The original model of the USS Enterprise in 1965.

"Beyond Exoplanets" --NASA's New Kepler Mission Field of View Embraces Our Solar System

Previously, the Kepler space telescope looked straight out from the solar system in a direction almost perpendicular to the ecliptic and the plane of the planets. This way, it could observe the same spot all year long, as the sun, and most of the solar system, were out of its field of view. But since the start of K2 mission, it has been observing parallel to that plane in order to better balance against the radiation pressure of the sun.

This new strategy has two important consequences: One is that Kepler has to change its field of view every three months to avoid the sun; the other is that our own solar system, unexpectedly, has become a target for the exoplanet-hunting telescope.

For most astronomers working with Kepler, planets and asteroids zipping through the images are little more than a nuisance when studying the light variations of stars. Researchers from the Konkoly and Gothard Observatories in Hungary, however, saw a research opportunity in these moving specks of light. Following up on their work with trans-Neptunian objects, they examined the light variations of some main-belt and Trojan asteroids in a pair of research papers.

Main-belt asteroids were not targeted by Kepler, so the astronomers selected two extended mosaics that covered the open cluster M35 and the path of the planet Neptune, and simply tracked all known asteroids crossing them. Most of the objects were continuously observable for one to four days, which may not sound like much, but is significantly longer than single-night runs achievable with ground-based telescopes. Indeed, the researchers hoped that with Kepler, they could determine the rotation periods of the asteroids more accurately, without the uncertainties caused by daytime gaps in the data—and they did, but only for a fraction of the sample.

"We measured the paths of all known asteroids, but most of them turned out to be simply too faint for Kepler. The dense stellar background toward M35 further reduced the number of successful detections," said Róbert Szabó (Konkoly Observatory, MTA CSFK), lead author of the paper. "Still, we have to keep in mind that Kepler was never meant to do such studies; therefore, observing four dozen asteroids with new rotation rates is already more than anybody anticipated," he added.

The other study focused on 56 pre-selected Trojan asteroids in the middle of the L4, or "Greek" group, which orbits ahead of Jupiter. Since they are farther out from Kepler, they could be observed for longer periods, from 10 to 20 days, without interruption. And this turned out to be crucial: Many objects exhibited slow light variations between two and 15 days. Long periodicity suggests that what we see is not just one rotating asteroid, but actually two orbiting each other—the study confirmed that about 20 to 25 percent of Trojans are binary asteroids or asteroid-moon pairs. As Gyula M. Szabó (ELTE Gothard Astrophysical Observatory), lead author of the other paper, said, "Estimating the rate of binaries highlights the great advantage of Kepler, because the interesting periods, longer than 24 to 48 hours, are really hard to measure from the Earth."

What Kepler did not see are rapidly spinning Trojans. Even for the fastest ones, one rotation takes more than five hours, suggesting that the asteroids we see are likely icy, porous objects, similar to comets and trans-Neptunian objects, and different from the rockier main belt objects. "A large piece of rock can rotate much faster than a rubble pile or an icy body of the same size without breaking apart. Our findings favor the scenario that Trojans arrived from the ice-dominated outer solar system instead of migrating outwards from the main asteroid belt," Szabó said.

As Kepler continues its new mission, more objects from the solar system are crossing into its view, including planets, moons, asteroids and comets. The telescope that transformed the science of stars and exoplanets will undoubtedly leave its mark in planetary science, as well.

http://www.nasa.gov/…/nasas-kepler-mission-announces-larges…

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/…/beyond-exoplanets-nasas-new-ke…

http://mashable.com/2015/04/08/alien-life-found-2025/…

Cecile G. Tamura

How much Cosmological Redshift can we expect in a flat, non-expanding universe?

The light coming from a single hydrogen molecule is red shifted because the hydrogen molecule has mass…not much mass, admittedly, and the amount of red shift is going to be extremely challenging to measure but it’s there.

Most of the hydrogen molecule is space. If the electron in a hydrogen atom orbited at the far end of a baseball stadium then the nucleus would be the size of a grain of salt on the pitcher’s mound. Likewise, in a gas, if we were seeing the hydrogen molecule as the size of a star then other hydrogen molecules would be far far away on average, even further if the gas heats up.

But if that hydrogen molecule is part of the gas which is a star then the light coming from that hydrogen molecule is now very measurable indeed as the mass of the entire star contributes to the redshift of our hydrogen molecule even though that molecule is, in its own world, far from other molecules of gas.

If we start our journey near the hydrogen molecule and then move away to the distance of, say, the Earth, we will note an increase in the redshift of the light from that molecule as we proceed. What if we continue?

As we exit the Milky way the redshift of the light from that molecule in the sun is further redshifted as now it is light from a galaxy and not just a star or a single molecule. As we proceed further away we receive light from a cluster of galaxies, our Local Group, and then the local supercluster of galaxies.

Returning to our molecule in the star we note that particles to the left, the right and all around the target molecule contribute to the mass as well as molecules behind and in front. Molecules in the entire region contribute to the mass of the star and this contributes to the redshift of the light from our target molecule.

Thus as we move further away the contribution of clusters of galaxies in an ever bigger area contribute to the increasing redshift of the light from our target molecule. Think of a patch of sky the size of the sun as seen from Earth as contributing mass and therefore to the redshift. With ever greater distance there are ever more galaxies occupying that same footprint in the sky.

That redshift will increase with distance in a flat universe is not the question, it does and we have measured it locally (redshift from the sun verses redshift from a single molecule). The only question is how much this phenomena contributes to the cosmological redshift that we observe ~ a little bit, a lot, or all of it??

Note that if we zoom in on just one molecule of a gas in the sun we will still measure the same redshift, that is, the entire sun’s mass produces the redshift whether we are focused on one molecule or the entire sun. Likewise when we focus in on just one galaxy far away we see the redshift contributed by nearby galaxies, ever more contributing with ever greater distance from us.

Note also that the fact that there is just as much mass behind us as in front of us does not reduce the amount of this form of redshift. If there were another sun equidistant from us so that the Earth was between them then we would measure redshift from both bodies in much the same way with only a very modest reduction in redshift.

The Indian physicist who ‘created’ a black hole Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Cecile G. Tamura 

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was known to the world as Chandra. The word chandra means "moon" or "luminous" in Sanskrit.

As a young doctoral student at Cambridge, Subramanian Chandrasekhar had deduced that certain types of stars, called white dwarfs, could not have a mass more than roughly 1.44 solar masses (the Chandrasekhar limit). If they exceeded this mass, they would undergo collapse under the pull of gravity. The collapse of a star exceeding the Chandrasekhar limit was a precursor to the idea of black holes.

 
When he presented his results in 1935 to the Royal Society, Britain’s most celebrated astronomer, Arthur Eddington (1882–1944) took violent objection on the grounds that Chandrasekhar had wrongly used quantum mechanics and that his proposed behavior for a star was simply absurd.

Physicists knew Eddington’s argument to be incorrect, but did not come out in Chandrasekhar’s defense—some thought it obvious, and some were afraid to contradict Eddington. Chandrasekhar left England (where all doors were closed to him in view of the above) and migrated to the USA to become one of the most influential and respected astrophysicists in the world.

His results came to be universally accepted and he won the Nobel Prize in 1983, over 50 years after his great discovery.

http://chandra.harvard.edu/blog/node/587

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/…/the-indian-physicist-that-c…/

http://www.nobelprize.org/…/lau…/1983/chandrasekhar-bio.html

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, (born October 19, 1910, Lahore, India [now in Pakistan]—died August 21, 1995, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) Indian-born American astrophysicist who, with William A. Fowler, won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for key discoveries that led to the currently accepted theory on the later evolutionary stages of massive stars.

Chandrasekhar was the nephew of Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930.

Chandrasekhar was educated at Presidency College, at the University of Madras, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. From 1933 to 1936 he held a position at Trinity.

By the early 1930s, scientists had concluded that, after converting all of their hydrogen to helium, stars lose energy and contract under the influence of their own gravity. These stars, known as white dwarf stars, contract to about the size of Earth, and the electrons and nuclei of their constituent atoms are compressed to a state of extremely high density. Chandrasekhar determined what is known as the Chandrasekhar limit—that a star having a mass more than 1.44 times that of the Sun does not form a white dwarf but instead continues to collapse, blows off its gaseous envelope in a supernova explosion, and becomes a neutron star. An even more massive star continues to collapse and becomes a black hole. These calculations contributed to the eventual understanding of supernovas, neutron stars, and black holes.

Chandrasekhar joined the staff of the University of Chicago, rising from assistant professor of astrophysics (1938) to Morton D. Hull distinguished service professor of astrophysics (1952), and became a U.S. citizen in 1953. He did important work on energy transfer by radiation in stellar atmospheres and convection on the solar surface. He also attempted to develop the mathematical theory of black holes, describing his work in The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes (1983).

Chandrasekhar was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1953, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1962, and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1984. His other books include An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure (1939), Principles of Stellar Dynamics (1942), Radiative Transfer (1950), Hydrodynamic and Hydromagnetic Stability (1961), Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (1987), and Newton’s Principia for the Common Reader (1995).

https://www.britannica.com/biogr…/Subrahmanyan-Chandrasekhar

Earth-sized planet around nearby star is astronomy dream come true

Planet orbiting Proxima Centauri is likely to be the focus of future interstellar voyages.

Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the Sun, has an Earth-sized planet orbiting it at the right distance for liquid water to exist. The discovery, reported today in Nature1, fulfils a longstanding dream of science-fiction writers — a potentially habitable world that is close enough for humans to send their first interstellar spacecraft.

“The search for life starts now,” says Guillem Anglada-Escudé, an astronomer at Queen Mary University of London and leader of the team that made the discovery.

Humanity’s first chance to explore this nearby world may come from the recently announced Breakthrough Starshot initiative, which plans to build fleets of tiny laser-propelled interstellar probes in the coming decades. Travelling at 20% of the speed of light, they would take about 20 years to cover the 1.3 parsecs from Earth to Proxima Centauri.

Proxima’s planet is at least 1.3 times the mass of Earth. The planet orbits its red-dwarf star — much smaller and dimmer than the Sun — every 11.2 days. “If you tried to pick the type of planet you’d most want around the type of star you’d most want, it would be this,” says David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University in New York City. “It’s thrilling.”

Earlier studies had hinted at the existence of a planet around Proxima. Starting in 2000, a spectrograph at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile looked for shifts in starlight caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. The resulting measurements suggested that something was happening to the star every 11.2 days. But astronomers could not rule out whether the signal was caused by an orbiting planet or another type of activity, such as stellar flares.

Star and planet align

In January 2016, Anglada-Escudé and his colleagues launched a campaign to nail down the suspected Proxima planet. ESO granted their request to observe using a second planet-hunting instrument, on a different telescope, for 20 minutes almost every night between 19 January and 31 March. “As soon as we had 10 nights it was obvious,” Anglada-Escudé says.

The team dubbed the work the ‘pale red dot’ campaign, after the famous 'pale blue dot' photograph taken of Earth by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. Because Proxima is a red-dwarf star, the planet would appear reddish or orangeish, perhaps bathed in light similar to the warm evening tints of Earth.

Although the planet orbits at a distance that would permit liquid water, other factors might render it unlivable. It might be tidally locked — meaning that the same hemisphere always faces the star, which scorches one side of the planet while the other remains cool. The active star might occasionally zap the planet with destructive X-ray flares. And it's unclear whether the planet has a protective, life-friendly atmosphere.

Proxima itself belongs to the triple-star system Alpha Centauri. In 2012, a Nature paper reported that an Earth-mass planet orbited another member of that stellar trio, Alpha Centauri B2. That result has now mostly been dismissed3, 4, but exoplanet specialists say the Proxima claim is more likely to hold up.

“People call me Mr Sceptical, and I think this result is more robust,” says Artie Hatzes, an astronomer at the Thuringian State Observatory in Tautenburg, Germany.

False alarm

This time, the combination of new observations and older measurements dating back to 2000 increases confidence in the finding, Anglada-Escudé’s team argues. “It’s stayed there robustly in phase and amplitude over a very long time,” says team member Michael Endl, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin. “That’s a telltale sign of a planet.” The data even contain hints that a second planet may exist, orbiting Proxima somewhere between every 100 and 400 days.

The researchers now hope to learn whether the Proxima planet's pass across the face of its star can be seen from Earth. The chances are low, but such a ‘transit’ could reveal details of the planet, such as whether it has an atmosphere. A team led by Kipping has been independently looking for transits around Proxima, and is frantically crunching its data in search of any signal.

The discovery of the Proxima planet comes at a time of growing scientific interest in small planets around dwarf stars, says Steinn Sigurdsson, an astrophysicist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. NASA’s Kepler space telescope has shown that rocky planets are common around such stars, which themselves are the most common type of star in the Galaxy. “This is a total vindication of that strategy,” he says.

One day, the Proxima planet might be seen as the birth of a new stage in planetary research. “It gives us the target and focus to build the next generation of telescopes and one day maybe even get to visit,” says Kipping. “It's exactly what we need to take exoplanetary science to the next level.”

http://www.nature.com/…/billionaire-backs-plan-to-send-pint…

http://www.nature.com/…/earth-sized-planet-around-nearby-st…

http://www.nature.com/news/the-exoplanet-files-1.18809

http://www.nature.com/news/the-exoplanet-next-door-1.11605

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36210

Cecile G. Tamura

Life Cycle of Sun

The Sun has always been the center of our cosmological systems. But with the advent of modern astronomy, humans have become aware of the fact that the Sun is merely one of countless stars in our Universe. In essence, it is a perfectly normal example of a G-type main-sequence star (G2V, aka. “yellow dwarf”). And like all stars, it has a lifespan, characterized by a formation, main sequence, and eventual death.

This lifespan began roughly 4.6 billion years ago, and will continue for about another 4.5 – 5.5 billion years, when it will deplete its supply of hydrogen, helium, and collapse into a white dwarf. But this is just the abridged version of the Sun’s lifespan. As always, God (or the Devil, depending on who you ask) is in the details!

To break it down, the Sun is about half way through the most stable part of its life. Over the course of the past four billion years, during which time planet Earth and the entire Solar System was born, it has remained relatively unchanged. This will stay the case for another four billion years, at which point, it will have exhausted its supply of hydrogen fuel. When that happens, some pretty drastic things will take place!

The Birth of the Sun:

According to Nebular Theory, the Sun and all the planets of our Solar System began as a giant cloud of molecular gas and dust. Then, about 4.57 billion years ago, something happened that caused the cloud to collapse. This could have been the result of a passing star, or shock waves from a supernova, but the end result was a gravitational collapse at the center of the cloud.

From this collapse, pockets of dust and gas began to collect into denser regions. As the denser regions pulled in more and more matter, conservation of momentum caused it to begin rotating, while increasing pressure caused it to heat up. Most of the material ended up in a ball at the center while the rest of the matter flattened out into disk that circled around it.

The ball at the center would eventually form the Sun, while the disk of material would form the planets. The Sun spent about 100,000 years as a collapsing protostar before temperature and pressures in the interior ignited fusion at its core. The Sun started as a T Tauri star – a wildly active star that blasted out an intense solar wind. And just a few million years later, it settled down into its current form. The life cycle of the Sun had begun.

The Main Sequence:

The Sun, like most stars in the Universe, is on the main sequence stage of its life, during which nuclear fusion reactions in its core fuse hydrogen into helium. Every second, 600 million tons of matter are converted into neutrinos, solar radiation, and roughly 4 x 10²⁷ Watts of energy. For the Sun, this process began 4.57 billion years ago, and it has been generating energy this way every since.

However, this process cannot last forever since there is a finite amount of hydrogen in the core of the Sun. So far, the Sun has converted an estimated 100 times the mass of the Earth into helium and solar energy. As more hydrogen is converted into helium, the core continues to shrink, allowing the outer layers of the Sun to move closer to the center and experience a stronger gravitational force.

This places more pressure on the core, which is resisted by a resulting increase in the rate at which fusion occurs. Basically, this means that as the Sun continues to expend hydrogen in its core, the fusion process speeds up and the output of the Sun increases. At present, this is leading to a 1% increase in luminosity every 100 million years, and a 30% increase over the course of the last 4.5 billion years.

In 1.1 billion years from now, the Sun will be 10% brighter than it is today, and this increase in luminosity will also mean an increase in heat energy, which Earth’s atmosphere will absorb. This will trigger a moist greenhouse effect here on Earth that is similar to the runaway warming that turned Venus into the hellish environment we see there today.

In 3.5 billion years from now, the Sun will be 40% brighter than it is right now. This increase will cause the oceans to boil, the ice caps to permanently melt, and all water vapor in the atmosphere to be lost to space. Under these conditions, life as we know it will be unable to survive anywhere on the surface. In short, planet Earth will come to be another hot, dry Venus.

Core Hydrogen Exhaustion:

All things must end. That is true for us, that is true for the Earth, and that is true for the Sun. It’s not going to happen anytime soon, but one day in the distant future, the Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel and slowly slouch towards death. This will begin in approximate 5.4 billion years, at which point the Sun will exit the main sequence of its lifespan.

With its hydrogen exhausted in the core, the inert helium ash that has built up there will become unstable and collapse under its own weight. This will cause the core to heat up and get denser, causing the Sun to grow in size and enter the Red Giant phase of its evolution. It is calculated that the expanding Sun will grow large enough to encompass the orbit’s of Mercury, Venus, and maybe even Earth. Even if the Earth survives, the intense heat from the red sun will scorch our planet and make it completely impossible for life to survive.

Final Phase and Death:

Once it reaches the Red-Giant-Branch (RGB) phase,  the Sun will haves approximately 120 million years of active life left. But much will happen in this amount of time. First, the core (full of degenerate helium), will ignite violently in a helium flash – where approximately 6% of the core and 40% of the Sun’s mass will be converted into carbon within a matter of minutes.

The Sun will then shrink to around 10 times its current size and 50 times its luminosity, with a temperature a little lower than today. For the next 100 million years, it will continue to burn helium in its core until it is exhausted. By this point, it will be in its Asymptotic-Giant-Branch (AGB) phase, where it will expand again (much faster this time) and become more luminous.

Over the course of the next 20 million years, the Sun will then become unstable and begin losing mass through a series of thermal pulses. These will occur every 100,000 years or so, becoming larger each time and increasing the Sun’s luminosity to 5,000 times its current brightness and its radius to over 1 AU.

At this point, the Sun’s expansion will either encompass the Earth, or leave it entirely inhospitable to life. Planets in the Outer Solar System are likely to change dramatically, as more energy is absorbed from the Sun, causing their water ices to sublimate – perhaps forming dense atmosphere and surface oceans. After 500,000 years or so, only half of the Sun’s current mass will remain and its outer envelope will begin to form a planetary nebula.

The post-AGB evolution will be even faster, as the ejected mass becomes ionized to form a planetary nebula and the exposed core reaches 30,000 K. The final, naked core temperature will be over 100,000 K, after which the remnant will cool towards a white dwarf. The planetary nebula will disperse in about 10,000 years, but the white dwarf will survive for trillions of years before fading to black.

Ultimate Fate of our Sun:

When people think of stars dying, what typically comes to mind are massive supernovas and the creation of black holes. However, this will not be the case with our Sun, due to the simple fact that it is not nearly massive enough. While it might seem huge to us, but the Sun is a relatively low mass star compared to some of the enormous high mass stars out there in the Universe.

As such, when our Sun runs out of hydrogen fuel, it will expand to become a red giant, puff off its outer layers, and then settle down as a compact white dwarf star, then slowly cooling down for trillions of years. If, however, the Sun had about 10 times its current mass, the final phase of its lifespan would be significantly more (ahem) explosive.

When this super-massive Sun ran out of hydrogen fuel in its core, it would switch over to converting atoms of helium, and then atoms of carbon (just like our own). This process would continue, with the Sun consuming heavier and heavier fuel in concentric layers. Each layer would take less time than the last, all the way up to nickel – which could take just a day to burn through.

Then, iron would starts to build up in the core of the star. Since iron doesn’t give off any energy when it undergoes nuclear fusion, the star would have no more outward pressure in its core to prevent it from collapsing inward. When about 1.38 times the mass of the Sun is iron collected at the core, it would catastrophically implode, releasing an enormous amount of energy.

Within eight minutes, the amount of time it takes for light to travel from the Sun to Earth, an incomprehensible amount of energy would sweep past the Earth and destroy everything in the Solar System. The energy released from this might be enough to briefly outshine the galaxy, and a new nebula (like the Crab Nebula) would be visible from nearby star systems, expanding outward for thousands of years.

All that would remain of the Sun would be a rapidly spinning neutron star, or maybe even a stellar black hole. But of course, this is not to be our Sun’s fate. Given its mass, it will eventually collapse into a white star until it burns itself out. And of course, this won’t be happening for another 6 billion years or so. By that point, humanity will either be long dead or have moved on. In the meantime, we have plenty of days of sunshine to look forward to!

How we escaped from the Big Bang

 Credit : app.griffith.edu.au

A Griffith University physicist is challenging the conventional view of space and time to show how the world advances through time.

Associate Professor Dr Joan Vaccaro, of Griffith’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics, has solved an anomaly of conventional physics and shown that a mysterious effect called ‘T violation’ could be the origin of time evolution and conservation laws.

“I begin by breaking the rules of physics, which is rather bold I have to admit, but I wanted to understand time better and conventional physics can’t do that,” Dr Vaccaro says.

“I do get conventional physics in the end though. This means that the rules I break are not fundamental. It also means that I can see why the universe has those rules. And I can also see why the universe advances in time.”

In her research published in The Royal Society Dr Vaccaro says T violation, or a violation of time reversal (T) symmetry, is forcing the universe and us in it, into the future

“If T violation wasn’t involved we wouldn’t advance in time and we’d be stuck at the Big Bang, so this shows how we escaped the Big Bang.

“I found the mechanism that forces us to go to the future, the reason why you get old and the reason why we advance in time.”

“The universe must be symmetric in time and space overall. But we know that there appears to be a preferred direction in time because we are incessantly getting older not younger.”

The anomaly Dr Vaccaro solves involves two things not accounted for in in conventional physical theories – the direction of time, and the behaviour of the mesons (which decay differently if time went in the opposite direction).

“Experiments show that the behaviour of mesons depends on the direction of time; in particular, if the direction of time was changed then their behaviour would also,” she says.

“Conventional physical theories can accommodate only one direction of time and one kind of meson behaviour, and so they are asymmetric in this regard. But the problem is that the universe cannot be asymmetric overall.

I begin by breaking the rules of physics, which is rather bold I have to admit

“This means that physical theories must be symmetric in time. To be symmetric in time they would need to accommodate both directions of time and both meson behaviours. This is the anomaly in physics that I am attempting to solve.”

Dr Vaccaro is presenting her work at the Soapbox Science event held in Brisbane as part of National Science Week, titled “The meaning of time: why the universe didn’t stay put at the big bang and how it is ‘now’ and no other time”.

Without any T violation the theory gives a very strange universe. An object like a cup can be placed in time just like it is in space.
“It just exists at one place in space and one point in time. There is nothing unusual about being at one place in space, but existing at one point in time means the object would come into existence only at that point in time and then disappear immediately.

“This means that conservation of matter would be violated. It also means that there would be no evolution in time. People would only exist for a single point in time – they would not experience a “flow of time”.

When Dr Vaccaro adds T violation to the theory, things change dramatically.

“The cup is now found at any and every time,” she says,

“This means that the theory now has conservation of matter – the conservation has emerged from the theory rather than being assumed. Moreover, objects change over time, cups chip and break, and people would grow old and experience a “flow of time”. This means that the theory now has time evolution.
The next stage of the research is to design experiments that will test predictions of the theory.

Dr Vaccaro will be speaking from a soapbox on Saturday August 20 between 1pm and 4pm in King George Square.

http://app.griffith.edu.au/…/uploa…/2016/08/joan-vaccaro.pdf

http://app.griffith.edu.au/sciencesimpact/escaped-big-bang/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-symmetry

 Cecile G. Tamura

The Pyramids, Egypt, and their alignment with the constellation of Orion

The three pyramids of Giza are a perfect reproduction of the 3 stars of Orion’s belt:

• Like the pyramids, the three stars of Orion are not perfectly aligned, the smallest of them is slightly offset to the East.
• All three are slanted in a Southwesterly direction (Note the exact match in the animation).
• Their orientation to the Nile recreates Orion’s orientation to the Milky Way.
• The layout of the pyramids, and their relative sizes were a deliberate design plan, and not the result of three king’s enormous egos as been preached as dogma by the so-called Egyptologists.

Robert Bauval has spent the last ten years investigating the pyramids themselves and the Pyramid Texts, the oldest writings known to mankind.

He and Adrian Gilbert have uncovered for the first time the key to the plan that governed the construction of the pyramids. They reveal in "The Orion Mystery" that the pyramids were much more than just tombs: they were nothing less than a replica of Heaven on Earth (The constellation of Orion, or known to the Egyptians as Osiris).

With great astronomical precision, the pyramids were created to serve as the pharaoh’s gateway to the stars.

 

The correlation between the Giza Pyramids and Orion’s belt

This is an aerial picture of the Memphite Necropolis Site at Giza, south-west of Cairo. Look carefully at the way the Pyramids are aligned.

 

At first glance they seem to be imperfectly positioned. Classical Egyptologists maintain that this was either a mistake or a result of the terrain in the Giza Plateau.

 

Compare this to the image of the Belt Stars of Orion and things become a little clearer.

 

Far from being a mistake, the Pyramids are aligned almost exactly as the Belt Stars appear!

'Dyson sphere' star found to be dimming dramatically - and nobody knows why

Alien megastructure mystery deepens: 'Dyson sphere' star found to be dimming dramatically - and nobody knows why

This star is breaking all the rules.

Bizarre readings from star called KIC 8462852 have baffled scientists

One theory is dips in light caused by structure similar to Dyson sphere

Others suggest break up of huge comets would block the starlight

A Kickstarter campaign to investigate has reached its £68,352 target

The star KIC 8463853 has a dark secret. Literally. In 2011 and 2013, the light from this star plummeted by as much as 20 percent, suggesting that something very big must be blocking the light. Like, something 20 times the size of Jupiter. Scientists have speculated that comets, gobs of dust, or even a large alien structure could be causing the dimming, but so far, none of the explanations really works.

Now, a paper that was just published to the arxiv has found that the star dimmed by an unprecedented amount over the whole four years that the Kepler telescope kept an eye on it. It's not known whether this phenomenon is connected to the huge but short-duration dips from 2011 and 2013.

Big Dipper

In new study, which is not yet peer-reviewed, astronomers Ben Montet and Joshua Simon measured the light from the star (known informally as "Tabby's Star") that the Kepler telescope recorded during its four-year mission. And they found some pretty strange activity.

For the first few years, Tabby's Star dimmed at about 0.34 percent per year. Then its light level dropped dramatically by about 2.5 percent in 200 days. After that it returned to the original slow fade rate.

The authors looked at 500 other stars in the vicinity of Tabby's Star, as well as 500 other stars that are similar in size and makeup to Tabby's Star, but none of the others experienced such a dramatic drop in light levels. Their brightness remained essentially unchanged.

A Long-Term Trend?

Previously, old astronomy plates indicated the star has been dimming for the past century, which would require a seemingly impossible number of giant comets to explain the trend. However, scientists disagree over those findings, and the debate over long-term dimming remains inconclusive.

The Kepler telescope's high precision data show that the star was definitely dimming over the 4 years that Kepler monitored this star, suggesting that the long-term dimming hypothesis is possible, but scientists still can't say for sure.

"These results introduce us to another delightfully unexpected piece of the puzzle," says Tabetha Boyajian, one of the star's discoverers and the namesake of the Tabby's Star nickname.

"Tabby's star continues to defy easy explanation!" Keivan Stassun, who has studied the star's long-term light patterns, told Popular Science in an email. "These intriguing new findings suggest that none of the considered phenomena can alone explain the observations. Of course, the star doesn't have to abide by our hope for a single explanation. In the end, figuring out this puzzle may require accounting for a combination of effects."

Defying Explanation

Scientists differ in their favorite explanations for what's happening around Tabby's Star. While Boyajian still thinks the most likely explanation is a group of cold comets, Montet thinks the evidence is growing that a large cloud of dust is blocking the star's light.

"Tabby's star continues to defy easy explanation."

If the light were being blocked by comet or dust (or an alien Dyson swarm, for that matter), scientists would expect to see extra heat energy coming from around the star. So far they don't, but Montet wonders if taking deeper measurements will find the missing energy.
"There's a lot of explanations that explain half or two-thirds of story, but there's nothing that fully explains everything," he says.
Although many uncertainties remain, the possibility that the weird blips in light are being caused by some previously undiscovered star behavior is at least seeming less likely, according to Montet.

"To have one thing that we haven't seen before might be explainable with a stellar mechanism, but this is a few things now. It seems unlikely we would miss a stellar mechanism that fits all of these."

Finding An Answer

To find out what's causing KIC 8462852's mysterious behavior, scientists want to study it while it's in the midst of one of the major dips, like the ones that happened in 2011 and 2013.
Although the Kepler telescope is no longer able to keep an eye on Tabby's Star, Boyajian's team recently won funding to continue monitoring the star using the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT). If any funny business is detected, networks of astronomers--both professional and amateur--will be contacted immediately in order to collect as much data about the dimming event as possible.

Observations from the ground, like those of the LCOGT, aren't as precise as those of a space telescope like Kepler, but an upcoming telescope from the European Space Agency could also lend a hand.
PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) will be like "Kepler on steroids," says Montet. The space-based telescope is expected to spend a few years studying the same region that Kepler monitored. The telescope is expected to launch in 2024.

In the meantime, the mystery surrounding Tabby's Star only deepens.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01316

http://www.popsci.com/have-we-detected-alien-megastructures…

http://www.popsci.com/something-made-alien-megastructure-st…

http://www.popsci.com/study-confirms-that-alien-megastructu…

Cecile G. Tamura

Artist illustration of a crumbling Dyson sphere

Danielle Futselaar/SETI International

What is a Dyson Sphere ?

A proposed method for harnessing the power of an entire star is known as a Dyson sphere.

First proposed by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, this would be a swarm of satellites that surrounds a star.

They could be an enclosed shell, or spacecraft spread out to gather its energy - known as a Dyson swarm.

If such structures do exist, they would emit huge amounts of noticeable infrared radiation back on Earth.

But as of yet, such a structure has not been detected.

Source: All About Space magazine

Interest in the star, which is 1,480 light-years away, began last October when Yale scientists found unusual fluctuations in its light - with some suggesting the dips in light are caused by an alien megastructure. One theory that has got traction says the dips are caused by an alien megastructure, similar to a Dyson sphere (stock image)

Credit : Jay Wong/ All About Space Magazine

KIC 8462852, located 1,480 light-years away, was monitored by the Kepler Space Telescope for more than four years, beginning in 2009.

As a planet passes in front of a star's light it causes the light to dim, and Kepler can capture these fluctuations.

Typically this light dims in a symmetrical pattern.

However, during Kepler's study into KIC 8462852 the researchers noticed it went through 'irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips.'

In some cases, the flux dropped down to below the 20% level and lasted between 5 and 80 days at a time.

Some stars don't have uniformly bright discs and spin at such a high rate that they have an spheroidal shape.

This causes them to have a larger radius at the equator than at the poles.

The poles, with their smaller radius, have a higher surface gravity meaning they are hotter and brighter - or 'gravity brightened.'

Meanwhile, the equator is cooler and darker, which is known being 'gravity darkened.'

Mr Galasyn suggests that the dips and increases in flux of KIC 8462852 are caused as planets move across these brighter and darker areas.

Two of the dips, on day 1520 and 1570 of Kepler's mission, are shown having a similar shape but a different magnitude.

Despite their differences, both curves follow the shape of a planet travelling across a brightened pole, as suggested by the paper.

Mr Glasnyn claims that the two dips could be caused by two planets moving in front of the star.

If the first planet is large it could block out around 20% of the star's disc, while a smaller planet could occlude just 8% of it.

The second dip may be shorter because the smaller planet is moving faster and orbiting closer to the star.

Astronomers have been looking for answers about what is causing the bizarre light fluctuations around the star KIC 8462852 (pictured) for weeks. Some have suggested it is an alien megastructure such as a Dyson sphere. The strange structure was spotted by researchers from Yale

Dredit : Arxiv

Ruling out an alien structure

In order to explore the idea that such a structure could have been built by intelligent alien life, the Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, Seti, trained its Allen Telescope Array on the star for more than two weeks.

Experts looked for two types of radio signal: narrow-band signals generated as a 'hailing signal' for alien societies wanting to announce their presence, and broad-band signals.

These signals would be produced by 'beamed propulsion'.

Seti said that if large scale alien engineering projects really are underway, the array would pick up signals made by intense microwave beams that could be used to power spacecraft.

Scientists analysing the data found no clear evidence for either type of signal.

They believe this rules out the presence of omnidirectional transmitters - large antenna - of approximately 100 times today's total terrestrial energy usage in the case of the narrow-band signals, and ten million times that usage for broad band emissions.
So the presence of a Dyson sphere is unlikely.