NASA Swift satellite sees furthest ever cosmic explosion

NASA reported on 23 April 2009 that their Swift satellite and a international team of astronomers detected a ten-second gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or less than five percent of its present age.

The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen. 

In line with other posts in this blog about basic questions, this event sheds further light (no pun intended) on the age and size of the universe.

To quote: "Swift was designed to catch these very distant bursts," said Swift lead scientist Neil Gehrels at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The incredible distance to this burst exceeded our greatest expectations -- it was a true blast from the past."

"The burst most likely arose from the explosion of a massive star," said Derek Fox at Pennsylvania State University. "We're seeing the demise of a star -- and probably the birth of a black hole -- in one of the universe's earliest stellar generations."

Read the NASA article to view a short animation of a gamma-ray burst and find out more.

Technorati Tags: NASA,Cosmology,Astronomy,Age of the Universe,gamma-ray burst,black hole

How wide is the universe? (again)

I’ve just been checking out a YouTube flash video downloader, a free Windows desktop one from FLVsoft (Moyea Software) 

I tested it out on a couple of cosmology videos, and it worked very well, with a number of useful configuration options and a nice built-in Flash player. … Recommended!

I’ve tested a number of YouTube downloaders over the last year or two, and some of them are quirky or unreliable. Another recommended one is browser-based KickYouTube. This one couldn’t be simpler to use. There’s no installation required, you merely insert the word “kick” into the URL of the YouTube page immediately in front of the “youtube.com” part) and press the Enter key, select your desired output file format (such as FLV or MP4) and click the green Go button to initiate the download.

Anyway, in the spirit of this blog, here are the two videos that I used for testing the YouTube downloader:

YouTube - The Universe is 156 Billion Light Years Wide

 

Flying Through the Big Wide Universe

Technorati Tags: Universe,YouTube,FLVsoft,Flash video downloader,KickYouTube

Blogger Labels: Universe,YouTube,FLVsoft,Flash video downloader,KickYouTube

When does human life begin?

One of the most difficult and troubling basic questions of all for us is "When does life begin?"

This is an especially awkward question when it applies to human life. Rightly or wrongly, we consider our species more important than and dominant over others. See, for example, Aquinas, Animal Rights, And Christianity or Genesis 1 (verse 26) or Canadian Seal Hunt web site.

When it comes to human life, the question gets even tougher for us. It leads to intricate and sometimes fierce and vociferous debate, sometimes extended to physical attack or even murder. Imagine that: taking human life (by an anti-abortionist) when you're supposedly opposed to the very taking of human life. How irrational and contradictory we can be, how flawed!

I don't mull over such matters very often, preferring to spend my time on more pleasant matters. Strangely enough, I was led to this stream of painful thought when I took an unexpected detour while dallying in my comfort zone of technology and computing.

Perusing Wired Magazine's blog, I just came across McCain Equates Embryos and Fetuses in Stem Cell Statement (19 September 2008).

I encourage you to read the entire short article. A few brief extracts follow:

John McCain's recent statement on embryonic stem cell research was ambiguous in some ways, but clearly misleading in another: He equated human embryos with fetuses, and used language implying that farming fetuses for their tissues is a realistic possibility. ... Though the bill was unanimously approved in the House and Senate, its sponsors were criticized for failing to make clear that "fetal farming" doesn't exist.

Embryos used to produce embryonic stem cells are harvested after five days, when the embryo is still an undifferentiated blob of about 70 cells. While there is no sharp line for when an embryo becomes a fetus, nine weeks is a good rule of thumb; the industry standard for halting development on research embryos is two weeks. No reputable scientist has supported fetus experimentation. For McCain to revive the language of "fetal farming," say bioethicists, was misleading.

This was the first time that I've seen a specific number of cells specified, and a specific number of days or weeks of gestation. Why choose 70 cells rather than 80 or 100, and why is nine weeks a good rule of thumb?

Humanism aside, this is a complex minefield for bioethicists and legislators -- not to mention thise directly involved (medical practitioners, nurses, researchers, mothers, and so on). This is all very alien and uncomfortable for me, but I felt compelled to add such basic questions to this blog.

GORE LIED: Global average temperatures still down significantly since An Inconvenient Truth released

In an earlier post back in October 2008, About Asking the Right Questions, I pointed out work that had been published on the Greenhouse Effect (the issue of climate forcings, etc).

Asking the wrong questions, or avoiding asking the right questions, is famously with us in the form of Al Gore's moneymaking odyssey to spout his ideas about "inconvenient truths" -- or at least, his perception of what are truths.

Doubtless, some of Gore's perceptions are accurate, or at least reasonably so. But is he manipulating things to suit his preconceived notions of what is "the truth"?

Some people seem to think so, so it's not just me ... GORE LIED: Global average temperatures still down significantly since An Inconvenient Truth released

(Click to view a larger image)

The descending "Gore extrapolation line" on this chart indeed makes an interesting comparison with the methodologies discussed in the climate forcings charts (referenced in that earlier posting of mine).

A baker's dozen of unanswered questions

This blog is about asking questions. ... We don't even know all the correct questions to ask, much less the answers.

New Scientist has put together an intriguing list of 13 things that do not make sense that bring home this point:

• The placebo effect
• The horizon problem
• Ultra-energetic cosmic rays
• Belfast homeopathy results
• Dark matter
• Viking's methane
• Tetraneutrons
• The Pioneer anomaly
• Dark energy
• The Kuiper cliff
• The Wow signal
• Not-so-constant constants
• Cold fusion

I'm confident that when (or if) we ever find the answers to these questions, there will be another 13 questions to take their place! Life's interesting, isn't it.

Questions without end -- Science, Religion, God

Fellow iTWire blogger William Atkins has just posted an article Science, Religion, God: Discussions by thinkers that's kicked my grey matter (what's left of it) into overdrive again.

Amongst other things, William mentions the John Templeton Foundation website, which was new to me, and refers to A Templeton Conversation which is the most recent (the third) in a series of conversations among leading scientists and scholars about the "Big Questions" ... Does science make belief in God obsolete?

The foundation's website has a Big Questions Archive which surely is very apposite to the "Basic Questions" theme of this blog!

The other two series so far are Will money solve Africa's development problems? and Does the universe have a purpose?

The contributors' responses are downloadable as PDF files, if you want to browse the responses offline.

Universe is 13.73 Billion Years Old

The latest on the "age of the universe" thread of this blog is news from NASA that it's been estimated to be 13.73 billion years old, see WMAP Reveals Neutrinos, End of Dark Ages, First Second of Universe

"NASA released this week five years of data collected by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) that refines our understanding of the universe and its development. ... WMAP measures a remnant of the early universe - its oldest light. The conditions of the early times are imprinted on this light. It is the result of what happened earlier, and a backlight for the later development of the universe. This light lost energy as the universe expanded over 13.7 billion years, so WMAP now sees the light as microwaves. By making accurate measurements of microwave patterns, WMAP has answered many longstanding questions about the universe's age, composition and development.

Microwave light seen by WMAP from when the universe was only 380,000 years old, shows that, at the time, neutrinos made up 10% of the universe, atoms 12%, dark matter 63%, photons 15%, and dark energy was negligible. In contrast, estimates from WMAP data show the current universe consists of 4.6% percent atoms, 23% dark matter, 72% dark energy and less than 1 percent neutrinos.

WMAP cosmic microwave fluctuations over the full sky with 5-years of data. Colors [in the image] represent the tiny temperature fluctuations of the remnant glow from the infant universe: red regions are warmer and blue are cooler."

Scientific American tells all?

I've been reading articles from Scientific American for fifty years or more, and still enjoy it tremendously. While there are many other extremely worthwhile scientific journals, I'm a creature of habit and this one is good enough for me!

Relative to the "Basic Questions" theme of this blog, I would heartily recommend that you read various online Scientific American articles. The following two articles in particular are very cogent summaries of several aspects of cosmology that I've mentioned in earlier posts, and they're well worth a read:

• Misconceptions about the Big Bang - Baffled by the expansion of the universe? You're not alone. Even astronomers frequently get it wrong. ... Expansion is a beguilingly simple idea, but what exactly does it mean to say the universe is expanding? What does it expand into? Is Earth expanding, too? To add to the befuddlement, the expansion of the universe now seems to be accelerating, a process with truly mind-stretching consequences. ... The universe does not seem to have an edge or a center or an outside, so how can it expand?
• The Universe's Invisible Hand - Dark energy does more than hurry along the expansion of the universe. It also has a stranglehold on the shape and spacing of galaxies. ... Scientists are just starting the long process of figuring out what dark energy is and what its implications are. One realization has already sunk in: although dark energy betrayed its existence through its effect on the universe as a whole, it may also shape the evolution of the universe's inhabitants--stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters. Astronomers may have been staring at its handiwork for decades without realizing it.

By the way, a subscription to the digital edition of Scientific American is only US $3.33 per month ($39.95 per year): they say "the latest Scientific American issue delivered online before it hits newsstands, access over 180 issues of scientific progress from 1993 to the present, and quickly locate, preview and download your selections ... Download to your computer for convenient offline reading ... in high-quality PDF format."

Big -- Mandelbrot Universe

Watch this fractal unfolding, and listen to it too. (It reminds me a bit of scenes near the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey.)

A Mandelbrot the size of the known universe

"An extremely deep dive into the Mandelbrot zoom. If the final frame were the size of your screen, the full set would be larger than the known universe."

There are more Mandelbrot/fractal animations on the same YouTube page. If you want to get a rigid mathematical explanation of Mandelbrot's accomplishments , be sure to listen to the following one as it unfolds:

Mandelbrot Set Zoom

Is the Universe Finite, or Not?

I've just come across a few interesting items in my quest to understand "life and the universe" and would like to share them with you:

• On A Finite Universe With No Beginning Or End (a PDF document) - by Peter Lynds of New Zealand, with the following abstract:
  
  

  "Based on the conjecture that rather than the second law of thermodynamics inevitably be breached as matter approaches a big crunch or a black hole singularity, the order of events should reverse, a model of the universe that resolves a number of longstanding problems and paradoxes in cosmology is presented. A universe that has no beginning (and no need for one), no ending, but yet is finite, is without singularities, precludes time travel, in which events are neither determined by initial or final conditions, and problems such as why the universe has a low entropy past, or conditions at the big bang appear to be so "special," require no causal explanation, is the result. This model also has some profound philosophical implications."

  If the above paper is too much for you, then from Science a Go Go there's a pair of articles that might make it more digestible: The Universe As Magic Roundabout: Part I plus The Universe As Magic Roundabout: Part II
  
  Here's an earlier paper by Peter Lynds (also a PDF document):
  Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity
  
  
• For another view, this time about multiple universes, there's Towards observable signatures of other bubble universes (another PDF document) with the following abstract:
  
  

  "We evaluate the possibility of observable effects arising from collisions between vacuum bubbles in a universe undergoing false-vacuum eternal inflation. Contrary to conventional wisdom, “typical” observers inside a bubble should have access to a large number of collision events. We calculate the expected number and angular size distribution of such collisions on an observer’s “sky”, finding that for typical observers the distribution is anisotropic and includes many bubbles, each of which will affect the majority of the observer’s sky. After a qualitative discussion of the physics involved in collisions between arbitrary bubbles, we evaluate the implications of our results, and outline possible observable effects. In an optimistic sense, then, the present paper constitutes a first step in an assessment of the effects of other bubble universes on the cosmic microwave background and other observables."

Light Speed (and Other Puzzling Data)

Doing a bit of Web searching discover more views and answers to some of my basic questions, I came across the following interesting presentations by by Barry Setterfield (over at YouTube):

• Light Speed and Other Puzzling Data - Part 1 of 6
• Light Speed and Other Puzzling Data - Part 2 of 6
• Light Speed and Other Puzzling Data - Part 3 of 6
• Light Speed and Other Puzzling Data - Part 4 of 6
• Light Speed and Other Puzzling Data - Part 5 of 6
• Light Speed and Other Puzzling Data - Part 6 of 6

How big is BIG?

This morning I was looking at the Web site of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Fascinating stuff! SDSS is systematically mapping the entire sky, determining the positions, brightnesses and distances of celestial objects, to give a three-dimensional picture of the universe through a volume one hundred times larger than that explored to date.

They are obviously asking some basic questions. And getting answers, too. one question that really tickles my fancy is described in the article How big is big? Probing the conditions of the universe on the largest scales

Back in May 2006 researchers at SDSS announced the first measurements of galactic structures more than a billion light years across. Now that's getting to be sizable, isn't it!

Dark energy - the pressure exerted by empty space!

I would never have thought it, and even after reading it cannot begin to properly understand or appreciate this:

... dark energy is the pressure exerted by empty space. From a quantum mechanical perspective, empty space is unstable. According to statistics, photons and subatomic particles pop into the vacuum of space in a way that shows that "empty" is only an approximation: Space actually comprises a statistical soup of particles and antiparticles that are in a constant state of creation. Today scientists can demonstrate this by pumping the gases out of any empty chamber. After every atom has been pumped out, particles begin to percolate into existence in a process called vacuum fluctuation. ...

... unless the vacuum itself exerts the negative pressure observed, then the universe must otherwise be composed of as much as 70 percent dark energy.

Read more in the following Dr Dobb's article: Quantum Mechanical Theory Behind 'Dark Energy'?

How Wide is the Universe? - revisited

Way back in November 2005 I asked How Wide is the Universe? and have been pondering it every now and again since then.

Reading Bill Bryson's tour de force "A Short History of Nearly Everything" gave me some additional insights (see the early chapters).

And a few days ago I came across this link at Yahoo! Canada and the following article at www.space.com which I found especially informative on this matter:

Universe Measured: We're 156 Billion Light-years Wide!
If you've ever wondered how big the universe is, you're not alone. Astronomers have long pondered this, too, and they've had a hard time figuring it out. Now an estimate has been made, and its a whopper. The universe is at least 156 billion light-years wide.

In particular, it neatly outlines one aspect that beforehand I simply couldn't get me head around: why, if the universe is some 13 or 14 billion years old, its diameter in light years can be numerically greater than this. And it turns out that the above figure -- converted, of course, into distance in Light Year units -- cannot simplistically be regarded as the radius which, by being doubled, would lead to a diameter of 27 or 28 billion light years. And the key to this is explained thus:

... the universe has been expanding ever since the beginning of time, when theorists believe it all sprang forth from an infinitely dense point in a Big Bang.

"All the distance covered by the light in the early universe gets increased by the expansion of the universe," explains Neil Cornish, an astrophysicist at Montana State University. "Think of it like compound interest."

90% or 99.9% - The gene quandary

I was in two minds about whether to post this item here or in my Leave Good Enough Alone blog! But it is a pretty basic question, so here goes ...

Are we gullible or are we gullible? I was watching a TV science show special a week or so ago, and it made the oft-repeated statement that our human genes are almost identical, one person to another. And our genetic structure is remarkably similar to that of monkeys, and earthworms, and amoebae, and ... Or is it?

We watch ultra-modern analytic equipment doing its stuff, see gene structures flash across the screen, and listen to various genetics "experts" make their pronouncements. (And, if they're wearing white lab coats that makes them all the more believable!)

But, as of now in late 2006, how much do we really know about genetics and molecular biology and how much do we still have to discover?

These musings bubbled out of my unconscious today when I came across the Reuters article: New human gene map shows unexpected differences which starts off:

One person's DNA code can be as much as 10 percent different from another's, researchers said on Wednesday in a finding that questions the idea that everyone on Earth is 99.9 percent identical genetically.

Certainly intriguing, isn't it. I wonder where it eventually will all lead to.

About Asking the Right Questions

Here in Australia we have a national referendum every now and again, for such things as whether or not Australia should change from the monarchic model to the republican model.

Invariably -- as you'd expect from politicians -- the party in power in the federal government carefully crafts each referendum question in such a way that their preferred option is most likely to succeed: if you will, a variation upon the saying that "The devil is in the details".

Similarly so with many a scientific debate over the decades and centuries.

Australia is in the vice-like grip of a great drought, perhaps the worst for some centuries, and there's intense dicsussion of global warming and climate change. Are the "right questions" being asked about all this?

Upon this theme, at RealClimate there's an interesting recent post: Attribution of 20th Century climate change to CO2 (with lots of comments, too) ...

In public discussions there is often an emphasis on seemingly simple questions (e.g. the percentage of the current greenhouse effect associated with water vapour) that, at first sight, appear to have profound importance to the question of human effects on climate change. In the scientific community however, discussions about these 'simple' questions are often not, and have subtleties that rarely get publicly addressed.

One such question is the percentage of 20th Century warming that can be attributed to CO2 increases. This appears straightforward, but it might be rather surprising to readers that this has neither an obvious definition, nor a precise answer. I will therefore try to explain why.

For a range of findings, opinions and views see also:

• Climate change (Wikipedia)
• Forcings and Chaos in Global Climate Change
• Observational Estimates of Radiative Forcing due to Land Use Change in Southwest Australia
• Climate and Chemistry: forcings, feedbacks and phasings in the Earth System (CACHE)
• World Climate Report: Climate Forcings
  Global average temperature change projected from 16 different climate models for the 21st century if atmospheric CO2 levels are held constant at the year 2000 levels.
• Climate forcings in the Industrial era
• The Impossibility of Prediction - in which Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, makes some very interesting points/claims!

D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?

I just came across again some references to Paul Gaugin's 1897-1898 work "D'ou venons nous? Que sommes nous? D'ou allons nous?" (Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?) which is held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.



I haven't made many posts to this particular blog, but that doesn't mean I haven't been musing about Basic Questions. It's just that I've been busy with my other blogs, web site, software development, and so on.

I'm about half way through Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and that's certainly got my grey matter working! I suppose that you could call it a superlatiave travel guide to the universe. Very nice work, Bill: most enlightening, in your usual fashion, and quite scary in places.

Size of Our World

Only the occasional entry in this blog (one of several hosted here at Blogger.com). Oh well, with apparently arounf 100,000 new blogs per day maybe nobody noticed my severe case of bloggus infreqentius.

This topic -- Basic Questions -- is pretty well covered by others, but I just came across the following and couldn't resist adding a new post here of a set of simple images that quite effectively get their message across:

The Size Of Our World

The following video gives an entirely different perspective on it all, though:

Earth has got a nasty case of the Humans

At the Edge

Although I've visited the following web site briefly in the past (a couple of years ago) I didn't pay too much attention to it back then. But now I've decided that it needs much closer attention from me in my newly-launched resolve to search for the "meaning of lfe, and all that".

It's the Edge Foundation and its mandate is "to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society."

It has an interesting section title "The Third Culture" but what whets my appetite more (in relation to this particular blog of mine) is its World Question Center so it will be indeed interesting for me to examine there all the questions that others have raised previously!

Stretchy, stringy questions

When relating a story or giving a presentation, did you ever "get ahead of yourself" the saying goes? Well, that may be the closest you ever get to to time travel! But the topic of time travel is fascinating -- as are related realms of physics -- and certainly puts more mundane earthbound happenings into perspective.

Here are a few sites with some VERY nice multimedia demonstrations and explanations of this sort of thing:

• Einstein Light - multimedia modules that present the main ideas of relativity, with background info about mechanics and Galilean relativity; electricity, magnetism and relativity (Maxwell); the principle of Special Relativity; relativistic mechanics leads to E = mc² ; how relativity implies time dilation, and more.
• The Elegant Universe - a fascinating and thought-provoking journey through the mysteries of space, time, and matter. Brian Greene's excellent 3-hour visual feast, with outstanding graphical animations explaining string theory (alias "the theory of everything").
  
• Superstring Theory >> Cosmology >> Take a trip through the Big Bang >> Black Holes

You'll find some more links like this, towards the bottom of the page at http://asiapac.com.au/Links/Sciences.htm ... or its mirror/backup USA site http://notestracker.com/Links/Sciences.htm

I really like the explanations given by physicist Joseph Wolfe of the University of New South Wales (in Australia) at the Einstein's Light website. For example, at www.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/jw/module4_time_dilation.htm (in the section called Is time dilation true? How big are the effects?) there's this interesting example:

"Some particles striking the Earth's upper atmosphere have energies that exceed 2*1020 eV. If such particles are protons (with mass of about 1 GeV), their speeds would be 0.999 999 999 999 999 999 999 995 c. For them, g is 1011. Now the age of the universe is about 13 billion years for us, but for such particles, the age of the universe would be about (13 billion years/1011), ie about a month. Such a particle could cross the visible universe in a matter of months (their time)."

You'll have to read the rest of the article to see this in context, but it's a sobering thought all the same.