Posted on 09/26/2012 7:22:19 PM PDT by lbryce
Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe.
Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, it revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time.
The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive, and contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.
I wrote: “within the Hubble Deep Field we’re seeing a succession of square images, beginning from very tiny (grain of sand at arm’s length size) to enormous (millions of light years across) at the distant end.”
What I should have said was that the Hubble Deep Field images can be viewed as a succession of planes, each at a different distance.
Yeah, me too. I'm bad when I find a subject that is this stimulating. The hours slip by unnoticed.
Gotta hit the hay pretty soon, though. Big day with work tomorrow. Great talking with you. This stuff is fascinating.
May your day go well. Great to speak with you and everyone who spoke gave it their all. It is a fascinating subject, one which leaves me saying ... what the heck? Me too, am going east bound and down.
Good travels, my friend. Talk later.
Also, a line from the movie Ben Hur came to mind...
“Balthasar is a good man. But, until all men are like him, we must keep our wits keen, and our swords bright.”
An eye on the prize does not make us blind to reality.
Yet in every case, not simply a few, rather every case, does reality truly blind us or bind us, or does reality instead make us want the prize, yet obtaining the prize is worthless? Certainly would depend on what the prize being sought happened to be. If this is history repeating itself, and mankind has done all of this before, and did not attain the prize before, one has to wonder if mankind’s destiny is to never attain the prize, but rather instead to seek it and always fail. Seeking the unattainable or finally capturing the prize? Welcoming myself to the Twilight Zone.
HE sure does, awesome is our GOD, and marvelous is HIS works. How privileged we are that HE allows us to see this.
Unless all that black matter that we can't account for is absorbing those transmissions...
I agree with both premises. I think radio transmissions get diluted and lost among the background noise emanated by stars, quasars, radioactive gases, planets, nebulae, etc. I'm no scientist, but in my opinion, radio is a terrible medium for interstellar, or even interplanetary communication.
I think you'd want to send communications in a precisely directed manner, using a medium that is something like a tight beam that exceeds the speed of light. Now, that would be a neat trick, given that you and the recipient are both in motion, relative to the stars and planets.
But --- if you imagine a straight line between the transmission point and the receipt point, you can begin to get the idea that they could perhaps lock onto each other, thereby having that one stable line as their path of communication. Even though both points are in motion, it wouldn't matter, because the line of contact between them remains stable in relative terms. Hmm....
What if, in the plane, the geometry is such that there is no opportunity to form a straight line where the communication can arrive unobstructed? A heavenly body gets in the way or the communication is obstructed because of another event where no stability of the communication line is possible either due to an obstruction or unacceptable geometric planes.
HOUSTON — A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television's Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.
A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, however subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy.
Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially brining the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.
Laboratory tests
White and his colleagues have begun experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in their laboratory.
They set up what they call the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer at the Johnson Space Center, essentially creating a laser interferometer that instigates micro versions of space-time warps.
"We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million," White said.
He called the project a "humble experiment" compared to what would be needed for a real warp drive, but said it represents a promising first step.
And other scientists stressed that even outlandish-sounding ideas, such as the warp drive, need to be considered if humanity is serious about traveling to other stars.
"If we're ever going to become a true spacefaring civilization, we're going to have to think outside the box a little bit, were going to have to be a little bit audacious," Obousy said.
http://news.yahoo.com/warp-drive-may-more-feasible-thought-scientists-161301109.html
Well, think about our primitive radio technology. It goes through walls, buildings, clouds, storms, metal car bodies, etc. I would think that a sufficiently advanced communication technology would have to overcome the obstacles you mentioned. Perhaps through some sort of 'lensing' or 'line bending' feature that we can't quite imagine today.
Today there are, but that won't always be the case. If there's one thing the human race is good at, it's in figuring out the structure and puzzles of the physical universe. Our minds are our greatest tools.
After a 2nd look, by God I think your right.
We’re only immortal for a limited time.
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