Arquivo para a ‘Astronomia’ Categoria
There are forces that can change the course of catastrophe
27
Jan
The idea of some imminent catastrophe to happen is in the air, it’s
not just apocalyptics, but natural scientists who see planetary depletion (glaciers, species extinction, climate change, earthquakes, etc.), political scientists about the ideological tension that returns remembering the cold war, and it would be possible to avoid or at least have a positive reaction to it, the pandemic looks like it was a training and the rehearsal doesn’t look good.
One of the recent mysterious discoveries made by astronomers is that an object in our “galactic backyard”, which means at 4 thousand light years, a space object was found, as being a neutral star or white dwarf are only hypotheses, in which this object produces powerful beams of energy, the strange object (pictured) launches the beam of powerful energy that crosses the line of sight of the earth observed by astronomers and published in the journal Nature (see in ICRAR), are something unusual in space observations.
Natasha Hurley-Walker, from Curtin University’s International Center for Radio Astronomy Research, leads the team that made the discovery and stated: “This object was appearing and disappearing for hours in our observation…. It was kind of scary for an astronomer because there is nothing known in the sky that does that.”
There are also powerful forces that act in our midst, it is not just about cheap exploitations of prayers or positive feeling that can lead to the improvement of an environment and people, a set of words and actions taken in a positive direction for a given problem can and should able to resolve or change situations where the problem or conditions are great.
In addition to the pandemic, which some want to decree the end as if it were that simple, we have the tension of an imminent war, and we should have no doubt that all people who can speak, ask, meditate or pray that an atrocity of this size does not occur. they must do it, in war only civilians, the poor and the weakest who suffer, there is no palpable or healthy solution that comes from provoked catastrophes.
Mysterious object unlike anything astronomers have seen before – ICRAR
James Webb arrives at his destination
25
Jan
Exactly one month ago, the new James Webb Space Telescope
observatory (JWST Nasa) arrived yesterday at 17:00 (Brasília time) in a region where with a minimum of fuel consumption he will be able to remain in orbit, called the Lagrange L2 point, which is actually a region between the Earth and the Sun where the centripetal (attractive) force is balanced with a centrifugal force.
In fact, they are regions and therefore called orbital islands, every planet in the solar system has Lagrange Points and as they move away from the Sun these islands are larger, the island related to the earth is about 800,000 km wide, the which in spatial terms is small, the point L2 for example is 5 million km from Earth and still very far from Mars, 57.6 million is the distance from our neighboring planet.
The observations will still take 5 months to calibrate all equipment, adjust the mirror and aim for the first targets.
Now it will be 5 months of work for Webb to send the first images on his “targets in the infrared universe”, he will not look for exoplanets or new points, but point to known points and make measurements more precise and with greater definition, Webb’s mirrors ( hexagonal) that should have a complicated and fine adjustment will have up to 5 times the power of Hubble’s mirrors, in addition to using a more sophisticated technology that is infrared, where you can “see” by observing the light strongly “deflected to the red” of distant objects and can peer through clouds of murky dust, it will be able to sift through exoplanet atmospheres identifying gases with greater precision.
More than 1,000 teams of astronomers from around the world have requested time on the Webb in its first year and 287 have already been lucky enough to be pioneers, among the questions from these teams are looking at the ice-covered oceans on Uranus’ 27 moons, the icy giants Uranus. and Neptune can explain much of the origin of galactic systems, look at black holes that are of average size and resolve conflicting measurements on the rate of expansion of the universe and generally speaking will use Webb for two dominant themes: time and distance between opposite extremes in the universe. universe: the early universe and the closest planetary systems and their dilemmas.
In addition to these great themes, a topic that arouses curiosity, although it is due to a childish aspect of aliens, is what is called biosignature, that is, real conditions of life, which in fact do not find “beings” but the conditions of past or future existence. of them are: gaseous, direct or indirect products of the metabolism of living beings, of surface, of spectral results resulting from the radiation reflected by organisms, and, temporal, which are responses related to seasonal changes in the biosphere where there is, for example, diurnal and nocturnal variation of CO2, some biosignatures can be found, beings are still left to the imagination, it is clear that some biological form can exist in such an infinite space of probabilities.
Christmas gift
24
Dec
In December 1947, right around Christmas, three Bell Telephone
engineers (William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain) invented the transistor (TRANsfer reSISTOR) that revolutionary communication and later computing, also ICs (Integrated Circuits) have as a base the transitor.
The big event this Christmas will be the launch of the James Webb Space Observatory (jwst, James Webb Space Telescope) from the Kourou space base, in French Guiana, at 9:20 am EDT, which will be taken to the Ariane 5 spacecraft. made at the cost of $10 billion, the most expensive space project in history.
What are we going to look for in space, in addition to other puzzles, the origin of the universe in its early stage, and it’s curious why this happens this Christmas, and why it is so special.
Lights decorate cities even in attention with a possible new wave of the pandemic and also a new flu, they light up hope and make us look to the future and to the beginning of our lives, our planet and humanity.
There is no way to escape from utopians, cosmogonies and religious eschatologies, even if we can solve many enigmas, the philosophical question remains: why there is everything and not nothing.
The answer can only be ontological, there is a reason for being and there is a promising future, where there is hope if we return to the logic of Being, of dialogue and of the encounter with the Other.
The message cannot be any other than that which speaks of brotherhood and peace, both not yet fully achieved by humanity, Christmas reopens this hope.
This is the prophecy that Isaiah announces (Is 52,7 when there will be true peace: “how beautiful they are, walking on the mountains, the feet of him who proclaim and preach peace, of him who proclaims good and preaches salvation, and says to Zion, ‘Reign thy God,’” the message that believed in the coming of the Savior, the birth among men of the Messiah.
The lights in the city not only announce this light visible to the eyes, but those that open the heart to friendship and peace (Jn 1:4-5): “in her was life, and life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it”, because a tiny point of light already dissipates the darkness, and this is our hope.
May Christmas renew hopes for a possible and sustainable future for humanity, and may justice and peace reign in a new world.
Black holes and discoveries
16
Dec
Black holes don’t “suck” all the matter around them, and the latest
observations prove that several bodies escape their very strong gravitational field, a region where a singularity point occurs, a name given in physics and mathematics for points of curves and events Physicists that some trend changes, for example, it is speculated that artificial intelligence may surpass human intelligence, which would bring about an irreversible change in human civilization.
Black holes, according to English physicist Stephen Hawking (from the Big Bang and the Theory of Everything), emit thermal radiation due to quantum effects and a special type of radiation that became known as Hawking radiation, as we have already pointed out in the blog, are the final stage of supermassive stars.
An observation made in 2013 proved this theory, and it was published by researchers at Cornell University (we did a post), but the observation of a black hole was only possible in 2019, thanks to an internationally collaborative experiment known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT ), which captured the first image of a black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy, photographed in the heart of the Centaurus A galaxy in unprecedented detail (pictured).
In a black hole, space and time fold in on themselves, the laws (which we know) of physics that apply to most of our universe don’t seem to work there, its edge as we’ve said is called the event horizon, and a Spinning black holes can reach temperatures in excess of 20 million °C, the accretion disk in a quasar releases blinding radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
The accretion disk refers to an accumulation of material on the “surface” (one must remember that the notion of time and space here is different), and this works as if it were a very efficient engine, in the view of French astrophysicist Marta Volonteri , from the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, black holes “are the most efficient and efficient engines in the universe”.
The mystery is what exists beyond black holes, one of the two most acceptable hypotheses is the one developed, in 1935, by Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen to theorize bridges that connect two different points in space-time, and in 1980, the physicist Kip Thorne hypothesized that physical objects could travel through, something like the fourth dimension “wormholes” (wormholes), but different because they are seen in certain positions (space-time) of space.
The other hypothesis is called the “black hole firewall”, it would be like a kind of fire barrier, where the event horizon would burn anything that comes into contact immediately, this hypothesis lacks both theoretical and observational proofs, they were recently observed objects that exit or escape black holes.
The last hypothesis, the least likely of all, is called a white hole, where each white hole would have been in contact with another in the past, and was formulated by Russian cosmologist Igor Novikok in 1964, it lacks observations and some plausible fact.
The Leonard Christmas Comet
15
Dec
Discovered January of this year by astronomer G.J. Leonard
of the University of Arizona from the Mount Lemmon Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, the small celestial body Comet Leonard has an orbital period of 80,000 years, and has been seen in the northern hemisphere as it approaches Earth, and will now be seen in the coming weeks from the 15th in the southern hemisphere.
Technically called C/2021, it is reversing its visibility position from the north to the south of the planet, so residents of the southern hemisphere will be able to see it, albeit small.
The closest approach distance to the Earth was 34 million kilometers on December 12th, now it heads towards the Sun, on December 18th it will already be close to Venus, at 42 million kilometers and it will orbit the sun on January 3rd 2022, at a distance of 90 million km, these distances are small in spatial terms, but due to its size it will be seen as a weak point until then, with a telescope and knowing its orbit it will be easier to see it.
The comet travels at a speed of 70 km/s, and despite the expectations being very good, it is necessary to remember that it will be closer and closer to the Sun and brings the possibility of losing strength, in general they are unpredictable and the closer to the Sun the more they can lose how to increase their brightness, so how bright their tail will be in our hemisphere is not quite certain, in the northern hemisphere observation was made more easily with the help of instruments, even a small telescope.
The observations made so far there has been an increase in luminosity due to a phenomenon known as frontal scattering, dust particles ejected from the comet cause a refraction of light, when the angle between the comet in relation to the Earth and the Sun is very large (larger than 160º), as its trajectory is perpendicular to the earth, this will be happening these days from December 14th and 16th, but the scattering depends on the size of the particles and of course, if the sky is clear, in southern Brazil there are rains at this time.
Unlike comet Neowise, which was brightest in the northern hemisphere in 2020, this time Leonard will be more visible in the southern hemisphere, being visible on the horizon, each night from today it will be more visible further up towards the planet Venus ( incorrectly called the Dalva Star), and it will be more visible longer until the 18th because appearing later the sky will be darker.
You need to look for a place with good visibility, low local light and open skies, and look to the west horizon, until January 3rd when the sun approaches and it will start to get weak.
URGENT: Launch of James Webb Space Telescope postponed to 12/24.
The new space telescope observer
14
Dec
T
he Hubble telescope, named after Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953) is already showing signs of aging, has recently been repaired again and is back in service, named after Hubble’s intergalactic and extragalactic measurements and demonstrating that many objects once considered clouds of dust and gas, were actually galaxies far beyond our own Milky Way, now another more powerful telescope will honor a former NASA administrator of the Apollo project: James Edwin Webb.
The name was embroiled in controversy, but NASA findings did not attest to the veracity of the facts, the telescope was built with the participation of the Canadian Space Agency and the European Space Agency, in addition to NASA, of course, and its launch is scheduled for the 22nd of December 2021, next week, and may be followed live on a youtube channel (James Webb Space Telescope Launch — Official NASA Broadcast – YouTube).
Much more powerful than Hubble, the larger mission of the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) will be to investigate the origins of the universe, most clearly infrared radiation, which resulted from the original great expansion (Big Bang) and the transformation processes of the Universe’s childhood , but its power and instruments will allow you to see very far.
This way you will be able to observe the evolution and formation of galaxies, there is already a mapping of galaxies in formation and so it will only be necessary to adjust the position, understand the formation of stars and planetary systems. and finally, study the planetary and life origins.
It is made up of three main modules: Integrated Science Instrument Modele (ISIM), it contains powerful infrared instruments and microprocessor circuits, the Optical Telescope Element (OTE), a complex optical system built by Ball Aerospace, and the Space Support Module (SSM) which supports JWST navigation and spatial support.
The expectation that once in orbit the Telescope will send thousands of data daily, and soon we will have puzzles and probably new discoveries before the end of the year, the launch has already been delayed a few times, but now the date seems to be close.
URGENT: Launch of James Webb Space Telescope postponed to 12/24.
New paths and new christmas
10
Dec
Man has gone through many historical stages, each with its 
drama and its mystique, like the one revealed in the Neolithic monument Stonehenge (photo).
The times of pandemic made us more withdrawn both in the proximity of family members and in the interior life (which Western thought calls subjectivity), but where are we heading, what kind of Christmas this year will be, the end-of-the-year festivities we already know by the new pandemic wave will be reduced.
Anyway, we celebrate a passage, whether for Christians waiting for the parousia (the first two weeks) or from here to Christmas the intervention of God in history through the birth of the God-child in Bethlehem, which is gradually being erased from the party and replaced by consumerism, snow and other rites alien to the historical fact.
Yes historical, because Mary and Joseph go to Bethlehem precisely for a census, that is, to be counted among men and registered they should go to Joseph’s hometown and by a whim and divine care Jesus is born and is already registered among men, this is therefore not symbolic, but recorded historical data.
What to expect this Christmas, the atmosphere of “party” is reduced, we are still involved with the pandemic, there is a climate of apprehension and already a certain discouragement, for some it involves anxiety and some kind of anguish, nothing better than believing in a New weather, the popular saying goes: after the storm comes the calm, it will come.
Perhaps not as we expected, for example, a huge euphoria or an explosion of joy, but the feeling that we must rebuild life with struggle and behind the rubble, the Christmas season at its root is this, something divine intervened in human history to change it forever, it is certain that they want to erase Christmas and with it the hope of a new world, however precisely because of the suffering we have been through, we do not know how long it can last and how far it can go, it is a harbinger of a new time, a calm.
John the Baptist, who was Jesus’ cousin, baptized people with water (Baptist because of this), and the people thought he was the Messiah, but he explained that the type of baptism that would make Jesus would be much stronger: “He will baptize you in Holy Spirit and on fire. He will come with a shovel in his hand: he will clean his threshing floor and gather the wheat in the barn, but he will burn the straw in the photo that does not go out” says the evangelist Luke (Lk 3,16-18) and John “proclaimed a lot other ways” the Good News.
We can expect this in the near future, certainly yes, there is also this expectation in our theme, in many ways, and it will certainly be something unpredictable
Universe mysteries and universal forces
25
Nov
When Einstein formulated the Theory of General Relativity, two
big “holes” remained in his theory, one he recognized as wormholes, paths in a space-time dimension in which there could be spaces, from a mathematical point of view, of immense gravity in which everything “disappeared” and another unrecognized one was the formulation of quanta as a dimension between time and space where there is a third hypothesis between matter and non-matter, the “quanta”.
According to physicist Jim Al-Khalili “He devised a new theory about the entire Universe, in which he also said that when stars collapse they form black holes”, and that at that time he believed they were just mathematical hypotheses, necessary to close the account, but “that they didn’t exist, that they were just products of mathematics”, but it was something that bothered him said Al-Khalili in the BBC interview.
The quantum issue was a state called entanglement, today called quantum entanglement, a state of the particle where there was a collapse of the wave function, and thus, the actual existence of the particle was in an “adjacent” reality which is precisely the entanglement, Einstein, Poldoski and Rosen wrote an article that by their names was called EPR in which they said that the particle was always present and rejected the hypothesis of a “third state”, which was later proved.
Black holes not only exist, but pictures have already been taken (a famous one was published in April 2019), which are actually made by algorithms that map the magnetic effects around it, and thus build an image, it is now known that they are numerous and even some exist within our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Universal forces are increasingly arousing curiosity and also fear, a large comet was recently discovered and was named after the Brazilian Bernardinelli who were doing a doctorate in cosmology in the US, called Bernardinelli-Bernstein (C/2014-UN271) 150 km in diameter and can be seen in 2031, but they are the meteors that populate the imagination of the apocalyptic on duty, they are numerous and unpredictable, some are discovered moments before passing close to our planet.
NASA started a test mission in an attempt to redirect asteroids, the project called Dart (Double Asteroid Redirect Test) will try to send a small spacecraft to collide against Dimorphos, “moon” of the asteroid Didymos, in an attempt to change its route, does not represent danger to the planet, so this is just a test.
The universe is mysterious, we still know little about it, 68% is made of dark energy (picture), and this energy does not dilute as the universe expands (the entropy principle), and if this expansion is faster and faster, as Einstein supposed, this can lead to some curious conclusions, such as the fact that this strange “energy” arises in this expansion.
Look at the Universe and its mysteries should restore us to the humility of how little we know, how admirable is the mystery of life and our destiny as a person and as a planet.
Distances in light years events in millions of years
12
Nov
If on a scale of human life we speak at most hundreds of years,
on a planetary scale we must speak of millions and even billions of years, if in terms of distance we can speak of thousands of kilometers on a planetary scale, in astronomical terms this scale is millions of light years, the time light travels per year.
This is not even to say that extraordinary events do not happen, because in terms of planetary and universal life billions of years have passed, so at some point in time this could happen, like the end of the dinosaurs, the ice age and changes in the planet’s geology that have already occurred, and neither that it will occur tomorrow or in the next few years, but at some point in time they may occur.
The volcano on the island of La Palma shows signs that it may be ending its eruption, so the catastrophes that were suggested (hypothetically and with a rare possibility of occurring) will not happen, but it doesn’t mean that others elsewhere on the planet cannot happen, earthquakes and weather events have occurred and caused tragedies such as Fukushima in Japan in March 2011.
This pandemic also seems to be at the end of its cycle, although Europe is alert, but there more than here the number of people who have resisted the vaccine is very large.
We must always be alert, life on the planet is at risk, the problem of environmental balance, the social problem arising from the pandemic crisis, but which was huge before it, the eternal danger of wars over market disputes and religious intolerance is always hanging around us.
A great international agreement that unites peoples and establishes a truce in conflicts, that brings solidarity between peoples and resolves the ecological balance, could be a great encouragement for a civilization in crisis.
In spiritual terms it means that humanity must also evolve at this point, and the signs are not the best, so it is not a matter of apocalypse or threat, when the human spirit releases all energy contrary to its well-being and progress moves towards an abyss and towards tragedies, the day when a great night will fall on men seems to be at hand, so says the Bible reading (Mk 13:24-15): “In those days, after the great tribulation, the sun will be darkened and the light it will no longer shine, the stars will begin to fall from heaven and the forces of heaven will be shaken”, but the reading immediately afterwards also indicates (Mk 13:32): “no one knows about that day and hour, not even the angels of heaven , nor the Son, but only the Father”.
So let’s live life and let’s favor what is good for all humanity, not just for groups or ideologies, life needs to go on and it is necessary to fight for it.
The evolution of stars and white dwarfs
11
Nov
The evolution of a star like the Sun goes from a giant to a supergiant
phase and ejects a planetary nebula and then transforms into a white dwarf when it is losing its energy and brightness.
The basis of stellar evolution calculations is called Hydrostatic Equilibrium whereby the pressure of the gas counteracts gravity in most of the lives of stars, since if there is no such dynamic equilibrium or time it collapses, so stars have nuclear reactions at some stage in their evolution, the ones that don’t have are brown dwarfs.
Using the ALMA radio observatory in Chile, which study a dozen red giants, the evolutionary stage at which stars approach death, they release an enormous amount of energy, producing a constant stellar wind, ie, ejecting a stream. of particles that throws the mass of the star itself in all directions, and these are the bases of its spectacular images.
If they were solitary nebulae, they would only have concentric shapes, but the presence of other companion stars and even planets that orbit the red giants, the influence of their fields ends up forming other images, influenced by the surrounding objects, giving specific configurations and colors.
One of the project scientists Carl Gottlieb, co-author of the study “(Sub)stellar companions shape the winds of stars evolved” said: “We now have an unprecedented view of how stars like our Sun will evolve during the last stages of its evolution”, this is of course on a scale of millions and even billions of years.
Palaeontologist and theologian Teilhard Chardin said that on the scale of the Cosmos: “only the fantastic has the condition to be true, planetary nebulae form incredible cosmic images that look more like divine paintings and are formed around a star that has reached the giant stage red, and recently scientists discovered why their shapes are unique.
