these invisible sections of the sky for eons. If today all starts vanished from the sky, we can still detect which portion of the sky a planet is moving through, meaning which zodiac sign they are moving through.
Just because the Aries symbol is ram, which was drawn by using the pointers of the starts in the sky, doesn't mean that the meaning of Aries will vanish if that start patter was to disappear in from the sky tomorrow.
5 Tips For Surviving the 12222-2020 Saturn-Pluto Conjunction in Capricorn
Starts are not important when it comes to astrology. The only thing that is important is measurement of the sky where planets are traveling in.
They don't realize that start are just a way to separate those thirty degree section we called the 'zodiac belt'. Age of planet:. Infant: The infant stage of a planet is between the and degree. Any planet that has less than 1 degree in your horoscope is infant. That planet is like a little baby who sleeps all day and doesn't know exactly what's going on. Those planets tend to act without direction, without maturity and without sense. However, the infant planets wake up and mature up between the age of These planets will tend to keep people in regards to their significance and the houses they rule in your horoscope.
If Mars is infant in your horoscope and you have a Taurus ascendant, then Mars is ruling your 7th house of marriage and legal partnerships and 12th house of foreign lands, jail, hospitals, looses, hidden treasure and isolated places. If Mars is sitting in the sign of Cancer in the 3rd house with less than one degree position in your Taurus ascendant horoscope then it will do several things for you.see url
Astrology: The Opposition (Aspect)
Delays the marriage. Make sure lazy regarding your effects in life and regarding marriage. You will wander like a lost soul in regards to your siblings, higher learning and dealing with enemies. You can even go to jail due to your 'stupidity' or 'stupid action'. You will also have trouble keep a steady job, Why? First, Mars is in the 3rd house of siblings, courage and effort. Second, Mars from the 3rd house 'aspects' the 6th house of enemies, 9th house of long distance travel, higher learning and your teachers, also, Mars aspects the 10th house of career.
Third, Mars will make feel lazy towards religious beliefs, higher learning in school and long distant travel. Anytime you go to a distant land to visit or to stay, you will feel like a lost soul because Mars is infant and Mars represents energy and will power within you and since Mars is debilitated and is less than 1 degree, it's like a double edged sword. Although you might have a will power, it would be used in wrong action and wasteful actions. You will have abrupt and uncanny anger, and short temper.
Now, let's make an example out of infancy of Mars and conjunction. If let's say Mars in the 3rd house for Taurus ascendant is less than 1 degree, but, this time Venus is sitting in the 3rd house at 3 degrees with Mars, this make a 'close' conjunction between the two planets. This is just a small part from my upcoming book:. Conjunctions The Speed of Light. March 17th What are conjunction in astrology? Types of Conjunction Charging Army of Planets: Age of planet: What are Functional malefic and Functional Benefic?
Planetary friendship in conjunctions: What is a virtual conjunction? Retrograde planetary conjunctions: Let's start on conjunctions About The Sun: The orbs listed above are suggestions.
Of these types of division, some are more powerful, with more noticeable effects and are thus used more frequently by astrologers. The divisions by 5, 7, 9, 10 and 12 are not as influential as these other divisions and are called minor aspects.
What is Conjunction and Aspect in Astrology | Netchanting
The eighth-multiples, and even multiples of sixteenths, are used primarily only by a certain system of astrology called Uranian astrology, developed in the 20th Century by Germans. In the 21st Century, this is sometimes now called Symmetrical Astrology. It is very mathematical and uses very tight orbs for all aspects. There are some additional aspects not formed by dividing the circle by a whole number.
This is a little more important and more often used than the minor aspects. Some astrologers consider certain aspects to be easier to handle than others. Generally trines, quintiles, sextiles and semisextiles are considered to bring pleasant effects and conditions and are referred to as easy aspects while oppositions, squares, semisquares and sesquiquadrates are considered to bring unpleasant effects and conditions and are referred to as hard aspects.
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Here is how the parts of a chart get along when connected by the aspects [the brackets show the number degrees between the involved chart parts and the orb allowance for the aspect]. These are known as the Ptolemaic aspects, those favored by the prolific ancient Greek astrologer Ptolemy. More than two astrological objects may be involved in an aspect. For instance, two planets may be conjunct and both may be opposite and third. But say these three are square to a fourth. This is then an aspect pattern involving almost half the planets and is a focal point of the chart.
There are names for certain patterns. There is also a Grand Cross with two pairs of oppositions at right angles square to one another. An equilateral triangle is called a Grand Trine. Always look at the faster planet in relation to the slower one. The Moon is closest to earth and is thus the fastest of the heavenly bodies from our perspective. Another way of looking at aspects is to see if they occur in the first half of the phase relationship between the planets or in the second half.
When a faster moving planet passes a slower moving planet, they are conjunct. When the faster one gets halfway around the circle from the slower one, they are opposite. You are already familiar with the waxing and waning Moon. From the New Moon conjunction of the Moon to the Sun to the Full Moon opposition of the Moon to the Sun is the waxing phase, where the Moon appears to grow bigger and bigger. From the Full Moon back to the next New Moon is the waning phase, where the Moon appears to contract in size.
Any pair of planets can be considered in a similar fashion, although neither appears to change in size the way the Moon does in this example. On an interpretation level, we say that the energy exchange between the planets is slightly different in the waxing phase versus the waning phase.
There is a more subconscious or instinctual component to the waxing phase and a more conscious or informed component to the waning phase, since the opposition which divides the phases is thought to bring awareness or objectivity. Or we might say, the energy is increasing or growing during the waxing phase and decreasing or declining when waning.


LEADER TIMES WEEKEND RELIGION COLUMN FOR
January 28, 2017 by William H. Scarle, Jr. 813-835-0129
Within the past two months we lost two pioneering astronauts of the NASA space program. John Glenn passes away on December 8, 2016 and Eugene Cernan died on January 16, 2017. John Glenn was the first man to orbit the earth which he did three times aboard the Friendship 7 space craft in 1962. He was 42 years of age at the time and was not likely to be chosen to go to the moon. He resigned from NASA on January 16, 1964 to begin his political career.
Glenn was a man of deep religious conviction. Shortly after his historic orbit of the earth he preached a sermon entitled “Why I Know There Is a God.” In it he pointed out “the orderliness of the whole universe about us, from the smallest atomic structure to the most enormous thing we can imagine.” When he returned to space in 1996 at age 77 he remarked, “Looking at the earth from this vantage point, looking at this kind of creation and not to believe in God is, to me, impossible. To see [earth] laid out like that only strengthens my belief.”
Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon. He was born on August 5, 1930 and died on August 25, 1912 at 82 years of age. Armstrong visited Israel in 1994 and exclaimed that he was more excited walking in the steps of Jesus than he was walking on the moon. He asked his host, archaeologist Meir Ben Dov, if there was a place where Jesus would have undoubtedly have walked. Ben Dov was one of the excavators of the Temple Mount and suggested that Jesus would certainly have used the southern steps to the Temple in his many visits to Jerusalem. When they arrived at the southern staircase Armstrong knelt down and kissed the ground. The man who is more famous for the statement, “This is one small stem for man, one giant leap for mankind” was overcome with the emotion of the moment.
Buzz Aldrin accompanied Armstrong on the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969. He was born on January 20, 1930. He carried with him in special plastic packages the bread and wine for a communion service which he held on this first landing of man on the moon. He read from chapter 15 of John’s Gospel before taking the communion signifying Jesus’ dying for our sins upon the cross with the determination that the first words spoken on the moon would be the Word of God. Buzz had wanted to share his experience with the whole world at the time, but NASA was afraid of legal controversy and persuaded Buzz to switch off his radio during the ceremony.
Back in 1968 Aldrin was on Apollo 8 which was the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon. On Christmas Eve during the most watched television broadcast in the world at that time the crew took turns in reading from Genesis 1 the story of creation. The crew was made up of Buzz Aldrin, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman.
Buzz remarked concerning the communion service on the moon in 1969 that, “It was interesting for me to think the first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements.”
These are men of science who understand something very simple. I used to sing with the children when I was a Pastor, “Only God can make a flower,” or a universe.
(Bill Scarle can be contacted at firstname.lastname@example.org) END-whs


Tombaugh draws the diameters of Earth and Mars to illustrate the planets’ comparative sizes. Earth's diameter is 7900 miles against Mars diameter of 4215 miles. On his Mars diagram, Tombaugh draws what would seem to be his understanding of the pitted Martian surface. His observations of Mars led him to conclude that Mars had been hit by asteroids causing observable craters due to the planet's proximity to the asteroid belt. The Mariner 4 space probe affirmed his hypotheses. The astronomer best known for identifying Pluto has signed, "Clyde W . Tombaugh" in a bold hand. A fine, visually instructive illustration.
The asteroid 1604 Tombaugh discovered in 1931 is named after him. He discovered 14 asteroids, beginning with 2839 Annette in 1929, mostly as a byproduct of his search for Pluto and his further searches for other celestial objects.


The northern lights definition is - large areas of green, red, blue, or yellow light that sometimes appear in the night sky in far northern regions large areas of green, red, blue, or yellow light that sometimes appear in the night sky in far northern regions see the full definition. The northern lights can be elusive and there are a few factors you need to keep in mind when trying to witness this great natural phenomenon weather, season and location all matter and by taking them into account you can greatly increase you chance to see the auroras. Northern lights near wrangell-st elias national park spanning 132 million acres, this national park is the largest protected reserve in the united states. The basics of northern lights chasing go north in northern lapland the lights shine about every other clear night between september and march in southern finland they are visible on about 10-20 nights a year.
The kola peninsula’s proximity to the northern lights viewing zone also makes it a key area, and the town of murmansk is a popular base to stay in—if you can handle the below freezing. 2 2 yellowknife, canada yellowknife is the capital city of the northwest territory and is located about 250 miles south of the arctic circle famous for its gold and diamond mines, this city is also referred to as the “northern lights capital of the world. The northern lights are one of nature's great displays, a free, multicoloured light show that is most commonly seen in the arctic regions every performance is different, a beautiful, shifting. The northern lights in ireland – best places to view them it’s almost the best time of year again to watch the incredible light show that is the northern lights, but where in europe are the best places to catch them.
While the northern lights grab most of the attention, there is a chance to check out their southern sister, aurora australis the southern lights are the same in concept, but since there is less landmass in the far southern hemisphere, generally there are fewer places for viewing. 5 tips to see the northern lights getting a photo of the northern lights, aurora borealis, or most commonly referred to as holy smokes, what’s that in the sky, isn’t exactly easyfor starters, they’re largely unpredictable. 2 the northern lights are unpredictable in order to see the northern lights, you need a dark, clear night they are visible from late august to early april anytime during dark hours, which in places like abisko or tromsø can be nearly 24 hours a day in winter. For more information about the northern lights, read northern lights (aurora borealis) in iceland the lights are always there, but you can only see them when the sky is dark because of iceland's midnight sun during the summer, the time for northern lights is usually restricted to the winter months of september until april. The northern lights usually circle the globe in a circular or elliptical oval centered on the earth's north magnetic pole, which is not at the same location as the north geographic pole, but rather is slightly offset in the direction of northern canadathis oval is known as the aurora oval.
The northern lights is the tale of one man's quest or obsession, if you will, to discover the cause of the eerie visual phenomenon of the title kristian birkeland was a man who was more than a good fifty years ahead of his time,. The northern lights (aurora borealis) are a beautiful and mysterious force of nature, but what causes them subscribe - new vids mon & thurs: . The northern lights are present within the northern lights oval around the clock and throughout the year however, during the day and on bright summer nights under the midnight sun, it’s too light to see them. Best time to see the northern lights in iceland northern lights are visible in iceland for about eights months a year, from the early september to late april.
The regions where you have the most chance of seeing the northern lights are at a latitude of 66 to 69 degrees north -- a sliver of the world that includes northern alaska and canada and bits of. The northern lights, or the aurora borealis, is a spectacular natural phenomenon that amazes even the most critical viewer. This northern lights tour is disappointing, annoying and should definitively be avoided we spent 3 wonderful days in tromso and appreciated the landscapes and the activities above all, we loved the fishing experience with kenneth and jack (polar fishing experience, which i highly recommend) and.
The aurora borealis – otherwise known as the northern lights – is a vivid demonstration of the earth's magnetic field interacting with charged particles from the sun. Northern norway is a land of wide open spaces and little light pollution offering superb opportunities for seekers of the northern lights board the famous hurtigruten for a northern lights coastal cruise. An aurora (plural: auroras or aurorae), sometimes referred to as polar lights, northern lights (aurora borealis) or southern lights (aurora australis), is a natural light display in the earth's sky, predominantly seen in the high-latitude regions (around the arctic and antarctic. The northern lights seen on the 3rd of march, 451 were connected to the historic defeat of attila at chalons-sur-marne, in what is now france often, the blood of martyrs flowing up into the sky was seen in the northern lights.


As the two countries jockey for economic, technological, geopolitical and even ideological superiority on Earth, space has become a natural extension — and crucial frontier — in their great power competition.
And due to the inherent dual-use nature of space technologies, what’s at stake extends far beyond mere scientific prestige and global standing. In addition to national defence, so much of our life on Earth — from digital communications to navigation — depends on satellites in space.
That particular breakthrough prompted NASA’s new administrator Bill Nelson to warn against American complacency in face of China’s space ambitions.
Despite its advancements, China’s space technology still lags behind the US. But China’s space program is flush with political and monetary support from the ruling Communist Party, which views its success as a key measure of its intentional standing and domestic legitimacy.
That exclusion has at least in part spurred Beijing to build its own space station, the Tiangong, which is expected to be completed by the end of next year — two years before the ISS is scheduled to be decommissioned in 2024.
If the US and its international partners do not decide to extend the ISS’s operational life, China’s Tiangong space station may soon become the only crewed outpost in orbit — one that NASA astronauts are barred from joining by US law.
While the ISS was primarily a US-Russian venture born out of the ashes of the Cold War, China’s Tiangong is being built amid talks of a new Cold War. And it is likely that in the years to come, alliances in space will increasingly mirror the geopolitical lines on Earth.
Neither China nor Russia is a signatory.


The Yodh Prize recognizes a scientist whose research career has had
a major impact on the understanding of cosmic rays. It was endowed by
Gaurang and Kanwal Yodh to the University of California Irvine
Foundation in 1998.
The recipient is selected by an international committee of
distinguished scientists in the field of cosmic rays and astroparticle
physics. The award is administered through the Commission on
Astroparticle Physics of the International
Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and is presented every
two years at the International Cosmic Ray Conference. In addition,
the prize winner presents a Colloquium to the Department of Physics and
Astronomy at UC Irvine.
Further information is available through the links above.


|Divine Designer Concept - An Ideal Before Its Time|
Main Page >> Divine Designer
In an attempt to offer proof for the existence of God, Thomas Aquinas developed a systematic theoretical approach. This rational argument, known as the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God, looks at the complexity of nature and being and concludes that a deity known as the Prime Mover, First Cause, and Divine Designer is responsible for the existence of the universe.
If something is finite, it has a beginning. Because of the universal law of causation, we know that in order for something finite to have its beginning, something had to be there to do the starting. In our physical realm, we see evidence of finite existence all around us. The universe started from a single point and is expanding. Much of what was there in the beginning has decayed. Our earth will someday be destroyed when the Sun explodes. If the sun doesn't explode, but instead loses its ability to provide the necessary level of heat earth requires for life, then the earth will freeze over and life on earth will likely cease to exist. The start-to-end path of finitude is an absolute. We have not seen evidence in the physical realm of anything that defeats this trend.
Since the universe appears to have a beginning (Big Bang), the mystery is what was it that provided the starting of the Big Bang? If something else finite was identified as the starter, then that finite object would have to have a starter as well, and if that starter was finite...and so on. This is what is known as infinite regression. It is an endless series of finite events being started by finite objects.
Some scientists believe that until technology is more advanced, we will just have to maintain as a mystery that which existed prior to the Big Bang; hence, the starter. But some scientists, philosophers, and theologians hold to the theory that something infinite must have started the Big Bang.
Without any knowledge of the Big Bang, Thomas Aquinas defined this Infinite Starter as though Aquinas was familiar with the Big Bang. Aquinas stated that a Primer Mover put things into motion, a First Cause is responsible for the initial causation, and as contingent beings, there must be a Necessary Being.
Aquinas took it a step further in an attempt to show that our existence has a personal touch. He argued that complexity of our reality demonstrates purposive design, and thus labeled God as the Divine Designer. This is known as the Teleological Argument or Design Argument for the existence of God. Aquinas stated that purposive design could not have occurred by accident.
Today, advanced scientific technology, theoretical physics, chemistry, and biology have uncovered a more detailed understanding of our existence. To some people, these details result in the Anthropic Principle: an understanding that the successive stages that led to life faced extreme odds, and these odds could not have been overcome naturally. Thus, a Divine Designer was responsible for the incredible complexity of nature and life.
For more on the Anthropic Principle, read the article entitled Anthropic Assessments.
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