Large Hardon Collider

[Mizango]

Hell yeah.

[Eliseos]

Miz, your picture is obviously fake. It has no Britney Spears in it.

[Kaelan?]

Hey Woozie, I wasnt sure if you were going to be on FB later or on Yahoo, but I figured you'd check this thread first. Since I know you like neat pictures like this I figured I'd share it and for anyone else that wants it

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y15...tenedlarge.jpg

Fucking amazing.

[Eliseos]

Raising with

Spoiler: show

http://britneyspears.ac/wallpaper/bswp005_1024x768.jpg

http://britneyspears.ac/wallpaper/bswp005_1024x768.htm

[Pirian]

One of these things is not like the other! Hmm....

[Mizango]

lol Eliseos

[Acturus]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...tory?track=rss

Distant planets' orbits rattle theories
Some planets are observed circling stars in the opposite direction from the stars' spin, calling into question beliefs about the formation of solar systems.

By Thomas H. Maugh II
April 14, 2010


Some highly unusual planets orbiting other stars are calling into question theories about how solar systems are formed and suggesting that more complex theories must be developed.

European researchers reported Tuesday that some of the recently observed extrasolar planets are revolving around their stars in the opposite direction from the stars' spin.

That finding is inconsistent with the view that planets are formed by the condensation of dust from a disk surrounding a newly formed star.

Some other planets were found to have highly tilted orbits that are also at odds with conventional theory.

The findings also suggest that planets with such eccentric orbits would destroy any smaller, rocky planets, eliminating the chance that an Earth-like planet could be orbiting around that same star.

"This is a real bomb we are dropping into the field of exoplanets," astronomer Amaury Triaud of the Geneva Observatory, one of the authors of the report, said in a statement.

The new results imply that at least some of these massive planets, known as hot Jupiters because they orbit close to their suns, must reach their final orbits not through the familiar process of accumulation of dust, "but rather through the much more dramatic and exciting process of gravitational billiards," astronomer Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington said in an e-mail.

In such a billiards scenario, close encounters between planets orbiting the star would result in some planets getting sling-shotted into highly eccentric orbits, in some cases even backward (or retrograde) ones.

"The real excitement here is what it says about planetary migration," Boss said.

Added astronomer William J. Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, "What's wonderful is that we can measure the direction of the orbit and compare it to the spin of the star. It's something brand new, that we are able to do this."

The results were reported at a Glasgow meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society by astronomer Andrew Cameron of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

His team identified nine new extrasolar planets using the Wide Angle Search for Planets project at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, which monitors millions of stars looking for sudden diminution of light intensity indicating that a planet has passed in front of them. That brings the total extrasolar planets observed so far to 452.

The team then used a combination of other telescopes to determine the orbital tilt and direction of these and 18 other recently discovered planets, all of them hot Jupiters.

They found that more than half of the planets had orbits that were misaligned with the rotation axis of their parent stars. Six of them had retrograde, or backward, orbits.

Conventional theory is that a newly formed star and its dust disk rotate in the same direction. As planets are condensed from the dust, they should continue to orbit in that direction. That these are not suggests that other forces are coming into play.

One possibility, Cameron suggested, is that the massive planets are being tugged at by more distant massive planets or companion stars that pull them into tilted or elongated orbits. Over millions of years, such tidal friction would pull them into a near circular but randomly tilted orbit, even one that is retrograde.

A dramatic side effect of this process is that it would wipe out any smaller, Earth-like planets in the system, either absorbing them into their own mass or sling-shotting them into the far reaches of the solar system.

Two of the retrograde planets have already been found to have more distant massive companions, supporting this possibility, Cameron said.

"We don't see this in our solar system, suggesting that there were different physical forces at work here," Borucki said. "Our planetary system is different. We may not be alone, but there are certainly a lot of other systems out there that are quite different from ours."

thomas.maugh@ latimes.com


Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

I want to start a band and name it Gravitational Billiards.

[Eliseos]

Satan made those planets orbit the wrong way.

[Kryssan]

Satan made those planets orbit the wrong way.

I'd be more inclined to believe it was due to scientists naming the stars after the non-Christian deities. After all, you can't very well be a heavenly body and not named after Christ, right?



Edit: Also~


Washington State Sues over Yucca Mountain.

Oh my.


Crossposted:

Washington State - home of the Hanford nuclear weapons development site - has filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Energy (DoE) to prevent it abandoning plans for the Yucca Mountain radioactive waste repository in Nevada.

Attorney General Rob McKenna announced that Washington has filed suit in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to prevent the DoE from "irrevocably terminating the Yucca Mountain radioactive waste repository by withdrawing 'with prejudice' its licence application for the repository."

In its lawsuit, Washington claims that the DoE's decision to "irrevocably terminate the Yucca Mountain project in favour of an unknown and yet-to-be identified alternative" violates the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.

Washington is requesting that the Court of Appeals issues a permanent injunction requiring DoE to continue to fulfil its obligations with respect to the Yucca Mountain project and prohibiting the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) from hearing or granting the DoE's motion to withdraw its licence application.
In February 2009, the Obama administration announced that funding for the Yucca Mountain project had been reduced to all but zero and that a new plan for the disposal of the country's used nuclear fuel and high-level waste would be developed. The project came to an official halt on 3 March 2010 when the DoE filed a motion with the NRC to withdraw the application to build and operate Yucca Mountain.

Washington's lawsuit follows its motion to intervene in the licensing proceeding before the NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB). Last week, the NRC issued an order putting the licensing proceeding on hold until three similar cases already filed in the appeals court are resolved.

In a separate motion, Washington State has also requested a preliminary injunction to prevent DoE from taking any further action to terminate or dismantle operations at Yucca Mountain until the court has an opportunity to rule on the merits of the state's lawsuit.

The Hanford site has been in use since 1943: First as part of the Manhattan Project that created the world's first nuclear weapons, then as a nine-reactor plutonium production complex throughout the Cold War period. There was also some research into peaceful uses of nuclear energy. One result of this program of work has been almost 241 million litres of liquid radioactive and chemical waste. This is stored in 177 large underground tanks, 149 of which are 42 years beyond their expected 25-year design life.

In a statement, McKenna's office said that the $12.3 billion Waste Treatment Plant at Hanford continues to be designed and constructed to meet standards specific to the Yucca Mountain facility. Design and engineering of the plant is 78% complete and construction is 48% complete, it noted.

"In a worst-case scenario, termination of the Yucca Mountain repository could result in the need to tear down and rebuild portions of the plant to implement design and engineering changes to meet another repository's waste acceptance criteria," the statement said. "This would result in significant costs and delays in Hanford's entire tank waste clean-up mission."

McKenna commented: "The people of the Tri-Cities did their part to help our country fight World War II and the Cold War - and the federal government should honour that sacrifice." He added, "The Department of Energy's move to permanently remove Yucca Mountain as a potential nuclear waste repository - with no identified alternative - significantly sets back cleanup at Hanford and puts our people and our environment at risk."

"In taking this legal action, we continue to staunchly defend the interests of Washington in retaining a potential repository for the millions of gallons of high-level radioactive waste our state currently houses," McKenna noted. "DoE simply does not have the authority to unilaterally and forever terminate the Yucca Mountain project with no alternatives and no valid reason."

Earlier this month, sixteen electricity utilities, together with US nuclear industry organisation the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), filed a lawsuit against the DoE seeking a suspension of payments into the country's nuclear waste fund. The suit followed a similar one filed days before by the National Association of Utility Regulators (NARUC).

[Woozie]

What's funny about star and solar system formation is how little we truly know for sure.

We see models of star formation, life cycles, and death in magazines, books, and even elementary school. It always appears that they have everything down pact. Like we got everything down to a science.

In reality, virtually every model we have of star formation/solar system formation is based on simplifying assumptions and idealizations that will almost never occur in nature. We have some ideas on how stars should form in the non-ideal situations, but most of these haven't been demonstrated by computer models or empirical observations (yet). In other words, we don't actually have a model of how stars form in the real world. Only on how they could form in ideal worlds.

I actually just found this out a few years ago. I thought we knew a lot about stars, but we really don't, not even the relatively simple stuff. The explanations for star formation are so easy to find and explained in so much detail that it gives the impression that we actually know what we're talking about. But we don't. We're not even that sure on what causes gravitational collapse. Some models use nearby stars or supernovas, some use other methods. There are observations that point in each direction, but we don't have any models that are conclusive and that we're absolutely sure about.

There was actually an article on this in NewScientist a few months ago. If anyone's interested, I'll see if I can find it and provide a link.

That article (Acturus') is an example of how inadequete our models are. I personally blame Miz. You're the astrophysicist, stop slacking and get on your job.

[Acturus]

There was actually an article on this in NewScientist a few months ago. If anyone's interested, I'll see if I can find it and provide a link.

If you stumble across that link, I'd be interested in reading.

And I agree with what you're saying, it's like science just started using placeholder words and ideas with the promise of "oh hey, I'll come back to this", but if it doesn't get re-visited quickly, it all of a sudden becomes fact, and gets printed for the next generation to read and believe that what we know right now is all there is to it.

[Max™]

There is a bit of news on that front actually, though I don't understand any of it.

http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/first.htm

http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media...2005-22b.shtml

More fun stuff from spitzer: http://gallery.spitzer.caltech.edu/I...nomical_Images

Some more work from simulations: http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2008/pr200814.html

The universe began with the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago. Very soon after that event, the first stars formed. Today, those stars are dead and gone leaving little evidence of their size and composition behind. Now, a new computer simulation now offers the most detailed picture yet of how these first stars came into existence. These findings will be published by the journal Science on Friday, 1 August. The composition of the early universe was quite different from that of today, and the physics that governed the early universe were also somewhat simpler. Dr. Naoki Yoshida, Nagoya University in Nagoya, Japan and co-author Dr. Lars Hernquist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA, incorporated these conditions of the early universe, sometimes referred to as the "cosmic dark ages," to simulate the formation of an astronomical object that would eventually shine as a star.

According to their simulations, gravity acted on minute density variations in matter, gases, and the mysterious "dark matter" of the universe after the Big Bang in order to form the early stages of a star called a protostar. With a mass of just one percent of our Sun, Dr. Yoshida's simulation also shows that the protostar would likely evolve into a massive star capable of synthesizing heavy elements, not just in later generations of stars, but soon after the Big Bang. These stars would have been up to one hundred times as massive as our Sun and would have burned for no more than one million years. "This general picture of star formation, and the ability to compare how stellar objects form in different time periods and regions of the universe, will eventually allow investigation in the origins of life and planets," said Hernquist.
"The abundance of elements in the Universe has increased as stars have accumulated," he says, "and the formation and destruction of stars continues to spread these elements further across the Universe. So when you think about it, all of the elements in our bodies originally formed from nuclear reactions in the centers of stars, long ago." Their simulation of the birth of a protostar in the early universe signifies a key step toward the ambitious goal of piecing together the formation of an entire primordial star and of predicting the mass and properties of these first stars of the universe. More powerful computers, more physical data, and an even larger range will be needed for further calculations and simulations, but these researchers hope to eventually extend this simulation to the point of nuclear reaction initiation – when a stellar object becomes a true star. "Dr. Yoshida has taken the study of primordial star formation to a new level with this simulation, but it still gets us only to the halfway point towards our final goal. It is like laying the foundation of a skyscraper," said Volker Bromm, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin and the author of a companion article. "We must continue our studies in this area to understand how the initially tiny protostar grows, layer by layer, to eventually form a massive star. But here, the physics become much more complicated and even more computational resources are needed."

Edit: I read "star formation" and jumped to the conclusion that Woozie was referring to the problem of population III star formation, i.e. the initial bunch of huge non-metallic stars in the Universe.

Though I see he was not just talking about those, it is still neat as hell to sift through the Spitzer pics, so I'll leave it.


http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/i...-large_web.jpg

[Woozie]

If you stumble across that link, I'd be interested in reading.

And I agree with what you're saying, it's like science just started using placeholder words and ideas with the promise of "oh hey, I'll come back to this", but if it doesn't get re-visited quickly, it all of a sudden becomes fact, and gets printed for the next generation to read and believe that what we know right now is all there is to it.

Well, the situation probably isn't quite as bad as with some other areas of science. For example, the model of the atom we learn in high school is so grossly inaccurate that I want to go back in time and punch my teachers. At least with star formation, our basic ideas are (probably) at least somewhat accurate.

I don't know if it was just me though. Did everyone else learn that electrons orbit the nucleus like small planets around the sun in high school? Or were my teachers just idiots?

Edit: Well it wouldn't be the teachers who were idiots. That's actually what the textbooks said too. We even saw science videos and animations with little balls floating around the nucleus.

[Max™]

Hell yeah man, the Bohr shit was great!

http://knowledgepublications.com/doe...f_the_Atom.gif

Not that I learned any of this.

[Woozie]

Edit: I read "star formation" and jumped to the conclusion that Woozie was referring to the problem of population III star formation, i.e. the initial bunch of huge non-metallic stars in the Universe.

The article I'm referring to in NewScientist does specifically address this issue. I can't seem to find it though. I think I still have it on my computer at home. If I don't post it within the next few minutes, I'll have it up either tonight, or tomorrow afternoon.

Edit: I thought it was NewScientist, but maybe it was this

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...hance-of-stars

I'll check when I get home to see if that's the article. If so, you can download this issue of SciAm from demonoid.

Edit: Also, the pic you posted, Max, seems to at least take into account the quantum behavior of electrons to some extent (energy levels, etc). It's reasonably accurate for some of the aspects of the hydrogen atom (though it fails horribly in any other situation). No one even talked about energy levels for my entire high school career. I didn't learn this until I read it on my own. Most people around here still don't know.

[Max™]

Oh, I know the article... uhhh...

Talking about how compression type waves move through galactic arms and set off star formation I think?

[Woozie]

That was one of the things mentioned, but there was a competing theory that was mentioned too.

Edit: Wait, no, the waves they mentioned that set off gravitational collapse came from nearby supernovas, I think.

Edit: Here's another somewhat relevant article, but this time more about star death than birth.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...me-forgot.html

[Max™]

Nice, pair-instability, I missed the article about finding one.

No one even talked about energy levels for my entire high school career. I didn't learn this until I read it on my own. Most people around here still don't know.

>.<

My brain hurts.

[Purrrfect]

Dunno if anyone has seen this, but I just stumbled upon it.
http://primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale_of_universe.swf

[Eliseos]

Edit: Also, the pic you posted, Max, seems to at least take into account the quantum behavior of electrons to some extent (energy levels, etc). It's reasonably accurate for some of the aspects of the hydrogen atom (though it fails horribly in any other situation). No one even talked about energy levels for my entire high school career. I didn't learn this until I read it on my own. Most people around here still don't know.

Didn't learn about energy levels (in a class, anyway) until my modern physics class last semester. All through high school it was the planetary orbit model.