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Astronomy Thread I: Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Dark Flow

Which do you think is more strange?

  • Total voters
    48
bojanglefunk said:
It is really almost impossible to think about.
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The Fermi paradox is what really puzzles me. Given the size of the universe, the answer may just be as simple as the universe is too vast for rapid colonization. The Great Filter theory is scary as shit.
 
deacondamo said:
The Fermi paradox is what really puzzles me. Given the size of the universe, the answer may just be as simple as the universe is too vast for rapid colonization. The Great Filter theory is scary as shit.
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Wikipedias Fermi paradox and Great Filter theory...aaaaand my afternoon is shot.
 
deacondamo said:
The Fermi paradox is what really puzzles me. Given the size of the universe, the answer may just be as simple as the universe is too vast for rapid colonization. The Great Filter theory is scary as shit.
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Or we are just in the wrong spot ;)
 
deacondamo said:
The Fermi paradox is what really puzzles me. Given the size of the universe, the answer may just be as simple as the universe is too vast for rapid colonization. The Great Filter theory is scary as shit.
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well we invented how to destroy ourselves (nukes) before we learned how to land on the moon. So that ain't good.
 
TWDeac said:
Or we are just in the wrong spot ;)
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Right. I chalk that up to the vastness of the universe. Sure it's possible a part of the universe is teeming with activity, but it's so far away that we are not relevant. In that scenario, the active part of the universe would be like NYC and our solar system would be like a small village in Africa. Manhattanites be all like, "I ain't got time for that little village in Africa. I tryin' to do something awesome." While we are stuck riding around in rusted bicycles just trying to avoid AIDS.
 
deacondamo said:
You can pretty much stop reading there.
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Ehh, not that the paper is necessarily true, but iirc lots of researchers submit papers to ArXiv before they ever go out to peer-reviewed journals, right?
 
They have some serious explaining to do but it is at least interesting. I have a man crush on Max Tegmark
 
I thought Hawking recently said event horizons don't exist, therefore black holes don't exist.
 
bernbp5 said:
I thought Hawking recently said event horizons don't exist, therefore black holes don't exist.
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Not exactly, at least not by my understanding. He changed the idea of an event horizon to an "apparent horizon" from which "matter and energy is temporarily suspended, but then released." The confusing quote is “The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity,” Hawking wrote in his paper.

My understanding is that they still exist, but with different properties than we previously understood.

Here's my source material - http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/hawking-meant-black-holes/
 
I had some similar questions and found this on Youtube.

 
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-most-interesting-star-in-our-galaxy/410023/

Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope, which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.

“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.
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Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”
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